Countering housing dispossession in Cluj, the Silicon Valley of Eastern Europe
The pursuit of international recognition of its urban policies turned into a major source of legitimacy for the Romanian municipality of Cluj-Napoca. The city has been designated the 2015 European Capital of Youth. Next year it made it into the national final stage of the competition for the 2021 European Capital of Culture; losing the […]
Becoming Western: the story legitimising neoliberalism, violence and dispossession in Central and Eastern European cities
The smart city, the civilised city, the city for the respectable tax-paying citizens – in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), what all of these urban imaginaries have in common is that they cater to a performative, aspirational desire of becoming Western. For the past thirty years, while our cities have seen the emergence of a […]
What we can learn from Georgia’s social workers’ struggle
Although Georgia differs significantly from Ukraine in size and population, we have much in common. In particular, we are united by the past, as well as the common, albeit different in scale, the experience of invasion by the Russian Federation, respectively — war, destruction, displacement of large numbers of people and the resulting poverty. However, […]
«Let’s not get into the wrong fight! We must support the Ukrainians without thinking twice or holding back»
Since February 24, Vladimir Putin has been waging a war of conquest against Ukraine. His army has been bombing and destroying cities, killing civilians by the thousands, as it did in Chechnya and Syria. The Ukrainians are resisting. We must support them without thinking twice or holding back. In most of our countries, however, too […]
US-plaining is not enough. To the Western left, on your and our mistakes
Here in the post-Soviet world, we learned a lot from you. By ‘we’ I mean atomized or loosely organized communist, democratic socialist, left anarchist, feminist scholars, and activists from Kyiv, Lviv, Minsk, Moscow, Saint-Petersburg, and other places that are plunging into the horrors of war and police violence. After our own Marxist tradition underwent sclerotization, […]
Hillel Ticktin: I have not met any Marxist in the Soviet Union
Among the many Western Marxists who have attempted to understand and politically define the Soviet Union, Hillel Ticktin is perhaps the most interesting. Unlike many other theorists, whose reflections on the subject were often deductive speculation based on fragmentary data, Ticktin set out to thoroughly analyze the political economy of "real socialism" based on what […]
Why is the world divided into poor and rich countries?
This essay will explain why it is that despite historically unprecedented globalization of free trade, the rich countries remain rich, while the poor countries remain poor. Beginning here, and more closely in future article,we will use a theoretical perspective derived from the work of the Marxist economist Arghiri Emmanuel to analyze the history and present […]
Partisans or Workers? Figures of Belarusian Protest and Their Prospects
These week’s protests in Belarus have clearly overcome their initial electoral focus and morphed into an expanding dissident movement of urban middle class and workers. In a recent (August 4) article for Open Democracy platform on the presidential campaign in Belarus, I tried to explain why the opposition candidates from the ruling elite and the “creative class” […]
More contagious than coronavirus: electoral unrest under Lukashenka’s tired rule in Belarus
Volodymyr Artiukh At the onset of Covid-19, everyone in Belarus, including president Lukashenka, expected that the elections planned for 9 August would be at the very least boring. The country’s previous presidential campaign in 2015 was bleak and predictable, characterised by a cold truce which had set in between Belarus’ opposition, terrified by Russia’s activity in […]
Does the ‘Great Sex Work Debate’ matter at all? The real-world implications of the two strategies
The debate about how the state should regulate sex work seems to be everlasting. Some feminists strongly insist on the need for regulation, while others point out an inherent ethical contradiction: “How can one be a feminist and opt to legalize a trade that harms the very selfhood of a ‘worker’?” The two sides are […]
