International Viewpoint - online socialist magazine

Outsourcing Exploitation to Europe's Periphery

Madlen Nikolova — 2019-04-06T09:42:29Z

Most people probably associate outsourcing and subcontracting, whereby a company pays another company (usually in a country where wages and labour standards are significantly lower) to produce its goods which it then resells for a profit, with the clothing and electronics factories of China and Southeast Asia. While “Made in Korea” and even “Made in Japan” were once synonymous with cheap, mass-produced goods in the West in the 1960s and 1970s, today “Made in China” or “Made in Bangladesh” stand for low wages, cheap goods, and hyper-exploitation along the global value chain. Whether basketball jerseys, DVD players, or laptop computers, the disposable consumer lifestyle prevalent across the industrialized world is made possible by externalizing production costs onto poorly paid workers in the global periphery.

- IV531 - April 2019 / European Union, Bulgaria

It was never about the Istanbul Convention

Stanislav Dodov — 2018-08-08T05:27:14Z

The debate over the ratification of the so called “Istanbul Convention” in Bulgaria, as in some other countries in the region, became a huge public scandal and probably the most important political matter of 2018. Originally intended to provide states with a framework for prevention and reduction of domestic violence against women, the document has become a byword for a conspiracy against the Bulgarian people and their supposed “traditional values” violated by foreign liberal powers through the use of “gender ideology”. On the 27th of July the Constitutional Court, referred to the matter by 75 deputies to the National Assembly, ruled that the Convention is incompatible with the constitution. The ruling revealed what the actual struggle was about.

- IV523 - August 2018 / Women, LGBT, Bulgaria

â€˜A Better Past is Still Possible'. Interview with Boris Buden

2018-07-16T18:41:59Z

Note from LeftEast Editors: This interview was originally published in Bulgarian for dVERSIA (8/2017) on the occasion of the publication of the Bulgarian translation of Boris Buden's book â€˜Zone des Ãœbergangs. Ãœber das Ende des Postkommunismus'.

- IV522 - July 2018 / Bulgaria

Landgrabs and the EU

Georgi Medarov — 2016-05-28T08:24:06Z

In the past few years, particularly after the 2007-8 world food price crisis, there has been a lot of attention to the global expansion of large-scale acquisitions of farmland, or what is usually referred to as land grabs. The investors range from transnational corporations and high-class individual investors to governments.

- IV496 - May 2016 / Europe, Ecology and the Environment, Economy, Bulgaria

The wave of protests, 2012-2013

Mariya Ivancheva — 2013-12-30T07:48:58Z

In the past half-decade, post-socialist Bulgaria has witnessed a persistent wave of protests. These protests have coincided with the global wave of anti-neoliberal mobilization against austerity, debt, and precarity, heralded by the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and Indignados movements. Yet, interpreting the Bulgarian protests as part of the same protest wave might turn out to be dangerously misleading. In this paper, I explain the dynamic of contestation and frames of protest by discussing the three peaks of the 2012–2013 protest wave. I show a number of characteristics of the political and social landscape of post-socialist Bulgaria, which have made the anti-neoliberal or anti-capitalist framing of the protests increasingly difficult. I claim that a reason for this has been a few mutually reinforcing characteristics of the Bulgarian protests, typical not only for Bulgaria, but also for other post-socialist countries.

- IV467 - December 2013 / Bulgaria