Forum: Russia's invasion of Ukraine : The war between us

Ivancheva, Mariya (2023) Forum: Russia's invasion of Ukraine : The war between us. Social Anthropology, 31 (2). pp. 153-156. ISSN 1469-8676 (https://doi.org/10.3167/saas.2023.310209)

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Abstract

In early December 2013 at the Institute for Human Sciences, IWM, in Vienna, an institution until recently known for promoting post- and anti-communist liberal intellectuals, Timothy Snyder – a historian of Stalinism – gave a lecture on Karl Marx. He declared Marx's 'anthropological' (as opposed to 'political economic') texts crucial for social scientists to understand the world in 2013. He praised the rising New Left in Eastern Europe (or rather some Left -Liberal groups in Poland and Ukraine he met) for rediscovering Marxian values despite witnessing the collapse of the former socialist world. As a Bulgarian who is part of this tiny New Left movement and positions herself further on the Left than most groups Snyder was referring to, I was perplexed: was this a signal of an ideological shift , or yet another asymmetric negotiation attempt between a Goliath (the (neo)liberals) and David (Eastern European leftists)? Were the liberals recognising, in the aftermath of the 2008 subprime crisis, amid rising anti-austerity social movements in the region and beyond, that their transition had gone wrong, and Marxism and 'really existing' socialism had some lessons to teach?

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