Red Threads

Universalism from the East. Speaking from the former Second World to the planet, rooted in shared politics and struggles across the region.

[Red Threads @RedThreads1917]

Read the full article on our Substack:

https://t.co/W7AdHrONsw

[Red Threads @RedThreads1917]

Today Armenia's elections are framed as a geopolitical contest between Russia and the West. But what if the real story is class?

An anonymous Armenian leftist activist argues that the answer lies not in geopolitics, but in class struggle and postsocialist transformations.

⤵️

[Red Threads @RedThreads1917]

New out on Red Threads: Gal Kirn's article on "Reconciliation with Fascism in Times of Capitalist Transition: The Case of Sloevnia". Read it here: https://t.co/Hmz1MZKtsF

[Red Threads @RedThreads1917]

Alex Herbert on how post-1991 Soviet historiography was shaped by a cultural turn, which marginalized materialist analysis, emphasized disaster, and carried a strong dose of liberal triumphalism: https://t.co/rxk0Iolbq4

[Red Threads @RedThreads1917]

Jeremy Morris's ethnography shows how Soviet collective life’s “phantom limb” lingers in today's Russia, shaping both new corporate “families” and wartime social reproduction amid neoliberal precarity https://t.co/8BTPFjLam4

[Red Threads @RedThreads1917]

"I think Netanyahu is trying to do this because he doesn’t know what would come out of a popular revolution in Iran. ... if you had a change in the regime that came from within Iranian society, it wouldn’t be an Israel-friendly or US-friendly regime. It would be more independent"

[Red Threads @RedThreads1917]

https://t.co/CXkPuKjkCh

@ShoraEs: "we don’t have a left anti-war movement in Europe like we did in 2003, and it is really making it difficult to go to the squares and to say 'no to war, no to the Islamic Republic, and no to the Shah.' That is what I want to scream."

[Red Threads @RedThreads1917]

"I read testimonies coming out of Iran. It’s horrible. And they’re saying, 'just do something, go out and be our voice and say no to the war and say no to the Islamic Republic.' It shouldn’t be that difficult, but it is."

[Olena @OlenaLyubchenko]

Our first @RedThreads1917 interview

[Red Threads @RedThreads1917]

"Care is the Basis that Makes Life Possible": an Interview with LevFem about Socialist Feminist Struggles in Bulgaria

https://t.co/fvToeiIKrh

[Bryan Gigantino @bryan_gigantino]

Newest episode of Reimagining Soviet Georgia now up on all platforms!

Episode 65: Poverty Alleviation and Socialist Construction in China with Tings Chak of the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research!

@t_ings

@tri_continental

@ReimaginingG

[👻призрак бродит по твиттеру☭ @brainw45h]

@Volod_Ishchenko @sopjap @RedThreads1917 More like red trots

[Olena @OlenaLyubchenko]

Today, on March 8 we launched @RedThreads1917 ! We conceive of our distinctive contribution as a Universalism from the East. This is at once a geographical and a political-theoretical position, a reclaiming of the struggles for and within twentieth-century socialism.

[Volodymyr Ishchenko @Volod_Ishchenko]

In the sense of a proper communist party, the left probably exists nowhere :)

The fact that some look at post-Soviet politics through the lenses of German foundations, left-liberal journalists and academics, sectarian loons, rare articles in Jacobin, and occasional political and war tourism—and see instead of the left a set of small NGOs and disorganized anarchists—is largely a problem of their own confirmation bias.

A very different post-Soviet left exists, even if they can't, don't know how to, or simply don't want to speak to international audiences. Their domestic audience on Telegram and YouTube, however, can be orders of magnitude larger. This doesn't mean they have strong political organizations, but they do have courage and innovative, relevant ideas. Most importantly, they are on the right side of history. There is no need to wear sackcloth and ashes :)

[Volodymyr Ishchenko @Volod_Ishchenko]

Our new project, @RedThreads1917, is now live with an opening editorial statement that is well worth reading on its own. Very excited to see how this will develop!

"We conceive of our distinctive contribution as a Universalism from the East. This is at once a geographical and a political-theoretical position, a reclaiming of the struggles for and within twentieth-century socialism. Both proximate to the capitalist heartlands of Western Europe and subordinated to its imperial power, the revolutionary protagonists of our region sought to produce universally valuable knowledge from their contradictory conditions. Their position enabled them to engage with and intervene in Marxist debates with utmost seriousness and to recognize that the very process of capital accumulation reproduces unevenness and that capital’s false universality itself produces heterogeneity. That insight generated home-grown vocabularies and creative revolutionary practices and institutions that the world still has much to learn from. We proudly inherit from them this task.

The task of universalism from the East is a practice in concrete universalism, which requires that deep political principles are not abstracted from but are concretely conceived within the history, experience, and reflections “from the region to the world.”

Actually existing socialism and socialist aspiration belong to one historical field of struggle. To split them too neatly and treat one as an alien deviation from the other serves to protect present-day desire for a communist future from the burden of life itself: from contradiction and complicity, from the messy and bleeding conditions in which collective futures are made. If one part of the courage to make history under conditions not of our own choosing is to admit that history is never pure, another part is to admit that responsibility, accountability, and learning must be shared as well."

[Red Threads @RedThreads1917]

https://t.co/w97vmPDl6J

[Red Threads @RedThreads1917]

This March 8th we are proud to launch Red Threads.
Our distinctive contribution: a Universalism from the East. Our opening editorial statement is about how we understand this position - at once geographical & political - reclaiming the struggles of 20th-century socialism.