Ksenia Arapko

history & intellectual history | legal history & theory | political & economic thought | 19–20th c. philosophy & theory | marx

formulating a PhD project, 在学习中文

[Ksenia Arapko @marxologist]

I have done the deed. Didst thou not hear a noise?

[Tom Ashbyトム アシュビー @tomaashby]

This essay serves as an illuminating intervention on translation and the global turn. Working between four languages, in her English debut, Ryu Aerim discusses historical methods and translation, mistranslations, double translation, asymmetries in translation practices, and more.

[Economic History Society @EcHistSoc]

More than twenty interviews with some of the leading figures in economic history in the last century are now available to watch on our website & YouTube channel.

Interview with Professor Eric Hobsbawm:
https://t.co/u6RXgpvwiC
https://t.co/41znEPQTUj

[Furkan Gözükara @FurkanGozukara]

Terrifying reality check. Al Jazeera confirms the US and Israel have bombed over 760 schools and 350 health centers in Iran. They are intentionally obliterating mental health hospitals and residential markets. The scale of these war crimes is absolutely sickening.

[Al Jazeera English @AJEnglish]

Rights groups and Palestinian leaders have condemned Israel’s passage of a law approving the use of the death penalty against Palestinians convicted of deadly attacks, calling the measure a violation of international law and inherently discriminatory. https://t.co/JgH0nNibJh

[Isabella M Weber @IsabellaMWeber]

The world energy shock is coming — it will deepen inequality in ways we've seen before. Our new @newstatesman piece argues that without urgent government action, the Strait of Hormuz crisis will ripple through our economies and rip apart our societies. Here's why. 1/

[Linda Mamoun @mamoun_linda]

Over half a million people. Barely a headline.

[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."

[Abby Martin @AbbyMartin]

Day one of the US-Israel war on Iran and they've already massacred 85 schoolchildren. There's no limit to the hell empire will unleash to plunder the earth https://t.co/0mAl9kH8qT

[Drop Site @DropSiteNews]

🟢 BREAKING | An international coalition of activists, trade unionists, and humanitarian groups is preparing to sail next month with food, medicine, and essential supplies to Cuba, seeking to break the intensifying U.S. siege of the island.

Organizers of the “Nuestra América Flotilla” say tightened U.S. measures have blocked fuel imports, grounded flights, triggered rolling blackouts, and severely strained hospitals and critical infrastructure nationwide.

Inspired by the Global Sumud Flotilla to Gaza, the mission is backed by figures including UK MP Jeremy Corbyn and former Barcelona mayor Ada Colau. “Last year we sailed to Gaza to challenge a blockade that was starving civilians. Today we are preparing to sail to Cuba for the same reason: break the siege, bring food and medicine,” said organizer David Adler.

"The Trump Administration is strangling the Cuban people, cutting off fuel, flights, and critical supplies necessary for survival,” Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, who is endorsing the mission, told Drop Site News. “This policy of cruelty does not speak for the people of the United States.”

[COMBATE |🇵🇷 @upholdreality]

In 2026, the financial siege that strangled Cuba for more than six decades became a military one.

Five oil tankers seized in a single month. 7.3 million barrels confiscated. One of the tankers was not even under sanctions.

The largest naval deployment in the Caribbean since 1962. US drones surveilling Mexican tanker routes. An executive order threatening tariffs on any country on earth that sells Cuba a single barrel of oil.

Mexico, facing $400 billion in trade exposure to the US, stopped shipments. Venezuela's supply was destroyed by force. No alternative supplier was willing to risk retaliation or seizures.

20-hour daily blackouts. Hospitals on generators running out of diesel. Families cooking with wood.

The Secretary of State testified to Congress that regime change is the objective. The President said: "I think it's just going to fall."

But the siege did not begin in 2026. It began decades ago, and it was never unilateral.

187 nations vote to condemn the US embargo on Cuba every year. 33 consecutive years. The most lopsided vote in UN history.

And every year, every country that votes against it lets its banks enforce it anyway.

The reason is structural.

88% of all global foreign exchange transactions touch the US dollar. 95% of cross-border dollar payments clear through 42 American banks. One country controls the pipes through which the world's money moves.

That is all it takes.

Any foreign bank that processes a Cuba-related payment faces ruin.

BNP Paribas was fined $8.9 billion.
Société Générale, $1.34 billion.
HSBC, $1.9 billion.
Standard Chartered, $1.1 billion.
ING, $619 million.

$13.5 billion in penalties against foreign banks from countries that formally oppose the embargo.

The lesson was received. Most foreign banks now refuse all Cuba operations.

Several countries passed laws making it illegal for their own companies to comply with the US embargo.

Total enforcement of those laws over 30 years: one fine. $15,000. Against a hotel in Mexico City.

The votes against the blockade are symbolic. The fines are real.

And the machinery does not stop at banking.

A US private equity firm buys a Dutch software company. 23 years of Cuban contracts, severed in a week.

A US corporation acquires two Swiss ventilator manufacturers. Deliveries to Cuba stop overnight.

An American cargo company refuses to deliver Jack Ma's donated medical supplies to Cuba. It was the only country in Latin America that did not receive them.

PayPal blocks any transaction containing the word "Cuba." Including orders for a cocktail recipe book.

Cuba does not lose these suppliers to politics.

It loses them to mergers, algorithms, and compliance departments that would rather cut off an entire country than risk a phone call from OFAC.

The result:

35 children on a pediatric ward vomiting 28 to 30 times a day because the anti-nausea drug essential for chemotherapy cannot be sourced from anywhere on earth.

An 89-year-old woman implanted with a pacemaker recycled from a dead patient, two years of battery life, because no manufacturer will sell to Cuba.

69% of necessary medicines unavailable.

Infant mortality rising for the first time in decades.

When one nation controls the infrastructure through which the world trades, and weaponizes that control to deny an island of 11 million people fuel, medicine, food, pacemakers, ventilators, software, insurance, shipping, and banking for more than six decades, while every other nation on earth formally objects and none enforces its objection, the word for that is SIEGE.

The longest siege in modern history.

Condemned annually. Enforced permanently.

[Clash Report @clashreport]

Cuba's President Díaz-Canel gets emotional:

Cuba is not a terrorist country, nor is it a threat to the security of the United States.

Cuba has never carried out, nor proposed, nor organized any aggressive action that puts at risk the territorial integrity, the security, or the stability of the government of the United States.

We do not protect terrorists, and there are no military forces in Cuba from other nations or from other groups.

In Cuba, there is indeed a military base—an illegal military base—and it is an illegal United States military base on Cuban soil, in the province of Guantánamo, against the will of the Cuban people.

[Global Sumud Flotilla @gbsumudflotilla]

Today, the Global Sumud Flotilla announced the largest coordinated humanitarian intervention for Palestine in history.

On March 29, 2026, a unified maritime flotilla and overland humanitarian convoy will depart simultaneously, mobilizing thousands from over 100 countries in a coordinated, nonviolent response to genocide, siege, mass starvation, and the destruction of civilian life in Gaza.

“This is the enemy we are confronting. It’s not a person. It’s a way of life that determines the future of other nations.” — Saif Abukeshek, GSF Steering Committee

The announcement was made at the Nelson Mandela Foundation in Johannesburg, grounding this mission in a legacy of global solidarity and civil resistance.

This mission brings together:
- 1,000+ doctors, nurses, and healthcare workers
- Educators, engineers, and rebuilding teams
- War crimes and ecocide investigators

This isn’t just about sailing.
It’s about the world rising together.

📅 March 29, 2026

[Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt @FranceskAlbs]

Who believed that "if they only released the hostages"? Who believed in the ceasefire?
After killing 500+ people in about 3 months, Israel- armed and supported by the US - continues its genocide in Gaza undisturbed.
Don't let it become the new normal. Stand up against genocide!

[Jeremy Corbyn @jeremycorbyn]

There's only one reason the IDF accepts this figure: they know the real number is much, much higher.

Palestinians tried to tell the world. Shame on all those who discredited them.

By hiding the genocide, you fuelled the genocide.

[Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt @FranceskAlbs]

Not sure the magnitude of this is fully understood: Israel has wiped out 2,700 families in Gaza, leaving 6,000+ people as the sole survivors of entire bloodlines. This is the result of deliberate policy, pursued with full knowledge of its effects. This is not war. It is genocide.

[Vijay Prashad @vijayprashad]

Michael Parenti (1933-2026) died today. He has, as his son Christian said, 'gone to the Great Lecture Hall in the Sky'. A socialist from early into his life till the very end, Michael Parenti wrote in a feisty way and spoke bluntly the truths that were not always easy to digest in a wretched capitalist system. He was a fierce critic of imperialist wars and suffered the consequences of this because he could keep and then hold academic jobs even in liberal states such as Vermont.

The toughest test for all of us came when the USSR collapsed, and it was in this period that Michael Parenti played an important role in the Battle of Ideas, fighting the reactionary Western media and the intellectual cowardice of his peers. His books on Yugoslavia's destruction earned him terrible attacks, which he brushed off as the necessary price you pay in this struggle. In the midst of it all, Michael wrote 'Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism' (1997), a rebuttal to the anti-Marxist and anti-Communist blather that had begun to infect the world. The book remains an essential tool to fight against the ridiculous anti-communist historiography that demeans the great achievements of the workers' movements.

He spent the last period of his life within himself, which was a loss to the rest of us, and now his departure leaves us without that anchor which he provided.

Michael Parenti. Comrade. Our Red Flag dips in your honour.

[Institute of Intellectual History @StAndrewsIIH]

Published! Get your copy now! @CambridgeUP

[LeftEast @LeftEast1]

Last week we announced the closing of LeftEast. Endings are sad––and that one particularly so,--but it also marks a new beginning, or at least the birth of a successor project.

[Synekura Audio @synekura_audio]

Georg Lukács at the opening of the National Congress of Soviets in the Municipal Theatre in Budapest, June 15, 1919

[Christopher Satoor​​ @aufgehenderRest]

Miki Kiyoshi's The Logic of Imagination: A Critical Introduction and Translation.