Red Threads

Our first @RedThreads1917 interview

"Care is the Basis that Makes Life Possible": an Interview with LevFem about Socialist Feminist Struggles in Bulgaria redthreads.media/p/care-is-the-…

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

@Volod_Ishchenko @sopjap @RedThreads1917 More like red trots

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.

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 :)

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."

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.