What We are Fighting For (Mission Statement)
Red Threads is an online publication for internationalist politics speaking from the former Second World to the planet, rooted in lived realities, shared politics, and struggles across our region but addressing global questions. A successor to LeftEast, we are a multi-tendency left collective: more than a magazine, less than a party. While beginning with English, we also aim to publish in the languages of the region. Our name, Red Threads, is a salute to the East as a place and a universal ambition. A thread weaves and binds; it is not still but in motion. We trace our name to the Petrograd Red Thread textile factory (Красная нить)—where women workers stood at the forefront of the revolution, for bread and against war and imperialism—and to the “red thread” invoked by Luxemburg and Lenin as a through-line of history.
We work in the aftermath of defeat for the global left and amid right-wing revanchism, war, and new forms of repression. We seek to critically reclaim the historical inheritance of socialism and communism in the twentieth century —its realized, unrealized, and interrupted horizons. Our method is an immanent critique—historically grounded and accountable to contradiction, failure, and loss. We reckon with the legacy of the past century’s socialist projects on their own and on our terms, rather than on those of the Cold War or the triumphalist, unipolar 1990s. Knowing that it is neither possible nor desirable to turn the clock back, we ask what in our history—revolutionary struggle, institution-building, infrastructures of care, and more—can be reclaimed, developed, and carried forward, toward new political forms.
Who We Are (the Editors)
Adela Hincu is an intellectual historian researching the history of Marxist social thought, social sciences and feminism in socialist Eastern Europe. She is currently conducting a Marie Cure postdoctoral project at the Institute of Contemporary History in Ljubljana.
Matan Kaminer is an anthropologist and a lecturer at Queen Mary University London. An anti-occupation and migrant solidarity activist, he is the author of Capitalist Colonial: Thai Migrant Workers in Israeli Agriculture, and a member of the boards of Academia for Equality and the International Journal of Middle East Studies.
Olena Lyubchenko is a PhD candidate at York University and associate faculty at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. Rooted in the critique of political economy, her work examines the transformation of the Soviet Union, with a focus on social reproduction. She is affiliated with Alameda Institute and Black Sheep Society.
Rossen Djagalov teaches Russian and Slavic Studies at NYU. He studies Soviet culture and internationalism, history of the left, and is the author of From Internationalism to Postcolonialism: Literature and Cinema between the Second and the Third World (2020). He is active in the Black Sheep Society, Basis, and DSA.
Volodymyr Ishchenko is a Ukrainian sociologist, currently at Freie Universität Berlin. He studied protests, revolutions, right and left radicalism, nationalism, and civil society. He contributed to The Guardian, Al Jazeera, New Left Review, and Jacobin. He authored Towards the Abyss: Ukraine from Maidan to War (Verso, 2024).
Zach Hicks is a doctoral candidate at University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include the cultural production of the former Second World, critical theory, and the critique of political economy. He is a member of the editorial collective of Long-Haul Magazine and active with Black Sheep Society.
Graphics by Srđa Dragović.
