Avral is Russian for ’all hands on deck’ but repurposed to mean rushing to meet a target, the frantic sprint against a deadline that leaves no space for breath. A word born in the Soviet factory, in the peculiar rhythms of the planned economy where long stretches of managed idleness were punctured by collective effort. That it remains everyone knows tells us something important about what has been preserved and what has been lost since 1991. What was lost is self-evident to anyone alive today in the Russian Federation: an industrialized workforce with job guarantees and symbolic capital, if poor working conditions. What is preserved is an embedded sense that the rush is shared, that the labour-time and space of others is implicated in your own. That understanding has survived the destruction of the institutions that once structured it, lingering now like feeling a phantom limb.

The phantom limb metaphor is just one possible way of thinking about what I call the ‘absent presence’ of social reproduction in Russia. Institutions that once organized collective existence are gone, but the sense of their potentiality is not. Now, in the conjuncture of post-2022 wartime Russia, that frustrated desire is being channelled into new forms: into an ersatz corporate kinship that promises protection from mobilization while delivering the discipline of the market, that invokes family while enforcing hierarchy. Understanding this dynamic requires thinking simultaneously about social reproduction but embedding that within the texture of lived experience in wartime Russia.

The Feeling of What’s Missing

The most common framework for understanding Russian political life in the West is via the optic of authoritarianism, revanchism, and imperial nostalgia. Russians who express support for Putin, or who do not visibly oppose the war on Ukraine are understood to be acting out a collective geopolitical identity: the wounded pride of a post-imperial nation, the resentment of Western humiliation, the backward-looking desire for Soviet greatness. This frontstage Punch and Judy show played out daily on TV misidentifies what drives the bulk of political behaviour and non-behaviour in Russia.

I argue, on the contrary, based on my long-term ethnographic engagement with rustbest company towns, regional cities and rural settlements, that a deeper resentment is about ‘feeling for an absent presence’: a haunting by the possibility of connection and belonging that the Soviet project — contradictory, coercive, and ultimately failed — once nevertheless instantiated. As with all anthropology, I focus on specific times and places, but as far as it’s possible to generalize, Kaluga region, four hours south of Moscow, is not untypical in representing a snapshot of a national feeling for such resentment. This is not nostalgia in the straightforward sense, which tends towards affective sentiment. It is closer to what Raymond Williams meant by a ‘structure of feeling’: a humming tension within experience, a social formation that is not yet fully articulate itself outside the dominant hegemony, but that nonetheless inflects one’s sense of time and place. It is more like the relation of a tree to water than the relation of an ageing person to a cherished photograph. The desire for connection is not chosen or purely personal, but intersubjective and ‘historically’ aware of itself.

The absent presence in question is not the gulag, not the nomenklatura, not the Stalinist terror — though those are also sedimentations. Georgian-Russian philosopher Keti Chukhrov has arguably captured it best: the Soviet model might be called dealienated sociality: the set of actually-existing practices, imperfect and often degraded, through which people were incorporated into something larger than themselves. The factory collective that organized not just production but housing, childcare, holidays, and funerals. The trade union that was also a social club, a welfare office, a venue for the distribution of not just wages but the so-called ‘social wage’: subsidized meals, sanatorium vouchers, kindergarten places, access to better housing. The institution of work itself as a site not merely of economic exploitation but of social recognition and mutual obligation. Caroline Humphrey, writing in the early 2000s about the shock of the transition period, described these (and other organizations) as ‘possessive domains’: spaces in which the self was constituted through collective inclusion, so that to be expelled from them was to lose not just income but a form of personhood. When those institutions collapsed, or were transferred to the market, or decayed into hollow shells, the loss was triply dispossessing. People lost access to work and economic security. They lost the associational life that work had organized. And they lost, in Humphrey’s formulation, an ontological reference point: the sense of being held within a structure of purpose and mutual recognition that exceeded individual reproduction.

Compressing dispossession

The transition from Soviet to post-Soviet was a catastrophic time compression of the dispossession that Western capitalism had accomplished over centuries. The ‘social wage’ — that complex of subsidized goods and services through which the Soviet state had effectively socialized much of the cost of reproducing labour power — was dismantled at speed. Childcare facilities closed or were privatized. Factory social clubs and canteens disappeared. Housing privatization transferred public assets to private hands. Healthcare and education were nominally retained as public goods but were stripped of funding and increasingly captured by informal payments and outright commercial providers. The reproductive burden was, in Silvia Federici’s terms, ‘re-enclosed’: transferred from the collective back to the household, which meant, in practice, back to women who still needed to also hold down a job (if they were lucky), or sell their possessions and yard-grown vegetables on the side of the road.

Zooming forwards to 2022, in the provincial towns of Kaluga region I study, a worker named Igor faces potential mobilization. For merely five weeks from September 2022, the authorities attempted to call-up former servicepersonnel, but this proved so politically risky, that they quickly backtracked in October 2022, announcing the ‘success’ of the policy. Relatively quickly into 2023, recruitment using large monetary payments among the more economically vulnerable parts of the population replaced mobilization of reservists amounting to hundreds of thousands of troops per year.

Igor’s talk always veers into the question of ‘how to get by’. He summarizes the situation with the matter-of-fact bitterness of someone who has calculated the same equation too many times: wages don’t keep up with wartime inflation. In any case, bank rates are too high for a mortgage; a child’s illness sufficient to lose a job; ‘social protection for women is a legal fiction’. These are not exceptional grievances. They are the ordinary texture of Nancy Fraser’s crisis of care in its specifically post-Soviet form. All the costs and risks of precarity are transferred to individuals who must then spin — krutitsia — forever adapting, forever calculating, with no cognitive or emotional bandwidth left over, even when war looms.

What distinguishes the Russian case from, say, the British or even American experience of neoliberal social dispossession is precisely the depth and freshness of that absent presence. In societies where the commons of social reproduction were enclosed centuries ago, their loss has become naturalized, sedimented into common sense. In Russia, the memory is living: it is carried in the bodies and practices of people who themselves used the factory canteen, who themselves were ‘possessed’ by the encompassing domain of the Soviet enterprise. The phantom limb aches because the amputation happened recently enough that the nervous system has not yet adapted. This is what makes the Russia case still valuable for a global left: the trace of the desire for collective social reproduction is still damp, still excavatable. It has not yet fossilized.

Wartime and the Intensification of Contradiction

The invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and the mobilization that followed in September of that year did not introduce new structural contradictions into Russian social life but merely intensified contradictions that were already operative. The most immediate structural effect was demographic. The combination of mobilization, emigration (roughly a million people, predominantly educated and economically active, left Russia in 2022 alone, though many have since returned), and the ongoing secular decline in the working-age population produced an acute labour shortage in precisely the sectors where the pre-war economy had already been strained. These included transport and logistics, and later the service industries and municipal workers. Shortages also crept into the industrial sectors, as skilled workers who could move were ‘stolen’ by the military industrial complex which could offer higher wages. At least before 2026, the result was something that workers with any structural bargaining power could begin, cautiously, to exploit. Wages in some sectors rose significantly in some industrial locations and in big cities. The social bargaining power of labour, in purely structural terms, strengthened. Workers can and do vote with their feet in ways that were less available to them before.

And yet this apparent structural strengthening takes place within a social and political context that prevents its translation into associational power. The organized labour movement in Russia has been co-opted for decades. The concept of ‘illusory corporatism’ that David Ost applied to the post-communist transitions of Central and Eastern Europe describes the Russian case aptly: unionism is institutional theatre, absent as genuine representation. There’s a post-communist labour paradox — strong structural position, weak associational capacity and in the Russian war this paradox only intensifies.

The implications for social reproduction tend to be passed over. The inability of workers to convert structural into associational strength is not merely a product of state repression, though it is certainly that. It is also a product of the way social reproduction is organized — or rather, disorganized. A workforce that must devote enormous energy to the hustle of survival, to navigating the informal economy of childcare and healthcare and housing, is a workforce with diminished capacity for collective organization. Silvia Federici’s insight about the political function of primitive accumulation applies here: the fragmentation of reproductive life into individual household struggles is not just an economic consequence of neoliberalism but a political one. Exhausted, isolated, without the time or space to develop solidarity beyond the household, workers can rarely mobilize even when their structural position objectively warrants it.

Simultaneously, the wartime state extends significant financial incentives to those willing to fight — contracts worth hundreds of thousands of rubles, payments to families of the fallen — while simultaneously cutting social expenditure in healthcare and education. The offer is explicit: the state cares (in mercenary terms) for those willing to die; for those who are not, the market remains. This double movement — expanding the monetary incentive for death, contracting the social infrastructure for life — is the care crisis in its most cynical wartime form. This creates a perverse moral economy in which those soldiers unlucky enough not to die-for-hire are constructed as unworthy of care, which produces its own social friction: businesses refuse to hire returning fighters; demobilized soldiers face social sanctions from below even as they are lionized from above. While programmes exist to try to support veterans and also integrate them into the workforce there are two barriers. Firstly, the demographic profile of men willing to sign up for the war often aligns with those who didn’t want to or couldn’t hold down formal employment, or matched the profile of regions that were economically depressed. Secondly, the stigma is significant: employers suspect soldiers of having unmanageable mental health disorders and substance abuse as a result of service; they ‘typologize’ them sociologically as unreliable for ‘normal’ work; they doubt, given their previously high pay (perhaps triple or quadruple normal blue-collar pay) that these workers will remain long in their jobs; they deduce that these workers will lack necessary skills, given they took the ‘extreme’ decision in the first place to go to fight rather than pursue a civilian career.

The Corporate Family: Fictive Kinship as Social Reproduction

In my work I try to tie this together to describe a constellation of social forces — the absent presence of collective personhood, the intensification of the care crisis, the structural strength of labour — but under wartimes, I am interested in the emergence of a social phenomenon that deserves serious analytical attention: ‘devolved corporatism’ articulated through the idiom of fictive kinship at the level of employment relationships.

Fictive kinship in anthropology refers to the recognition that social bonds of obligation, solidarity, and mutual recognition exceed the biological relation. In corporate contexts, this is generally treated as a management ideology: the firm as family is a well-documented feature of Japanese corporate culture, of certain forms of American evangelical capitalism, and of what Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello called the ‘connexionist’ spirit of contemporary capitalism, in which belonging to a team substitutes for the lost securities of Fordist employment. But the Russian case suggests something more than ideological manipulation from above, or at least something more complicated.

Caroline Humphrey’s 1970s (and later) ethnography on Soviet collective farms identified the ‘collective’ as a specific Soviet institutional form whose genius — if it can be called that — was to organize not just production but the entire social existence of its members. The collective was not merely an employer; it was a ‘domain’ in her terms, a zone of encompassing social incorporation within which the self was constituted. People were, in a precise sense, possessed by their collective: their identity, their social recognition, their access to social goods, their sense of purpose and belonging were all organized through and by the collective’s incorporation of them. The loss of this — ‘double dispossession’ — was therefore not just a material loss but an ontological one.

What is now visible in the provincial factories and metalworking plants of post-2022 Russia is, I argue, an attempt to reconstruct something functionally analogous — not by the state but by individual firms, not through the mechanisms of Soviet paternalism but through an uneasy combination of Soviet idiom and neoliberal discipline. My good friend Nikita, always lounging with me at home in his blue overalls, or sitting over a barbeque in his jerrybuilt garage, is employed in a metal fastenings firm in Kaluga’s Special Economic Zone. When I see him again in 2023 he’s ‘proud’ to announce that he no longer fears being called because he is protected by his employer from mobilization — a ‘reserved’ category worker whose draft deferral depends on maintaining his employment. In return, he performs a new kind of corporate loyalty: he stays late, works hard, and participates in the firm’s social media culture of team videos and collective self-presentation. The exchange is transactional, but it is also inflected by a historical trace of feeling. Nikita and workers like him develop what appears to be genuine affective attachment to the firm: incorporation into a ‘corporate extended family’. An HR manager expresses surprise at its success to me, even embarrassment; he had not predicted that workers would take the family metaphor so seriously.

Incorporation draws heavily on the Soviet vocabulary and idioms of paternalism. The general director of a new (wartime) ventilation plant in Kaluga describes himself as responsible for social ‘infrastructure’ in terms that echo the Soviet enterprise director as patron. Workers come to him as ‘supplicants’ — the word is precise and important — for social projects, sporting sponsorships, the maintenance of urban life that the state no longer provides. Boris, a skilled technician at this firm who also escapes mobilization describes this employer as a khoziain — a word that Xenia Cherkaev recently wrote about in her book on Soviet property forms. This is a term for a master of a domain whose authority is at once despotic, contingent, paternalist, and collective. Boris, who was born in 1990, compares his boss (admiringly) to Elon Musk, but the word he uses is very Soviet, in the way it is used today.

Scepticism and the Limits of Incorporation

It would be a mistake to read this emergent fictive kinship as simply ideological domination — as false consciousness that prevents workers from seeing their true interests. The third figure in this analysis is wiley Misha. Misha is a technician in the energy sector that should, by wartime logic, be thriving. But his enterprise suffers from labour shortages. As a result, his boss must accommodate his demands for flexible hours because the risk of losing him is real. Misha monitors job boards, calculates carefully, distinguishes between headline wages and the ‘hidden conditions’. He has left better-paying jobs because the greater self-exploitation they required was not worth it. He is a ‘realist sceptic’: someone who reads the offer of corporate paternalism clearly, who neither rejects it romantically nor accepts it uncritically, but calibrates it while building a kind of historical materialist DIY history of capitalism in Russia since 1991.

He knows, from lived experience, that wages in Russia have nominal and discretionary and ‘personal’ components, that what is offered and what is delivered are not the same thing, that the ‘norm’ gets quietly doubled while the pay increases by a fraction of the work increase, that working harder beyond a threshold is dangerous. His parting comment — that he might go to work for a Chinese automotive firm ‘but only if the conditions are right: a normal five-two schedule, plus lunch, and the proper corporate trinkets befitting the scale of production’ — is a precise, knowing articulation of the labour compact he is willing to enter and the terms on which he is willing to enter it.

This sceptical realism is, in E. P. Thompson’s terms, a form of moral economy: an operative understanding of what is fair and what is not, what obligations employers owe to workers, what the minimum terms of dignified employment consist in. It draws on the Soviet legacy not as nostalgia but as a set of standards — imperfectly realized, often betrayed, but remembered — against which present conditions are assessed and found wanting. The vernacular socialism that others have traced in Russian working-class culture is not gone; it is simply subterranean, surfacing in the calibrations of people like Misha rather than in explicit political contestation.

The labour paradox that structures Russian workers’ lives — structural strength, associational weakness — is therefore not simply a product of fear or false consciousness. It is a product of the specific configuration of social reproduction under wartime neoliberalism: the absence of the collective forms that would allow structural power to be converted into organized action; the exhaustion of reproductive labour that consumes the time and energy that organization requires; the genuine, not manufactured, need for protection that the firm’s paternalism partially addresses; and the accurate, not ideologically distorted, assessment that the available forms of collective action are likely to be crushed before they can succeed. Nonetheless, a valid question is to doubt that Russia is significantly different from other places - equally repressive - where collective forms of resistance did occur. What is less clear is how new forms of protest and political action based on the real and increasing grievances the war has caused will start and what political entrepreneurs will ‘ride’ their wave.

Absent Presence as Political Resource

There is a strand in social reproduction theory, visible in Federici’s work on commons and commoning and in Fraser’s concept of non-market forms of social cooperation, that insists the reproduction of life under capitalism always exceeds and partially escapes the commodity form. People feed each other, care for each other, maintain networks of mutual aid that are not fully captured by either market exchange or state provision. These practices are not merely survival strategies. They are the seeds of a different social logic, traces of a commons that is always being both enclosed and reconstituted.

The absent presence of Soviet collective sociality in Russia is something like this: a trace, a remaining sediment, of a different way of organizing social reproduction that capital has not fully succeeded in expunging. It manifests in middle-aged man’s spontaneous decision to cut firewood for an elderly neighbour in my village and sit on her bench for an hour in conversation – even though he doesn’t really want to; in my neighbour Tamara’s cherishing of a broken Soviet vacuum flask her mother used to take to work, and her articulation of a sensibility of ‘social justice and responsibility’ that she identifies as an unthought inheritance from the Soviet education system. The significance of this trace is not nostalgic but prospective: it is evidence that the desire for collective social reproduction is not extinguished, only displaced. Many of the practices I observe also find their origin in a tradition of mutual aid, which is socialist, if not necessarily Soviet.

The politics of this situation is not simple or comfortable. The devolved corporatism of the post-2022 Russian enterprise is not an embryo of socialist self-organization. It is a form of social incorporation that, as Gramsci would have recognized, generates consent to existing relations of production by partially addressing the social needs that those relations create. Hegemony is still born in the factory. The worker who is protected from mobilization by his employer, who participates in team-building videos, who feels the firm as a second family, is not simply duped; he is incorporated. His consent is won through real concessions, however limited and conditional, that address real needs that the state and market have otherwise left unmet.

But incorporation is not permanent, and its contradictions are visible. The firm’s care is contingent and revocable; the boss’s paternalism is power distance dressed as warmth; the protection from mobilization lasts only as long as the firm needs it and the state permits it. The structural power of labour that the demographic crisis has created does not disappear simply because workers feel familial loyalty to their employers. As the war eats into the leftovers – human, infrastructural, otherwise material – it becomes more and more likely that structural power of ordinary working Russians will be activated, at first in supplications to the boss, then to the regional government, and then to ‘the good Tsar’. But even now people are beginning to realise the biggest khozain in the country has no ear, and no reverse gear.

In the meantime, in a slightly different modality of thinking among the people whose lives I inhabit, the absent presence makes itself felt: the phantom limb’s ache: renewing the life of the village, the town, the country, was once more than the individual hustle; the factory was once more than a labour market; the state was a mobilizer and frankly a monstrous thing, but it also encompassed all for what seemed like a future commonwealth. That knowledge is a resource. It is not yet fully visible as ‘political’. But it is not nothing.

Jeremy Morris is Global Studies Professor at Aarhus University, Denmark. His book on wartime social reproduction in Russia Everyday Politics in Russia: From Resentment to Resistance was published by Bloomsbury in 2025.

Mark Carney’s speech at Davos in January 2026 has sparked a frenzy of truth-telling, which gives one the opportunity to assess the current state of politics and to reflect on the unified meaning of the transition to capitalism for the West and for the former socialist bloc of Eastern Europe, using the particular case of Romania.

Carney has brought the hard truth from his vast experience at the commanding heights of world economy, not only as Canada’s current prime-minister, but as the former governor of the Bank of Canada (2008-2013), who has faced the crash of capitalism in 2008 in such manner that he was appointed the first ever non-British governor of the Bank of England (2013-2020), having to deal in his mandate with the consequences of Brexit and with the quick succession of the failing governments of David Cameron, Theresa May, and Boris Johnson. Yet the speech itself, as remarkable as it is, is not the real turning point: the hard truth has come to the surface from within a historical process of denudation of the modern world. What seems to be chaos, the objective turbulence of the world-system at bifurcation, is only the result of hard truths being revealed the hard way, after the damage has been done.

The fracture within the Western world has widened so much that it has allowed Carney to say at Davos the quiet part out loud:

For decades, countries like Canada prospered under what we called the rules-based international order. We joined its institutions, we praised its principles, we benefited from its predictability. …We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false, that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically, and we knew that international law applied with varied rigour, depending on the identity of the accused or the victim. This fiction was useful, and American hegemony in particular helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security and support for frameworks for resolving disputes. So we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality. This bargain no longer works. Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.

The Canadian banker thus explained that the elites of the Western world have simulated democracy for the rest of the world because they were complicit with the imperial hegemon and they were making money in the process. Deep down, it was all a lie. Carney also willingly admits in his speech that the Western powers have firstly lied to themselves that even though the game is rigged, it is good for the capitalist elites, and perhaps it was good enough for the lower masses and for the rest of the non-Western world.

Well, it was not. The turbulence shaking the world is precisely the result of the inflated lie bursting out. Carney’s speech may have been motivated by the desire to show that the emperor is naked, but that was not possible because these days the emperor goes out fully armored and weaponized. In his frustrated desire of denudation, Carney turned against the game he himself has been playing and pronounced the naked truth.

Carney’s speech made official the cracking into pieces of the dominant ideology of Eurocentrism and has a particularly important meaning for East Europeans because it spells out the unified sense of the post-socialist transition to capitalism for Eastern Europe and for the Western world. Carney emphasized his point by making a reference to Vaclav Havel’s essay “The Power of the Powerless” (1978), thus making a comparison between the state of late “communism” in the 1970s-80s and the state of global capitalism in the late 2020s. The comparison revealed more than it intended. For one, it recognized just how important the turn of 1989 for the capitalist elites of the world-system has been. Namely, from the Western standpoint, the dismantling of the East European socialist bloc has been a turning point and a victory for the rich and powerful. And indeed, whatever it was that happened in 1989 was turned from the 1990s into a frenzy of capitalist accumulation: the greedy win of the ruling classes of the world-system. Instead of an “end of history”, it was a new start of ruthless accumulation after the recession and stagflation of the Western world in the 1970s-1980s. As it turns out, the transition of Eastern Europe, therefore, was not as much about democracy as about obedience to and alignment with the moneyed and the powerful in the global class struggle. All the rest was secondary smoke and mirrors, with some crumbs left falling from the big table. One can surmise that, in the underbellies of the world powers, there was an underlying consensus between the liberal and the conservative tendencies within the Western representative democracy. Liberal democracy was the carrot to the conservatives’ stick, the shine given to the gearbox, in order to maintain superficial but acceptable appearances, and to decide who gets the acceptable crumbs feeding the same digestive organism. The historical period of the 1990s to 2020s reveals itself to be indeed the times of fake it ‘til you make it.

As it turns out, that meant creating the reign of the few over the many, beautified with the human face of liberal democracy. In the euphemistic terms of the liberal language, the period of transition has been for the countries of Eastern Europe the passage from the lowest inequality group to significant income inequality. “Weakening the scope of collective action” is another euphemistic term used for the adopted anti-social philosophy of the post-socialist governance, quite understandably for an economy based on the “privatization of gains but socialization of losses”. Such an unchallenged rule of the rich over the world is not sustainable, which would explain why it has to be weaponized. Even with a financial sector deregulated and set free from the embeddedness in the industrial sector, capitalism cannot keep on inventing itself and falls into bigger crises, compensated by ever bigger interventions from above, which in turn are reducing the state to a militarized coercive instrument. At the global level, the unchallenged rule of the rich and powerful has unleashed three decades of wars of colonial invasions, which have enticed the global empire to fall into hyperimperialism. It has devastated entire countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria, creating millions of refugees, and has polarized domestic societies. It has taken liberalism to absurd extremes, bringing the regression of proto-fascism at the center of politics and the return of fascist violence used by the repressive apparatus of the democratic capitalist states. The post-socialist rule of the imperial, rich, and powerful has only aggravated the dangerous rivalry with the pretenders seeking the status of the imperial, rich, and powerful. The superficial shine of liberal democracy has only served to establish the unprecedented rule of the richest 1%, who are possessing more wealth than 95% of the population of the entire world. Even the personal computer and the internet, hailed in the 1990s as irrepressible drivers of democratization, have been taken over by monopolies and turned into means of capitalized surveillance. On top of it all, the unchallenged rule of consumerist and extractivist capitalism has revealed itself to be a war on life that produces uncontrollable waste and has brought the world to the brink of ecological disaster. Now would be a good time to remember that the shiniest Western promises of the 1990s were that capitalism equals efficiency and that capitalism equals democracy; in reality, the world is overwhelmed by waste and war. Thus far, these hard truths have only been learned the hard way, after the damage has already been done.

The time of rupture announced by Carney would mean that the former socialist bloc is also facing the revealed necessity of re-orientation, which confuses the hell out of its Euro-centrics. What social order would give an answer to the reign of the few over the many, and would be able to centralize ecological restoration? And who could be the international partners looking for real transnational democracy instead of dependency under imperial and colonial supremacy? In the great transition of the world-system, the East could keep on learning the hard way, forced by external circumstances beyond control, or with some semblance of planning and preparation. For its part, Romania has paid already a heavy price through the radical austerity measures imposed by the regime in the 1980s in order to align the whole economy to the absolute priority of paying the debt to the Western lenders, and then it has paid another heavy price in the post-socialist transition in order to align itself obediently into the position of a semi-periphery of the world system. For a semi-peripheral country like Romania, this moment of truth of the world-system puts into question the whole process of democratization, and in particular the form of representative democracy established after 1989. In this sense, the chaos of the Romanian presidential elections of 2024-2025 can be understood as a moment of clarification: a sign of popular anticipation rather than confusion. The discontent and distrust expressed by the majority of the people are pointing at historical truths that are getting revealed as we speak. We are witnessing a re-orientation of historical consciousness that has yet to find its political expression, because the political forces traditionally fighting and building against capitalism and colonialism have been unfairly eliminated after 1989 from the game of representative democracy. Even the year 2026 has begun in Romania with yet a new legislative initiative coming from the zealot drive of the establishment of post-socialist anticommunism, which seeks carceral and financial punishment for the public use of communist names and symbols, as well as ideas and concepts (!). The drive does remind one of the 1930s hunt in Europe to eradicate any root of communism and anarchism – and of who launched that hunt. Yet what is clear is that the popular discontent has been asking Romanians for an altogether different political form.

However, the formal political sphere continues to be occupied by the same normative binomial split between the liberal tendency and the conservative tendency. The social democrats have never really threatened it, playing in the middle, with facets of both tendencies. Currently, they are in decline, riding on institutional inertia and the power of clans, seemingly without direction. The current carriers of the liberal tendency, the Presidency of Nicuşor Dan and the mono-European government of Bolojan, are the latest caretakers of the fundamental lie. They are governing by pretending that everything will be alright after hurting the people, by trying to maintain the status quo that is only to the advantage of the big capital and the upper middle-class, while implementing no less than three waves of brutal austerity measures over one year. Thus, they are conforming yet again to the dividing and brutalizing logic of the transition to capitalism. As one should know, the tendency of a lie is only to inflate; accordingly, the extraordinary measures taken against the rise of the far-right, which directly contradicted their own principles of liberal democracy, have only strengthened the liberals’ belief in their moral supremacy and have turned into the blind fury of a radicalized and authoritarian Eurocentrism. Nothing else matters now except following even closer the same “European” directive line. The waves of neoliberal measures of austerity taken by the Bolojan government in 2025-2026 are nothing else but a mini-transition, compressing the period of sacrifices of the post-socialist transition into one more sacrificial year that “does not matter”, until the submission of the new budget of Romania to the European Commission in October 2026, looking forward to the end of the EU financial framework 2020-2027 and the beginning of the next one in 2028. Thus, in order to produce some good numbers needed for an acceptable report to the European Commission and for the rating agencies of global financial capitalism, the structural target of the neoliberal measures of austerity taken by the Bolojan government in 2025-2026 proved to be the individual consumer, the small and medium businesses and, prominently, the public employee. The big capital and the big funds are spared of being affected by the austerity cuts in the name of “prioritizing investments”, which is the direct inheritor of the term “strategic investors” used in the 1990s-2000s for the incoming capitalists who received favors giving them a leg up above the market realities. Prime-minister Bolojan refused to increase the state revenues by returning to the progressive tax or by going after the wealthy non-payers or by limiting the costs of militarization, yet has gone ham into the masses by increasing significantly the value-added tax (VAT), by increasing the annual road tax paid by individual car owners and other individual taxes, by increasing the normative number of working hours for teachers for the same pay (!) – a measure justified by saying it means “alignment to the European standards”, by freezing the minimal wage, the wages of the public sector and the pensions (!!) in the context of producing the rise of prices, by cutting the bonus for working in hazardous or harmful conditions (!!!), and even by cutting the pay for the first day of every paid medical leave (!!!!).

The pettiness of some of these measures is not just an indicator of sociopathic sadism but the structural characteristic of a new generation of politicians who know nothing about political ideologies and state matters, let alone about economic alternatives, but are mentally suffused instead in the corporatist “culture”. The current carriers of the liberal tendency in Romania are under the full delusion that the state is a corporation, namely a “badly managed corporation”, and are simply applying the capitalist definition of corporate “efficiency” to the state, without understanding the basic difference that the state has to work for the people, not for profit. They are cutting costs regardless of the interest of workers, always targeting work, not capital, down to the pettiest details hurting the common folk, and are proud of their own sociopathic version of Eliminating One Olive from First Class Salads, completely indifferent to or unaware that context is everything. These Eurocentric carriers of the liberal tendency are simply proud to be the middle management of the dependency of a semi-periphery, unaware that this is the meaning of “Europe” that they are actually conveying to the people. As in every harmful episode of the post-socialist transition to capitalism, the principle of dishing out “tough love” only applies to the masses and not to the capital or to the directing Western institutions. The tougher the love for the people, the sweeter the deal for the wealthy patrons. The real-world meaning of the word “sacrifice”, which has been predicated in the post-socialist transition to capitalism exclusively with reference to the “people”, and which has been softened and rationalized by adding the word “efficiency”, is revealed thus to be simply: exploitation. It is only common sense to expect that the current disenchantment of the people with this exploitative meaning of Europe will only continue to grow and to be capitalized by the opposition represented by the far-right pretenders to the conservative tendency. In spite of their tough posturing as “men who do what needs to be done”, the current Romanian carriers of the liberal tendency cannot avoid being seen for what they are: hapless mid-level managers who are obeying other political masters, who in turn are outside the national game of electoral democracy. They are only the latest carriers of the Western lie divulged by Carney, willingly taking the first hits of the internal distrust and division that they themselves have sowed while managing exploitation and dependency. Their only way forward is to keep on inflating the lie, blaming either an external or an internal threat.

Meanwhile, the rising right-wing pretenders to the conservative tendency are gaining popular support by pretending to address the truth. In reality, they are part of the same lie that completes the binomial and their answers are symbolic. The currently rising form of populist sovereignism is only the radicalization of the conservative tendency within the same normative political binomial of post-socialism. The radicalization itself is the direct result of trying to overcompensate the crisis and bankruptcy of neoliberalism. The sovereignist “patriots” are not a priori spared of popular distrust, which applies to the entire political class, and can be understood as the awakening consciousness or popular consensus that the post-socialist transition has been indeed a process of colonization, i.e., a loss of popular sovereignty, and that the historical time after socialism has been governed by social injustice: by lies, thefts and exploitation resulting in the ruling clique (cîrdăşie) of a few big winners and their faithful servants.

Thus, the external denudation of the world has been accompanied by internal revelations. Liberal democracy has been used in Romania to the benefit of the few. Captured Justice, the most popular investigative documentary of 2025 from Romania has shown how the justice system has been “captured” in the aftermath of the famous anti-corruption campaign led by the National Anticorruption Directorate of Romania between 2006-2012 and 2013-2018. The investigative journalists focused on the corrupt adaptation and reorganization of the justice system, particularly after 2022, and found today a “captive justice system”. The presented evidence is clear: the ultimate beneficiaries of the reorganization have been people who have enriched themselves in the post-socialist transition through theft, abuse, and fraud. The rich and powerful have been exonerated and acquitted along this corrupt process, not in the least by way of an ingeniously orchestrated expiration of liability under the existing statute of limitations. In other words, the investigation showed that the class war of the post-socialist transition has been won, some three decades later, by the rich and powerful. They are the ones who have become free with impunity after 1989, not in the least by privatizing the state and turning the justice institutions into their clients. I would add that this victory had been officially announced already through the controversial decision of the Romanian Constitutional Court from May 2025, which ruled in favor of limiting the transparency of the wealth statements of politicians.

Rather than chaos, the exposé evidences an organized order, but an order that requires increased control, militarization and surveillance, otherwise it is not sustainable. Corruption is not a local disease but a structural feature that upholds the logic of the transition. The semi-peripheral state reveals itself to be cracked, instrumented against collective action and privatized by the combined pressures of the world system and of the rich and powerful, piling up on top of the man-made climate calamities. This is the common clarity that keeps on emerging both at closer range and in the wider horizon of the world, amidst all the violence. While the liberal elites keep on pretending that there is nothing wrong with the direction of the transition, the sovereignists are reacting to the popular consensus, supported by evidence, that the transition to capitalism has been a theft, but only with vague promises of doing justice that sound like the threats of thugs, without talking at all about the gap produced and maintained between the enriched and the impoverished.

The objective reality is that the elimination of the socialist option from the East European semi-periphery has turned it into a war zone and into an area of plunder. Even the emergent right-wingers are saying out loud half of this truth. Their sovereignism is a predictable right-wing political expression that has emerged at this particular historical conjuncture out of the structural crisis of the semi-peripheral state: the right-wing responds to the deep popular discontent with mirroring indignation and the superficial means of a broken, privatized and weaponized state. At its best, the right wing looks at the cracks created by the loss of popular sovereignty through military and militia lenses, talking only about state symbols and the loss of state sovereignty. That does not make it less of a client of the world-system, or less of a servant of the rich and powerful. The elite political figures of sovereignism are just the part of middle-management who dream of promotion. I would advance this: the current form of Romanian sovereignism is the domain of the self-colonized who have temporarily lost the master and are trying to move into the void of an imagined future hegemon. The sovereignists simply cannot get rid of the dark energy of the void, which they bring wherever they show up. They must feel it themselves; otherwise, there would be no need to cover it up with pseudo-messianic rallying cries and strident promises of a golden age.

The void is the result of the objective fracture of the world-system and of the perpetual state of half-awakening of the right-wing from the state of self-colonization. Yet the only existing sovereignty belongs to the political community, otherwise called the people. Real politics would be based on the popular sovereignty which precedes any colonization or domination and provides the forces of liberation. In other times, that was the ideal meaning of work.

To sum up, the clarity emerging in the wider horizons of a turbulent world comes from the admission that the rulers of the Western world have lied and committed violence in order to maintain their advantages within the world order of colonial and imperial supremacy. Whether it was inadvertently or not, the result is the same. The global lie has given the direction of the post-socialist transition to capitalism, which has been implemented with disciplined obedience by the local managers of the lie. The lure of the coalition of “middle powers” invoked by the Canadian prime minister is, therefore, the superficial answer that tries to respond to the truth of the fractured world without correcting the course, without responding to the need for transnational democracy of the whole world, without addressing the constituency that listens to the far-right, and without actually addressing the tendency of the currently diminished Europe to slip itself into the semi-peripheral status itself. It is a weak appeal to mobilization addressed to the mid-managers of the world, who have never been known for their rebellious spirit. It is remarkable and revealing that Carney’s speech recognized the inflated lie of the Western world, but did not make an appeal for taking responsibility for its consequences! As it turns out, the banker is not even an Ivan Ilych character. Recognizing the lie does not lead to an awakened consciousness. On the contrary, the banker who recognized having managed a life of lies just pleaded for a tactical change that would keep up the charade of the status and power of the European and Canadian capitalist elites. Carney’s recognition of “the end of pleasant fictions and beginning of harsh reality” is not a return to realism, but the reaction of the coterie who has been left out of the latest scheme and realizes it has to concoct a new one. The discrepancy is striking between the “mid” range and select club of his appeal for mobilization, and the gigantic size of the lie that he has just revealed. One can contemplate, thus, the character and limits of an adult person in a position of power who has never spoken out against the lies and war crimes that were profitable for him, yet cannot accept what he perceived to be a rupture within the ranks of the Western elite. This crack within the monolith of Eurocentrism puts the middle-managers of dependency from the semi-periphery in a waiting game that is only to the advantage of the far-right.

The denudation of the world is a temporary phenomenon that encourages politicization and allows re-orientation. The politicization towards the half-baked, conservative solution of barbarism is already here, with all its dark energies. Yet we already know that in spite of claims about sovereignty, they are just future clients of the empire. The politicization toward corporate liberalism remains attractive for opportunists looking to maintain the status quo. Yet the larger world is changing, and the liberal game of complicity with the colonial and imperial forces has lost its moral pretense and it runs mostly on money. We already know that in terms of policy, all it does is to demand more sacrifices from the common folk while dishing out austerity. Within this impoverished landscape, Eastern Europe has its own resources for re-orientation in the world because it has actually experienced transformation and it has come to a point of popular disenchantment. For all its faults, real socialism has actually produced in record time social mobility at the level of the entire population, homes for everybody and an entire infrastructure for education, culture, health, energy, production and transport, adequate for the world of the 2^nd industrial revolution. In comparison, after more than three decades and for all the influx of global capital, the governance of the post-socialist transition has built some roads, real estate riches and many local images to be sold to tourists, and a profuse network of supermarkets and malls, while it keeps on relying on the socialist infrastructure and on socialist-educated people. The option that would be offered by a process of socialist renewal based on the characteristics of this time and place and on the collective intelligence of East Europeans is only forbidden by the current ideological constraints. The anti-democratic nature of this interdiction should be clear by now even for the local managers of the big lie.

When even the leaders of the capitalist world are signaling the end of the post-socialist transition, it is not too late to look seriously towards the third option of a transformative left. Animated by the vision of clarity in times of turbulence, new energies of re-organizing the left have come to a common expression found in the Manifesto of the Initiative for the Right to the Future. However, one has to recognize that this is only the beginning of a beginning, which needs to be strengthened and needs a culture of solidarity and appreciation. The existing collective intelligence will have to focus on identifying and mobilizing the local and transnational resources of re-orientation that are answering the concerns of the people and are able to anchor a vision for the future. It has to be said here that not everybody has learned these truths the hard way, and that the current denudation of the world has been confirming many particular points and even the burgeoning consensus from the growing body of East European critical theory that has been expressed organically in local groups of social justice activism, in the voluminous body of work of the independent journals of leftist tendencies, and in major academic conferences such as Capitalist Transformations in Eastern and Central Europe or the four editions of the Urban Inequalities Forum from Sofia, as well as across professional associations such as the Black Sheep Society of the Association for Slavic, East European & Eurasian Studies and others. The hapless choice of learning only the hard way evidences the discrepancy between power and knowledge in neoliberal times, which has been pointed prominently in the recent blockade of the Rectorate of the University of Belgrade, organized by what is still the largest social movement in Europe.

Something is brewing in Eastern Europe, but the political space that remains to be articulated from the critical cumulation of knowledge and social mobilization would have to be able to break through the binomial reign of mediocrity of the mid-level managers of the semi-periphery. Outside this option, the much darker clarity emerging in the process of denudation of the world is that the new TINA is simply the duel to the death of the resource wars.

Ovidiu Ţichindeleanu is a Romanian philosopher, translator, and culture theorist, writing on critical social theory, decolonial thought, international politics, and the cultural history of socialism and post-socialism. His work in many independent collectives foregrounds cultural activism and political journalism in transnational, transperipheral and intercultural connections.

Red Threads Editorial Note: Three weeks ago, the US and Israel launched an aerial war of aggression against Iran, accompanied by a new round of Israeli violence in Lebanon and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, leading to thousands of deaths throughout the region. Following months of protests in Iran and their bloody repression, many expected the regime to suffer a swift defeat. However, despite the decapitation of its leadership, the regime has proved remarkably resilient and even taken the initiative, establishing a chokehold on one of global capitalism’s arteries, the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20 percent of global oil passes, and striking back powerfully at Israel and US allies in the Gulf.

On March 13, 2026, a week into the assault on Iran, Matan Kaminer of Red Threads conducted this interview with writer and journalist Shora Esmailian, based in Malmö, Sweden. Esmailian places the protests that sparked the recent state crackdown in continuity with waves of protest since the 1979 revolution. She points out that these waves have incorporated a wide range of demands around political freedom as well as economic, gender and environmental justice.

Esmailian highlights that resource extraction, and dependence on oil, gas, and steel production at the expense of working people, make the Islamic Republic a capitalist society, one in which the leadership enriches itself on the backs of the working class. Our conversation broaches - without being able to answer - that most difficult of questions: what should the left’s relationship be to regimes that may support liberation struggles externally while remaining oppressive internally , especially in a context where there is no alternative on the horizon?

RT Thank you for agreeing to this conversation. Could you introduce yourself to our readers?

SE I was born in Tehran in 1981 and I came to Sweden as a nine-year-old refugee with my mother. My immediate family were all involved in the Revolution of 1979. I grew up in a leftist home, where I heard about everything from Palestine to Iran to US imperialism. My family never said much about what they did during the revolution, but they were secularists, leftists.

I started working as a journalist around 2004, when I went to Iran to report on the awakening labour movement together with Andreas Malm. We wrote a book, Iran on the Brink. Since then, I’ve covered Iran, Palestine, the Middle East, but also climate change and climate justice. I wrote a book on climate refugees in Pakistan, Egypt and Kenya back in 2010-11. My most recent book is in on Gaza and the genocide. I also work as a cultural journalist and writer.

RT Could you begin by telling us about the dynamic between internal resistance and repression in Iran on one hand and external aggression on the other in the lead-up to the current war?

SE During the protests in December and January, when a lot of protesters were massacred by the regime, Mossad was saying [its agents] are on the streets. Israel was saying, “do whatever you can to free yourself from the Islamic Republic.” And I saw a lot of leftists in Sweden just saying, “You know, these are not popular protests.” But protests have been bubbling up in Iranian society for twenty-five years. We had the students in the late ‘90s. They were crushed. We had the labour movement in the early 2000s. They were crushed. We had the feminist movement, who tried different ways, not only protest, but also reforming family law; they were crushed. We had the elections of 2009 and the reformist Green Movement. They were crushed. The leaders of the reformist movement that came out of the Islamic Republic itself were put under house arrest.

Then we had protests about water, corrupt banks, farmers who lost their land and moved into the cities and had some small savings in 2017, and the banks just disappeared and all their savings were gone, and now they didn’t have land because there’s been a thirty-year drought in Iran. And then 2019 again.

You can see all these protests for twenty-five years coming every second or third year or so. We have to see the protests in December-January as a part of all these protests. The promise of the Revolution of 1979 was that Iran would be a free Iran, free from oppression, both internally and externally, but also an equal society. That was what both the left and the Islamists said in ‘79.

These promises were never granted to people. They never saw the light of day. That’s why we see people go out now and then and protesting. And during all these protests, some of the demands have been political, like: Women want freedom. I want to dress as I want. I want to vote as I want. And then a lot of demands that are economic, like we want to actually be paid for our jobs. We want social insurance. We want pensions, we want better working conditions.

All these came together during the December-January protest when people went out because of high prices. But this time, very soon they started to say “Death to the Islamic Republic.” And it doesn’t matter that Mossad were on the streets of Iran, because we have been hearing these slogans for years, including during Woman Life Freedom [in 2022]. That was one of the biggest protest movements. Then you could hear “down with the regime,” but moreover, to question the veil is a revolutionary demand in the Islamic Republic, because that one the pillars that it stands on is forcing the veil on women. When some leftists are saying these protests were ignited by Mossad, I think it’s bullshit, because these are the Iranian people, going out saying what they’ve been saying for twenty-five years.

RT You mentioned the economic question. I’ve seen arguments recently that the sanctions regime has not only made life hard for ordinary Iranians, but has also enabled regime corruption. Do you agree with that analysis?

SE What we’ve been seeing for thirty or thirty-five years, since right after the death of Khomeini, is the Islamic Republic’s elite trying to enrich themselves. Once the Republic was established, it started executing leftists and Mojahedin at once. And then they had this war with Iraq that saved Khomeini for many years.
Nobody could protest anything during eight years of war.

I grew up during that war: it was daily bombings. Just before the war, on the 8th of March 1979, women went out to say no to the compulsory hijab. And then we had war for eight years and nobody could say anything. And when the war ended and Khomeini died, a new leadership took over and opened up the Islamic Republic, becoming a classic capitalist society where the leadership would enrich themselves on the backs of the working people. A decade later, when the labour movement started again, they said “look, we are seeing that people tied to the regime are running factories into the ground to be able to sell the lands.” That’s what the workers told Andreas [Malm] and me when we were in Iran. Or “they’re making us work and they’re not paying us for eight or ten months.”

So ordinary people in Iran, working-class or middle-class, had to work two or three jobs to live. And that, of course, has to do with the sanctions, because sanctions and the isolation of the Iranian regime, especially since the invasion of Iraq, have been crippling the economy. But at the same time, a small part of the elite, tied to the Islamic Republic, have been enriching themselves, living in luxury, building malls and talking “consumption is the way out of this crisis,” and so on.

The sanctions have been really bad on people and the government, but the Islamic Republic’s leadership could have done things very differently, at least paying workers. Instead of holding all the money, and then you see their kids living in luxury, you see their Instagram posts and what cars they have or what big weddings they have, and so on. That is not a leadership that takes care of its own [people].

RT It’s interesting what you say about the Iran-Iraq war. I hadn’t realized before that this use of external aggression to strengthen internal power is something that the regime is already very practiced at. Do you see a parallel to today?

SE I really do. During the Iran-Iraq war, nobody could go out and say no to the war, because Iraq had attacked Iran. So Khomeini could say “we are defending ourselves.” But how did they defend themselves? They sent millions and millions of young boys to the front, and they were killed in the most devastating ways, you know, just running and having a key around their neck signifying that they would go to heaven. But they were just running towards mines. It was a horrible war, and I remember the only way we had to protest. We used to get bags from school, with a note that would say something like: “2 pairs of men’s underwear, 2 pairs of socks, 3 cans of food.” So that the families would fill them and send them to the front.

And I was living alone with my mother and she was like, “no way, I don’t even have a man at home with men’s underwear. And even if I did, I wouldn’t.” So she let me go back to school with the bag empty. That was the only way to protest. During those years, thousands of leftists were executed in prisons, and people could not even protest against that, because the lid was on so hard.

The war was kind of a saviour for Khomeini. And that is, I think, what is going to happen today. When I saw the protests start again after forty days of mourning in February, I became hopeful. All these students going out. We had students praising the son of the Shah, but we had also students saying “Woman Life Freedom” or “behind every killed comrade, there are hundreds of comrades,” and so on. So I had a lot of hope, because it was four or five days of continuous protest at the universities, even though the Basij, the paramilitary force, would really beat them, try to arrest them. But they kept going out and it felt like what I had read about the revolution in 1979, that revolution is not something that happens from one day to another. It’s a process.

When the students keep going out after they’ve been massacred, and they’re being attacked by the Basij, it means something. It means that the will is still there. And I was thinking maybe I could go back to Iran this year. But what shut them up was not the Basij. It was not the Islamic Republic. Maybe if it had continued, it would be them, like it had been with all the other protest movements, because the Islamic Republic’s only language towards protests is repression, and hard repression. They don’t have any other sort of language.

But this time it was the war. That totally silenced the students and their demands for change. We don’t know how long this war will go on. We don’t know what country they will even have to protest for, but what I know is that after a war, it’s not easy going out and saying we want the end of the Islamic Republic. It is like these bombs really threw back everything in Iran, from infrastructure to social organizing and political organizing, at least ten or fifteen years back.

RT Can you describe the internal composition of the opposition in Iran before the war? I know it’s much more complex than what is portrayed on the outside, either by the liberal media or the campist left.

SE Iran is a very diverse society. It’s difficult to know how much of the population supports the Islamic Republic. Some figures say 15%, some 20%. But what we know is that these different attempts to organize, the students, the labour movement, the women’s movement, have all been crushed by severe repression. They literally silenced workers’ leaders by cutting out their tongues in 2006, when the bus drivers were trying to unionise, or all the imprisonment of [participants in] the women’s movement during 2007-8, or all the killings after the Green Movement 2009 in the prisons.

It’s difficult to say that there is an organized political opposition in this country, because it’s been impossible. And since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the US and Israel have been threatening Iran with war. For twenty-something years, every time people went out, the regime represses them, takes their leaders and accuses them of running errands for the empire. It’s also very difficult to have something ongoing for years. Really, the labour movements tried in the beginning of the 2000s, but a lot of them were imprisoned and the labour movement died out. But we have intellectuals who came out during the war this summer, [from] the writers’ union, They came out with statements saying “no to war and no to the Islamic Republic.” And they were all imprisoned.

RT Another way of approaching this question is that we’ve seen different epicentres of the explosions over the last few years, right? Feminist movements, environmentalist movements – what are the different kinds of fault lines that the resistance has taken in recent years?

SE The Woman Life Freedom movement is very interesting because for the first time since the revolution in ‘79, the movement spread all over Iran in just a few days. It started in [Iranian] Kurdistan, but then you suddenly saw women in Baluchistan, that is a Sunni minority area and very religious, very traditional. Women, fully veiled, not the Tehrani style where veil starts in the middle of your head, walking in big demonstrations saying “Woman Life Freedom,” and for them, the compulsory hijab was not the most important thing. For them, the drought that has been going on in Baluchistan for the past thirty years and affecting their lives was the most important issue and they chanted about water.

The Baluchi minority have been so repressed, not only because of the drought. The regime hadn’t done anything for them. Their children go to schools that don’t have heating in the winter or cooling in the summer. They don’t have hospitals, water pipelines. So it was interesting to see that during Woman Life Freedom, all these questions about environmental disasters came together. And all this other baggage of being repressed in different ways came out in that movement. So that was also why that movement was very hopeful.

But then you have a capital, Tehran, lying below a mountain chain, and suddenly you don’t have enough water. Last October President Pezeshkian was saying ”if it doesn’t rain this autumn, we have to move the capital.” How do you even move a capital with 10-14 million people? A country like Iran is vulnerable to climate chaos, especially when it comes to droughts.

But it’s also important to remember that water management in Iran has to do with these “millionaire mullahs,” as we called them in the book. Look at Zayanderud, it’s the biggest river in Isfahan. Some years ago Zayanderud was totally dry for the first time in history. Of course, that has to do with the drought, because it’s not raining enough in Iran, but it’s also because around Isfahan there are a lot of steel factories, and those factories are owned by people with connections to the Revolutionary Guard, and there was total mismanagement. Steel production requires a lot of water, and they were not using it in a sustainable way, they were totally emptying all the aquifers under Isfahan, Kerman and other cities.

It says a lot about how this regime has not tried to fulfil any of the promises of ‘79, that they would take care of the poor who had suffered during the rule of the Shah; they just enriched themselves. They don’t care. They didn’t manage anything in a sustainable way. Climate change really meets the mismanagement of a corrupt leadership in a very bad way. And all these crises coming together are making life really, really hard.

RT Does this analysis also extend to the way oil has been managed? Levels of renewable energy use in Iran are among the lowest in the world. There doesn’t seem to have been any attempt to wean the economy off dependence on oil.

SE No. And that is very strange, because when you’ve been living under sanctions for thirty years, did you ever think about shifting your economy to something that works for you? You have a lot of sun, you have a lot of desert. You have a lot of wind. It’s a really big country with different sorts of nature, but they never tried to pursue that. Instead, they made rivers and lakes totally dry up.

The environmental movement hasn’t been so big in Iran, but you had some both old and new activists that tried to raise these questions and link them to climate change as well as mismanagement by the leadership. And you know, they just disappeared. People don’t even know where they are. When it came to the labour movement or the women’s movement or the student movement, people were imprisoned and maybe killed in prison, but people knew where they were. When it came to environmental activists, they just disappeared.

I think that has a lot to do with the threat they posed to the Islamic Republic, because [the regime] really wanted to silence them. They didn’t want these activists to put political thoughts in the minds of the people and have them make the analysis. But they have a lot of oil; now they have more gas. I don’t understand how this this regime thought that, after all these years of sanctions and isolation, maybe they were hopeful that they could start selling gas – but no, there is not much going on when it comes to wind or water or sun.

Water and droughts are important in Iran because it has a lot of aquifers, but it’s fossil water. When you use it, it runs out and when it’s finished, it needs a lot of years of rain to fill up again, and the rains are not coming. I think that’s the most important mismanagement that has been going on.

RT There’s also this ancient technology of irrigation with qanats, right?

SE Yes. That is how people, even in arid places like Kerman where my father’s family is from, have been able to farm. My grandfather and his brother bought a piece of land where they had pistachio trees. It’s very arid there, they don’t have much water, but with the help of the qanats, they’ve been managing for generations. But then, in the past twenty years, my father’s family lost half the land and the trees because of the drought. And my uncle was saying some years ago that when they try to pump up water from these aquifers, there is none any more. You know, the qanats were exported throughout the Middle East because they were a sufficient way of using the land in this very arid part of the world.

RT And this infrastructure has been allowed to disintegrate?

SE Yeah, because when it doesn’t rain into the qanats, you cannot pump up the water, you cannot use the qanat.

RT I’d like to return to the international questions. Before the war, I would have said that it looked like the militarized strategy of resistance [to the US and Israel] had failed over the last two years. Hizballah had been beaten back, the Assad regime in Syria fell, Hamas lost control over most of Gaza, the Iranian regime looked very weak. And they were all weakened by deep unpopularity at home. But I’ve been surprised by the way that Iran and Hizballah have managed to hold up and fight back.

We don’t live in the kind of world that we would like to live in, and there are all sorts of difficult choices that people living under oppression have to make. Given what we’ve seen over the last two weeks, what’s your appraisal of the way forward for progressive or liberatory movements in the Middle East? In terms of the question of armed struggle, and also of the relationship to regimes that might be supportive of liberation struggles in one area, but also oppressive in another?

SE It’s a very difficult question. I can start with this: I’m very sad that 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. I’ve been protesting for Iraq, Kurds, Palestinians for so many decades now, and I would like to take my kids to a demonstration for Iran against all oppression. But it’s really difficult to do that because if we do, either we would be accused of being on the side of the Islamic Republic by the royalists – and they are crazy aggressive, they are fascists, really fascists, at least here in Sweden – or we would kind of be played, the Zionists would say, “oh, so now you are against the Islamic Republic: here is an Israeli flag for you!”

It’s so confusing right now, and it’s so difficult to do something. 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. You have to go back in the modern history of Iran about 120 years, to the Constitutional Revolution, to see what this is and what is happening in Iran now. Every time we had a movement by the people that threatened the state, some empire, whether Russia or Britain or the US, came in, stopped it and put in their own puppets. That happened during the Constitutional Revolution in 1905-06 and during the 1953 coup against Mosaddegh. And the only conjuncture in in this history when people actually said no both to the dictatorship and to imperialist intervention was the Revolution of 1979.

The Islamic Republic has destroyed everything, but [back] then the left and the Islamists were saying the same thing. They were saying Iran should be free and independent. So when we think about today, interventions have never been good for the ordinary population in Iran, whether you’re a worker, a women’s rights activist or a minority.

I agree that if Israel and the US win this war, and if they are the ones taking down the Islamic Republic, then we have a Middle East where for the first time US and Israeli hegemony is total. So it’s a very frightening time. And I think Netanyahu is trying to do this because he doesn’t know what would come out of a popular revolution in Iran. Sure, for the past few years you have been hearing inside Iran, “don’t put the money in Gaza, don’t put the money in Lebanon, don’t put the money in Syria, put it in us.” That’s not so progressive, but people are saying this because they don’t have food on the table for their kids. Still, I don’t think that the memory of the Iranian people is so short. I think if you had a change in the regime that came from within Iranian society, it wouldn’t be a totally Israel-friendly or US-friendly regime. It would be more independent than that. I think that is also why Netanyahu is really pushing up the son of the Shah; we saw Haaretz’s investigation of the social media accounts helping the Shah and so on.

RT That reminds me of something that then-Israeli Foreign Minister Lieberman said in 2012 during the Arab Spring, that if the revolutions in the Arab world are allowed to win, if Egypt becomes a democratic country, then it’ll be more dangerous to Israel than the Iranian regime.

SE That is true, actually. It’s important to remember that this narrative that the Islamic Republic has about itself, that it’s supporting the Axis of Resistance, and of course October 7^th would never have happened if we didn’t have Iran. But also, what the fuck did they do after October 7^th? Iran could have done something to avoid a full genocide in Gaza. I really think they could have, but they didn’t. They even stopped Hizballah from doing more. I don’t see this regime as a protector of Palestinian people, or a protector of the oppressed in this region. They want their power and their hegemony, and they want to be able to enrich themselves. But on the other hand, what do we do when we have a fully Israeli-US-controlled Middle East? Then we have fascism from India to the Sahel region and nobody undertaking any resistance.

I still want to claim that progressive leftists in the West should say no to war and no to the Islamic Republic, and also no to a puppet, whether it’s a Shah or Maryam Rajavi or whoever that the empire wants to put in that place. And I think it’s important to hold this line and not to defend the Islamic Republic on the pretence that they support Palestinian liberation, because I don’t see them being close to doing that.

RT You mentioned the anti-Iraq war movement. Then I think it was pretty easy for most people to say they don’t support the Saddam Hussein regime in any way, but they also don’t support the war. It was somehow much easier then to make that distinction.

SE Yeah. But at that point the left was also much stronger in Europe. We had years and years, with the World Social Forum and the summit protests, and Ya Basta in Italy. Today we don’t have that, we live in fascist times. Sweden is one country that is really running towards fascism. It’s another world order. But you’re right. We didn’t support Saddam Hussein when we went out in our millions and said no to the war.

RT At Red Threads we’re very interested in thinking about connections between world regions that don’t run through Western Europe or North America. Is there anything about these regional connections that you think we should be looking at?

SE I don’t know much about Eastern Europe, but the other day I saw a Bosnian friend posting that people were putting flowers outside the Iranian embassy in Sarajevo. Of course that has a lot to do with what Iran did during the genocide in Bosnia, but that regime was a totally different regime than it is today. I don’t know what more to say, other than that it seems like Russia is going to be the big winner in all this because suddenly they can sell their oil and gas again.

RT But Russia’s also been supporting Iran militarily, right?

SE Yeah, of course, and Iran has been supporting Russia with drone technology in Ukraine. But I was just listening to the news this morning and Trump is saying, “you have thirty days where you can buy Russian oil.” Suddenly it’s okay. No sanctions for the next thirty days.

RT Ideologically, the Russian and Iranian regimes don’t seem to have much in common, but they have forged a strong alliance over the last decade or two. Is there anything that we should be paying attention to in that relationship?

SE You know, we don’t have an official Cold War, but we still have a country in the Middle East that is talking about anti-imperialism. And so they are the only ones that Russia could support.

RT And what about China’s role?

SE That is so strange. I don’t know much about China either, but I’m fascinated with their complicity and silence, when it came to the genocide in Palestine or now this war. A lot of the markets in Asia are affected because of the closure of Hormuz, and they’re silent. What are they doing under the table all the time? Because they keep being a strong power. They seem not to ever lose anything. I don’t know much about it, but I’m fascinated, especially now that they rely on a lot of Iranian oil, and how will that affect such a big country with so much production?

RT They have been making a lot of investment in renewables, so they’re less dependent on oil than they were.

SE Yeah, but China has also seen Iran as a backyard for selling products. The past twenty years, because of the isolation, you find almost only Chinese products in the bazaars. So I think Iran is very important for them, but I haven’t heard them say much about this war.

RT Given that the discourse of the regime is so strongly Islamist, how does it present its relationship with these two countries that are not Islamic or even Muslim? Is this completely pragmatic, or is anti-imperialism, a Third World kind of position, still involved in any way?

SE Yeah, I think it’s more about anti-imperialism than anything else. Because look at the Muslims in China and how they’re being treated. Has Iran ever said anything about that? No. They just keep buying stuff from China without ever protesting anything.

RT Yeah. And Russia has its own share of Islamophobia.

One last question on the politics of the Iranian diaspora. Right now the monarchist ideology is extremely strong there. As a member of the Iranian diaspora who’s obviously very opposed to this ideology, can you tell us about diaspora networks that are leftist or progressive?

SE This is such a sad question. What you have to know about the Iranian diaspora after ‘79 is that it’s very traumatized. The Iranian left had a lot to do with organizing a whole revolution, with the downfall of the Shah, with organizing unions and all these different movements, councils in workplaces, neighbourhoods and so on. When they lost the revolution to a despot like Khomeini, they were scattered all around the world and totally traumatized. So all these years, 47 years, they haven’t been able to organize because they’ve been just fighting each other. That is the left.

Then we have the royalists, a lot of people that fled at the end of the Shah’s rule with a lot of money. Many of them went to the US and ended up in Los Angeles.

And then we have the Mujahedin, a sect that fought with Saddam Hussein and turned their weapons against their own, and will never again ever be respected in Iran in any way. The US took away their classification as terrorists just a few years ago. Now their base is no longer in Iraq, but in Albania. But they’re very sect-like: people that go into Mujahedin have to give up their kids and go and fight for the cause and stuff like that.

So these are the three big exile groups and unfortunately none of these groups has come up with anything that is good or progressive, or something that could be used in a transformation after a popular revolution in Iran. So I don’t have any faith at all in the diaspora. We tried to show our solidarity with Woman Life Freedom, and during 2009, we had some demonstrations for the workers in 2004-6. But it’s not a power that you can rely on, I think, and especially the royalists, they are very toxic and they are really a product of MAGA and the right-wing and fascist movements in the US, and they have a lot of money and they pump it into TV channels and social media accounts.

And they’ve been really revisionist when it comes to the rule of the Shah . They have these documentaries where people who worked for SAVAK, who tortured Iranians in prison, are saying, “oh wow, it was so good under the Shah. Women could wear short skirts,” and pushing this nostalgia. So they’ve been really whitewashing the Shah and SAVAK. And they are very dangerous. So it’s a very sad story. I wouldn’t rely on any diaspora when it comes to change in Iran. I really hope that on the day that the people in Iran manage to do a revolution and to take down the Islamic Republic on their own, that the diaspora can hold itself and not get involved and destroy it.

RT It’s a very depressing situation, but I don’t think the US and Israel will win this war. And even if they do, they don’t really win. It’s a symptom of decline, of real collapse. And yeah, I don’t think China is going to be saving us, but I have this messianic side. I think sometimes things need to collapse for something new to emerge.

SE I hope so. What the students did just before the bombs started to fall was really, really hopeful. That the people keep going [out to protest] even though they know the level of repression. For thirty years, they’ve been seeing their comrades, their parents, their family members imprisoned, hanged, sitting in front of cameras on state television [after being tortured], saying, “I did wrong.” They still kept going out. And that means a lot when it comes to hoping for real change.

RT There’s a good chance that the moment the war ends, and it will end, then they’ll be back.

SE Yeah, but I think we’ll have to wait some years for that. The regime is sending threats to people right now saying “don’t come out, if you do then you’re on the side of the US and Israel.” And even socially, to be accused of being an Israeli spy, that is devastating for you, not only for going to prison, but also for your neighbours, for your workplace.

RT Yeah, and it really helps the regime that it’s not entirely made-up.

SE Yeah, no. All these Mossad and CIA posts in Farsi. It’s really, well, it’s fucked up.

RT I really agree with what you were saying before. We need to be careful about getting too conspiratorial about this stuff, but it does seem that, at the very least, Israel and the US know that they’re discrediting the opposition and they don’t give a damn about that. They don’t mind.

SE Yeah. And Trump is saying that this Pahlavi, he’s a nice guy, but he’s not cheering for him as much as Netanyahu is.

RT It’s the same as he did with the Venezuelan opposition, right? He doesn’t respect these people.

SE Yeah. Reza Pahlavi is really a clown. How have you been spending so many years of your life in exile with so much money? And you cannot even start, I don’t know, a simple human rights organization? And suddenly he wants to be the leader.

RT I don’t think that’s what bothers Trump about him. That’s very similar to Trump himself in a lot of ways, but no, Trump likes dictators. He likes strong men.

SE Maybe. But it’s really scary to read his document on Transformation Day in Iran. He is going to be the decision-maker in everything. Not the law, not the people’s court, nothing like that, he will make all the necessary decisions. Just like his father.

This interview with LevFem was conducted by Burcu Ayan and published in Turkish in Çatlakzemin. Red Threads is grateful to them for letting us publish it in English.

Burcu Ayan: How did LevFem emerge, and what political and social context shaped its beginnings? In relation to this, how would you describe the broader landscape of feminist organising in Bulgaria today, and what strategies or tensions define the work of feminist organisations in the country?

LevFem emerged in 2018 in a very specific moment of upsurge and renewal in the history of the Bulgarian feminist movement. This was the year in which we experienced a massive, well-organized reactionary wave against the adoption of the Istanbul Convention (aka “Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence”, which reactionaries in Eastern Europe have accused of introducing “gender ideology”). Religious and conservative organisations, parties, and political actors were leading this campaign, and within only a couple of months, they managed to dramatically shift the public narrative around gender justice, women’s rights, and the rights of LGBTQI+ people. The campaign was deeply homophobic, transphobic, and misogynistic in its nature and specifically attacked the definition of gender as a social construct that is rooted in the Istanbul Convention. As a result, even the Constitutional court of the country declared that gender in Bulgaria is, apparently, a biological dichotomy, which makes it very hard to talk about gender, gender roles, gendered division of labor, gender specific policies, etc. As a direct aftermath of this reactionary wave, feminist and especially LGBTQI+ rights have been under a massive attack in the years since, and the lives of queer and trans people have been increasingly put in danger.

However, also as a result of this backlash, since 2018, there has been a surge in newly founded feminist organisations because we saw how organised and powerful the reactionary movements were, and still are. LevFem is part of this “new feminist wave” in Bulgaria in the aftermath of the lost battle for the adoption of the convention. LevFem was initiated as an informal group that included a handful of women and queer people from a few New Left groups that formed around the social centres, left-leaning publications, and movements in the 2010s. Its first action was a small online campaign that we issued around November 25th, 2018 - the International Day Against Violence against Women. We called on comrades to write short articles on violence against women. Our goal was to broaden the public discussion around the topic and thematise structural violence as gender-based violence: a topic and aspect that was ostensibly lacking from the public discussion. In the modern history of the Bulgarian feminist movement after 1989, violence against women has been very narrowly defined as domestic violence in a romantic relationship, and most of the efforts of the big women’s organisations in the past have been focused on lobbying and providing social services for survivors of domestic abuse. However, we know violence against women is much more than that. The exploitation in the capitalist system is a form of violence against women; racial capitalism adds the layer of racist policies and racist border regimes, which are also forms of violence against women; poverty is a form of violence; and so on. The issue is much bigger, and we knew that if we wanted to address it, we needed to address the systems that enable all aspects of gender-based violence - patriarchy, capitalism, and racism. This is the context in which we emerged and the message we have been trying to convey ever since.

Burcu Ayan: You bring feminist, socialist, and anti-racist perspectives together in your work. In a country with a socialist past and a complex post-socialist transformation, why is it important for you to hold these struggles jointly? What specific tensions or challenges arise from working across these perspectives in such a context?

We see our organisation as part of a lineage of especially autonomist Marxist feminism where patriarchy, capitalism, and racism are seen as systems of oppression that have been intersecting historically, socially, and politically to shape the specific forms of subordination that women and other marginalized groups experience. We see this tradition as important within the post-socialist New Left, because it allows us to both keep a deeply structural analysis, acknowledge structural advancements in the socialist past, as well as recognise some of the structural limitations of ‘really existing socialism’ in which actual policies and practices fell short of necessary deep structural change to combat capitalism, patriarchy, and racism. For us, then, naturally, as part of this political tradition, not acknowledging the complex ways in which these systems interact means that we would never be able to understand the roots of the problems and effectively fight them. For instance, it is impossible to fight for the liberation of women from patriarchal expectations and stereotypes if we don’t acknowledge how capitalism requires free labor of women (e.g., child care, cooking, cleaning, etc.) to guarantee the social reproduction of the workforce, which puts a double shift on the shoulders of the women workers. Similarly, it is futile to just fight for women’s rights without understanding how institutional racism guarantees that there is a supply of racialised workers who have worse chances to get a decent job and are thus easier to exploit - especially if they are women.

Basing our political activism on such a theoretical standpoint poses some challenges to navigating the present-day Bulgarian feminist field. The dominant political alignment among feminist organisations in Bulgaria in the last 30 years has been liberal feminism. We acknowledge and respect what these organisations have achieved, especially when it comes to legislative reforms against gender-based violence. Yet, we also see how this worldview limits the potential for a more daring feminist agenda that goes beyond fighting domestic violence and being on friendly terms with those in power to lobby for minor legal changes. Moreover, we are an openly socialist feminist organisation - this brings many negative associations because of the widespread cliche that socialism necessarily and always means repression and lack of democratic initiative. Anti-communist sentiments are very prevalent among the Bulgarian liberal middle class; this also affects some of the feminist organisations (especially the ones active before the 2018 wave of feminist mobilising around the Istanbul convention). In their reading, socialism achieved certain positive changes for women, but they were introduced from the top down, thus the “real” feminist movement (e.g. one that is similar to Western European feminism) started in the 90s. We dare to disagree. Socialism in Bulgaria (and elsewhere) is anything but a monolithic block of 45 years - there were more liberatory and progressive periods, as well as more conservative ones. The decision-making process within the Bulgarian Communist Party was much more complex and nuanced, and women were actively fighting within the ranks of the party for one or another feminist achievement. To completely erase these struggles is disrespectful to the work and achievements of generations of women.

However, our socialist identity does not mean that we have it easy with the contemporary left-wing political actors either. Bulgaria’s only prominent nominally left-wing party - the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) - has taken a very conservative course since 2016 and was among the parties who were most vocally against the Istanbul convention. The ideological development of the BSP mirrors to an extent the development of SMER in Slovakia, even if the electoral results of the BSP in Bulgaria are tragic (currently polling between 5-7%), while SMER is governing Slovakia. It is easier for us to communicate with some members and factions within the BSP on the anti-capitalist axis and about women’s rights, however, the moment we mention LGBTQI+ justice, things get very ugly. The non-party left is small, fragmented and not very powerful: at the moment, LevFem is among the bigger, better-recognised, and organised collectives in this context.

Finally, as you can imagine, we are a target for different sorts of reactionary and conservative actors as we represent everything they hate - class-conscious feminists and anti-racists, who fight for queer liberation.

So we need to be smart and resourceful when navigating the field and searching for allies, but it is not mission impossible and we have had our successes - among some more progressive (feminist) organisations, politicians, unions, workers and younger activists.

Burcu Ayan: How do you understand the feminist labour struggle in Bulgaria today? What challenges do women workers face? As a feminist organisation, what has your engagement with trade unions and labour organisations been like? How have feminist perspectives been received in those spaces?

The feminist movement and the labour movement are fighting their battles separately, which is a dangerous development with long-lasting consequences in our reading. This is a direct result of the liberal understanding of the world that separates “human rights” (where feminism is usually positioned) from labour rights and tries to convince us that equality is achievable without challenging capitalist exploitation. For example, around March 2019, there were the March 8th feminist protests, nurses went on a national protest to fight for better labour conditions, and mothers of children with disabilities were taking to the streets the demands for better public care for their children. All these struggles were fought separately; there wasn’t a big joint demonstration. Now, some feminist organisations approached the nurses and the mothers of children with disabilities, but the latter decided not to join forces, as key actors in the nurses’ mobilisation were also affected by the ongoing conservative anti-gender wave that emerged around the adoption of the Istanbul Convention and saw the feminists as a threat. Here we clearly push for a feminist-and-labour movement that is able to see that beyond the liberal notion of separation between struggles. However, we also feel like the powerful reactionary agenda contributes ever more towards dividing the working class and weakening our power.

The lack of feminist reading within the contemporary organised labour movement in Bulgaria makes it harder for workers to understand the specific ways in which gender affects their experience at the workplace. For instance, very often we hear from women workers statements like “we have achieved equality, we have all the rights that men have, why should we bother about feminism”. Behind such statements, however, there is the same old story of invisible, underrecognised and poorly remunerated women’s labour: women predominantly work in fields that are badly paid; their salaries stagnate after maternity leave; discrimination is rampant towards women with small children during the jobhunt period (“she is a woman with small children, they get sick, she will be constantly taking leave to care for them, I can’t deal with this”); women shoulder the burden of the domestic, child care and elderly care labour at home and in their extended families and neighbourhoods; women’s pensions are lower than those of men because of the persistent gender pay gap and as pensions are calculated on the basis of lower salaries they got throughout their active years; and of course, sexual harassment at the workplace is a gendered experience that usually affects women.

In this context, Levfem is trying to act as the political agent that actively introduces labour issues and class consciousness within the feminist movement and pushes the feminist viewpoint within the labour movement. While our union organisations are usually acting as enclosed environments that solely focus on their specific agenda, we have managed to establish connections and have sporadic joint events and initiatives with some more progressive unions or feminised unions, which represent social and public workers, nurses and medical staff, and agricultural workers. We often invite their representatives as speakers to our events, and participate in their protests, and they have shared some of our content and have connected us to workers for interviews. Yet, while we see some increased sensitivity towards feminist viewpoints among some of the union members and workers, for the time being, the effects are predominantly on an individual level. We recognise, of course, that this is a long process and requires a lot of trust-building and work alongside the unions and movements. Our dream is that one day we will have a big feminist workers’ movement in Bulgaria that challenges the patriarchal capitalist system. But it is a rocky road ahead of us if we are serious about achieving this goal.

Burcu Ayan: Your report “Who Cares? Feminised Care Labour and the Crisis of Social Reproduction in Post-Socialist Bulgaria” offers a strong analysis of paid care labour in the country. Based on this work, where do you see the key sites of struggle around care today? And what practical steps do you think are needed to move toward public, accessible, and dignified care?

Given what we spoke about earlier, our report on the care sector in Bulgaria, based on 40 interviews with care sector workers, was published in a vacuum of political and public discourse and awareness about what we see as absolute core topics in the feminist and labour movement: care work and social reproduction, and their deficit and dire conditions in Bulgaria. First of all, we define the paid care sector rather broadly by including the systems of social reproduction - pre-clinical healthcare, early years, primary education, and social services. Very often, care work is defined even among feminists as the act of taking care of someone physically, but in our understanding care needs to be seen through the lens of social reproduction - the systems that make life possible. Having this theoretical understanding is useful to see the connections between seemingly very different sectors, but it also makes it very hard to highlight specific recommendations, as the situation in the healthcare system is different than the one in the education system, and elderly care takes many formal and informal forms.

Still, there are certain common traits that can be observed in all spheres of the care sector in Bulgaria. For instance, all of these spheres have a very feminised workforce and moreover - it is usually older women (50+) who predominantly find occupation in the care domain. Young people rarely choose these professions as the salaries are usually very low. In addition, many care workers choose to migrate to Western and Southern Europe in search of better pay, where they usually continue to perform care labour and are once again subject to harsh working conditions and racialised discrimination. These two processes result in a massive workforce shortage in Bulgaria, putting additional stress on the workers who remain in the system and creating a severe care deficit. As a consequence, people in Bulgaria have less and less access to decent care, as women working in the sector have all but decent working conditions. The lack of access to decent public care puts additional pressure on individual families (and specifically on women) to perform further unpaid care labour at home, while private providers are also invited to “fill in the gaps”, thus making access to decent care dependent on the financial situation of those in need. These aren’t problems specific to Bulgaria; many other Eastern European and Balkan countries face similar issues, while the deficit of care workers is a global phenomena. Yet, Bulgaria is specific as it shares some of the vices of both core and peripheral countries in the global economy. As a peripheral country, it sends care workers abroad. Yet, while it has the ageing population of a core country, currently it also has a particularly restrictive migrant labour regime which does not allow it to fill in the gap of emigrant care workers with immigrants.

Beyond this, we see two other major challenges ahead of us. First of all, there is no collective understanding of the care sector, except as ‘humane professions’ in which women’s ‘altruistic’ self-denial or even self-sacrifice is taken for granted. Equally absent is a shared public recognition of care as a human right and as a public good/interest. Furthermore, within a very re-traditionalising discourse that has soared since the conservative mobilisation around the Istanbul Convention, women are seen as possessing ‘natural qualities’ that make them more suited to providing care. These notions are not just prejudices, but have an impact on the material conditions of care work in both the workplace and the home. The result is, firstly, the feminisation of care professions and a shortage of male workers; secondly, low pay and low status, as well as poor working conditions in these sectors; and last but not least, the unequal distribution of care work at home, which is mainly performed by women.

There isn’t a silver bullet solution to address all these complex issues, but we need to start somewhere. In our analysis, we identify a number of steps that need to be taken in the short-term, middle-term and long-term for progress on this complex situation to be achieved. First of all, there is a need for a widespread information campaign that raises awareness of the challenges faced by care workers. It should address the links between ‘naturalised’ female care work, the poor conditions of pay and work in the care sector, and the nation-wide care deficit, and articulate concrete demands for financial remuneration and public recognition of work in this field. To this effect, one of our units is now engaged in the presentation of the report across the country and tailoring such demands together with members of feminist groups and labour unions in the care sector. Secondly, it is imperative to increase the pay of care workers as a whole, but also to reduce the differences between the private and public sectors and the differences in job hierarchies in certain sectors, particularly healthcare. We see it as unacceptable that the powers-that-be vote budgets that heavily subsidise military production and securitisation, not least as this is a direct pathway to austerity in all other sectors, including the care sector. And specifically for Bulgaria, there is a need for taxation reform, as we have suffered under a flat tax policy for the good part of two decades. We need a progressive taxation that puts the tax burden on the shoulders of businesses and economic elites instead of the working poor, as it is now. So a feminist initiative that wants to promote care as the basis that makes society possible should also engage with political demands for an economy that at least puts militarised capitalism in check (and at a later stage dismantles it entirely, of course). Third, there is also a need for effective policies, agreed upon by those working in the sector and their representative associations, aimed at tackling discrimination based on gender, age, ethnicity, etc. Finally, in our analysis, on an international level, there is a need for a solidarity care tax paid by wealthier countries attracting care workers to poorer countries like Bulgaria which send care workers in migration and experience a massive care deficit. We need to close the care work gap. We would like to oversee such a campaign first developing within the European Union, where Bulgarian trade unions, NGOs, and politicians have the opportunity to make this issue central to their mobilisation and lobbying efforts. Yet, if successful on the EU level, such a campaign should also be scaled up on a global level, within a larger struggle for reparation within colonial capitalism: we dream big.

Burcu Ayan: When you think about feminist organising in the Balkans, what shared challenges and possibilities come to mind? And how do you imagine solidarity and collaboration between movements in neighbouring countries such as Bulgaria, Turkey, and Greece, which often face similar political and social backlashes?

The Balkans is a very specific place with 12 countries (depending on how you count), at least 4 different language groups, and diverse ethnic and religious communities spread across a very small territory. We don’t even share a common language the way, say, Latin Americans do, and coordinating and organising among ourselves needs to happen in English. At the same time, we have countries with vastly different political pasts: imperial projects, anti-imperial struggles, former Eastern Bloc countries with diverse experiences with socialism, former Western Bloc countries, military dictatorships and coup d’état, genocides, wars and ethnic cleansing among neighbors, and more recently divisions across the lines of NATO and EU membership. Every 200 km, you have buried skeletons from past violent conflicts, which makes political organising incredibly challenging and nationalist sentiments very prevalent. All that being said, we can clearly see that we face some very similar threats - conservative waves that practically copy the same anti-gender narratives from Croatia through Bulgaria to Türkiye; increasingly more right-wing and even authoritarian governments; increased state violence on the borders to counter migration; deeply rooted corruption and oligarchic capitalist structures capturing the states.

The Balkans is also a place that has produced some powerful mobilisation waves in the last years - the Serbian students and their movement; the Romanian and Bulgarian anti-corruption protests; the Greek farmers strikes; the Turkish anti-Erdogan protests as well as the workers and feminist mobilisations around the withdraw of the country from the Istanbul convention; the Slovenian (and pan-European) My body, my choice campaign that took Europe by storm. There have been initiatives in the past that try to connect the struggles we face, most notably the migrant solidarity campaign across the Balkan route that has been active for about a decade, and more recently - the feminist network Essential Autonomous Struggles Transnational (EAST). EAST is a project that LevFem was heavily involved in as one of the coordinating collectives. It was an attempt to connect feminist, labour, and migrant organisations from Eastern Europe and beyond in the immediate aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, so that we have a space for exchange on the struggles in the social reproduction sector that we face. It was a common infrastructure via which we were able to better understand what was going on in different countries in the region, to show solidarity with each other, and learn from the strategic experiences of others. Unfortunately, the network is no longer active, but this type of common coordination and exchange space is clearly needed in our region. So we should probably start there.

Finally, in the last 30 years, at least in many post-communist countries, we have been convinced that we need to “catch up” with the West and be more (Western) European to have a decent life. However, the current protests in Bulgaria show a shift in this notion. While calls for Bulgaria to become a “decent European country” are popular among many of the protestors, there is something beyond this. For instance, we see how the protests are being described as “Gen Z” protests. While this description is in itself highly problematic and not at all representative of what is going on in the streets (where Gen Z is definitely not the most populous group among the protestors), it is an attempt to create and mobilise a collective identity that goes beyond the national and the European and ties Bulgaria to a global wave of protests among young people mostly in the Global South. We think that this shift in the collective imagination might be productive for the region more broadly. Maybe we can start thinking of identities that go beyond the national and the (white) European and tie us not so much to the hegemons and the powerful, but rather to the struggles of other ‘wretched of the Earth’ - the same way the Soviet Union was supporting the anti-imperialist and anticolonial struggles worldwide. Maybe a more productive way forward could entail building a collective Balkan identity that is rooted in our experience with historical complexities and traumas, but goes beyond the past and searches for connections with other pariahs of the world whose pain we can relate to and fight together.

Burcu Ayan: Looking ahead, what are LevFem’s main priorities? What kinds of political and organisational efforts do you hope to focus on in the coming period?

We would want to continue expanding our work on the care economy and possibly do a campaign with demands for better conditions in the care sectors around March 8th, hopefully in coordination with a bigger coalition of organisations. March 8th is usually a small demonstration in Sofia done by urban activists - this is a good starting point, but it needs to be much, much bigger, with women from all walks of life (care workers, office workers, self-employed, poor women, etc.) joining and demanding the dismantling of oppressive patriarchal, capitalist, and racist systems. We don’t have experience with bigger, more recognisable campaigns, so this will be challenging and exciting at the same time. Also, we would like to expand our capacities to fight against the anti-feminist and anti-gender movement: this has always been a priority of ours, but we have rather been reactive - the conservatives attack us, and we respond. We need to think about proactive strategies, too - and part of a proactive strategy needs to include political education that allows us to enlarge our base and convince more previously not politically active people to join the movement.

Red Threads is born at a moment when the present cannot presume superiority over the past. The reintegration of the postsocialist region into global capitalism has materialized not as liberation, but as poverty, ecological destruction, racism, and war. The false promises of the 1990s now pale before the transformative and universal aspirations of the socialist projects of the twentieth century. Their contradictions have left unfulfilled potentials for the future.

Red Threads calls on the legacy of twentieth-century socialism in all its complexity: its achievements, failures, and unrealized futures. In the face of denial stand its world-historical accomplishments: the raising of living and educational standards throughout the region; the skilling of millions of workers; the inspiration of revolutionary and reformist movements throughout the world; the construction of physical and social infrastructure, which still, despite decades of neglect, enables survival; and, above all, the victory over fascism. What were for the socialist project its own contradictions, to be resolved dialectically towards the horizon of communism, became easy indictments of the entire project in the postsocialist period: enduring and new social inequalities, flailing political mobilization that eventually required harking back on nationalist tropes, continued use of state violence, the routinized forms of socialist democracy. Red Threads maintains that these contradictions of the socialist project must be faced militantly, not apologetically. Our commitment is to immanent criticism, one that holds the socialist project up to its own demanding criteria, while reaffirming its aspirations. This is also the way to reckon with the bitter disappointment and material losses of the region’s working classes, which are expressed sometimes in the politics of resentment and other times in nostalgia for an alternative.

In a salute to the socialist legacy, Red Threads takes its name from the Petrograd textile factory «Красная нить», where women workers stood at the forefront of revolution, and from the “red thread” invoked by Luxemburg and Lenin as a through-line of history. A thread weaves and binds; it is in constant motion. Our threads are multiple and open-ended; we seek to weave together the realized and interrupted horizons of the revolutionary legacy into our daily reality and our visions of future political forms.

Universalism from the East

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.

Our political principles here reflect this dialectical relationship between theory and history.

As socialists committed to a communist horizon, we believe in the creative power of ordinary people to shape history, and in their capacity to undertake a democratic organization of material production, social reproduction, and cultural and intellectual life.

Taking reality as a totality in which parts and whole are mutually constituted through internal relations, we hold that the struggle against capitalism cannot be divorced from the fight against racism, imperialism, colonialism, and hetero-patriarchy.

Capitalist production of surplus value is antagonistic to the reproduction of life. This antagonism is not merely a logical contradiction: the totality of ecological-material relations and life processes on the planet is the precondition of all social relations, and sets natural limits on human activity.

We, thus, understand class in an expansive sense, one that encompasses relations to the means of reproduction as well as production. We reject any rigid distinction between exploitation and oppression and offer unconditional support for the liberation of all oppressed groups.

The primary enforcer of capitalist violence is the capitalist state, and at the global scale, the imperial state. We reaffirm the need to analyze imperialism, a category central to the political thought of revolutionaries in our region. As we witness the precipitous decline of the American Empire, we commit to the renewed task of understanding imperialism, and to solidarity with all peoples subjected to occupation, colonization, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. Recognizing the right of such peoples to armed liberation struggle, we also note that militarism reinforces capitalist violence, and that the price of war is always paid by the most vulnerable and least guilty. We thus affirm the internationalist value of peace.

We recognize state-socialist achievements in the fight against imperial, patriarchal, racial, and colonial oppression. And this requires us to take seriously the problem of how the criticism of oppression has been de-materialized and instrumentalized for imperialist, anti-communist, and nationalist purposes in the post-socialist era.

In contrast to the liberation struggles of the early 20^th century and the anti-colonial movements in the post-war period, today, in the context of deep neoliberal reforms and erasure of legacies of socialist knowledge production, nationalism in our region has played not a liberatory or anti-imperialist role, but a reactionary and imperialist one. There is a lot to learn from this phenomenon in the East for the global left.

Finally, these trajectories are rooted in the intentional repression of communism in the post-socialist region and the outright criminalization of socialist histories and ideas in the name of national sovereignty, as well as the integration of many successor Communist parties into right-wing regimes and their appropriation of communist symbols, images, and slogans. As a result, the level of theoretical debate and engagement with communist ideas—as ideas for social progress and liberation for all—has suffered immensely. We celebrate and support the rediscovery and reappropriation of communism by the younger generation of intellectuals and workers in the region.

Our invitation

As a successor project of LeftEast, Red Threads is a multi-tendency left collective: less than a party, but more than a magazine. We publish together in order to think together, to reflect on evolving questions, and to maintain dialogue between distinct left traditions. We aspire to a socialist politics together that is attuned to the current moment while drawing lessons from the past. However, we invite a demanding, comradely, collective conversation that begins from common principles and arrives at collective action.

As a publication, we welcome contributions from anyone who shares our political orientation. In furtherance of a universalism from the East, we invite contributions relevant to socialist political analysis and strategy, theory and history, past, present, and future. We provide our linguistic and editorial skills in support of perspectives from the ground that require more than translation, but the careful rearticulation of the academic and political language to which they are addressed. We are committed to working closely with contributors to sharpen political clarity and improve textual quality.

We intend to give pride of place to the post-socialist world, as well as to the socialist traditions of the Global South, which are still little known in Eastern Europe despite the deep links between our histories and present struggles. That said, we will also continue conversations with comrades in the West, including with diasporic socialists who had to leave our region.

In order to facilitate communication across post-socialist contexts, we will begin by publishing in English, but we aspire to expand into other languages in the near future. We welcome submissions by non-English speakers in their own languages, which we can appraise for translation and publication. Please see our Submissions page for more details, and never hesitate to get in touch with us with questions or feedback.

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