Mission statement

Red Threads is an online publication for internationalist politics speaking from the former Second World to the planet, rooted in lived realities, shared politics, and struggles across our region but addressing global questions. A successor to LeftEast, we are a multi-tendency left collective: more than a magazine, less than a party. While beginning with English, we also aim to publish in the languages of the region. Our name, Red Threads, is a salute to the East as a place and a universal ambition. A thread weaves and binds; it is not still but in motion. We trace our name to the Petrograd Red Thread textile factory (Красная нить)—where women workers stood at the forefront of the revolution, for bread and against war and imperialism—and to the “red thread” invoked by Luxemburg and Lenin as a through-line of history.

We work in the aftermath of defeat for the global left and amid right-wing revanchism, war, and new forms of repression. We seek to critically reclaim the historical inheritance of socialism and communism in the twentieth century —its realized, unrealized, and interrupted horizons. Our method is an immanent critique—historically grounded and accountable to contradiction, failure, and loss. We reckon with the legacy of the past century’s socialist projects on their own and on our terms, rather than on those of the Cold War or the triumphalist, unipolar 1990s. Knowing that it is neither possible nor desirable to turn the clock back, we ask what in our history—revolutionary struggle, institution-building, infrastructures of care, and more—can be reclaimed, developed, and carried forward, toward new political forms.