Research Center Superstructure: a Manifesto

Introducing a newly established “red” postsocialist think tank, which will be hosted on Red Threads.

The Preamble

Red Threads is delighted to introduce Superstructure*, a newly established “red” research center, which will be hosted on our website. Superstructure was born at last June’s BASIS–2025 Forum in Bishkek. Organized by Kyrgsoc, Red Threads, and Books for Development, the Forum brought together representatives of leftist groups, trade unions, environmental and feminist organizations from Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Eastern Europe.

The Forum was a momentous event. National borders and regional instability, domestic authoritarianisms and different geopolitical orientations, poor transportational connectivities (try flying from Yerevan to Bishkek!) and the relative youth of the Central Asian left, whose organizations began to emerge after the 2010s, had until now stymied left internationalism in that region. So, when, after many months of planning, over 40 representatives of leftist groups from Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, joined by Russian, Ukrainian, Moldovan, and other Eastern European leftists, living either in their countries or in exile, descended onto Bishkek to be hosted by the comrades from Kyrgsoc, the sense of mutual recognition and common cause was palpable. It would be no exaggeration to say that four days later, the visitors left with a sense that something new and powerful (if not fully developed or shaped) had been born.

Several initiatives came out of the Forum: a safety working group (for the repressive conditions that prevail in some of the countries make it necessary to practice secure communications, to avoid the attention of authorities whenever possible, and support political prisoners), a labor working group, and a reading group. But the largest of these was Superstructure, with a mandate to analyze the material conditions of production, labor and its reproduction, as well as the forms of power and inequality arising within capitalist and post-socialist economies. While the geography under its purview is the whole of the postsocialist world, Central Asia takes a particularly central role in it, in part because of the sheer rarity of Marxist, or more broadly leftist, studies of the region in today’s academia. There are numerous reasons why this should be so. Central Asian universities tend to be under much greater political supervision than their counterparts in Eastern Europe. Intellectually and socially, they offer only a hostile terrain for the left. Dominated by keywords such as nation and empire (if the research is historical) or authoritarianism and corruption (if contemporary), Western scholarship on Central Asia, too, has left little space for leftist perspectives.

Hence, the imperative to found such an independent structure aimed at producing knowledge—political, sociological, historical, ecological, gender, etc.—that would be of use to leftist groups and their allies. Superstructure aspires to serve as a pole of attraction for both sympathetic academics and movement intellectuals. And while the need for politically engaged knowledge on Central Asia is particularly acute, Superstructure’s remit includes the whole of the postsocialist world, from Chukotka to Sofia, and even beyond.

Figures, archival materials, dossiers, and analytical reports will be Superstructure’s methods of fighting for a just and peaceful world. Many of these you will be seeing in Red Threads.

Superstructure’s organising committee has already initiated three working groups—on Contemporary imperialism and forms of resistance, Political ecology, and Left history—and issued the following manifesto:

The Manifesto

The war in Ukraine has, with a new urgency, brought up the long-standing question: to what extent should the countries of the former socialist bloc be viewed as part of a symbolically unified region. Opponents of the idea of a common space are convinced that the republics, which had previously pursued the project of “real existing socialism,” destroyed this commonality simply by declaring independence. By rebuilding borders and national economies, and establishing their own languages and identities, the “new” societies have lost the universalism and internationalism that the Soviet Union “imposed.”

But has the post-socialist community truly come to an end? With the attainment of independence, each of these states—to varying degrees and at different speeds—faced neoliberalization, economic crisis, and acute social inequality. The transition to a market economy was everywhere marked by the dismantling of public property and the institutions of the welfare state. The severing of former economic ties and the need to integrate into the asymmetrical hierarchies of global politics plunged many of the former socialist republics into a peripheral state.

Every post-Soviet country has its own untold story of social regression after 1990, and none of them has managed to preserve the possibility of an alternative, fundamentally different trajectory of development. What if the impulse that destroyed the community of post-socialist countries paradoxically created new foundations for it?

In post-Soviet conditions, the production of knowledge detached from technocratic tasks is considered a dangerous excess. States are systematically weakening universities—the key institutions for the production of critical knowledge. They are underfunding the social sciences and humanities and imposing ideological obligations on them, designed to legitimize the authority of the ruling regime and the global capitalist order comprising a constellation of nation-states. Under such conditions, research free from pressure and censorship becomes increasingly impossible within university walls.

Leading capitalist countries create conditions under which researchers from peripheral countries—whether voluntarily or not—find themselves drawn into imperialist conflicts. By allowing a critique of colonialism within certain theoretical frameworks, (post-)empires directly or indirectly polish their reputations. Attention is thus shifted away from the key issue—the structural role of capitalism in the reproduction of imperialist relations. Often, this is not a subversion of imperialism, but a new attempt at normalization; not a critique of it, but a way to neutralize it.

Opponents of the post-socialist community see its dissolution as a fundamental condition for social well-being. Maximum independence becomes the primary goal to aim for. But isn’t this fragmentation the driving force behind imperialist incursion? Nation-states, confined within their linguistic and cultural borders, are nonetheless embedded in the global architecture of capitalism. And discursive isolation not only undermines grassroots solidarity but also allows structural problems and shared interests to be ignored.

We believe it is important to continue to conceive of the post-socialist space as a symbolic community. It is precisely in recognizing the interests of post-socialist societies as shared that a way out of the current capitalist reality may lie. But to recognize these interests, we need knowledge—about ourselves, about the similarities and differences between us, and about the systemic constraints we face. To generate this knowledge, we—researchers from post-socialist countries—must act collectively and learn from one another’s experiences.

We are an association of left-wing researchers from formerly socialist countries that aims to help our societies develop a program to fight for a better life.

Description of the Research Groups

Political Ecology

The ecological crisis cannot be viewed in isolation from production relations and the political system. The destruction of ecosystems, pollution, and climate change are largely the result of an economic model oriented toward profit extraction and endless growth, where natural resources and ecological costs are alienated from society.

The working group examines the system of knowledge and power underpinning contemporary issues of economic production and infrastructure projects. A particular focus is on the financing of environmental and climate projects through international financial institutions.

Our goal is to develop a critical analysis of environmental policy and to formulate alternative approaches based on the principles of environmental justice, public control over resources, and sustainable development.

Coordinator: Bermet Borubaeva

Contemporary Imperialism and Forms of Resistance

The group’s objective is to integrate into the post-Soviet context methods of analysis and theoretical frameworks on imperialism and anti-imperialist practices developed by left-wing theorists from peripheral and semi-peripheral countries. This group will begin its work in the format of a reading seminar, which will take place once a month. During these sessions, we will explore key historical and contemporary literature on related topics (by authors such as Walter Rodney, Samir Amin, Ruy Mauro Marini, Adeeb Khalid, etc.), in order to subsequently rethink approaches to describing political, social, and cultural processes in various segments of the post-Soviet space.

Coordinator: Dmitry Mazorenko

Left History

The goal of this group is to recover histories that have been erased by the liberal or nationalist historiography now dominant in post-socialist countries. To show that Marxism, workers’ rights, women’s rights, and social justice are not phenomena occurring somewhere in the West (or, at best, coming from the West), but values that generations of people in Central Asia, the Caucasus, Russia, Ukraine, or the Balkans have thought about and fought for.

Specific projects will be developed based on existing studies by individual or collective members of the group, who will seek to turn them into public history, whether in the form of popular articles and translations (for example, for Red Threads), archival publications, podcasts, etc.

We will seek to serve as a hub for academic historians and independent scholars who share our interest in left-wing history, culture, internationalism, and reaching a broad audience. In practice, most of our work will be ad hoc: the group will come to life when one member shares a text that other members can read or help with before it goes public.

Coordinator: Rossen Djagalov

*Base and superstructure: a Marxist concept according to which the superstructure consists of the world of ideas, institutions, and forms of consciousness (the state, law, religion, morality, art, philosophy) that develop on the basis of society’s material-economic “base” (productive relations).