With Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, it is clear that a new kind of madness is seeping into global political discourse, a poisonous fog that suffocates reason. This fog, which has long marinated in the old, ugly ideas of white supremacy and Western superiority, is clouding our ideas of humanity. The general malady that ensues is deep suspicion and hatred of China, not just of its current leadership or even the Chinese political system, but hatred of just about anything to do with China.
The PAIGC’s Political Education for Liberation in Guinea-Bissau, 1963–74
Red Alert no. 14: The US Ministry of Colonies and Its Summit
The United States is set to host the Summit of the Americas on 8–10 June in Los Angeles. Despite purporting to promote cooperation and sovereignty, the summit – along with its parent institution, the Organisation of American States – are instruments of US power. Red Alert no. 14 looks at these two institutions as well as the challenges that the US faces as it tries to impose its hegemony in the region
Based on an analysis of the current global landscape, this dossier brings the work of Antonio Gramsci to the trenches of social struggles today, reinforcing the central role of the Battle of Ideas. Towards this end, it features an interview with Neuri Rossetto, a national coordinator of Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), and sheds light on contemporary social struggles that are planting seeds of hope towards building a new world.
Winds from Fusang: Art, Multipolarity, and China-Latin America Relations
Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research interviewed the painter Zheng Shengtian. Winds from Fusang (2017) is a mural by him and Sun Jingbo included in dossier no. 51, Looking Towards China: Multipolarity as an Opportunity for the Latin American People. Zheng spoke to us about his life’s work, Winds from Fusang, and about Chinese-Latin American cultural exchanges dating back to the 1950s, propelled by the Bandung Conference. This interview is a reflection on art, multipolarity, and the possibilities brought by China’s re-emergence.
Nela Martínez Espinosa (1912–2004) Women of Struggle, Women in Struggle
Ecuadorian activist Nela Martínez Espinosa (1912-2004) was a central figure in the struggles of the working class and women in Ecuador in the 20th century.
Dossier 53 discusses the land question in South Africa, looking at the role of white farmers who have long benefited from the labour of exploited Black farmworkers.
Beginning with a historical account of the plight of farmworkers, it argues that those who work the land deserve to be its primary beneficiaries, but, instead, they have been excluded from the profits and stability of owning land for generations. Faced with this reality, dossier no. 53 discusses what a land reform agenda that centres the perspectives and needs of farmworkers would look like.
On 2 May 1942, hundreds of China’s leading writers, artists, and communist leaders gathered to discuss the key cultural questions of the time. The historic Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art lasted for three weeks. Why did tens of thousands of artists and writers travel to the remote town of Yan’an during those years? Why was culture so central to the political construction? How did intellectual developments help bring the Chinese people and nation to revolution? Eight decades later, what relevance does the Yan’an spirit hold, especially for artists, writers, and intellectuals who seek to serve the people’s struggles today?
The decline of the US empire, a geopolitical transition already in full swing, and the shaping of a multipolar world open up a new series of possibilities and discussions for Latin America and the Caribbean about the region’s possibility for autonomy in a transition away from dependence on capitalist countries that accounts for the needs of the majority.
After nearly three decades, Brazil’s military has re-emerged into the country’s political life with the arrival of Jair Bolsonaro as president. This dossier analyses the composition of Brazil’s armed forces, their relationship to US imperialism, and the militarisation of the public sector. Brazil’s military is characterised by a conservative and liberal ideology, a state that regulates the demands of private interests, and a strong anti-communist vision, aspects allow us to better understand its behaviour and its drive to openly dispute the direction of Brazilian society.
Camouflaged behind the language of ‘human rights’ and ‘democracy’, the United States has allied itself with the right-wing oligarchies of Latin America and the Caribbean in order to isolate and damage its adversaries in the region. To understand the continent’s current reality, we turn to Héctor Béjar, one of the most distinguished intellectuals in Peru and in the hemisphere, who has written with great passion about his country’s history, the left, and the possibilities for social change in our time.
Under the leadership of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America – People’s Trade Treaty (ALBA-TCP), Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research partnered with 26 research institutes from around the world to draft A Plan to Save the Planet. This living, evolving document puts forward a vision for the present and the immediate future centred on twelve key themes: democracy and the world order, the environment, finance, health, housing, food, education, work, care, women, culture, and the digital world. Dossier no. 48 includes and elaborates on the Plan and lays out our orientation, principles, and horizon.
In Latin America, the adoption of the neo-reactionary and alternative right projects of the Global North appears to be a launching pad from which to modify the cognitive maps of the people and to shift political and discursive positions and public agendas to the right. This dossier analyses the right-wing developments in Latin America, identifying how they operate and with what discourses, what social base they mobilise, and their continuities of and ruptures with the history of the right wing in the continent.
The fact that the largest companies are in the field of information technologies raises a concern about the use of data for repression, control, and surveillance. This dossier seeks to understand the dynamic of contemporary capitalism and technological transformations and their social impact on class struggle, sparking a debate about the role of digital data and technology companies.
Despite the constraints that their socioeconomic conditions impose on them time and again, Indian women have found their collective voice to fight for their rights. A vibrant women’s movement in various parts of India has fought against the apathy of the state towards the condition of women, attaining big and small victories in asserting the constitutional rights of women as citizens and workers.
On 25 February 2021, the Chinese government announced that extreme poverty had been abolished in China, a country of 1.4 billion people. This historic victory is a culmination of a seven-decade-long process that began with the Chinese Revolution of 1949. This study looks into the process through which China was able to eradicate extreme poverty as a fundamental step in constructing socialism.
‘Risen from the Ruins’, the first edition of the new series ‘Studies on the DDR’, follows the foundation of the German Democratic Republic (DDR) after World War II and traces its development from an anti-fascist democratic state to a socialist one. The study investigates the DDR’s economic efficiency, accomplishments, and contradictions, while also outlining central aspects of its socialist society such as collective organization in state-owned enterprises, the planned economy, and internationalist solidarity.
This study looks at the life and legacy of Kanak Mukherjee, a fighter for the people and people’s struggles who was born in undivided Bengal, India, in 1921. The rich trajectory of her activism teaches us about the history of women organising in local, national, and international struggles that linked women’s rights to anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist struggles throughout the twentieth century.
The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed and exacerbated existing social, political, health, and economic crises. It is often women who bear the brunt of the cataclysmic shifts in daily life, from the increasing care work of children, the elderly, and the sick to skyrocketing incidences of gender-based violence, as women and LGBTQIA+ people are quarantined with their abusers. This study looks into the challenges that have been sharpened by the pandemic — in particular, how the current crisis has impacted women across the world — and presents a list of people’s feminist demands as we strive for a path forward.
In this report, we look at Cuba, Venezuela, Vietnam, and Kerala (India) to investigate how these socialist parts of the world have been able to handle the virus more effectively.
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States government has put its tremendous resources towards heightening aggression against its perceived adversaries – notably, against Venezuela – from heightening sanctions to a foiled invasion to leveraging its stronghold over international institutions like the IMF. This study takes a deep look at the US-led hybrid war against Venezuela, debunking the false narratives created to support this attack.
This is the first in a multiple part series of studies on CoronaShock. It is made up of three articles on how China identified the novel coronavirus and then how the Chinese government and Chinese society fought against its wider diffusion, as well as an interview with Li Zhong, an artist from Shanghai.
The world that we live in today is characterised by great social and political upheavals, with workers facing overwhelming attacks from neoliberal politics. The policies of neoliberalism and neofascism put immense pressure on women, who become the primary and principal targets of precariousness, oppression, and exploitation.
In honor of the 150th anniversary of the soviet militant and intellectual Alexandra Kollontai’s birth on 31 March 1872, the International Union of Left Publishers releases Kollontai 150, an effort of 25 publishing houses in more than 20 different languages.
Julian Assange, journalist and co-founder of Wikileaks, helped bring to light the torture and atrocities committed by the United States during its so-called War on Terror. Now the United States wants to imprison Assange for 175 years for obtaining and publishing this classified information. Red Alert no. 13 explains why we must stand up against this attack on journalism and fight to free Julian Assange.
As part of a network of research institutions that have been looking closely at the long-term crises of neoliberal austerity, induced debt regimes, and maldevelopment, we have jointly produced a set of policies toward a new world order. Our plan – drawing from the lineage of the New International Economic Order – puts forward a vision for the present and the immediate future centred on twelve key themes: democracy and the world order, the environment, finance, health, housing, food, education, work, care, women, culture, and the digital world.
There is nothing more obscene than the existence of hunger, the terrible indignity of working hard but being without the means for sustenance. While 1 in 8 people in the world go hungry, one third of all food produced is either lost during processing and transportation or it is wasted. As we approach World Food Day on 16 October, Red Alert no. 12 explores why hunger persists, explains the campaign to end hunger, and sets forward a path towards creating a just food and distribution system that could finally eliminate world hunger.
This dossier focuses on the Black Community Programmes, a series of projects initiated in 1972 that served as the practical implementation of the Black Consciousness philosophy to give Black people the power to become self-reliant. In practice, these programmes included the foundation of publications and research, health centres, factories to employ the economically marginalised, and a trust fund to provide basic necessities for ex-prisoners as well as grants for yet other projects.
This dossier seeks to assess the effects of CoronaShock on education in Brazil, in particular how a mercantile logic advanced through the pandemic and how large corporations in the sector took advantage of the crisis. It documents the actions of private corporations, changes in the educational model, the impact on workers in the sector, and the challenges facing a programme of struggle.