On 1 October 1949, Mao Zedong announced the creation of the People’s Republic of China. Those who began to build this new state understood that they were embarking on the road to socialism, a process that would take decades, if not a century. This long-term perspective continues to guide the country’s development. Seventy-five years into its revolutionary process, China has made rapid advances while still facing many challenges.
This dossier catalogues the immense cultural production of the Telangana armed struggle in India and how it inspired the people to participate in cycles of protest against colonialism, monarchy, and landlordism, building on the idea that art and culture are both produced by the class struggle and, in turn, produce the class struggle. In a society that was prevented from being fully literate, storytelling and songs played a key role in building confidence and organisation.
This dossier presents a broad overview of the Latin American far right’s political, economic, and cultural programmes and how the absence of a real left political project that secures better living conditions has thrown different fractions of the working class into the grip of neofascism.
At a time when rebellion and radicalism are largely being ceded to the right, this dossier explores the possibilities that the current crisis of global capitalism creates for sovereign regional development projects in Latin America and the Caribbean and the importance of South-South alliances in this struggle.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo is home to vast mineral wealth – including cobalt, lithium, and coltan – that is essential for modern technology. Despite this, the Congolese people suffer extreme poverty. Historical and ongoing conflicts, driven by global capitalist interests, have destabilised the region. This dossier underscores the fight for sovereignty and dignity, ending with the words of young Congolese activists who have identified eight categories that are key to building their path to freedom.
This dossier looks at how the US-led New Cold War against China is destabilising Northeast Asia along the region’s historic fault lines. The ‘trilateral security cooperation’ pact signed in 2023 by the US, Japan, and South Korea, is a significant escalation of Washington’s containment strategy that heightens tensions in the Korean Peninsula and Taiwan Strait. To build a lasting peace in the Asia-Pacific, it is necessary to strengthen the regional peace movement, undo US militarisation, and overcome the ongoing legacies of colonialism.
This dossier looks at how the contradictions of the struggle for land in Brazil led to creation of one of the largest peasant’s movements in the world: the MST. This text focuses on the movement’s tactics and forms of organisation and why it is the only peasant social movement in Brazil’s history that has managed to survive for over a decade in the face of the political, economic, and military power of Brazil’s large landowners.
This dossier looks at the history and unfinished work of women’s liberation in the German Democratic Republic (DDR). Women’s lives vastly improved during the DDR’s forty years of existence in areas such as self-determination, reproductive rights, and access to affordable, quality childcare and healthcare. Women’s participation in the production process played a crucial role in achieving these rights, with the socialist workplace anchoring these transformations. Despite the less than favourable conditions following the dissolution of the DDR in 1990, this process continues in the present and offers valuable lessons for contemporary struggles.
The People’s Science Movement in Karnataka, India, is revolutionising education and cultivating scientific learning amongst children. Through neighbourhood schools and the Joy of Learning Festivals organised by the Bharat Gyan Vigyan Samiti (Indian Science Knowledge Association), the movement employs creative, inclusive, and hands-on learning in order to advance critical thinking and tackle deeply rooted divisions and hierarchies in Indian society. The People’s Science Movement is unique in that it operates in the spaces made available due to the failures of capitalism, differentiating it from other class-based organisations that, by definition, confront capital with full force.
Tectonic changes are taking place in the world, accelerated by the war in Ukraine and the rapidly escalating genocide in Palestine. These changes are shaped, on the one hand, by the Global North’s loss of economic power alongside its increasing militarisation and, on the other, by the Global South’s growing political demand for sovereignty and economic development. To understand these changes and the Global North’s bewilderment about the new mood in the Global South, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research produced dossier no. 72, The Churning of the Global Order, based on original research carried out with Global South Insights.
This dossier discusses the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, highlighting the role of the Medu Art Ensemble (1979-1985) in mobilising cultural workers and the people inside and outside South Africa. The art and cultural history, theory, and practices from this period are part of the tradition of struggles for national liberation and socialism across the Third World and remain relevant for cultural workers engaged in political struggles today.
The fifth study from the Women of Struggle, Women in Struggle series discusses the life and political struggles of Josie Mpama (1903–1979), a leader in the resistance against colonial oppression and the apartheid system in South Africa. As a central figure in the Communist Party of South Africa and in society more broadly, Josie teaches us about the importance of grassroots and mass organising. Like so many women involved in radical politics, particularly in the Global South, Josie’s extraordinary political contributions and theoretical acumen have been overlooked and largely excluded from then mainstream historical record.
Significant global changes have emerged in the years since the Great Financial Crisis of 2008. This can be seen in a new phase of imperialism and the particularities of eight contradictions, summarised in our latest text.
This publication, from Tricontinental and ALBA Movimientos, sets out on a path to recover the history of struggles, resistance, insurrections,and revolutionary dreams that have been led by womenand LGBTQ+ people throughout the region at different times in order to find the seeds of the popular Latin American feminisms that exist today. Selected and produced by popular feminist activists in Latin America and the Caribbean, these stories continue to inspire us today.
Although it existed for just 40 years, the German Democratic Republic (DDR) was able to construct a fundamentally different health care system that ensured a continuous improvement of the population’s health. The DDR built on progressive medical traditions and socialist property relations to eliminate the profit motive from medicine and construct a unitary health care system that operated in all sectors of society, from urban neighbourhoods and rural villages to workplaces and schools.
Catastrophes of one kind or another have rippled outward from Ukraine, including galloping inflation that is out of control. Areas of the world that are not directly party to the conflict are being hit hard by growing economic pressures, with political unrest an inevitable consequence. In this context, the Peace and Justice Project, a research institute headed by Jeremy Corbyn, joined up with Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and two media partners, Globetrotter and the Morning Star, to produce a series of reflections on unfolding conflicts in relation to concepts of nonalignment and peace.
We are witnessing a dangerous political, economic, and military escalation by the United States and its Western allies against Russia and China. The United States seeks to prevent a historical process that seems inevitable, the process of Eurasian integration, which threatens the primacy of the Euro-Atlantic elites. To secure global hegemony, the United States is committed to the pursuit of global nuclear primacy and is willing to use any means to ‘weaken’ both Russia and China – even at the risk of destroying the planet.
Nela Martínez (1912–2004), Ecuadorian activist and fighter for the people, was a key figure in the struggles of the working class and women. A communist and internationalist militant, she participated in the formation of the Ecuadorian Federation of Indians and played a central role in the Glorious May Revolution. A member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ecuador, she led the creation of women’s organisations such as the Ecuadorian Women’s Alliance and the Revolutionary Union of Ecuadorian Women. Her political biography intertwines women’s struggles with anti-capitalist, anti-fascist, anti-racist, and anti-imperialist struggles.
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.
