Red Threads Research Center Superstructure Manifesto:
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.
