Tag Archives | Tricontinental Dossier

Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research created the collages in this dossier based on archival photographs, inserting silhouettes of people and activities and breathing life back into the spaces of the Black Community Programmes of decades past.

One and a half years since the beginning of the pandemic in Brazil, it is possible to better evaluate some of its effects. The most visible immediate aspect of the pandemic has certainly been the sudden suspension of in-person activities and the temporary closure of schools and universities.

Neo-colonialism, Nkrumah noted, seeks to fragment Africa, weaken African state institutions, prevent African unity and sovereignty, and thereby insert its power to subordinate the aspirations of the continent for pan-African consolidation.

India’s big capital, in close cahoots with the political class, took advantage of privatisation policies to seize public resources (including profitable public sector assets), acquire vast tracts of land by displacing village and forest communities, control the nation’s mineral resources, and undermine public sector banks through a cascading set of fraud and non-payment schemes.

If the social consequences of adopting an ultra-neoliberal project weren’t enough already, the emergence of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 and the gross mismanagement and negligence in combatting the virus have led to the worst-case social, economic, and health scenarios.

On 28 June 2009, President Manuel Zelaya was overthrown in a coup d’état engineered by the Honduran oligarchy and the United States government. The reverberations of the coup extend into present-day Honduras, which continues to struggle to maintain its political sovereignty.

The pandemic has sharpened and transformed pre-existing inequalities, reconfiguring the processes that sustain and guarantee life.

Only at the end of his life did Karl Marx leave the shores of Europe and travel to a country under colonial dominion. This was when he went to Algeria in 1882. ‘For Mussulmans, there is no such thing as subordination’, Marx wrote to his daughter Laura Lafargue.

If there was one revolution that marked the beginning of the end of the colonial epoch and that inaugurated a new worker-led civilisation, it was the Haitian Revolution of 1804. Enslaved Africans defeated the four major European powers of the day, won their freedom, and declared an independent republic.

Martin Aleida recalls the moment he was released from prison at the end of 1966. At twenty-two, Martin emerged from nearly a year behind bars to Jakarta, unable to find his friends and comrades.

He constantly experimented with and thought about how to connect learning and teaching among the poor and oppressed with the radical transformation of society.

Across the world, youth have become important political actors, especially since the 1960s. Along with workers, women, and people of colour, youth have been main protagonists in the fight for national, anti-colonial, anti-imperialist liberation in Asia, Africa, and the Americas.

Through their self-effacing work, the communists have galvanised hundreds of millions of people into action in order to bring about far-reaching changes in society.

In his famous speech from the dock in April 1964, Nelson Mandela spoke of ‘revolutionary democracy’ rooted in precolonial forms of collective deliberation and decision making.

The first cases of COVID-19 were detected in December 2019 in Wuhan (China). In early March, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the rapidly expanding illness a pandemic.

In the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), Article 25 offers an expanded vision of what it could mean to be a human being. Human beings, it notes, have ‘the right to a standard of living adequate for [their] health and well-being’. This includes ‘food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services’; human beings also have the ‘right to security’, which means they have the right to compensation for any lack of livelihood due to circumstances beyond their control.

In December 2019, doctors in Wuhan (China) began to see patients with a kind of viral pneumonia. By the end of the month, an investigation began and China’s health authorities sent out a public warning and notified the World Health Organisation (WHO).

The land question is central to understanding political life and society in Brazil. The country has enormous landed estates, known as latifundios, which have their roots in the beginning of the Portuguese occupation of this part of South America at the start of the 16th century. The Portuguese seizure of this land and its conversion into large latifundios–together with the mono-cultivation of crops for export and the enslavement of human beings–established the roots of social inequality that persist to this day.

Frantz Fanon was born on the Caribbean island of Martinique on 25 July 1925. He died in the United States, from leukaemia, on 6 December 1961. He was thirty-six years old.

Under the shadow of the Charter of the United Nations (1945) and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), countries are obliged to guarantee the right to health. The 1946 Constitution of the World Health Organisation (WHO) defines health as ‘a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity’.