socialism

  1. A letter to intellectuals who deride revolutions in the name of purity
    21
    Nov

    A letter to intellectuals who deride revolutions in the name of purity

    Revolutions do not happen suddenly, nor do they immediately transform a society. A revolution is a process, which moves at different speeds whose tempo can change rapidly if the motor of history is accelerated by intensified class conflict. But, most of the time, the building of the revolutionary momentum is glacial, and the attempt to transform a state and society can be even more slow. Leon Trotsky, sitting in his Turkish exile in 1930, wrote the most remarkable study of the Russian Revolutio[...]
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  2. Grateful for Progress Publishers
    15
    Jul

    Grateful for Progress Publishers

    The bookshelf in my mother's apartment in Kolkata is weighed down by an old history. There are books in the familiar blue and white spine, the old Progress Publishers volumes that include my volumes of Karl Marx's Capital, bought in 1981. Russian classics jostle for space, a bit of Lermontov here and a bit of Gogol there. There used to be children's books, but in the move from one apartment to the other, these might have been slipped into the bags of the kabariwallah. Running my hands over these[...]
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  3. Liberate the Colonies! Voices from the Global Struggle for Freedom
    24
    Jun

    Liberate the Colonies! Voices from the Global Struggle for Freedom

    ‘I come from the Indies; I have travelled forty days.’ These words were addressed by Tan Malaka of the Communist Party of the Dutch East Indies to the Congress of the Toilers of the Far East—convened by the Comintern. He had been asked to conclude his speech as his time was up. He was in no mood to comply. Fighters for justice are not easily silenced, even by their comrades! The speaker hadn’t travelled forty days to discuss the political situation back home with foreigners. Divided by [...]
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  4. Kerala FM T.M. Thomas Isaac Talks to Vijay Prashad @ LeftWord
    01
    Jun

    Kerala FM T.M. Thomas Isaac Talks to Vijay Prashad @ LeftWord

    Before the elections, Kerala's finance minister T.M. Thomas Isaac, who has also written several books (some of them for LeftWord), sat down for a little chat with our chief editor Vijay Prashad. In this short interview, Isaac briefly explains how they're trying to do things differently in Kerala, keeping in mind that people want dignity as much as they want bread. A rough transcript of their talk has been included below the video.       Vijay Prasad (VP): Hello! Welcome. I am Vijay Pr[...]
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  5. An excerpt from ‘The End of the Beginning: Lessons of the Soviet Collapse’
    20
    Dec

    An excerpt from ‘The End of the Beginning: Lessons of the Soviet Collapse’

    Although a distance of more than a quarter-century separates us from that fateful day in December 1991 when the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) ceased to exist, understanding of the Soviet collapse remains unsatisfactory and incomplete. The global working class is still reeling from the blows of that two-year period from 1989 to 1991 – when socialism was dismantled from Berlin to Khabarovsk. Yet, we still haven’t fully understood the nature of those blows. Such a situation must b[...]
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