Children of Darkness

The lockdown is slowly being lifted. For many among us it was a semi-sabbatical, albeit with a mild feeling of being held in captivity. Perhaps a good time to reflect on another lockdown that hides in plain sight. Mythily Sivaraman, a fierce fighter for equality, between the sexes as well communities, writes with feeling of the despair that casteism generates for the mass of the people. Taken from Haunted by Fire: Essays on Caste, Class, Exploitation and Emancipation (LeftWord, 2013; also availa[...]

Bases for Coexistence

The only mutual recognition worth having, says Edward Said, is one that recognizes the suffering of both the Jewish and Palestinian people, one that insults neither the memory of the Holocaust nor that of Arab dispossession. Written in 1997, barring some references to recent events, this article might as well have been penned yesterday. One of the most important differences between Arabs in the Arab world and those who live in the West is that on a daily basis the latter are forced to confron[...]

Remembering Comrade Rebati Barman

Comrade Rebatimohan Barman (1903/05 – 6 May 1952) was a full-time organiser of the undivided Communist Party of India and a communist intellectual. Comrade Barman was born in a family of legal practitioners and died from leprosy, a disease of the poor, contracted in prison. Comrade Barman’s political life had begun in the revolutionary nationalist fold. The mass upsurges from below made him recognise and reject the proprietor class positions embodied within anti-colonial nationalism. He con[...]

Karl Marx and Our Necessary Future

When Karl Marx (born on 5 May 1818) finished his doctoral dissertation on Epicurus, he could not find a job. The reactionary climate in Germany meant that any radical, actually any liberal, could not be allowed a post; two of Marx’s interlocutors – Ludwig Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer – were both denied academic jobs. Marx, therefore, wandered into journalism; he, along with Bruno Bauer, worked at Rheinische Zeitung, where he wrote powerful pieces from 1842 to 1843. In January 1843, Marx wrote[...]

Create two, three, many Vietnams

[Editor’s note:] In April 1965, Che Guevara left Cuba to lend his leadership abilities as a guerrilla commander to revolutionary struggles in other parts of the world — from the Congo to Bolivia. The following undated message was addressed to the Organization of Solidarity with the Peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America (OSPAAAL, also referred to as the Tricontinental), which was established following a January 1966 conference in Havana. It was published on April 16, 1967, in a special in[...]