Monthly Archives: May 2020

The Last Testament of Ho Chi Minh

Having led the Vietnamese people to freedom and successfully through a devastating war with the French, not to mention the one with the United States which was to end several years after his death, Ho Chi Minh made this heartfelt statement to his compatriots shortly before it—filled with pride for their past and hope for their future. This text originally appeared in The Antioch Review (vol. 29, no. 4 [Winter, 1969–1970], pp. 497–99), and is going to be part of a forthcoming LeftWord title[...]

Ho Chi Minh, 2020

Tomorrow, 19 May 2020, is Comrade Ho Chi Minh’s 130th birth anniversary. Vijay Prashad speaks about what Comrade Ho meant to the Vietnamese people and their revolution; to the task of creating a socialist society in a country destroyed by thirty years of war imposed by imperialism, on land ravaged and poisoned by conventional and chemical weapons; and on how Vietnam has responded to the global pandemic, Covid-19, with a scientific and human approach. Below the video is a transcript of the tal[...]

Bhagat Singh, from Colonial Kolkata

Five migrant workers from Hoshiarpur were asleep in their rented room at 5 AM in a Kolkata neighbourhood. At that precise moment, their lives changed. A little-known episode from May 1933, locked in the Bengal police dossiers, points in the direction of lost histories of migrant workers linked with diasporic radicalism in Kolkata and the repression mounted on them by the colonial state. The records reveal the ways in which young migrant workers engaging with leftwing politics were persecuted fo[...]

The ‘Manifesto’ in India: A Publishing History

Today’s extract features a brief history of the publication of The Manifesto of the Communist Party in various Indian languages. It has been taken from A World to Win: Essays on the Communist Manifesto (LeftWord, 1999). Also see कम्युनिस्ट पार्टी का घोषणापत्र (LeftWord, 2019; bilingual edition). The story of how The Communist Manifesto came to be available in Indian languages is not well known. The Communist Party of India was founded o[...]

Murder in Mudukulathur

The killing of Immanuel Sekaran in September 1957 became a major flashpoint in Tamil Nadu politics. Memories of the Mudukulathur riots have been moulded to perpetuate and intensify caste conflict in the region ever since. Prof K.A. Manikumar’s Murder in Mudukulathur: Caste and Electoral Politics in Tamil Nadu (2017) helps set the record straight. Below is the preface to his monograph. Terrible caste violence broke out in 1957 in eastern Ramanathapuram district (Tamil Nadu). The reasons for [...]