Posts

In the land called hunger

As the kisan rally marched into Mumbai, all eyes were on one man, the CPI(M) MLA from Surgana and Kalwan constituencies. He organised the potable water and food packets. He sent messages to party colleagues in Mumbai and Delhi. Above all, he egged on the 35,000 peasants through personal example, he walked shoulder to shoulder with them. And the peasants marched with him, they trusted him.          Comrade Jiva Gavit Even when the peasants walked through Mumbai at midnight (so as not t[...]

#KisanLongMarch

    ‘Meherbani nakko! Hakk Havet.’ ‘No favors, we want our rights.’ On 6 March, about 20,000 farmers from Maharashtra mobilized by CPI (M)-affiliated All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS) began their 200-km march to Mumbai from Nashik. The plan was to indefinitely gherao the Assembly while the Budget session was on and demand immediate resolution of the life-and-death issues facing farmers. The march swelled to around 35,000 farmers as they walked in the heat for six days and reached Mumba[...]

The Left Loses an Election in Tripura, but it Has Not Been Defeated

The BJP and its ally – the Indigenous People’s Front of Tripura (IPFT) – have won the 2018 elections to the Tripura state legislature. The alliance of the BJP and the IPFT will now form a government. The Left It is the first time in twenty-five years that Tripura, a state of four million people in India’s northeast, will be without a government of the Left. The outgoing chief minister – Manik Sarkar of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) [CPI-M] – has been in that office since M[...]

The Birth of the Communist Manifesto

In 1848, Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels published a short pamphlet on behalf of the Communist League. Marx and Engels, both young men at that time, were tasked by the League to produce a document that would define their current situation and propose a communist path forward. This is what they did. Their text - The Communist Manifesto - arrived at a propitious time. Not long after the publication of the Manifesto on February 21, 1848, workers and peasants as well as sections of the middle class[...]

"He spoke truth to and about the Power"- P. Sainath on John Reed

We, at LeftWord Books, recently published John Reed's "stirring eyewitness account" of the Russian Revolution, 'Ten Days That Shook the World' with an introduction by one of India's finest journalists and public intellectuals P. Sainath. In Howard Zinn's words, Reed "made history come alive for the readers of popular magazines and impoverished radical monthlies" through his journalistic work in the times preceding and during the First World War when warmongering and binary narratives were the [...]