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Letter to Our LeftWord Community (May 2017)

Dear Comrades and Friends, We are now in the midst of 2017 – the centenary year of the Russian Revolution. The Soviet Union, which was built after the Revolution, lasted a mere seventy years. This is far too short a time in the span of human history to make any kind of judgment about either socialism or communism.  Great strides were made, certainly, but there were also grievous wrongs. Two of our new books offer a sense of the Revolution and of the USSR: Cecilia Bobrovskaya’s Rank and [...]

May Day at May Day Bookstore

On May 1, the May Day Bookstore (run by LeftWord Books) completed five years. Over these five years, the May Day event at the bookstore has become an important annual punctual point in Delhi’s political/cultural calendar. This is no mean feat, considering the location of the store — in West Delhi, in a neighbourhood with a large concentration of working people and migrants. NDTV covered the event in their 'Art Matters' section and here's a report about our unique vibrant community space: [...]

The Freedom Theatre: ten years of tenacity -

Rehearsing Freedom: the story of a theatre in PALESTINE Edited by Johanna Wallin; Designed by Sherna Dastur Published by LeftWord Books in association with The Freedom Theatre To you who stole the future: Your airplane is powerful, It flies faster than a storm and destroys a whole city. But it has one defect: It needs belief. - an excerpt from Suicide Note from Palestine (2013-14) It is not a coffee table book. Rehearsing Freedom: the story of a theatre in PALESTINE is not a book th[...]

Syrian Kaleidoscope

On April 6th, the United States attacked the Syrian regime by launching a number of missile strikes against a military airfield. The US administration, in a statement later, said that the strikes were prompted by the alleged use of chemical weapons by the Assad government against its own population. After the alleged chemical attack and then the missile strikes which followed, Vijay Prashad, chief editor at Leftword Books, writing in alternet.org, argued that the idea of cracking Syria into pie[...]

Dr. Ambedkar and Communism

 Today, April 14, Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar's birthday is a monumental day for India. It is the day when we celebrate the movement to break the bonds of caste and of social hierarchy. The point of Dr. Ambedkar's movement - as he said in 1927 during the Mahad Satyagraha - was to fight to ensure that our society 'treats human beings like human beings'. In 1944, Dr. Ambedkar was most explicit at a Depressed Classes Conference, 'The root of untouchability is the caste system; the root [...]