communism

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 [...]

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 [...]

Letter to the LeftWord Books community

Dear friends, We have opened our year with a publication that has been long anticipated – Teesta Setalvad’s Foot Soldier of the Constitution: A Memoir.   The book has already been widely reviewed all favorably and is on the road to appear in Gujarati, Hindi, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, and a host of other languages. Teesta’s book tells an intimate story of a young woman from an important legal family who goes on the quest of journalism only to be dragged into the world of the la[...]

Vijay Prashad on Teesta Setalvad's Memoirs

Here's the transcript of the interview: On Teesta Setalvad's Memoirs: For the past two years I have been editing Teesta Setalvad's memoirs. The reason, we at Leftword, were very excited about this book is that during the summer of 2013 and into 2014, there was a demonization of Teesta in the media, mainly by BJP politicians. One heard about a person called Teesta that those of us who worked with her couldn't recognize. We thought that it’s important for her to tell her real story so t[...]

Communist Histories

We are – with 2017 – a hundred years away from the Russian Revolution, whose audacity brought the workers and peasants of that vast region of Eurasia to power. The USSR lasted only seven decades, and – without doubt – there will be much made this year about its achievements and its failures. One can guarantee that more will be said of the latter than the former. What will be overshadowed is the achievement of the revolution itself – the fact that ordinary people could overthrow the anc[...]