marx

Marxism-Leninism and the Bourgeois Judiciary

In February 1968, the High Court of Kerala held E.M.S. Namboodiripad in contempt for certain ‘offensive’ remarks about the judiciary he had made publicly on November 9, 1967. Soon after, EMS challenged his conviction in an appeal to the Supreme Court, which gave its decision on July 31, 1970. The apex court upheld the HC judgment, noting that ‘as regards sentence we think that it was hardly necessary to impose heavy sentence. The ends of justice in this case are amply served by exposing th[...]

Activist Arrests in India Are Part of a Dangerous Global Trend to Stifle Dissent

On Tuesday morning, the police from the Indian city of Pune (in the state of Maharashtra) raided the homes of lawyers and social activists across India and arrested five of them. Many of them are not household names around the world, since they are people who work silently on behalf of the poor and oppressed in a country where half the population does not eat sufficiently. Their names are Gautam Navlakha, Sudha Bharadwaj, Vernon Gonsalves, Arun Ferreira and Varavara Rao. What unites these peop[...]

LeftWord Books in Kolkata: New Developments

At the start of this month, Seagull Books shifted into a new home at 36C, Shyama Prasad Mukherjee Road in Kolkata, 700025. Already into their 36th year, Seagull Books has also opened a new space in Delhi's Maharani Bagh. LeftWord Books has a special designated shelf at Seagull Bookstore in Kolkata. All our new titles and titles from our back-list are available at the Seagull Bookstore. We are planning to organize events at Seagull Books' space in the form of reading groups, small poetry sessions[...]

Marx Turns 200

I imagine Karl Marx at his desk in the British Library, reading the Blue Books produced by the British imperial officials, studying the large books of Smith and Ricardo, spilling ink onto his coat, wondering what chaos will meet him at home. When he returns home, his children throw themselves on his bulk, demanding he read Shakespeare or the Grimm’s Fairy Tales to them. One of his children is likely sick, his wife and Helene Demuth tending to the ailing child. Marx tells Jenny Marx what he has[...]

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[...]