vijay prashad

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[...]

Vas Bien, Fidel.

In 1999, LeftWord Books – only a few months old – decided that one of our early titles must be from Fidel Castro. Castro had delivered two speeches that year, one at the University of Venezuela and the other at a conference on culture and development in Havana. These were incredible speeches – vintage Castro – laying out his assessment of the world through the experiences of Cuba and through the emergence of what he called ‘imperialist globalisation’. One of the key elements of Castr[...]

Is Fascism Imminent?

A few weeks ago, CPI(M) leader Prakash Karat wrote a brief article in the Indian Express that assessed the character of the RSS and the BJP. He argued that the BJP is not capable of fascism because the conditions that would require the ‘terroristic dictatorship of finance capital’ – as the Communist International put it – do not exist. At the Sabrang website, historian Jairus Banaji responded tartly, saying that indeed the BJP-RSS is a fascist ensemble. Joining the debate then was LeftWo[...]