working class

Emergence of Left Forces in Madras

For anyone seeking to understand the early years of the labour movement in India, D. Veeraraghavan’s The Making of the Madras Working Class (2013) is an indispensable book. In the chapter ‘Emergence of Left Forces, 1933–1937’ he discusses at length the role of the socialists and communists. In the extract below, one can get an idea of their militant interventions for the protection of workers’ rights in that period in Madras. While acknowledging the active participation of the Congress[...]

An India without the Left?

To understand the Left’s central role, one has to take stock of the mass mobilisations to highlight injustice and inequity One out of every two Indians goes to bed hungry at night. That’s almost 700 million Indians. The number comes from McKinsey. But you don’t need a consultant to tell you about the distress in India. It is evident on our streets and in our fields. Agrarian distress (amplified by the suicide of farmers) and urban distress (illustrated by the growth of slums) have become [...]

An excerpt from ‘The End of the Beginning: Lessons of the Soviet Collapse’

Although a distance of more than a quarter-century separates us from that fateful day in December 1991 when the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) ceased to exist, understanding of the Soviet collapse remains unsatisfactory and incomplete. The global working class is still reeling from the blows of that two-year period from 1989 to 1991 – when socialism was dismantled from Berlin to Khabarovsk. Yet, we still haven’t fully understood the nature of those blows. Such a situation must b[...]

The Revolution of 1917

Today – November 7, 2017 – is the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution of 1917. In February of that year, the working class and peasantry – along with the soldiers – overthrew the Tsar’s regime. That October (November in our calendar), led by the Bolshevik party, the workers and peasants completed their social revolution by overthrowing the conciliatory government of the bourgeoisie led by Alexander Kerensky. Lenin, who had returned to Russia from exile, saw that behind Kerensky[...]