2021

by Sukla Sen
Professor Achin Vanaik, to the discerning Indian public in particular, is quite a familiar name—both as a radical intellectual and an activist as well, especially in the field of anti-nuclear peace movement; is a co-recipient, with (late) Praful Bidwai, of the International Peace Bureau’s Sean McBride International Peace Prize for 2000.
Prof. Vanaik, who had started his professional career as a journalist with the Times of India, back in the ’70s, is intellectually, and even (…)

Title: I Am No Messiah; Author: Sonu Sood with Meena K. Iyer; Publisher: Ebury Press (Penguin Random House); Pages: 215; Price: Rs 399
This is a heart-warming and a candid account of how actor Sonu Sood achieved the impossible: in the worst nightmarish months of Covid-19, he became a one point of hope and instant action for countless people across the country and beyond. At a time when administrations appeared to collapse and “celebrities” retreated into safe cocoons, this man from Moga (…)

Open Letter Stop Racist and Misogynist Attacks on the Emergent Indigenous, Eco-Feminist Left in Latin America Address the Crisis in Today’s Ecuador
Dear Editors of Jacobin Magazine and Monthly Review,
March 1st, 2021
We, the signatories of this letter, have to come together to demand the retraction or clarification of two recent articles that smear political movements and leaders in Ecuador. The gains of Yaku Pérez and the coalition around the Pachakutik party in the 7 February 2021 (…)

by Muhammad Dan Suleiman & Benjamin Maiangwa *
February 24, 2021
The Nigerian state, as with other African countries, is trapped in a crisis of belonging. This is expressed through identity battles which sometimes harm people of “other” religions and ethnicities. Such battles have even led to a call for the state to be dissolved.
In our paper we trace the history of how this came about. We use frameworks provided by three philosophers and historians. To trace the first phase – what (…)

As a global community, we cannot wait for more warning signs or the “right moment”. Last year alone has seen devastating examples of ecocide: fires ravaging the Amazon, the Congo basin, Australia, Alaska and Siberia all at unprecedented rates; a large oil spill in Ecuador; and unending, accelerating plastic pollution, which could weigh up to 1.3bn tons by 2040. Unfortunately, under cover of Covid-19, ecocide has accelerated. Deforestation in the Amazon basin increased by 50% in the first quarter of 2020, with rampant fires reaching a 13-year high in June.

Published first in Pravda, January 25, 1921. The text was banned in Soviet Russia in March of 1921, by resolution of the 10th Congress of the Communist Party

Table of Contents, Mainstream, Feb 27, 2021 Letter to the readers, Mainstream, Feb 27 On Asiatic Despotism and the Transcendence of Capitalism | Murzban Jal New farm laws & Solidarity Movement: Unfolding New politics | Sunil Ray On Farmers Mistrust of New Legislation in Indian Agriculture | Mohd Shahwaiz Emerging Unity of Farmers & Workers | Bharat Dogra and Jagmohan Singh Promotion of Coronil by the Health Minister Unfortunate | Dr. Arun Mitra Modi vs Disha Ravi and Disha Wins! | (…)

Letter to the Readers, Mainstream, Feb 27, 2021
In 2003 India and Pakistan had signed a ceasefire agreement along the Line of Control (LoC) in the Kashmir region but this agreement had pretty much broken down in the recent years and there had been continuing violations and tensions on borders. There has been an important development on that front and Director Generals of Military Operations of India and Pakistan have issued a joint statement —“Both sides agreed for strict observance of all (…)

by Murzban Jal
Arup Kumar Sen’s ‘Reading “Asiatic” Despotism’ has raised a very pertinent question of Asiatic despotism that was stubbornly buried by Stalin in the 1930s. With this burial what was also buried by Stalin and his henchmen, was the burial of a very important idea that was central to both Marx and Engels. This essay is in a way a study of this important idea and how this idea offers new paradigms for the Indian left. It puts Marx’s multilinear view of history, constituted (…)

by Sunil Ray *
Farmers’ upheaval, a unique resistance movement against the new farm laws epitomizing neo-liberalism is making a case for an epochal transformation that the nation has ever witnessed after Independence. It is capturing the imagination of structural change not of agriculture alone, but of the entire rural economy of the country. Besides, it resonates cries of all resistance movements, small or big, that seem to have been pressing their natural inclination to be retrieved for (…)