The year 2019 marks a century since the brutal murder of Rosa Luxemburg, on 15 January 1919, when she just a little over 47 years old. In her life and death for socialist revolution, Rosa Luxemburg remains a revolutionary icon.…
Samir Amin who passed away recently was an outstanding Marxist thinker of our time. An economist by training, he did not confine himself to armchair theorising; he was deeply and passionately engaged till his last breath in praxis for changing…
Professor Irfan Habib has for some time been developing a perspective on modern Indian history that is novel and rather different from that of much of the Indian Left, not to mention the bulk of the European Left. In contrast…
Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik, A Theory of Imperialism, New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2016, xxviii + 212 pages, Rs 695 This book is a brilliant exposition of the origin of capitalist colonialism and imperialism and its sustenance. The two major…
Vaqar Siddiqui, Do Sarfarosh Shaa‘ir, Ram Prasad ‘Bismil’ aur Ashfaqullah Khan ‘Hasrat’ (Urdu), New Delhi: Anjuman-i Taraqqi-i Urdu, 2015, 179 pages, Rs 180 Sunayan Sharma, Sariska: The Tiger Reserve Roars Again, New Delhi: Niyogi Books, 2015, 224 pages, Rs 650…
The tragic and untimely departure of Sam Moyo from amidst us creates a void that can be filled only through an uncompromising commitment towards the poor and an unflinching solidarity with struggles of historically oppressed people. Passionate as he was…
The year 2014 marked the 125 th birth anniversary and 50 death anniversary of Jawaharlal Nehru. During that year the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust had organised a series of lectures assessing Nehru’s role in building independent India. Two of those…
There is scarcely a society, throughout the empire, that British imperialism left undivided. The view that colonial rule in India was based upon the strategy of ‘divide and rule’ might seem to be a nationalist cliché, but is nevertheless substantially…
The highest level of development of theory, Georg Lukacs had argued, is when theory breaks into practice. Lenin’s theory of imperialism represented in this sense the highest level of development of theory: starting from the ‘immanent tendencies’ of capitalism analysed…
Deep Kanta Lahiri Choudhury, Telegraphic Imperialism: Crisis and Panic in the Indian Empire, c. 1830, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2010, pp. xii+277. In 1870 Bombay and London were connected by telegraph. According to received wisdom, this technological leap enabled greater metropolitan…