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About Brinda Karat

Brinda Karat is a Polit Bureau member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPI(M), India’s largest communist party. She is the author of Survival and Emancipation: Notes from Indian Women’s Struggles (New Delhi: Three Essays Collective, 2005), Food Matters: Law, Policy, and Hunger (Hyderabad: Prajashakti, 2012), and wrote the introduction to Rosa Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution (New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2015).
  • Mallu Swarajyam (left) and other members of an armed squad during the Telangana armed struggle (1946-1951)

    For the Ruthless Abolition of the Caste System

    Vijay Prashad and Brinda Karat

    The Communist movement in India celebrated its centenary on October 17, 2020. The party was founded in Tashkent (USSR) in 1920. A decade later, most of the leaders of the Communist Party of India (CPI) were arrested by the British colonial state and imprisoned in Meerut.

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Money on the Left Episodes

  • Out of the Shadows: Public Banking for Municipal Finance
    Brinda Karat

    In a recent essay, we advanced a proposal for sub-federal governments to sell municipal bonds to their own public banks. We took the city as our primary point of departure, but the same lessons are applicable to U.S. counties and states. Establishing a public bank that regularly purchases municipal debt, we argued, would not only significantly […]

  • Reclaiming the Public Interest: Cities Should Sell Municipal Bonds to Their Own Public Banks
    Brinda Karat

    What chance do local governments have in fighting authoritarian austerity, especially when they are left to rely on feckless legislators at the state and federal levels who refuse to push back? Right now, we see austerity budgets appearing across every institution and major employer in the U.S. If the federal government continues to sabotage municipalities, […]

  • Defending the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau w/ Tyler Creighton
    Brinda Karat

    In this episode, we speak with Tyler Creighton about the ongoing struggle to save the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) from defunding and closure at the hands of Russell Vought in the second Trump Administration. Creighton is a lawyer at the CFPB and a member of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU), Chapter 335.

See all Money on the Left Episodes

Monthly Review Essays

  • Nikolai Gogol’s Department of Government Efficiency
    Andy Merrifield A 1926 Soviet illustration of a production of Gogol's play The Government Inspector, showing audience members in the foreground, and actors on stage in the background.

    Almost two centuries after its opening night, Gogol’s five-act satirical play The Government Inspector continues to create a stir with every performance, seemingly no matter where. Maybe because corruption and self-serving double-talk aren’t just familiar features of 19th-century Russia, but have become ingrained facets of all systems of government and officialdom, making them recognizable to […]

Lost & Found

  • The CIA and the Cultural Cold War Revisited
    James Petras

    The sociologist James Petras died on January 17, 2026, at the age of eighty-nine. This article originally appeared in Monthly Review 51, no. 6 (November 1999). Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta Books), £20. This book provides a detailed account of the ways in which the […]

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