Geography Archives: Asia

Ashok Mitra.  Calcutta Diary.  Kolkata: Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, 2014 (first published in 1977 by Frank Cass, London).  pp xxvii + 300.  Rs 395. They do not trumpet their inspiration from the rooftops: “their identification with the cause is nevertheless total”.  Amal Sen, the homeopath, was one such sympathiser.  A dreamer of socialist dreams, he medicated, […]

5th Dr. BR Ambedkar Memorial Lecture, Indian Institute of Dalit Studies, New Delhi, September 27, 2014 I I would like to use this occasion to dwell upon a point to which Dr Ambedkar had drawn attention in his closing speech to the Constituent Assembly on November 25, 1949.  In that speech he had underscored a […]

I. The Piketty Argument Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-first Century embodies an immense amount of empirical research into the distribution of wealth and income across the population for a number of advanced capitalist countries going back for over two centuries.  In particular Piketty has made extensive use of tax data for the first […]

  On Monday, October 6th, ISIS forces entered the autonomous Kurdish canton of Kobanê in Western Kurdistan (North Syria) following a siege which began on September 15th.  Defending Kobanê are the skilled but ill-equipped People’s Protection Units (YPG) and Women’s Protection Units (YPJ), who are up against The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), […]

“Humpty-Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty-Dumpty had a great fall.” The children’s rhyme and its words Wall and Fall came to mind in connection with commemorations of the fall of the Berlin Wall — actually its opening up.  Is such an allusion frivolous?  Maybe.  For millions, that event twenty-five years ago was marked by genuine, […]

The most severe crisis in the Middle East to date, the coming to power of the “Islamic State” in Iraq and Syria, has entered an extremely absurd phase.  The European states are about to follow the lead of the U.S. by exporting arms to the Kurdistan Regional Government under the command of Mustafa Barzani.  This […]

Two famous heads got lost in Berlin.  Neither loss, I hasten to add, was connected with brutality.  From the past or near future, they caused melancholy or rejoicing, depending on your viewpoint. One loss really occurred twenty-two years ago, when the 62-foot red granite statue of Lenin on East Berlin’s Lenin Square and Lenin Allee […]

If today it is possible to prolong life, health and the productive time of persons, if it is perfectly possible to plan the development of the population in accordance with growing productivity, culture and development of human values, what are they waiting for to do so?

For many years, American unions have been trying to “organize the unorganized” to offset and, where possible, reverse their steady loss of dues-paying members.  In union circles, a distinction was often made between this “external organizing” — to recruit workers who currently lack collective bargaining rights — and “internal organizing,” which involves engaging more members […]

Despite the prolonged global economic crisis since 2007/2008, neo-liberal economic thought and practice continue to reign supreme.  In his important book Capitalist Globalization: Consequences, Resistance, and Alternatives (Monthly Review Press, 2013), Martin Hart-Landsberg makes a number of key interventions unraveling the myth of neo-liberalism as well as the dynamics underlying capitalist accumulation. First, he identifies […]

  Here we go again, the US is using a humanitarian catastrophe to implement imperialist objectives and pour petrol on fire. It is sickening to see Obama and the Western media shedding crocodile tears for the Iraqi people, after the US-led occupation pulverised Iraq as a society and killed a million of its people.  It […]

In response to Roger Cohen, “Why Americans See Israel the Way They Do,” New York Times, August 3, 2014. . . . The bias of the cowboy-and-Indians movies I grew up on in the 1950s has long been exposed: swallowing up Native American land was the aim, and the myth of the dangerous savages who […]

This tribute to one of India’s finest radical economists first appeared in Analytical Monthly Review, May 2014.  AMR, published from Kharagpur, West Bengal, India, is a sister edition of Monthly Review. Nirmal Kumar Chandra (1936-2014), referred to by his dear friend, Ashok Mitra, in The Telegraph (April 4, 2014) as “The Compleat Economist”, was in […]

Gülden Özcan and Bora Erdağı: In some of the interviews you gave, you talked about your own everyday life experiences that led you to discover that Marx’s total critique of capitalism is an unfinished project.  In this discovery, you emphasized elsewhere that your class background and political struggle you were involved in have played an […]

What a trip!  I had last visited my American home country three years earlier; some things hadn’t changed much, some things had.  As ever, piled high, were many contrasts and contradictions. My first goal was my class reunion (the 65th!!!), partly in the Harvard Yard, sober and dignified even when filled with thousands of new […]

Chaman Lal.  Understanding Bhagat Singh.  Delhi: Aakar, 2013.  pp. 245. Left Traditions in South Asia Bhagat Singh is to South Asia what Che Guevara is to Latin America — a popular iconic figure who continues to inspire generations of youth in the subcontinent in their struggles against imperialism and the trajectory of national politics after […]

“Get out!  Get out of here and never come back!” shrieked an enraged Barbie, as she hurled a tiny bedroom slipper in my direction.  The dainty missile careened off an itty-bitty bust of Ken, then shattered the frame that held a photo of Barbie’s best friend, Midge.  “Take your Gay Pride and shove it!” Barbie’s […]

In a recent Washington Post article entitled “Latin Americans Are Embracing Globalization and Their Former Colonial Masters,” written by a political science professor from the University of Colorado, the author begins with the following sentence: “Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano recently renounced his 1971 classic, Open Veins of Latin America, one of a few books admitted […]

“Numbers sanctify”.  The context is very different, but I couldn’t keep my mind off that quote from Charlie Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux.  After all, the alleged mastermind of the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat will soon be sworn in as India’s prime minister, at the head of a government in which his party, the BJP, will […]

Suniti Kumar Ghosh died on May 11, at the age of 96.  It is not a passing to be mourned but a life, rich and meaningful, to be celebrated. On the face of it, his life had two major phases: the first was one of direct political activity; the second was of research and writing. […]