Geography Archives: India

  • An Unnamed Woman Tortured to Death by Rape in Delhi and the Death of Aaron Swartz; The Degrees of Responsibility — Carmen Ortiz, Manohar Lal Sharma and Colonel Lama

      Analytical Monthly Review, published in Kharagpur, West Bengal, India, is a sister edition of Monthly Review.  Its January 2013 issue features the following editorial. — Ed. We know nothing about the beliefs of the canon (religious) lawyers among the Christians, but can safely assume that they would consider it a sign of movement in […]

  • The Promises and Challenges of Bolivia’s Socialist Government

    Bolivia’s government entered 2013 on an optimistic note.  Socialist-oriented projects aimed at shoring up national independence and protecting indigenous rights seemingly were on track.  Now, however, the government is having to deal with emerging reports of official corruption. Opinion surveys show that President Evo Morales, overwhelming victor in two presidential elections and one recall vote, […]

  • Imperialism — for the Value of Money

    Prabhat Patnaik: To me, imperialism is immanent in the money form, and I want to argue that in the era of finance capital, far from its becoming less relevant, it becomes more relevant. . . .  I would even define imperialism as an arrangement in which not only you get use values but you get […]

  • For Whom Do the FAO and Its Director-General Work?

    For farmers small and large?  For the tens of millions of food-consuming households, poor or just getting by?  For the governments and bureaucracies of small countries who want to import less and grow more?  For the organic cultivators on their small densely bio-diverse plots?  Or for the world’s large food production, trading, and retail corporations, […]

  • ‘Naxalbari . . . Will Never Die’: The Power of Memory and Dreams

      Here is the full-text of what I said — as also, what I wanted to say but restrained myself because of the time constraint or because of my diffidence — at the book release of Gautam Navlakha’s Days and Nights in the Heartland of Rebellion (Penguin Books, 2012), organised by Sanhati at the Gandhi […]

  • The Sad Legacy of Moose Dung and Red Robe

    Squaw Point today (photo by David Thorstad)Silent City (photo by David Thorstad) In 1904, the Ojibwe village at Thief River Falls, in northwest Minnesota, was removed to the Red Lake Indian Reservation to the east, much diminished after the tribe’s cession of 256,152 acres between the reservation and Thief River Falls (known as the eleven […]

  • All the News That Doesn’t Fit Anywhere Else

    NYPD to Racially Profile White Males New York, NY — Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly announced today in a joint press conference that, following a recent study on race and “going-postal” homicides, the New York City Police Department will revamp its Stop and Frisk crime prevention policy by instructing officers to stop […]

  • Whose War?  The War of 1812

    Centennials, bicentennials, and other historical anniversaries — not to mention annual holidays — play a major role in the legitimation of power relations.  And they can be sharp ideological battlegrounds like Columbus Day.  This year is the two hundredth anniversary of the War of 1812, an inconclusive two and a half-year war with Great Britain […]

  • We Refuse Economic Bondage: Stop the Loans

    Dear friends, In the coming period we will again be facing a familiar enemy that many of you have and continue to battle.  International Financial Institutions (IFIs) like the IMF have long had a hand in plundering the Egyptian economy and dispossessing the Egyptian people.  We aim to resist these institutions and their depredations, but […]

  • “Collectivized Torture”: Drone Warfare and the Dark Side of Counterinsurgency

    The recent Stanford University report on drone strikes in Pakistan, Living Under Drones, raises the possibility that the US is intentionally using drones, not merely as hi-tech assassination devices, but also as weapons of state terror intended to subdue unruly regions and populations.  The appalling reality of drone warfare along the Afghanistan border closely resembles […]

  • On Eric Hobsbawm’s Passing

      Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012), regarded by many as the top 20th century British historian, passed away October 1st, at the age of 95.  Hobsbawm joined the British Communist Party in 1936, the year he entered Cambridge University, and remained a life-long member.  In a life dedicated to historical scholarship and to draw attention to injustice […]

  • Capitalism and “Human Nature”: A Rebuttal

    In the celebrated section of The Wealth of Nations in which he discusses the advantages of the division of labor, Adam Smith advances the thesis that “common to all men” is a “propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another.”  Smith hedges on whether this “propensity” is a matter of original human nature […]

  • Some Memories of Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy

    In 1949, Paul Sweezy and Leo Huberman created Monthly Review.  In the same year, Paul Baran and I began to teach in the San Francisco Bay Area: Baran at Stanford, myself at UC Berkeley.  As the years unfolded, we worked together politically in the area with the same social aims and values.  Meanwhile, the two […]

  • All Sorts of Roguery?  The ‘Financial Aristocracy’ and Government à Bon Marché in India

    My voice is a crime, My thoughts anarchy, Because I do not sing to their tunes, I do not carry them on my shoulders. — Cherabandaraju, who was the lead accused in a “conspiracy case” involving poets and their poetry. It’s been two decades and a year since India’s elite embraced neo-liberalism.  Money — the […]

  • Tadeusz Kowalik, 1926-2012

      Professor Tadeusz Kowalik (1926-2012) was a noted Polish economist who played a major role in Polish economic debates for more than a half century.  A graduate of the University of Warsaw, Kowalik was a student of the distinguished Polish Marxist economist Oskar Lange and like his teacher, was a prominent advocate of market socialism […]

  • Imperial Sovereignty in the Automated Battlefield: Interview with Aijaz Ahmad

    Aijaz Ahmad: Since the Vietnam War the United States has been developing what they then called the “automated battlefield.”  Now, after about 40 years, we are now seeing some very, very advanced expressions of that, where the entire battlefield is being automated, to use the whole spectrum of technologies that they have . . . […]

  • The Emerging Left in the “Emerging” World

    Ralph Miliband Lecture on the Future of the Left, London School of Economics, London, U.K., 28 May 2012 It is a great honour and privilege for me to be invited to deliver this lecture in the Ralph Miliband series on the future of the Left.  Ralph Miliband was not just an outstanding social scientist and […]

  • The World Seen from the South: Interview with Samir Amin

    I would like to focus this interview on three distinct but related questions: your vision of the world and the possibilities of changing it; your conceptual and political proposal on the implosion of capitalism and delinking from it; your analysis of the global context, seen especially from Africa and the Middle East.  What is your […]

  • Against Eco-incarceration: Class Struggle and Indigenous Rights in India

    Whereas once the primitive was our savage other, today the native is the bearer of an alternative future.  In the late 1980s the Kayapo Chief Raoni, with his spectacular feathered headdress, accompanied the pop star Sting on concert tours to enlighten western audiences of the ecological disaster in the Amazon that came hand-in-hand with human […]

  • Always Occupy

    And so I left Montserrat, a place of brief and merciful funerals.  She does a good burial, Montserrat — the only place in the world where the barefoot gravedigger rules.  He gets to choose the hymns sung, judge the quality of the choir’s voices, and keeps up a running conversation as he joyfully sets about […]