Geography Archives: India

  • Will Chinese Workers Challenge Global Capitalism?

      Paul Jay: In China in June, leaders of the Chinese Communist Party said that it’s time for workers’ wages to go up.  And there’s been a lot of discussion about whether China’s actually restructuring its economy to try to boost domestic demand.  Certainly in what leaders say in other parts of the world they […]

  • Marx and Engels on Music

    In 1857 Charles Dana invited Karl Marx to contribute to the New American Cyclopaedia.  Marx was the European political correspondent for the daily New York Tribune, of which Dana was the editor; Dana and George Ripley, his former mentor at the utopian colony of Brook Farm, were co-editors of the encyclopedia.  In due time Marx […]

  • The Myth of the “Sub-prime Crisis”

    Capitalism, like the proverbial horse, kicks even when in decline.  Even as the current crisis hit it, it gave an ideological kick by attributing the crisis to “sub-prime” lending; and so well-directed was its kick that the whole world ended up calling it the “sub-prime crisis”. The idea, bought even in progressive circles, was that […]

  • The Return of the Damascenes

      Christa Salamandra.  A New Old Damascus: Authenticity and Distinction in Urban Syria.  Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004.  x + 199 pp.  $21.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-253-21722-6; $49.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-253-34467-0. Christa Salamandra’s A New Old Damascus: Authenticity and Distinction in Urban Syria is a thought-provoking analysis of one segment of the Syrian elite’s […]

  • Why You Should Read AFL-CIO’s Secret War against Developing Country Workers

      Dear Brother, Sister, Friend, As you daily confront the challenges of leading or representing union members or other workers, in whatever capacity, awareness of the current situation of the labor movement is unavoidable: we are in trouble, and we need to audaciously address our weaknesses and limitations if we are to have a chance […]

  • The State under Neo-liberalism

    Much has been written on the subject of the capitalist State in the era of neo-liberalism.  Two features of the “neo-liberal State” in particular have been highlighted.1  One relates to the change in the nature of the State, from being an entity apparently standing above society and intervening in its economic functioning in the interests […]

  • The Revolutionary Road in India

      The editors of Aneek have asked us to present, in brief, our stand regarding what we think is “the correct path” towards equality, cooperation, community, and human solidarity, that is, socialism in India.  The struggle for socialism is going to be long, hard, and violent, and I, for one, cannot imagine a socialist India […]

  • The Structural Crisis of Capitalism

    There is a very pervasive view that the current capitalist crisis consists exclusively of the financial crisis and, in so far as the financial crisis is now over, the crisis as a whole is over.  This, I believe, is erroneous, and this is because, like Bob Brenner, I also believe that the current financial crisis […]

  • Killing Azad: Silencing the Voice of Revolution

      To suppress the most articulate voice of the Indian revolutionary movement, the state indulged in the brutal assassination of Cherukuri Rajkumar, popularly known as Azad, spokesperson of the Communist Party of India (Maoist), along with freelance journalist Hemchandra Pandey, on July 2.  Azad was supposed to meet a courier at Sitabardi in Nagpur, Maharashtra […]

  • Sending a Message, Setting a Precedent: Nuclear Powers vs. Iran, Brazil, Turkey, and Other Emerging Powers

      In international politics, if an action seems reckless or callous and the ones taking it are not certified loonies, usually it’s because it was made to look that way, on purpose.  To send a message. Take Israel’s attack in international waters on a civilian flotilla that resulted in the death of nine Turkish passengers. […]

  • ‘God Helps Those Who Help Themselves’: Interview with Norman G. Finkelstein, Part 2

    What is the British government’s role in the conflict?  It is officially committed to the international consensus two-state settlement, but what has our record been in practice? It’s been awful.  Britain doesn’t have an independent role — it just does what the US tells it to do.  On the other hand, the struggle is easier […]

  • The Myth of Conflict-Free Diamonds

    The issue of “blood diamonds” has once again made the news: Farai Maguwu, Director of Zimbabwe’s Mutare-based Centre for Research and Development (CRD), languishes under the long arm of Zimbabwe’s laws on alleged charges related to his research on Zimbabwe’s Marange mines.  According to a confidential 44-page report produced by investigators mandated by the Kimberley […]

  • Iranian Sociology and Its Discontents

    I recently returned from the quadrennial International Sociology Association’s World Congress held in Gothenburg, Sweden.  It’s kind of like the World Cup of sociology.  There I sat in on a session organized by the Iranian Sociology Association, where a few presenters, including its president Hossein Serajzadeh, discussed the state of social science in Iran.  I […]

  • Treasure Islands: Mapping the Geography of Corruption

    When is a tax haven not a tax haven?  When Mauritius’ Vice Prime Minister Ramakrishna Sithanen says so.  “We are a not a tax haven,” stated Sithanen, who is also the country’s Minister of Finance.  Ironically, Sithanen would go on to reveal that ring-fenced financial services (FS) — the legal and financial secrecy vehicles facilitating […]

  • The 2010 Commonwealth Games: Delhi’s Worrying Transformation

    Amid spells of heavy monsoon rain and sticky, sweltering heat, Delhi is an anxious city, struggling to meet a deadline.  Preparations are furiously underway for the nineteenth Commonwealth Games, to be held in town in less than three months (from October 3-14).  Delhi residents expect that their upturned streets, recurrent blackouts and impassable traffic jams […]

  • What Difference Does a Revolution Make?  A Preliminary Contrast of India and China

    I. Commonalities At the time of their casting off of colonialism — India gaining independence from Britain in 1947, China putting an end to a century of imperialist domination in 1949 — the two largest countries in Asia shared many common characteristics.  Each possessed an enormous continental landmass with a population in the hundreds of […]

  • Socialism or Reformism?

    I We live at a time when resistance to the inequities that exist in this world and the struggle for a better world are almost totally detached from any striving for socialism.  Climate change, imperialist aggression, forcible dispossession of peasants in the name of “development”, oppression of the tribal population, gender discrimination, and ecological degradation […]

  • ‘God Helps Those Who Help Themselves’: Interview with Norman G. Finkelstein, Part 1

    Norman Finkelstein is one of the world’s foremost public intellectuals writing about the Israel-Palestine conflict.  He is the author of many books on the topic, most recently Beyond Chutzpah, an exhaustive account of Israel’s human rights record, and This Time We Went Too Far (reviewed in New Left Project), an analysis of the Gaza massacre […]

  • Goodbye to Turkey or Goodbye to Good versus Evil?

    The West is worried about Turkey.  Its spokespeople fear that the West might have “lost” Turkey since its Prime Minister, Recep Erdoğan, associated himself with President Lula, proposed to act as intermediary between the West and Iran, and, later, reacted with determination against Israel’s violent raid on a boat sailing under the Turkish flag and […]

  • India: The Poverty of the Intellectual Mind and the Enlightened Mind of the Backward Adivasi

      This is a rejoinder that the slain CPI (Maoist) spokesperson had penned in response to B.G. Verghese’s article in Outlook. Reading B.G. Verghese’s article Daylight at the Thousand-Star Hotel in Outlook (May 3), one is stunned by the abysmal poverty of thought and colonial mindset of this renowned intellectual.  How is it that the […]