The Manifesto of New Path
National Council, New Path: For some time now, some of us in a small collective, mostly from backgrounds in social movements and mass organisations, have been discussing how the work of people’s struggle and revolutionary transformation can be taken forward in the Indian context. Out of those discussions we have reached the decision to found […]
Delhi Gang Rape and the Feminism of Proletarian Militancy
Pothik Ghosh Demands for harsh and summary punishment for rapists, or for that matter, stringent laws to deal with rape – fuelled as they are by moral outrage – do little else than reinforce the capitalist structure of patriarchy that thrives on gendered division of labour between waged productive work and unwaged reproductive work. For, […]
Editorials
Delhi Gang Rape and the Feminism of Proletarian Militancy
Pothik Ghosh Demands for harsh and summary punishment for rapists, or for that matter, stringent laws to deal with rape – fuelled as they are by moral outrage – do little else than reinforce the capitalist structure of patriarchy that thrives on gendered division of labour between waged productive work and unwaged reproductive work. For, […]
Maruti: A moment in workers’ self-organisation in India
Pratyush Chandra The Chairman of Maruti Suzuki, R.C. Bhargava, himself described the July 18 incident as a “class attack”. The management, which learnt from the Japanese how to instrumentalise unions as tools to educate and regulate workers in work discipline, are now learning a new lesson from their own Manesar workers – they want their […]
From Nonadanga to Workers’ Power
Pothik Ghosh तू है मरण, तू है रिक्त, तू है व्यर्थ, तेरा ध्वंस केवल एक तेरा अर्थ. (You are death, you are emptiness, you are useless, In your decimation lies your only meaning.) – Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh The resistance of Nonadanga is – for the working-masses of Calcutta, West Bengal and beyond – a shining […]
Commentaries
Class Societies and Sexual Violence: Towards a Marxist Understanding of Rape
Maya John The movement which emerged post the 16 December 2012 gang-rape case in Delhi was a media sensation.[1] The circumstances leading to the victim’s rape (i.e. a young woman returning from a high-end shopping-cum-cinema complex) touched a chord very quickly, especially with the city’s upward mobile middle-class inhabitants who quite easily read their own […]
Historical Materialism, Delhi: Legal Marxism Redux
M.S. Khan and Madan Singh The HM conference in New Delhi, India, is the arch-example of sanitising Marxism and academicising it. The purported promotion of the “new cultures of the left” is nothing but an attempt to sanitise Marxism of its dirty old history in India and elsewhere, and present it to the liberal conscience […]
Situating the Shahbag Movement: Re-founding the National?
Nazmul Sultan “Each time an event unfolds or erupts hope and anxiety accompany it, in different ways and to different degrees during each event. And many initially outside its compass are rapidly moved to intervene, in attempts to support it, to redirect it, or to squelch it. An event starts out of apparent uncertainty and […]
Class Societies and Sexual Violence: Towards a Marxist Understanding of Rape
Maya John The movement which emerged post the 16 December 2012 gang-rape case in Delhi was a media sensation.[1] The circumstances leading to the victim’s rape (i.e. a young woman returning from a high-end shopping-cum-cinema complex) touched a chord very quickly, especially with the city’s upward mobile middle-class inhabitants who quite easily read their own […]