Henry Bernstein, Class Dynamics of Agrarian Change, Fernwood Press & Kumarian Press, 2010

This book, written by Henry Bernstein, is the first in the Agrarian Change and Peasant Studies series published by 'Initiatives in Critical Agrarian Studies' (based at the International Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, Netherlands). Considering the size of the task it takes on in barely 125 pages – of providing an introduction to, an overview of, and a perspective on agrarian formations and transformations under capitalism – it would not have been possible, perhaps, for anybody else but Henry Bernstein to undertake it. His intimate and longstanding involvement in setting the agenda for the debates on the agrarian question allows him to paint the "big picture" of agrarian change in capitalism through generalisation and periodisation, yet remaining extremely sensitive to the specificities of its realisation in diverse spatial-temporal locations.

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 Yasser Shams Khan

This paper deals with the dilemma concerning the relationship between politics and aesthetics. The following analysis will consider the concept of the political aesthetic and its expression in the works of art by interrogating the related but contrasting theoretical frameworks offered by Adorno and Benjamin: while Benjamin conceptualises the revolutionary potential of technically advanced popular forms of art, Adorno is in favour of the artistically advanced but elitist avant-garde literature. The polarities of these two perspectives, as Adorno puts it, are but "torn halves of an integral freedom, to which however they do not add up" (Adorno and Benjamin, 2007: 123). It is this concept of freedom and the struggle for freedom that will raise the question of the relationship between revolutionary praxis and aesthetic contemplation, within which is embedded the question of how the 'political' is represented in the aesthetic domain, and conversely, whether the concept of aesthetics itself is an expression within the socio-economic and political domain.

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Victor Serge, Revolution in Danger: Writings from Russia, 1919-1921 (Translated & edited by Ian Birchall), Haymarket Books, 2011

The pamphlets collected here were written during the Russian Civil War. They were read by Victor Serge's anarchist comrades as justification for Bolshevik authoritarianism and excess, while his new comrades possibly saw in them an anarchist hangover and germs for future deviation.

Victor Serge has been known mainly for his anti-Stalinism. More recently, his novels have become an attraction for their description of contradictions, bureaucratisation and degeneration of the Russian Revolution. However, he is seldom recognised for the originality of his understanding of revolutionary tasks in general, and their realisation in the Russian scenario. Hopefully, this collection will be an impetus for critical inquiries into his 'revolutionary theory'.

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 Maya John

Early this year a relatively unknown 74-year old Gandhian, Kisan Baburao Hazare (also known as Anna Hazare), shot to fame for raising a campaign against corruption. For days on end, Anna Hazare haunted our television sets, and details of his campaign greeted us every morning in almost all newspapers. Perhaps some of the readers of this article were avid supporters of the crusade he led, and perhaps some were vocal or even silent critics. However, now that the high point of the campaign has passed and tempers and anxieties have ebbed, a calm and composed assessment of anti-corruption campaigns may be pursued. This paper is one such endeavour to sum up and assess the contours of the 'India Against Corruption' campaign. A special focus of the paper is on the process, whereby anti-corruption campaigns conflate the discontent of exploited and oppressed classes with the interests of the economically dominant class, i.e. the class of capitalists. This subsumption or conflation of differing class discontent is intrinsic to anti-corruption campaigns and it is this process which provides such campaigns their distinctive nature. It is argued here that the 'India Against Corruption' campaign corresponds with the interests of international as well as Indian capitalists. For the capitalist class an "efficient" and "incorrupt" administration has become a necessity to sustain on-the-ground implementation of pro-capitalist policies and laws. This demand by the capitalist class for a strong state has emerged in the context of growing mass discontent among India's poor, as well a large section of India's middle class (1), against brutal capitalist appropriation of public resources. In a well-formulated political manoeuvre, Indian and international capitalist lobbies have hand-picked and promoted NGO leaders in a bid to use them as authoritative pressure groups whom the state is compelled to consult in the process of policy formation and implementation. These selected leaders have been superimposed on the masses, as a result of which the discontent of the masses has been conveniently misdirected towards the capitalist understanding of corruption, and hence, towards a bourgeois resolution of the problem. 

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