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 example of struggle against capitalist repression and exploitation. The Nonadanga movement is a wake-up call for Mamata Banerjee and her Trinamool Congress-led West Bengal government.  It is an indication that the popular upsurge, which unseated the 35-year-old CPM-led Left Front regime in West Bengal 10 months ago, was neither meant to clear the way for Mamata’s Trinamool Congress to appropriate state-power by forming a new government in West Bengal nor was it meant, at a more general level, to affirm and consolidate the hegemony of and consensus for competitive electoral politics. The different people’s movements – whether they be in Jangal Mahal or Darjeeling, Dooars or Calcutta city – were all directed against the deviation of the Left Front and its largest constituent, the CPM, from the fundamental ideological principles of Leftist politics. 

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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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 Saswat Pattanayak

"He who tells the people revolutionary legends,
he who amuses them with sensational stories,
is as criminal as the geographer
who would draw up false charts for navigators."
HPO Lissagaray, "History of the Paris Commune of 1871" (1877)

The challenges to Occupy Wall Street are many. Some even more critical than the very issues the protestors are fighting against. Whereas it claims to be the 99%, yet the movement practices the age-old privileges of class and race blindness. Similar to most white liberal movements, the OWS is hardly inclusive of the people of colour. Although the spirit is radical and the intent is revolutionary, the movement itself suffers from a lack of critical understanding on how race and class intersect. In reality, 99% of people do not form a class in themselves. This is because the 99% of population comprise a significant amount of aspiring rich, a "middle class" category of people who have steadfastly refused to side with the poor working class whenever the latter has organised itself. In the US, this segment of opportunistic liberal citizens have always believed in the country’s racist foundations, its heritage of exclusionary democracy, and its segregated educational system, and amply benefited from patriotic allegiances. And as a result, they have lent unconditional supports to electoral reforms that sustain an individualistic social order, to corporate policies that help private business thrive, to political outfits such as the Democratic Party in recent times, which upholds the status quo in every level of governance defining American imperialism.

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 Anjan Chakrabarti

"The emancipation of the working class
must be the act of the workers themselves."
- Rules of the First International

On 16th October 2011, the veteran 71-year-old trade union leader, the chief advisor of the Kanoria Jute Mill Shramik Sangrami Union, and exponent of cooperation ethic, Prafulla Chakraborty, was arrested on the trumped up charges of attempting to murder a worker of the Kanoria Jute Mill and disturbing industrial peace. He was remanded in judicial custody for seven days; since then he has been on indefinite hunger strike. My objective in writing this piece is not merely to protest his arrest which many have rightfully done, but to argue that the arrest involves something more sinister, which needs to be scanned and opposed. Specifically, underlying his arrest is an attack on cooperation ethic and the institution of the economic collective (1) which Prafulla Chakraborty has personified for the last few years, most definitely in the case of the Kanoria Jute Mill.

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 Paresh Chandra

Capitalism and Legality I: Corruption, Ethics and Reification

The notion of 'corruption' is an essentially ethical one; the terms in which the issue is judged are 'good' and 'evil'. The problem with raising an ethical issue, as one can guess, is that it stays, as does its solution, within the system that defines ethical standards. Corruption is also, simultaneously, a legal issue. In fact, the legal question is in itself ethical, just as the ethical one is legal – the legal and the legitimate intertwine. In the final analysis, the legal structure of a society is defined in terms of what the socio-political order deems legitimate and what it does not. The obvious corollary being that a legal question, by definition, never goes into a questioning of the law itself. Anti-corruption crusaders are asking for more laws, stronger laws, or different laws. There is a difference between the old and the new law/setup, but they are also, to give the matter a Hegelian twist, identical. Fundamentally the system remains the same. In fact, these changes intend to make the system more entrenched and foolproof.

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 Saswat Pattanayak

The homeless and the Hippies, the socialists and the students, the communists and the commoners - the Wall Street has been occupied for good by the countless human beings demanding dignity of life denied to them under American capitalism. Every disenfranchised minority is now decrying the citadel of private capital, greed and monstrosity. And contrary to White House assertions and corporate media verdicts, the defamed Wall Street has been denied a bail-out - by the people of the United States.

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 Bhumika Chauhan

Michael Löwy, The Politics of Combined and Uneven Development: The Theory of Permanent Revolution, Haymarket Books, 2010.

Whenever the inherent contradictions of the capitalist system have developed into an overt crisis, the unevenness of capitalist development has acted as a sort of pressure-release mechanism. In our neoliberal times, the unevenness can be seen on many levels – from the formal labour-informal labour binary to the so called North-South divide. To maintain its rate of profit in the face of proletarian struggle (and/or the tendency of the rate of profit to fall), the capitalist class found, like always, new avenues to exploit. When the accumulation of absolute and relative surplus value became problematic, like it so often does, capitalism turned yet again to its so-called 'originary moment' – primitive accumulation. As such, primitive accumulation is still very much a part of our present. For instance, today in India, the capitalist system is turning to those pockets that it had kept in reserve (literally) for so long. In backward, agrarian and/or tribal regions, plans are in motion for the acquisition of resources.

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