Marxism And The Indian Left

In a country plagued by a massive income disparity and widespread corruption, communism is an experiment which cannot lead to worse outcomes than what already exists. It isn't so surprising then that the Marxist ideology and its ideas of equal privilege have attracted a fair amount of traction in India. However, in 2011, when the Communist Party of India lost in Kerala, it took with it the seed of Marxist thought and influence in the country. In The Past and Future of the Indian Left, Ramachandra Guha examines the Marxist ideology and talks about what it means for India by deeming it as a religious doctrine having scriptures and deities, going into the details of how the Communist party of India gained power in the country.

Taking as an example the encounter of Marxism with nationalism in colonial India, explores how the two ideas became inextricably intertwined in much of the colonial world. Critically examines political documents to trace how people devoted to socialism came to see nationalism as the essential feature of the non-west, and how that conception changed Marxism in India and throughout the world. Acidic paper. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Do the Lok Sabha elections of 2014 signal the end of the road for the Left? Over the past twenty years, the Indian political climate has shifted decidedly to the Right - with the BJP and the Congress dragging India into a growth trajectory that squanders the hopes of working people. The old consensus on Indian socialism is threadbare, and socialist parties in disarray.//The future of Indian communism is rooted in the popular hopes for a better tomorrow and in the popular discontent with the bitter present. No Free Left is a critical examination of the past of Indian Communism and an assessment of its future.//Most literature on Indian communism feels claustrophobic. It assumes that the communist movement lives on a detached landscape - its programme and political judgments are adjudged against a divine standard. A history of communism cannot be written, Gramsci said, without writing a "general history of a country." Vijay Prashad does exactly that.//No Free Left stays alive to the details of the present while drawing out the long term dynamic, combining a rich historical survey with acute political analysis of the present. It is a compelling work for students of Indian politics. For activists of the Left, it is indispensable reading. Above all, it is a live work, an invitation to debate and discussion.

Who are the Indian Leftists? Why are communist leaders like Harkishan Singh Surjeet and Sitaram Yechury considered so important though the Indian Left parties are numerically not very strong in Parliament? Why is it that the most extravagant claims of the Leftists pass off as gospel truth and their kinky theories as well-known facts? Where do the Leftists derive their authority from? More Equal Than Others seeks to answer such questions and analyzes why the influence of the Indian Left is disproportionately greater than its electoral strength. Ravi Shanker Kapoor asserts that a purely political study will not help understand the tremendous intellectual hegemony of the Left; one has to look beyond politics. The author thus delves into art, culture, cinema, literature, academics, and the media to map the pervasive influence the Indian Left wields. He probes into the antics and pranks of aristocratic socialists, elitist Left-libbers, and pinkish teenybopper intellectuals: how they revel in controversies like the ones caused by Hussain's nude Saraswati and the movie Fire; how they manufacture consent and ostracize dissent; and how they collaborate with the Establishment, their professed radicalism notwithstanding. More Equal Than Others is the first critical study of the Indian Left. And while the author's criticism of the Left is scathing, he is equally unsparing of the Indian Right which, he holds, suffers from "downright cerebral poverty".

In Left of Karl Marx, Carole Boyce Davies assesses the activism, writing, and legacy of Claudia Jones (1915–1964), a pioneering Afro-Caribbean radical intellectual, dedicated communist, and feminist. Jones is buried in London’s Highgate Cemetery, to the left of Karl Marx—a location that Boyce Davies finds fitting given how Jones expanded Marxism-Leninism to incorporate gender and race in her political critique and activism. Claudia Cumberbatch Jones was born in Trinidad. In 1924, she moved to New York, where she lived for the next thirty years. She was active in the Communist Party from her early twenties onward. A talented writer and speaker, she traveled throughout the United States lecturing and organizing. In the early 1950s, she wrote a well-known column, “Half the World,” for the Daily Worker. As the U.S. government intensified its efforts to prosecute communists, Jones was arrested several times. She served nearly a year in a U.S. prison before being deported and given asylum by Great Britain in 1955. There she founded The West Indian Gazette and Afro-Asian Caribbean News and the Caribbean Carnival, an annual London festival that continues today as the Notting Hill Carnival. Boyce Davies examines Jones’s thought and journalism, her political and community organizing, and poetry that the activist wrote while she was imprisoned. Looking at the contents of the FBI file on Jones, Boyce Davies contrasts Jones’s own narration of her life with the federal government’s. Left of Karl Marx establishes Jones as a significant figure within Caribbean intellectual traditions, black U.S. feminism, and the history of communism.