Reader’s Guide Buddhist theory of the origin of state, as contained is Digha Nikaya, one of the collections of Buddha’s teachings) is a great ancient Indian contribution to the history of political theory. Purpose of this chapter is to explain the need of the state for the maintenance of the social order, arising due to emergence of evils in the[Read More…]
Janhastakshep takes strong note of and unequivocally condemns the fascist state crackdown on farmers and the journalists factually reporting the movement and the state action. Two independent journalists, Mandeep Punia and Dharmender Singh were detained by Delhi Police near Singhu border late night on 30th Jan, 2021. Punia is associated with Junputh and The Caravan while Singh works for Online[Read More…]
Like communalism, Brahmanism (casteism) and the gender, the Race, is also not an attribute of biology but an ideology that is constructed, reconstructed, nurtured and perpetuated in the day-to-day life experiences and intellectual discourses. A sense of superiority or supremacy is one of the key elements of the hegemony. In the colonial era, the European colonizers harbored the illusory sense[Read More…]
The CPI (ML – Liberation) office in Varanasi was raided at midnight without the search warrant, a couple of days ago. The process of the arrest under the draconian law UAPA of human rights activists and intellectuals beginning with the arrest of 90% handicapped, Delhi University Professor GN Saibaba is going on unabated since the last few of years.[Read More…]
The attack on the students by the state and the right wing extremism, represented by RSS that took off with Mr. Modi’s ascendance to power in the center, has intensified in the last one year along with the ongoing of failures of the government on the economic fronts. The ruling classes, in order to divert the popular attention from the[Read More…]
Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India, Gyanendra Pandey, Delhi, oxford university Press, 1992, pp297, Price: Rs 100.10 The present epoch of Indian history is marked by its ‘decolonization’ through World Bank-IMF sponsored ‘developmental’ economic policies of ‘liberalization- privatization-globalization’ on the one hand and rising tides of communalism on the other. The communal historiography , claiming ‘hinduttva’ to be synonymous[Read More…]
Today, March 18, is a red letter day for the working class and all true friends of the workers in the country and throughout the world. For, on this day, one hundred forty-seven years ago, in the municipality of Paris, in France, the Parisian workers garnered a historic greatest achievement. Their proletarian revolution triumphed and established the first working class[Read More…]
Many people keep quoting Karl Marx, as “Religion is the opiate of the masses.” But he never used that exact phrase.The exact quotes from the essay on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, published in 1844 in “Deutsch-FranzösischeJahrbücher”, during his stay in Paris, are: “Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against[Read More…]
The contradiction of praxis is the eternal contradiction of Capitalism with its innate attribute of unceasing accumulation. It means opposite to what it says. It appropriated political power and established itself with the slogans of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity but its very existence depends on the contrary principles, as its prominent organic intellectual Adam Smith has aptly defined the historical progress (of[Read More…]
Introduction Like Hobbes and Locke, the central political concernof Jean Jacks Rousseauhas also been a legitimate public authority in agreement with them about its ultimate source – the people. But similarity ends here. For Hobbes and Locke, even theoretically, sovereignty emanates from the people but moves away to an external sovereign body, for Rousseau the sovereignty mot only emanates from[Read More…]
Introduction “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, consequently also controls at the same time the means of mental production, so that the ideas[Read More…]
The summary The new educational policy and proposed reforms like CBCS, RUSA, Central Universities’ Act are steps towards conformity of the WTO demands commoditization, liberalization and privatization of education on the so-called developing countries and the least developed countries. It is to be noted that the WTO representing the interests of the imperialist global capital, has included education in GATTS[Read More…]
Plato’stheory of justice quite different from and contrary to the justice as we understand it in constitutional-legal terms, can be precisely summed in following two quotes from the Republic: “Justice is having and doing what is one’s own”and “A just man is a man just in the right place doing his best and giving full equivalent of what he receives”.[Read More…]
Plato’s theory of Idea or the Form constitutes the philosophical foundation of Plato’s political theory. The problems variety and the change have been common questions for ancient Greeks, who were trying to discover the uniting element in the variety, i.e. the one in many; and the permanence in the ever changing world. Pre-Socratic Greek philosophy generally addressed to the observation of life and motion[Read More…]
The intellectual world is teleological. That is to say nothing is written without purpose and each intellectual responds to; reflects upon; provides intellectual explanation and justification or critique and alternative to the issues and circumstances prevailing in his contemporary time-space. Plato’s Republic is not an utopia addressed to no-one but a passionate appeal to fellow Athenians to overthrow the existing democratic governance[Read More…]
The summary The new educational policy and proposed reforms like CBCS, RUSA, Central Universities’ Act are steps towards conformity of the WTO demands commoditization, liberalization and privatization of education on the so-called developing countries and the least developed countries. It is to be noted that the WTO representing the interests of the imperialist global capital, has included education in GATTS[Read More…]
Quotes from Karl Marx’s works reverberated in the unprecedented 5-day long conference organized by the Asian Development and Research Institute (ADRI), participated by the delegates from 18 countries across the 5 oceans, held in Patna, the capital of Bihar that has witnessed many revolutionary and counter revolutionary movements and uprisings. Gist and the central message of the conference in one[Read More…]
The principles of Marxism and the Indian communist movement “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling materialforce of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectualforce. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, consequently also controls at the same time the means of[Read More…]
Today, March 18, is a red letter day for the working class and all true friends of the workers in the country and throughout the world. For, on this day, one hundred forty-six years ago, in the municipality of Paris, in France, the Parisian workers garnered a historic greatest achievement. Their proletarian revolution triumphed and established the first working class[Read More…]
To rebel is to create
To conform is to stagnate
To question is to know
To follow is support to status-quo
To doubt is to be radical
To undoubtedly assent is to be ‘practical’
To self-criticize is to grow
To self-eulogize is just to blow with the flow
So dare to think
Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-97), rightly credited as the first feminist philosopher, though the term feminism was not available in the discourse of that era, by the Enlightenment-inspired passion for reason,dared to rationally think and publically express her thought, a philosophical taboo for women at the time. By defying and challenging the prevalent social role models and stereotyped notions of[Read More…]
19th Century witnessed many revolutions in the realm social movements and theories. The ordinary people, the working population, the wretched of the earth [Fanon] who entered in the arena of political theory through Rousseau in the 18th century found a profound spokesperson in the genius of Karl Marx in the 19thcentury. Marx, as a student of jurisprudence, history and philosophy, at a time when[Read More…]
This article was published in a book Social Movements in Contemporary India edited by SK Chaube in 1996 Many small Nadis join to make the Mahanadi. This statement of Shankar Guha Niyogi, the architect and the ideologue of the Chhattisgarh movement under the red –green banner of Chhattisgarh Mukti Morcha (CMM), explains the motif of its slogan, ‘A New Chhattisgarh for a[Read More…]
The term Dialectical Materialism was not used by Marx himself but by subsequent Marxists to delineate the synthesis of Marx’s critiques of Hegel’s Dialectics, which he called idealist and Feuerbach’s materialism, which he called mechanical or metaphysical. For the first time the term Dialectical Materialism was used by Plekhanov in 1891.Five years after Marx’s death Engels expressed his and Marx’s[Read More…]
The Athenian Charvak Protagoras (490-420 BC), a sophist was an atheist, a rarity those days in Greece. One of the false charges against Socrates in the Athenian judicial assembly consisting of 1000 judges was corrupting the youth by spreading atheism. Plao’s last work, LAWS, restrains the state from capital punishents except for the serious crimes, like atheism. Sophists were alien[Read More…]
Plato’s theory of communism is just opposite to Marxian theory of communism that seeks to eventually establish a classless and hence stateless society, as according to it the state is instrument of the domination in the hands of ruling classes. Plato’s theory of communism that is used as one of instruments of consolidation of the hierarchically ‘well ordered’ state[Read More…]
Any cowardly, armed or mobbed attack on unarmed people must be condemned in no uncertain terms. We, who came out in “Not in my name” protest at Jantar-Mantar against Gorakshak mob lynching, also came out to protest against the ghastly act of attack on Amarnath pilgrims. But why the Salim Sheikh, is, instead of being praised for his presence of[Read More…]
Alternative Readings of the Durga-Mahishasur Myth. A Revolt Against Brahmanical Epistemology: The beginning of a new cultural renaissance in India The alternative readings of myths from Brahmanical mythological reservoir mark the beginning of a new cultural consciousness among the Dalits, Adivasis and other deprived sections of the Indian society. The deprived peoples have realized that the Brahmanism has been able to[Read More…]
The historical roots and the continuing theoretical basis of the modern liberal, liberal democratic and neo-liberal — states can be traced to the economic and the consequent political and intellectual developments of, what is known as, the long 18th century (1685-1815) in Europe beginning with Thomas Hobbes, as far as the history of political theory is concerned, though his major[Read More…]
As Benedict Anderson has rightly pointed out in The Imagined Communalities, the concept of nationalism as a new identity criterion and as a hegemonic ideology “was born in an age when Enlightenment and revolutions were destroying the legitimacy of divinely ordained hierarchical dynastic realm”. In fact the basis of the secular allegiance in place of the old religious-feudal is[Read More…]
In the aftermath of Allahabad High Court judgement that nullified her election as a MP from Raebareli and in the midst of on growing students’ unrest, also known as Bihar or JP movement, Mrs Indira Gandhi imposed emergency on 25th June 1975 under . Fundamental rights were suspended; political opponents and dissenting intellectuals were jailed, press censored. The pervasive[Read More…]
The people of my generation, particularly those who were associated with students’ movement in 1970s, still have memories of fascist terrorism unleashed during the Emergency. The book under review book that people having view a different to Modi, that is Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh, have memories worse than those of seventies. In every area Modi’s undeclared emergency is more frightening[Read More…]
Contradiction of praxis has been the perennial contradiction of capitalism from the very outset. It never says what it does and never does what it says; it promises the sky and plunders the earth. It appropriated power with the slogans of ‘equality; liberty; fraternity’, but its very existence, as aptly articulated by Adam smith, in terms of “individual profit making[Read More…]
“SPARTACUS“ is a powerful novel of ancient slave society with rich meaning for the liberation struggle of our day. It is brilliantly written, and in certain sections probably represents the high point in the development of Howard Fast’s superb craftsmanship. The story of Spartacus and his army of slave warriors is one of the great epics of history. Early in[Read More…]
A communal organization derives its ideology, base and support from religion and tradition, that is, from the past or the existing social order, and functions as a bridge between religion and politics. Tradition is the continuation of the ‘glorious past’ as perceived, and projected, by the ideologies of such organizations, which may or may not bear any resemblance to historical[Read More…]
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Our beloved K.P.Sasi is no more. Filmmaker, cartoonist, writer, mentor, friend and above all tireless activist championing the cause of every underdog, Sasi breathed his last, mid-afternoon this Christmas day – after battling a medical condition for months. I remember the last time I met him, almost exactly a month before he passed away, at the ayurvedic healing center in[Read More…]
