Thank you, Bernie Sanders
Watching and covering Sanders rallies has been an incredible journey for me. His decency, ethics, admiration for the teeming millions of Americans across social locations — were all superlative.
Shirley Chisholm: The Original Boss Lady of American Politics
Even while positing herself as a candidate beyond gender and race identifications, the way Shirley Chisholm managed to constantly draw national attention to problems of sexism and racism perplexed many.
A Closer Look At “The Enemy of the People”
"With so much recent mainstream press evocation of Joseph Stalin and claims of “enemy of the people” comparisons to Donald Trump we thought it timely to share some recent thoughts on the subject from journalist, professor and writer Saswat Pattanayak. As an additional side note, and given what Pattanayak exposes about the nature and history of the association of a phrase, rather than with Stalin some of us would be more familiar with the play by Henrik Ibsen and further note that this is also where the late Dr. John Henrik Clarke got the inspiration for the spelling of his own middle name." (Dr. Jared Ball, iMixWhatILike)
Brahminism, Patriarchy, Supreme Court And The Justice
It is the patriarchal fixation with fathers and husbands as feudal heads of indian households where sanctities are attached to family units, that leads to normalization of corruption in a judicial system that is unsurprisingly spearheaded by the brahminical chiefs.
No Nazis, No KKK, No Fascist USA
Rise and Resist protest against Donald Trump’s rhetorics surrounding Charlottesville
Donald Trump and the ritual of shock and awe in American duopoly
Trump is the logical apotheosis of humanized capitalism, where the winners take all, where executive decisions are sacrosanct, where we feel it right to sponsor deaths and tortures and waterboarding and drones and assassinations and weaponization of regions that we consider inferior, says Saswat Pattanayak.
Kanhaiya Kumar and Betrayal of Freedom Struggles
Kanhaiya Kumar’s arrest was unfortunate and so his release on bail is a great relief. But beyond that, to seek revolutionary potential in the hoopla surrounding it, is to miss the point entirely. Competing for authentic nationalism to legitimize an oppressive power structure is not what the Communists do. Quite the opposite.
Rohith Vemula: Indian Left and the Dalit Student Suicides
Rohith Vemula did not just commit suicide – he was murdered. And this murder was not committed by the right-wing ABVP – it was conducted by the left-liberals. The “Dalit problem” citing which Rohith gave up his life, is not the creation of any fringe elements among communal Hindus – it is sustained by the liberal Hindus who tremendously profit from the status quo it provides.
Comrade A B Bardhan, Lal Salam!
Comrade A B Bardhan (1924-2016) was the foremost communist mass leader of India who raised working class consciousness among millions through his oratory and organizational persistence.
Modi-Sharif Class Interests
While the corporate bosses collaborate with each other representing their own class interests, they make sure to let the working class folks fight with each other in the name of various distracting absurdities.
Looking for Jesus and Finding them
Physically disabled GN Saibaba, the revolutionary from Delhi University who is suffering the brunt of a fascist Indian state for holding radical views, is Jesus. The Puerto Rican nationalist Oscar Lopez Rivera suffering from a sentence of 70 years in an American prison, charged with “seditious conspiracy”, is Jesus. Black Panther and political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal who remains the undying conscience of a world crying for freedom, is Jesus.
Arvind Kejriwal Ko Gussa Kyun Aata Hai?
Arvind Kejriwal suddenly discovers in Modi a coward and psychopath, simply because he finally becomes a victim of fascist vendetta now. However, this outrage is a social media melodrama as it was Kejriwal himself who has contributed the most in the resulting chaos that prevail today.
Eurocentrism as Terrorism
Contrary to what Žižek claims, egalitarianism and personal freedoms do not comprise Western legacy—their suppression in the name of colonialism does. One cannot rule over and plunder another country for decades, if not centuries, and then blame the “backwardness” on the ruled subjects.
Roots (and prospects) of Justice
Maulana Mohani was concerned that in our anticommunist quest, we were ignoring an emancipatory USSR Constitution, while heavily borrowing from colonial legacies of oppressive Constitutions of the imperialist world, and that, by doing so, we were facilitating prospects for dangerous communal violence in the coming years
Sovereignty, Unity and The State Of Denial
Contradictions abound in the new political landscape. Like Savarkar’s divisive Hindutva excluded other religions, so does Modi’s prescription of Hinduism as the way of life for Indians. To reemphasise my point: Modi did not win the people’s mandate because he opposed divisive politics, but because he profited from it. Not because he spoke against identity politics but because it is the victory of the identity politics – specifically that of the Hindu identity. It is the victory of the idea of a Hindu nation.
International Women’s Day: Anti-War, Anti-Capitalist Movement to Emancipate All Workers!
When in 1917, the IWD was first observed in Leningrad, women workers of Petrograd had organized a mass of 50,000, comprising their fellow male comrades in demanding for “bread, peace and land” and to end the imperialistic world war.
The Politics We Deserve
Our social conditioning has manifested in our misplaced patriotic duties to refuse authority to a woman not on grounds of political differences, but solely because she is a ‘foreigner’, despite having been more of an Indian than the countless NRIs whose funds we have voluntarily solicited to fuel hatred in the subcontinent.
Pete Seeger: UnAmerican Communist and a People’s Songster
Seeger always took his communism seriously and he wrote about capitalistic contradictions, but carefully employing a language that was truly accessible to the workers, to the “bottom” uneducated and semi-literate section of society who he remained connected with, all his life.
Amiri Baraka: Angry Black Communist, the Soul of the Sun
Saswat Pattanayak's tribute to Amiri Baraka.