K. VELA VELUPILLAI A review article around Anwar Shaikh’s ‘Capitalism’, now turning into a classic Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises by Anwar Shaikh ‘Capitalist history is played out on a moving stage.’- Shaikh, 2016, p. 50 (see also p. 5; italics added). The Book 1 by Anwar Shaikh 2 which is reviewed here was published a little over six years ago;… Read More Understanding Capitalism
First posted on May 16, 2021 “The spectacle is the guardian of sleep”: Guy Debord – ‘But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence… illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be… Read More Society of the Spectacle / इमेज – Image: A Poem on Deaths in the Age of Covid
First posted December 3, 2016 Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion By Gareth Stedman Jones; Reviewed by Jeremy Adelman While Jenny was dying, Marx wrote a letter to the Russian Group for the Emancipation of Labour in Geneva on the question: was communal property good? Stedman Jones ends Karl Marx with a story about the fate of… Read More Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion
First posted November 11, 2017 Madhavan Palat Utopia is a place or as it literally means, a no place, in Thomas More’s Greek pun, one that does not exist, cannot exist, but ideally should come into being as the good place, the Eutopia. Many utopian projects, be it beauty that never fades or the return… Read More Madhavan Palat: Utopia and Dystopia in Revolutionary Russia
Rohini Hensman Christianity came to India and Sri Lanka from other countries at various periods ranging from ancient times to the present. Therefore a general view of the link between Christianity and capitalism (or anti-capitalism) is necessary in order to understand how the specific relationship between Christianity and capitalism (or anti-capitalism) developed in these two… Read More Christianity and Capitalism in India and Sri Lanka
First posted July 28, 2017 Life and Fate was written in the late 1950’s & confiscated by the Soviet authorities. It was published in the West in 1980, and in Russia in 1988. Grossman died in 1964. Linda Grant says of it: ‘Novels fade, your immersion in their world turns into a faint dream, and then is forgotten. Only… Read More The manuscript that was arrested: Linda Grant on Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate
First posted June 21, 2014 The Zhivago Affair by Peter Finn and Petra Couvee Reviewed by Adam Kirsch More than Christianity, however, life itself is Zhivago’s sacred value – his name is related to the Russian word for life – and he despises every ideology that claims to be superior to life, to be able to… Read More The Zhivago Affair: one of the Cold War’s most fascinating cultural skirmishes / Boris Pasternak’s refusal of The Nobel Prize. His son’s memoirs
First posted November 3, 2017 NB: This essay has appeared in EPW’s special number commemorating the centenary of the Bolshevik Revolution, which falls on November 7. (A Word file is downloadable here). The revolution began on February 23, 1917, (March 8 according to the new calendar adopted in 1918); but for complex reasons, tended to be identified with the… Read More The Bolshevik Heritage. By Dilip Simeon
First posted July 15, 2013 There was no one inside him; behind his face (which even in the bad paintings of the time resembles no other) and his words (which were multitudinous, and of a fantastical and agitated turn) there was no more than a slight chill, a dream someone had failed to dream. At… Read More Everything and Nothing by Jorge Luis Borges / “Borges and I”
First posted December 29, 2016 The Disappearance of Emil Zola: Love, Literature and the Dreyfus Case by Michael Rosen[Emile Zola was sentenced to one year’s imprisonment after writing “J’accuse”, an open letter to the French government accusing it of anti-semitism in the Dreyfus affair. Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French Army, had… Read More Alfred Dreyfus revisited: Émile Zola on the run in London, 1898, by Michael Rosen
After the truth-shower 