Readers outside of India can donate here to support Mainstream Weeklyhttps://tinyurl.com/2rsy4ss6++++++ In this issue What Lessons from the Wrecking Ball in Nepal – Letter to the Readers Nepal’s 2025 Crisis: Causes, Dynamics, and Impacts | Dewendra Pratap Tiwari Decoding Nepal Unrest From the Perspectives of Raja Ram Mohan Roy, B R Ambedkar & K R Narayanan |… Read More Mainstream, Vol 63 No 37, Sept 13, 2025
Modern corporations are not merely economic entities, but political entities without democratic accountability Grace Blakeley‘s Vulture Capitalism critiques the alliance of corporations, finance, and states underpinning the capitalist system that drives inequality, stifles democracy and enriches elites. Brilliantly combining theory, analysis and practical solutions in engaging prose, this book offers a blueprint for reclaiming power… Read More Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes and the Death of Freedom
First posted September 09, 2018 The workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes. They consider it an earnest of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot… Read More Karl Marx: Letter to Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America; 1865
The World Bank says it can fight poverty through technical solutions. But poverty is inherently political Alf Gunvald Nilsen The future of work and the future of poverty are closely bound up with each other. Global value chains, those webs of firms criss-crossing the world that collectively bring products to market, have driven economic growth… Read More Global inequality is the World Bank’s elephant in the room
Hell hath no fury like corporate power scorned, writes Norman Solomon of the general-election battle over the next mayor of New York City. By Norman Solomon; Common Dreams The Supreme Court’s first chief justice, John Jay, would have empathized with the billionaires who’ve been freaking out ever since Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic primary for mayor of… Read More The Billionaire Frenzy Over Zohran Mamdani
First posted July 07, 2015 Anil Nauriya NB: This is an important contribution to the historiography of Indian nationalism, and of socialist theorising in India. The paper is available online here: Non-violent Action and Socialist Radicalism: Narendra Deva in India’s freedom movement IntroductionThe dynamic that linked non-violent movements for Indian freedom in the first half… Read More Non-violent Action and Socialist Radicalism: Narendra Deva in India’s freedom movement
NB: An important interview about an important book. DS Documents unearthed by Robert Parry and reported in an article entitled When Israel/Neocons Favoured Iran show that Israel’s Likud government of Menachem Begin became an important source of covert arms supplies to Iran after Iraq invaded Iran in 1980, with the profits being invested in Jewish… Read More The People First: Rohini Hensman on Democracy, Resistance, and the Global Left
The major intellectual and moral preoccupations of philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who died this week at the age of 96, speak to key issues of modernity and morality that leftists will be grappling with for a long time. Nick French: Alasdair MacIntyre Leaves a Legacy to Wrestle With lasdair MacIntyre, the preeminent moral philosopher known for… Read More Alasdair MacIntyre Leaves a Legacy to Wrestle With / Alasdair MacIntyre obituary
Both Perestroika and Thatcherism, then, meant scaling back economic and social security to drive efficiency gains and shift labor and capital from declining to rising industries. If this similarity between East and West is unsettling to readers today, it is nonetheless one that, as Bartel’s archival work demonstrates, was recognized behind closed doors at the… Read More No Alternative?
Situationist International and the Students of Strasbourg November 1966 On the Poverty of Student Life: The Little Pamphlet that Started a Revolution The Situationist International (SI) was founded in 1957 by a half-dozen European avant-garde artists. Recent historical events, chiefly workers uprisings in East Germany, Poland and Hungary, convinced them that a social revolution was… Read More On the Poverty of Student Life Considered in its Economic, Political, Psychological, Sexual, and Especially Intellectual Aspects, with a Modest Proposal for Doing Away With It (Strasbourg, 1966)
