radicalblogger

Seribaan, South 24 Parganas, 2019,pp xv+ 144, Rs. 495 The collapse of the USSR did not lead to a collapse of interest in Marxism, or in the actual class conflicts across the world. But it did mean that the Cold War certainties about what constituted Marxism, held by two sets of states, gave way to the possibility of Marxism resurfacing as a critical instrument. One part of that was of course the use of Marxist analysis to understand our contemporary world. The other part was a recovery of the wide spectrum within revolutionary Marxism that had been flattened into the correct line versus the class traitors and deviationists under Stalinism and its kin elsewhere. Sobhanlal Datta Gupta has been one of the few Indian scholars seriously engaged in that project, while accepting that the Russian revolution in its inception had been a popular and democratic revolution. Datta Gupta has previously published a volume on Rosa Luxemburg in this series, which updates his earlier take on Lux...

The centenary of the Russian Revolution had been observed, in whatever shape, through large numbers of meetings, seminars, rallies, and publications in India. This was however not the case for the centenary of the Communist International. None of the major parties claiming to be Marxist organised any serious discussion, or even significant political meetings in West Bengal, where a left front had governed between 1977 and 2011, and where even now there are numerous left parties and groups. Radical Socialist organised a programme on 22 nd November. Radical Socialist is a small organisation of communist revolutionaries, functioning since 2008. Sections of RS came out of the Inquilabi Communist Sangathan (Indian Section of the Fourth International) when it was collapsing. Others have joined since then. Radical Socialist is a Permanent Observer to the Fourth International. The programme on the Comintern was organised because Radical Socialist felt that in recent times most shad...