Decolonizing Theory

Prof Pranab Bardhan,  Professor Emeritus, UC Berkeley, delivred the 24th Democracy Dialogues Lecture on August 27, 2023, Sunday at 10 AM India Standard Time. Theme : The Erosion Of Liberal Democracy in India: An Analysis Speaker : Prof Pranab Bardhan Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley It was also live streamed … Continue reading The Erosion Of Liberal Democracy in India: An Analysis – Prof Pranab Bardhan →

Guest post by RAHUL GOVIND Gyan Vyapi Mosque and Kashi Vishwanath  Temple (Image courtesy Indian Express) The present controversy over several religious sites threatens to tread yet again the path that led to the communal mobilization, riots and destruction of the Babri Masjid. The popular press also repeats several legal arguments without always analysing their … Continue reading The Hindu deity as juristic person – A dangerous path, yet again: Rahul Govind →

    Spot the difference between the two quotations below. “The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just … Continue reading Communist Manifesto, Late Marx and the Farmers’ Struggle →

The label ‘populism’ has acquired unprecedented currency lately and is used to indiscriminately describe such a wide range of poliical figures and political tendencies that it seems to have lost all conceptual meaning. In the best of times, it was always a slippery concept that has been linked to democracy at one end and fascism … Continue reading Mass Politics and ‘Populism’ in the World of Indian Languages →

    Many words are walked in the world. Many worlds are made. Many worlds make us. There are words and worlds that are lies and injustices. There are words and worlds that are truthful and true. In the world of the powerful there is room only for the big and their helpers. In the … Continue reading Capitalism, Development and Western Hegemony – Looking Beyond to the Pluriverse →

This tribute to Prof HARI VASUDEVAN by Prof SOBHANLAL DATTA GUPTA, who passed away in Kolkata recently, is being reproduced here, courtesy Mainstream Weekly. Thereafter, as we proceeded in our work on the publication of the texts of the documents, we began to face insurmountable resistance, quite surprisingly, from a section of the Left establishment … Continue reading Hari Vasudevan, the Soviet Archives and the Left Establishment: Sobhanlal Datta Gupta →

  [This is the final instalment of the series on ‘Life After Capitalism – Manifesto of Hope’. Earlier parts can be accessed Part I here, Part II here and Part III here.] The Employment Paradigm In this final instalment of the series, I want to discuss the vexed question of employment and what can be … Continue reading Beyond the ‘Employment’ Paradigm and Life After Capitalism – Manifesto of Hope IV →

  In the previous instalment of this article in Parapolitics, I had discussed the situation arising out of the Covid 19 pandemic in terms of the possible implications of the global lockdown and ‘quarantine of consumption’, for post-capitalist futures. In this part, I will discuss (a) the conditions that make such futures not just imaginable … Continue reading Life After Capitalism and the New ‘al Shatir-Copernicus’ Revolution – Manifesto of Hope II →

    I The term ‘contemporary’ is often used synonymously with ‘the present’. It is often used to connote ‘newness’. But there is another sense where it refers to the idea of inhabiting the same time (as for example in the statement: ‘Gandhi was a contemporary of Tagore’) or of the industrial revolution being contemporaneous … Continue reading At the Edge of Postmodernity – Reflections on the Contemporary from the Global South →