WHEN we started planning for Levellers’ Day 2017 back in October, little did we know that we would be holding it in the middle of a general election campaign the likes of which we have not experienced for many decades.
A campaign in which voters are being presented with real radical alternatives.
It is therefore timely that this year we will gather today in Burford with a theme of “movement building.”Read More »
The eight-hour declaration of the Chicago Trades Assembly being next in order that document was read by the Secretary as follows:Read More »
Once a prime national centre of historical research, ICHR has been totally handed over to the RSS pracharaks. It is nobody’s argument that RSS cadres have no right to influence research in Indian history. But as George Orwell in his masterpiece NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR (1949) wrote, it should not be left to the whims of a section of the sectarian ruling elite which specializes in daily changing historic records to fit its polarizing propaganda goals of the day. The deliberations at recently concluded 3-day (8-10 February, 2017) national seminar on Subhash Chandra Bose and Indian National Army (INA) organized by ICHR show that even George Orwell and practitioners of post-truth dictum would be embarrassed by reliance on sheer false-hood by the RSS historians and leaders invited for the seminar.Read More »
SOME anniversaries are respectfully observed annually in the West and widely reported by the obedient “free press” — International Holocaust Memorial Day, Victory in Europe Day, Remembrance Day and so on.
Yet the following are anniversaries suitably airbrushed from history books, the media, political rhetoric and polite conversation which serves the requirements of Western power.Read More »
Now 97, the anti-fascist veteran looks at the battles he fought during the Spanish Civil War and the global fight against the right wing today.
Born in France of parents from Spain’s Valencia region, José Almudéver, a 97-year-old veteran of the Spanish Republican Army and the International Brigades, has always been a staunch defender of the historic memory of the Spanish Republic that lasted from 1931 to 1939. He has also always been a harsh critic of the 1936 Non-Intervention Pact signed by all major Western European powers with the express goal of preventing military support reaching the contending sides in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39).
“But the philosophy of plunder has not only not been ended, it is stronger than ever.”
With respect to the Grenadian Revolution, authoritarian means could not have given birth to the desired end, namely, the self-emancipation of the people. Effective control, initiative and power must be in the hands of the working-class in order for it to carry out the tasks associated with the development of a socialist society.
The collapse of the Grenadian Revolution on 19 October 1983 [1] should be carefully examined for the lessons that it might offer to organizers in the Caribbean who are currently organizing with the labouring classes. If the working-class shall be the architect of its liberation, the process of revolution-making should enable them to fulfill that role. Fundamental change should not be the outcome of a vanguard force that usurps the initiative of the people. Self-emancipation of the people, as advocated by Walter Rodney and C. L. R. James, is the prudent and humanistic approach to struggle, if “all power to the people” is not simply an exercise in empty sloganeering.Read More »
Frontier | Vol. 49, No.17, Oct 30 – Nov 5, 2016
[ A Teenager’s eye witness account of Chittagong Uprising 1930 : Armed Rebellion and Indian Freedom Struggle ]
The Last Of The Rebels: Ananda And His Masterda
Bilingual (English and Bengali)
By Piyul Mukherjee and Nivedita Patnaik, Pages 142 (English)+,
Price : Rs. 399, Ed 2016,
Bushfire Publishers,
Mumbai and Kolkata
Chittagong revolt of 1930 has been one of most important revolutionary movements during freedom struggle. It exploded on 18 April 1930 and by 1934 it gave many martyrs for the country, the last one being the leader of the movement Master Surya Sen, who was executed in January 1934. But scores of the revolutionaries lived around and had long lives as the Ghadarite Babas of 1915. Incidentally both got together in Andaman’s and other jails for long incarcerations and both movements survivors joined Communist Party mostly and a few Congress Party, but none joined the so-called ‘nationalist’ RSS!Read More »
For decades, the former colonial powers have written the history of the night in which the second UN Secretary-General and his companions died in a plane crash in Zambia. But a new history is about to be written if the recent momentum to find the full truth is anything to go by.
Fifty-five years ago, shortly after midnight on 18 September 1961, an aircraft crashed on its approach to Ndola airport in the British colony of Northern Rhodesia, which is now Zambia. On board were 16 people: the UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld, the members of his mission, and the Swedish crew. The sole survivor, who spoke of “sparks in the sky” and said the plane “blew up”, died six days later.
Kabir[1] (15th Century), a contemporary of Sikander Lodi (1489-1517) and a resident of Banaras, was the most radical intellect of his age after Basavanna[2] (12th Century, Karnataka). His works[3] are compiled/referred[4] to in Adi Granth, Panchvani, Sarvangi, Bijak and Granthavali which still imprints the social, academic discourse, folk traditions and radical praxis. He was one of the gurus of Ambedkar on whom, unfortunately, the disciple did not write much[5].Read More »
