Ashok Mitra: ‘End of a Long Journey’

by Anirban Biswas

Frontier | Vol. 50, No.45, May 13 – 19, 2018

Ashok Mitra, the economist, politician and writer, passed away at a private hospital in Kolkata, 2018 at the age of 90. To the common public, he is chiefly known as the controversial former finance minister of West Bengal, but a proper appraisement of his career must take into account much more. He did a doctoral thesis from the Netherlands Institute, taught at Delhi School of Economics, University of Lucknow, IIM Calcutta and ISI Calcutta, besides having short stints at some other universities in India and abroad. As a regular writer of the weekly NOW, edited by Samar Sen—he was a lifelong admirer of Samar Sen—he became known as a leftist intellectual.

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Veteran Naxal leader Bhaskar Nandy passes away at 80

by MAHESH DEKA

NORTHEAST NOW | May 04, 2018

Naxal leader Bhaskar Nandy

Eminent Naxalite and general secretary of the Provincial Central Committee (PCC) of the CPI (ML), Bhaskar Nandy passed away on Friday in a hospital at Jalpaiguri in West Bengal. He was 80.

Ashok Mitra: Railing Against the Times, But Very Much a Part of Them

Revisiting a review written for ‘Frontline’ magazine of the English version of Ashok Mitra’s Bengali memoirs, ‘Apila Chapila’, published in 2007. Mitra passed away in Kolkata on Tuesday.

by Jayati Ghosh

The Wire | May 01, 2018

 

Ashok Mitra. Credit: CMO Kerala Twitter

It is difficult to write about those whom you love. Curiously enough, the difficulty is not only because of the fear of excessive partiality: it is also because love brings with it the freedom to be exasperated. And intimacy creates very complex and textured perceptions, often too nuanced to be easily captured in mere words.

Ashok Mitra: the doyen among Left intellectuals in India

By Prabhat Patnaik

 NEWSclick.in  | 2 May , 2018

Ashok Mitra who passed away on May1, 2018, was the doyen among Left intellectuals in the country, held in the highest esteem by one and all for his absolute integrity, his outstanding intellect and his commitment to the cause of the working people.

Why Marx? Why now?

by Conor McCarthy

Dublin Review of Books | April 16, 2018

Two hundred years have passed since the birth of Karl Marx. Few historical figures of any kind have been so influential ‑ surely no thinker has. Yet many now would dismiss his ideas as outdated, as flawed, as tending towards totalitarianism. Why should we remember him?  What can we possibly learn from him now?

Eleanor Marx: the Jewess of Jew’s walk

by Dana Naomi Mills and Lucy Kaufman

The International Marxist Humanist | April 06, 2018

Lucy Kaufman’s new play about Eleanor Marx (the daughter of Karl Marx who was an important artist as well as activist), which will soon open in London—along with a 2014 biography of her by Rachel Holmes—makes this a valuable moment to re-examine the life and thought of this important revolutionary socialist feminist. The article includes a long passage by Kaufman.

— IMH Editors.

Eleanor Marx changed the world. Foremother of socialist-feminism, trade unionist, internationalist, her father’s first biographer and editor of his key works, she had left a colossal heritage in many spheres of life. Rachel Holmes, in her extraordinary Eleanor Marx: A Life (Bloomsbury, 2014), gives us a glimpse into Eleanor, the woman. She was called by her family and friends Tussy (Holmes tells us, her parents said, to rhyme with pussy not fussy; cats she adored, fussy she was not). She loved Shakespeare, both Shelley’s, good poetry and bad puns; white was her favorite color and champagne her idea of happiness. (She was in fact the first champagne socialist!)

Robeson is remembered with record and Row R

by Norman Richmond

Pambazuka News | April 13, 2018

The Robey Theatre Company

“Robeson may have joined the ancestors but his example, his intelligence, his political acumen remains as a lodestar we would all do well to study—and exemplify”, Gerald Horne.

 

One of Gerald Horne’s latest volumes is Paul Robeson: The Artist as Revolutionary. I recently walked into the Parkdale Library in Toronto, Canada and saw a huge poster celebrating the great Robeson.