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Homage to Juan Almeida

Tue, 2009-09-15 22:28 | Pragoti Editorial Team
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One of the stalwarts of the Cuban Revolution and a symbol of the achievements of both the 26th of July movement as well as its successor, the Cuban Communist Party, Commandante Juan Almeida Bosque breathed his last on September 11,aged 82. Pragoti pays homage to Comrade Almeida.

SOCIALISM AND WELFARISM

Sun, 2009-09-06 12:30 | Prabhat Patnaik
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Prof.Prabhat Patnaik lucidly explains the dialectical relationship between 'Socialism' and Welfarism' and argues for the necessity of 'political intervention' of the left in welfare measures for the transformation of people from 'Objects' to 'Subjects'.

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People's Democracy

The Need for a New Socialist Vision

Mon, 2009-08-10 12:34 | Prabir Purkayastha

Prabir Purkayastha argues that the Left needs to recreate a new vision of socialism by moving away from the 20th century Fordian paradigm to a new way of looking at future production systems.

The Paradox of Capitalism

Wed, 2009-07-08 09:58 | Prabhat Patnaik
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J0hn Maynard Keynes, though bourgeois in his outlook, was a remarkably insightful economist, whose book Economic Consequences of the Peace was copiously quoted by Lenin at the Second Congress of the Communist International to argue that conditions had ripened for the world revolution. But even Keynes’ insights could not fully comprehend the paradox that is capitalism.

What threatens the security of the North American people is the aggressive policy of the warmongers of the United States

Mon, 2009-05-04 12:12 | Fidel Castro
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Excerpt from Fidel Castro's speech at Havana's May Day celebrations on May 2, 1961 - Less than two weeks after the Bay of Pigs invasion.

Source: 
History of Cuba

Radical Enlightenment and the Socialist Alternative

Sun, 2009-03-22 21:53 | Prabhat Patnaik, Murzban Jal, Mihir Bhattacharya, Javeed Alam, and Akeel Bilgrami

How does the critique of modernity (as it is found in some of the alternative radical strains in the Enlightenment ranging from seventeenth century dissenters against the newly emerging orthodox elements of modernity to Gandhi in our own country's emerging modernity) square with the ideals of economic and social justice in the broad Leftist tradition owing chiefly to Marx? Pragoti presents a selection of articles from a seminar in Hyderabad in January 2009 on 'Radical Enlightenment and the Socialist Alternative'.

DEMOCRACY: (Thinking of it) as a Socialist Project

Sun, 2009-03-22 21:47 | Javeed Alam

The need for the incorporation of elementary forms of democracy minus their assumption developed by liberal-democratic theory is more, and not less, in the period of post-revolutionary transition. Javed Alam argues that the concept of Rights along with the sources of negative liberty and arbitrariness are important in the post-revolutionary transition to a social formation in which power as possession mutually recognized loses ground to the mutual recognition of the primacy of human needs; that is, a re-appropriation of social essence not bound in power relationship. This can then, among other conditions, provide the basis for the beginning of the “withering away” of State as a coercive presence.

Socialism and the Peasantry

Sun, 2009-03-22 21:08 | Prabhat Patnaik

Capitalist industry and peasant agriculture can never grow in tandem in a balanced manner. Either peasant agriculture lags behind and is expropriated to serve the needs of capital, or it is merely supplanted by capital, which also requires a dispossession of the peasantry. In either case the peasantry is squeezed in the process of capital accumulation. The basis for the worker-peasant alliance must be the immanent tendency of capitalism, whence it follows that the road to socialism must be marked by an alternative and better deal for the peasantry than what capitalism has to offer. Socialism in short must be premised on the support, protection and nurturing of the peasantry and petty producers as opposed to their decimation which is what capitalism promises. Prabhat Patnaik argues for a shift within Marxism to more emphatically locate the case for socialism not just in the proletariat’s self-emancipatory project, but in the fact that the proletariat alone is capable of playing the agency role in the emancipatory project of mankind as a whole that is faced with the prospect of decimation under capitalism.