The Social Science Collective - சமூக அறிவியல் கூட்டிணைவு

Philosophy has a lot to learn from film
Author Costica Bradatan
Published by Balaji on 07-Jul- 2017 | Leave a response

Machiko Kyō and Toshiro Mifune in Kurosawa’s Rashômon (1951). Costica Bradatan is a professor of humanities at Texas Tech University and an honorary research professor of philosophy at the University of Queensland, Australia. He is the author, most recently, of Dying for Ideas: The Dangerous Lives of the Philosophers (2015). Bradatan serves as the religion/comparative studies editor for The Los Angeles Review of Books and is the founding editor of Philosophical Filmmakers, an interdisciplinary… Read more →
The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu by Charlie English review – how precious manuscripts were saved
Author William Dalrymple
Published by Balaji on 07-Jul- 2017 | Leave a response

Timbuktu, Mali: a city with medieval manuscripts ‘so numerous that no one really knows how many there are’. Photograph: James P Blair/National Geographic/Getty Images In April 2012, the jihadist army of the Saharan branch of al-Qaida drove a fleet of their armoured pick-up trucks into the centre of the ancient caravan town of Timbuktu in northern Mali. As black flags were hoisted… Read more →
Revolution and Counterrevolution, 1917–2017 by John Bellamy Foster
Author John Bellamy Foster
Published by Balaji on 07-Jul- 2017 | Leave a response

The Russian Revolution of 1917 erupted on the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Karl Marx’s Capital. From the start, the October Revolution seemed both to confirm and contradict Marx’s analysis. He had envisioned a working-class-based socialist revolution breaking out in the developed capitalist countries of Western Europe. But the 1882 preface to the Communist Manifesto, written a year before his death,… Read more →
Noam Chomsky: Neoliberalism Is Destroying Our Democracy
Author
Published by Balaji on 01-Jul- 2017 | Leave a response

Noam Chomsky interviewed by Christopher Lydon Christopher Lydon: All we want you to do is to explain where in the world we are at a time— Noam Chomsky: That’s easy. CL: [Laughs]—When so many people were on the edge of something, something historic. Is there a Chomsky summary? NC: Brief summary? CL: Yeah. NC: Well, a brief summary I… Read more →
The Origins of American Fascism
Author Michael Joseph Roberto
Published by Balaji on 30-Jun- 2017 | Leave a response

Donald Trump’s presidency marks the most acute stage of the protracted crisis of U.S. imperial hegemony and its trajectory toward neofascism. The president, his closest advisers, and some key cabinet members are now promoting an openly racist, xenophobic, and nationalist ideology. As John Bellamy Foster has noted, none of this is new to right-wing politics. But he is right to… Read more →
Blanqui and Marx
Author PETER HALLWARD
Published by Balaji on 29-Jun- 2017 | Leave a response

If we ignore Blanqui’s influence on Marx, we miss important ideas about the role of theory and practice in revolutionary politics. A reply to William Roberts. I was struck by what may seem a minor point in the interesting exchange between David Harvey and William Roberts in Jacobin this spring. Toward the end of his review of Marx’s Inferno: The… Read more →
Lenin’s April Theses and the Russian Revolution
Author Kevin Corr
Published by Balaji on 29-Jun- 2017 | Leave a response

I shall never forget that thunder-like speech, which startled and amazed not only me, a heretic who had accidently dropped in, but all the true believers. I am certain that no one had expected anything of the sort. It seemed as though all the elements had risen from their abodes, and the spirit of universal destruction, knowing neither barriers nor… Read more →
Top 10 books about the Russian Revolution
Author Tariq Ali
Published by Balaji on 28-Jun- 2017 | Leave a response

A century after the Bolsheviks seized power for communism, Tariq Ali chooses some of the best books about an uprising that changed the world forever How Lenin’s love of literature shaped the Russian Revolution He was neither saint nor totalitarian despot, the two roles assigned to him after his death in 1924. Hidden underneath the chaos and misery… Read more →
What was Lenin Thinking?
Author Tariq Ali
Published by Balaji on 27-Jun- 2017 | Leave a response

LONDON — What was Vladimir Lenin thinking on the long journey to Petrograd’s Finland Station in 1917? Like everyone else, he had been taken by surprise at the speed with which the February Revolution had succeeded. As he traveled from Zurich across Europe to Russia, on board a sealed train courtesy of Germany’s kaiser, he must have reflected that this… Read more →
Hobsbawm’s Long Century
Author JOSEPH FRONCZAK
Published by Balaji on 26-Jun- 2017 | Leave a response

The historian Eric Hobsbawm would have turned 100 today. During his life, he never lost faith that the future belonged to socialism. One long century ago, on June 9, 1917, not quite halfway between the February Revolution and the October Revolution, Eric Hobsbawm was born in Alexandria, Egypt. The lifelong communist died only five years ago, in 2012 at the… Read more →
Salt and shrimp in the Cauvery delta
Author Prema Revathy and Senthil Babu
Published by Balaji on 20-Apr- 2017 | Leave a response

Temple tank, taps, fields—it is as if the entire village and its surrounding areas have been submerged in salt water Parched riverbeds, canals like dead veins in a writhing body, barren fields, unusually long queues for drinking water, desolate markets with no buyers, men departing in search of work and wages to faraway places: these sights mark the unprecedented drought… Read more →
Tamil Nadu’s season of discontent
Author Prema Revathy and Senthil Babu
Published by Balaji on 20-Apr- 2017 | Leave a response

Farmers’ deaths have been reported from the drought-hit Cauvery delta. Loan waivers, soft loans and compensation for ‘proven’ suicides are insufficient as state response. Young Karl Marx in a letter to his friend Ruge (1843) fervently noted: “Shame is a kind of anger which is turned inward. And if a whole nation really experienced a sense of shame, it would… Read more →
Memory Against Forgetting: the Resonance of Bloody Sunday
Author Mark Kernan
Published by Balaji on 05-Apr- 2017 | Leave a response

Martin McGuinness died last week, one time IRA leader, more recently a British government minister-the irony of even writing that still leaves me a bit incredulous. Inevitably a lot has been written about his ‘journey’ from gunman to peacemaker and his supposed damascene conversion. That as it may be, people like McGuinness don’t appear in an ahistorical vacuum-however much it… Read more →
My way on the highway
Author Gautam Bhatia
Published by Balaji on 05-Apr- 2017 | Leave a response

The top court’s orders banning liquor sale on highways encroach upon the executive’s domain of policymaking cades ago, Lon Fuller, the famous American legal philosopher, coined the term “polycentric problems”. Certain social issues, according to Fuller, involved a complex set of interdependent relationships, where changing one feature could result in unforeseen and far-reaching changes to other features. A polycentric problem… Read more →
Reimagining ‘New Democracy,’ Rethinking Radical Politics
Author Bernard D’Mello
Published by Balaji on 28-Mar- 2017 | Leave a response

Capitalism, especially Indian capitalism with its monstrous inequalities, has proved to be totally incompatible with democracy when the latter is understood in terms of its basic principles and aspirations—liberty, equality, and comradeship (fraternity is not the appropriate word now). But in transforming Indian society to ensure a better future for the Indian people, radical politics must preserve the kernel of… Read more →
Reorienting the Left
Author Editorial
Published by Balaji on 28-Mar- 2017 | Leave a response

Labour, and the left, are in a mess, and there are no easy answers. Recognising this is a precondition for the renewal we need. Under our editorship, Renewal will interrogate the structures and contexts for a viable left politics, unearthing new ideas and initiatives that demonstrate the necessity and potential of a social democratic revival. When Renewal began in 1993,… Read more →
The British Left at a Crossroads
Author James Stafford and Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite
Published by Balaji on 28-Mar- 2017 | Leave a response

It is rare to live through a year like 2016, and to know that it will be a marker in scholarship and memory for generations. Rarer still, perhaps, to know this while also doubting whether coherent and truthful public reflection on politics will be possible for much longer. Across the world, the left faces a virulent, networked, right-wing International, with… Read more →
Breitbart for the Left
Author Aaron Lake Smith
Published by Balaji on 28-Mar- 2017 | Leave a response

Willi Munzenberg We need left-wing media outlets to build socialism. And the late German communist Willi Munzenberg shows us how it can be done. Every political movement has its hidden architects, those unscrupulous tacticians who shun the limelight, preferring to shape public perception from behind the curtain. In the United States, these imagineers work under many titles: key adviser, chief… Read more →
1966, 1917, and 1818: ‘Let a Hundred Schools of Thought Contend’
Author Bernard D’Mello
Published by Balaji on 16-Mar- 2017 | Leave a response

1966, 1917, and 1818: ‘Let a Hundred Schools of Thought Contend’ Posted Oct 25, 2016 by MRonline Webmaster Topics: culture , education Places: Germany , India , Russia , United States This year marks 50 years since Mao and his close comrades launched the Cultural Revolution in China. Next year, 2017, will be 100 years since the February and October… Read more →
Interview With John Scales Avery, One Of The Greatest Living Intellectuals On Earth
Author
Published by Balaji on 16-Mar- 2017 | Leave a response

I’m at the home of one of the greatest living intellectuals on earth. In the cold, windy Copenhagen weather as we ring the bell John Scales Avery opens the door and welcomes me and my friend John Graversgaard warmly into his home. He serves us coffee and we talk. I’m stunned by his humility and breadth of knowledge. John Avery… Read more →
89th Academy Awards: What does Hollywood offer today?
Author David Walsh
Published by Balaji on 05-Mar- 2017 | Leave a response

The 89th Academy Awards ceremony, held Sunday at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, was an even more complex and peculiar affair than usual. At such an event, in a quite striking and almost brutal fashion, genuine artistic talent and personal decency cross paths with banality, cynical commercial interest and triviality. This year, the coming to power of Donald Trump… Read more →
THE DILEMMAS AND POTENTIALS OF THE LEFT: LEARNING FROM SYRIZA
Author ANDREAS KARITZIS
Published by Balaji on 05-Mar- 2017 | Leave a response

THE DILEMMAS AND POTENTIALS OF THE LEFT: LEARNING FROM SYRIZA ANDREAS KARITZIS I s there any room for manoeuvre towards emancipatory politics in the current global context? It is true that today things are pretty tight when it comes to the implementation of non-neoliberal policies. Especially in Europe, today’s neoliberal configuration is ever harsher towards other political orientations. A huge… Read more →

Philosophy has a lot to learn from film

This article has been written by Costica Bradatan and originally published in https://aeon.co/ideas/philosophers-have-much-to-learn-from-the-great-filmmakers on 01-Jul-2017

Posted by Balaji on 07-Jul- 2017 | Leave a response

Machiko Kyō and Toshiro Mifune in Kurosawa’s Rashômon (1951). Costica Bradatan is a professor of humanities at Texas Tech University and an honorary research professor of philosophy at the University of Queensland, Australia. He is the author, most recently, of Dying for Ideas: The Dangerous Lives of the Philosophers (2015). Bradatan serves as the religion/comparative studies editor for The Los Angeles Review of Books and is the founding editor of Philosophical Filmmakers, an interdisciplinary… Read more →

The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu by Charlie English review – how precious manuscripts were saved

This article has been written by William Dalrymple and originally published in https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jun/28/book-smugglers-timbuktu-charlie-english-review on 28-Jun-2017

Posted by Balaji on 07-Jul- 2017 | Leave a response

Timbuktu, Mali: a city with medieval manuscripts ‘so numerous that no one really knows how many there are’. Photograph: James P Blair/National Geographic/Getty Images In April 2012, the jihadist army of the Saharan branch of al-Qaida drove a fleet of their armoured pick-up trucks into the centre of the ancient caravan town of Timbuktu in northern Mali. As black flags were hoisted… Read more →

Revolution and Counterrevolution, 1917–2017 by John Bellamy Foster

This article has been written by John Bellamy Foster and originally published in https://monthlyreview.org/2017/07/01/revolution-and-counterrevolution-1917-2017/ on 01-Jul-2017

Posted by Balaji on 07-Jul- 2017 | Leave a response

The Russian Revolution of 1917 erupted on the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Karl Marx’s Capital. From the start, the October Revolution seemed both to confirm and contradict Marx’s analysis. He had envisioned a working-class-based socialist revolution breaking out in the developed capitalist countries of Western Europe. But the 1882 preface to the Communist Manifesto, written a year before his death,… Read more →

Noam Chomsky: Neoliberalism Is Destroying Our Democracy

Interview of Noam Chomsky conducted by Christopher Lydon and originally published in https://chomsky.info/06022017/ on 02-Jun-2017

Posted by Balaji on 01-Jul- 2017 | Leave a response

Noam Chomsky interviewed by Christopher Lydon Christopher Lydon: All we want you to do is to explain where in the world we are at a time— Noam Chomsky: That’s easy. CL: [Laughs]—When so many people were on the edge of something, something historic. Is there a Chomsky summary? NC: Brief summary? CL: Yeah. NC: Well, a brief summary I… Read more →

The Origins of American Fascism

This article has been written by Michael Joseph Roberto and originally published in https://monthlyreview.org/2017/06/01/the-origins-of-american-fascism/ on 01-Jun-2017

Posted by Balaji on 30-Jun- 2017 | Leave a response

Donald Trump’s presidency marks the most acute stage of the protracted crisis of U.S. imperial hegemony and its trajectory toward neofascism. The president, his closest advisers, and some key cabinet members are now promoting an openly racist, xenophobic, and nationalist ideology. As John Bellamy Foster has noted, none of this is new to right-wing politics. But he is right to… Read more →

Blanqui and Marx

This article has been written by PETER HALLWARD and originally published in https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/06/blanqui-marx-french-revolution-paris-commune-jacobins on 28-Jun-2017

Posted by Balaji on 29-Jun- 2017 | Leave a response

If we ignore Blanqui’s influence on Marx, we miss important ideas about the role of theory and practice in revolutionary politics. A reply to William Roberts. I was struck by what may seem a minor point in the interesting exchange between David Harvey and William Roberts in Jacobin this spring. Toward the end of his review of Marx’s Inferno: The… Read more →

Lenin’s April Theses and the Russian Revolution

This article has been written by Kevin Corr and originally published in http://isj.org.uk/lenins-april-theses-and-the-russian-revolution/ on 05-Apr-2017

Posted by Balaji on 29-Jun- 2017 | Leave a response

I shall never forget that thunder-like speech, which startled and amazed not only me, a heretic who had accidently dropped in, but all the true believers. I am certain that no one had expected anything of the sort. It seemed as though all the elements had risen from their abodes, and the spirit of universal destruction, knowing neither barriers nor… Read more →

Top 10 books about the Russian Revolution

This article has been written by Tariq Ali and originally published in https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/apr/12/top-10-books-about-the-russian-revolution-tariq-ali?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other on 12-Apr-2017

Posted by Balaji on 28-Jun- 2017 | Leave a response

A century after the Bolsheviks seized power for communism, Tariq Ali chooses some of the best books about an uprising that changed the world forever How Lenin’s love of literature shaped the Russian Revolution He was neither saint nor totalitarian despot, the two roles assigned to him after his death in 1924. Hidden underneath the chaos and misery… Read more →

What was Lenin Thinking?

This article has been written by Tariq Ali and originally published in https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/03/opinion/what-was-lenin-thinking.html on 05-Apr-2017

Posted by Balaji on 27-Jun- 2017 | Leave a response

LONDON — What was Vladimir Lenin thinking on the long journey to Petrograd’s Finland Station in 1917? Like everyone else, he had been taken by surprise at the speed with which the February Revolution had succeeded. As he traveled from Zurich across Europe to Russia, on board a sealed train courtesy of Germany’s kaiser, he must have reflected that this… Read more →

Hobsbawm’s Long Century

This article has been written by JOSEPH FRONCZAK and originally published in https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/06/eric-hobsbawm-historian-marxism-communist-party-third-reich-stalingrad on 09-Jun-2017

Posted by Balaji on 26-Jun- 2017 | Leave a response

The historian Eric Hobsbawm would have turned 100 today. During his life, he never lost faith that the future belonged to socialism. One long century ago, on June 9, 1917, not quite halfway between the February Revolution and the October Revolution, Eric Hobsbawm was born in Alexandria, Egypt. The lifelong communist died only five years ago, in 2012 at the… Read more →

The Other “Jallianwala Bagh”

Posted by Balaji on 28-Apr- 2017 | Leave a response

On April 13 India has observed the 97th anniversary of British India’s darkest episode, the massacre of innocents at Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar. That unspeakable act happened in 1919. A year later British India bared its imperial fangs again in another episode that remains largely unknown in India. The Connaught Rangers of the British Army was entirely manned… Read more →

Salt and shrimp in the Cauvery delta

This article has been written by Prema Revathy and Senthil Babu and originally published in http://www.thehindu.com/society/salt-and-shrimp-in-the-cauvery-delta/article17892272.ece on 08-Apr-2017

Posted by Balaji on 20-Apr- 2017 | Leave a response

Temple tank, taps, fields—it is as if the entire village and its surrounding areas have been submerged in salt water Parched riverbeds, canals like dead veins in a writhing body, barren fields, unusually long queues for drinking water, desolate markets with no buyers, men departing in search of work and wages to faraway places: these sights mark the unprecedented drought… Read more →

Tamil Nadu’s season of discontent

This article has been written by Prema Revathy and Senthil Babu and originally published in http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/tamil-nadu-farmers-deaths-cauvery-delta-loan-waivers-debt-monsoon-punjab-karnataka-telengana-andhra-pradesh-demonetisation-4564150/ on 11-Mar-2017

Posted by Balaji on 20-Apr- 2017 | Leave a response

Farmers’ deaths have been reported from the drought-hit Cauvery delta. Loan waivers, soft loans and compensation for ‘proven’ suicides are insufficient as state response. Young Karl Marx in a letter to his friend Ruge (1843) fervently noted: “Shame is a kind of anger which is turned inward. And if a whole nation really experienced a sense of shame, it would… Read more →

Memory Against Forgetting: the Resonance of Bloody Sunday

This article has been written by Mark Kernan and originally published in http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/03/28/memory-against-forgetting-the-resonance-of-bloody-sunday/ on 28-Mar-2017

Posted by Balaji on 05-Apr- 2017 | Leave a response

Martin McGuinness died last week, one time IRA leader, more recently a British government minister-the irony of even writing that still leaves me a bit incredulous. Inevitably a lot has been written about his ‘journey’ from gunman to peacemaker and his supposed damascene conversion. That as it may be, people like McGuinness don’t appear in an ahistorical vacuum-however much it… Read more →

How Lenin’s love of literature shaped the Russian Revolution

Posted by Balaji on 05-Apr- 2017 | Leave a response

Passion for the classics The father of the Soviet Union was also a Latin buff who adored Goethe and liked to compare his enemies to figures in novels Literature shaped the political culture of the Russia in which Vladimir Ilyich Lenin grew up. Explicitly political texts were difficult to publish under the tsarist regime. The rasher essayists were holed up… Read more →

My way on the highway

This article has been written by Gautam Bhatia and originally published in http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/my-way-on-the-highway/article17818575.ece?homepage=true on 05-Apr-2017

Posted by Balaji on 05-Apr- 2017 | Leave a response

The top court’s orders banning liquor sale on highways encroach upon the executive’s domain of policymaking cades ago, Lon Fuller, the famous American legal philosopher, coined the term “polycentric problems”. Certain social issues, according to Fuller, involved a complex set of interdependent relationships, where changing one feature could result in unforeseen and far-reaching changes to other features. A polycentric problem… Read more →

Reimagining ‘New Democracy,’ Rethinking Radical Politics

This article has been written by Bernard D’Mello and originally published in http://www.epw.in/search/site/Reimagining%20New%20Democracy

Posted by Balaji on 28-Mar- 2017 | Leave a response

Capitalism, especially Indian capitalism with its monstrous inequalities, has proved to be totally incompatible with democracy when the latter is understood in terms of its basic principles and aspirations—liberty, equality, and comradeship (fraternity is not the appropriate word now). But in transforming Indian society to ensure a better future for the Indian people, radical politics must preserve the kernel of… Read more →

Reorienting the Left

This article has been written by Editorial and originally published in http://renewal.org.uk/articles/reorienting-the-left

Posted by Balaji on 28-Mar- 2017 | Leave a response

Labour, and the left, are in a mess, and there are no easy answers. Recognising this is a precondition for the renewal we need. Under our editorship, Renewal will interrogate the structures and contexts for a viable left politics, unearthing new ideas and initiatives that demonstrate the necessity and potential of a social democratic revival. When Renewal began in 1993,… Read more →

The British Left at a Crossroads

This article has been written by James Stafford and Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite and originally published in https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/british-left-crossroads-brexit on 16-Mar-2017

Posted by Balaji on 28-Mar- 2017 | Leave a response

It is rare to live through a year like 2016, and to know that it will be a marker in scholarship and memory for generations. Rarer still, perhaps, to know this while also doubting whether coherent and truthful public reflection on politics will be possible for much longer. Across the world, the left faces a virulent, networked, right-wing International, with… Read more →

Breitbart for the Left

This article has been written by Aaron Lake Smith and originally published in https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/03/media-breitbart-willi-munzenberg-hitler-fascism-popular-front/ on 25-Mar-2017

Posted by Balaji on 28-Mar- 2017 | Leave a response

Willi Munzenberg We need left-wing media outlets to build socialism. And the late German communist Willi Munzenberg shows us how it can be done. Every political movement has its hidden architects, those unscrupulous tacticians who shun the limelight, preferring to shape public perception from behind the curtain. In the United States, these imagineers work under many titles: key adviser, chief… Read more →

1966, 1917, and 1818: ‘Let a Hundred Schools of Thought Contend’

This article has been written by Bernard D’Mello and originally published in https://mronline.org/2016/10/25/dmello251016-html/ on 25-Oct-2016

Posted by Balaji on 16-Mar- 2017 | Leave a response

1966, 1917, and 1818: ‘Let a Hundred Schools of Thought Contend’ Posted Oct 25, 2016 by MRonline Webmaster Topics: culture , education Places: Germany , India , Russia , United States This year marks 50 years since Mao and his close comrades launched the Cultural Revolution in China. Next year, 2017, will be 100 years since the February and October… Read more →

Interview With John Scales Avery, One Of The Greatest Living Intellectuals On Earth

and originally published in www.countercurrents.org/2017/03/15 on 15-Mar-2017

Posted by Balaji on 16-Mar- 2017 | Leave a response

I’m at the home of one of the greatest living intellectuals on earth. In the cold, windy Copenhagen weather as we ring the bell John Scales Avery opens the door and welcomes me and my friend John Graversgaard warmly into his home. He serves us coffee and we talk. I’m stunned by his humility and breadth of knowledge. John Avery… Read more →

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