Author: Ravkaran Grewal

“Producing a theory of race and racism that avoids the commonplace pitfalls of either cultural essentialism or class reductionism is no easy task. To do so, however, is imperative to challenge this racist, colonialist, and imperialist world.”

Both organisations communicated clearly through their fashion that this racist, colonial, capitalist world — “this narrow world, strewn with prohibitions” as Frantz Fanon outlines — “can only be called in question by absolute violence.” 

Inquilab Zindabad (“long live revolution”) — the chant that Bhagat Singh popularised during his arrest — should, if we are to stand for progress, reverberate eternally not only in society but in our minds and thoughts as well. Singh’s atheism — the rejection of ultimate authority and transcendent truth — is necessary in any revolutionary thought.

There is some value in the empirical understanding he advances; the degree to which modern capitalism is unproductive, unprofitable, monopolised, and increasingly relies on assets, rents, and finance to make any money. Yet any useful insights that Varoufakis has are obscured by his confused notion of technofeudalism. What Marx identifies as the core of capitalism — generalised commodity production and the wage-labour social relation — still reigns.

Filmed across three decades, The World Is Family encapsulates Patwardhan’s quintessential style: spontaneous, organic and unwaveringly analytical. Narrating the early lives and last days of his parents, Pathwardhan presents a refreshingly intimate insight into the feelings of struggle, nostalgia and hope which have coloured key moments in India’s history of independence, Partition and protest.