PRAGOTI

One of the features of the current Saradha scam which is distinct from other such scams like the Sanchayita, in West Bengal, is that majority of the people who deposited money in Saradha are rural poor people. Why did rural poor people keep their money in fraudulent companies like Saradha and not in small savings schemes of the government? This is a very important question which needs to be looked at to pin point the role of the central government and state governments in facilitating the activities of companies like Saradha.

Aasim Sajjad Akhtar is a renowned left intellectual and currently the general secretary of the Punjab section of the newly formed Awami Workers Party (AWP). The new party was formed last month after a merger of three progressive and left forces, the Awami Party Pakistan, the Labour Party and the Workers Party and vowed to "build a new programme of socialism for 21st century Pakistan". Com. Sajjad speaks about the challenges before the AWP, it's goals and its immediate aims to Pragoti Edit Group Convenor, Srinivasan Ramani in this interview (via email). 

Pragoti salutes the nameless and the ordinary whose valiance and courage in life and death will not be headlines in the chronicles of the Mumbai carnage. The immediate appeals to jingoistic nationalism and communalism by the hard and soft Hindu right, and the proposals to launch war and pass draconian laws, dished out by the mainstream media, is an attempt to ensure that the people are put through more of such terror. We stand committed to the struggles of the ordinary and the nameless people of India to fight terrorism and all political harbingers of terror.

In this wide ranging interview, Noam Chomsky talks about his new book "Hopes and Prospects" and dwells on the issues of Haiti, the US economy and polity, the growth processes in India and China and the current political state of Latin America. We are grateful to Keane Bhatt for making this interview available to us.

A debate on 21st century socialism hosted on Pragoti featuring articles by Rohit & Srinivasan Ramani, a riposte by Arjun Sengupta and a response by Rohit & Srinivasan Ramani again. 

The anti-people character of the neoliberal regime and the bankruptcy of its free market ideology are getting thoroughly exposed with the deepening economic crisis and the irrational, vested-interest-driven actions of the bourgeois governments. With the weakening hegemony of neoliberal ideas, debates over alternatives to globalised capitalism are emerging, along with a revival of interest in Marxism and socialist ideas across the world. Attempts are also underway to better understand and analyze the contemporary world from a Marxist standpoint.

Stanly Johny reviews Vijay Prashad's book, "Arab Spring, Libyan Winter". 

Nearly a hundred and thirty years after his death and 190 years after his birth on May 5, 1818, Karl Marx continues to exert enormous intellectual and practical influence across the world. The socialist future he so confidently predicted has not yet become the global reality that many had hoped it would. The capitalist mode of production that he diagnosed as crisis-prone and doomed to extinction in the course of further historical development dominates the contemporary world. The early attempts at establishing a socialist society have faced exceptionally difficult problems in a predominantly capitalist/imperialist world. Yet, none of these facts can be seen as rendering Marx irrelevant or as diminishing the power and vitality of his theory and vision. Why?