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KOLKATA: Karl Marx was born in Germany on May 5, 1818. He died in 1883 in London. India appeared in the writings of Marx and Engels over a period of about four decades: from the 1840s to the 1880s. The first reference to India — to the Indian gymnosophists, to be specific — appeared in Marx’s doctoral dissertation. The Indian caste system is mentioned in The German Ideology. The division of labour under the caste system is distinguished from division of labour in the modern workshop, in The Poverty of Philosophy.

The Indian filmmaking legend Satyajit Ray stepped into his 104th birth anniversary on May 2, 2025. The maestro died in 1992, at the age of only 71. He left us without finishing many of the proposed film and writing projects which he had undertaken in his last years. Bengal lost not just a great filmmaker, but also a writer of extraordinary calibre, who opened up the Bengali children and adults to a new world of adventure and science fiction in their mother tongue.

From 1836 to 1844, the Chartist movement started in England. It helped the working class to take a political role. It was also a time when in 1847-48, Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto came out interpreting the role of the working class, concretising it in a general form, and soon it was applied in whole of modern history. In 1848 and 1850, it became more concretised during the class struggles in France. Working class no more remained amorphous. It was emerging as a strong force in the world history, developing its own strategy and also tactics, and in the process became a conscious historical class. The entire process was traced and analysed with a concrete application of materialist conception of history. For the first time, the concrete role of the proletariat was identified.

I first met Sanjay in 2010 when I was doing a project on the theme of non-standard workers and social dialogue practices in India (the first ever project initiated by the International Labour Organisation in the world at that time). His “office” was situated in the slums of Dharavi. The office was as disorganised as it could be with poor furniture and papers generously strewn around. I was doubtful whether I was visiting the right place and the right person!

The architect of first path breaking event that heralded the new socialist society, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, was born on April 22, 1870. According to laws of historical materialism, or following the materialist concept of history, Socialism follows capitalism. Whichever socio-economic formation replaces the former stage is always higher. Socialism is also higher than capitalism and superior to it. It is always the result of evolution of productive forces. It takes a new route while in transition. This transition from the industrial to higher levels of industrial organization is always according to historical materialist stance in full.

Sanghamitra Chakraborty’s just released book ‘Soumitra Chatterjee and His World’ is perhaps the first authoritative biography in English of the great Bengali icon, who was not just the chosen on-screen face for Satyajit Ray, featuring centrally in fourteen of his twenty-eight feature films, but also a writer of plays, a director, a poet and the pro-active editor of one of Bengal’s prestigious literary magazines “Ekkhon”. In his younger days, Soumitra was sought after by the youth of Bengal for recitation programmes, while in his last years, he focused on painting, and many of works got appreciation from eminent artistes like Jogen Chowdhury.

“Revolution is the inalienable right of mankind. Freedom is the birthright of all. The labour is the real sustainer of the society. …To the altar of this revolution, we have brought our youth as incense, for no sacrifice is too great for so magnificent a cause. We are content, we await the advent of revolution…” These were the words of Bhagat Singh when he was scattering all over the leaflet that had everything he wanted to communicate to those in power throwing a bomb in the assembly hall, not to hurt anyone, it was just a demonstrative act. It was against the anti-labour Trade Dispute Bill. In his trial in the court, Bhagat Singh had told the court that the revolution for him was not the cult of bomb and pistol, but a total change of society culminating in the overthrow of both foreign and Indian capitalism under the dictatorship of proletariat.

NEW YORK: Just in time for Women’s History Month comes the wrestling biopic Queen of the Ring, which provides an epic rollercoaster ride through the journey of sports legend Mildred Burke. The movie is packed to the brim with wrestling lore through the scope of a woman who dared to defy societal conventions—and the odds—to go on to be one of the most prolific athletes in wrestling.

NEW YORK: Last week on March 2 , ordinary Brazilians have been jubilant at the news that I’m Still Here pocketed an Oscar — the first ever Brazilian film to do so. Walter Salles’s work, which stars Fernanda Torres and Selton Mello, is a powerful exposition of the human cost paid by those who opposed Brazil’s military dictatorship, with its focus on the family of Rubens Paiva, an opponent of the junta who was tortured and murdered in 1971. I’m Still Here does not focus too deeply into the background of Paiva, a sometime social democratic politician who had lived in Yugoslavia and Paris following the dictatorship’s 1964 seizure of power but returned home to continue family life. It is, ostensibly, a story about the Paivas’ experience of state persecution and their fight for justice — particularly that of Rubens’s wife Eunice, who died at the age of eighty-nine in 2018.

Nobody can claim that the rate of growth of agricultural production, especially of foodgrain, has been higher in the neoliberal period than during the years of dirigiste development that preceded it. It may have been somewhat lower but let us agree that it was certainly not higher. On the other hand, the rate of growth of Gross Domestic Product was estimated to be significantly higher and several economists argued that this growth rate was exaggerated. Then again, let us agree that taking the period as a whole it has been noticeably higher.