Pradip Baksi

Many images of Karl Marx have been  formed through the ideological filters of many marxisms and of the ideologies opposed to them since the middle of the nineteenth century. One such image identifies Karl Marx with the study of  philosophy and political economy. In a parallel image Friedrich Engels is identified with the study of some natural sciences and military affairs. Since the last decades of the twentieth…

The ongoing cycles of industrialization of the world economy continue to be accompanied by cyclical rise and decline of interrelated political ideologies of imperial and colonial liberalisms and marxisms. This paper proposes that the rise and decline of these ideologies need to be studied in their interconnections: for every society separately, as well as globally. From South Asia such studies may begin with…

It is the script of a talk delivered in Kolkata  on the occasion of release of a Bengali translation of a selection of essays on Social and Political issues by Raja Rammohun Roy (1772-1833). Here the problems of interrelated transformations of the multiple societies of South Asia and those of the rest of the world towards the end of the 20th century are posed and discussed. 

This dialogue started with some questions about the results of the just concluded parliamentary elections in Chile and Germany (2021), and then went on to discuss the role of elections and wars in the Aufhebung [sublation/transformation] of  bürgerlichen Gesellschaft [civil society/ bourgeois society], its states/governments, and that of the idea and reality of 'left' and 'right' in politics, since the days of the…

Contemporary transnational capital aims at full spectrum dominance over the entire political economy of our planet. We learn from the first sentence of the Foreword of Karl Marx (1859), Zur Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie: Erstes Heft, that he wished to critically investigate the system of bourgeois economy involving the six domains of capital, landed property, wage-labour, state, foreign trade and world market.

This article deals with the history of reception of the India-related writings of Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels in India.

Bengali translation of Marx's excerpts from Kovalevsky (1879) on the history of land relations in India.

This is a short note on Karl Marx’s excerpts on the history of land relations in India. It covers a part of a book by one of his friends, the Russian Jurist and Sociologist, Academician Maksim Maksimovich Kovalevsky (1851-1916). This book was published in 1879, and Marx made his excerpts from it in a notebook that he used during the years 1879-1880. These excerpts of Marx contain many important threads for…

Śūnyatā and Karl Marx About a year and a half before the publication of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, Erster Band (1867), there appeared in two sentences within two of his letters, a particular view of the term शून्यता / Śūnyatā: rendered in his own English, as nothingness. He came to know about and understood this term in the context of some meditational practices of the monks, nuns and their householder devotees…

Marx in the MEGA This is a preliminary report on the process of transformation of Karl Marx’s papers into published texts after his death. This process started in the second half of the 1880s with Friedrich Engels’ editorial interventions on Marx’s manuscripts related to the theme of Capital within his incomplete research programme for a Critique of Political Economy. It continued through the various volumes of…

A proposal for continuing Karl Marx’s critique of political economy