South Asia Citizens Web

Judy Tzu-Chun Wu’s Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam Era is a wide-ranging, thought-provoking contribution to a growing literature on radicalism in U.S. foreign relations. As its title suggests, Radicals on the Road uses the transpacific journeys of anti-Vietnam War activists as a window into radical American and Vietnamese politics and culture in the 1960s. Its principal claim is as multipronged as its intended audience and intervention: in the 1960s American and Vietnamese antiwar activists created a transnational political community, beyond the confines of any nation-state or locality, based on a sustained critique of U.S. policy in Asia. Through Third World tourism, alternative journalism, citizen diplomacy, familial ties, and personal encounters across the Pacific, such activists created “a global public sphere” centered on the war (p. 4). Wu argues that these individuals shaped the era’s tumultuous events in ways not captured by existing accounts.

Platform Publication 2, May - June 1979

Translated and abridged by Jairus Banaji from Henryk Grossmann Das Akkumulations - und Zusammenbruchsgesetz des kapitalistischen Systems (Zugleich eine Krisentheorie), (Hirschfeld, Leipzig, 1929)

For most of the Left today, the state is an externally existing ’instrument of the ruling class’, something that is used for enacting policies. This reactionary naivete betrays and imprisonment within the necessary appearances of modern society. The left does not see itself as movement to abolish this monstrous institution, but rather, wishes to ’capture the state power’, and refine it.

What was life like for prisoners and camp staff in the many “ordinary” camps, colonies, and special settlements of the Soviet Gulag? This is one of the key questions that Wilson Bell attempts to answer in The Gulag and Soviet Society in Western Siberia, 1929-1953. Western Siberia was the home to one of the Soviet Union’s most extensive prison camp complexes (Siblag) and its various successors and offshoots. It also included a mixture of “corrective labor camps” (ITLs), “corrective labor colonies” (ITKs) and “special settlements.”

In Pakistan, the debate about women and the left has an added twist. It is sometimes pointed out that in recent history women have done better under the anti-politics, rhetorically liberal dictatorship of General Musharraf. The provision of 33 per cent seats in local bodies, the dilution of the Hudood ordinances, the promotion of education and media and culture (which arguably helps women to claim more public space) were all achieved under conditions when politics, or electoral politics, were in abeyance. This contention deserves detailed and nuanced debate.