South Asia Citizens Web

Secret Reports on Nazi Germany: The Frankfurt School Contribution to the War Effort, by FRANZ NEUMANN, HERBERT MARCUSE, and OTTO KIRCHHEIMER. edited by RAFFAELE LAUDANI reviewed by William E. Scheuerman War makes for strange bedfellows. Among the oddest pairings that World War II produced was the bringing together of William “Wild Bill” Donovan, head of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS) — a precursor to the CIA — and a group of German Jewish Marxists he hired to help the United (…)

13 episode animated TV series adventures of the Burka Avenger and three young kids in the imaginary city of Halwapur as they fight the evil Baba Bandook and his henchmen. Burka Avenger takes on her enemies using a martial art called Takht Kabaddi, which uses books and pens as weapons.

South Asian Labour Forum (SALF) on Thursday demanded immediate release of Maruti Suzuki workers in India, who were arrested by the police last year as well as withdrawal of all cases lodged against them by the administration. Addressing a press conference at the Karachi Press Club (KPC), the trade union leaders and human rights activists expressed solidarity with the Indian workers.

Politically speaking, Malala’s gravest error was to survive the attack by the Taliban gunmen who shot her in the head on her way back from school in 2012. Had she succumbed to her injuries or deteriorated to a vegetative state in some underequipped Swat hospital then she may have been forgiven (and forgotten) as a passive patriot. Survival has earned her suspicion and accusation of being an anti-Pakistan agent of the west.

The collection provides an opportunity to assess Jairus Banaji’s original and provocative contributions over more than three decades. This review tries to chart a path across the range of the essays as a whole, marked by three themes and their connections and possible disconnections: what constitutes modes of production; modes of production before capitalism and their histories; and characterizing and periodizing capitalism. Banaji’s emphatic arguments for long histories/trajectories of commodity production, exchange and accumula- tion across different times and places, especially in estate agriculture and the circuits of merchant capital, traverse these three themes.