PARIVARTHAKA
About PARIVARTHAKA
We're a magazine committed to understanding Indian society through Marxism, and to strengthening the struggles against exploitation, caste oppression, patriarchy, communalism, and imperialism.
India today is a country of stark contrasts: enormous wealth for a few, and for everyone else, agrarian distress, informal work, joblessness, and dispossession. We believe Marxism is still the best tool for getting to the roots of that injustice. We use it to look closely at the specific forms of class, caste, gender, and regional oppression that colonialism left behind and that still shape our lives.
We have three aims:
- Build critical theory grounded in Indian conditions.
- Make Marxist analysis accessible to students, workers, and activists.
- Connect ideas to the people resisting neoliberal restructuring, authoritarian rule, and communal polarization.
Our politics are internationalist, secular, and anti-sectarian. We reject both market fundamentalism and reactionary nationalism. Through serious study, open debate, and solidarity across movements, we want to add to the long struggle for a democratic, egalitarian, and socialist India.
What We Mean by Marxism
For us, Marxism is a method for understanding society and changing it. It starts from a simple idea: how people produce and share the means of life shapes how society is organized, and who holds power in it. We look at history through struggle, not through great men or fixed national essences. Class is central, but it never works alone. In India it runs through caste, patriarchy, religion, region, and the long afterlife of colonialism.
Marxism is also a practice. Ideas are tested in movements, unions, fields, and campuses, and theory is only as good as its ability to explain what people are living through and help them act on it. That's why we treat it as a living method and not a set of texts to defend. We read Marx, Engels, Lenin, Luxemburg, Gramsci, and Ambedkar critically, and we expect to learn from today's struggles as much as from the classics.
We don't claim one correct line. What we do hold to:
- A materialist analysis of exploitation
- Solidarity across oppressed groups
- Internationalism
- Open debate