Founding Editorial Note

Why This Magazine, Why Now

India is changing fast, but not in the direction of freedom. Neoliberal capitalism is tightening its grip, and so is authoritarian power.

Growth gets celebrated while jobs disappear, schools and hospitals are hollowed out, and millions live with permanent insecurity. Informal labour, agrarian crisis, privatized natural resources, and policy bent to corporate interests have remade daily life for the working majority.

Alongside this runs an ideological project: communal politics made normal, dissent criminalized, democratic space shrinking, and history rewritten to serve a narrow, exclusionary nationalism. Put together, it's a new phase of Indian capitalism, one that pairs market discipline with cultural authoritarianism.

In this moment, Marxism isn't a dogma to defend or a relic to archive. It's a method. It helps us see how class power works through caste, how patriarchy is reproduced through economic dependence, how imperialism shapes national development, and how culture becomes a battleground.

We start from three convictions.

First, the Indian Left needs fresh theoretical clarity. Without rigorous analysis of today's financialized, privatized, communalized capitalism, political practice turns episodic and defensive.

Second, ideas have to travel beyond universities and party offices. Theory only changes things when it reaches trade unions, student movements, women's organizations, farmers' struggles, and cultural spaces.

Third, we need a culture of principled debate. We reject the sectarianism that splits resistance, and the opportunism that shrinks politics to electoral arithmetic. We want unity in struggle, not uniformity in thought.

Here you'll find:

• Marxist theory, engaged in the Indian context.
• Analysis of what's happening now, from labour codes to land acquisition, digital surveillance to communal violence.
• Reports and reflections from movements in struggle.
• Cultural work that keeps alive the imagination of a society beyond exploitation.

This isn't a finished product. It's a collective project, open to students, workers, teachers, artists, organizers, and anyone who refuses to accept the present order as inevitable.

When inequality is sold as efficiency and repression as nationalism, our task as Marxists is both intellectual and practical: to explain how power works, and to help build the forces that can change it. This magazine is a modest contribution to that larger, unfinished struggle, for democracy, dignity, and socialism.