Dilip Simeon's blog

Courtesy Jairus Banaji, whose brief introduction: In September 1880 the American journalist and radical John Swinton, a strong supporter of Eugene Debs, conducted an interview with Marx while the latter was staying at Ramsgate, surrounded by two generations of his family. The interview (reconstructed by Swinton from his notes) was published in the New York Sun and appears in MEGA I/25. Here are two short extracts that are particularly interesting, the first because it seems to be Marx’s last reference to what he felt should come after Capital. And that, prophetically enough, would be a book on “credit”, he told Swinton; in other words, a special study of the financial system that would, doubtless, have drawn on much of the analysis in Vol. 3/pt. 5, but also constituted an original and more developed work. https://www.facebook.com/notes/jairus-banaji/marxs-last-interview-two-excerpts/10151018085800064 “Inquiring why his great work “Capital”, the seed f...

Letter to  India  from Mr. Adnan Memon from Karachi Pakistan, whose 2 year old deaf – mute daughter is able to hear and talk now, thanks to a cochlear transplant surgery facilitated in India by two Indian organisations Dear All, These days there are no measures to my happiness and excitements caused by the daily progress of my beloved deaf born 2 year old daughter “Khadija”!  She has started calling some names and saying some words. Though these are still a little broken, but at least she has started to talk, which would not have been possible without the cochlear implant surgery. This happiness me and my family are experiencing is just because of a generous ear gift through  Cochlear Implant  by SAHI (Society to Aid  Hearing Impaired ) from across the border! Yes from the Indian city of  Hyderabad Deccan , from where neither me nor my friends or any of my fellow countrymen would expect any help, not even in dreams.  Yes, a country with wh...

Fatal clashes continued into the night in several Egyptian cities on Friday as thousands of demonstrators took to the streets to protest against President  Mohamed Morsi , the Muslim Brotherhood, and police brutality – exactly two years after the start of the 2011 revolution that toppled Hosni Mubarak. According to state media, at least seven people died in Suez and 379 were injured across the country as riots broke out in Cairo's Tahrir Square and cities including Alexandria, Mahalla, and Ismailia. Police repeatedly fired teargas across much of central Cairo and protesters pelted them with stones – bringing parts of the city's road and metro networks to a standstill. As night fell, medics warned that the amount of teargas in Tahrir Square had reached a "dangerous level". According to Tahrir Bodyguards, a group protecting female protesters, at least nine women were sexually assaulted in the square – prompting memories of some of the worst moments of the Egyptian u...

Robert Brulle, a sociologist at Drexel University in Philadelphia, has estimated that over the past decade about $500m has been given to organisations devoted to undermining the science of climate change, with much of the money donated anonymously through third parties. A secretive funding organisation in the United States that guarantees anonymity for its billionaire donors has emerged as a major operator in the climate "counter movement" to undermine the science of global warming,  The Independent  has learnt.  The Donors Trust, along with its sister group Donors Capital Fund, based in Alexandria, Virginia, is funnelling millions of dollars into the effort to cast doubt on climate change without revealing the identities of its wealthy backers or that they have links to the fossil fuel industry. However, an audit trail reveals that Donors is being indirectly supported by the American billionaire Charles Koch who, with his brother David, jointly owns a majority...

The comprehensive reforms suggested by Justice Verma and his colleagues will protect the right to dignity, autonomy and freedom of victims of sexual assault and rape At a time when despair and anger at the futility of hundreds of thousands of women’s lifetimes spent in imagining a world that is safe drive us yet again to the streets; at a time when our daughters get assaulted in the most brutal ways and our sons learn that unimaginable brutality is the only way of becoming men; at a time when we wonder if all that intellectual and political work of crafting frameworks to understand women’s subjugation and loss of liberty through sexual terrorism has remained imprisoned within the covers of books in “women’s studies” libraries; at a time like this, what does it mean to suddenly find that all is not lost and to discover on a winter afternoon that our words and work have cascaded out of our small radical spaces and transformed constitutional common sense? The Report of the Committ...

By Karima Bennoune New York Times, January 23, 2013 Before the recent French intervention in Mali began, 412,000 people had already left their homes in the country’s north, fleeing torture, summary executions, recruitment of child soldiers and sexual violence against women at the hands of fundamentalist militants. Late last year, in Algeria and southern Mali, I interviewed dozens of Malians from the north, including many who had recently fled. Their testimonies confirmed the horrors that radical Islamists, self-proclaimed warriors of God, have inflicted on their communities. First, the fundamentalists banned music in a country with one of the richest musical traditions in the world. Last July, they stoned an unmarried couple for adultery. The woman, a mother of two, had been buried up to her waist in a hole before a group of men pelted her to death with rocks. And in October the Islamist occupiers began compiling lists of unmarried mothers. Even holy places are not safe...

Syria's civil war is now strongly characterised by militias identifying along sectarian lines. The growing divide between Sunnis and Alawites has profound implications for Syria, and the Middle East The transformation of the Syrian Revolution from a nonviolent and inclusive pro-democracy protest movement into a civil war, pitting majority-Sunni and majority-Alawite militias against each other in deadly daily clashes throughout the country, has been a slow and complex process driven in equal measure by domestic as well as external factors. But while much analysis has addressed the role of external factors, there are certain aspects of the domestic dynamics that remain unexamined, in particular the evolving ethos driving Sunni and Alawite fighters.  Indeed, the very nature of the ruling Assad regime that the protesters challenged contributed to the increasing sectarian character of the conflict. The Alawite community, from which the Assads hail, is a minority sect that mixes Sh...