The Relevance of Marxist Academics

This commentary examines the relationship between a Marxist scholar and the institutional and societal environment of the university. The focus is on how a Marxist academic navigates the social, economic and political aspects of the university while attempting to maintain a commitment to class analysis and Marxism as political practice

Politics of Marx as Non-sectarian Revolutionary Class Politics: An Interpretation in the Context of the 20th and 21st Centuries

This article is condensed from three chapters of my Marxist Class Theory for a Skeptical World (Haymarket, 2018) and from a longer article based on these chapters. It is based on a talk on Marx’s politics’ delivered at ‘A Bicentenary Conference: Karl Marx at 200’ at Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario. Canada. I am thankful to the participants at this conference for their comments. Put simply, Marx’s politics is about class struggle for state power to build socialism, a society of popular democracy, by overthrowing capitalism. In this short article, I will explore different aspects of this single idea, from Marx’s political writings, as I interpret them, and I will do this schematically. This is the first part of the article. In the second part, I will extend my articulation and interpretation of Marx’s politics, and briefly and schematically, relate this to some aspects of the Leninist legacy. Needless to say, this article does not provide a detailed exposition of Marx’s or Marxist politics (for this, see Das, 2018a)

Politics of Love, and Love of Politics: Towards a Marxist Theory of Love

Romantic love, like many other kinds of love, appears to be just a relationship between two individuals, but upon closer analysis it is more than that. Love is a deeply social process. It is also more than a spontaneous neuro-biological impulse. Love involves conscious activity, both subjective and material. Love is a social process both at the level of human society and at the level of class society, including capitalism. Private property relations and related logics of accumulation in all forms of class society shape relations of love. Love in capitalism reproduces love with capitalism. Because love is social, it is political. It is political in part because it has a role to play in the fight against capitalism and in the construction of socialism. Love must be rescued both from the principle of love of two humans, as in romantic love in modern societies, and from the principle of love of all humans. In place of these principles, there is a need for new principles of love that promote or advocate love of class brothers and sisters, within the context of love of the struggle against class enemies, in a manner that does not ignore erotic love between individuals and that does not make exaggerated claims about the political power of love. A critical examination of love from the standpoint of materialist dialectics makes it possible to address the question what kind of love might exist under communism, and how it might be different from love under capitalism, and why

The Right-Wing Attacks on the Academic Left in India

While right-wing attacks on the ideas of democracy and socialism in academia are a worldwide trend, in the remainder of the paper, I will focus on India, considered to be the largest democracy in the world. India has become a hotbed of right-wing politics, led by an authoritarian Hindu-nationalist government of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). There are various reasons why this has happened which this paper will not discuss (Das, 2020a; Jaffrelot, 2021; Vanaik, 2017). Suffice to say that the BJP is the political wing of the fascistic paramilitary organization called RSS (or, National Volunteer Corps) which, in part inspired by European fascism, aims to build a Hindu nation where religious minorities can live only as second-class citizens

Cost Optimal Design of a Single-Phase Dry Power Transformer

The Dry type transformers are preferred to their oil-immersed counterparts for various reasons, particularly because their operation is hazardless. The application of dry transformers was limited to small ratings in the earlier days. But now these are being used for considerably higher ratings.  Therefore, their cost-optimal design has gained importance. This paper deals with the design procedure for achieving cost optimal design of a dry type single-phase power transformer of small rating, subject to usual design constraints on efficiency and voltage regulation. The selling cost for the transformer has been taken as the objective function. Only two key variables have been chosen, the turns/volt and the height: width ratio of window, which affects the cost function to high degrees. Other variables have been chosen on the basis of designers’ experience. Copper has been used as conductor material and CRGOS as core material to achieve higher efficiency, lower running cost and compact design. The electrical and magnetic loadings have been kept at their maximum values without violating the design constraints. The optimal solution has been obtained by the method of exhaustive search using nested loops

Knowledge, attitude and practices about antimicrobial resistance and appropriate use of antimicrobial agents among the MBBS students of a medical college hospital in Eastern India

Background: Antimicrobial agents are one of the most commonly used as well as misused drugs. Rational antibiotic use is thought to be the best way to control resistance. Awareness and practice about antimicrobial use and resistance among medical students of different years so that appropriate measures can be taken to educate them properly to prevent misuse of antimicrobial as far as possible.Methods: It was a cross sectional questionnaire-based study undertaken in a teaching hospital in Eastern India among 328 medical students in 4 different batches. their responses remained confidential. total correct and incorrect responses from each of the 4 batches of MBBS students. overall trend and batch wise difference in the responses were analyzed.Results: Most of them had idea about problem of antimicrobial resistance and most of the students answered majority of the questions correctly. While assessing difference in responses in different batches, result showed that there was very significant improvement in the response of 6th semester students than the response of 4th semester students, may be due to acquiring knowledge of antimicrobials from their pharmacology classes in that period.Conclusions: Overall knowledge of antimicrobial resistance and proper use of antimicrobials appears good among different batches of MBBS student of this institution, though some areas need to be improved. Knowledge improvement is most evident from 4th semester to 6th semester students. Pharmacology training appears to make students more aware of this problem. Regular education is important to make them more aware