The Long View Magazine

Why the Long View

Capitalism is in crisis—but not in retreat. It has proved remarkably adept at reinventing itself, moving seamlessly between the language of liberal inclusion and the machinery of authoritarian rule. Whether draped in the rhetoric of markets, meritocracy, and reform, or in the politics of nationalism, surveillance, and repression, its underlying logic remains unchanged: the concentration of wealth, the consolidation of power, and the exploitation of labour. Capitalism ruthlessly creates marginalisation. Questions of identity, values, moral, ethics are not beyond the system that we inhabit. All of them need to be read as located within the system and produced by it.

Equality and justice as possibilities within capitalism appear as oxymoron. There is widening inequality, deepening precarity, and the relentless expansion of capitalism into every sphere of social life. Rule of capital demonstrates its “human face” through analysis of these tendencies as mere anomalies that can be corrected within its fold. It generates theoretical tendencies to veil its actual nature. A delusional framework  that promises a better capitalist society; a well-thought programme to instil historical amnesia that scratches the superficiality of developments. The need to go to the essence, a critical reflection of the ‘critical’ itself becomes more necessary than ever.

The Long View magazine is a forum of critical inquiry that seeks to create a space for analytical yet accessible analysis of the present times. Through essays of 1,000–2,500 words, it aims to examine the structures of power that shape our present.

Please send your contributions to Aruna Jayasena, the editor of Long View at aruna@conjunctures.org.

We will get back to you in the shortest possible time.

The South Asia-Shaped Hole in BRICS

By Shiran Illanperuma The BRICS New Delhi Declaration, an outcome of the eighteenth BRICS summit held under the rotating chairship of India, called for a more democratic global order and...
  • October 5, 2026

Bangladesh: When the Powerful Fall

The 2024 uprising brought down an increasingly authoritarian political order. What followed poses a harder question: can political rupture produce democratic transformation? On 5 August 2024, Sheikh Hasina left Bangladesh...
  • October 1, 2026

The Math of Extraction: What the Medical Intern’s Stipend Really Pays For?

The White Coat on the Road On the morning of 7 September 2026, a group of medical interns in their white coats and aprons marched from Gandhi Medical College towards...
  • September 25, 2026

The Law That Cannot Be Found: On the Quiet Politics of Digital Redress in Bangladesh

Ask a young woman in Dhaka who has just been harassed online where she is supposed to go, and you will discover something that no statute admits to the state...
  • September 12, 2026

The God Hypothesis of Capital: Lenin, Lukács and the Return of the Repressed Totality

In 1913, Lenin wrote a letter to Maxim Gorky so uncharacteristically vicious that it reads less like party correspondence and more like an exorcism. Gorky had been hobnobbing with Bogdanov,...
  • September 7, 2026

The Fetish of the Seat: Reservation Hatao and the Personification of Crisis

It is cruel occurrence that a slogan outlives the movement that gave birth to it. On 21 August, several hundred protestors gathered at Jantar Mantar under saffron flags, chanting “Educate,...
  • August 29, 2026

What Are We Preparing For? Questions the Cockroaches Leave Behind

Imagine a very big casino. Millions of people have been invited to play the game. Everyone receives the same rules. Everyone is told that if they play well, they will...
  • August 24, 2026

Chasing Communisation, Battling Spectacle : A Few Polemics and Some Unfinished Thoughts Occasioned by the July 20 Delhi Upheaval

“The revolution lags behind itself.” —Henri Lefebvre, The Explosion: Marxism and the French Upheaval “I hope to find “What is denied to me.” –Paul Eluard, ‘The Corner’ (1937)   Theory...
  • August 21, 2026

Is There a Right (Wrong) Way to Protest?

If democracy is to be qualified as one, it cannot, by and large, ban protest. But protest is not simply what democracy allows. It is something people make and remake,...
  • August 21, 2026

No Smartphone, No Service? Sri Lanka Needs a Right to Be Offline

An ordinary citizen who prefers not to use digital mobile devices recently struggled to obtain an appointment at a Sri Lankan government department because he did not have a mobile...
  • August 11, 2026

Morbid Symptoms: What South Asia’s Youth Uprisings Are Really Diagnosing

Antonio Gramsci’s line from a fascist prison in the early 1930s has been quoted into cliché ever since: the old world is dying, and the new cannot yet be born,...
  • August 11, 2026

Nepal’s “New politics” was never about new faces rather about retiring “old habits”

Governments do not lose public trust in a single day, its lost through silence when people demand answers, through arrogance when criticism deserves humility, and through the dangerous illusion that...
  • August 11, 2026

Cockroach Mutiny

‘We need to create sober, patient people, who do not despair in the face of the worst horror and who do not get excited about every little thing. Pessimism of...
  • August 11, 2026

Disclaimer : The views and opinions expressed in these articles are those of the individual authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the magazine, its editors, or the affiliated institution.