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Vijay Prashad remembers Progress Publishers’ books as part of his political and intellectual education, not simply as relics of childhood. In a July 20, 2019 essay, he connects that experience to The East Was Read: Socialist Culture in the Third World, an anthology about socialist culture and reading across different settings.
What Progress Publishers meant to Prashad
In his Scroll.in essay, Prashad recalls the Progress Publishers volumes in his mother’s apartment in Kolkata: books with blue and white spines, including his copies of Karl Marx’s Capital, which he says he bought in 1981. These are his first-person recollections, rather than independently verified details of his biography or of the books’ publishing history.
He remembers reading Turgenev on the lawns of Victoria Memorial and struggling with Marx beside the Hooghly. In Prashad’s account, the books offered more than stories or abstract ideas: they helped him think about capitalism, inherited culture, power, and the difficulty of moving toward socialism.
Reading as part of socialist education
Prashad places these memories in 1980s Kolkata, which he describes as governed by the Left Front and shaped politically by Marxist theory. He presents reading Marx as one way to understand capitalism and the challenges of socialist transition, while Russian novels helped him consider how culture and power are passed down.
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- The East Was Read
- Brand : Leftword Books
But he does not argue that reading alone is enough. For Prashad, ideas must be tested against experience, and education also involves listening and struggle. As he puts it, “To read is only one part of a socialist education. To listen and to struggle are the other parts.”
That is why nostalgia is not the central point of his remembrance. He writes: “I celebrate Progress and the other Soviet publishing houses for the way they contributed to the socialist education of millions of people – including myself.” The phrase “millions of people” is Prashad’s assessment, not a quantified count supplied with a date or underlying measurement.
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How the memory connects to The East Was Read
Prashad connects that educational legacy to The East Was Read: Socialist Culture in the Third World, a collection he edited. He says Pankaj Mishra’s 2006 essay about reading Soviet books and magazines anchors the volume. He also points to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s account of writing Petals of Blood in Yalta and Wang Chaohua’s essay about reading Soviet novels in China.
Those examples place reading within distinct personal and national contexts. The collection is an anthology, not a single-author argument: its essays approach socialist culture through reading, publishing, literature, and wider cultural production. The LeftWord publisher catalog describes the book as essays about socialist culture in the Third World and lists contributors including Deepa Bhasthi, Maria Berrios, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Pankaj Mishra, Revati Laul, Rossen Djagalov, Sudhanva Deshpande, Sumayya Kassamali, and Wang Chaohua.
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What the book connection adds
Prashad’s recollection offers a personal account of what access to socialist books meant to one reader; the anthology widens the subject by bringing together accounts from different writers, readers, and cultural settings. Read together, they frame Progress Publishers’ legacy not only as a publishing history, but as part of a broader question: how books and other cultural forms shaped political learning across the Third World.
The article’s description of the book as “new” belongs to its 2019 publication date. It should not be taken as a claim that the anthology is newly published today.
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