Ajit Chaudhury

Dipankar Das

Anjan Chakrabarti

Acknowledgements

It all started with two small papers by the first author of this book. The first one was "From Hegemony to Counter Hegemony/A Journey in a Non-Imaginary Unreal Space" published in Economic and Political Weekly, 1988. Chapter Three and a half of this book records a part of the history: how the paper was not read. A few months went by, another effort followed. In the form of a cheap dot-matrix printout in archaic-looking courier-new a typed paper distributed in private circles. "Mimicry of Overdetermination, Synthetic Hegemony, and Margin of Margin: Three Key-concepts: An Intercontinental Ballistic Missile for Third World Studies". History repeated itself.

Would history repeat again for this book too? We do not know. Maybe not, we will wait for that. (We can think. We can wait. We can fast.) Indeed we did fast for long years. And then God sent His angels for help: Jack Amariglio, Zahiruddin Mohammed Alim, Masato Aoki, Enid Arvidson, Antonio Callari, Steve Cullenberg, Jonathan Diskin, Julie Graham, Bruce Roberts. Without their minute reviews of the five articles published in "Rethinking Marxism", the content of the pages that follow could never find a book form and would have forever remained what many people call the ravings of a few cranks.

Lastly, no word of thanks can express our debt to Richard Wolff who explored the third stream writing in Calcutta and put his money on the dark horses that drive the chariot of this book. We dedicate this book to him.

Ajit Chaudhury

Dipankar Das

Anjan Chakrabarti

Date: 22^nd May 2000.