SPECIAL ARTICLE
Asiatic Mode of Production, Caste and
the Indian Left
Murzban Jal
The study of Marxism in India has consciously
underestimated Karl Marx’s concept of the “Asiatic mode
of production” which has led it to a number of errors.
The place of casteism in the larger matrix of the “Asiatic
mode of production” can only be understood if the
Eurocentric reasoning and the search for a fictitious
“Indian feudalism” are avoided. This would also end the
consequent illusory search for the transition from
feudalism to capitalism, which has rendered the project
of socialism in India to be a mirage.
Murzban Jal (murzbanjal@hotmail.com) is with the Indian Institute of
Education, Pune.
Economic & Political Weekly EPW may 10, 2014 vol xlIX no 19
Alongside of modern evils, a whole series of inherited evils oppress us,
arising from the passive survival of antiquated modes of production,
with their inevitable train of social and political anachronisms. We
suffer not only from the living, but from the dead. Le mort saist le vif!
We are seized by the dead!
– Karl Marx, Capital, Vol I.
The people who laid the spark to the mine will be swept away by the
explosion, which will be a thousand times as strong as they themselves
and which will seek its vent where it can, as the economic forces and
resistances determine.
– Frederick Engels, “To Vera Zachulich”, 23 April 1885.
Pre-capitalist Societies and the Problems
of ‘Direct Socialism’
K
arl Marx’s late writings on non-western societies have
largely not been recognised by the established left in
India, despite Theodor Shanin’s Late Marx and the Rus-
sian Road and Kevin Anderson’s Marx and the Margins that
have through different perspectives argued for understanding
social formations in non-European societies from a non-Euro-
pean viewpoint. The lack of articulating this very important
aspect of Marxism has led to the tendency to understand non-
European societies from the Mao Tse-tung-inspired articula-
tion of agrarian societies. This has missed out Marx’s impor-
tant contributions as he had envisioned in his Ethnological
Notebooks, a work that was published only partially and for the
first time in 1974 by Lawrence Krader. Even stalwarts of Indian
history like Irfan Habib had said that these Notebooks were
“not available to me” (2006: XXIV). The impression one got of
Marx’s understanding of India was only from his articles in the
New York Tribune from 1853-61 and the Marx-Frederick Engels
correspondence (1852-62).
The result was that the study of complex social formations
and their internal dynamics was missed out. What was missed
out was also the dynamics that could lead these societies
directly to socialism without going through the process of cap-
italism. Not much has been said of this form of “direct social-
ism”. A brief note on this is therefore extremely necessary.
Writing in the early 1880s, especially after the then Narodnik
radical Vera Zasulich had written to Marx about the problems
of socialist action in pre-capitalist Russia, Marx had claimed
that Russia because of “unique combinations of circum-
stances” could compel the village commune to discard its
primitive features and develop “collective production on a
national scale”, where one need not go through the “dreadful
vicissitudes” of capitalism (1970: 153).
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SPECIAL ARTICLE
What has been the tragic irony of history is that the very same
“dreadful vicissitudes” of capitalism were carried through per-
fection by Josef Stalin. In this very ironic situation and inspired
by a form of revolutionary cynicism one seeks to chalk out a
path of direct socialism that is able to skip out the teleology of
these dreadful vicissitudes of capitalism. In this new reading
one proceeds to a non-teleological understanding of history
whereby it is possible to articulate the historical conjuncture of
class struggles in India and thereby find both the vanguard
classes and how a unity of the Indian popular classes is possible.
It is in this site that in more than one way the disconnect of
the mainstream political left from the labouring masses is
based on a strange form of spurious theorisation of India, that
almost misses out Marx’s original contributions to the study of
non-western societies. Despite Marx’s warnings in 1877 that
there could be “no general path of development prescribed for
all nations” (1975e: 293) and that historical materialism did
not have a “master-key” to study each and every society (ibid),
what happened is that even the best scholars theorising on
India worked with this general path of development prescribed
for all nations governed by the phantasmagorical master key.
Consider the following from Marx’s letter to Zasulich. Because
a form of Marxism articulated a theory of the iron laws of his-
tory, all history was seen as necessarily going through the
process from primitive communism via slave society, feudal-
ism and capitalism to socialism. Note Marx’s critique of this
point of view:
One should be on one’s guard when reading the histories of primitive
communities written by bourgeois historians. They do not stop at any-
thing, even outright distortion. Sir Henry Maine, for example, who was
an ardent active supporter of the British government in its policy of
destroying Indian communes by force, tells us hypocritically that all
noble efforts on the part of the government to support these communes
were thwarted by the elementary force of these laws! (1970: 154).
...
In my analysis of the origin of capitalist production I stated that its
secret lies in the fact that it is based on ‘divorcing the producer from the
means of production’ and that ‘the expropriation of the agricultural
producer, of the peasant, from the soil, is the basis of the whole process.
The history of this expropriation, in different countries, assumes dif-
ferent accepts...In England, alone, which we take as our example, has it
the classical form.’ In so doing I expressly limited the ‘historical inevita-
bility’ of this process to the countries of Western Europe (ibid: 152).
In the new reading of Marx, not only is the idea of “iron laws
of history”, but also the necessity and inevitability of capital-
ism is critiqued. What happened in the old reading of iron laws
of history was that one had a dislocation of real history from
the imagination of the hitherto known left scholars, so that the
most important “moment” (to borrow a term from Hegel) was
missed out, namely, the moment of class conjunctions and their
relation to the Indian caste system. This dislocation would not
allow the following: (1) the study of the emergence of the revo-
lutionary proletariat in India, (2) what caste means even today,
and (3) what the radical anti-caste thinkers from Jyotiba Phule
to Bhimrao Ambedkar meant to convey in their work and
understanding. This dislocation would not allow a radical left
imagination of the understanding of the programme of the
annihilation of caste and its relation to “direct socialism”.
42
In this site of direct socialism one can say that the stages
theory that the established left believes in, namely, that a
bourgeois democratic revolution has to precede a socialist
revolution is as false as the belief that history is an automaton
governed by a puppetmaster. One knows that Walter Benjamin
had critiqued this type of mechanical reasoning. Consider
Benjamin:
The story is told of an automaton constructed in such a way that it
could play a winning game of chess, answering each move of an
opponent with a countermove. A puppet in Turkish attire and with a
hookah in its mouth sat before a chessboard placed on a large table. A
system of mirrors created the illusion that this table was transparent
from all sides. Actually, a little hunchback who was an expert chess
player sat inside and guided the puppet’s hand by means of strings.
One can imagine a philosophical counterpart to this device. The pup-
pet called ‘historical materialism’ is to win all the time. It can easily be
a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which today, as
we know, is wizened and has to keep out of sight (1979: 255).
Since we all know that there is no expert chess player guid-
ing the established left’s hand and since we know that history
is no automaton, but comprised of real people with real needs,
one would have to rethink the idea of Indian history from a
radical left perspective.
Marx, the Asiatic Mode and ‘Hinduism’
as Symbolic Disorder
The Asiatic mode of production, a most controversial topic in
the social sciences today, is what has been termed by Brendan
O’Leary as the “most controversial mode of production” (1989:
7-39). The Indian left of whatever shade (the mainstream com-
munist parties of the Left Front, the Trotskyites, or the Mao-
ists) have never taken recourse to this idea. Despite Marx’s
usage of the concept this idea has not been accepted by Marxists,
since Stalin’s closing of all debates on the Asiatic mode in the
early 1930s. The Indian left uncritical reading of Marxism
through the tinted spectacles of the Soviet bureaucrats led to
Marxism being interpreted in a bureaucratic manner. Even
historians like Romila Thapar thought that Marx was wrong in
attributing this idea (1993: 10-11), whilst for Irfan Habib this
was a remnant of Eurocentrism which Marx somehow uncriti-
cally borrowed from Hegel (2006: XX-XXII).
To link the relation between the Indian variant of the Asiatic
mode of production and caste, it is necessary to emphasise
Marx’s statement that caste has been “the solid foundation of
Oriental despotism” (Marx 1976a: 40, Marx, 1975g: 80). To
those who thought that Marx excluded casteism from his his-
torical materialist repertoire, it is necessary to point out that
for him, caste was not only the “solid foundation” of Asiatic
despotism, but even in this despotism, it celebrated the “wild
aimless, unbounded forces of destruction” (Marx 1976a: 41),
based on “a sort of equilibrium, resulting from a general repul-
sion and constitutional exclusiveness, resulting between all its
members” (1976b: 81). Consider Marx’s 1853 observation on
this “constitutional exclusiveness”:
These idyllic republics where only the boundaries of their villages are
jealously guarded against the neighbouring village, still exist in a fairly
well-preserved form in the North-Western parts of India, which were
may 10, 2014 vol xlIX no 19 EPW Economic & Political Weekly

only recently acquired by the English. I do not think that one can
envisage a more solid foundation for Asiatic despotism and stagnation
(1975g: 80).
Despite post-structuralism’s infantile critique of what we
know as “essentialisms”, one needs to borrow two categories
from Hegel’s Science of Logic: essence (Wesen) and concept
(Begriff) in order to proceed to the understanding of Indian
social formations. The pertinent question, “what is the leitmo-
tif of Indian society and what is the ideology of the dominant
social classes-castes such thamt the Indian elites can discipline
and control the masses, thereby thwarting the revolution in
India?”, seems to elude thinkers. This is because they detach
the caste question from the larger genre of the Asiatic mode of
production. The answer seems to be simple – caste is not only
the subject of the Marxist basis, but the Hegelian essence and
concept that define social formations in India. Despite the
simplicity of the answer one needs a rigorous explanation in
order to unravel this bizarre “secret” of Indian civilisation. Let
us see how caste is an essential component of the Indian vari-
ant of the Asiatic mode. One cannot write caste off as being
accidental or contingent to India. Nor can one have the inno-
cent liberal theory (that the established left uncritically bor-
rowed) that modernity will see to the automatic withering
away of caste.
Instead one will hold with Marx in seeing caste as some sort
of neurosis in Indian civilisation whereby “when accidently
destroyed (caste), spring(s) up again on the spot and with the
same name” (Marx 1986: 338). One knows that this characteri-
sation has been challenged from thinkers as diverse as Edward
Said and Ashis Nandy to Irfan Habib who thought that Marx
was following the European travellers’ tales of Indian society,
as a society having no history. Instead we need a different
articulation of history (or histories), where the singular form
of an onward march-past of history known to us since the
European Enlightenment is challenged with a multiple and
over-determined form of many histories. In this method, not
only the onward account of history, but also counter-revolu-
tionary history is accounted for, the latter understood as the
neurotic account of history.
This neurotic account of history we borrow from Freud’s
account of the obsession neurosis where the neurotic patient is
cured of the initial trauma, only to be struck by the same
trauma. The psychoanalytic reading of the neurotic’s obses-
sion to repeat (the selfsame trauma) is then brought in the
register of history as the eternal recurrence of the selfsame
trauma. We have thus two accounts of motion in historical
materialism: the forward moving one and the neurotic one. Our
reading of caste is inserted in this neurotic account of history.
A Second Reading of Caste
But there is also a second reading of caste within the Marxist
register. One will also hold with Marx that caste is also a form
of what he called in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts
of 1844 as the “estranged mind” (1982: 129), a mind that takes
the form of cultural and political cretinism. This is so because
this caste-based cretinism is based on two rigorously-defined
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SPECIAL ARTICLE
concepts: the “regression of thinking” that we borrow from
Theodor Adorno and the “divided self” from David Lang. Be-
cause caste is essentially based on this idea of the “divided
self”, which itself is based on the “regression of thinking”, we
claim that this form of caste-cretinism in India enforced the
order that even though wars and famines raged over it, the caste-
inflicted Indian forgot them and was obsessed only with his mis-
erable caste identity. That is why “caste is both a neurosis as well
as a cretinism”. With colonialism and industrialisation, classes
also evolved, and with this evolution one saw a simultaneous
evolution of the Indian form of modern neurosis and cretinism
that crystallised in present-day communal-fascism. In noting
this neurosis one will also have to put the psychoanalytical
thinking hat on, besides considering Marx and Bhimrao
Ambedkar’s views on the need for a casteless, classless society.
There are a number of points that one needs to note on the
specificity of Indian history. For one, it has been noted that the
Asiatic state did not emerge merely from class contradictions
(a point that Irfan Habib critiques), but emerged as an Asiatic
bureaucratic elite which is itself part of an economic system
(Sawer 1977: 101). This fusion of the economic base and the
ideological and political superstructure is the peculiarity of
the Asiatic state. Secondly concentration was not merely based
on economic differences, but on social ones built on the princi-
ple of social stratification (ibid), especially the stratification
based on the totem of purity and the taboo of pollution. The
third point is extremely contentious and needs debating,
namely, the point of the absence of private property in land-
ownership in the Asiatic mode. Those who insist on this logic of
the absence of private property in the west European sense
claim that this led to not only the totalitarian and authoritarian
state in India, but also the lack of individuation and a “civilisa-
tional” lethargy, where the neurotic account of history would
eventually merge with an Asian Confucianism. It is this which
impeded economic and political development (ibid: 102).
One way of conceptualising this character of neurosis and
domination is to understand the Indian national movement,
especially after the coming of Bal Gangadhar Tilak followed
by Mohandas Gandhi’s absolute domination of the national
imagination. Perry Anderson’s The Indian Ideology follows this
trajectory of thinking as to how the ruling political discourses
of independent India were based on Gandhi’s betrayal of the
popular classes. What we would like to do is to relate this form
of domination and relate it with the infamous 10th Mandala of
the Rigveda where the brahmins claimed absolute authority
through the control of speaking and thinking – they were the
original constructors of what Louis Althusser calls the “Ideo-
logical State Apparatus” – whilst the other (more populous)
classes were degraded into the non-thinking and non-speak-
ing people. What happens in this neurotic understanding is
that the selfsame brahmins exist in the realm of the ideologi-
cal state apparatus, whilst the popular classes are designated
as what we call after Herbert Marcuse as the “great refusal”.
The tragedy is that not only did Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and
the Indian liberals perfect this macabre “art” of the ideological
state apparatus; the established left too in a very uncanny way
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adopted this model (albeit unconsciously and unwittingly)
where the politburo became a set of the speaking and thinking
brahmins.
It is this space of caste as neurosis, cretinism and lethargy;
conceptualised within the larger space of the Asiatic mode
that the revolutionary left is able to engage with the radical
politics of Ambedkar. In contrast to the established left’s
largely economistic account of politics, the radical left has to
engage this form of political practice that involves a cultural
revolution. This radical left claims that brahminism is the
name of this neurotic and lethargic Indian form of Asian Con-
fucianism and the destruction of brahminism is the necessary
condition for the making of socialism. Just as the French Revo-
lution needed the Enlightenment and the destruction of feu-
dalism and clerical ideology, the Indian revolution needs the
destruction of not only brahminism, but also Hinduism (based
on the caste order) per se. Now those well acquainted with the
writings of Ambedkar know that this was his basic thesis.
Since we are talking of “Hinduism” as symbolic disorder, a
small note on this fuzzy fetish called “Hinduism” is necessary, not
only because of the capacity by the fascist Rashtriya Swayam-
sevak Sangh (RSS) to mobilise on the basis of “Hindutva” also
necessary because the entire liberal democratic project of
Nehruvian democracy is placed within the politics of “suspi-
cion”. In this sense we do not critique only the fascist forces,
but we also critique liberal democracy. In this critique we
claim that the projects of both “Hinduism” (from the colonial
period), and the “Indian nation” are fetishes, both created by
the mechanisms of colonial capital and British administration.
Though one knows that the very term “Hinduism” has Per-
sian origins (at least since the times of the Achaemenid Persian
empire, i e, at least since 550 BC), what we know today as
“Hinduism” has little to do with these origins, and everything
to do with colonial administration, That is why we say that
“Hinduism” is a colonial fetish and a Westphalian imposition
on India. Thus the very idea of the “Indian nation” (even in its
liberal democratic form) had to obliterate its earlier cultural
narrative of the popular classes that comprised subaltern lan-
guages and cultures stretching from west Asia to the Indian
subcontinent for a sterile homogeneous narrative or a “Hindu-
istic” narrative. This narrative took the brahminical overlord-
ship model from the Adi Shankara-led counter-revolution, and
through the romantic version of Hinduism and India from Wil-
liam Jones, Maurice Winternitz and Max Müller (who con-
structed the false equation: Hinduism=Aryan civilisation) to
Aurobindo and Vivekananda and then politicised by Bankim
Chandra, Tilak and Gandhi. Caste was the hidden leitmotif that
bound these three narratives – the Adi Shankara led one, the
romantic and the Gandhian political narratives. Both the liberal
democracy of the Nehruvian state and the communal-racist and
fascist version of Damodar Savarkar and M S Golwalkar were
the culmination of this brahminical counter-revolutionary nar-
rative. Again, caste would be the leitmotif and the base, as well
as the Hegelian essence of these political narratives.
But with the emergence of the fascist RSS, in totally dictating
its communal-capitalist agenda, can one articulate the caste
44
question – especially in the era of capitalist modernity – along-
side the race question? Remember that for M S Golwalkar (the
second leader of the RSS) as he claims in We, or Our Nation
Defined, the national question is also the race question. Just as
the assimilation of castes in traditional Hinduism is not possible,
the assimilation of races is simply not possible for this fascist
narrative. It is in this site that we ask the very important ques-
tion: “Is casteism then equivalent to racism?” Do we say that
besides the class question (within the Indian variant of the
Asiatic mode of production), would caste also include a racist
form of exclusion? Would “Hinduism” as symbolic disorder also
be a form of racism, albeit a non-European form of racism?
Marx, Ambedkar and the ‘Hindu’ Counter-revolution
A note on Ambedkar’s reading of the Hindu counter-revolution
is necessary in order to place our argument in its proper con-
text. In this little note one needs to locate Ambedkar as a
Gramscian philosopher of praxis and his thought as a Lukác-
sian critique of reified consciousness. A reading of caste and
Hinduism as a “symbolic disorder” is based on this Gramscian
and Lukácsian critique. According to Ambedkar this infamous
“Hindu” counter-revolution is based on two premises: “graded
inequality” and “division of labourers”. This counter-revolution
started with Adi Shankara’s theological coup against the egali-
tarian Buddhist order and in privileging the parasitic brah-
minical priests and condemning the artisan and craftsmen as
unclean untouchables. According to this type of reading, this
counter-revolution privileged the infamous “spiritualisation”
thesis over the indigenous sciences.
Here one needs to state that E M S Namboodiripad had also
followed this trajectory of thinking alongside of his (one time)
acceptance of Marx’s idea of the Asiatic mode of production.
One must also note that though the established left has ignored
this thesis, quite recently Prabhat Patnaik has raised these
issues (2009). Since Patnaik raises the question of the Asiatic
mode, one needs to refer back to his thesis. According to him
(he is talking of Namboodiripad’s “overall sense of Indian
history”) there are the following points to be noted:
(1) That there is a remarkable continuity in Indian history,
where “breaks” and “transitions” are to be considered only as
“superimpositions”.
(2) This qualifies for the thesis of the relatively unchanging
nature of Indian and other Asian societies.
(3) The fundamental fact of this Asiatic mode was that the “in-
dividual does not become independent of the community”
(this is quote from Marx’s Pre-capitalist Social Formations).
(4) The absence of private property in land, along with the
thesis of the unity of agriculture and manufacture.
(5) The importance of irrigation and the role of the centralised
state that absorbed the surplus leaving little room for a proto-
bourgeois to emerge.
The most important point that Patnaik raises (which is rele-
vant for our discussion) is on the ideological hegemony of brah-
minism which contributed immensely to the stagnation of soci-
ety. Whilst he mentions Namboodiripad and the Marxist philo-
sopher Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya, the echoing of Ambedkar’s
may 10, 2014 vol xlIX no 19 EPW Economic & Political Weekly

voice can also be heard. According to this argument just as
Confucianism retarded the development of Chinese society, in
India it was brahminism institutionalised by Adi Shankara’s
theological counter-revolution that laid the basis for India’s
ideological retardation. Brahminism created the ideology of
“Indian spiritualisation” and the political economy of brah-
minical overlordship by denouncing the artisans and their sci-
entific practices. This entrenched itself so much so that brah-
minism as the dominant ideology appears as akin to Marx’s
figurative “sack of potatoes”. The fact that even today the
ghost of this brahminical spirit is being raised once again by
not only the right-wing organisations like the RSS, but also by
the now prosperous middle class who have benefited from
neo-liberal capitalism. What has happened is that this awful
ghost continues to haunt modern India leading to not only the
segregation of people and the damaging of democracy and the
sciences, but also in the regular riots and violence among the
marginalised populations of the country. Let us have a look at
Patnaik’s reading:
The ideological hegemony of Brahminism contributed to the stagna-
tion of Indian society, not just by preventing a revolt of the exploited
classes; it did so in another way as well, which EMS elaborated some-
how later, basing himself on the work of the great Marxist philoso-
pher, Debiprasad Chattopadhyay. And it was by arresting the growth
of science and technology, and hence of the productive forces beyond
a point. Chattopadhyay had argued that the triumph of Brahminism
under Adi Shankara represented not only a reinforcement of the caste-
system in the country, but a demise of science and hence of advances
in technology. Paradoxically according to Chattopadhyay, the much
celebrated triumph of Adi Shankara was the harbringer of a dark age
when India lost the edge it had in scientific advances in mathematics,
astronomy and other branches of learning, because of both the ideo-
logical and social implications of the triumph of idealism over materi-
alism; and since, as Lenin said in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, a
scientist must be a materialist in practice, this represented a setback to
science, and hence to technological advance. Socially, since the practi-
tioners of technology, the artisans and craftsmen, were those who
typically belonged to the ‘lower castes’, the counter-revolution ushered
by Adi Shankara means a social downgrading, and hence implicit
devaluing, of technological advances (2009: 5-6).
A Very Different Bourgeois
Two important points emerge here. If a scientist must be a ma-
terialist in practice (to borrow this Leninist phrase) and if the
caste-based brahminical overlordship did not allow a radical
bourgeois to emerge that would challenge caste and along
with it a form of commercial and usurious capital class that
stunted the growth of manufacturing capital, then the form of
the emergence of the bourgeois that emerged in India had
to be very different from that of Europe. Thus if 19th century
liberalism, as the guiding doctrine of western Europe,
emerged as a new ideology to meet the needs of a new world of
rising capitalism in which privilege and status were replaced
by the celebrated theory of social contract which served as
the judicial foundation of society. While in western Europe,
science not only replaced religion as the dominant factor in
giving shape to social ideas but also delegitimised religion;
in the Indian subcontinent the new order even post-1947
could not get rid of the old order. That caste did not wither
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away was also because the liberal elites compromised with the
old order.
If Lenin had said that a scientist must be a materialist in
practice and if the artisans of ancient India who were the prac-
titioners of technology were downgraded by the Adi Shankara-
led counter-revolution (as also the downgrading of their scien-
tific practice), then brahminical overlordship which defeated
the oppressed people and constituted a victory of idealism
over materialism laid the fertile ground for the lethargy and
sluggishness of Indian civilisation. Though both urban as well
as rural India, through the process of what David Harvey calls
“accumulation through dispossession”, is bearing the full force
of capitalism, we also have the burden of pre-capitalist past
standing on our urban and rural heads. In this great burden of
traditions we unfortunately continue with this spiritualistic
lethargy even today. This has been sanctified by not only the
past village traditions accompanied by idealist philosophies of
19th century neo-Hinduism manufactured by Aurobindo and
Vivekananda, but primarily through both the living reality of
caste-stratified India as well by the spiritualist-phantasmagoria
that Gandhi institutionalised. The name of this lethargy and
sluggishness is the “Hindu counter-revolution”, first started by
Shankara and then made successful in modern times by
Gandhi. It is in this perspective that one says that Gandhi has
played a more counter-revolutionary role than the Hindutva
right-wing led by Savarkar and Golwalkar.
One will consequently have to look at the idea of the Asiatic
mode of production from a perspective other than that of both
Eurocentrism and the post-structuralist discourses influenced
by Edward Said. The unchanging character of pre-capitalist
India that Marx talked of is to be seen in three perspectives:
(1) that of the economic base where a form of sedentary type of
culture arose based on a tributary mode of production (Alatas
1993: 29-30), (2) where the Asiatic state because of its heavy
investments in irrigation projects absorbed the surplus leaving
little room for what Marx calls “productive consumption”
(Marx 1986: 536), thereby suppressing the emergence of a
dynamic proto-bourgeois and the development of both cities
and the sciences, thus leaving the caste-based agriculture
economy and culture dominating the Indian life-world (Patnaik
2009), and (3) the brahminical counter-revolution that syn-
thesised the above two points in the realms of theology, rituals
and ideology.
Though colonial capitalism broke the backbone of the vil-
lage economies and thus did initiate a break in the political
economy of the jajmani agrarian caste system, it would fall in
this same sort of neurotic logic: it destroyed the unity of man-
ufacture and agriculture; destroyed the artisans and their
technologies, and like the earlier counter-revolution privileged
the same phantasmagoric “spiritual” Indian civilisation. Gandhi,
as we very well know, would use this same logic of spiritual
phantasmagoria. Independent India (despite the thoughts of
Phule, Periyar, the trade union movement and Ambedkar) could
not develop a materialist logic that could grip the national im-
agination and thereby overthrow the old and moribund order
of things. “Spiritualisation”, the terrible commodity that the
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Indian bourgeoisie could produce for the world market, was
found in abundance in independent India. Confucian lethargy
and the neurotic-unchangeable character could not be thus
very far behind. One could reflect on this character by a his-
torical reading of the Indian peasantry:
But for rare possible exceptions Indian peasant farming was organized
on individualistic lines. Each peasant had his own separate holding.
Owing to land abundance, land in most areas had little or no price, but
seed and cattle were important forms of peasant property, and indi-
vidual ownership must necessarily have given rise to stratification
within the peasantry, even if other causative factors are ignored. At
the same time, the Indian village presented the appearance of a
closed, custom-based social and economic unit. The close settlement
of peasant households and the need for peasant migrations to move in
a body, for better protection, furnished the basis for a collective or-
ganization of peasants, within the framework of clan and caste, the
Indian village community (Habib 1995: 185).
Caste, Pre-capitalism, and Global Accumulation
of Capital
There is also another fact that necessitates that caste-based
pre-capitalist social formations are a dire need for global capi-
tal accumulation. Here one needs to articulate Marx’s idea of
capitalism-at-the-periphery differently from the model of west
European capitalism that broke the shackles of feudalism. The
Indian variant of capitalism-at-the-periphery could not break
its caste-based past. Rosa Luxemburg’s idea of the necessity of
pre-capitalist formations in the dialectic of capitalist exchange
of commodities (1972: 61-62, 77) has to be invoked here. Con-
sequently the intrusion of capitalism in Asia has not brought in
“pure capitalism” – capitalism with “free labour”. Instead it
would bring in capitalism with a form of unfree labour, labour
that has the stamp of caste marked on its unfortunate fore-
head. That labour in India exits as both free and unfree labour,
and within the parameters of caste stratification should not
shock anyone. Consequently when one conceptualises the dra-
matic changes that capitalism has brought to India, the neuro-
sis of caste has also to be kept in mind. Capitalist change comes
along with the neurotic unchanging character. The problem is
that the progressive forces in India have not been able to sweep
away the forces of regression and state-sponsored supersti-
tion. One is thus compelled to say that if in Europe “science
rebelled against the church”, as Engels said, “the bourgeoisie
could not do without science, and, therefore had to join in the
rebellion” (1975b: 383); in India things would turn out to be
different. The unchanging would return to haunt India.
One is also compelled to say that if the European bourgeoi-
sie could get what Marx and Engels call an “upper hand”
where it struck at “feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations” (1975:
38), the Indian bourgeoisie could not strike its idyllic past. In
India, capitalist self-interest and egoistical calculation coin-
cided with patriarchal, idyllic relations. If in Europe exploita-
tion veiled, as Marx and Engels put it, “by religious and politi-
cal illusions” is substituted with “naked, shameless, direct,
brutal exploitation” (ibid); in India (as in great parts of Asia:
one only has to look at the mullahs in Iran and Pakistan and
their counterpart, the RSS fascists) “religious and political illu-
sions” and “naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation”
46
(ibid) are neatly synthesised. If the European bourgeoisie
constantly revolutionised the instruments of production and
the relations of production, breaking all “fixed, fast-frozen
relations with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices
and opinions” (ibid), in India it is these relations with their
train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions which
refuse to leave the scene of history. The core, or what one may
call after Marx the “cell-form” (1986: 19) of these ancient and
venerable prejudices is caste. The superstructural train of pre-
judices runs on the rails of the caste system.
One thought that modernity and modern industry would
destroy caste, but caste sat comfortably on the seat of this
modern industry. True, caste alliances and power structures
change continuously, but caste per se refuses to leave. It has to
be (to borrow Ambedkar’s term) “annihilated”. Once one has
struck this awful schizophrenic system, one should also be
able to strike at the train of ancient and venerable prejudices.
Marx’s basic categories of historical materialism need slight
amendment: caste then is understood as the base, whilst
insanity is the superstructure. According to the grand logic of
the universal laws of history it was the bourgeoisie who would
strike both caste and superstition. Instead the bourgeoisie
accommodated themselves in the retrogressive group, which
included representatives of finance capital sharing space with
the most “modern” industrialists besides leaders from the RSS
and khap panchayat leaders.
That is why an analysis of caste in the age of late imperial-
ism in permanent crisis needs detailed analysis with its double
roots in brahminical counter-revolution and colonialism. The
caste system is at the centre of not only neurotic-lethargy but
also at the centre of the Indian counter-revolution. In this
sense, with a certain sense of irony, one could say following
Engels that if “the great international center of feudalism was
the Roman Catholic Church (which) united the whole of feu-
dalised Western Europe into a grand political system” (1975:
383), then one could also say that the Indian caste system
unites the reactionary system in India into the same grand sys-
tem of not only idyllic republics, but schizophrenic communi-
ties. Just as the Europeans in the times of the bourgeois revo-
lutions had to destroy the influence of the pre-capitalist insti-
tutions and practices led by the Church, one needs to destroy
the caste system.
Since capitalism in India (one should call it “surrogate capi-
talism”) is not the capitalism that emerged in the liberal epoch
that needed to sweep away pre-capitalist remnants, the anti-
caste revolution could not be carried out in the bourgeois
epoch. Instead as Indian capitalism emerged during the period
of colonialism and stuck its roots in the times of imperialism
and the global crisis of capital accumulation, its backwardness
was inscribed deep in its belly. The “image of the future” was
not going to be that of the galloping world market, the emer-
gence of the educated middle classes steeped in science and
technology and so-called high culture. Instead, backward-
nesss and underdevelopment, along with surplus development
is the essence of world capitalism. Capital accumulation is
necessarily interlocked with various pre-capitalist economic
may 10, 2014 vol xlIX no 19 EPW Economic & Political Weekly

formations. In the logic of uneven development and unequal
exchange, the pre-capitalist caste figure would return once
again. This is in both economic terms of commodity exchange
as well as in terms of reactionary politics carried out by both the
liberal Congress Party and the communal Bharatiya Janata Party.
Since the vision of the Indian bourgeoisie was too much
locked up in the horizons set by its brahminical and colonial
parents, it could not lead this bourgeois revolution. It was for
the left to undertake an annihilation of caste and the system of
human slavery, racism, patriarchy and superstition that the
caste system actively propagated. And since, as even Nehru
had noted that “many a Congressman was a communalist
under his national cloak” (2001: 136), and since we know from
Ambedkar that the Congress Party would not go for social
reform, but hand over this process of reform to the reactionary
Hindu Mahasabha (1945: 23), the burden of change would
have to be with the left. But then did the left fulfil this very
basic task it was to supposed to fulfil?
How does one understand this very peculiar mode of social
stratification and control, where caste as clannish oligarchy, is
understood in theory and then destroyed in practice? How
does this type of Marxist humanism at the same time become
a popular philosophy that is able to grip the masses? In a cer-
tain way just as the Marxists after Marx betrayed revolution-
ary Marxism by substituting the abolition of the class system
with the preservation and maintenance of classes, so too the
Ambedkarites became the Stalinists of the dalit movement.
They do not want to annihilate caste – they want to preserve it.
Caste is basically inherited class status, or simply frozen
classes that are reified and hypostasised and based on segrega-
tion. Caste is a status that is based on the double ideas of graded
inequality and division of labourers, sanctioned on theological
grounds and built on the metaphysical opposition of “cleanli-
ness/uncleanliness” has found itself a breeding place in neo-
liberal India. The upper castes led by the once-upon-a-time
priestly castes who besides being priests were also considered
as scholars and ideologists and the interpreters of Dharma (the
Hindu moral law) have returned onto the scene of Indian poli-
tics. Sometimes the counter-revolutionary appears riding a
chariot chiding the masses to enforce religious war (the case of
L K Advani in 1992), sometimes it is the case of a deluded media
sponsoring a regressive yoga teacher (Baba Ramdev). One
must note that the counter-revolutionaries transform the tradi-
tional structure of caste-stratification (brahmin vs the shudras)
onto the new plane of communal-fascist stratification (Hindu
vs the Muslims) to build their fascist politics.
One should understand caste as a structure of human alien-
ation and a form of social exclusion. Remember that Trotsky
used the word “caste” to point out that the bureaucratic Stalinist
state was akin to the age-old Asiatic caste structure where all
forms of human morality was erased (2005: 40, 2006: 102, 214,
256). Revolutionary Marxism thus has to note what Ambedkar
meant by saying: “Hindu society had its morals loosened to a
dangerous point” (1943: 30), and what Hegel meant when he
said that there is no “moral sentiment” with the ruling ideology
of India. This is because the ruling ideology of Hinduism is
Economic & Political Weekly EPW may 10, 2014 vol xlIX no 19
SPECIAL ARTICLE
based on the prohibition of the mixture of castes, i e, prohibi-
tion of the varna-sankara (Hegel 1995: 17, 19, 51).
Something is rotten in this estranged state of India, and it
has not yet been cleared away.
Caste and the Question of the ‘Alienation Effect’
Ambedkar’s note of the brahmin as what he called the “alien
element” of Hindu society (2008d: 147) through Bertolt
Brecht’s idea of the “alienation effect” is an idea that we trans-
fer from Brechtian theater to Indian sociology. In this idea of
the alienation effect we will see the method of annihilating
caste, a method that one will need to locate in Marx’s Economic
and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. This is the way the
method works. It relates caste as a fragmented social system
with modern alienated reality. Anxiety, despair, and accept-
ance of the ruling ideas of the ruling classes are among the
prevailing forms of reified capitalist consciousness. How this
reified capitalist consciousness now manifests in caste needs
to be articulated. After all, caste as the term itself implies (as
both varna and jati) is a system of “cutting off” (as the Portu-
guese word castus implies) human beings from one another.
Consequently caste involves this alienated process of “cutting
off” humanity from itself, a form of alienation that is built on
the notion of purity and pollution. In this sense caste is directly
related to alienation. In this case one will have to rethink the
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 in relation to the
caste question. One will also have to rethink the role of the left
in remaining away from the Ambedkar movement, as if, the
proletarian movement left to its own mechanisms would auto-
matically resolve the caste question.
The role of the Indian Stalinists and the betrayals of liberal-
ism and social democracy, have to be pointed out in fragment-
ing the unity of the popular classes and in not solving the real
social problems of India. In contrast to the Stalinists and the
liberals, we are viewing Marx’s views of the Indian caste-based
villages as particularist, inward looking and apartheid driven
– “restraining the human mind within the smallest compass,
making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it be-
neath traditional rules”, as Marx famously summed up the
caste-based anti-human condition (1976a: 40). The tragedy of
the democratic movement is that because the left could not
articulate the centrality of caste, the modern class system
fused and mimicked the caste-form of the Indian variant of
human alienation.
We must thus insist on the fault of the Indian caste system as
inhibiting the rise of the insurrectionist proletariat. If Hegel
had said in his Science of Logic that the beginning (of his logic)
is not lost, one could ironically say that the caste system is
never ever lost. If Marx had conceptualised capitalism as the
system of human alienation, one needs to re-draft this theory
to explain the caste system.
We insist that not only is it a peculiar system of class – or rei-
fied and ossified classes based on the ontology of segregation
– but it is also the equivalent to race in the south Asian sense.
“Varna”, one must insist, means “colour”, and social classifica-
tions and stratification are according to race-inspired markers.
47
SPECIAL ARTICLE
Whether varna, as it appeared in Vedic literature, implied the
“race” perception of the early Vedic Indo-Iranian warrior
tribes’ disdain for the dark-skinned dasas and mlecchas of the
Gangentic plain is debatable. But with the fusion of the Vedic
fetishes with the fascist imagination since the 1920s – remember
that the Nazis were fond of Vedic literature, Heinrich Himmler
the Reichsführer himself was an avid reader of early Hinduism
and had with him a leather-bound version of the Bhagavad Gita
– caste, as we know it, has been mobilised as racism.
Why do we insist again that casteism (at least in its modern
bourgeois avtar) is equivalent to racism? It is in the double-
bind of class and race that we reimagine caste and its process
of its economic base of stratification, clannishness and frag-
mentation; and its ideological superstructure of superstition
and rituals, whereby the upper-caste elites govern through
this very strange type of power and control. If one wants to
understand the basic classes in India, if one has to reimagine
the proletariat, one has to actively confront this very strange
and uncanny apparatus. The uncanny (das Unheimlich), as we
know from Freud, is the feeling of dread and terror (1990).
Since the fascist RSS has classified the Muslims in the same
caste-like hierarchical manner, the importance of understand-
ing and annihilating this uncanny and dreadful system is of
extreme importance.
In this case one will have to say that the articulation of caste
in the age of late imperialism in permanent crises has to be
articulated differently than those that we find in the early dis-
courses of Hibert Risley, John Nesfield, Emile Senart, Max
Weber and Louis Dumont. One may also add that late imperi-
alism will also compel and necessitate a different articulation
than those found in the works of D D Kosambi, Namboodiri-
pad, M N Srinivas, Sharad Patil, Nicholas Dirks and Christophe
Jaffrelot. Caste in this sense is no longer class on a primitive
level of production. It is an essential part of the most modern
of moderns, mimicking not only the German form of fascism,
but also the Israeli form of imperialist occupation.
Since caste has hitherto been taken merely as some sort of
primitive division of labour – this was D D Kosambi’s view –
(2000: 50), sketched in the iron-clad mechanics of history
devoid of the terrible consequences – here one would imply
fascist implications – one needs to take a radical Indian Franz
Fanonist position that it is not a mere division of labour
(Ambedkar 2008b: 385). It is both a “legal system of pains and
penalties” that subjugates the proletariat (ibid: 386), as well as a
system of psychosis when it conveniently forgets its apartheid
type of social control. To Indian democrats who curse Marx
and swear by Gandhi one needs recalling Ambedkar again:
“Gandhism may be well suited to a society which does not
accept democracy as an ideal” (2008c: 159). In this sense one
needs to recall Slavoj Žižek who in his 2010 Sarai lecture called
Gandhi a “social fascist”. To do so one needs to not stick to the
old Comintern definitions of fascism, but to radically create
and recreate new ones, definitions that are suitable for India
and to the space of multilinear historicism.
It is from this epistemic articulation that comprehends caste
from the perspective of global capital accumulation that one
48
relates caste with modern classes. The latter, one must insist,
emerges from the former. Modern economic classes emerge from
the caste system. Caste is not something that is outside the ambit
of class struggle. Further it also ought to be noted that imperial-
ism does not merely involve the exchange of unequals, and conse-
quently needs the existence of pre-capitalist social formations,
but also requires caste and clan-based organisations – not only
the fascist RSS and the Shiv Sena, but alongside them conserva-
tive organisations penetrating into many areas of society – that
would not only sabotage revolutionary processes and break the
unity of the popular classes, but also derail bourgeois-democratic
processes. After all, if one was to see the political economy behind
the RSS (and its pogroms), one will find the phenomena of the
saffron dollar, just as one would see the Wahabi-petro dollar be-
hind the rise of conservatism in the minorities. In this case if Ham-
let was to answer Polonius’s question: “What do you read my
lord?”, Hamlet’s response would not have been “words, words,
words”; but: “dollars, dollars, dollars”.
It is well known that “the betrayal of socialism”, as Raya
Dunayevskaya once said, “came from within the socialist
movement” (1982: 106). In this case of betrayal what one needs
is a re-emergence of revolutionary Marxism, that itself needs a
creative and activist reimagining of Marxism. Revolutionary
Marxism is not reactive like the political practice of our con-
temporary parliamentary comrades trained in both brahmani-
cal overlordship and Eurocentrism.
Brahmanical overlordship has strangely also seeped in the
established left through the form of ignorance of the caste
question. It has also compelled the Indian left to think uncriti-
cally. Reified as a bourgeois parliamentary force, the estab-
lished left has ceased to become an active force. It has ceased
to think in terms of concrete analysis of concrete conditions. It
has thus become a reactive force. Since this parliamentary left
has become a reactive force that has foregone radical praxis, it
has let the fascists to create mass hysteria, mobilise on com-
munal grounds and engage in pogroms.
Another Space
Revolutionary Marxism, in contrast to the parliamentary left,
would not peacefully protest by passing a memorandum con-
demning the barbaric fascists. It would actively confront the
fascists. It would consequently set the agenda for politics in
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may 10, 2014 vol xlIX no 19 EPW Economic & Political Weekly
 SPECIAL ARTICLE

India. Since imperialism pervades the world, one will have to
actively transcend the nationalist imagination for a revolu-
tionary internationalism. From henceforth, Asian Soviets will
have to replace the traditional left parties. It will have to
widen the scope of freedom struggles, as to mean not only for
the freedom of labour (from capital), but also freedom of
oppressed nationalities from Kashmir to Kurdistan, from
Baluchistan to Palestine. For that one will also have to recreate
the idea of the specter of communism that will haunt the
global bourgeoisie. The arena of the struggle against capital-
ism and imperialism is much wider than imagined in the fan-
tasyland of the parliamentary struggle. It requires another
space. It also requires struggle unimaginable for the legal and
parliamentary Marxists. After all, the answer to Asiatic des-
potism, high capitalism and late imperialism in perpetual cri-
sis is not waiting at the doorsteps of Parliament for the revolu-
tion to begin. In this case the time for waiting may have, quite
possibly, ended.

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