Asiatic Mode of Production Caste and the Indian Left

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Economic & Political Weekly EPW may 10, 2014 vol xlIX no 19 41

Murzban Jal ([email protected]) is with the Indian Institute of Education, Pune.

Asiatic Mode of Production, Caste and the Indian Left

Murzban Jal

The study of Marxism in India has consciously

underestimated Karl Marxs 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.

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

Karl Marxs late writings on non-western societies have largely not been recognised by the established left in India, despite Theodor Shanins Late Marx and the Rus-sian Road and Kevin Andersons 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 Marxs impor-tant contributions as he had envisioned in his Ethnological Notebooks, a work that was published only partially and for the fi rst 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 Marxs 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 d irectly 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 n ational scale, where one need not go through the dreadful vicissitudes of capitalism (1970: 153).

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may 10, 2014 vol xlIX no 19 EPW Economic & Political Weekly42

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 fi nd 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 Marxs original contributions to the study of non-western societies. Despite Marxs 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 I ndia worked with this general path of development prescribed for all nations governed by the phantasmagorical master key. Consider the following from Marxs 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 Marxs critique of this point of view:

One should be on ones 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 s ecret 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 t oday, and (3) what the radical anti-caste thinkers from Jyotiba Phule to Bhimrao Ambedkar meant to convey in their work and u nderstanding. This dislocation would not allow a radical left imagination of the understanding of the programme of the a nnihilation of caste and its relation to direct socialism.

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 r evolution is as false as the belief that history is an automaton governed by a puppetmaster. One knows that Walter B enjamin 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 puppets 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 lefts 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 Hinduismas Symbolic Disorder

The Asiatic mode of production, a most controversial topic in the social sciences today, is what has been termed by Brendan OLeary 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 Marxs u sage of the concept this idea has not been accepted by Marxists, since Stalins 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 Marxs 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 Marxs 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

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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-structuralisms infantile critique of what we know as essentialisms, one needs to borrow two categories from Hegels 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 I ndia?, 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 defi ne social formations in India. Despite the s implicity 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 l iberal 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 Freuds a ccount 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 neurotics obses-sion to repeat (the selfsame trauma) is then brought in the r egister of history as the eternal recurrence of the selfsame trauma. We have thus two accounts of motion in historical m aterialism: 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-defi ned

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-infl icted 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 Ambedkars views on the need for a casteless, classless society.

There are a number of points that one needs to note on the specifi city 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 stratifi cation (ibid), especially the stratifi cation 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 Gandhis absolute domination of the national imagination. Perry Andersons The Indian Ideology follows this trajectory of thinking as to how the ruling political discourses of independent India were based on Gandhis 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 lefts 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 N ehruvian 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 Mller (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

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 Defi ned, 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 Ambedkars 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 Lukc-sian critique of reifi ed consciousness. A reading of caste and Hinduism as a symbolic disorder is based on this Gramscian and Lukcsian 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 Shankaras 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 Marxs idea of the Asiatic mode of production. One must also note that though the established left has i gnored this thesis, quite recently Prabhat Patnaik has raised these i ssues (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 Namboodiripads overall sense of I ndian h istory) 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 qualifi es 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 Marxs Pre-capitalist Social Formations).(4) The absence of private property in land, along with the t hesis 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 Ambedkars

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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 Shankaras theological counter-revolution that laid the basis for Indias ideological retardation. Brahminism created the ideology of Indian spiritualisation and the political economy of brah-minical overlordship by denouncing the artisans and their sci-entifi c practices. This entrenched itself so much so that brah-minism as the dominant ideology appears as akin to Marxs fi gurative 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 benefi ted 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 Patnaiks 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 scientifi c 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 d evaluing, 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 l iberalism, 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 I ndian subcontinent the new order even post-1947 could not get rid of the old order. That caste did not wither

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-tifi c 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 sanctifi ed 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-stratifi ed India as well by the spiritualist-phantasmagoria that Gandhi institutionalised. The name of this lethargy and sluggishness is the Hindu counter-revolution, fi rst started by Shankara and then made successful in modern times by G andhi. 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 infl uenced 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 d ynamic 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 theo logy, 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 (des pite 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 refl ect 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 stratifi cation 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 Accumulationof 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 Marxs 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 Luxemburgs 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 stratifi cation 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

(ibid) are neatly synthesised. If the European bourgeoisie c onstantly revolutionised the instruments of production and the relations of production, breaking all fi xed, fast-frozen r elations 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 Ambedkars 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.

Marxs basic categories of historical materialism need slight amendment: caste then is understood as the base, whilst i nsanity 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 a ccommodated themselves in the retrogressive group, which i ncluded representatives of fi nance 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 infl uence 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 e poch. 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 neces sarily interlocked with various pre-capitalist economic

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formations. In the logic of uneven development and unequal exchange, the pre-capitalist caste fi gure 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 J anata 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 u nder his national cloak (2001: 136), and since we know from Ambedkar that the Congress Party would not go for social r eform, 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 fulfi l this very basic task it was to supposed to fulfi l?

How does one understand this very peculiar mode of social stratifi cation 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 reifi ed 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-stratifi cation (brahmin vs the shudras) onto the new plane of communal-fascist stratifi cation (Hindu vs the Muslims) to build their f ascist 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

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

Ambedkars note of the brahmin as what he called the alien element of Hindu society (2008d: 147) through Bertolt B rechts 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 Marxs 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 reifi ed capitalist consciousness. How this reifi ed 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 Marxs 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-fi ed and ossifi ed 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 classifi ca-tions and stratifi cation are according to race-inspired markers.

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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 Reichsfhrer 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 stratifi cation, 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 classifi ed 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 fi nd in the early dis-courses of Hibert Risley, John Nesfi eld, Emile Senart, Max W eber 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 Kosambis view (2000: 50), sketched in the iron-clad mechanics of history d evoid 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 a ccept democracy as an ideal (2008c: 159). In this sense one needs to recall Slavoj iek who in his 2010 Sarai lecture called Gandhi a social fascist. To do so one needs to not stick to the old Comintern defi nitions of fascism, but to radically create and recreate new ones, defi nitions 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

r elates 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 fi nd 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 Poloniuss question: What do you read my lord?, Hamlets 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. Reifi ed 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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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 l abour (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 r equires 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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Asiatic Mode of Production Caste and the Indian Left