வியாழன், 30 ஏப்ரல், 2015

The Marxist
Volume: 18, No. 03-04
July-December 2002
CLASS STRUGGLE AND CASTE OPPRESSION : INTEGRAL STRATEGY OF THE LEFT 

JAYANTANUJA BANDYOPADHYAYA

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Marxist Thinking on Caste in India

Karl Marx was the first thinker to draw sharp attention to the highly deleterious impact of caste on Indian society and its causal link with the relations of production. In his famous essay on The Future Results of British Rule in India Karl Marx characterized the Indian castes as “the most decisive impediment to India’s progress and power”. Marx correctly argued that the caste system of India was based on the hereditary division of labour, which was inseparably linked with the unchanging technological base and subsistence economy of the Indian village community. At that time he believed that British rule would undermine the economic and technological foundations of these primitive, self-sufficient, stagnant, and isolated village communities, particularly through the spread of railways. The industrialization and commercialization of India under British rule, facilitated by the spread of railways, would lead to the breakdown of the traditional village communities, and with them also the caste system. But Marx wrote later on that he had exaggerated the possible impact of the spread of railways on the traditional relations of production characterized by the Indian village community.2 The important point, however, is that Marx clearly and causally connected the archaic social formation of caste in India with the relations of production. It followed logically that the abolition of the caste hierarchy and the oppression and exploitation of the ‘lower’ castes could not be separated from the Marxian form of class struggle.
  Following this Marxian approach to the relationship between the class struggle and the struggle against caste oppression, the renowned Indian Marxist leader and thinker, E.M.S. Namboodiripad, placed the Marxian approach to the struggle against caste consciousness and caste oppression as a part of the class struggle in modern India when he  observed in 1979:
One has to realize that the building of India on modern democratic and secular lines requires an uncompromising struggle against the caste-based Hindu society and its culture. There is no question of secular democracy, not to speak of socialism, unless the very citadel of India’s ‘age-old’ civilization and culture – the division of society into a hierarchy of castes – is broken. In other words, the struggle for radical democracy and socialism cannot be separated from the struggle against caste society.3
The same year another Indian Marxist stalwart, B.T.Ranadive, regretted the fact that “there has been a certain neglect in the ideological struggle against caste and communalism”, a

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