An imaginary letter from Karl Marx to Indian Communist Parties |
Dear Comrades,
I have watched, from a distance of time and circumstance, the trajectory of communist politics in your land. What troubles me is not that Marxism has lost relevance in India, but that it has lost its ability to translate itself into the language of lived life. The words you speak are right out of my lexicon - class, labour, surplus, exploitation - but I often do not recognise the society they are meant to describe.
Allow me to remind you of something you already know but either seem to forget or ignore: Marxism was never meant to be doctrine. It was meant to be a method and a lamp. If that lamp has dimmed, it is not because the night has ended, but because the flame has not been fed by the realities around it.
Your task, therefore, is not reinvention for its own sake or in the manner of reinventing the wheel. I shall also not advise you to abandon the fundamentals. What you require is an organic renewal - one that grows from the soil of Indian society rather than being imported wholesale from other histories and societies. And in undertaking this renewal, you must reject a false and debilitating opposition that has haunted your politics for decades: the separation of class from caste.
Caste, comrades, is not a cultural residue floating outside the political economy. It is a material system of graded inequality that long predates capitalism and has been remarkably compatible with it. Capitalism in India did not abolish caste; it learned to operate through it. To imagine otherwise is to misunderstand both capitalism and caste. It misplaces priorities for people's struggle as well.
Who owns land? Who performs the most degrading labour? Who bears the greatest risk and precarity? Who is denied dignity even when wages are paid? These questions cannot be........