My eldest brother brought Communism into our home in the 1950s as an activist of SF (Kerala Students Federation). A childhood friend lent me the Communist Manifesto to read when I was in Class 7. Marx has been there with me ever since alongside two other disparate companions viz, Protestant Christianity and politics of identity.
The famous potato metaphor of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte has helped me a lot in explaining why Dalits continue to be represented by others and not by themselves; and in linking this condition to their total lack of the four Bourdieuan capitals such as social (intellectual or professional networks), economic (land or wealth), cultural (good education) and symbolic (respect). Marx used the potato metaphor mainly to argue the relation between want of social capital and lack of self-representation among French peasants. For me, the symbolic capital which deals with the idea of respect and dignity is more important than the social or economic. The treatment of a person as untouchable and polluting (Govindapuram, Vadayampady, Ashanthan’s body, the ill-treatment of Dalit students and faculty by fellow students and learned colleagues reported from universities), and the daily humiliation such a person is subjected to cannot be resolved through subsidised rationing or use of euphemisms like ‘thozhilurappu’ for traditional scavenging. Adolfo Gilly says, ‘The essence of revolution is not the struggle for bread but the struggle for human dignity.’
Marx’s name is often used synonymous with revolution. But it was Fanon who explained the meaning of revolution to me in simple and clear words: ‘The last shall be first.’ Who are the ‘last’? Brahmins, or Dalits? Before Fanon, W.E.B.Du Bois warned the world about the question of the colour line. In India, Ambedkar raised the structural problem of caste, which the twice-born Communists dismissively dubbed as superstructural. But the Indian social structure is that of caste. It is the Base and not the superstructure. Gramsci’s notion of hegemony does not help to overcome this theoretical blindness of the communists who accuse Dalits of theoretical confusion. It is not Dalit confusion but the casteist attitude of the communists towards Dalits that leads to Dalit estrangement from the communists. How is revolution possible with caste intact? Ambedkar is right in asserting how caste effectively prevents the coalescence of the oppressed. And what space is provided by communists to Dalit leadership in the class-based struggles? Thanks to endogamy and heredity, even after 70 years of Independence, the chief means of transfer of wealth and power is through caste. This phenomenon is to be called caste politics and not the emergence of Kanshi Ram and Mayawati.
My idea of Marx
I understood Marx better with my acquaintance with writings of thinkers like Eric Fromm, Ivan Illyich, Paolo Freire, Fanon, Memmi, Ambedkar, Gutierrez, James Cone, Paul Lehmann, Foucault, Derrida, Zizek, Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams , E.P. Thompson, Hogarth, etc., feminists, leaders of the Countercultural movements, historians of the Subaltern Collective, and writers on new social movements. I would not have read them but for my love-hate relationship with Marx.
The author is a Dalit scholar
