Explain!

Since I am unable to understand many things you say, probably it is better to request you to explain. I shall insert where I need clarification.

"As you know, this point is as political as economic, though, strictly speaking, such distinction is meaningless beyond a point in Dalit Marxist analysis just as in any Marxist analysis."

I do not subscribe to your understanding of Marxism here. To say that such points are strictly meaningless beyond a point in Marxist analysis is a crudest distortion of Marxian method. The point may be meaningless for your Dalit Marxist analysis but not for Marxism. By this, do you mean there is no difference between what is called political and what is known as economic? Do you even claim that Marxism thinks so?

"I am not clear what do you mean by “specificity or uniformity of labor form or labor process,” Comrade, trust me, I am really not at all clear what do you mean by this phrase? Please explain! In this connection (neither clarification nor explanation) you said: 1. “Labour form specific to each mode of production” 1. That you referred to Engels’ text “Principles of Communism.” Still, I don’t know what you mean. Could you please explain? You are free, of course, to heap any number of insults while doing it, but please explain!

By highlighting the work of Engels (Principles of Communism) in my post I have made it clear what I mean by labour form specific to each mode of production. To say that you are not clear about my expression only underlines your theoretical ignorance of Marx and Engels.

"At a different level, one is surprised that you think Dalits should embody a uniform labor process in India." I still ask this question. It is not enough for you to assert that I was wrong and misrepresenting when I asked you the meaning of a line you wrote and switch over to some other issue. It is not useful to avoid the responsibility to explain your own words when asked to.  

This is not true. It is your wrong inference/ interpretation of my writing. My conflict with your use of 'Dalit' prefixing Marxism is fundamentally related to the specificity of labour form associated with each mode of production. The category you are prefixing Marxism does not necessarily embody a specific labour form typical of the capitalist mode of production. Tell us, why a prefix has to do with “a specific labour form typical of capitalist mode of production”? And, why should it ‘embody’ it? This business of embodying is another curiosity. Are you sure you are the word correctly? Please confirm.  To equate 'Dalit' with the form of labour that capitalist production entail in India is a crudest distortion of Marxism/Marxian politics. What do you mean by “equating ‘Dalit’ with the form of labour that capitalist production entail in India.”? It is clear that this attempted sentence doesn’t mean anything as it is. But, it is not important if you explain what did you try to say?   The category you are prefixing Marxism is totally insufficient and in fact has a regressive impact on the understanding of Marxian theory, method and politics. 

You say that I am a comrade from Mars who is totally alienated from earth (and by extension Indian reality). I believe that you are sunken in the distorted understanding of Indian reality and seem to extend your decayed understanding (spreading the disease) to Marxism too. 

My fundamental conflict with you still remains on the prefixing of 'Dalit' to Marxism. I am happy comrade that you can write clearly when you want to. I hope you extend this healthiness to other things. If your fundamental problem is with Dalit prefix, what is your point in trying to explain which you used various phrases with the word ‘labour’ in them? Again, please explain. We don’t have to know everything in advance. Find out if you have to, but explain.  

Understand that when Marx/Engels theorized the labour form specific to each mode of production, they also implicitly underlined the 'mentality' associated with each labour forms specific to each mode of production. Their theorization of labour has implication for politics as well. Propaganda and mobilization of labour, central to Marxian politics, bases itself on the theorization of labour by Marx/Engels. 

There can be no innocence in your prefixing of 'Dalit' to Marxism albeit a deliberate one aimed at poisoning and distorting the Marxian politics. 

Unless you keep the emotions away and engage in the central theme that I try to explain in my understanding of Marxian method and politics there can be no meaningful consensus between us.

It helps me to systematically respond to your inputs and criticisms if you explain things I don’t understand. I beg your patience and cooperation.

Why Communism failed, why we should be thankful for that?

This is yet another contribution to an ongoing debate with a comrade who thinks Dalit Marxism is a handmaid of business classes because of  'its failure to conform to what he thinks are the nuances of Marxist understanding of labour.' Well, this is admittedly an attempt at overconfidence of typical of Marxists, my own included,  in the correctness of their theory even if 'in practice some mistakes do happen.' For example, Nadigram or Kakatiya Express. 

Working class includes those unable to find or not allowed to, work. Most of the Dalits don't find work. What a small section of them finds is not ‘productive’ in the sense that ‘domestic work’ is not productive, in the simple sense that it doesn't contribute to production or produce anything directly but in the sense that we can do without it. There will never be any economy without agriculture in one or other form but there can and are societies without manual scavenging or cloth-washing. We mean that they do contribute to existing production in the immediate sense but they exist due to the historical or accidental or cultural reasons without which too production can be organised.

Most of the clerks and managers are simply parasitical classes not in the sense that they don't work or their work is not necessary but the conditions which make their work necessary are actually unnecessary.

Society has many such forms of work- for example a great portion of advertising, printing money, share-market, making land mines, PhDs such as the comparative studies of school enrolment patterns in two village in Tamilnadu and many more such things.

Prostitution is another example. This is for all practical purposes ‘work’ but not given such status. We fight for giving prostitution the dignity of work but we don't think it is actually work.

We oppose the exploitation and debasement of prostitution but ask for the right to practice it as profession because it is a better form of exploitation in comparison with treating it as just plain immorality.

Then we join the prostitutes’ struggle to have all the rights other workers have or should have and then work for conditions in which practicing prostitution becomes unnecessary.

So is the case with many forms of labour many including, but not limited to, Dalits do engage in. We ask for the simple abolition of some of them because they are already redundant in the present ‘stage of development of productive forces’ and ‘cultural sensibilites’ even when they are not universally available. There are other forms of unnecessary forms of labour which we don't seek their direct abolition but the abolition of their need.

We do retain many 'forms of labour' or can't do without even in 'idealistic' and advanced condition of communism, which Marx insisted could only be defined negatively, in terms of what will not exist but not what would make it up, but the forms of labour change so dramatically that we cannot actually say that they are the same. 

So, we can safely say that if humanity avoids total self-annihilation and proceeds to form communism we most probably avoid all forms of labour we now know of. Even the content of labour will have to change. As Marx said, those forms of labour- despite all the automation and advanced technological sophistication and drastic cut down on time a person daily works for, might still not be very easy. They may still be difficult but they resemble the happy strain we love to bear in playing, exercising and love-making.

Marxism doesn't say simply that what those elite sophisticates spend their time doing, appreciating and producing art, tasting widest variety of food, sporting etc in themselves are wrong and hard labour is inherently superior, because the latter is what gives the fundamental means of our existence. Marxism is for creating condition in which such sophisticated life is accessible to all by changing the conditions in which such is the privilege of a very few. 

Well, Marxism doesn’t say that such advantages of the few are to be gradually extended to the whole society. Marxism’s point is such is not possible. It has shown repeatedly how false or naive such ideas of lower down percolations or gradual extentions of the few to the whole. Privileges are not exceptions but the very condition of the deprivations of the most.

Such conditions, in terms of development of productive forces, are already in place. But mere socialisation is not enough. We need people mature enough to make best of them. It is not enough to socialise the means of production and develop them to their full potential. This can be achieved even through military means. A coup in US defence is enough, however improbable, such scenario is not impossible and enough for achieving such socialisation and unleashing of productive forces. 

But, sadly we don't have mature enough humanity to make best of it. History has repeatedly proved that after establishing rule of the communist parties the biggest hurdle for such society to move forward to better social organisation is the all-powerful parties themselves.

It is relatively easy to defeat capitalists to socialise means of production but humanity has not discovered how to defeat communists to create communism. Both the defeat of capitalism and defeat of communism have actually occurred in the previous century. But defeating capitalists but not to revert to capitalism or defeating communists to advance to communism did not happen. We don't know how will it happen.

You must have known this cynical anti-communist quip, making a mockery of different historical stages attributed to Marxism: the shortest route from feudalism to capitalism is via communism. How cruel, but how true!!

Nearly all advanced countries 2 centuries ago remain advanced today and those left out of capitalism then remain so today with very few exceptions. And, nearly all those exceptions are due to 'communism,' excepting, probably, Japan.

Coming back to the question of 'subjective conditions,': despite objective development and potential of productive forces and even the lingering crisis in capitalism, what stops us from bringing revolution? Not just the near invincible military might of the global capitalism and their agents. It was never the case that communist revolutionaries ever defeated foes through their own force but by winning over a section of the ruling class' military forces or though coups or seizing upon the momentary lapse in the state functioning.

But, I think even if present day's crisis fails to stabilise for too long as to give us enough time and we are alert and lucky enough to put together revolutionary forces and created enough popular support still I don't think we can win or if we win we can make our world any better place. In all likelihood, we will end up creating a disaster.

Why? We don't have human beings worthy of communism. We are like the U.S. which can potentially without much risk to itself occupy nearly any country except the nuclear powers. But the US can't rule them. We can pull off revolution at the most but we cannot create a better society. Our human rights record is worse than that of fascism's. Zizek's judgement is that Stalinism is worse than Nazism.

Our pre-history of communism - establishment of formal socialist societies from Russia to Korea- is akin to the oil-rich countries of West Asia: strong in productive forces, but utterly incapable in mindset to ‘realise’ its potential. We achieved socialisation of production but, you know what followed, if not reasons at least results. Nearly all collapsed communist countries were overthrown by their own people born and brought up by those very communist countries. What allows people of China and Cuba to remain with the status quo till today is nationalism and not communism. All of it can be explained as the effect of external pressures. True. But, corruption can be from outside but corruptibility is within. So far, we have defied and even defeated the power but never learnt to wield it wisely.

The word Communism has two meanings in Marxism. First is an advanced form of society in which most social evils we see (and fail to see) don’t exist because the conditions for them disappear. Second meaning is, the theory of those who try to change existing society with a view to lead it to such advanced level later. In the first sense, the humanity as a whole is not mature enough to create, even imagine it. In the second sense, humanity is not mean enough to tolerate it.  

All of it might sound anti-communism to you. This is simple self-critical communism. Communism is nothing if not self-critical. It doesn’t have to depend on false claims and apologies. All the above narrative which refuses to be self-congratulatory is admittedly too simplistic. At times it is too broad to be meaningful. Dalit Marxism hopes to base itself on a double reversal in our semi-feudal surroundings. It builds not only on the strengths of capitalism but also the faults of communism with an aim to exploit the opposites of both!

Why both capitalism and communism?

Because both are better forms than the one we are locked in.   

Reply to a comrade who thinks Dalit Marxism is reactionery

There are many things true in your post. We can identify a single or a combination of more than one mode of production as ‘dominant’ in any given system at any given time. Such mode of production is either in decline or being ascendant. And, Marxists are supposed to locate this thing and form their strategy most suitable to it. All of it is perfectly alright. Dalit Marxism doesn’t say or imply or find any difficulty in making the best of this point — one of the most fundamental political insights of Marx.
As you know, this point is as political as economic, though, strictly speaking, such distinction is meaningless beyond a point in Dalit Marxist analysis just as in any Marxist analysis. I am not clear what do you mean by “specificity or uniformity of labor form or labor process,” There has never been a uniformity of labor form or even labor processes either in pre-capitalist or capitalist or even in the post-capitalist economies.
In fact, one of the principle attractions Marx had for the communist ideal is its ability to free human beings from the monotony or unlovable nature of labor performed under conditions of exploitation or compulsions external or internal and retain or elevate it to what he thought it surely was: an expression of the essence of humans. Marx imagined a world, and argued that such a thing was possible, in which you write poetry in the evening and fish in the afternoon and repair machinery in the night and do all of it out of your own free will and a sense of responsibility for the society. Some of the principle evils in the capitalist economy and society Marx locates, and also of course, in other forms of society, is the division of labor of a kind that fragments the vision of the worker.
But there is something common to all forms of labor, which he called abstract labor. Not that there could be any labor whatsoever which could be ‘abstract.’ But at one level it is a simple analytical devise we need to use to grasp the commonalities of all forms of labor, the products of which could be exchanged. But at a much fundamental level the very process of exchange is what makes this bizarre process of abstraction not just mental but something that happens in the objective reality. Well, you know how difficult it is to talk about this ‘objective process of abstraction’ the inexorable exchange advanced levels of capitalism involves. But, the point is, at no point, labor is abstract in any simple sense.
And, as you should know, one fundamental feature of Hindu society is, it doesn’t allow for any straight forward exchange between the products of labor of different kinds. For example, it insists that certain forms of labor, like manual scavenging, is open only to dalits. Very often, it says not only that only dalits can do it but also that dalits have to do it.
If one bothers to look up from their study of debates among the European and U.S. Marxists about the transition from feudalism to capitalism in Europe and bother to see what is happening to Dalits, I think s/he may accept that after all capitalism is not uniform, nor are its forms of labor. Probably, the ‘nuance’ you have in mind doesn’t allow for any such negligible distinctions between the labor of, say, an employee of Treasury and a manual scavenger on contract for the last 15 years or an MPhil student back home in summer holidays who was forced to carry the dead animal from the backyard of a small peasant.
If this MPhil student fails to appreciate the essential commonality of all labor from the postal workers of Deutsche Post and Satyam Employees threatened with cut down on perks and his own work to clear the corpses of his upper-caste village mates, we might still blame him for being a ‘subjective empiricist’ (whose knowledge is derived solely from his own experience) missing the larger picture. But, can we say anything against him if insists that there is no UNIFORMITY of different forms of labor and there is no possibility of exchange in the first place if there is such a state of affairs. He has every right to further mock us that except God, who supposed to have created everything and run all of them and provides customer care without even any pretence of multi-tasking, nobody could imagine the ‘uniformity of labor.’
Unfortunately, you description of Marxism as something which tells us that there is only one kind of working class is simply not true. If you are tribal in Africa or India, it is most likely that you will be raped routinely and lucky if you are not killed and you are either driven out of your land first to be able to be robbed of your land or first be relieved of your land and then driven out of it and then further exploited when you go and seek work somewhere else. I did not read much of Das Capital, but one chapter from it, on ‘Primitive Accumulation,’ describes similar process in the making of Capitalism, rubbishing the myth which said frugality and hard work of the capitalists provided them with capital. Probably, Marx was being deviant here from the Party line( though I suspect he was the only lucky Marxist to have escaped it while not formulating it) or failed to foresee the dangers of noting such variations that could divide proletarian unity and let himself to be played into the hands of business class.
“Dalit does not embody any uniform labor process in India.” “Dalits may represent a subjugated labour but…” I am not sure what could these assertions possibly mean. If you mean to say that all Dalits don’t belong to a single class, you are absolutely right. They don’t. It is no news to anybody that caste and class, despite all their overlapping, intersecting and resembling each other, are in some crucial ways, simply, different things.
While an individual can move upwards of his class of origin or fall out of one, such is not possible for any Individual from her caste. Some castes as collectivities could move upwards or downwards over longer periods of time but individually it is not possible. Here, you are introducing this Hindu principle of caste into understanding class and class struggle. If you and me, definitely no longer belong to working class, could join working class struggles, why can’t the dalits from other classes join the struggle of working class(which includes those denied work) for emancipation? If you say that intellectuals can transcend their class by studying Marxism and ‘declassifying’ themselves, why do you think that the very small section among the dalits who are no longer in the working class can’t do so?
 It is also surprising that you think the labor of dalits MAY REPRESENT subjugated labor (or, did you mean Dalits as a subjugated labor force?). Marxism, for all I know, shows all labor, including the one for which workers struggle to get, is subjugated without exception. You are unwilling even to give that status to the labor of Dalits. What prevents you from acknowledging the labor of dalits to be subjugated? At a different level, one is surprised that you think Dalits should embody a uniform labor process in India. You seem to think the fault with the category of Dalit, if not the Dalits themselves, is its incapacity to embody uniform labor process. It is like blaming your mail for its inability to give me a single cigarette when I read it. How can, and why should, a political category embody a ‘labor process’? Isn’t it somewhat similar to the joke about the inability of a poetry anthology to make a set of boot laces?
Since you are a comrade from Mars, let me introduce this peculiarity in one of the planetary systems far away from your abode: we have here something called Earth revolving around sun on which is a country called India which houses nearly twenty percent of humanity of which more than twenty percent are Dalits. Most of us have no option to choose which work we can do. Not just individually but also as a collective. Moreover, many of us, like rest of the non-dalits, cannot hope to get any work at all.
“By introducing such sweeping category like 'Dalit' which does not embody the uniform labour form or labour process in India and also has no legitimate reference to the theoretical nuances of Marxism, you ultimately intend to distort Marxism and in the process pay to the interest of corporate class in India.”
Now, you relent and give some promotion to the category of dalit. It is now “sweeping.” A moment ago it was divisive and distorting the essential unity of this entity called the working class. But, each and every category is much bigger than any of its constituent elements or particularities whose abstraction it is. And, naturally, it is more specific and concrete than even bigger category. “Dalit journalists” is a bigger category than “Dalit Women Journalists” while being smaller than “Dalit professionals” which in turn is smaller than “Dalit employees.” The point is, if a category is both inclusive and exclusive enough to serve the concrete task for action or analysis, frequently for the both. I want you to throw some light on that aspect.
Comrade, there are many more things. I shall respond to them later. Meanwhile, waiting for your response, so that we can sharpen our formulations further, and naturally, together.

Reply to Karandeep Singh

Karandeep Singh wrote:
sir, i saw your community dalit marxism. with dew respect i want to say that Marxism is about equality to human beings without discrimination on any basis. Dalit Marxism fails the basic concept of marxism. kindly remove dalit from it and help make India a discrimination free nation.

The due respect you were talking about is as misplaced as it was misspelled. Marxism's "basic concept" is that there is no equality. And, that there cannot be. Neither in nature and society nor in human thought. Kindly get this point right. It is fundamental to Marxism.
Things would have been simple if your idealism is practical: eliminating discrimination, by deleting words. It is also good that world is not like the MS word because someone with your well-meaning but ultimately meaningless idealist enthusiasm would delete good things along with, or even instead of, the bad ones.
I am assuming that you are sympathetic to Marxism if not much familiar with it. If so, let me argue this way: you might be aware that Marxism wants to side with Working classes as opposed to exploitative-parasitical classes. It is partisanship, not siding with the whole humanity but only a portion of it. It is discrimination. Bias. Could you accuse Marxism of bias for this? You can't, because what Marxism questions is the very ‘bias-is-bad-always’ idea. It further denies the possibility of neutrality. In other words, it is simply not possible to be unbiased, non-discriminatory, to be neutral, in anything. If such is not even possible, Marxism says, the talk about non-discrimination is mistaken or downright misleading. You might have known about this writer, Bertolt Brecht. Look up for him, if you haven't. He said something to the effect that, ‘on an uneven surface the shortest route from one point to the other is necessarily crooked.’ According to Geometry of abstract and even spaces, the shortest line between two points must be a straight one. Brecht is a Marxist and understood it and found a striking, memorable way to put this point across. In the exploitative world, you need to build a discriminatory mechanism to eliminate unfair, unnecessary discrimination. How absurd it would be to expect a doctor to give same medicine in same measure to all patients for all complaints? Marxism says we need to have a highly biased and discriminatory principles and practices to correct the existing inhuman discriminations and equally ‘inhuman non-discriminations.’ The second point is as important as the first one. Marxism is not an argument for indiscriminate actions or thinking.
For example, nationalism talks as if everybody in the nation is equal and all in a nation have common interests. Marxism says it is a ‘false ideology’ as far as it is spread by sections with vested interests and ‘false consciousness’ of those without them. Marxism says, the interests of the exploiting, the oppressing classes are different from those of the working/exploited class (including those denied work). Therefore, the idea of a common nation is absurd logically and dangerous politically. When Marxism calls nationalism a danger, it is taking only the point of view of the losers of nationalism, and, refusing the perspective of the beneficiaries of nationalism. Marxism is always already biased and open about it.
Now, let us come to your objection to calling ‘our’ Marxism Dalit. Why not?
Do Dalits have no right to be Marxists? Can’t Dalits read Marxism, practice it and develop it? You may still say, ‘you can, but not AS Dalits but as the oppressed, or the workers or simply communists. It is as absurd as the advice to earlier Marxists by liberal nationalists that “ask for more justice to the poor and the weak but do it from a nationalist point of view. Tell those in power that our fellow French men, they are suffering, let’s do something about them.’ This approach was not acceptable for Marxism then and not for Dalit Marxists today.
You might again counter it by saying that by calling ourselves Dalit Marxists we still allow caste to define our identity or self-understand and perception of others. But the point is to eliminate the caste.
Marxists want elimination of not only caste, but also nation, wage-labour, family and many more things. Yet, if you notice, Marxists are the first to take up the demand for raising the wages. Why? Is it inconsistency ?
Marxism is a philosophy of practice, it takes the permanent dynamism of everything into account, views things as part of processes and not as a fixed set of rules followed like ritual or chanting hymns. You build a movement and consciousness by taking up the issues of the toiling, oppressed and excluded people they feel and in the process of strengthening, refining the demands, aspirations.
The most oppressed community, Dalits, in the country need to be the lead-agent of change for better. Of course, no communism is worth its name if caught up permanently in a nation-state. Yet, we begin with Communist Party of India (A, B, C, D) and first work within the existing borders, however unnatural or irrational they may be, toward the final goal of communism across the globe. We are for elimination of gender discrimination but we start that process by women organizing themselves independently, separately.
There are good liberals who refuse to see criminal side of governments and capitalism, feudalism, patriarchy, caste system, plunder of tribal lives and livelihoods. Not all of them are idiots or criminals. But we reject their solutions because they think the above mentioned list of oppressive-exploitative mechanisms are in need of reformation. They cannot be. They can only be re-formulated. Marxism differs from good liberalism or liberal nationalism, philanthropy in seeing that there are certain things which we can’t be controlled for too long but can only done away with. Capitalism is one such, Caste is another. If you agree with this, it is not difficult to understand that you MUST first see, accept as real, the things you want to destroy.
We should not be like that proverbial cowardly cat. This cat, for fear of seeing humans, drinks milk eyes closed. Many Upper-Caste Communists behave exactly like this cat, they close their eyes to the reality of caste and assume that it is just in the eyes of the beholder. Caste is no more a superstition than capitalism is. Just as some pre-Marxist socialists thought oppression and exploitation was caused by the “greed” of capitalists, our own 21st Century Upper Caste Indian Marxists imagine that “caste feeling” is an inability to overcome a backward feeling. They say: forget about your caste and mine, it will go away. Somehow, they don’t say that about Capitalism or family system. Imagine telling workers, overcome your feelings being a worker, think like a human being. You will not be seen as a worker in cinema hall. All are equal there. Same movie for those in the balcony or in in cheaper, lower front-row. Probably, it does work as long as worker could still spare some money for going to movies or they are not killed for sitting in the same row as an upper-caste man.
Some of them don’t stop there. They think those of us, Dalits, are themselves to be blamed for using ‘caste’ in discussions and politics, thus prolonging it. There are people who naively believe that many people are poor because they did not study well in the school. Or, lazy people, not good at their work, not disciplined, or victims of misfortunes. Such a thing may be true in many individual cases in the immediate sense. This line of thinking is known as “blaming the victim.” Seeing and fighting against “victimization” is Marxism’s method. It wants human beings who refuse to be victimized or victimize. It says such human beings could be born in a society without triaining in victimizing or being victims or both. But, such society could be built only by asserting ourselves proudly as Muslims, Women, Workers, Dalits and Kashmiris, so on. Dalit Marxism says that Marxism in India, just like Russian Marxism of intellectuals before it gained currency among the working class, hitherto was caught up in the hands of upper-caste people and sensibilities, a kind of monopoly, similar to education in earlier times. And time has arrived now when it should be taken up by those who are proper agents of it- Dalits.