The Tragic Regression of Anand Teltumbde

The Tragic Regression of Anand Teltumbde
From ‘Mahad: The Making of First Dalit Revolt’ to ‘Bridging the Unholy Rift’

Abhinav Sinha

A year ago, I had read Anand Teltumbde’s book ‘Mahad: The Making of the First Dalit Revolt’. I found it to be a research work of the first degree and probably the best on the subject so far. Though the book never directly criticizes the Deweyan Pragmatism of Dr. Ambedkar, yet, through the comprehensive account of his political practice in the 1920s and early-1930s, the book reveals the extent of the impact of Deweyan Pragmatism on Ambedkar, especially for those who know what Deweyan Pragmatism is. For me, the book was extremely useful and I have prescribed the book in my talks and presentations throughout the country and outside the country as well. I considered it a commendable and rigorous fact-based research, despite the fact that the portion of historiography of caste was weak in the book. Therefore, when I came to know that Teltumbde has written the introduction of Dr. Ambedkar’s unfinished manuscript ‘India and Communism’, I bought it immediately in the hope that Teltumbde would have presented an objective account of Ambedkar’s relation with Marxist philosophy as well as Indian communists.

However, reading the introduction, which is named ‘Bridging the Unholy Rift’, came as a shocker to me, indeed a tragic one.

This ‘Introduction’ named ‘Bridging the Unholy Rift’ is not only full of factual and logical mistakes but also shows that Teltumbde understands the least about Marxism. He distorts facts about Ambedkar’s attitude towards communist philosophy, his attitude towards Indian communists (howsoever ideologically weak they were!) and makes a shame-faced attempt to make Ambedkar a sympathizer of Marxist philosophy. Anyone who has read Ambedkar knows that such a claim would be nothing less than a travesty of facts, a mockery of history. This attempt leads Teltumbde, first, to make a liberal appropriation of Marx, Engels and the entire Marxist philosophy and then show the vicinity of pragmatist liberalism of Ambedkar to Marxism as a science of revolution. Such wilful distortion of Marxism was not expected from Teltumbde. Also, he has revealed his “understanding” of Marx’s Capital as well as his stand towards the use of parliament and establishment of socialism, not to speak of Lenin’s theory of Imperialism and the strategy and general tactics proposed by Lenin in the imperialist stage.

In the present essay I will attempt to show these serious shortcomings of this ‘Introduction’ written by Anand Teltumbde, mostly in chronological order.

Hollow Claims, Shallow Arguments

The essay starts with the claim that Dr. Ambedkar was never against Communism and rebukes the middle class Dalit intelligentsia who has projected this anti-Communist image of Ambedkar due to their own vested interests; this is one of the consistent motif of the essay. In order to prove this hypothesis, Teltumbde has done the following: first, show that Ambedkar is sympathetic to Marxist philosophy and was against only the practice of Indian communists; second, since Marxist philosophy, as it is, cannot be made up into a close ally of Ambedkar’s Deweyan pragmatism and bourgeois liberalism, he attempts a bourgeois liberal appropriation of Marxism, Marx, Engels as well as Lenin (which is comparatively more difficult); finally, Teltumbde attempts to show that there is no big gap between Ambedkar and Marxist philosophy, in fact, they are natural allies.

In the present essay, I will demonstrate how all the above claims of Teltumbde are baseless and his understanding of Marxism itself is in want of a serious study of Marxist classics. We all acknowledge the contributions of Ambedkar to the anti-caste movement, especially, as someone who established a sense of self-dignity among the Dalits and who established the caste question on the agenda of the national movement. In order to comprehend and acknowledge these contributions, however, there is no need to first undertake a Marxist misappropriation of Ambedkar and then a liberal misappropriation of Marxism in order to what Teltumbde has called ‘bridging the unholy (?) rift.’ One can acknowledge the contributions made by Ambedkar to the anti-caste project without undertaking a Leftist appropriation of Ambedkar by showing him sympathetic to Marxism or making Marxism a left-liberal philosophy akin to some sort of Fabianism or Labour Party-brand Leftism or Kautsky-brand Social-Democracy.

Teltumbde begins by claiming that certain Dalit intellectuals due to their vested interests have made Ambedkar ‘an enemy of communists’. This has thrown Ambedkar into the camp of exploiters and oppressors, according to Teltumbde. However, since Teltumbde by heart knows that Ambedkar, ideologically and philosophically speaking, has nothing in common with Marxism, he immediately, though not so skilfully, introduces a caveat. Let us see how, “They stretched this antipathy between Ambedkar and communists to such an extent that they would discard anything even remotely associated with Marxism.”(Teltumbde, 2017, Bridging the Unholy Rift, India and Communism, Leftword Books, New Delhi, p. 10, italics mine) As one can see the issue of rift now becomes an issue of “extent”. This is how shame-faced Teltumbde manoeuvres through in this essay.

Teltumbde also claims that Ambedkar makes the use of category of ‘class’, though not in the Marxian sense and yet it becomes a problem for the middle-class Dalit intelligentsia, that has become a beneficiary of the system. We will show later how the concept of class used by Ambedkar is not only not-Marxian, but is opposed to the Marxist idea of class and is akin to the pragmatist idea of class, which was introduced precisely for a shadow-boxing with Marxism. However, first we should say a few words on the trenchant attack of Teltumbde on the Dalit identitarian politics which has conjured up (according to Teltumbde!) the anti-Marxist image of Ambedkar.

Teltumbde shows how the RPI was divided between the Kamble-faction, which was against communism and agitational methods, and the Gaikwad-faction, which led agitations on the question of land. While it has a grain of truth that the Gaikwad-led faction led some protests on the question of land, it would be inappropriate to claim that Ambedkar was ever in support of agitational methods against the State for demands of working masses, including the Dalits. Christopher Jaffrelot in his book ‘Dr Ambedkar and Untouchability’, Eleanor Zelliot in her book ‘Ambedkar’s World’ and, interestingly enough, Anand Teltumbde himself in his book ‘Mahad: The Making of the First Dalit Revolt’ has shown with clear evidence, Ambedkar’s aversion to agitational methods. Whenever he experimented with agitational methods he took care to keep the movement within the limits of bourgeois legality most rigidly and in the strictest sense. Generally speaking, he always avoided any conflict with the government. The experience of Mahad Satyagraha and temple entry movements of the early-1930s had made it clear to him that agitational methods were to be avoided. Only under mass pressure he sometimes lent his support to mass demonstrations or agitations, but in all those cases, he was not the chief organizer or planner of the agitations, as Zelliot has shown (Zelliot, ‘Ambedkar’s World’, Navayana, p. 200-201). Therefore, it would be erroneous to claim that Ambedkar was a big supporter of agitational methods.

Besides, to claim that Ambedkar, throughout his political life considered capitalism to be one of his enemies, is a gross misrepresentation of the facts. It was only the interregnum of the Independent Labour Party, which was nothing more than an electoral strategy as Teltumbde himself embarrassingly accepts, during which Ambedkar declared capitalism to be one of the enemies. Sometimes he has critiqued the vagaries of free-market private capitalism in the economic sense; however, this is not to be taken as a political criticism of capitalism. The reason for Ambedkar’s declaration during the ILP-period that capitalism is one of the enemies, was that under the political electoral conditions of reserved seats, the best strategy was to expand the political appeal by inducting workers into one’s political constituency and this could be done only by using an anti-capitalist rhetoric. But even in the documents of the ILP, capitalism is not criticized as the political rule of the bourgeoisie (an analysis which will automatically lead to the political conclusion/program of overthrow of the capitalist rule), but only the free market private capitalism has been criticized. That is why the panacea suggested by the ILP is state capitalism. However, except this period, neither before 1936 nor after 1941-42, we find capitalism as a declared enemy of Ambedkar. Speaking half-truths like Yudhhishthir (Ashwatthama hato naro vakunjaro- Ashvatthama died, but either human or animal) is essentially telling a lie. Teltumbde should have refrained from such Brahmanical practices.

Also, Teltumbde claims that Ambedkar was disappointed with his educated followers, whom he had hoped, would become ‘an armoured shelter above the Dalits’ (from Ambedkar’s Mahad Conference speech, quoted by Teltumbde himself in his last book ‘Mahad’!) but who ultimately ‘betrayed him’, as Ambedkar himself lamented towards the twilight of his political career. But Teltumbde did not answer why it happened, though I suspect that he knows that answer! The policy to create a class of middle class intelligentsia who would become ‘mamlatdars, magistrates, etc’ (from Ambedkar’s Mahad conference speech) and thus would enable the Dalits to become a ‘governing community’ (Narake Hari, ed, Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar Writings and Speeches, op. cit., vol17, part-3, p.332.), because it is the ‘government servants who are the mind of the government’ (from Ambedkar’s Mahad Conference speech), was bound to end up in a big disappointment. Ambedkar neither understood the dynamics of class nor did he understand the class nature of the state/government. His idea of class as well as state was totally a Deweyan pragmatist idea, as we will show later. Therefore, Teltumbde should also have answered why Dr. Ambedkar’s hopes were dashed regarding the role he thought the middle-class intelligentsia or the small elite within the Dalits would play. The reason was that the hope itself was unreasonable. The small elite created within the Dalits were bound to play the role, which first Ambedkar lamented and now Teltumbde is lamenting. It is the class nature of this small elite section, which obliges them to play the role that they are playing. Though Teltumbde understands it, but he hides the fact that Ambedkar failed to understand this fact.

Teltumbde discusses the splits within the RPI due to the influence of Kamble-faction and later splits in Dalit Panthers also for similar reasons. However, he fails or rather pretends to fail to capture the correct reason for these splits. He just wonders how Ambedkar, Ambedkarite path and Ambedkarism became the rhetoric by which different opportunists (like Kamble-faction of the RPI, or, the Buddhist faction of Dalit Panthers, etc. who were against Marxism and agitaitional methods) justified their opportunist stands. Question again may be asked: why did it happen? The reasons for the rise of these “opportunist” trends and the splits they caused must be mentioned. In my opinion, the truth that Teltumbde fears to utter, is that the reason for these trends (opportunistic or not) were present in the pragmatist politics of Ambedkar himself. In fact, in one sense, these Ambedkarites who opposed agitational methods and anti-establishment approach and method were closer to the political and ideological stand of Ambedkar. Despite the contributions of Dalit Panthers and the Gaikwad-faction for a brief period, these factions in fact were, in one sense, the ‘deviators’ from Ambedkarite praxis.

Dr. Ambedkar was firm throughout his life as an honest Deweyan pragmatist that State is the ‘Great Mediator’, ‘the most rational agent’ which brings the change in a gradual incremental process from above; change is always gradual in society as well as nature and any attempt to bring changes by leaps through collective effort ‘from below’ will involve the use of force, and will end in waste and destruction. That is why Mahad Satyagraha ended in an anti-climax, as Teltumbde himself had shown in his previous book, though he refrains from going to the philosophical roots of Ambedkar and show why Ambedkar withdrew the Satyagraha. He stops at naïve wondering! Teltumbde just wonders why the Satyagraha ended up as a non-starter! Here too, Teltumbde tries to hide the philosophical roots of Ambedkar by arguing that Ambedkar was in favour of anti-establishment politics or agitational methods. In fact, ample evidence can be produced (a lot from Teltumbde’s last book ‘Mahad’ itself!) which show that Ambedkar never wanted a confrontation with the government or State, due to his Deweyan pragmatist ideological prejudices. The truth is that the splits which took place in RPI and Dalit Panthers were not due to opportunism of certain individuals or factions. There were two co-ordinates of these splits: one co-ordinate was the pragmatist politics and ideology of Ambedkar himself and the other dimension was the assertion of the subaltern elements within these organizations, expressed in the desire to use radical agitational methods and take up the issue of caste oppression from a class standpoint, whatever were their weaknesses. The constant tension between the Ambedkarite ideological and political positions and the radical class assertions within these organizations ultimately led to these splits. These splits were bound to take place. Teltumbde condemns the opportunist middle-class and elite Dalit politicians claiming to be Ambedkarites in the following terms: “They wish to broker the interests of the Dalits to the ruling classes, who would do whatever it takes to thwart the germination of a radical consciousness among the Dalit masses.” (Teltumbde, 2017, p. 13) One is tempted to ask: Wasn’t Ambedkar doing to same, though without the individual degeneration of certain post-Ambedkar Amdedkarite organizations? When did Ambedkar go beyond brokering the interests of Dalits to the State? Whenever, the State took a confrontational stand to the agitations led by Ambedkar, did he not retreat? Politically speaking, when was a he radical, because radical means ‘going to the root of things’, being subversive? In the end of the present subhead of this lengthy essay, Teltumbde comments rhetorically, “…even if Ambedkar arrived today and took up cudgels for the Dalit masses, he would be condemned as anti-Ambedkar.” (ibid, p.13) Though it is true that the current Ambedkarite and identitarian organizations have descended to a level which makes even Ambedkar look like a radical, yet, Ambedkar himself, despite his genuine concerns for annihilation of caste, was never a radical in the political sense of the term. Secondly, what Ambedkar would do today had he been here can only hypothesized on the basis of what he actually did when he was alive. This is something that Teltumbde must understand, that in his imaginary world Ambedkar would not do what he (Teltumbde) as a self-refential radical wants, but would do what he (Ambedkar) as a pragmatist deems fit.

Now we will present the critique of the rest of the essay by Teltumbde under the same subheads that he has used in order to show the factually and logically incorrect and misrepresentational character of his essay.

Ambedkar and Marx: or How Teltumbde Hides the Ignorance of Dr. Ambedkar Regarding Marxism – I

Teltumbde claims that Ambedkar’s relationship with Marxism was “enigmatic” (!) and he claimed that he was a socialist, though never a Marxist. Everybody knows how liberally this epithet ‘socialism’ has been used in the political history of the modern world since the time of post-Enlightenment utopian socialist thinkers, petty-bourgeois socialists, Fabians, Labour Party of Britain, syndicalist traditions of Europe as well as America, and in our country, from Nehru to Subhash Chandra Bose (both of whom had their own notions of “socialism”), from Lohia to Jai Prakash Narayan and from Madhu Limaye to Malayam and Lalu. We shall see shortly what “socialism” of Ambedkar was. Teltumbde claims, “Ambedkar was not unimpressed by the élan of the Marxist tradition.” (ibid, p. 14) However, he never presents a single quote where Ambedkar has expressed this impressed-ness. Agreeing with the ultimate aim of communism as a noble wish, but then discarding it as being ‘impractical’ and a fool’s paradise or ‘pig philosophy’ is certainly not a sign of being impressed! Secondly, this kind of agreement with the ‘ultimate aim as a noble wish’ is something that even the most reactionary bourgeois economists and thinkers have expressed. Even a Paul Samuelson or Nordhaus, or Mises could say that ‘the aim is noble, but cannot be achieved because it is impractical and opposed to the ‘human nature’ and ‘common sense’’. In fact, a number of bourgeois economists and political scientists have said such things.

Next, Teltumbde moves to the caste humiliations faced by Ambedkar and wonders what Ambedkar had felt about the epochal event of October Revolution in the context of the hardships that he faced as a Dalit. Teltumbde accepts that he does not find any reference in Ambedkar’s writings of this period about the October Revolution. The first reference to October Revolution is from 1929, when Ambedkar criticizes communists for trying to create a revolution in India “without worrying about the class consciousness of people.” This is a gross misrepresentation of facts. Teltumbde should have shown by evidence that Ambedkar was bothered about raising the class consciousness of the people. In fact, the one quote that he presents shows that Ambedkar was more disturbed by the fact that communists were trying to become the hegemonic force in the labour movement and the strikes organized by them led to adverse impact on workers’ conditions. Ambedkar himself writes: “The main aim behind the strike is not to improve the economic condition of the workers but to train them for revolution.” (quoted in Teltumbde, 2017, p. 14-15, Italics mine). Now, first of all, in this quote Ambedkar is not criticizing communists for not raising the class consciousness of the workers. Quite the contrary, he is opposed to communists’ efforts to raise the class consciousness. If by ‘class consciousness’, Teltumbde means the same thing that Marx and Lenin meant then it means progressing from trade union consciousness to what Lenin called ‘class political consciousness’, which simply means that even in economic struggles, exposing the limits of capitalism to the workers and preparing them for revolutionary political class consciousness. However, as we can see from the quote of Ambedkar himself, he is happy as long as the strike is limited to the economic demands of workers and does not transcend the trade unionist class consciousness. This is in congruence with the economism of the Fabianist and British Labour Party-style as well as Deweyan pragmatism: the question of the state should not be raised and the strikes should confine themselves for the economic betterment of the workers through collective bargaining by the media of trade unionist struggles. Economism is an important component of the concept of labour-capital relation advocated by the Fabians as well as pragmatists like Dewey. Ambedkar is simply reiterating that idea. He is not at all concerned with the efforts of communists to raise the class consciousness of workers to the level of class political consciousness; he is rather opposed to it. This is a different issue whether Indian communists succeeded in this endeavour or how far they were even serious about making this endeavour. In fact, more evidence can be produced that they themselves were prisoners of some sort of Left militant economism. However, to the extent that the communists tried to politicise the strikes, any such attempt on the part of communists is regarded as sacrificing the economic interests of the workers by all liberals. Therefore, the objection of Ambedkar was not simply to the practice or methods employed by communists to bring about revolution because the “majority of people were not ready for the ideal society the communists wanted to create” (ibid, p. 15) but the objection was the very ideal of such a society (Teltumbde is mistaken to think that communism is an ideal for communists; in fact, Marx clearly said that communism is not an ideal to be achieved but the real movement of history). Teltumbde himself quotes Ambedkar in a footnote on page 10, where Ambedkar talks about his concept of class but negates the rationale or necessity of ‘class conflict’. His idea of class was a Deweyan pragmatist idea, according to which society is a collection of disparate groups and these disparate groups do not have real contradictions but only perceived contradictions; these contradictions are to be resolved by the intervention of the ‘Great Mediator’, i.e., the government or the State. Raising class consciousness tantamount to the sharpening of class conflict, to which Ambedkar was categorically opposed. Therefore, Anand Teltumbde, in order to show that Ambedkar was only opposed to communist practice, not the communist ideal, creates a myth about Ambedkar.

Teltumbde claims that Ambedkar opposed the communists because the communists attacked Ambedkar for collaborating with the Simon Commission and also advising the Dalit workers to break the strike in 1929. On both these accounts, Teltumbde defends Ambedkar’s position. Let us take both these questions separately.

On the question of separate electorate and communal award, Teltumbde claims that Ambedkar was fighting for ‘autonomous’ Dalit voice. We will come to Teltumbde’s support to ‘autonomous voice’-theory later. First look at the support and opposition to separate electorates from different quarters. The Congress and mainly Gandhi, obviously opposed the separate electorate for all the wrong reasons, the most important being Gandhi’s concern with the ‘unity of the Hindu society’. However, just because Gandhi and the Congress opposed separate electorate for wrong reasons does not make this demand a correct one. Moreover, the communists were least bothered by the unity of the Hindu society, but opposed it for their concern with the unity of the working class (which is not out there, but has to be constituted through constant political class struggles; however, the separate electorates would have closed any such window). Bhagat Singh and his comrades also opposed communal award and separate electorate as a device used by the British to ‘divide and rule’. Teltumbde should also have criticized Bhagat Singh and his comrades for this. However, for Left Ambedkarites like Teltumbde, it is the communists who are always the punching bag and soft target.

There is no doubt about the fact that this intention of ‘divide and rule’ precisely was the motive of the British colonial state. (See, Sumit Sarkar, Modern India) On the one hand, Teltumbde opposes the identitarian politics and at the same time, in the same breath, supports Ambedkar’s demand for separate electorate, which shows his lack of understanding of this whole issue. Separate electorates definitely would have broken the potential unity of the working class (though there was no by-default unity of the working class). Every Marxist knows that class unity is not something which is out there, a given, but has to be constituted by constant political struggles. It is true that the CPI could not understand the caste question in its historicity as well as in its contemporaneity. However, this was part of a broader failure. The CPI since its foundation did not have a program of Indian Revolution till 1951. In 1920 formal declaration of foundation was announced in Tashkent, its first All India Conference took place in 1925 in Kanpur. However, both of these events do not qualify to be regarded as the formation of the party. The first real milestone of formation of the party was 1933 when following the letters from CPs of Germany, Britain and China, a provisional nucleus of the central committee was formed; the next milestone was 1936 when this body assumed the shape of central committee and P. C. Joshi was elected the first secretary of the party and the most important and third milestone was 1943 when the first Congress of the party was held. However, even then a systematic program of Indian Revolution was not adopted. Only in 1951, a program was adopted, following the visit of a delegation of the CPI to Moscow which met with Stalin and Molotov. Howver, by the time, the CPI adopted a program of Indian revolution, it had progressed on the path of becoming revisionist parliamentary Left party, so that the program was good only for cold storage. The program of revolution is the document based on the concrete analysis of concrete conditions in a country and identifies the enemy classes and the friend classes, that is, the basic question of revolution in any country and the strategy and general tactics of revolution, including the path of revolution. Had the communists taken up this task, the question of caste also would have been understood historically as well as politically. However, since the CPI failed to work out the program of Indian revolution till 1951, its struggle against caste was at best empirical and positivist. We will come to the question of the failure of communist movement later in detail.

However, this much is certain that opposing Simon Commission and separate electorate was not among the numerous failures of the communist movement in India. On one instance, in the early-1940s, they supported the creation of Pakistan on the basis of a false understanding of nationhood based on religion. From the Marxist-Leninist theory of nation (not ‘nationalism’ as Teltumbde thinks), religion is not one of the basis of constitution of a nation. However, the mistake was so glaring that it was corrected within a couple of years. This only shows the poor foundations of the Marxist understanding of the CPI. Still, opposing Simon Commission by the CPI on the one hand and Bhagat Singh and his comrades on the other, was not at all an incorrect political position. One can oppose Simon Commission not only from the caste Hindu concerns of Gandhi, but also from the class stand point of Bhagat Singh. However, Teltumbde vindicates the position of Ambedkar in an erroneous fashion and calls it an attempt to build ‘autonomous voice’ of the Dalits. The question that can be asked is: autonomous from what? As we remarked above, we will come to this question in detail later in this essay.

Now a few words on the Textile mill strike of the late-1920s. The strike had started on the issue of introduction of a machine by mill owners which would lead to retrenchment of workers. Ambedkar did not get involved on his own initiative, but was invited by the owner of E.D. Sassoon Mill, Frederick Stones, as Teltumbde himself has mentioned. If he had his main concern towards the discrimination against the Dalit workers, he should have gone to the striking workers and their leadership on his own, rather than on the invitation of a mill-owner. Secondly, the way to introduce and fight for the demands of the Dalit workers was definitely not by advising the Dalit workers to stay away from the strike and break the strike, but rather to struggle to introduce these issues in the charter of demands of the strike and also struggle against the caste prejudices of caste Hindu workers. Did breaking the strike help in doing away with the caste prejudices of caste Hindu workers? It is highly unlikely. Rather, by making a contradiction among the masses (non-antagonistic contradiction) as the contradiction between enemies (antagonistic contradiction), Ambedkar’s strategy only helped the owners. Teltumbde claims that at the insistence of Ambedkar, the communists-led trade union included the demand of Dalit workers into the charter, unwillingly (though no evidence is provided of this unwillingness). To this the mill-owners “rightly responded” according to Teltumbde that they do not have any responsibility in this discrimination. However, since the union had included this demand in the charter and expressed the willingness to fight to do away with this discrimination, Ambedkar should have supported the further strikes. Yet he actively campaigned against the strike when it broke out again. Such kind of ‘autonomous voice’ did not actually give any autonomy to the Dalit workers, as history showed. The best way to fight against the caste prejudices of the non-Dalit working class is in the thick of the struggles. Only in the process of class struggle, can the working class fight against casteism and patriarchy prevalent among themselves. The separation of Dalits from the general class struggle of the working class is no way to resolve this question. This is a different issue altogether whether the communists, given their ideological weaknesses, would have been able to wage a political and ideological struggle against caste prejudices within the working class movement or not. The empirical evidence shows that their struggle against caste never went beyond empirical struggle due to complete lack of a theoretical understanding of the issue at stake. Nevertheless, breaking the working class movement by separating the Dalits was definitely not the way. Given the fact that objectively Ambedkar did play the role of strike-breaker, it was not unjustified to criticize him for it. It must be understood that Ambedkar was firmly opposed to communism. He believed that strikes and communism are “inseparable twins” and communists “use” strikes for their “political aims” (which is true and there is nothing to be apologetic about it!). Secondly, as Gail Omvedt has argued in ‘Dalits and Democratic Revolution’ that Ambedkar was not opposed to strikes as long as they were not led by communists.

Teltumbde claims that the Indian communists were too enthusiastic about the prospects of Indian Revolution and believed that India is past the stage of feudalism through a non-revolutionary path and the main task was to organize industrial workers. This, according to Teltumbde, led the communists to ignore the land question and caste question in the villages. The sole evidence for the communists holding this line is M. N. Roy and his thesis presented in the book India in Transition. However, it seems that Teltumbde has not read the history of communist movement in India and the statements regarding program that CPI adopted. The CPI never adopted the thesis of M. N. Roy and later expelled Roy. Secondly, he also seems to be unaware of the radical agrarian struggles for land led by the communists in the colonial India. Let me draw readers’ attention to this history very briefly.

It is true that before 1951, the Communist Party of India failed to draft the program of Indian revolution and consequently also the agrarian program, which constitutes one of the most important parts of the program of democratic revolution. However, it would be a mistake to think that before 1951, the CPI had adopted the program of a socialist revolution. On the basis of the line of Comintern, the Indian communists had accepted the task of National Democratic Revolution to be the principal task, though no creative independent study of Indian concrete conditions was carried out. Mostly, there were some articles, essays and statements which talked about the line of National Democratic Revolution, based mostly on the cut-copy-paste of Comintern positions and documents. Therefore, first thing to be made clear is that the CPI accepted a program of anti-colonial anti-feudal National Democratic Revolution, though it failed to undertake a serious creative Marxist analysis of the agrarian question and program of revolution in India, which also led them to the failure in understanding the caste question and its articulation with class struggle in India. Secondly, it is sheer ignorance on the part of Teltumbde to claim that the communists did not organize peasantry and focused on industrial labour only. Empirically, they did. M.A. Rasul, a veteran communist leader and a prominent figure in the peasant movement has written about the early attempts as well as later attempts of the communists to organize peasantry on the land question. Rasul in his book ‘A History of the All India Kisan Sabha’ has shown that the first attempts to study the agrarian question and organize peasants were made in the late-1920s itself in Punjab, Malabar, Andhra, Bengal, and United Provinces, i.e., a couple of years after the First All India Conference of the CPI in 1925. Some movements and organizations were organized. After the breaking out of the Great Depression, the economic impact on the peasantry was noticed by the communists. Communists working within and outside the Congress felt the need for an all India peasant organization at this point. In October 1935, the South Indian Federation of Peasants and Workers called an all-India peasants’ and workers’ conference. The Congress thoroughly opposed the idea of an All India peasant organization as it could lead to the radicalization of the peasantry. In fact, Sardar Patel ridiculed and attacked the idea of such an organization sharply. Nevertheless, in April 1936, the first All India Kisan Congress was held in Lucknow, which was presided over by Bihar peasant leader Sahajanand Saraswati. The communists under the leadership of P.C. Joshi persuaded the Congress to give recognition to AIKC and AITUC. This was the period of ‘popular front’ line to oppose bourgeois reaction as well as forming alliance with representatives of bourgeoisie, so long as they show their anti-colonial and anti-feudal credentials. Now, it is a different matter whether this mechanical implementation of the line of ‘popular front’ was correct in the Indian conditions by the CPI or not. This much, nonetheless, is certain that CPI was a strong force within the peasant movement. An intelligence report of the British colonial government from 1937, says, “the communist leaders are developing a stranglehold upon any future agrarian movement as well as inspiring this with their special methods and outlook, of which by no means the least is the belief in mass violence and the violent overthrow of the British rule.” (Quoted in H. Surjeet, 1986, ‘What AIKS stands for’, NBA, Calcutta, p.8)

The years from 1937 to 1939 saw a string of peasant movements in different parts of country, often under communist leadership. The period between 1945 and 1947 saw Telangana peasant revolt, the Tebhaga movement and Punappra-Vylar peasant uprising and many other peasant movements. All of them were either under the leadership of communists or were under influence of communists. In nutshell, from the late-1920s itself, the communists had become active in the peasant movement. From AIKS to Telangana, the communists did participate in the peasant movements, often in the leadership capacity, though they did not have a clear program of agrarian revolution and committed blunders in the 1930s as well as in the period from 1942 to 1947 due to the lack of a program of Indian revolution, including the agrarian program, a program on annihilation of caste, and other particular questions. This does not mean that they did not participate in or led the struggles of peasants and landless Dalits. This is what I have called empirical involvement in all these struggles by the communists, despite the lack of a positive program based on the concrete analysis of concrete conditions of India. However, to claim that the CPI ignored peasantry and focused only on industrial workers is gross misrepresentation of facts on the part of Anand Teltumbde and that too in order to prove that the critique of CPI by Ambedkar was correct! Ambedkar had no concern whatsoever whether the CPI is raising the class consciousness of Indian people before becoming over-optimistic about Indian revolution. Making such a claim is not only a gross distortion of history but also politically outrageous. Even Teltumbde seems to be a bit aware about it and therefore in passing he comments, “However, his (Ambedkar’s) use of a moral scale for judging the Marxist methods smacks of his liberal obsession and lack of appreciation for the alternate epistemology of Marxism.” However, in the end, Teltumbde makes a shame-faced attempt to give some validity to Ambedkar’s attitude to communists.

Teltumbde claims that Ambedkar was only antagonistic towards the practice of Indian communists and not Marxism itself. Later, I will show that this too is a gross distortion of history. It will be shown in this essay that Ambedkar as a consistent Deweyan Pragmatist had a natural anathema to Marxist philosophy itself. There should be no attempt to make this ill-fated bridge between Ambedkar’s political thought and Marxism, philosophically speaking. Needless to say, that the revolutionary Left and the genuine Ambedkarite organizations should make joint-fronts and alliances on the basis of the pertinent issues of anti-Dalit atrocities and other important anti-Dalit measures of the State. However, to talk about philosophical vicinity of Ambedkar’s Deweyan Pragmatism and Marxism would be a travesty of science and history.

Next, Teltumbde embarks upon his project to prove that Ambedkar not only believed in the concept of class, he employed it in his political and historical analysis, though later like an act of intellectual burglary Teltumbde accepts that through a continuum Ambedkar’s notion of class was closer to Weber’s than Marx’s! Though this statement too is inaccurate, because there can be no continuum, stretching from Marx’s notion of class to Weberian notion of class, as the two concepts are fundamentally opposed and their theoretical basis is completely different. A continuum can be made between concepts of the same genus. Still, Teltumbde is forced to concede in an intellectual sleight of hand, that Ambedkar’s concept of class was not a Marxist one. And yet, he persists in his endeavour to prove Ambedkar’s belief in the concept of class as opposed to liberal bourgeois emphasis on individual. It must be reminded here that liberal bourgeois philosophy has its own notion of class and it had this notion much before Marx and Marxism. To claim that liberalism does not have a concept of class and only a concept of individual, and how Ambedkar, by having a concept of class and going against liberalism, drew closer to Marxism is a shameful attempt of Teltumbde to fool his readers. Different bourgeois liberal ideologies have different notions of class. Moreover, the trend of British political economy even developed an economic notion of class which was critiqued and sublated by Marx to develop the dialectical materialist notions of class. In fact, Marx categorically said:

“… And now as to myself, no credit is due to me for discovering the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Long before me bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this class struggle and bourgeois economists, the economic economy of the classes. What I did that was new was to prove: (1) that the existence of classes is only bound up with particular historical phases in the development of production (historische Entwicklungsphasen der Production), (2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat, (3) that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society .

“Ignorant louts like Heinzen, who deny not merely the class struggle but even the existence of classes, only prove that, despite all their blood-curdling yelps and the humanitarian airs they give themselves, they regard the social conditions under which the bourgeoisie rules as the final product, the non plus ultra [highest point attainable] of history, and that they are only the servants of the bourgeoisie. And the less these louts realize the greatness and transient necessity of the bourgeois regime itself the more disgusting is their servitude….” (Marx to J. Weydemeyer, March 5, 1852)

In the above quote, Marx has also expressed his disdain for people who do not acknowledge the existence of class struggle.

Firstly, the claim that Ambedkar, by emphasizing the notion of ‘class’ and by undermining the bourgeois liberal notion of society as collection of ‘atomistic individuals’, moved closer to Marxist position is wrong because (1) liberalism does have a concept of class, though it is a purely sociological categorization which has nothing to do with production relations; this categorization varies according to the different schools of liberal bourgeois philosophy from occupation and income to intellectual categories; (2) Ambedkar still believed in the primacy of individual over society, though he accepted the existence of different groups of individuals existing in the society and stressed upon the need of internal communication (Deweyan idea of social endosmosis) between them; (3) Ambedkar’s concept of ‘class’ is akin to the Deweyan concept of society as a collection of ‘disparate groups’, a concept which has not only nothing to do with Marxism, but in fact, was invented to do ‘shadow-boxing’ with Marxism; according to this concept there are no real contradictions between these groups but only perceived contradictions and it is the duty of the ‘great mediator’, i.e., the State, to resolve these perceived contradictions by intervention from above. Ambedkar always clung to this idea. If you read ‘Annihilation of Caste’, you will find that Ambedkar paraphrases this Deweyan idea of society as a collection of disparate groups: “nowhere is human society one single whole. It is always plural. In the world of action, the individual is one limit and society the other. Between them lie all sorts of associative arrangements of lesser and larger scope—families, friendships, co-operative associations, business combines, political parties, bands of thieves and robbers.” (Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste) As one can see, this idea of class/social group has nothing to do with Marxist notion of class.

The quote that Teltumbde presents as the proof of Ambedkar’s belief in the category of class clearly shows that Ambedkar uses ‘class’ as a generic term which might be formed on the basis of “economic or intellectual or social.” In this quote from his famous paper from Columbia University, Ambedkar makes it clear at the very outset that he considers the theory of class conflict to be an exaggeration. This once again makes it clear as day-light that Ambedkar not only has nothing to do with Marxian concept of class but is actually opposed to it because according to Marx, classes came into existence precisely due to contradiction and conflict of interests between the groups of people, based on production relations, that is, relations of ownership, relations of distribution and relations of labour division. It is not as if classes first came into existence and then class contradiction developed. Just the contrary, it is contradiction inherent in the process of production and reproduction of life, which leads to the emergence of classes. Therefore, if we accept the Marxian concept of class, or even if go near to the Marxian concept of class, we will be obliged also to accept class struggle because it is contradiction itself that leads to the formation of classes. This clearly shows that Ambedkar’s use of the term ‘class’ had nothing whatsoever to do with Marxist notion of class and rather it was diametrically opposed to it, as an incorrigible pragmatist liberal idea.

Further.

Teltumbde argues that Ambedkar had no guiding philosophy or ideological frame of reference to fight against caste when he entered public life. This too is incorrect. By the time Ambedkar returned from Columbia University, he had begun his philosophical journey as a Deweyan pragmatist. In fact, a number of scholars have shown that John Dewey was an overriding philosophical and political influence on Ambedkar right since his days in Columbia University. Teltumbde claims that the only point of reference that Ambedkar had was Jyotiba Phule’s writings and fight against caste. In this process, Teltumbde makes a claim that is, if not wrong, is certainly inaccurate, namely, that Phule saw the British rule as a boon for the lower castes; while it is true that Phule began his political-philosophical career with this idea, we must realize that Phule’s political life had a trajectory which shows that he was becoming increasingly critical of the British towards the end of his life. His Cultivator’s Whipcord is the best example of this trajectory. In fact, Phule’s disciple Lokhande had edited the last few chapters of Cultivator’s Whipcord, because he thought Phule had become too critical of the British in these sections of the book. Phule was extremely irked with Lokhande for this unsolicited editing job. Later, the book was published in its full form. Coming back to Ambedkar’s philosophical frame of reference, whatever the case may be, this fact is irrefutable that after his stint at Columbia University, it was only through the glass of Deweyan Pragmatism that Ambedkar saw everything, including Phule, the British colonial state, the communists, role of intellectuals and role of education. It can be proven with fairly conclusive evidence that in his writings on all these issues, Ambedkar shows strong shadow of Dewey, even when he does not quote Dewey by name. Teltumbde wants to project the image that when Ambedkar entered public life, he was in want of a worldview and was at loss to analyse caste. This is factually incorrect and the real intention here is to show that communists were at a vantage point, politically and philosophically, as compared to Dr. Ambedkar because they had the most developed analytical tools in the shape of Marxism. I do not think that even Dr. Ambedkar would agree to such a preposterous claim! Ambedkar certainly had a method and approach when he entered political life with his testimony to the Southborough Committee.

About Marx and Marxism, Teltumbde has made a number of incorrect and inaccurate, if not totally ignorant claims, to which I will later come. However, here it must be pointed out that the claim that Marx thought that development of railways and limited industrialization would lead to the collapse of the Asiatic mode of production, the village community and with it, the caste system is wrong. Marx talked about the hereditary labour division, which would slowly be broken with capitalist development and railways, not the caste system itself. He did not say anything about the fate of caste system in its totality in event of industrialization and development of railways. Moreover, Marx’s views about Asiatic mode of production, its internal stagnation and the presumed need of an external force to break it had changed towards the end of 1870s itself. Marx acknowledges that the village community and its institutions were breaking from inside and class differentiation had set in. Those who are interested in Marx’s changing views on village community and caste system might look at the notes of Marx from his reading of the Kovalevsky’s book Communal Landholding and his notes from his reading of Elphinstone’s book History of India. One can also read Shlomo Avineri’s book Karl Marx on Colonialism and Modernization and Irfan Habib’s introduction to the anthology Karl Marx on India published by Tulika Books. However, Teltumbde glosses over these details about changing views of Marx regarding Indian social formation, village economy and caste system and makes a sweeping generalization. More on Ambedkar’s and Teltumbde’s views on Marxism later.

Further, Teltumbde claims that Ambedkar, though not aware of Marx’s views on caste (Ambedkar was not aware of Marx’s views about anything from primary sources, that is the writings of Marx and Engels, as we will show later), nonetheless believed in struggle against caste as class struggle, though his idea of class was not Marxist. This is a strange argument. If he does not believe in the Marxist idea of class then how come he believed in class struggle? Moreover, Ambedkar clearly rejects the very notion of ‘class conflict’ categorically, while accepting a generic liberal bourgeois notion of ‘class’, as shown clearly by the quote of Ambedkar that Teltumbde himself has used. Still claiming that Ambedkar saw struggle against caste as class struggle is gross misrepresentation of Ambedkar and also a serious distortion of history by Teltumbde. In fact, Ambedkar clearly believed that caste is the appropriate category to analyse Indian society as opposed to class. Clearly enough, Ambedkar saw an anti-thesis between the caste and Marxist notion of class. Even in the period of Independent Labour Party, when according to claims of many, including Teltumbde, Ambedkar was drifting towards class politics, he categorically rejected such an illusion. Christopher Jaffrelot in his pioneering study Dr Ambedkar and Untouchability has shown beyond doubt that even in the period of ILP, Ambedkar categorically rejected Marxist notion of class as a useful category in the context of India and emphasized that caste as such has nothing to do with the access to the economic resources (see Jaffrelot, 2005, ‘Dr Ambedkar and Untouchability’, Permanent Black, Delhi, p. 75-77). Therefore, Ambedkar without using the Marxist terminology argued that caste belongs to ideological superstructure!

In fact, the argument of Ambedkar against socialists in his ‘Annihilation of Caste’ clearly shows how less he understood of socialism. For example, at one place he argues that individuals will join a revolution for ‘equalization of property’, only when they are assured that they would not be discriminated against on the basis of caste or creed: “Men will not join in a revolution for the equalisation of property unless they know that after the revolution is achieved they will be treated equally, and that there will be no discrimination of caste and creed.” (Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste) Ambedkar argues at three places in this essay that socialists fight for ‘equalization of property’! Teltumbde cannot say that he is talking about non-Marxian socialists. Ambedkar is clearly referring to Marxists here. Evidently, he did not understand what Marxists fought for. First of all, socialists do not fight for ‘equalization of property’, but the common ownership of everything and eventual withering away of property, class and state. Slogans of property or wage equalization have nothing to do with Marxism, which Ambedkar utterly failed to understand. Such claims are nearer to different forms of petty-bourgeois socialism, including Proudhonist idea of socialism. Even a XIIth standard humanities student knows it today that Marxism gives no such ridiculous slogan! Secondly, Ambedkar’s claim (that he makes in his ‘Annihilation of Caste’ for which he even invokes the authority of Lasalle, a close associate of Marx; however, if you read the quote of Lasalle that Ambedkar uses, you realize that Ambedkar had totally misunderstood it and quoted him out of context to prove his point) that religious and social revolutions always preceded political revolutions is a faulty one (which Teltumbde quotes in approval). The revolutions that Ambedkar calls ‘religious revolutions’, for instance, the Reformation, Mohammed’s revolution in Middle-East, or the Sikh movement led by Guru Nanak, were not simply religious and social revolutions, but thoroughly political movements or revolutions. If one reads the works of Christopher Hill on Reformation and Puritanism, of Hodgeson and Rodinson on the advent of Islam under Mohammed or the works of J. S. Grewal on Sikh movement, it becomes clear that it was not the emergence of an idea that led to material historical change, but it was the movement of real contradictions within the relations of production and reproduction that led to the rise of certain ideas at certain conjunctures of history. Otherwise, one would not be able to tell why a certain social or religious movement or idea emerged at a particular moment in history. It would become completely an issue of chance based on the emergence of certain individuals. Evidently enough, Ambedkar could not understand the political essence of such movements and saw them as simply social or religious movements, whereas these movements were primarily and predominantly political movements representing definite political class interests and they had their own definite socio-religious dimensions and articulations.

Subsequently, Teltumbde showers curse on Ambedkarites who “have vehemently rejected class politics in their antipathy to Marxism.” According to Teltumbde, they need to be reminded (a duty that Teltumbde has taken upon himself!) that Ambedkar interpreted castes essentially in class terms! To save humiliation, Teltumbde accepts a few sentences later the Ambedkar’s concept of class was nearer to Weber’s notion as compared to Marx’s “on a continuum”. This too reveals that Teltumbde neither understands Marx’s notion nor Weber’s notion of ‘class’ because there can be no continuum between the two as we pointed out earlier. Marx’s notion of ‘class’ is based on exploitation and relations of production, whereas Weber’s notion of class is based on what he calls ‘life chances’. We cannot go in the details here but can refer readers to writings of Erik Olin Wright, Henryk Grossman, and other Marxist critiques of Weber’s notion of class, which is a part of his tripartite theory of stratification based on class, status and party. This much is certain that there can be no bridge between the two notions and therefore no continuum. Secondly, the “sin” for which Teltumbde rebukes the Ambedkarites equally applies to Ambedkar himself and the contrast between Ambedkar and Ambedkarites in the context of acceptance or rejection of ‘class analysis’, that Teltumbde wants to conjure up, can safely be called a figment of his imagination. Ambedkar clearly rejected Marxist class analysis and class politics in the communist sense (objectively, every politics is a class politics in so far as it serves certain class/es) and, as we will show later with evidence, he had a clear antipathy to Marxism (not simply Indian communists!). We will return to the theme of Ambedkar’s views about Marxism and Communism later in the second part of this subhead, where we will show with quotations from Ambedkar’s work that he not only did not understand Marxism and did not read any Marxist classic, but also that his Deweyan pragmatist prejudice led him to oppose and detest Marxism, without even knowing it properly.

Ambedkar’s Strategies of Conversion and Electoral Politics: The Selective Narrative of Teltumbde

Teltumbde also presents the history selectively regarding evolution of Ambedkar’s views in relation to conversion as an emancipatory strategy. Let us see, in brief, how the views of Ambedkar regarding conversion evolved.

First reference by Ambedkar to conversion comes in Jalgaon Depressed Classes Conference in 1927 where Ambedkar says that if the untouchables cannot get rid of the injustice within the fold of Hinduism, they would not lose anything by abandoning this identity. After this proclamation a few Dalits converted to Islam. This scared the Brahminical orthodoxy and in some villages they opened up the wells for Dalits, as Christopher Jaffrelot has shown in his book Dr Ambedkar and Untouchability. Consequently, he gave a number of allusions to his strategy of conversion. Jaffrelot also shows that Ambedkar had told G. A. Gavai, with whom he had represented the Untouchables at the third Round Table Conference, that he wanted to leave the fold of Hinduism but Islam repelled him. In an open letter of 1936, Ambedkar compared Islam, Christianity and Sikhism and argued that by converting to Sikhism the Dalits would not ‘denationalize’ and will continue to be the part of the Indian nation! This is what Ambedkar wrote, “What the consequences of conversion will be to the country as a whole is well worth bearing in mind. Conversion to Islam or Chritianity will denationaise the Depressed Classes. If they go to Islam the number of Muslims will be doubled and the danger of Muslim domination also becomes real. If they go to Christianity, the numerical strength of Christians becomes 5 to 6 crores. It will help to strengthen the hold of the British on this country. On the other, if they embrace Sikhism they will not only not harm the destiny of the country, but they will help the destiny of the country. They will not be denationalised.” (quoted in Jaffrelot, 2005, p. 122) In the course of the year 1936, a galvanization was taking place on the question of mass conversion of the Dalits.

Why Ambedkar chose Sikhism has an interesting story behind it, which Anand Teltumbde does not tell and I suspect that it is out of sheer innocence. Moonje, a leader of Hindu Mahasabha had a three day-secret talks with Ambedkar in which J. K. Birla, brother of G. D. Birla also participated. Moonje persuaded Ambedkar to convert to Sikhism because by this the Dalits will only leave Hindu religion but not Hindu culture and civilization. This idea was given weight by Shankaracharya of Karweer Peeth who supported this idea and thought that Sikhism is part of Hinduism as one of its protestant sects. It is noteworthy that Ambedkar accepted the advice of Moonje and expressed his choice of Sikhism and even explained it to the Dalits: “to have some responsibility as for the future of the Hindu culture and civilization.” (quoted in Jaffrelot, 2005, p. 129). It was only when it became clear that the benefits of minority would not be granted to the the Dalits converted into Sikhism, the evidence of anti-Dalit atrocities by Jatts within the fold of Sikhism and the resistance of the leader of Sikhs, Master Tara Singh, that Ambedkar slowly dropped this idea. The next time this idea emerged in Ambedkar’s discourse was the late-1940s and then came the manifest idea of choice of Buddhism in the 1950s. However, Teltumbde smoothly slides over all this important history which only reveals the pragmatism of Ambedkar.

Now let us see Teltumbde’s selective account of Ambedkar’s politics in the period of the ILP.

Teltumbde is obliged to accept that Independent Labour Party was basically a child of the Poona Pact. In view of the reserved seats instead of separate electorates, the strategy to form a broad mass-based party with transcendental appeal was better for Ambedkar, as compared to the strategy of establishing the image of a Dalit leader for himself. Jaffrelot has demonstrated this fact beyond doubt. Teltumbde’s section on ILP in this introduction borrows heavily from Jaffrelot’s analysis, but according to his own ideological and political exigencies and convenience. Let us see how.

It is true that during the period of the ILP, Ambedkar collaborated with communists on a number of issues including that of land and the Industrial Disputes Bill, which threatened the very right to strike. Though Teltumbde builds on Jaffrelot’s analysis however he omits and edits at will. For example, Jaffrelot shows that the proposal for strike against this ID Bill came from the communists which Ambedkar accepted. However, Teltumbde’s account shows that the communists and Ambedkar “came together for this strike” without mentioning the origin of the initiative. The communists had proposed for a one day strike against ID Bill and Ambedkar had readily accepted this proposal. Secondly, during the phase of the ILP, it was natural for Ambedkar to use class rhetoric. However, the class rhetoric that he uses never goes beyond the class rhetoric used by all “leftists” belonging to the breed of Labour-Party-style Leftism. This rhetoric in and by itself had nothing to do with Marxism. Even where Ambedkar talks about the communist philosophy being nearer to him as compared to other philosophies, he makes it clear that he does not believe in the idea of class struggle. Jaffrelot also shows that even during the period of these joint fronts with communists, Ambedkar particularly ruled out any idea of revolutionary transformation and stressed upon the constitutional methods to win power. (see Jaffrelot, 2005, p. 79)

The program of ILP was program of state capitalism with huge doses of welfarism. This is termed by Teltumbde as ‘state socialism’. Lenin and later Marxists have shown that this term ‘state socialism’ is an oxymoron. There is no such thing as ‘state socialism’. In transition to a socialist economy, there can be a period of ‘state capitalism under the dictatorship of the proletariat’ (which tantamount to socialism itself), as Lenin called it. However, the nationalization of key and basic industries and land does not tantamount to socialism. There have been several cases of such State capitalisms under bourgeois dictatorship in the modern history of world, from Bismarck to the war-time economy of Germany during the First World War (called ‘WUMBA’ economy), economies of certain Scandinavian countries, etc. For a Marxist, the first characteristic feature to determine whether a country is socialist or not, is the character of the state power. What is the class character of the state: is it a workers’ state or a bourgeois state? This is the first and foremost yardstick to determine the character of a social formation. However, the model of welfarist state capitalism (a la Fabians and Labour Party) has been termed as ‘state socialism’, which actually is an empty term and can be filled up with anything. This program of the ILP in no way shows any affinity towards Marxist program of socialism, as Jaffrelot has convincingly shown. Moreover, there are specific provisions in this program which tend to accommodate the bourgeois principles of Ambedkar also. For example, due to his respect for private property, Ambedkar was against the agrarian program for confiscation without compensation. He argued that the feudal lords and landowners should be compensated for confiscation of their land. The quote that Teltumbde has presented mentions this element of the program of the ILP. In fact, it was Ambedkar who just before the Independence proposed that the feudal lords and erstwhile royals should be compensated by giving them government bonds and they will be paid the dividend for these bonds from the revenue collected by the Indian state from the peasantry. This is a travesty of, even, a radical bourgeois land reforms, and Teltumbde is busy striving to make a ‘socialist’ out of Dr. Ambedkar. Besides, the proposal of privy-purse to be given to the erstwhile royals and lords was made by Dr. Ambedkar. Even a bourgeois revolution of the late-18th century presented a program of confiscation without compensation! If a program is not even radical enough to match the program of a late-18th century bourgeois democratic revolution, what justification does it have to be called ‘socialist’?

Despite accepting the fact that the ILP was mainly an electoral strategy for Ambedkar, Teltumbde claims that ideologically ILP as a model was closer to Ambedkar’s disposition and closer to program of communists. However, both these claims are baseless. First, if ideologically the ILP was closer to Ambedkar’s disposition, why did he shifted to the strategy of SCF in 1942 and disbanded the ILP? May be Teltumbde would argue that the communists forced him to do so! Whatever be their intellectual mistakes and ideological-political weaknesses, we certainly cannot blame the communists for the different strategies employed by Dr. Ambedkar. It would be too demeaning for Dr. Ambedkar if we make all his strategies as a derivative of what the communists did or did not do. The truth is that the ILP was purely an electoral strategy and nothing in the theory and practice of ILP was communist or communistic. The program is thoroughly Fabian and the practice is totally in congruence with the ideals of Fabianism and Pragmatism.

Ambedkar’s defence of workers’ rights to strike or later his introduction of Indian Trade Union Amendment Bill as the member of labour of Viceroy’s council is basically the defence of workers’ right of collective bargaining, which is totally supported by the Fabians as well as the Pragmatists. One does not become a communist by defending these economic rights of workers. Different strands of liberal bourgeois thought totally defend these economic rights of workers, in fact, support them vociferously because they believe that if the workers are not given certain legal and economic rights, then their militancy or opposition to the establishment could not be regulated. Every serious social scientist now knows that laws in the bourgeois state have dual functions: rights and regulation, and they must be understood as such. Teltumbde is uselessly trying to drag Marxism and Ambedkar’s Deweyan Pragmatism closer, which is bad for both. He laments that despite Ambedkar becoming so ‘radical’ the communists adopted an antagonistic stand towards Ambedkar! I would later show that the tension was mutual and even in the period of the ILP, Ambedkar never missed an opportunity to attack Marxism as well as Indian communists.

As soon as the political exigencies that led to the creation of the ILP disappeared, so did the ILP and Ambedkar shifted to the strategy of SCF. During this period, while attacking Ambedkar for his demand of separate electorates and collaboration with the British, the CPI protested the police crack-down on SCF units that demanded separate electorates for Dalits. However, according to Teltumbde, the communists should have accepted this demand of separate electorates for the Dalits. Teltumbde should also critique Bhagat Singh and his comrades for their “presumed Brahmanical bias”, because they too opposed communal award and separate electorates. However, he would not mention Bhagat Singh and single out the communists for his attack. There is no doubt that there were leaders and cadre in the CPI who had casteist mind-set. Before 1951, the CPI took action against such elements whenever they came to light. That is what communists could have done. How can someone figure out, a priori, who has caste prejudices and who does not? Only through political practice such elements appear or rather surface in a communist party. The communist party accordingly takes action against such elements and expels them or tries to change them through the process of criticism and self-criticism. In general, the CPI did undertake this process at least before 1951-52. As we mentioned earlier the communist movement in India had been intellectually and politically weak due to its intellectual dependence on other big parties like the CPs of Britain, Russia, Germany and later China. Due to this, they could not even work out the program of Indian revolution till 1951 and were content with some scattered program-related statements, articles and essays. In such a scenario, they were bound to fail in understanding the caste question and how it is articulated with class struggle and adopting a particular program on the annihilation of caste. However, to claim that the CPI was a Brahmanical outfit, even before 1951, is a preposterous and outrageous claim.

Teltumbde presents a picture that since Ambedkar undertook class politics with ILP, the communists felt threatened! This too is a ridiculous claim. Teltumbde does not care to provide any documentary evidence to support it. In fact, Ambedkar felt threatened due to increasing appeal of communism among his followers, as he accepted to Field Marshall Wavell. We will quote that source later in this essay. The truth is that, subjectively and consciously, Dr. Ambedkar was never in favour of class struggle; even in the period of the ILP he had made it clear time and again. Objectively, of course, every politics is a part of the overall class struggle that goes on in any society. In that sense, every political strategy of Dr. Ambedkar was always a part of class struggle. However, subjectively and consciously, he was always against the politics of class struggle and he never hid this fact. Teltumbde’s claim that it was the communal atmosphere of 1940s that drew Ambedkar away from class politics has no historical evidence and is nothing more than a false speculation to prove his hypothesis of supposed vicinity of Ambedkar and Marxism. It would have been better had Anand Teltumbde saved his energy for a better intellectual enterprise, instead of performing endless ideological somersaults to prove that Dr. Ambedkar had any affinity with Marxism and it was the practice and behaviour of Indian communists that drove him into the arms of liberal bourgeois philosophy!

Teltumbde on ‘How the Indian Communists Made Ambedkar Anti-Communist!’

The mistakes and weaknesses of the Indian communist movement apart, can we blame the shifts and transitions in the political career of Ambedkar on the deeds of communists, especially, his repulsion to communism? The central slogan of Anand Teltumbde is: whenever you cannot show that Ambedkar is friendly towards Marxism, blame it on Indian communists! Interestingly, this argument robs Dr. Ambedkar of all political autonomy and agency and his entire attitude towards Marxism becomes a derivative discourse stemming from what the Indian communists did. Isn’t it ridiculous to make such an argument about an intellectual like Dr. Ambedkar? However, I would not simply speculate. I will show in a short while that Ambedkar as a firm and consistent Deweyan Pragmatist had a natural antipathy towards Marxism. But first, let us return to our eternal Leftist interlocutor between Ambedkar’s pragmatism and Marxism, Mr. Anand Teltumbde.

The problem with Mr. Teltumbde is that he cannot decide which stool to sit on; he jumps back and forth from one stool to another and in the process falls in between the two stools. First Teltumbde accepts that Ambedkar’s interest in Marxism was thwarted by his religious upbringing, influence of pragmatism and Fabianism during his education in the US and Britain; he never accepted Marxist economics even when he used the term ‘state socialism’ in his ‘States and Minorities’; he also accepts that the term ‘socialism’ has assumed many meanings over the centuries and it was only with Marx that theories of Scientific Socialism were propounded. However, here Teltumbde by mistake exposes his poor understanding of the difference between myriad forms of pre-Marxian socialism and the Scientific Socialism of Marx. Teltumbde argues that the differentia specifica of Marxian Scientific Socialism is that it wants to do away with State whereas the pre-Marxian or non-Marxian theories of socialism including theories of ‘state socialism’ believe that it is the state that will do away with exploitation and will promote general welfare. While it is true that the theories of state socialism did believe that State is the agent that will end exploitation and promote general welfare, this is not the main basis of difference between Marxist theory of Socialism and other theories of socialism. The most important aspect of Marxian Scientific Socialism is that Socialism is a result of class struggle and what Marx called ‘liberation of the working class by the working class itself’; it is not the work of some enlightened and benevolent individuals; it is the dynamic of class struggle that leads, first to socialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat and then the eventual withering away of the state with emergence of a classless society; under socialism, state continues to exist but now it is characterized by dictatorship of the proletariat; this dictatorship of proletariat is only a transitional phase towards communism, when the classes and state will wither away in a long and protracted process. Lenin and Mao showed that during this period of transition the possibility of reversal and capitalist restoration continues to exist and it is minimized only to the extent that the continued hegemony of bourgeois ideology is decisively broken under the proletarian state. The differentia specifica of Marxist theory of socialism is not the existence or absence of state, as such. It is the class nature of the process through which socialism comes into existence and the class nature of the socialist state, though this state strives and intends to become more of a no-state in the protracted process of socialist transition. Teltumbde’s arguments in this regard are certainly lacking.

Teltumbde attempts to refute Gail Omvedt’s argument that Ambedkar was opposed to communism. She has quoted Ambedkar where he clearly says that communism is like a forest fire and goes on burning and consuming anything and everything that comes in its way. However, Teltumbde wants to reduce this stand of Ambedkar to his antipathy to Nehru’s foreign policy of creating a false impression of friendliness towards both countries, Russia and China! Any reader can gauge the extent of distortion of facts by Teltumbde here. The statement of Ambedkar has nothing critical about the foreign policy of Nehru as such, but a clear-cut antagonism towards communism itself. Later in this essay, we will quote the entire statement to expose the lie of Teltumbde.

Since, Teltumbde senses the weakness of his arguments, he comes up with a new argument: the Soviet Russia had lost its sheen after Lenin! So, this might be the reason for Ambedkar’s antipathy, though Teltumbde does not say so. However, he mentions this “losing sheen by Soviet Russia” only to create the context that Ambedkar might have become critical of Soviet Russia like many had become during the Stalin years. Teltumbde argues that stories of persecution of political opponents by Stalin were pouring from Russia. This too is a ridiculous claim. The news of famous trials of 1930s did emerge from Soviet Union, however, the slandering based on these trials, what Teltumbde calls “stories” emerged from the American and British bourgeois and imperialist press, not from the USSR. Interestingly, a few sentences later, Teltumbde had the audacity to claim that Ambedkar also had a ‘soft corner’ for Stalin and arguably he maintained a one day fast when Stalin died, though there is no evidence of this! These anecdotes without evidence are produced here by Teltumbde in order to show that Ambedkar became anti-communist due to the misdeeds of the communists in the 1930s! However, the fact is that Ambedkar never expressed his admiration for communism even in the 1920s. He deals with communists and communism mainly in the 1930s because that was the decade when he entered electoral politics. In the late 1920s itself, Ambedkar clearly believed that communism and strikes are twins and he would never support a strike which is led by communists, because communists politicize the strikes which lead to economic loss of workers! An incorrigibly liberal bourgeois idea, as you can see. In the 1930s too, he critiqued communism in a number of writings including ‘The Annihilation of Caste’. Even during the phase of the ILP, he clearly declared that class analysis is not relevant in the Indian context and the Marxist theory of class conflict is something to which he cannot agree. In fact, Ambedkar had expressed his antipathy to Marxist theory of class struggle in his paper presented in Columbia University in 1916 itself, which Teltumbde himself has quoted. Evidently, the claim of Teltumbde that Ambedkar became anti-communist only in the 1940s and that too due to the practice of Indian communists, is a gross distortion of historical facts. Later, Teltumbde accepts in a shame-faced fashion that some responsibility of this antipathy also lies with Ambedkar who himself felt threatened by communism once he entered electoral politics. He concedes, “As these instances illustrate, his anti-communist statements mainly came out anxiety to defend his turf in electoral politics.” (Teltumbde, 2017, p. 32) Afterwards, he immediately claims that this antipathy of Ambedkar was not to communist theory in general but the practice of Indian communists, which we have shown is a baseless claim.

Teltumbde fails to understand that the allegedly “trivializing attitude” of communists to the question of caste stems from their broader failure to understand concrete conditions of Indian society and their failure to undertake a concrete analysis of these concrete conditions. He claims that it was the Brahmanical mind-set of communists to follow the vedavakya. First they followed the word of the Brahmin Samhitas and later followed the word of Marxist theory but by turning it into a creed or religion. The problem with this argument is that the Indian communists did not even follow the Marxist classics by word! Not that it would have been sufficient, but, the Indian Marxists not only failed to apply the universal truth of Marxism to Indian conditions, they also failed to understand the “word” of Marxist theory itself. We can see this failure in their support to the formation of Pakistan for a brief period when an anti-Marxist idea of nation based on religious identity was accepted uncritically, or the failure to understand the principal contradiction during the Quit India Movement and the decision not to participate in it and also in drafting and implementing a particular program on the question of caste as well as gender during the national movement. However, the issue of lack of understanding of caste question is singled out to prove that it was the Brahmanical bias of the CPI that prevented it from comprehending this question in totality. This is a gross injustice to the early communists, who despite their lack of understanding of the program of Indian revolution, including the program for annihilation of caste, fought and sacrificed more than any other political force during the national movement of India and also since the Naxalbari Revolt. It is often easy for armchair passive radicals to make such ludicrous claims.

Teltumbde’s Account of ‘Unmarxist Marxists’: An Unmarxist History of “Unmarxist” Marxists!

Under the subhead ‘Unmarxist Marxists’, first Teltumbde repeats his allegation that Indian Marxists took the notions and categories of Marxism uncritically that had come into existence in the specific European context. This claim is incorrect on many levels. First of all, which categories Teltumbde is talking about? Is it class? Is it state and its class character? Is it class struggle? If yes, then he misses that these categories are universal categories and are applicable to all class societies, even the Indian class society. Secondly, in all countries class exploitation is articulated with different forms of oppression from race, ethnicity, linguistic identity to caste and religion. All these forms of social oppression have their own particularity and they articulate with class exploitation in their own specific ways in different national contexts. Communists in India undoubtedly failed to understand the specificity of the articulation of caste-based oppression and exploitation with class exploitation. This led to serious mistakes on the part of communists. But to claim that the communists did not take up caste question is historically incorrect. They did take up the caste question, but in the lack of a proper understanding of the particular form of articulation of caste and class, which I have called the relationship of Correspondence (see, Abhinav Sinha, ‘Historiography of Caste: Some Critical Observations’, Caste Question and Marxism, Arvind Trust, Lucknow, 2014), they failed to devise a particular program of anti-caste struggles as part of class struggle. However, to conjure up an image of Brahmanical idea of ‘following the vedavakya of Marxism’ and impose it on this weakness of communists is preposterous. The truth is that Indian communists did not even follow the word!

Teltumbde again repeats the false claim that Indian communists believed that India had already become capitalist and therefore they ignored peasants and rural class struggle where the caste dynamics was being played out. We have shown above that this claim of Teltumbde is not based on the documents and practice of the CPI but solely on the works of M.N. Roy, which was rejected by the CPI. Teltumbde is not well-versed in the history of communist movement and that is why he makes such a childish claim. His argument that even the Congress understood the importance of Untouchability as early as 1916 and communists were “blissfully ignorant” about it, is inaccurate. First of all, proper formation of the CPI took place only in 1933, as we have pointed out earlier. The 1920 Tashkent declaration was just a formal event. The 1925 All India Conference was even more meaningless, when speeches were made which attempted to make a bridge between Islam and Marxism (for instance, the speech of Maulana Hasrat Mohani), and a constitution was adopted which said that every worker can participate in election of delegates to the party forums like party conferences and party congress. Evidently, it was a constitution that was even weaker than those of the Social Democratic parties of Europe. That is why, it must be understood that the first major milestone in the process of formation of the CPI was 1933, when following the advice of CPs of Germany, Britain and China, a provisional nucleus of the CC was formed. To expect, therefore, that the CPI could have adopted a particular program on the Caste Question, when it did not even have a general program of revolution in India, is ridiculous.

Secondly, though the communists did not theoretically understand the caste question and therefore the question of untouchability, they were not “blissfully ignorant” about it. In 1930, in a document ‘United Front for Action’, the communist party discussed the caste system and untouchability in detail, linked anti-caste struggle with the struggle against feudalism and the British rule. It declared to fight against all forms of caste-based oppression and discrimination. In the Second Congress of the Party in 1948 also, the paper on political situation discusses the problem of untouchability and appeals to the toiling untouchable masses to struggle uncompromisingly against ‘the upper-caste bourgeois state’ and also carry out the struggle against the separatist leaders who want to isolate their struggles from the struggle of all working masses. The allusion here is to Ambedkar. The AITUC, in its fourth, fifth and sixth conferences, had made untouchability an issue, and even later, had included this issue in the ‘charter of the workers.’ Regarding the anti-caste activities and stand of AIKS, we have already talked. In the work of Andhra Mahasabha that prepared the prelude of Telangana peasants’ struggle, the communists actively raised the question of caste and untouchability. The CPI in many states of country was known as the ‘party of chamars and dusadhs’ due to its struggle for the Dalits, especially on the question of land but also on the question of caste-based atrocities. Therefore, to claim that the communists were ‘blissfully ignorant’ of the caste question, again, is a distortion of history by Anand Teltumbde.

It is true that the CPI even after independence failed to present a program for annihilation of caste. Teltumbde quotes Singaravelu and some other early communists who presented a mechanical and economistic understanding of not only caste, but also class struggle. As we showed above, the intellectual weakness of communist movement was apparent from the very beginning. However, Teltumbde also claims that Indian communists followed Marx mechanically by word. If we look at Marx’s and Lenin’s concept of class, we can easily see that Indian communists failed to even mechanically follow the word of Marx! We have presented our detailed critique of how Indian communists failed to present a coherent and cohesive program of Indian revolution based on concrete analysis of concrete conditions and how this also led them to the failure in presenting a particular program for the annihilation of caste too. However, Ambedkar too failed to present such a program and all his remedies remained within the framework of Deweyan Pragmatist methods of collaborating with the rulers (irrespective of the fact who the ruler was!), identity construction, constitutionalism and legalism (see Jaffrelot, 2005). Why single out the communists only, then? Even Ambedkar reached the conclusion that tantamount to the statement that caste belongs to the sphere of superstructure as we showed above. The CPI at particular junctures claimed the same, though not always. There were times when another thesis of ‘caste is class’ also surfaced, which was equally erroneous. However, this error, namely, relegating caste to the sphere of superstructure, as we can see, was shared by the Indian communists and Ambedkar. The critique of communist movement on program of Indian revolution, caste question, gender and nationality is an important task and must be undertaken. We have actually undertaken this task (http://anvilmag.in/naxalbari-retrospection/#.Ws4As4hubIU). However, to claim that Ambedkar was driven to anti-communism due to the failures of Indian communists is a ridiculous mockery of reason and rationality.

“Metaphoric Madness” or Anand Teltumbde’s Derivative Discourse on ‘Base-Superstructure Metaphor’

Teltumbde rightly points out that the understanding of Marx and Engels regarding economic base and superstructure was a dialectical one in which economic base plays a dominant role in the final analysis because it is the production and reproduction of material life that forms the basis of political, ideological, cultural superstructure. However, in the process of stressing upon this dialectical notion, Teltumbde proves too much! The reason for that is that after quoting Marx and Engels on this issue, he relies on secondary sources like Chris Harman (a Trotskyite)! It would have been better had Anand Teltumbde relied on the classic texts on the question of economic base, superstructure, forces of production and relations of production. He relies heavily on a secondary text from a Trotskyite instead and the shortfalls are evident immediately. If you read the essay of Harman, which Teltumbde almost paraphrases, you find that just like the master (Trotsky), the disciple is equally economistic. First of all, Harman argues that base is combination of forces and relations of production. According to Marx, economic base is the sum total of production relations. Secondly, in the dialectics of relations and forces of production, according to Harman, it is the forces of production that are the dynamic element, the independent variable. This is the economism which prevailed in the Second International led by Kautsky, Russian Marxism before Lenin including the “legal Marxists” like Struve as well as Plekhanov and the Soviet Marxism after Lenin, for example, the Soviet textbook of Political Economy and a few writings of Stalin to some extent; however, if one reads Trotskyite works on the issue, they find that Trotsky and Trotskyites are the worst victims of this kind of economism. Marx had showed clearly in Capital that some production relations themselves were forces of production, for example, simple co-operation between labourers constituted a relation of production (as a division of labour) as well as a force of production, as it increased productivity.  Lenin steered clear of this mistake and Mao presented a thorough critique of this mistake, though the likes of Bettelheim and Althusser distorted him. The fact is that forces of production can develop in proper way only when the relations of production are in accordance with them. Historically, the forces of production develop with the interaction of human beings with the Nature. However, this interaction itself is shaped and modulated by the relations of production. Therefore, immediately after a revolutionary transformation it is the relations of production that play the dominant role in its dialectic with forces of production by giving impetus to the development of the latter. However, as the productive forces develop, the relations of production become a fetter upon them and the forces of production represented by the revolutionary class becomes the dominant element in the dialectic. Therefore, one cannot make a simplistic statement that forces of production always play the dominant role or the relations of production always play the dominant role. The dominant and secondary aspects of a contradiction always transform into each other and it is this transmutability that actually makes it a contradiction, a dialectic. There is no such thing as a non-transmutable contradiction or a static dialectic. Had Teltumbde read the classic texts of Marxism on base and superstructure, his alleged corrective would not have been built on an equally vulgar economistic representation of the subject by Chris Harman. To prove this, what Teltumbde paraphrases from Harman (though he acknowledges his debt to Harman in a footnote, yet the paraphrased paragraph has not been put within quotes, which creates an illusion that the voice belongs to Teltumbde!) can be presented here, which is a motley crew of mostly stupid questions:

“Ever since then Marxists began interpreting this statement: What is the ‘base’? The economy? The forces of production? Technology? The relations of production? What is included in the superstructure? Obviously, the state, but what about ideology (and revolutionary theory)? The family? The state when it owns industry? Finally, what is the relation between the ‘base’ and the ‘superstructure’? Does the base determine the superstructure? If so, what exactly is the nature of the determination? And does the superstructure have a degree of ‘autonomy’ – and if so, how can this be reconciled with talk of ‘determination’ (even if it is only ‘determination in the last resort’)?” (Teltumbde, 2017, p.40-41)

This is the paragraph from Harman paraphrased by Teltumbde, verbatim! And Teltumbde is stupefied by the pertinence of questions! Apparently, any person familiar with the development of Marxist-Leninist thinking on base and superstructure would be surprised at the misplaced character of these questions. For example, the question: “The state when it owns industry?” (!!) This is a stupid question. It does not really matter whether the state owns the industry or not! It still is the most important component of political superstructure. In fact, Engels said, “Force (that is state power) is also an economic power.” (Engels to C. Schmidt, 27 October, 1890). This is why, in same letter Engels ridicules confused people like Harman and his follower Mr. Teltumbde, “What these gentlemen all lack is dialectics.” (ibid) The very question itself, whether state is part of superstructure when it owns industry, is a non-question and shows how Harman is utterly confused about what base and superstructure means, not to mention the relation between them. And it is this Trotskyite fellow on which Teltumbde relies rather too heavily to introduce his corrective in the communist movement of India (!!), though we have seen how little Teltumbde is familiar with the positions of communists from 1925 to 1951, howsoever incorrect it was! In order to correct a mistake, one should first have a comprehensive understanding of what the mistake is!

Teltumbde after quoting oft-quoted excerpts from Marx and Engels to show the non-deterministic and non-economistic character of their use of the metaphor of base and superstructure, argues that what happened in the communist movement of India was just the opposite: a mechanical use of the metaphor which led the Indian communists to “denying the existence of the stark reality of caste.” The first part of the statement is true that the metaphor was used too mechanistically, or rather, the Indian communists failed to understand that it was merely a metaphor. However, the second part that it led them to deny the existence of caste is definitely not true as we showed above. Secondly, the corrective presented in Europe as an antithesis to this mechanistic attitude, that Teltumbde refers to is the New Left of the late-1950s and Maoist Left of 1960s as well as Althusser. One wonders what he includes in the New Left of the late-1950s and the Maoist Left of the 1960s. If it is the French Maoist tradition which emerged from the Paris of 1968, then the less we talk about it, the better it is! In the name of eliminating the economism and determinism of the Second as well as the Third International, they rather eliminated the revolutionary core of Marxism-Leninism. Either we take Young Hegelian idealism and voluntarism of the likes of Charles Bettelheim, or, the non-party revolutionism and pseudo-Maosim of the likes of Alain Badiou, Lazarus, etc; the one thing they share is that they eliminate or dilute the revolutionary analytical core of Marxism such as the notions of class, state, party and dictatorship of proletariat. Similarly, the anti-deterministic corrective of Althusser that Mr. Teltumbde talks about ends up in non-determination because according to Althusser “the last instance never comes!” I doubt whether Mr. Teltumbde has read anything original from Louis Althusser, or any other trend that he talks about. It appears that all his knowledge is coming from the poor source of Chris Harman. That is why Teltumbde ends up commenting, “Notwithstanding these interpretations, many among Indian Marxists even these days swear by this metaphor as profound theoretical tenet.” (Teltumbde, 2017, p. 43) So, for Teltumbde it is not the misuse/abuse of the metaphor of base-superstructure, but the metaphor itself is not a profound theoretical tenet. That is what we call “throwing the baby with the dirty water of the baby tub.”

Mr. Teltumbde does not stop there! He claims that this mistake has led to the split between the two branches of movement of Indian proletariat: the Marxist and the Dalit. This again exposes Mr. Teltumbde’s poor understanding of theory and ideology. A movement becomes proletarian or non-proletarian by the character of the hegemonic theory of that movement (“without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement.” – Lenin). A movement of workers dominated by reformist and pragmatic ideology is not a proletarian movement. Therefore, if by Dalit branch of the movement of Indian proletariat, Mr. Teltumbde means the movement led by Ambedkar, or by Gaikwad-faction and Dalit Panthers, then he is grossly mistaken. Definitely, the Dalit movement has radical potentialities in it and the possibility to become a part of the revolutionary movement of the proletariat in India; however, on the one hand, Dr. Ambedkar never failed to keep the movement under his leadership within the bounds of bourgeois legality (as Mr. Teltumbde himself has demonstrated beautifully in his last book ‘Mahad’) and away from political radicalization, and on the other, the communists in India could not organize a class-based anti-caste movement due to their own theoretical shortcomings and mistakes, though they organized Dalits in the land and agrarian struggles in many states. Therefore, the two movements, the Dalit movement led by Ambedkar and the movement led by the communists (which did include a large section of Dalits) remained separate movements from the very beginning and there is no question of split between them because they were never one. Moreover, Teltumbde like many identitarian writers uses Ambedkarite movement and Dalit movement as synonyms. On all questions, from separate electorates to conversions, there was a non-Ambedkarite Dalit movement from the very beginning. It is mischievous of such writers to conflate the two and deny any existence to non-Ambedkarite Dalit movements, radical and reformist alike.

Teltumbde claims that over the years Marxists have realized the mistake of ignoring caste and Ambedkar (again, the synonymity is conspicuous! If you talk about caste or its annihilation, it must be in the Ambedkarite vein, or else, you will be branded a casteist!). I would say it is not Marxists as such but certain “Marxists” who suddenly had this moment of epiphany! However, this epiphany has more to do with appeasing the Dalit masses by using the symbol of Ambedkar, rather than critically engaging with Ambedkar and his theories. As far as ignoring caste is concerned, it is certainly not true about revolutionary communists and it is pointless to talk about revisionist parliamentary Left of India, because once you make a theoretical compromise on one point, your compromising attitude will be manifested in some form or the other on all issues including caste and gender. Secondly, as far as ignoring Ambedkar is concerned, I believe it is true in one sense: there should have been a revolutionary dialectical materialist critique of Ambedkar, which the revolutionary Left failed to present. It moved between the extremes of phenomenal criticisms of the inconsistency of Ambedkar or complete surrender to Ambedkar (as is happening right now in the context of Maoists and other revolutionary Left groups). The need was to go to the philosophical roots of Dr. Ambedkar and present a Marxist critique of his worldview and politics. In this sense, yes! The communists failed to critically engage with Ambedkar. One humble attempt at this can found here: (https://redpolemique.wordpress.com/2017/05/04/caste-question-marxism-and-the-political-legacy-of-b-r-ambedkar/).

Under the next subhead, Teltumbde critiques the stand of CPI on Ambedkar’s demand of separate electorate and calls it casteist prejudice! I was surprised to see Mr. Teltumbde supporting Ambedkar’s demand for separate electorates. Of course, Gandhi opposed it from reactionary casteist Hinduist standpoint. However, this cannot become the reason for supporting this reactionary demand. Just like, just because the Modi government for its own communal and divisive agenda attacks triple talaak and halala, we cannot support it! Secondly, if CPI’s opposition to separate electorates can be ascribed to their caste prejudice, then Teltumbde should also criticize Bhagat Singh and his comrades for opposing separate electorates and communal award. However, Teltumbde safely steers clear of this!

Teltumbde gives a number of instances where the communist leaders or cadre showed a casteist attitude. First of all, let us be clear about one thing. There is no need to defend the communist leaders or the communist party after 1951-52, when the party was ideologically compromised and became revisionist. Revolutionary communists have no responsibility to defend the conduct of CPI or its leaders after 1951 or the CPM from 1964 itself. As I pointed out earlier, once you make an ideological compromise, this compromising approach is manifested on all questions and issues. Secondly, even before 1951, there were casteist tendencies, not so much on party forums, but especially on the mass organizational forums on which communists were a dominant force. For instance, on the platform of AITUC, etc. It must be understood that party exists in a class society dominated by a variety of forms of social oppression. It recruits from this society and people come with all the birth marks of this society. The question is whether the party has the approach to fight incessantly against these tendencies of class society carried over into the party? On the one hand we find a number of instances where there are compromises on the question of caste, especially on mass organizational forums; and on the other, we also find the party taking action against such elements and sending their professional revolutionaries to live in Dalit bastis and become one with the Dalit masses. The question can be asked: can a Dalit leader or Dalit organization claim to be free from caste and religious prejudices? I do not think so. Ample evidence can be presented where towering Dalit leaders showed religious or caste-based prejudices or modernist prejudices against the tribals, for example, Dr. Ambedkar himself. The point is not to show that any organization is insulated from the society out of which it grew; that is impossible. The point is to show whether the organization in question constantly and incessantly tried to fight against these reactionary tendencies or not. The CPI at least before 1951 did try to fight against caste prejudices within the party, though at a number of occasions it failed to do so. The reason for this failure was not simply the individual upper caste identity of the leaders, but the lack of a clear understanding of the issues at stake, as we showed above.

There is no need to say anything about the writings of Dange especially after 1951-52. His right-wing position within the party was apparent from the very beginning. However, there had been a strong opposition to P.C. Joshi’s and Dange’s right-wing opportunism within the party even before 1951-52, about which Teltumbde is silent. This is a kind of intellectual dishonesty to present only one side of the coin by selectively cherry-picking the instances where the party faulted to take firm steps against caste prejudices. There are equal counter-examples which Teltumbde silently passes over. On the other hand, regarding Ambedkar’s positions on conversion, on separate electorates, about Islam and Muslims, about tribals, Mr. Teltumbde has assumed a convenient but shame-faced silence. Notwithstanding the contributions of Dr. Ambedkar, his political positions on the above questions were thoroughly problematic.

In the process of critiquing Dange, Mr. Teltumbde commits a serious blunder. He claims, “Dange stood in contradiction with Marxist scholars like D. D. Kosambi and a host of liberal anti-caste thinkers including Ambedkar who considered Krishna’s pronouncements in the Gita as the creator of the caste system providing ideological justification for this exploitative system.” (ibid, p. 50) As the readers can see, the statement is a confused one. First of all, Kosambi never considered the pronouncements of Krishna in Gita as the creator of caste system. Kosambi’s theory of origin of varna/caste system is far from this childish claim. The second part of statement says that these pronouncements provided ideological justification for the caste system. This is just the opposite of the first part of the sentence according to which these pronouncements created caste system! A pronouncement can provide justification for something only when it already exists! The fact is that Teltumbde wants to bring the theories of Kosambi and Ambedkar regarding the origin of caste closer, which cannot be done. So he makes a contradictory statement that these pronouncements created the caste system and justified it! Such intellectual sleights of hand abound in this essay of Teltumbde.

Teltumbde, in his next subhead ‘Volley of Abuses,’ takes the distortion of history to a higher level. Let us have a look at the kind of criticism that he makes of Indian communists, “Right from his coming to prominence as the leader of the independent Dalit movement, the CPI was angry with him.” (ibid, p. 52) What kind of political criticism is this? This is psycho-analysis. In political and ideological struggle, it is not important whether someone is angry with the other or happy with them. It is about the merits and demerits of the criticism that both sides present. If we look at the criticism of Ambedkar by the CPI, we must acknowledge that the critique is ideologically weak. For example, that Ambedkar was a stooge of imperialism was only looking at the apparent reality and not the essential reality. This essential reality could have been revealed only had the communists undertaken a scientific and inductive analysis of the philosophy and politics of Dr. Ambedkar. He not only collaborated with the British rulers but the state in general. Christopher Jaffrelot has shown in his book, which Teltumbde also quotes repeatedly, that one of the strategies of Ambedkar was collaborating with the rulers. The root of this strategy is missed by Jaffrelot as well as Teltumbde: the Deweyan pragmatism of Ambedkar according to which, in words of Ambedkar himself: “The government is the most important and powerful institution. The manner in which the government thinks, makes things happen.” (Speech of Ambedkar in the Mahad Conference, March, 1927) Since the communists failed to see the philosophical roots of Ambedkar, they called him ‘stooge of imperialism’, which was like missing the essential reality. Ambedkar’s strategy of separatism and reformism also stems from his Pragmatism. However, how can one deny that demand for separate electorates was in fact a political separatism? How can one deny that Ambedkar’s strategies were actually reformist? And if the CPI presented his criticism on these points, how can one be irked by it, as Mr. Teltumbde is? Is it not the right of a political group or faction to present his critical views about others? Did not Ambedkar do the same in regard to communists, the Congress, even some untouchable leaders like Gavai, Raja, at different points of time? Then why so irked at the criticism of Ambedkar, howsoever weak or even incorrect it was? Was Ambedkar’s critique of Marxism and Indian communists correct? We have already seen some instances that his critique was misplaced. Later, we will see in detail how Ambedkar critiqued Marxism without even reading a single classic work of Marxism and all his knowledge about Marxism came from the lectures of pragmatist teachers like Dewey in Columbia University, the positions of Fabianists as well as Austrian School of Economics (Karl Menger), another source of influence on Ambedkar that Mr. Teltumbde has totally missed.

Teltumbde gives three quotes from CPI’s resolution of 1952 which critique the SCF in which Ambedkar has been called pro-imperialist and opportunist and a call to win over the local units of SCF has been made. As we argued above, it would be a mistake to call Ambedkar pro-imperialist. He was pro-state, irrespective of who was in the state. Even when he was angry with some policy of state, he only criticized it in the vein of counselling rather than presenting a radical subversive critique. This much even Deweyan pragmatism allows. In that sense, he cannot be called pro-imperialist, which is a misplaced criticism. However, Ambedkar’s role in the working class movement objectively did assume a shape of separatism and reformism and in such a scenario a collision with communists was inevitable. When the collision did take place, no side left any stone unturned, neither the communists nor Ambedkar. Therefore, there is no need for whining that Mr. Teltumbde is doing.

Teltumbde claims that Ambedkar was embittered and irked by the practice of communists and that is why, he went against Marxism. A counter-question can be asked. The British colonial state did a lot of harm to the Dalits and even Ambedkar’s movement. In fact, the British colonial state did not tamper with the system of colonial exploitation in the village, except one thing: the main appropriator at the top of the system of feudal exploitation was replaced. The British colonial state even systematized the feudal exploitation of shudra peasants and landless Dalits. In comparison to the negligible positive changes for the Dalits like army recruitment and Western education (limited to a very small section of the Dalits, especially in garrison towns and for a very limited time, because the army recruitment was discontinued in the early-1890s). Why did not Ambedkar ever go against the British state, even when it repeatedly disregarded the demands of Ambedkar himself? I will give a few instances. The Simon Commission rejected the demand for separate electorates but accepted the demand for reserved seats, but added a caveat which irked Ambedkar a lot. The caveat said that the Dalit candidate will have to have his competence certified by the governor of the province! However, did Ambedkar oppose or attack the British state? No! The British stopped military recruitment of the Dalits due to protest from Brahmins. Did Ambedkar oppose or critique the British for this? No! He only continued to plead with the British that military recruitment be resumed, just like a number of other reformers had been doing in Maharashtra, even before Ambedkar. The British in their land settlements never gave land to the landless Dalits, neither in the permanent settlement, nor in Ryotwari or Mahalwadi settlements. In fact, private ownership was introduced in land by British and the land was given to high castes mainly and secondarily some upward mobile middle peasant castes. This made the landlessness of the Dalits even more perennial. Did Ambedkar ever criticize the British for their anti-Dalit land settlements? No! The British ethnographic state ossified the entity of caste through its surveys and census by making caste a modern categorized, systematized juridico-legal category. Did Ambedkar oppose it? No, because from his Deweyan perspective these steps were for the good of the Dalits because they presumably formed the basis of future “affirmative action” (the term was not existent then and came into existence in the 1960s in the US; I always wonder what does this “affirmative action” affirm? The status quo?)! The British rejected Ambedkar’s demand for Sikh Dalit converts to be given the benefits reserved for minorities and made clear to him that only Jatt Sikhs will get these benefits. Did Ambedkar attack the British for this? No! He rather abandoned his idea of conversion into Sikhism! The Hindu sepoys attacked the Dalits pulling a robe of the chariot during the Nashik movement on the order of the British administration. Did Ambedkar critique British administration? No! He only demanded that the caste Hindu sepoys be punished. During the Mahad Satyagraha, the DM Kolaba, Mr. Hood, made it clear to Ambedkar that if he goes ahead with the Satyagraha in Mahad, he would take action against the protesters and therefore he must abandon the idea of Satyagraha. Did Ambedkar go ahead with Satyagraha anyway and critique the British administration for its partisanship with the Brahmins, who had been granted an injunction order to prevent the Dalits from drinking water from Chavdar Tank within one day? No! He rather dropped the idea of Satyagraha and tried to convince the Mahars that there is no need to put the British government in dilemma because the government is with us! Why are we presenting these instances? Just to show that it was not the opposition from the Communists which made Ambedkar anti-communist, otherwise, the constant thwarting by the British colonial state of a number of steps of Ambedkar himself, would have made him a staunch anti-colonialist. He never became anti-state or anti-British or he never became a supporter or admirer of Marxism, not due to deeds or misdeeds of certain people (communists or otherwise). It was his ideological and political standpoint of Deweyan pragmatism which guided his political practice and the political positions that he took. Teltumbde should abandon this useless exercise to show that Dr. Ambedkar did not have an independent and non-derivative political position and wisdom, and that his anti-communism stemmed from the practice of Indian communists.

Ambedkar and Marx: or How Teltumbde Hides the
Ignorance of Dr. Ambedkar Regarding Marxism – II

After repeating his old arguments (like, “CPI was irked by Ambedkar’s tryst with class politics,” etc) and critiquing the economism of Ranadive’s article on the SCF (though Teltumbde also criticizes some elements of the article which are broadly correct, for example, the desirability of democratic revolution as a step forward for annihilation of caste), he makes some new bold claims. He claims, “It is noteworthy that while Ambedkar was harsh against the communists in his statements, he was not so when he spoke on Marxism. It is the greatest compliment of a critique to place Marx and Buddha, whom he adored as his master, on the same plane, albeit for their goals. As a matter of fact, Ambedkar, never questioned the communist philosophy.” (ibid, p. 55)

Now let us turn to this question. Did Ambedkar ever attack Marxist philosophy itself? Yes. He did. Not once but many a times. Not only attacked it but also exposed his complete ignorance about Marxism. He once claimed that he had read more Marxist books than all the Marxists of India. However, this can be shown and proven to be a bombastic and false claim. Let us see, in brief, how and what Ambedkar understood of Marxism and how he “critiqued” it, the context of his work ‘Buddha and Karl Marx’ first. In the third part of the present subhead, we will come to other writings/speeches of Ambedkar, where he (attempts to) critique(s) what he thought to be Marxism.

First of all, Ambedkar called Marxism a philosophy of pigs. This is what he wrote, “Carlyle called Political Economy a Pig Philosophy. Carlyle was of course wrong. For man needs material comforts. But the Communist Philosophy seems to be equally wrong for the aim of their philosophy seems to be fatten pigs as though men are no better than pigs.” (Ambedkar, Buddha or Karl Marx) As evident from the statement, Ambedkar did not understand even a little of Marxist philosophy. The above comment is made in the context of Marxism’s critique of religion, which Ambedkar considers to be the only mode of spirituality. Marxism is presented as an ideology which only talks about fulfilling the material requirements of human beings as if they are animals. Such liberal “common sense” about Marxism suits a student of humanities in some school, but not Ambedkar who claims to have read more Marxism than Marxists!

Let us see a few more examples of Ambedkar’s understanding of Marxism. Though Ambedkar has made critical comments about Marxist philosophy at many places, we will focus only on the above-cited work here. He informs the readers in this book that for Buddhism he has read Tripitakas; however, we are not informed which Marxist classic has been used to expose the weaknesses of this “philosophy of pigs”! As you read on, you find that nowhere in the entire book has Ambedkar quoted any Marxist classic of Marx, Engels, Lenin, or Stalin. You also come to know that he has actually not read a single original work of Marxism and the source of his knowledge, or rather attack, on Marxism is the textbooks that are taught in the Western academia. A few examples will suffice. Ambedkar writes, “Karl Marx is no doubt the father of modern socialism or Communism but he was not interested merely in propounding the theory of Socialism. That had been done long before him by others. Marx was more interested in proving that his Socialism was scientific.” In the same breath, Ambedkar claims that Marx launched a “crusade” against pre-Marxian socialists. Had Ambedkar read any original Marxist classic written by Marx or Engels, he would not have made such a baseless claim. The truth is that Marx never launched any crusade against Utopian Socialists. In fact, Marx and Engels critically engaged with their theories and in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Engels clearly shows that the theories of Utopian Socialists were in some sense a precursor to Marxist theory of Socialism and praises them. It was class analysis that was missing from their theories and they could not have advanced the theory of Scientific Socialism based on class analysis in a period when the proletariat was in its infancy and capitalism itself was in the process of consolidation. Marx waged a struggle against those petty-bourgeois socialists who were playing the role of splitters in the working class movement. But he had high regard for Utopian Socialists like Saint-Simon, Fourier and Robert Owen. Moreover, Ambedkar’s claim that the theory of Socialism was propounded long before Marx, also, is an inaccurate statement. From the times of Levellers and Diggers itself, there was a political trend within the workers’ movement that aspired for a future of equality and called it ‘socialism’. However, to mistake it for the theory of socialism only shows that Ambedkar was not aware with the history of socialist thinking in Europe.

Ambedkar argues further while enumerating the “principles of Marxism”, “Marx’s contention rested on the following theses: “the purpose of philosophy is to reconstruct the world and not to explain the origin of the universe.”” Surprisingly, Ambedkar thought that Marx thought it a waste of time to interpret the world. Again, one can see Ambedkar’s complete lack of understanding regarding Marxism. Marx had said, “The philosophers, hitherto, have only interpreted the world in different ways, the point, however, is to change it.” Any reader can compare the two statements. Marx believed that only interpreting the world is not enough and interpretation should serve the project of changing the world; secondly, Marx believed that only those can interpret the world correctly who are also engaged in the struggle to change it (see Marx’s critique of Kantian agnosticism and his emphasis on praxis as the true source of knowledge.). However, Ambedkar’s interpretation of Marxism is straight out of the textbooks prescribed by pragmatists and Fabian teachers in Columbia University and LSE!

Ambedkar argues further that Marx says that “the workers are exploited by the owners who misappropriate the surplus value, which is the result of workers’ labour.” True, that the source of surplus value is the labour of the workers, however, Marxism unlike a moral philosophy, is least bothered about the good or bad use of this misappropriation! Had the owners made a good use, would this exploitation have been tolerable? Again, the very concept of exploitation and the class struggle is totally misunderstood by Ambedkar.

Ambedkar claims that in 60 years of its existence Marxism has been criticized by many and much of it has been discredited. But when he informs what has been discredited, we are totally floored. One of the theories that has been discredited, according to Ambedkar, is the absolute pauperization or impoverishment of the proletariat. First of all, if one reads Marx’s works like Capital, Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, or Grundrisse, they can understand that Marx gave no such theory. This fallacy was propagated by the likes of Bohm-Bawerk and it has been refuted from the times of Engels himself. Marx gave the concept of relative impoverishment of the working class, which may or may not take the form of absolute increase in the number of paupers. The concept of relative impoverishment is based on Marx’s concept of relative surplus value. However, Ambedkar totally misses this significant part of Marx’s political economy. Ambedkar also claims that Marx argued that Socialism is inevitable. However, Marx never said that Socialism is inevitable. He definitely argued that the class struggle is inevitable; however, this class struggle can lead to a higher form of social order or can lead to the destruction of the mutually antagonistic classes. This, in fact, is one of the basic teachings of Historical Materialism. Evidently enough, Ambedkar’s knowledge of Marxism was in want of serious study.

Ambedkar claims further, “The dictatorship of the proletariat was first established in 1917 in one country after a period of about seventy years after the publication of his ‘Das Capital’, the gospel of socialism. Even when the Communism – which is another name for the dictatorship of the Proletariat – came to Russia, it did not come as something inevitable without any kind of human effort.” As any informed reader of Marxism can see, Ambedkar had got it totally wrong! First, he did not know when Das Kapital was published because the Russian Revolution took place after 49 years of publication of ‘Das Kapital’, not 70 years. Apparently, Ambedkar confuses The Communist Manifesto with Das Kapital. Secondly, Communism is not the other name for the dictatorship of the proletariat. Communism is the name of a classless society which can come into existence after a protracted transition period of Socialism, characterized by the dictatorship of the proletariat. In Communist society, since there will be no classes, the state, too, as an instrument of class domination, will wither away, and therefore, there is no question of existence of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Thirdly, Marx never said that Socialism can ever come without conscious effort. On the contrary, Marx wrote important pieces on the ‘art of insurrection’ and the need of planned class action under the leadership of the vanguard. However, Ambedkar is stupefied that Russian Revolution was organized with so much conscious effort, whereas, according to Ambedkar’s “study” of Marx, it should have come automatically! What can we say!

To prove that Buddha had already given the theory of class and class struggle, Ambedkar quotes this statement of Buddha, “there is always strife going on between kinds, between nobles, between Brahmins, between house-holders, between mother and son, between son and father, between brother and sister, between sister and brother, between companion and companion…” As one can see, Ambedkar never actually understood the Marxist concept of class. Marxist concept of class is based on relations of production, namely the relations of ownership, the relations of division of labour and the relations of distribution. Class is something which is constituted, produced and reproduced through the real process of production and reproduction. Ambedkar is unable to make a distinction between Marx’s concept of class struggle and the above general idea of strife as expressed in the above quote of Buddha.

Buddha’s idea of doing away with sorrow was through change of heart because the reason for sorrow was what Buddha called trishna! So, the reason for sorrow of a worker or an Untouchable is his/her trishna, just like the reason for the sorrow of a king or a capitalist is his/her trishna. All are called upon to get rid of trishna by adopting the ashtamarga of Buddha. This according to Ambedkar is stipulation of one of the communist principles by Buddha 2500 years ago! Again, one can see the big void in Ambedkar’s understanding of Marxism and the clear evidence that he had not read a single classic work of Marxism.

Ambedkar goes further and claims that the elimination of private property is something that Buddha talked about 2500 years ago when he said that the Bhikkhu will have no private property, except eight personal items. First of all, for Marxism the elimination of private property is not a principle of asceticism and refraining from lures of the world! Marxism is a materialist philosophy and believes that abundant fruits of human labour and Nature, that is, all wealth should be enjoyed by human beings to the fullest extent, and this would become possible only in a communist society where everyone will work according to their capabilities and would get according to their needs. The very notion of ‘saving’ and ‘private property’ would become superfluous in this stage of abundance. However, Ambedkar confuses it with Buddhist principle of taking pravrajya and becoming an ascetic. Secondly, did Buddha call upon all the kings, lords and members of ruling class constituted by Brahmins and Kshatriyas to give up their wealth and private property and become Bhikkhu? No! Communism is not a sect of Bhikkhus and Ambedkar did not understand this simple fact, in his zealous attempt to prove that everything correct in Marxism has already been said by Buddha and whatever was not said by Buddha is incorrect in Marxism. However, it seems that Ambedkar made these bold claims without reading a single Marxist text. He also claims that a 60 year old political philosophy like communism would not work. And what would work? A 2500 years old philosophy of Buddhism! These are some of the “refutations” of Marxism by Ambedkar!

Finally, Ambedkar comes to the question of democracy and dictatorship and the question of violence on which Anand Teltumbde too, has surprised me with his confusion and liberal virus. However, on Teltumbde’s muddled liberal understanding of Marxism, we will come later. First, on Ambedkar’s critique of Marxism on these questions.

Ambedkar believed that “the communists preach violence as an absolute principle.” Ambedkar never provides any reference for his claims about this. Where did he read it? Nobody knows! Marxism has no fetish for violence whatsoever and it clearly distinguishes between the reactionary violence of the ruling class and the collective use of revolutionary violence by the revolutionary classes. In fact, the cherished bourgeois ideals of liberty, fraternity and equality had come to the fore only by a violent (even more violent than the Bolshevik Revolution!) revolution, the French Revolution of 1789. Secondly, Marx also distinguished between adventurist violence of a small group of revolutionists and the collective use of violence by the proletariat for overthrow of capitalism. However, Ambedkar is definitely ignorant about these things. Moreover, the question of violence or the use of force (because philosophically speaking, use of force has the fact of violence, even if not a single drop of blood is shed) is not an issue of choice for Marxism. It would be blissful if the ruling classes give up their control over political power and economic resources by a change of heart or without any use of force (it is noteworthy that a threat of use of force is actually use of force). It is a scientific analysis that Marx and Engels put forward according to which in every emancipatory and transformative change, the role of force is essential, whether some soft-hearted liberal likes it or not. Therefore, it was never a fetish for Marx and Engels, never a question of moral judgement for Marx and Engels, rather a historical necessity and a scientific judgement. Moreover, Ambedkar claims that violence is justified if it is done for justice and then he refutes Marxist theory of role of violence; of course, he has presumed that the revolutionary violence of proletariat is not for justice! Like any pragmatist philosopher, Ambedkar always remained blind to the violence of modern bourgeois state and the process through which a modern capitalist state perpetrates and perpetuates violence against the exploited and oppressed people on a daily basis. One can show ample evidence for this from the writings and speeches of Ambedkar as well as his political practice.

When Ambedkar gave his advice to the anti-untouchability league of Gandhi, in his letter to Thakkar, who was secretary of the league, Ambedkar clearly argued that in the process of fighting against untouchability, there will be some social upheaval and peace will be broken, some heads will be broken, some blood will be shed. But the league should pursue the strategy to assert the democratic and civil rights by use of force. He critiqued the league for limiting itself to just peacefully persuading the caste Hindus to do away with untouchability. It is interesting that Ambedkar himself never applied this strategy and whenever faced with the prospect of collision with the State, he always backed away, be it the case of Mahad Satyagraha or the Nashik temple entry movement. On record, he did give this advice to Mr. Thakkar of anti-untouchability league. However, the same use of force by workers en masse for revolution, under the leadership of communists, has been condemned by Ambedkar! It becomes clear why if we match this position of Ambedkar with the statement that he made to Dhananjay Keer. He clearly said that he would never support a strike led by communists. It is noteworthy that he was not against the right to strike per se, as long as, it was not politicized. He was openly against politicization of strikes. Note bene, it is the politicization of workers movement that educates and trains the workers to go beyond pecuniary logic and raise the question of state power, that Ambedkar was opposed to. He saw this as totally undesirable and condemnable. At any rate, one this is clear, Ambedkar was not opposed to the right of the State to perpetrate and perpetuate violence. He was rather blind to it. It is only the revolutionary violence that he is opposed to, and finds it even more undesirable if it is led by the communists.

Now let us come to the question of dictatorship. Ambedkar here too in wanting in the comprehension of the Marxist concept of class dictatorship and juxtaposes democracy with dictatorship without any class qualifier. Marxism never talks about democracy without a class qualifier: democracy for whom? What was the meaning of democracy for Sacco and Vanzetti who were executed in August, 1927, when Ambedkar was preparing for the Mahad Satyagraha? It is noteworthy that demonstrations against their execution were held in India too. Marx showed the class essence of bourgeois democracy and how a bourgeois democracy is at the same time a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. This element of dictatorship is exposed whenever the capitalist system is threatened during political crises, just like in June, 1975, when the Emergency was declared in India. Also, it is noteworthy that the provision of Emergency was there in the constitution drafted by Ambedkar. Indira Gandhi did not have to amend constitution for imposing Emergency! Moreover, proletarian dictatorship is also proletarian democracy and it is democracy for the exploited majority rather than exploiting minority. Lenin had said that Soviet democracy is a hundred times more democratic than even the most democratic bourgeois republics. It is true and this fact was recorded by numerous non-Marxist foreign visitors to the USSR even in the 1930s. However, Ambedkar was totally unfamiliar with Marxist concept of class dictatorship and the concept of class essence of democracy and he naively juxtaposes democracy and dictatorship.

We can go on and on about Ambedkar’s (total lack of) understanding of Marx and Marxism. However, we will stop here and we will take another opportunity to present a Marxist critique of Ambedkar’s speech ‘Buddha and Karl Marx’. Also, in the third part of the present subhead we will return to Ambedkar’s comments on Marxism and Communism in the last years of his life.

Teltumbde is disturbed by the fact that the CPI never missed an opportunity to attack Ambedkar “even when they sympathized with the Dalits.” (! When did they not?). This is a sly way of writing and conveying that it was only seldom that the communists sympathized with the Dalits. However, Teltumbde does not feel any need to prove this assertion which is made tangentially. When we look at the issues on which the CPI attacked Ambedkar, while opposing the torture and arrest of SCF members, we find that on most of these issues Ambedkar was in fact wrong. For example, the charter of SCF was in fact separatist, even calling for making separate villages for Dalits. Ambedkar even wrote a letter at this time to a British officer Beverly Nicholas and pleaded that even if the British have to resort to force (the holy force of the State!!) to effect en masse exodus of the Dalits, they must do it to establish separate Dalit villages before they leave. Will Teltumbde support this kind of separatist proposal of Ambedkar? And if not, then what wrong did the CPI commit in criticizing such proposals of Ambedkar? Moreover, the issue of bitter tone of these attacks can be supplemented by the bitter attacks made by Ambedkar on communists as well as Marxism on a number of occasions. In political struggle, anyway, bitterness of tone is an issue raised by someone who does not have logic on their side. Teltumbde’s argument that Ambedkar only attacked Indian communists and their practice and never attacked Marxist philosophy is a lie which we have refuted above and will provide more evidence later in the essay and even after this essay, if Mr. Teltumbde demands.

The Question of Imperialism, Dr. Ambedkar
and Mr. Teltumbde

In the next subhead ‘Question of Imperialism’, Mr. Teltumbde makes some bedazzling revelations. First he claims that the Dalits en masse saw the British as liberators, though the communists clung to their anti-imperialism. Wrong! All Dalits did not see the British as their liberators or their sympathizers. In fact, the movements led by communists against the British saw considerable participation from the Dalit masses. Ambedkar himself was alarmed at increasing participation of the Dalits in the anti-colonial movement led by the communists, as we shall show later in this essay with evidence. Christopher Jaffrelot has shown in his study that even at the height of Ambedkar’s political career, more Dalits stood behind the Congress due to their participation in the national movement. Therefore, Teltumbde again uses the Ambedkar’s movement and the entire Dalit masses as synonyms, just like other middle class Dalit identitarian politicians and ideologues. Secondly, the communists were not uncritically with the Congress or nationalists as Teltumbde claims. Let us see a quotation from a CPI leader Mirajkar:

“The Indian bourgeois politicians were, no doubt, at that time very much displeased with British Imperialists because they expected to get a few seats on this Royal commission (Simon Commission); And had that happened, the Indian bourgeoisie would surely have co-operated with the said commission. In that case, the boycott and counter-movement of that character would have been confined only to the petty-bourgeoisie and the working classes. But because of the mistakes of the British imperialists, in excluding the members of the Indian bourgeoisie on it, a temporary oppositional bloc was created; all political parties, such as moderates, Congresswallahs, communalists joined in the boycott movement of this commission.” (Documents of the Communists Movement in India, Volume 3C, page 183 onwards)

Another quote from ‘Resolution on Simon Commission’:

“The bourgeoisie has taken up an attitude of opposition to the commission and many of its representatives, in common with the rest of the nation, have declared for boycott. We welcome support from any quarter. But we desire to warn the nation in general against the danger to be expected from the participation and the leadership of a certain section of the bourgeoisie. This class has shown in the past and many of its representatives are showing now that they are not desirous of independence or even of democracy and freedom. They desire in their own interests, compromise with imperialism and use the enthusiasm of the masses as a weapon to extract concessions. Some proposed Indian membership of the commission, some a parallel commission, some a round table conference. All these things mean compromise, and the nation does not need compromise, it needs independence.” (ibid)

This is the policy that the communists always followed. When the Congress made governments in a number of provinces in 1937 and passed regressive legislations, it was not just Ambedkar who opposed certain legislations, but the most important force agitating against the Congress government was the communist party. The line of allying with that part of bourgeoisie which becomes a part of national liberation movement comes from the line of people’s democratic revolution, as propounded by the Comintern under the leadership of Lenin. This line was based on proletarian revolution in two stages in countries that were colonial, neo-colonial and/or feudal. Lenin had argued that in such countries the immediate task would be an anti-colonial anti-feudal National Democratic Revolution and the communists should strive to acquire the leadership of this revolution (which the Indian communists failed to do due to their lack of concrete analysis and strategic-cum-tactical mistakes regarding attitude towards the Congress). This revolution according to Lenin would be based on the alliance between the proletariat, the entire peasantry, the national bourgeoisie (generally, small owners, traders, etc.) and the middle class. Once this people’s democratic revolution is consummated, the communists should move forward toward Socialist revolution by forming a strategic class alliance between the proletariat, the poor and lower-middle peasantry and the lower middle class. This is Lenin’s theory of two-stage revolution which might assume the form of “uninterrupted revolution” under certain circumstances. This new strategy and general tactics of proletarian revolution propounded by Lenin was based on his analysis of the Imperialist phase. Anand Teltumbde is pathetically confused about this analysis, to which we will come shortly. Anyhow, this line of national democratic revolution was adopted by Indian communists, though they failed to implement this line in the Indian conditions since they did not undertake any creative Marxist analysis of the concrete conditions of India. However, the argument of Teltumbde that the communists saw nationalist forces as their friends is at best inaccurate and at worst, false. The statement of Mirajkar quoted above shows a policy of distrust and the intent to assume the leadership of the national liberation movement based on worker-peasant alliance. That the communists failed in this in India, is an issue of separate discussion. However, they never saw the Congress uncritically as a strategic friend during the national movement, as Mr. Teltumbde wants us to believe.

Teltumbde claims that Ambedkar too wanted freedom from colonial rule provided the Dalits are provided their freedom and equality. I could not find where Ambedkar has opposed the British colonial state directly. Secondly, if Ambedkar thought that the Congress leadership of the national movement was reactionary, then he should have worked to build an alternative leadership of national liberation movement. We cannot defend his position during the national movement by arguing that it was the reactionary leadership of the Congress that had driven him into the arms of the colonial state time and again. We have already shown that it was not Ambedkar’s love for colonial rulers but his Deweyan pragmatism that prevented him from going against the state in a confrontational manner. He genuinely believed that it is only the State that can bring any positive change in the society. This was something that Indian communists could not understand and called him “stooge of imperialism”. However, if Ambedkar even studied the history of colonial India, it should have become clear to him that the British colonial rule had caused more harm to the Dalit cause, than benefit. Moreover, even Mr. Teltumbde has almost accepted this fact and said that whatever miniscule positive developments took place for the Dalits during the British rule was only a by-product of some policies or measures of British colonial state, whose main aim was serving the interests of the British imperialists (see, Anand Teltumbde, Mahad: The Making of the First Dalit Revolt). However, here Mr. Teltumbde has performed a shocking volte-face!

Mr. Teltumbde and His Amusing Ideas About Marxism, Or, How Mr. Teltumbde turns Marx into a Common Liberal!

The task of this introduction written by Anand Teltumbde is to prove that Ambedkar was not antithetical to Marxism. Now, as long as Ambedkar is Ambedkar and as long as Marxism is Marxism, this is not possible. So, Mr. Teltumbde has employed an ingenious method to achieve the desired aim: he first turns Marx into a liberal (akin to a Fabian), then makes Ambedkar stand beside him and then prove that there is a remarkable affinity and vicinity between them, ideologically and philosophically! This in my opinion is politically and ideologically a criminal enterprise and I feel duty-bound to show that Mr. Teltumbde is performing an intellectual somersault which could prove quite harmful to his intellectual legacy.

First, I will show that Teltumbde’s understanding of Marxism and Leninism is extremely poor, if not poorer than Ambedkar’s understanding of Marxism. I will present quotations and clear evidence from his introduction itself, which will reveal that Teltumbde too has either not read Marxist classics or, may be, he read them a long time back and has now forgotten the basic Marxist theories of, for example, imperialism, three moments of capital in its circuit, violence, dictatorship and democracy, etc.

Let us first turn to Mr. Teltumbde’s understanding of Lenin’s theory of Imperialism and Marx’s theory of the three moments of capital. This is what Mr. Teltumbde opines: “He (Lenin) saw that the competitive industrial capitalism of Marx’s times had given way to finance capital (combination of industrial and bank capital), which in turn created imperialist blocks seeking to control developing countries. The ensuing competition between these imperialist blocks would result in internecine world wars, which would be the moment for the communist forces to strike at the weakest links, thus ushering into the world revolution. The promise of winning the world revolution gripped the communists so much that thereafter this empirical observation of Lenin would nearly eclipse the theoretical discovery of Marx and Engels. They would simple forget the fundamentals of Marxism and the class struggle, the prime mover of revolutions. Arguably, Marx’s theory was adequate to deal with the phenomenon. Marx in the second volume of Capital had explained that circuit of capital had three moments: money capital, productive capital and merchant capital, and that anyone of them could dominate over the others. The contemporary ‘supply chain’ paradigm that created Walmart-like behemoths best illustrates it.” (Teltumbde, 2017, p. 58-59)

This statement is foolish on so many levels that one essay is not sufficient to critique it, because one will have to go to the fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism to show the ridiculous understanding of Teltumbde. But allow me to make an attempt.

First of all, Lenin never said that imperialist blocs (I don’t know why Mr. Teltumbde has used the word ‘block’) would necessarily result in World Wars. He only said that imperialism would necessarily result in wars because no alliance between imperialists can be permanent. Why? Because of the law of uneven development that is characteristic feature of capitalist development. Therefore, any equation or balance of power that would lead to creation of a bloc can only be temporary. As soon as the equation changes, the old blocs would disintegrate and new blocs would be created and the international competition for re-division of the world would resume. This process would necessarily involve imperialist wars, which might or might not assume the form of a world war. Therefore, Teltumbde is totally wrong in claiming that Lenin believed that Imperialism will necessarily lead to world wars.

On the basis of this false claim, Teltumbde has tried to prove that Lenin’s thesis was totally conjunctural, based on the contemporary empirical evidence. In other words, now that conjuncture is past and Lenin’s theory of imperialism has become superfluous. (I wonder whether Mr. Teltumbde is reading too much of Prabhat Patnaik these days!) However, necessity of a world war was never a constituent part of Lenin’s theory of imperialism. The basic elements of Lenin’s theory were: formation of finance capital and monopolies and export of capital. Lenin talks about five characteristics of the imperialism, but rest of the three characteristics flow from the above two. Both of these characteristics have become even more pronounced since the demise of Lenin. There has been a lot of work on the late-20th century and early-21st century Imperialism, some of which empirically show that these two basic tendencies of imperialism have become even more intensified and pronounced. This is not to say that there have not been any changes in the modus operandi of imperialism. Those interested in these changes can read this paper: (https://redpolemique.wordpress.com/2018/04/15/marxist-theories-of-imperialism-from-marx-to-present-times-a-contemporary-critical-reassessment/). However, to claim that the concept of imperialism has become superfluous is preposterous in a time when the entire Middle East has become a battle-ground of inter-imperialist rivalry, the domination of finance monopoly capital has become so pronounced that a handful of financial corporations and TNCs are ruling the roost in world capitalism and the export of capital has assumed unprecedentedly gigantic proportions. Therefore, Teltumbde fails to show how Lenin’s theory of Imperialism was simply conjunctural and now it does not apply to the world.

Teltumbde also fails to understand that in the phase of finance capital and monopoly capital, the competitive phase is not finished, rather they re-emerge in much more intensified form. Lenin wrote in ‘Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism’: “At the same time, the monopolies, which have grown out of free competition, do not eliminate the latter, but exist above it and alongside it, and thereby give rise to a number of very acute, intense antagonisms, frictions and conflicts.” (Lenin, 1978, Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Progress Publishers, Moscow, p. 83)

Teltumbde utterly fails to understand what Lenin means by ‘world revolution’. For Lenin, it was not a world revolution at a single stroke. It only meant that the breaking of the weak links might inaugurate something of a domino effect and lead to collapse of world capitalist system eventually. Lenin was not at all deterministic about it that something of this sort was round the corner. In fact, Lenin sensed that people like Teltumbde might get confused with his use of terms for imperialism like ‘highest stage of capitalism’, ‘dying’, ‘moribund’ capitalism, ‘eve of proletarian revolution.’ Lenin clarified in the same booklet itself that he is not speaking chronologically at all. All these terms are used in logical sense, rather than chronological sense. Therefore, he writes, “…then it becomes evident that we have socialization of production, and not mere “interlocking”; that private economic and private property relations constitute a shell which no longer fits its contents, a shell which must inevitably decay if its removal is artificially delayed, a shell which may remain in a state of decay for a fairly long period (if, at the worst, the cure of the opportunist abscess is protracted), but which will inevitably be removed.” (ibid, p. 120) Lenin clearly stipulates here that proletarian revolution is not a spontaneous process and if right-wing opportunism and chauvinism dominates within the working class movement, instead of a revolutionary communist line, then world capitalism can continue to survive for a fairly long period, though in a state of decay. Tragically, the prognosis, rather this apprehension of Lenin has come true. However, the bearers of such opportunism, like Mr. Teltumbde, can hardly be expected to comprehend this fact.

Further, Mr. Teltumbde claims that to understand present world capitalism, there is no need to resort to Lenin’s theory, which was only conjunctural and now has become superfluous and Marx’s theory of circuit of capital is sufficient to explain the present world capitalism. Now comes the funny moment. He claims that in Marx’s theory of circuit of capital, there are three moments: money capital, productive capital and merchant capital! WRONG! The third moment is commodity capital. Now the value (including surplus value) can be realized by the sale of commodity by the industrial capitalist himself, without the intervention of merchant capital, or by the intervention of merchant capital. The point is that the division of capitalist class into industrial, merchant and bank/finance capital has nothing to do with the moments of capital in the circuit of capital and in the words of Marx, it is the division of labour within capitalist class in order to make the process of production and circulation smooth and uninterrupted. The circuit of capital with three moments of capital show the motion of capital-value advanced by the capitalist in the money form; how in order to valorize itself, first, it assumes the form of productive capital (which means, means of production and labour power); and how consequently it assumes the form of product/commodity, which embodies the value of the means of production (which is preserved and transferred to commodity in toto, in the case of circulating constant capital and in part, in the case of fixed constant capital), the value of the labour power (which is reproduced by the worker in the necessary labour time) and the surplus value (which is produced by the worker in the surplus labour time). The circuit of capital is to show the movement of capital-value in order to reveal how the circuit starts in the sphere of circulation and ends in the sphere of circulation, but through the sphere of production which is essential for valorization of capital. However, Teltumbde confuses commodity capital with merchant capital and then makes his revelation that the present stage of ‘supply chain’ capitalism can better be explained by Marx’s circuit of capital! We cannot prevent ourselves from quoting Einstein at such revelation of Mr. Teltumbde, “Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.”

Teltumbde argues that anyone of ‘money capital, productive capital and merchant capital’ can dominate over the others. Again a foolish statement! The movement of capital value through the circuit of capital must be seen in totality. It is not about the dominance of one moment over the other. Marx makes it clear that it is the same capital value which transmutes its form in order to valorize itself and then realize its value in money. It seems that Teltumbde has glided over the theories of Christian Palloix but not seriously. Palloix argued that the different moments of circuit of capital were globalized/internationalized at different points in history. First the commodity capital was globalized, which was the phase of pre-imperialist colonialism of free-trade era. Then the money capital was globalized, which was the phase of finance capital as described by Lenin. He argues that since the 1970s, the productive capital has been globalized as apparent from shifting of production centres from Global North to Global South and emergence of ‘value chains’ and ‘supply chains’. This theory too is mechanistic because the moment money capital is globalized, the productive capital is bound to be globalized. In fact, in Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism itself Lenin draws our attention to the exodus of industry from advanced capitalist countries to colonial and neo-colonial countries. Therefore, the temporal division presented by Palloix is mechanical. However, Teltumbde seems to have failed to follow even this over-simplistic mechanical scheme of Palloix, also known as ‘internationalization of capital’, which tries to build on Marx’s notion of three moments of capital. Teltumbde has even failed to understand the Marxist notion of three moments of capital by arguing that the third moment is the merchant capital! The emergence of companies like Walmart and Carrefour can be explained within the framework of Marxist-Leninist theory of Imperialism. It can be shown with sufficient evidence that these supply chains are created only by the power of finance capital and the quest of imperialist capital to exploit the cheap labour and resources of the developing countries. The new feature which has enabled the capital in the post-Fordist era to emerge as a ‘hunter and gatherer’ of cheap labour and cheap raw material is transport and communication revolution and IT revolution. These two phenomena represent a change from Lenin’s time. However, these changes have only buttressed Lenin’s theory of Imperialism because the tendencies identified by Lenin have become much more intensified and pronounced due to these changes. It seems that Teltumbde has dropped a speculative statement on the basis of, may be, some article that he read on the internet. However, not understanding the foundations of the science of history and society leads one to commit embarrassing blunders, like Mr. Teltumbde tragically has done. This is what happens when one is too eager and inclined to show their eruditeness without going to the classics.

Now let us move to Mr. Teltumbde’s comment about Marxism’s relation to nationalism and how Indian communists did not understand this relation. This is what Teltumbde has to say, “As a matter of fact, nationalism should be regarded as antithetical to communists whose ideology is primarily internationalism. The accusation against Ambedkar for ignoring the ‘nationalist’ struggle should thus be basically problematic. Ambedkar’s notion of every caste being a nation in India better reflected the Indian reality rather than imagining India as a nation. Moreover, when Ambedkar is accused of not being anti-imperialist, one could rather find the conduct of early communists to be wanting. Initially, guided by Comintern, the communists regarded the freedom struggle as a movement of the reactionary bourgeoisie and advocated militant struggle against the capitalist and landlords.” (Teltumbde, 2017, p. 59) Teltumbde tries to prove further that this stand of communists changed only after 1929 and then after 1934 and in 1938 the CPI declared support for the Congress. It is funny that a couple of pages later Teltumbde has the audacity to write this, “They (the communists) would easily ally with the bourgeois nationalists (although Marxism professed internationalism) but oppose the proletariat’s battle against the basic evil that thwarted this country from becoming a nation.” (ibid, p. 61)

First, Marxist espousal of internationalism and allying with every force that is anti-colonial against imperialism has no contradiction. Since, Mr. Teltumbde seems to be a google-Marxist, he does not know the Marxist-Leninist position on anti-imperialist national liberation movement as the first stage of proletarian socialist revolution, during which the communists, if possible, should ally with forces that are anti-colonial, with or without conditions. Secondly, if according to Teltumbde Marxism is not in support of national movement, why should the proletariat strive to make India a nation? Since Teltumbde wants to ride many boats together he is not able to decide what to say and what not to say and most of his statements are contradictory. Besides, it is a lie that communists were not part of anti-caste movement or did not raise the issue of caste, even if they failed to understand this problem in its historicity and contemporaneity and failed to present a program for its annihilation. But then, this failure was shared by Ambedkar also. Only because the anti-caste activities of the communists were not according to the line proposed by Ambedkar and only because they critiqued the line of Ambedkar, how can Mr. Teltumbde claim that they did not participate in anti-caste struggle and “allied with Congress”, as if they loved the Congress? We will show in a short while how Teltumbde is not only theoretically poor but he is also distorting the facts about communist movement. We will also show what kind of support for and alliance with the Congress, the CPI had, so that the lies being spread by Mr. Teltumbde are exposed. However, let us begin from the theoretical question of Marxism’s approach as an internationalist philosophy to the question of nation, nationalism and national liberation movements.

First of all Marxism is definitely an internationalist philosophy. However, to draw a conclusion so childish that Marxists would/should oppose the national liberation movement of the oppressed people shows how little Teltumbde has read and understood Marxism. Secondly, Marxism-Leninism differentiates between the chauvinist bourgeois nationalism of the imperialist and advanced capitalist countries and the national liberation movements of the oppressed people; had Mr. Teltumbde went beyond reading articles about Marxism on the internet and had he read the Leninist thesis on national liberation movements and Stalin’s work on nations and nationalism, he would not have made such a naively ridiculous argument. Needless to say, these oppressed people are never a homogeneous or monolithic entity and are always divided into many sub-nationalities, linguistic identities, ethnicities, religious groups, castes, etc. Still, the imperialist oppression and existence of a common colonial enemy becomes the principal contradiction and this contradiction can be resolved only through the national liberation movement of the oppressed people against imperialism and feudalism, which always work in collusion, as was the case with India. If the principal contradiction is between imperialism and Indian people, between feudalism (supported by colonialism) and the Indian people, then the communists should form alliance with the forces that are anti-colonial. The CPI followed this line of people’s national democratic revolution. About alliance with the Congress, on most occasions, the CPI made it evidently clear that in the alliance, it will follow a policy of suspicion and distrust, as we have shown above. As we can see in these proclamations, the CPI never extended its uncritical support or trust to the Congress as a genuinely progressive force of the national movement. However, Teltumbde knowingly or unknowingly projects the false image that the Communists gave their unflinching support to the Congress. Even the policy of infiltrating the Congress was based on winning over the masses in the Congress for a radical national liberation movement, away from the collaborationism of the Congress. Is this not a gross distortion of facts and slandering against the communists by Teltumbde, whatever their weaknesses and mistakes might have been?

Now let us come to Ambedkar’s notion of each caste constituting a separate nation in India. Teltumbde claims that this better reflected the reality of India. Again, Teltumbde reveals his complete lack of understanding of the dialectical method. First of all, castes in no way, even in the academic sociological sense, constitute separate nations. This kind of argument presupposes a homogeneous and undifferentiated idea of a ‘nation’, which no nation is. The constitution of an oppressed nation is only through the contradiction of a people (howsoever heterogeneous and differentiated) with imperialism and colonialism, which almost as a matter of law, always co-opts the feudal forces. Even the antagonistic social groups within a people, in face of a common and bigger enemy form alliances to fight against this common enemy. The question here is this: was the British colonialism an enemy of the Dalit masses or its friend? The constitution of a contradiction itself is always contradictory and one entity always divides into two. Therefore, we should ask: in the main, was British colonialism good for the Dalit masses? Any serious student of history would answer this question in a resounding ‘No!’ The British consolidated and fossilized caste distinctions and the excess vulnerability of the Dalit working masses through mainly two measures: rise of colonial ethnographic state and even more importantly, the British land settlements, which perennialized even more, the perennial landlessness of the Dalit masses. In the pre-British India, many a times, revolts of shudra and ati-shudra (Dalit) castes had forced kings and their ideologues, i.e., Brahmins, to accept social and ritualistic mobility to certain Dalit and Shudra castes. However, with the freezing of caste hierarchy with exercises like myriad kinds of ethnographic surveys and the Census, this relative mobility was completely eliminated. Once the colonial state defined and demarcated the lines, the castes for the first time became juridico-legal entities in the modern sense of the term. The land settlements of the British clearly show who was their firmest ally in India: the upper caste landlords, kings, and their subfeudatories and to a very limited extent, some middle peasant castes, coming mostly from upward mobile shudra peasant castes. In short, the Dalit masses did not have a friend in the British, but a colluder and collaborator of the same Brahmanical feudal forces that had oppressed them for centuries. That is why, when the British were about to leave India, it was not the Dalits who en masse flocked to petition the British not to leave India, but the upper-caste kings, feudal lords, and landlords who shed so many tears and requested the British not to leave. As Lenin said, “facts are stubborn” and history is the best judge. The miniscule benefits that reached a very miniscule section of the Dalits due to Western education and military service introduced by the British were thwarted and stopped whenever the Brahmins resisted. For instance, the military recruitment stopped in 1891-92 due to protest from Brahmins; even the education was denied repeatedly to the Dalit children despite all the laws, except in the garrison towns when the military recruitment was open to the Dalits. Moreover, even these miniscule benefits to a miniscule section of the Dalits were available for a short time-span only in few provinces of the colonial India, Bombay being one of them. Therefore, if we counterweigh the cost and benefit of the British rule for the Dalit masses, only someone ideologically blinded would argue that British were, in the main, the benefactors of the Dalits. Therefore, the concept that vis-à-vis the British colonialism, all castes constituted a separate nation is not only incorrect but a regressive concept, especially in the view that the British had always colluded and collaborated with the Brahmanical forces, except the period when their conquest of India was incomplete. This regressive idea was put forward by Ambedkar due to his Deweyan Pragmatist worldview; that is understandable. However, what is not understandable is the support that Teltumbde lends to this idea. What is his politics?

Teltumbde’s third assertion in the above-quoted statement is that the communists were wanting in their anti-imperialist stance and under the guidance of the Comintern, only talked about fighting against the capitalists and landlords and saw the freedom movement as a reactionary movement led by capitalists and landlords. Teltumbde does not produce a single resolution of the CPI, or its frontal organization WPP, or any communist leader that said that freedom movement itself was a reactionary movement led by capitalists and landlords. This again is a gross lie. The fact is that the analysis of the Congress by the CPI has been superimposed by Teltumbde on the analysis of the freedom movement itself. It was the Congress which was described by the communists as a party led by capitalist and landlord elements and which naturally would collaborate with the British and would shy away from demanding total independence. The CPI never in any of its documents said that the freedom movement itself is a reactionary movement. However, Teltumbde has no hesitation in presenting this brazen lie in order to show that it was not only Ambedkar who never participated in the anti-imperialist struggle, but also the early Communists who never participated in the anti-imperialist struggle. The CPI’s strategy and tactics continued to change regarding its attitude towards the Congress, under the influence of the line proposed by the Comintern from total distrust and opposition to conditional alliance with the Congress. It was never of opposing the freedom movement and it was never of giving unflinching and uncritical support to the Congress during the colonial period. Even when the CPI formed front with the Congress, it was a front of critical and conditional support with sufficient infusion of internal struggle and opposition and secondly the communists maintained their autonomy in the workers’ movement and peasant revolts, which were thoroughly opposed by the Congress. Otherwise, they would not have been active, often in leadership capacities, in the Tebhaga, Punapra-Vylar, Telangana peasant revolts, the wave of strikes in the 1940s and the Naval Revolt. Clearly enough, Mr. Teltumbde is lying about the communist movement.

Teltumbde makes many such historically incorrect claims and comments about the communist movement in one-liners and we do not have the space to refute each and every of them. However, to argue that how can communists criticize Ambedkar for not being part of anti-imperialist national movement when they themselves were not consistently anti-imperialist, is slanderous and preposterous on the part of Mr. Teltumbde. He needs to study history of the communist movement properly.

Now let us see how Teltumbde makes Marx a ‘Common Liberal.’

How Anand Teltumbde Turns Marx into a Common Liberal

As I noted earlier, one of the projects of Teltumbde in this introduction is to prove that Ambedkar was amenable and rather near to Marxist philosophy and it was only the practice of Indian Marxists by which he was repelled. Now, given the revolutionary content of Marxism this cannot be done. Therefore, first Teltumbde makes a pathetic attempt at turning Marx into a liberal and then brings Ambedkar close to him. For this, he also tries to prove in vain that Ambedkar’s two reservations about the methods to bring “communism”, namely violence and the dictatorship of the proletariat, were after all not that foolish and even Marx towards the latter part of his political life had moved to such an idea!

To agree or disagree with any philosophy, first of all you are required to know what that philosophy is. I have shown above with extensive quotations that Ambedkar did not have any understanding about Marxism as he had not read a single work by Marx, Engels or Lenin. Therefore the very question whether Ambedkar agreed or disagreed, in real sense of the terms, with Marxism or not is a non-question. The truth is that he did not have any understanding of Marxism. In fact, during the Chandigarh seminar on caste in 2012, Mr. Teltumbde himself accepted that Ambedkar had not read any original work of Marx. Then how can, in all earnestness, he raise this non-question as a pertinent question is beyond me. It is nothing short of intellectual dishonesty.

In the subhead ‘Opposing Communists’ Teltumbde once more embarks upon his futile project to show that Ambedkar was only opposed to the practice of Marxists in India and not the Marxist philosophy. This baseless claim I have already refuted above. Moreover, he also claims that Ambedkar went against the communists only when the latter attacked him for collaborating with the Simon Commission. First of all, it can be shown that even before that he was against communists and communism; secondly, it was correct to oppose the Simon Commission and communists attacked everybody who collaborated with this British endeavour to break the resistance of people; thirdly, just because it was Ambedkar, the communists could not have refrained from criticising his collaboration with the Simon Commission. Rest of the arguments in this regard, we have already stipulated above.

Teltumbde also presents a quote from 1938 where first Ambedkar claims that he has read more books on communism than all communist leaders present on the occasion and then also expresses his affinity to certain tenets of Marxism. As we have pointed out earlier, the period of the ILP was one in which due to his particular electoral strategy, Ambedkar was obliged to form joint fronts with the communists and contrary to Teltumbde’s claim the proposals of joint action were not always proposed by Ambedkar but also by the communists, for example, the proposal for one day strike against the industrial disputes bill of 1938 came from the communists. However, as Teltumbde himself accepts, that this quote should not be taken as a proof that Ambedkar accepted the communist philosophy, rather he questioned its practicability in India. Again, since Ambedkar did not understand what communism was, he was not a very good judge of the applicability of communism in India. The universal truth of Marxist philosophy, approach and method has been proven by history time and again.

Teltumbde claims that Ambedkar accepted the goal of communism but objected on the methods proposed by Marxism to achieve this goal. We have already shown that Ambedkar did not understand what communism is and equated communism with the dictatorship of the proletariat. He also did not understand the communist goal of elimination of private property and the withering away of class and state, when he equates the Bhikkhu Sangha’s rule for bhikkhus to renounce all private property except eight things. Twenty years before writing ‘Buddha and Karl Marx’ in ‘Annihilation of Caste’ also he had equated the aim of socialists with ‘equalization of property’, a goal to which Marx was thoroughly opposed. Ambedkar had never understood what dictatorship of the proletariat, socialism and communism meant. So there is no question of Ambedkar accepting the goal of Marxism, because to agree with it, one has first to understand it.

Now let us come to the question of dictatorship of the proletariat and that of violence, to which Ambedkar had objected and in defence of Ambedkar’s total lack of understanding of these concepts, how Mr. Teltumbde performs a liberal appropriation of Marx. Teltumbde opines, “Here too (in ‘Buddha and Karl Marx’) Ambedkar reveals his acceptance of its goals being the same as that of Buddha but faults it on two counts in its methodology. They were its reliance on violence and dictatorship. Surely, going by what has happened on the ground in Marxist revolutions so far, one will be inclined to accept these observations. They are however not essential to Marxist theory – for Marx did not justify violence anywhere, although at places one may tend to derive that impression.” (ibid, p. 62-63, italics ours)

Surprisingly enough, Mr. Teltumbde relies on Bhikhu Parekh for his understanding of Marx’s attitude towards use of violence! Parekh is Labour member of House of Lords. Of course, we can understand that in order to make Marx a liberal, something of that sort was required. The other source which appears in William Paul, whose article that Teltumbde has referred to emphasizes precisely the point that use of force and revolutionary violence (not to be confused with individual terrorist violence or adventurist violence to which Marxists have always been against) are, as a matter of law, part of revolutionary transformation. Teltumbde blames it on Kautsky who translated “force” as “violence” and since he was referred to as “the Pope of Marxism” by Lenin at one point of time, this confusion was internalized by the communists everywhere. This silly statement shows how less Teltumbde knows about International Communist Movement. Teltumbde writes, “Insofar as Marx’s metaphorical expression goes, anyone can see that force is not violence and a midwife is not an essential agent in the process of birth.” (ibid, p. 63) This is how Teltumbde begins his liberal misappropriation of Marx.

First of all, innumerable quotes can be produced to show that Marx had no unqualified notions about violence. He never opposed or supported violence as such, because as such, violence is an empty container, which can be filled with anything. Whenever Marx talks about violence he makes a clear distinction between revolutionary violence and individual terrorist violence, between revolutionary violence and the counter-revolutionary/reactionary violence of the ruling class.

Secondly, use of force is nothing but violence, philosophically speaking. Even the threat of use of force is nothing but violence, philosophically. Therefore, the watertight compartmentalization between the force and violence conjured up by Teltumbde here is a foolish device to justify, or make look respectable, Ambedkar’s totally misplaced objection on the supposed Marxist support for “violence.” Later, Teltumbde quotes Marx’s oft-quoted and oft-misused statements about the possibility of socialism through a peaceful parliamentary path in certain countries like England and America. I will later show how Mr. Teltumbde has misused and abused these quotations to turn Marx into a ‘common liberal’. First, I will show what Marx thought about the use of force and revolutionary violence to show that Teltumbde is selectively quoting the second-hand writers rather than primary sources to make this rubbish claim that Marx was for/against violence.

As I pointed out earlier, without any class qualification, Marx was neither for nor against violence. He would first ask: whose violence? Against whom? By whom? How? Individual violence? Terrorist violence? Or collective use of violence by the exploited classes? Without these qualifying questions, for Marx, violence was an empty term, a void rhetoric. If Mr. Teltumbde does not understand one of these basic concepts of Marxism, I am obliged to present Marx’s views on violence in short. Then, subsequently, I will show that Marx’s observations about England and America were totally conjunctural and even in that conjuncture these exceptions only proved the rule, namely, the use of force and revolutionary violence as a general necessity in history of revolutions in class societies. Let us proceed to the refutation of the first lie and fallacy propagated by Mr. Teltumbde. Note bene.

Marx definitely despised individual terrorist violence and considered it harmful for the revolutionary cause. He believed that role of force in history is the role that a midwife plays in the birth of the new, as Teltumbde himself accepts. However, he builds a Chinese wall between ‘force’ and ‘revolutionary violence’, which Marx never built. Let us see what he wrote about revolutionary violence:

“…on the eve of every general reshuffling of society, the last word of social science will always be: “Struggle or death; bloody war or nothing. It is thus that the question is inevitably posed.” (Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, emphasis ours)

Regarding the lessons of 1848 in Paris, he wrote:

“The purposeless massacres perpetrated since the June and October events, the tedious offering of sacrifices since February and March, the very cannibalism of the counterrevolution will convince the nations that there is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror.” (Marx, ‘The Victory of The Counter Revolution in Vienna’ Neue Rheinische Zeitung, No. 136, November, 1848, emphasis ours)

Just before the crushing of Paris Commune, Marx wrote: “It seems that Parisians are succumbing. It is their own fault, but a fault which really was due to their too great decency.” Marx continues: “If they are defeated only their “good nature” will be to blame. They should have marched at once to Versailles…They missed their opportunity because of conscientious scruples. They did not want to start a civil war…” (emphasis ours)

As we can see, according to Marx, one of the faults of the Communards of Paris was hesitation in the use of revolutionary violence.

In March 1850, in an address to the Communist League, Marx says, “The arming of the whole proletariat with rifles, muskets, cannon and munitions must be done at once, the revival of the old Bürgerwehr, or Citizens’ Militia, directed against the workers must be opposed. However, where the latter is not feasible the workers must attempt to organize themselves independently as a proletarian guard with commanders elected by themselves and with a general staff of their own choosing, and to put themselves at the command not of the state authority but of the revolutionary municipal councils which the workers will have managed to set up. Where workers are employed at the expense of the state they must see that they are armed and organized in a separate corps with commanders of their own choosing or as part of the proletarian guard. Arms and ammunition must not be surrendered on any pretext; any attempt at disarming them must be frustrated, by force if necessary. To destroy the influence of the bourgeois democrats upon the workers, establish immediately an independent and armed organization of the workers and create conditions which will be the most difficult and compromising for the inevitable momentary rule of the bourgeois democracy — these are the main points which the proletariat and hence the League must keep in view during and after the impending insurrection.” (Marx, ‘Address to the Central Committee of the Communist League, March 1850, emphasis ours)

More: “As long as other classes, and the capitalist class in particular, still exist; and as long as the proletariat fights against them… it must employ coercive measures, that is, governmental measures; so long it is still a class itself, and the economic conditions which give rise to the class struggle and the existence of classes have not yet disappeared and must be forcibly removed… With its complete victory, therefore, its rule also comes to an end” (Collected Works I: 321–3).

And finally these poetic words from the Communist Manifesto: “The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.” (Marx-Engels, Chapter 4, The Communist Manifesto, emphasis ours)

Now let us come to Engels’ arguments. In the following quote from Anti-Duhring, Engels clarifies that the use of force or the use of revolutionary violence are not totally isolated things and in the class struggle, the law is that their use is generally unavoidable:

“…That force, however, plays yet another role [other than that of a diabolical power] in history, a revolutionary role; that, in the words of Marx, it is the midwife of every old society which is pregnant with a new one, that it is the instrument with which social movement forces its way through and shatters the dead, fossilized political forms — of this there is not a word in Herr Duhring (Just like in Herr Teltumbde and Herr Ambedkar! – author). It is only with sighs and groans that he admits the possibility that force will perhaps be necessary for the overthrow of an economy based on exploitation — unfortunately, because all use of force demoralizes, he says, the person who uses it. And this in Germany, where a violent collision — which may, after all, be forced on the people — would at least have the advantage of wiping out the servility which has penetrated the nation’s mentality following the humiliation of the Thirty Years’ War. And this person’s mode of thought — dull, insipid, and impotent — presumes to impose itself on the most revolutionary party that history has ever known! (Engels, Anti-Duhring, third German edition, Part II, end of Chap.IV, p.193, emphasis ours)

Here is another quote from the ‘Introduction’ of 1895 edition of Marx’s Class Struggles in France where Engels argues that the days of street fighting behind barricades with small revolutionary groups is gone and by the end of the 19th century, much broader organization of masses and winning over of a section of military would be necessary for the revolution to emerge victorious in the insurrection. That certainly holds true even today. Let us see, what Engels says:

“Does that mean that in the future street fighting will no longer play any role? Certainly not. It only means that the conditions since 1848 have become far more unfavourable for civilian fighters and far more favourable for the military. In future street fighting can, therefore, be victorious only if this disadvantageous situation is compensated by other factors. Accordingly, it will occur more seldom at the beginning of a great revolution than at its later stages, and will have to be undertaken with greater forces.” (emphasis ours)

Engels emphasizes in ‘Principles of Communism’ :  ”Will it be possible to bring about the abolition of private property by peaceful methods? It is to be desired that this could happen, and Communists would certainly be the last to resist it… But they also see that the development of the proletariat is in nearly every civilised country forcibly suppressed, and that thus the opponents of the Communists are working with all their might towards a revolution.” (Principles of Communism, in K Marx and F Engels, Collected Works, op cit, vol VI, p349, emphasis ours).

Here too, Engels clarifies beyond doubt that the use of revolutionary violence is not an issue of the wish of the communists. The dynamics of class struggle between the ruling class and the proletariat as a matter of rule leads to the necessity of the use of force, in most cases, assuming the form of physical revolutionary violence. Even where the physical violence is nominal, for example in the storming of the Winter Palace, during the October Revolution, what happened was, from the Marxist standpoint, the use of revolutionary violence.

Let us look as this comment of Engels about England, about which Teltumbde is so enthusiastic due to a comment of Marx, taken out of context:

“A revolution by a peaceful path is an impossibility, and only a forcible overthrow of the existing unnatural conditions, a radical ouster of the titled as well as the industrial aristocracy, can improve the material situation of the proletarians. They are still held back from this violent revolution by their peculiarly English respect for the law; but the conditions in England described above cannot fail shortly to produce general hunger among the workers, and then their fears of starvation will be stronger than their fear of the law. This revolution was an inevitable one for England” (quoted in Hunt, Richard N., 1974, The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels, MacMillan, p. 111 ).

Now let us come to the views of Lenin on use of revolutionary violence, whom Mr. Teltumbde has totally and intentionally ignored. The reason for that is obvious. As one of my close friends once remarked, “One can try to perform a liberal misappropriation of Marx, because Marx’s time was the theoretical establishment of Marxist worldview, approach and method. However, it is impossible to even try to perform a liberal misappropriation of Lenin, because Lenin grounds Marx in concrete terms…” I cannot agree more and in the case of liberal misappropriator Mr. Teltumbde, this comment is bang on target!

This is what Lenin says in unequivocal terms: “We must not depict socialism as if socialists will bring it to us on a plate all nicely dressed. That will never happen. Not a single problem of the class struggle has ever been solved in history except by violence. When violence is exercised by the working people, by the mass of exploited against the exploiters — then we are for it! (Lenin, ‘Report on the Activities of the Council of People’s Commissars’ (24 January 1918) Collected Works, Vol. 26, pp. 459-61, emphasis ours)

Lenin destroys the apologists regarding Marxism’s espousal of the use of revolutionary violence when he was writing against bourgeois pacifism:

“But whoever expects that socialism will be achieved without a social revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat is not a socialist. Dictatorship is state power based directly on violence. And in the twentieth century — as in the age of civilisation generally — violence means neither a fist nor a club, but troops. To put “disarmament” in the programme is tantamount to making the general declaration: We are opposed to the use of arms. There is as little Marxism in this as there would be if we were to say: We are opposed to violence!” (Lenin, ‘The “Disarmament” Slogan’ (October 1916); Collected Works, Vol. 23, p. 94-104, emphasis ours)

The following words, it seems, were penned by Lenin precisely for the hopeless victims of ‘liberal virus’ like Mr. Teltumbde:

“Without in the least denying violence and terrorism in principle, we demanded work for the preparation of such forms of violence as were calculated to bring about the direct participation of the masses and which guaranteed that participation. We do not close our eyes to the difficulties of this task, but will work at it steadfastly and persistently, undeterred by the objections that this is a matter of the “vague and distant future.” Yes, gentlemen, we stand for future and not only past forms of the movement.” (Lenin, Revolutionary Adventurism, 1902)

And this last quote from Lenin is to show that the peaceful surrender of bourgeoisie even in small capitalist states can only be a very unlikely likelihood and therefore the general Marxist law cannot be that of peaceful transition to Socialism, but transition through revolutionary civil war:

“Peaceful surrender of power by the bourgeoisie is possible, if it is convinced that resistance is hopeless and if it prefers to save its skin. It is much more likely, of course, that even in small states socialism will not be achieved without civil war, and for that reason the only programme of international Social-Democracy must be recognition of civil war, though violence is, of course, alien to our ideals.” (Lenin, ‘A Caricature of Marxism and Imperialist Economism’ (August – October 1916) Collected Works, Vol. 23, pp. 28-76)

A hundred more quotations can be produced to show that: (1) Marxism firmly believes in the use of force; (2) It does not draw a rigid line of demarcation between use of force and use of revolutionary violence, in fact, use of force even when not involving physical violence has the ‘fact of violence’; (3) As a matter of law, with the consolidation of bourgeois state with its standing army, bureaucracy and its militarist tendency, the exceptional cases of peaceful surrender of power by the bourgeoisie have become totally impossible; (4) Marxism opposes individual acts of violence and terror or such acts by small groups of adventurists, however, it clearly differentiates such individual terrorism/violence from collective use of violence to smash the capitalist instrument of domination and oppression, i.e., the capitalist state and calls the latter as the revolutionary violence. Bottom-line: There can be no revolutionary transformation of society without the intervention of revolutionary violence.

Now let us move to Teltumbde’s claim that Marx believed that revolutionary transformation is possible without the use of revolutionary violence or use of force, through the use of universal franchise by the workers, in a peaceful process. In fact, Teltumbde argues that Marx believed that force only sometimes played the role of midwife in the birth of new societies in history. However, he does not feel the need to support this claim by quoting statements from Marx. The quotations that he gives are the ones where Marx is talking about exceptions of the US and England due to historically specific reasons. Lenin showed that generalizing these statements of Marx is a travesty of Marxism. These arguments were talking about an exception that proved the rule, even when Marx said these words. We will show the ideological sleight of hand by Mr. Teltumbde. Kautsky had done exactly the same thing: he quoted Marx’s comments about the exceptional scenario in the US and England, out of context to vindicate his thesis of peaceful transition. Lenin destroyed his revisionist logic in Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky almost a century ago. Teltumbde does the same Kautskyian trick to make Marx a liberal and therefore amenable to Ambedkar. We therefore do not need anything more than to invoke Lenin to show how useless this revisionist trick is. Interestingly, the subhead used by Lenin is ‘How Kautsky turned Marx into a Common Liberal’! Let us see what Lenin says here in this rather long statement,

“The proletarian revolution is impossible without the forcible destruction of the bourgeois state machine and the substitution for it of a new one which, in the words of Engels, is “no longer a state in the proper sense of the word”.

“Because of his renegade position, Kautsky, however, has to befog and belie all this.

“Look what wretched subterfuges he uses.

“First subterfuge. “That Marx in this case did not have in mind a form of government is proved by the fact that he was of the opinion that in Britain and America the transition might take place peacefully, i.e., in a democratic way.”

“The form of government has absolutely nothing to do with it, for there are monarchies which are not typical of the bourgeois state, such, for instance, as have no military clique, and there are republics which are quite typical in this respect, such, for instance, as have a military clique and a bureaucracy. This is a universally known historical and political fact, and Kautsky cannot falsify it.

“If Kautsky had wanted to argue in a serious and honest manner he would have asked himself: Are there historical laws relating to revolution which know of no exception? And the reply would have been: No, there are no such laws. Such laws only apply to the typical, to what Marx once termed the “ideal,” meaning average, normal, typical capitalism.

“Further, was there in the seventies anything which made England and America exceptional in regard to what we are now discussing? It will be obvious to anyone at all familiar with the requirements of science in regard to the problems of history that this question must be put. To fail to put it is tantamount to falsifying science, to engaging in sophistry. And, the question having been put, there can be no doubt as to the reply: the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat is violence against the bourgeoisie; and the necessity of such violence is particularly called for, as Marx and Engels have repeatedly explained in detail (especially in The Civil War in France and in the preface to it), by the existence of militarism and a bureaucracy. But it is precisely these institutions that were non-existent in Britain and America in the seventies, when Marx made his observations (they do exist in Britain and in America now)!

“Kautsky has to resort to trickery literally at every step to cover up his apostasy!

“And note how he inadvertently betrayed his cloven hoof when he wrote: “peacefully, i.e., in a democratic way ”!

“In defining dictatorship, Kautsky tried his utmost to conceal from the reader the fundamental feature of this concept, namely, revolutionary violence. But now the truth is out: it is a question of the contrast between peaceful and violent revolutions.

“That is the crux of the matter. Kautsky has to resort to all these subterfuges, sophistries and falsifications only to excuse himself from violent revolution, and to conceal his renunciation of it, his desertion to the side of the liberal labour policy, i.e., to the side of the bourgeoisie. That is the crux of the matter.

“Kautsky the “historian” so shamelessly falsifies history that he “forgets” the fundamental fact that pre-monopoly capitalism—which actually reached its zenith in the seventies—was by virtue of its fundamental economic traits, which found most typical expression in Britain and in America, distinguished by a, relatively speaking, maximum fondness for peace and freedom. Imperialism, on the other hand, i.e., monopoly capitalism, which finally matured only in the twentieth century, is, by virtue of its fundamental economic traits, distinguished by a minimum fondness for peace and freedom, and by a maximum and universal development of militarism. To “fail to notice” this in discussing the extent to which a peaceful or violent revolution is typical or probable is to stoop to the level of a most ordinary lackey of the bourgeoisie.” (Lenin, Proletarian Revolution and Renegade Kautsky, bold emphasis ours)

Does not it seem that these words were written precisely for Mr. Teltumbde, though anachronistically! Lenin here clearly shows that the situation in the US and England that Marx had talked about as a matter of exception was a temporally and spatially a very specific and peculiar situation that existed for a brief period and this in any case constituted only a rare exception to the law: the law of the role of force in history. Besides, Lenin also shows why this situation no more exists anywhere in the world, especially in the era of imperialism. However, since Teltumbde is too engrossed in his project to prove the ideological vicinity of Marx and Ambedkar, he has forgotten the A B C of Marxism. Tragic!

Teltumbde argues about the usefulness of Buddha’s distinction between “purposeful violence” and “natural violence”. Useful for what? Enriching Marxism, as Ambedkar argued? How? Marx, Engels and Lenin argued that the State is an instrument to perpetuate and perpetrate violence against the ruled, in order to perpetuate the rule of the ruling class and crush the resistance of the ruled. It is an instrument of force, maintained by force. Therefore, it has to be smashed by force. Only in the case of a bourgeois state whose repressive limbs (military, police, bureaucracy, etc.) have not developed properly and are still nimble; and these limbs of state are percolated by elements of the revolutionary class, and the ideological structural hegemony of the ruling class has not been established over it; only in such case as a matter of exception is it possible to overthrow the rule of  the bourgeoisie without revolutionary violence, by using universal franchise and gaining majority in parliament. Even in that statement Marx clearly says, “This being the case, we must also recognize the fact that in the most countries on the Continent the lever of our revolution must be force; it is force to which we must someday appeal in order to erect the rule of labour.” As we can see, Marx clearly argues that the general law can only be the use of force and revolutionary violence. Teltumbde is factually wrong that Marx and Engels justified the use of force only in the case of 1848 in Europe and in the conditions of Tsardom in Russia. It is a criminal distortion of history as we have shown above with quotes from Marx and Engels from period spanning from 1848 to 1895. They always stood for the general law of role of force and revolutionary violence in the historical revolutionary transformations and exceptions which existed for a short period for them, only proved the general rule, rather than refuting it. Moreover, as Lenin showed even those spatio-temporally determined exceptions too, do not exist anymore, anywhere in the world. However, Mr. Teltumbde clings to the dirty old revisionist tricks of Kautsky and attempts to turn Marx into a ‘common liberal’ just like his master Kautsky did a century ago. Pathetic attempt!

Now let us turn to another misinterpretation and misappropriation by Anand Teltumbde. Teltumbde talks about the concept of ‘historical calculus’ or ‘calculus of progress’ used by Herbert Marcuse. Let us see what it means and how Teltumbde misappropriates or misunderstands it to prove that Marxism is against violence. As we have shown above, Marxism per se is not for or against violence or class dictatorship. Before expressing its attitude to the question of violence and dictatorship, Marx would ask: whose violence? What kind of violence? Reactionary violence of the ruling class state or collective revolutionary violence of the masses? However, in order to prove the alleged theoretical affinity of Ambedkar and Marx, Teltumbde reduces the whole thing to this empty rhetoric which totally misrepresents Marxism: “On its own, Marxism is against violence.” (ibid, p. 67) We have shown above that this statement lacks any understanding of Marxism. However, to prove this, Teltumbde turns Marxism into pragmatism by using the concepts of Barrington Moore Jr., Herbert Marcuse and Ted Honderich. First of all, these scholars are not Marxist-Leninists, but, despite their contribution to critical theory and sociology in certain areas, are what can be termed as New Left or radicals. The New Left of 1960s was characterized by its antipathy to the concepts of dictatorship and violence, as is well-known. The reason for that was that most of these Left liberals did not understand the Marxist concepts of role of force and that of class dictatorship and harboured incorrigible liberal bourgeois illusions about “democracy”, which again, according to Marx was an empty container. We will show in a short while what Lenin had written about these illusions about “democracy” and “dictatorship” and how Mr. Teltumbde distorts the basic teachings of Marxism-Leninism on this question. But first, let us see how miserably Mr. Teltumbde has failed to understand the concept of ‘historical calculus of progress’ introduced by Marcuse, though the concept itself suffers from incurable bourgeois humanism. The reason for this misunderstanding is that Mr. Teltumbde in his hurry to prove what he badly wants to prove, did neither read Marcuse’s theory, nor Honderich’s theory, nor Moore’s argument.

First of all the historical calculus of progress offered by Marcuse is actually a thinly veiled vindication of the revolutionary violence and subversion of the oppressed people, as Ted Honderich himself accepts in his essay “On Democratic Violence”. Let us first see what Marcuse has to say about his concept of historical calculus:

“The historical calculus of progress (which is actually the calculus of the prospective reduction of cruelty, misery, suppression) seems to involve the calculated choice between two forms of political violence: that on the part of the legally constituted powers (by their legitimate action, or by their tacit consent, or by their inability to prevent violence), and that on the part of potentially subversive movements. Moreover, with respect to the latter, a policy of unequal treatment would protect radicalism on the Left against that on the Right. Can the historical calculus be reasonably extended to the justification of one form of violence as against another? Or better (since ‘justification’ carries a moral connotation), is there historical evidence to the effect that the social origin and impetus of violence (from among the ruled or the ruling classes, the have or the have-nots, the Left or the Right) is in a demonstratable relation to progress (as defined above)?

    ”With all the qualifications of a hypothesis based on an ‘open’ historical record, it seems that the violence emanating from the rebellion of the oppressed classes broke the historical continuum of injustice, cruelty, and silence for a brief moment, brief but explosive enough to achieve an increase in the scope of freedom and justice, and a better and more equitable distribution of misery and oppression in a new social system—in one word: progress in civilization. The English civil wars, the French Revolution, the Chinese and the Cuban Revolutions may illustrate the hypothesis. In contrast, the one historical change from one social system to another, marking the beginning of a new period in civilization, which was not sparked and driven by an effective movement ‘from below’, namely, the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West, brought about a long period of regression for long centuries, until a new, higher period of civilization was painfully born in the violence of the heretic revolts of the thirteenth century and in the peasant and laborer revolts of the fourteenth century.” (Herbert Marcuse, Repressive Tolerance, 1965, emphasis ours)

I quoted Marcuse at length only in order to show what he means by historical calculus of progress and how little Mr. Teltumbde understands this concept. This concept has nothing to do with the relative weight of the number of casualties in the case of continuation of status quo and the event of revolutionary violence or revolution. Mr. Teltumbde writes, “…Marcuse’s ‘calculus of progress’, involving a comparative assessment of the number of people likely to be killed during and after the revolution and if the existing order were to be allowed to continue, might be useful.” (Teltumbde, 2017, p. 67) Ridiculous! How can a person misunderstand a concept in such a childish way!

Secondly, the oppressed people and their leadership cannot first sit and calculate the estimated number of people to be killed in both the possible scenarios! Not only is this pragmatism of the worst kind, but also it is impossible to do so. However, Teltumbde himself has a strong streak of pragmatism. His eclecticism stems from this very pragmatic attitude. The kind of sources he has used in this introduction reveals his pragmatic eclecticism, though ironically he has not even read these academicians like Honderich, Goldstone, etc. properly. Most of the classics that he has quoted, he has quoted either from the internet or from secondary sources like Norman Geras, whose work ‘Althusser’s Marxism’ has been used to retrieve a quote of Engels from his famous Anti-Duhring.

Let us see what Ted Honderich has to say about Marcuse’s historical calculus, which might have caught the eye of Mr. Teltumbde, had he read these essays from beginning to end:

“Most of us, to pass on to another example, will be as reluctant to suppose that the “historical calculus” offered to us by Marcuse can be shown to issue in conclusion that political violence of the Left has generally a justification.” (Ted Honderich, On Democratic Violence) It is well-known that Honderich has been a supporter of the right of the oppressed people to use violent means to oppose their oppressors. In fact, he has fervently supported the moral right of the Palestinians to use ‘terrorism’ to resist the Zionist Imperialism of Israel. It would have been better had Mr. Teltumbde dropped the names of these scholars like bombs to bamboozle the readers after at least reading these scholars properly.

Now let us turn to Barrington Moore Jr. and his (mis)use by Teltumbde. Barrington Moore Jr.’s comparison between India and China has nothing to do with an assessment of the “number of people likely to be killed during and after the revolution and if the existing order were to be allowed to continue”. Moore’s comparison of China with India was based on two different types of feudalism; the former leading to peasant revolts and the latter leading to much more cohesive and comparatively peaceful rural life due to reactionary social organization based on caste. Here is the judgement of Moore Jr. regarding this comparison:

“The contrast between India and China suggests an hypothesis perhaps more tenable than those just discussed. Indian society, as many scholars have remarked, resembles some huge yet very simple invertebrate organism. A central coordinating authority, a monarch, or to continue the biological analogy, a brain, was not necessary to its continued operation. Through much of Indian history down to modern times, there was no central authority imposing its will on the whole subcontinent. Indian society reminds one of the starfish whom fishermen used to shred angrily into bits, after which each fragment would grow into a new starfish. But the analogy is inexact. Indian society was even simpler and yet more differentiated. Climate, agricultural practices, taxation systems, religious beliefs, and many other social and cultural features differed markedly from one part of the country to another. Caste, on the other hand, was common to them all and provided the framework around which all of life was everywhere organized. It made possible these differences and a society where a territorial segment could be cut off from the rest without damage, or at least without fatal damage, to itself or the rest of the society. Far more important, from the standpoint of our immediate problem, is the reverse of this feature. Any attempt at innovation, any local variation, simply became the basis of another caste. This has not been merely a matter of new religious beliefs. Since the distinction between sacred and profane is very dubious for Indian society, and since religiously tinged caste codes cover practically the whole range of human activities, any innovation or attempted innovation in premodern times was likely to become the basis for another caste. Thus opposition to society and preying on society became a part of society in the form of bandit castes or castes in the form of religious sects.

…

“A highly segmented society that depends on diffuse-sanctions for its coherence and for extracting the surplus from the underlying peasantry is nearly immune to peasant rebellion because opposition is likely to take the form of creating another segment. On the other hand, an agrarian bureaucracy, or a society that depends on a central authority for extracting the surplus, is a type most vulnerable to such outbreaks.” (Barrington Moore Jr. Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy)

Here we cannot go into a detailed criticism of Moore’s analysis which has now been rejected by most of the historians and social scientists, for example, Kathleen Gough, A.R. Desai, Ranajit Guha, D. N. Dhanagare, etc. First of all, Moore Jr. did not understand the articulation of caste and class and saw it as a relatively unchanging mechanism through ages, an idea critiqued and rejected by many serious historians of ancient, medieval as well as modern India like Kosambi, Sharma, Suvira Jaisawal, Satish Chandra, Irfan Habib, Sekhar Bandhyopadhyaya, Sumit Sarkar, Nicholas Dirks, Ranajit Guha (especially the early works like Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency). Secondly, Moore tries to prove Marx’s idea about Asiatic mode of production and Oriental despotism that it needed an external force to break itself as it lacked internal dynamism, an idea that Marx himself had abandoned after his reading of Kovalevsky’s and Elphinstone’s works. Finally, Moore Jr.’s analysis of even China and Japan (the countries that he compares with India) is totally outdated. It would have been better had Mr. Teltumbde read, first of all, Moore’s work in totality and also understood the obsolete nature of his outmoded and outdated theses. It appears that most of these big names that Mr. Teltumbde drops to stupefy the readers have come to him from some essays and articles and I doubt whether he has read even these essays or articles completely from beginning to end or not.

He uses Helmut Fleischer, an infamous name among Marxists-Leninists, who began his career as a Trotskyite and ended up as a scholar who rejected Lenin and also rejected the proletarian revolution of Russia, following Rudolf Bahro, an anti-Marxist-Leninist dissident from East Germany who ended up becoming a spiritualist. These are the sources on which Anand Teltumbde relies to prove that Marxists believe that violence is only a matter of tactics (an argument taken from one Eckard Bolsinger, a well-known liberal supporter of social market economy who compares the “political realism” of reactionary Right-winger Carl Schmitt and Lenin!). Of course, when and how to use revolutionary violence, is definitely a question of tactics. However, to make the role of force and revolutionary violence itself a question a tactics, is nothing short of a vulgar liberal appropriation of Marxist theory of history, by Mr. Teltumbde. And for What? To somehow drag Marx and put him in line with the pragmatic liberalism of Ambedkar; to defend Ambedkar’s ignorant comments on the question of violence against Marxism! What is this if not intellectual dishonesty?

Now let us come to the question of dictatorship and democracy. First, let us listen to what Teltumbde has to say on this issue: “The expression was rarely used by Marx, and never in documents for publication, though Engels did later cite the Paris Commune as a good example of the dictatorship of proletariat.” (Teltumbde, 2017, p. 68). A blatant lie! This claim is so outrageous that even Teltumbde understands it and immediately afterwards accepts that Marx has talked about the concept of dictatorship of the proletariat in Critique of the Gotha Program also. However, even more important is the fact that there are many places where Marx talks about the dictatorship of the proletariat without using these terms. Let us see. In the 1872 preface to The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels argue that certain parts of the Manifesto have become antiquated. The one amendment that they insert is this, as Lenin also pointed out in Proletarian Revolution and Renegade Kautsky:

“…this programme has in some details been antiquated. One thing especially was proved by the Commune, viz., that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.” (1872, Preface to The Communist Manifesto)

In fact, the following is the first use of the term dictatorship of the proletariat by Marx:

“…there appeared the bold slogan of revolutionary struggle: Overthrow of the bourgeoisie! Dictatorship of the working class!” (Marx, Class Struggles in France)

Many instances can be shown where Marx has talked about the class dictatorship of the proletariat as a necessary transitional phase between capitalism and communism. Secondly, it makes no difference whether Marx used this term in some letter or writing “intended for publication.” Teltumbde has himself used and quoted Marx’s letters, whenever it proved useful to his ends. Therefore, it does not really matter.

Another problem with Teltumbde’s argument is that he plagiarises from the sources that he uses. For instance, he argues, “It should be noted that the word dictatorship did not have quite the same connotation for Marx and Engels that it does for us. They associated it principally with the Roman office of dictatura, where all power was legally concentrated in the hands of a single man during a limited period in times of crisis.” (Teltumbde, 2017, p. 68)

These sentences are lifted straight out of ‘The Encyclopaedia of Political Revolutions’ edited by Jack Goldstone, whom he had quoted earlier in the same essay. The funny thing is that this faulty argument has been copied by Jack Goldstone from a Trotskyite Hal Draper’s book, who actually did not say that Marx and Engels associated their notion of dictatorship with the Roman office of Dictatura. In fact, Draper, despite his highly problematic treatment of the question, shows that Marx and Engels never associated the notion of dictatorship with the Roman institution of dictatura. Marx even names some dictators (individual dictators) who exercised no dictatorship (class dictatorship). Marx in none of his writing even talks about the Roman office of dictatura. So what appears to have happened here is something like this: Hal Draper wrote his work on Marx’s notion of dictatorship of the proletariat and shows that it has nothing to do with personal domination or martial law kind of situation introduced by the Roman institution of dictatura; then, Jack Goldstone completely misreads this and argues (under the impression that he is simply following Draper) that Marx and Engels associated this notion with Roman office of dictatura! And then, the funniest part, Mr. Anand Teltumbde plagiarises this error verbatim from J. Goldstone! How’s that! A comedy of errors, or rather, a comedy of chain of erroneous plagiarism! We would certainly have laughed with open heart at such ridiculous act, but we cannot due to the possible misleading and detrimental impact of such erroneous plagiarism on readers of Mr. Teltumbde.

Though in the end Teltumbde is compelled to accept that there is a difference in the sense in which Marx and Ambedkar used the terms like democracy and dictatorship, and yet, he persists in establishing this sense of affinity or similarity between the two! He should also have said that ‘therefore Ambedkar’s criticism of Marx’s concept of class dictatorship is totally off the mark.’ However, he refrains from saying that. It might be due to the fear of the Ambedkarites in Maharashtra, the wrath of whom he has faced more than once. However, one should speak the truth. As Lenin (some claim Gramsci and Arendt also said that) said, ‘to speak the truth is revolutionary.’

Teltumbde immediately falls into propagating another lie. He argues, “Ambedkar himself faulted the bourgeois parliamentary model of democracy as only the notional or political model of democracy that enshrines equal rights of all vote-worthy individuals and periodic elections to choose their representative in government.” (Teltumbde, 2017, p. 68) This is something that Ambedkar said about the establishment of parliamentary democratic system in India, which according to Ambedkar lacked notions of liberty, fraternity and equality in society and that is why if social and economic democracy is not introduced, the political democracy would become meaningless. He does not say the same thing about the American democracy or English democracy. This assertion of Ambedkar is closely related with the Deweyan Pragmatist idea of ‘social endosmosis’ characterised by ‘a model of associated living.’ Teltumbde erroneously equates it with Marx’s idea of society as “community of freely associated individuals” or “free association of producers”. It was Marx’s another name for communism. Ambedkar is certainly not talking about communist society where state and classes would have withered away and everyone will work according to their abilities and will get according to their needs. Ambedkar’s concept of ‘a model of associated living’ belongs to a society which is non-segregated, free of discrimination and guided by a humanist social code. This idea was taken directly from Dewey who had written in his book Democracy and Education, “A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience.” (John Dewey, Democracy and Education, p. 93). In fact, Ambedkar immediately eliminates any possible confusion of this expression being mistaken as an equivalent of communism or even proletarian democracy. First he quotes Dewey almost verbatim, without acknowledging and then also explains the meaning of this Deweyan phrase of ‘associated living’: “A democracy is not merely a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience. It is essentially an attitude of respect and reverence towards one’s fellow men.” (Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste)

As we can see, first Ambedkar paraphrases Dewey and then Teltumbde tries to equate the paraphrased sentences with Marxian idea of democracy and what he has done by this is, in fact, reducing the idea of proletarian democracy to ‘an attitude of respect and reverence towards one’s fellow men’! What can be more ridiculous than this moralist and pseudo-ethicalist distortion of Marx and Marxism? Any student of political science will tell Teltumbde that this idea of democracy propounded by Dewey and followed verbatim by Ambedkar has little to do with Marxist idea of proletarian democracy/dictatorship. However, as Mr. Teltumbde is hell-bent upon proving something as real which is only a figment of his imagination (quite wild one too!) and is based upon his whims and fancies, he does not care about facts or truths. He also harks back to Ambedkar’s idea of a ‘socialistic’ economy, which has nothing to do with Marx’s idea of socialism as an economic system. This Teltumbde accepts at one place, quite embarrassingly. However, towards the end of the introduction he forgets in his ‘moment of euphoria’ what he said in the beginning.

Before we move ahead, let us in brief see what Lenin has to say about these liberal misappropriators and distorters of Marxist notion of democracy and dictatorship. Lenin, removing all doubts created by liberal distortion of Marx by the likes of Kautsky, and may we add, Mr. Teltumbde, writes:

“It is natural for a liberal to speak of “democracy” in general; but a Marxist will never forget to ask: “for what class?” Everyone knows, for instance (and Kautsky the “historian” knows it too), that rebellions, or even strong ferment, among the slaves in ancient times at once revealed the fact that the ancient state was essentially a dictatorship of the slave owners. Did this dictatorship abolish democracy among, and for, the slaveowners? Everyhody knows that it did not.

“Kautsky the “Marxist” made this monstrously absurd and untrue statement because he “forgot” the class struggle. . . .

“To transform Kautsky’s liberal and false assertion into a Marxist and true one, one must say: dictatorship does not necessarily mean the abolition of democracy for the class that exercises the dictatorship over other classes; but it does mean the abolition (or very material restriction, which is also a form of abolition) of democracy for the class over which, or against which, the dictatorship is exercised.” (Lenin, Proletarian Revolution and Renegade Kautsky, Bold emphasis ours)

Further, Lenin writes, as if in anticipation of liberal Left distorters of Marxism like Mr. Teltumbde himself:

“Kautsky finds it necessary to interpret dictatorship as a “condition of domination” (this is the literal expression he uses on the very next page, p. 21), because then revolutionary violence, and violent revolution, disappear. The “condition of domination” is a condition in which any majority finds itself under … “democracy”! Thanks to such a fraud, revolution happily disappears!

“The fraud, however, is too crude and will not save Kautsky. One cannot hide the fact that dictatorship presupposes and implies a “condition,” one so disagreeable to renegades, of revolutionary violence of one class against another. It is patently absurd to draw a distinction between a “condition” and a “form of government”. To speak of forms of government in this connection is trebly stupid, for every schoolboy knows that monarchy and republic are two different forms of government. It must be explained to Mr. Kautsky that both these forms of government, like all transitional “forms of government” under capitalism, are only variations of the bourgeois state, that is, of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.

 

“The proletarian revolution is impossible without the forcible destruction of the bourgeois state machine and the substitution for it of a new one which, in the words of Engels, is “no longer a state in the proper sense of the word”.” (Lenin, Proletarian Revolution and Renegade Kautsky)

Academicians like Teltumbde often write about Marxism as if after Marx it is they who will understand and interpret and develop Marx! According to them, whether they manifestly say so or not, they believe that leaders like Lenin and Mao (some even include Engels in their list!) have only disfigured Marxism by their supposed “economism” and “determinism”. There is only one place where Mr. Teltumbde quotes Lenin in agreement, that is, where he has quoted Lenin’s famous definition of class from his essay ‘A Great Beginning’. Apart from that, they either make all of Lenin’s analysis totally conjunctural or reject it altogether. Prabhat Patnaik has done the same, time and again, and it seems that regarding Lenin’s theory of Imperialism as a conjunctural one, Mr. Teltumbde has, without acknowledging plagiarized Patnaik’s argument. However, even without speculating such highly likely likelihoods, we can safely claim that Mr. Teltumbde has made a very poor and pathetic attempt to distort the revolutionary core of Marxism-Leninism, just in order to bring Ambedkar closer to Marxism, an enterprise, which in my opinion is neither possible nor necessary.

The Quixotic Counter-Factual Simulations of
Anand Teltumbde

Now we move towards the end of this ‘Introduction’ written by Teltumbde. In the section ‘Ambedkar and Communism’ he makes some wild counter-factual speculations as to what Ambedkar would have written, had he completed his unfinished manuscript ‘India and Communism’. Referring to the scheme of the manuscript, we are told about the section ‘Pre-requisites of Communism in India’ (comprising of three chapters). Teltumbde fantasizes what Ambedkar would have written in this section. First, according to him, Ambedkar would have talked about the “social and religious revolution” like Reformation, Puritanism, etc. and how India lacked such movements due to caste system and therefore the revolutionary transformation of the consciousness of people did not take place. Though, this entire argument is highly problematic, historically inaccurate and ahistorical, we would not dwell further on its criticism and move forward. Teltumbde claims that the second chapter on Communism and Democracy would have reiterated Ambedkar’s liberal (he forgets to mention ‘bourgeois’!) views of Ambedkar regarding democracy and dictatorship. We have shown that Mr. Teltumbde’s views himself are nothing short of shame-faced liberalism! Teltumbde keeps making simulations about what was not written by Ambedkar. However, the most ridiculous simulations come when he talks about the two chapters of the third section.

First he accepts that Ambedkar was a liberal (bourgeois liberal, since, is there any other kind? Philosophically, the curious term ‘left liberal’ is only an apologetic euphemism for a bourgeois liberal who is or seems a little more radical; the ‘garam dal’ of liberal bourgeoisie!). Now, he makes a claim that makes you wonder whether Mr. Teltumbde even understands what a liberal is! Teltumbde fantasizes:

“Probably, he (Ambedkar) would have discussed the ways and means to transcend these social orders to create communist society. Or else he might have compared Marx’s impact on a society where – as Marx wrote in Capital — the idea of equality had become ‘a popular prejudice’ as against a social order where – as Manu would have it – equality is anathema. India’s soil needs to be made fertile for communism. It is sterile because of Maniusm, the barrier to Marxism.

“The importance of this incomplete book is not as much in its content as it is in the message that Ambedkar cared for communism. Despite the history of bitterness between him and the communists in India, he cared to think of reminding Indians about the prerequisites for communism. If he had been antagonistically oriented towards Marxism as propandised by vested interests, one could logically ask why would he worry about thinking of impediments in the path of communism in India?” (Teltumbde, 2017, p. 71-72)

How amusing! Another pack of lies! First of all, what Ambedkar would have written or not written about communism in this unfinished manuscript can only be decided on the basis of what he up till then had written about communism in his finished manuscripts, rather than, on the basis of Quixotic fantasies of Mr. Teltumbde. Teltumbde force-fits into the possible ruminations of Ambedkar what he wants him to have thought about communism. We have already shown that Ambedkar was least concerned about construction of a communist society in India. He was and always remained ideologically opposed to communism, whether Mr. Teltumbde likes it or not. For him, the bourgeois ideal society of the imagination of the thinkers of Enlightenment based on ‘liberty, fraternity, equality’ was the most appropriate form of human social organization, though Ambedkar’s understanding of even this society was extremely problematic. For instance, it never occurred to him in his constant opposition of the communist idea of role of force and revolutionary violence that the revolution which established these bourgeois ideals of ‘liberty, fraternity, equality’ was an extremely bloody revolution: the French Revolution of 1789! In fact, much bloodier than the Russian Revolution! Anyhow, the point is that, Ambedkar was never a supporter of communism or communist society and what he thought to be acceptable in communist ideal had nothing to do with what Marx, Engels or Lenin meant by the word ‘communism’. We have shown how by comparing Bhikkhu sangha as an ideal of elimination of property akin to communist ideal, Ambedkar showed his complete lack of understanding of what communism meant! In nutshell, it was not Ambedkar’s concern whatsoever, how to make India’s soil fertile for communism. Moreover, the argument that it is sterile because of Brahmanism and caste system is a fallacious argument. Marxism in all countries is faced by different forms of social oppression and all identitarians in these countries make similar claims. The faults of Indian communists, especially, not understanding caste and its articulation with class in the specific Indian situation, has nothing to do with the capability of Marxism as an approach and method to analyse the phenomenon of caste and devise a program for its annihilation.

Secondly, the claim that Ambedkar “cared for communism” and wanted to show Indian communists what must they do to achieve it, in other words, its pre-requisites, is a totally bogus claim of Teltumbde. In fact, the oeuvre of Ambedkar can be quoted at length to show that it was none of his concern to show Indian communists how to achieve communism. Otherwise, rather than showing them through books, Ambedkar would have become a communist practitioner and would have shown them in practice! Give us one reason why he did not, if he cared so much for communism and was worried with the incapability of Indian communists to fulfil its prerequisites!

Besides, Ambedkar did “care for communism” in one way. Communism and Indian communists (despite their all weaknesses) had a strong appeal among the working masses of the country and  a large section of middle class intelligentsia as well. That is why Dr. Ambedkar as a firm and genuine Deweyan Pragmatist, “cared for it”! It was not for nothing that he despised Nehru government’s (though totally pragmatic and determined by the political interests of Indian bourgeoisie!) inclination towards Soviet government after the Independence and cautioned him that “communism is like a forest fire” and it will burn and consume everything that comes into its contact. It was his ideological duty to show that communism is not fit for India.

Now I come to my own speculative enterprise, if you may allow! Had Ambedkar completed this book, he would have strived to show that communism is not possible in India. Moreover, he would have shown that the ultimate aim of communism, that is, of equality actually were stated by Buddhism 2500 years before Marx and they even did not have the shortcomings of Marx, namely, the principle of “violence” and “dictatorship of the proletariat”. He would have gone further to show, as he tried to do in his ‘Buddha and Karl Marx’, that, in fact, these two problematic principles are in contradistinction with the very ideal of equality which Marxism talks about. And therefore, according to Ambedkar, the Buddhist ashtamarga combined with the ideals of ‘liberty, fraternity, equality’, the American ideal of ‘pursuit of happiness’ and the ‘social endosmosis’ a la John Dewey, is the best principle that those should follow who aim a reorganization of society. How this is aim to be achieved? Through the state (‘the Great Mediator’) in a gradual process (‘all change is incremental’, another Deweyan dogma) and a religion as a humanist ethical code (read ‘Common Faith’ by John Dewey and Ambedkar’s essay on the need of religion)! This is what Ambedkar aimed to do and Teltumbde should not be secretly disappointed with Ambedkar’s firm convictions and as a result should not try to distort Marxism and also distort Ambedkar in order to build what he presumes to be a “holy bridge” as opposed to the “unholy rift” that he is talking about. As Marx said, “All that is holy is profaned”!

Regarding what Dr. Ambedkar said to Dada Saheb Gaikwad in a letter will become clear by quoting him again, “I am inclined to think that our people may join the communists if they think that can give them immediate relief?” Any sane person can see that this is only a pragmatic suggestion to try an option for immediate relief rather than an ideological directive to join communists, or become communists. In order to show that Dr. Ambedkar was ideologically opposed to communism, I will present some quotes from the late-1940s till the last days of Dr. Ambedkar’s life. These quotations will reveal beyond doubt that Mr. Teltumbde is lying.

Ambedkar and Marx: or How Teltumbde Hides the Ignorance of Dr. Ambedkar Regarding Marxism – III

Let us first see the excerpts from three interviews of Dr. Ambedkar from 1946, 1951 and 1953 and then from his recorded interventions in the parliamentary debates in 1954-55.

In an interview in 1951, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar said that his party would not in any case align with the Communist Party “for the plain reason that I do not believe in Communism.” Asked if he would prevent his party from aligning with the Communist Party simply because he was personally opposed to Communism, Dr. Ambedkar said: “I am not going to be a slave to my party. So long as I and my party agree, we work together else we go our own way.” (Told to PTI in an interview, November, 1951)

Here Ambedkar eliminates any doubt that he will not form any alliance with the communist party because he is ideologically opposed to communism and if his party goes ahead and forms an alliance with communist party, then he will part ways with his own party!

Let us see what Ambedkar told Field Marshall Viscount Wavell in a meeting with him. This excerpt is from the Note that was prepared based on the meeting and is included in the collected writings and speeches of Dr. Ambedkar published by the government. Take note of the bold and italicized portion:

“He (Ambedkar) thought that if India became independent it would be one of the greatest disasters that could happen. Before they left, the British must ensure that the new constitution guaranteed to the Scheduled Castes the elementary human rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and that it restored their Separate Electorates and gave them the other safeguards which they demanded. At present disillusionment was driving his (Ambedkar’s) followers towards terrorism and communism. He was on trial with them for the efficacy of constitutional methods.” (A Note On The Meeting Between DR. B. R. Ambedkar And Field Marshall Viscount Wavell, April 5, 1946)

Teltumbde had asked that if Dr. Ambedkar had no concern for communism, why would he write a book about it? Dr. Ambedkar himself has given the reason above. This reason persisted even after Independence. He deemed communism to be a growing menace, as well shall see shortly. He was not only alarmed at the growing popularity of communism in India, but in entire Asia. A section of his own followers were drifting towards communism and this obviously worried him, as he conceded before Viscount Wavell. His main objective in his intellectual endeavors regarding communism, was to discredit communism by demonstrating its “impracticability”, at least, in the Indian situation. We will see very soon that he was in general against and alarmed with the advance of communism in the 1950s.

Ambedkar said various contradictory things in 1950s, especially after his resignation from Nehru’s cabinet, where he served as the first Law Minister of independent India. Ambedkar resigned in 1951. If one reads his resignation speech, they find that Ambedkar was irked by Nehru’s compromise with the Hindu revivalist on the question of Hindu Code Bill; he also wanted the Labour Ministry, perhaps to introduce certain reforms, which was denied to him and also because the Law Ministry was just a useless ministry to do anything. The third reason was the lack of effort on government’s part to uplift the Dalits especially and also the Backward Classes. The fourth reason of Ambedkar for resignation was the foreign policy of India which presumably was suffering from the ill of “being too good” rather than “being realistic”. The realism of foreign policy for Ambedkar would have been partition of Kashmir and giving the Muslim-dominated areas to Pakistan and keeping the Hindu and Buddhist-dominated areas in India! Ambedkar evidently was in support of partition based on religion. Anyhow, these factors led to a lot of irritation and Ambedkar resigned from the Cabinet with bitter taste. He was dissatisfied with Nehru’s government’s inefficiency on several matters. After his resignation in 1951, he criticized Nehru’s government regularly.

One such disgruntled attack came in an interview given to the BBC in 1953. Some have erroneously claimed that Ambedkar supported communism in India. However, if one listens to the interview carefully, Ambedkar is actually warning the establishment about the possibility of communist revolution due to economic and social inequality and backwardness. Ambedkar is arguing that if the social structure of India is not changed in a gradual process, then the hope of peaceful change is gone. The system will eventually collapse and the alternative system that might emerge from the upheaval is communism “of some kind”. While such a system might fulfil the material needs of people, it will be violent. He ridicules the western interviewer by saying that has not the western countries killed people in war for their own interests? Ambedkar argues that in India nobody “cares about the election business” and everyone wants their material needs satisfied and this might lead the country to “communism of some kind”. The reason given by Ambedkar for this is mainly the lack of economic prosperity and social equality. He accepts in the interview that in America there is no chance of success of communism because “each American earns so much.” As we know, this is not true today and it was even less true in 1953. Certainly, a large section of Black people and migrants from Southern American countries lived a horrible life. Still, Ambedkar argues that “each American earns so much” that communism is not possible there. Then he goes on to contend that such prosperity is not possible in India because we do not have land (incorrect claim), we have less rainfall (incorrect claim) and our forests are being destroyed (partially true for 1953). Another reason that Ambedkar gives for future collapse of parliamentary democracy in India is that people have no consciousness and they vote for a symbol, without scrutinizing whether a donkey stands behind it or an educated man. Since people want their material needs to be satisfied and since these cannot be satisfied in India, people might go for communism and the parliamentary democracy might fail in India. This is the whole argument of Ambedkar in the said interview of 1953. Some ignorant people have claimed that Ambedkar is supporting communism in this interview, whereas the fact is that he is warning the establishment that if no steps are taken to gradually alter the social system and improve economic situation, then prepare yourself for a social upheaval. The reason for this can be found in the statements of Ambedkar given in some other interviews and parliamentary debates after this interview with the BBC.

Now look at some of the ideas of Ambedkar that he expressed during the Parliamentary debates. Ambedkar argues in one of these debates in 1954, that is, after the 1953 interview:

“Now, the background, to my mind is nothing else but the expansion of communism in the world. It is quite impossible to follow the principle or to understand the validity and the nature of the principle unless one bears in mind the problem that the world has to face today—that part of the world which believes in parliamentary and free democracy, viz., the expansion of communism in the world. I propose to give some figures to the House which I have collected in this matter. I am not going back into the long past but I am going to start from May 1945 when the War came to an end. By May 1945, Russia had consumed ten European States.” (Parliamentary Debates, D., Vol. 7A (Council of States), 26th August 1954, pp. 469-83.)

In the above quote from as late as 1954, Ambedkar clearly expresses his worries regarding the expansion of communism as a threat to “free democracy” which also makes clear the true implications of his warnings to establishment given in the 1953 interview to the BBC. Now, even a layman can see that Mr. Teltumbde was brazenly lying when he said that Ambedkar’s concept of democracy was something similar to Marx’s concept! Or, Mr. Teltumbde has lost the habit of reading, comprehending and then writing. I leave the readers to decide what might seem to be the more likely likelihood. In the meanwhile, let us ponder over another statement of Ambedkar from the same source:

“The question is: Can communism and free democracy work together? Can they live together? Is it possible to hope that there will not be a conflict between them? The theory, at any rate, seems to me utterly absurd, for communism is like a forest fire; it goes on burning and consuming anything and everything that comes in its way. It is quite possible that countries which are far distant from the centre of communism may feel safe that the forest fire may be extinguished before it reaches them or it may be that the fire may never reach them.” (ibid)

This is the same quote which Mr. Teltumbde has quoted, but out of context and selectively and subsequently has tried to prove that here Ambedkar is only expressing his irritation with the foreign policy of Nehru! Now, read the whole quote again and see whether Mr. Teltumbde is telling us the truth. Well, it does not look that way. Instead, it looks that Teltumbde is embarrassingly and apologetically trying to save the anti-communist ideological position of Dr. Ambedkar, for which no genuine Ambedkarite should feel apologetic! However, the problem with Teltumbde is that he has never been able to decide where he stands. His situation is somewhat like “Na Khuda hi mila, na visaal-e-sanam/Na udhar kay rahay, na idhar kay rahe (I found neither faith, nor union with my lover/And now I belong neither there nor here).”

The following quote shows the utter lack of understanding of Ambedkar regarding Marx and Marxism. He makes a very bizarre argument due to this complete lack of understanding about communism and socialism and this statement also betrays his dislike for communism. Note bene, the quote belongs to 1955.

“Even the Communists say that theirs is socialism and I want to know why they call themselves Communists if they are only Socialists. It would lose all the terrors which the word ‘Communism’ has for many people and they might easily have won a victory in Andhra if they had made a change in name.” (P. D., Vol. 9-B, 19th March 1955, pp. 2446-66.)

There is no need to comment on the above statement of Ambedkar. It is meaningless.

Now lastly, on the supposed love of Dr. Ambedkar for Soviet Union and Stalin. The following quote is from 1954.

“There is no room for Panchsheel in politics and secondly, not in the politics of a communist country. The communist countries have two well-known principles on which they always act. One is that morality is always in a flux. There is no morality. Today’s morality is not tomorrow’s morality. You can keep your word in accordance with the morality of today and you can break your word with equal justification tomorrow because tomorrow’s morality will be different. The second thing is that when the Russian Communist State is dealing with the other States, each transaction is a unit by itself. When we deal with somebody, we begin with goodwill and end with gratitude. When the Russians deal with somebody, they do not begin with goodwill, nor do they end with any gratitude.” (P. D., Vol. 7A (Council of States), 26th August 1954, pp. 469-83.)

I hope Mr. Teltumbde is listening! Ambedkar clearly believes that communist countries are bereft of morality and that is why these religion-less creatures cannot be trusted in foreign relations! We have already shown that the atheism of Marxism is something that Ambedkar was totally opposed to and believed that the only mode of existence of morality, ethics and spirituality is religion. You can find it in the writings of Ambedkar himself. Again, we see a total lack of understanding on part of Ambedkar, of the concept of morality, ethics and spiritual world. We cannot dwell on this any longer and will move to our last example to illustrate Ambedkar’s attitude to Stalin.

In response to a loaded-question of Mulk Raj Anand, Ambedkar expressed his agreement with former’s condemnation of the alleged acts of Stalin which curtailed the celebrated and fetishized bourgeois individual freedom. Mulk Raj Anand himself gave the details of the interview that took place in May, 1950. It goes as follows:

“M.R. Anand : State capitalism might also prove to be dangerous. You know what Stalin has done in Russia. Imposed a set of bureaucrats on the people in the name of Communism!

“B. R. Ambedkar : Of course, we must protect the individual from invasion of his rights from other individuals. Liberty of the person must always be a primary concern. That was in my mind when I urged for fundamental rights.”

It is of no consequence whether Ambedkar observed a one-day fast when Stalin died, which at any rate, is a claim by an author who provides no evidence for this. Ideologically and politically, Ambedkar’s views about USSR and Stalin were very clear and Mr. Teltumbde has apologetically constructed a mixed bag of lies to demonstrate, in vain, that Ambedkar was sympathetic to Marxism and socialist system in the USSR.

After repeating the non-sense that Ambedkar outlined the pre-requisites for communism in India (so that, presumably, the communists will learn from it and then move forward towards communism in India!), Teltumbde claims that when Ambedkar said that social and religious revolutions always precede political revolutions, he was actually responding to the rigid use of the base-superstructure metaphor by the Indian communists and in this process he fell in their trap and claimed that caste, in fact, belongs to superstructure. The slogan of Mr. Teltumbde is “blame every mistake of Ambedkar on communists”, as if he had no independent wisdom. Though he is obliged to accept that the religious also belongs to the sphere of superstructure and the communist argument never claimed otherwise. However, it is noteworthy that Teltumbde is scared of criticizing Ambedkar by name, even when his theoretical mistakes are so glaring that even a beginner in social sciences and Marxism can see those mistakes. The fact is that Ambedkar’s argument, that caste has nothing to do with access to economic resources, has nothing do with what the communists did with the metaphor of base and superstructure. This mistake of Ambedkar clearly stemmed from his own Deweyan Pragmatist understanding of society. Also, the claim that Ambedkar wanted to do away with caste consciousness first, so that class consciousness can germinate, is rubbish. He is clear that the theory of class conflict is incorrect. Wherever he refers to caste consciousness and juxtaposes it with class consciousness, he does it only in a rhetorical fashion in order to show the inapplicability of class analysis to the Indian situation.

In the end of the subhead ‘Ambedkar and Communism’, Mr. Teltumbde makes another bogus claim, “His motivation to write such a book rather reflects a certain affinity between him and Marx. Ambedkar shared with Marx and with liberal Enlightenment thinkers a belief in progress, a conviction that history brought with it an advance in human welfare. In Marxist terms we can interpret this as the advance in the forces of production that brings with it an advance in human capacities; in liberal terms we can speak of an advance in freedom. Ambedkar also believed that human history is a history of progress, a forward movement and not simply a phase in the endless cycles or final degeneration. He differed with Marx in interpreting the motive force of human history.” (Teltumbde, 2017, p. 73)

So, we are told that Ambedkar differed from Marx only regarding the motive force of history! Well, what about the dialectical materialist world-view of Marx? Can we equate it simply with Enlightenment philosophers? No! Teltumbde should read Socialism: Utopian and Scientific by Engels where he shows that Enlightenment philosophers were the apogee of the bourgeois democratic thinking, based on militant (but mechanical materialism). Engels also shows that Marxism sublates the positives of this intellectual tradition but goes beyond it: negation of the negation. Moreover, Ambedkar was not even rational enough to be compared with the most developed and revolutionary thinkers of the Enlightenment, for instance, Denis Diderot. Marx listed him among his favourite writers. Engels wrote this about Diderot, “If ever anybody dedicated his whole life to the “enthusiasm for truth and justice” — using this phrase in the good sense — it was Diderot, for instance.” Lenin argued in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, that among Enlightenment thinkers, it was Diderot, who came closest to contemporary materialism. And notably, Marx and Engels go much beyond the materialism and undeveloped dialectics of Diderot. However, Ambedkar, due to his reliance on a reactionary conservative Edmund Burke regarding religion as the foundation of society and on Dewey regarding the need of a religious experience for a democratic and humanist society, regresses backwards as compared, even to Diderot. Therefore, the claim that Marx and Ambedkar shared the Enlightenment ideals is only extremely partially true. Except the most generic and most general idea of ‘progress’ (that can be read in ‘n’ number of ways, by the way, as the philosophical developments of 1960s and 1970s showed!), they do not share their conception of the Enlightenment ideals. At the level of the generic idea of progress, why not include Nehru in this line? Didn’t he share the idea of progress, inherited from the Enlightenment? Can we, on the basis of this presumed sharing, claim that the idea of democracy harboured by Nehru was akin to that of Marx? No! Ambedkar’s idea of democracy was a non-class idea, just like his idea of the State was a non-class idea. Class for Ambedkar was nothing more than a generic categorization, as we have proven above. Lastly, Marx also presented a critique of the Enlightenment. His was not an uncritical espousal or celebration of the Enlightenment ideal of ‘liberty, fraternity, equality’, but a critique of precisely these ideals where Marx shows that in a bourgeois society liberty becomes liberty of the rational-choice-making bourgeois individual and equality becomes the equality of exchange and formal equality before law and fraternity becomes the fraternity of exploiters. To equate Marx uncritically with this bourgeois ideal is the worst kind of distortion possible of Marx and Marxism by Teltumbde. And for what? To put Marx and Ambedkar in the same ideological bracket, which, as we have shown, is not possible.

Moreover, Teltumbde’s argument which equates Marx’s idea of progress simply with the development of productive forces smacks of a blend of Trotskyite and Kautskyite economism. Lenin as well as Mao had refuted this faulty reading of Marx’s notion of progress. Marx’s notion is a dialectical notion, without any fetish for development of productive forces, which by themselves can be progressive or regressive, depending on the production relations prevalent in the society. For instance, development of war technology also is development of productive forces. However, under the world capitalist system, does it signify progress? No. Therefore, Teltumbde makes a foolish attempt to reduce Marx’s idea of progress to development of productive forces. It is the dialectics of productive forces and production relations for Marx that leads to the progress of human society with every new and qualitatively higher stage.

Building the Bridge and Falling from it, Teltumbde-style

In the last subhead ‘Bridging the Rift’, first of all, Teltumbde does what he does the best: stand on a pulpit of misunderstandings and lies and preach the Marxists as a self-proclaimed teacher and preacher. He claims that had the Marxists understood Marxism as ‘a science of societies’ (!?), rather than an ‘ism’ (!?), and applied it creatively, “the destiny of India and thereby the world would have been very different.” (ibid, p. 74) Well, we don’t know about that because the fate of revolutions do not simply depend on the correct subjective analysis by communist revolutionaries but also on the objective possibilities of the revolutionary conjunctures. However, one might agree that the intellectual weakness of the Indian communist movement exacted a heavy price, but not only in the context of caste, but in the context of overall possibilities of forward march of the communist movement in India. Teltumbde claims, “Although it (Marxism) denoted the collection of socio-eco-political theories expounded by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, it was not supposed to be confined to them. If there is contra evidence to its postulates, it should correct itself and still stay as Marxism.” (ibid, p. 74) The funny thing is that what Teltumbde accuses other Marxists of, he himself is a guilty of that sin! For instance, regarding Marx’s comments about the state and the necessity of smashing the state or using parliamentary means (in the exceptional spatio-temporality of England and America), Teltumbde clings to his conjunctural comments and does not tell us what Lenin said about it and its misappropriation by Kautsky (whom Teltumbde follows in this regard), especially when it is Lenin who has been ascribed with the greatest advance in the theory of the state even by academicians and later Marxists like Poulantzas, Miliband, etc. Therefore, it is Mr. Teltumbde who uses a very qualified and conditional statement of Marx about the nature of bourgeois state and revolution as a dogma in order to turn Marx into a common liberal and totally hides what Lenin said about it, or even, what Marx said about in in totality. Who is using Marxism as a mere ‘ism’ rather than a constantly developing science of history and society?  I leave it to the fine judgement of readers.

Moreover, Marxism is not a collection of socio-economic and political theories of Marx and Engels, as Teltumbde claims. Marxism is an approach and method, a worldview, which is distilled by the scientific generalization of Marx’s theories. It is not a simple aggregation of whatever Marx and Engels said, write or did. A number of theories proposed by Marx might be erroneous, even in the time of Marx; for instance, the theory of Asiatic mode of production and Oriental Despotism. That does not make Marxism as the science of history, an incorrect theory. Teltumbde’s understanding of Marxism is not a rational and scientific one, but a positivist and aggregative one.

Teltumbde cannot hide his admiration for Trotskyites. He has quoted more Trotskyites in this ‘Introduction’ than any other tendency. He quotes Mandel and Draper to support his claim that Marxism is a constantly developing science. There was actually no need for that. Anyhow, on the basis of this valid assertion, he makes a dangerous distortion. Let us see another gem of Mr. Teltumbde’s understanding: “American Marxist scholar Hal Draper pertinently remarked, ‘there are few thinkers in modern history whose thought has been so badly misrepresented, by Marxists and anti-Marxists alike.’ He pertinently reminded communists of their folly in calling Ambedkar as reformist as though reforms were a taboo in Marxism.” (ibid, p. 75) First of all, Hal Draper never reminded any Marxist about anything pertaining to Ambedkar! Hal Draper, as far as I know, has never even mentioned the name of Dr. Ambedkar! Teltumbde should have quoted Draper’s advice about communists’ attitude to Ambedkar verbatim. On the contrary, if we look at various Trotskyite sources of the period, we find derogatory remarks about Ambedkar by Trotskyite writers. It seems that Teltumbde is unaware of that. One specimen would be enough, “Certainly Dr. Ambedkar is a British agent with no following among the Untouchables, but anyone acquainted with the Congress today knows that it, too, has no base among this most depressed section of India’s people because of its long betrayal of their interests.” (Henry Judd, Opportunism on India, 1942)

However, the bigger and more criminal distortion that Teltumbde has committed here is erasing the line between reform work and reformism and claiming that Indian communists considered fight for reforms to be against Marxism. First of all, the CPI especially in its right-deviation period, like the period of P. C. Joshi and Dange, had a strong inclination towards reformism. Rather than considering reform work as opposed to Marxism, they had reduced most of the political work of the party to mere reformism. Secondly, the CPI since 1951 and the CPM from its very inception, rather than expressing any kind of antipathy towards fighting for reforms, have done nothing more than fighting for reforms. I do not think Teltumbde even knows what he is talking about! He should have quoted from the documents of the communist party to show that it believed that fighting for reforms was against Marxism; among myriad mistakes of the communist movement, this mistake was seldom committed by parties like the CPI (except the left-deviation period like Ranadive’s period) before 1951 and the CPM. It is only with the emergence of the Naxalbari movement, that a camp of revolutionary communists emerged, a part of which committed this mistake, the part that can be called the “Left” adventurist communist parties/groups. This tendency owes its origin to the “Left” adventurist ideas of Charu Mazumdar who, in fact, as a negation of the massline of the early Naxalbari movement, presented his line of “annihilation of the class enemy”. The funny thing is that this very tendeny of “Left” adventurism is currently surrendering before various strands of Identity Politics and also Ambedkarite political thought, due to its opportunism.

However, Teltumbde makes a blanket claim that the communists in India believed that Marxism prohibits fighting for reforms, without studying the history of communist movement in India. If need be, we will produce plethora of documents from the communist movement in India before and after the Independence calling for struggles for reforms.

Moreover, the communists always differentiate between revolutionary struggle for reforms on the one hand and reformism on the other. However, the question is what was Ambedkar’s strategy? Was it pragmatic reformism or a revolutionary struggle for reforms? One thing is clear: Ambedkar, while fighting for reforms, had no revolutionary agenda whatsoever, in mind, if we mean by revolution, the overthrow of the rule of the ruling class by smashing their state. One can use the word ‘revolution’ generically to mean anything from the number of rotations (!) to any kind of significant change. However, if by ‘revolution’, ‘reform’ and ‘reformism’, Mr. Teltumbde means what these terms mean in social science, then definitely, he is performing another sleight of hand, as an apologist of Dr. Ambedkar’s antipathy towards Marxism, in order to bring Ambedkar in the vicinity of Marx.

In the end, Teltumbde claims that after the death of Ambedkar, the communists realized (!) that they have been committing a mistake by not putting issue of caste on the forefront and by ignoring Ambedkar! And who are these repentant communists? You guessed right: the parliamentary revisionist Leftists: Ranadive (after his degeneration into parliamentary Leftism) and Namboodiripad! We have already shown that despite not understanding caste question theoretically and historically, the revolutionary communists (the CPI before 1951-52) always empirically fought for Dalits, raised the issue of caste on their party as well as mass organizational platforms, continued to fight against caste-prejudices of its own cadre and leaders, often by taking stringent action. It was not as if after the death of Ambedkar, the communists (who were now bourgeois in deeds and communists in name, to borrow from the Lenin, the description that suits revisionists) had a sudden moment of epiphany. The truth is that even after the Naxalbari, the revolutionary communist movement failed to undertake the task of studying the production relations, class structure and mode of production of India in a systematic fashion and formulate the correct program of Indian revolution. Only towards the late-1970s, a tendency within the Marxist-Leninist movement emerged that questioned the semi-feudal semi-colonial thesis and later also undertook the study of the origin and evolution of caste through centuries and through various modes of production and the forms of articulation between class and caste that evolved in this process. However, Teltumbde without a comprehensive study of the history of communist movement in India, makes ridiculous claims, as we have shown above.

Teltumbde talks about the desirability of the convergence of the “two movements”, namely, the Ambedkarite Dalit movement and the revolutionary communist movement. I would argue that the question of convergence can and must be raised at two levels. One is the level of concrete issue-based anti-atrocities movement. At this level, there should be efforts to form joint front between the non-identitarian genuine Ambedkarite organizations and the revolutionary communists. We, as part of anti-caste movement, have always formed and tried to form such an alliance. However, we disagree that the onus to persuade and form alliance lies with the revolutionary communists only. I don’t think it is the burden of any one of the two. It is the duty of any revolutionary and genuinely anti-caste organization to strive for such issue-based joint fronts, irrespective of the fact, whether they are revolutionary communist organizations or non-identitarian Ambedkarite organizations.

The second level at which the question of alliance emerges is at the ideological level. Can Ambedkarite political thought and Marxism merge or can there be a bridge between them, ideologically, as Teltumbde wants us to believe after such a long but utterly ahistorical essay about the supposed affinity of Marxism and Ambedkar? The answer is a resounding and firm NO! The reason for that is that these two ideological streams represent two diametrically opposite approach, method and worldview. This effort to mix ‘red’ and ‘blue’ at ideological level will only lead to formation of muddle-headed and short-lived groups or movements which will dissipate as their struggle progresses. Because the intensification of struggle always brings ideological and scientific questions to the fore and it no longer remains possible to maintain any kind of aggregative unity. An organic unity between these two worldviews is not possible at all, whether it breaks the hearts of a number of people like Teltumbde. Anyone, who has read Ambedkar’s works in totality and Marxism as a science, would never make such an infantile claim.

Now Teltumbde turns to Ambedkarites and Dalit movement. He argues, “The Dalit movement is almost decimated by its leaders who made brokering of Dalit interest into an art form. Paradoxically, Ambedkar is used by the ruling classes in accelerating this process. He is reduced to be an inert icon devoid of its radical content that could be manipulated to win Dalit votes.” (ibid, p. 77) The first charge regarding turning ‘brokering of Dalit interest into an art form’ is something that was initiated by Ambedkar himself. The basic instrumentalist political practice of Ambedkar consisted precisely in this and it can be proven by facts: influencing the State (the most rational actor) to give certain rights to the Dalits and even when the State refuses to do so or implements policies to the detriment of the Dalits, continue to counsel the State to formulate reformist policies for the upliftment of the Dalits. Therefore, critiquing the contemporary Dalit movement for brokering of Dalit interest and turning it into an art form is correct, but should not this critique start with Ambedkar himself?

Secondly, we also need to ask the question how the ruling class is able to co-opt the symbol of Ambedkar and I would argue that they do so not simply by turning Ambedkar into an inert symbol. For instance, the RSS itself distributes ‘Buddha and Karl Marx’, a writing of Ambedkar, which we have analysed and critiqued above for its complete lack of understanding of Marxism. Why? If it is an espousal of Marxism and only a critique of its means of “violence” and “dictatorship” as Teltumbde claims, then why is the RSS distributing this book of Ambedkar in all congregations of the Dalits every year? Are they fools? I don’t think so! Besides, there are elements in Ambedkar’s ‘Thoughts on Pakistan’ that are certainly problematic and lead to the conclusion that Hindu fundamentalism was a reaction of Muslim fundamentalism. If Mr. Teltumbde wishes to engage in a debate regarding this book of Ambedkar, we would accept the invitation with open mind and open arms. Moreover, his views regarding the adivasis also are definitely problematic, whether one likes the argument of Arundhati Roy or not. Facts are stubborn things. Lastly, the one thing that makes Ambedkar appropriate object for co-optation by the ruling class is his pragmatist philosophy of incremental change, State as the ‘great mediator’, firm rejection of confrontational anti-establishment/anti-state politics and firm rejection of role of force/revolutionary violence. It is true that the State especially under the leadership of Modi and the RSS is also performing a misappropriation of Ambedkar’s ideas about Hindu religion and Brahmanism. However, we also need to understand that there are elements in every political personality, movement or symbol that makes it prone to or prevents it from such appropriation.

There is a reason why the State never popularises Ayyankali of Kerala, who was a great anti-caste warrior. The reason is the fact that Ayyankali adopted radical methods and use of force in his movements, strikes of workers, etc. and did not care about the limits of bourgeois legality. He gave primacy to action over legality and understood this basic fact of history: action engenders legality, legality does not engender action. That is why Ayyankali is not totally fit for co-optation. Similarly, despite all attempts, the saffron brigade could never appropriate and co-opt Bhagat Singh. Any anti-state radical figure is unfit for such co-optation. There is a reason why the writings of Bhagat Singh were never published by the governments. These writings are still dangerous. They will only install the statues of Bhagat Singh and make him an object of worship. However, his writings will never be published or popularized by the State. Therefore, Mr. Teltumbde should understand that though it is tragic that Ambedkar is being co-opted by the Communal Fascists, but some responsibility of co-optation by the State in general also lies with the ideas of Dr. Ambedkar himself. Otherwise, why does the state publish the collected works of Ambedkar and makes it easily available and accessible? Why does the government of Maharashtra run BARTI (Babasaheb Ambedkar Research and Training Institute) and other institutes like this to promote and propagate the works of Ambedkar? The reason is this: despite his concerns for the annihilation of caste and critique of Brahmanism, his ideas, prognosis and program do not pose a threat to the political rule of the ruling class, rather in some ways bolsters it by rejecting any radical revolutionary strategy to overthrow this rule. Any opposition which, as a matter of principle, always remains within the ambit of bourgeois legality, is always good for the bourgeois system and helps the system perpetuate its hegemony.

Teltumbde claims that now some communists have regained their sanity (!) and are talking about battling caste and giving importance to Ambedkar’s contributions. As we can see, Teltumbde again equates being anti-caste with Ambedkarite politics. One can fight against caste and be consistently anti-caste and also at the same time critique Ambedkar. There is no doubt that Ambedkar made two important contributions to the anti-caste movement, about which we have already talked. However, as far as, his politics and ideological position go, they are inherently incapable of presenting a coherent program for the annihilation of caste. Any ideology which, as a matter of principle, refuses to go against the State in a radical and subversive way, can only win some piecemeal reforms for the Dalits; however, they cannot lead to the annihilation of caste. All the state formations in India since, at least, the 5th c. BC have buttressed and maintained the caste system, including the Muslim rulers (as Suvira Jaisawal has shown, one of last Tughlaq kings, issued an edict which ordered the demotion of a Kshatriya caste to the status of sonar caste!) and including the British state (we have already shown how the British rule contributed to the ossification of caste system by constructing state-sanctioned juridico-legal caste identities). The State has always played a major role in maintaining and perpetuating the caste system. Any ideology which refuses to go beyond counselling the State for introducing some ‘affirmative action’ (affirming what!?) and reforms for the Dalits, can never present a program for the annihilation of caste. This simple truth must be understood by every individual who is committed to the project of annihilation of caste. Otherwise, the anti-caste movement will continue to rotate in endless cycles of Deweyan pragmatism and reformism.

Moreover, there are revisionists as well as non-revisionist communist parties that are using the symbol of Ambedkar to appease the Dalit masses. Some think that by forming ‘Muslim-Dalit-OBCs’ equation, Fascism can be defeated, therefore they put up a face of repentance and penitence when the question of Ambedkar comes. There are others who try to mix up the political ideology of Ambedkar and Marxism in order to “rid Marxism of its determinism”! Needless to say, they only need to study Marxism, and also Ambedkar, properly, first of all! There are still others who use Ambedkar purely as a tactical move and in reality do not believe that Ambedkar’s politics was correct. This, in my opinion, is opportunism. A revolutionary communist cannot make an ideological issue as a matter of tactics. Communists disdain to hide their views, as Marx has said. What is true must be stated by calling a spade a spade, as far as ideological questions are involved. A Marxist critique of Ambedkar would not make anyone Brahmanical! In fact, such a criticism is essential for the anti-caste movement today. Obviously, a critique of the communist movement is also needed, not only on the question of caste, but on the overall lack of a revolutionary program, which includes the question of caste, of gender, of environment, of the national question, of the question of fighting Fascism. We have done this in comparatively much more detail than our critique of Dr. Ambedkar (http://anvilmag.in/naxalbari-retrospection/#.Ws6vM4hubIU). However, the likes of Mr. Teltumbde must be refuted who are trying not only to distort historical facts and spreading half-truths and lies, but are also engaging in the unforgivable sin of distorting Marx and his ideas by turning him into a common liberal.

Teltumbde claims that due to the mistakes of communists, the present forces that represent the vested interests of the small Dalit elite are able to keep Ambedkar away from Marxists. Again, a baseless argument! We have already shown above with ample evidence that it was never the intent of Dr. Ambedkar himself to ally with the communists, or even communism, in general ideological terms. Therefore, Teltumbde’s cursing the communists is futile and useless. It would have served him better had he read the ideas of Ambedkar about communism in totality. May be, he has. However, he is clearly distorting facts, spreading lies or telling half-truths here in order to fulfil his political task: mixing Ambedkar’s political thought with Marxism.

Teltumbde’s Amusing Theory of ‘Autonomous Voice’

Teltumbde considers it a tragedy that the Dalits could not win separate electorates and their autonomous voice was muffled! This argument is totally an identitarian argument and the funniest thing is that Teltumbde himself does not realize that it is identitarian logic. Autonomous voice!? Autonomous from what? Marxism as a politics and ideology is opposed to celebration of fragments and believes that only class-based organization cutting across identities has a subversive potential. All other identity-based mobilizations, congregations, institutions, and constitutional arrangements only strengthen the status quo, even if their political rhetoric is seemingly radical. I was surprised to see Teltumbde batting for “autonomous voice” of the Dalits, at the expense of class politics. Just because Gandhi opposed it for his own reactionary caste Hindu and Brahmanical reasons and prejudices, does not vindicate the demand for separate electorates. Such an endeavour would, on the one hand, not only fail to bring any meaningful change for the Dalits, it would also cut them off, politically, from the general revolutionary movement. If this is the way to ensure the autonomous voice for the Dalits, why is Mr. Teltumbde not making this demand for today? Secondly, if in this way the “autonomous voice” of the Dalits has to be secured, then why not raise this demand for the tribals? Why not raise this demand for the women? Why not raise this demand for every oppressed sectionality? In fact, the argument of “autonomous voice” by Teltumbde leads to the infamous post-modernist logic of intersectionality. This is reactionary non-class logic and it is bizarre that Teltumbde even used this phrase “autonomous voice”, while in the very next line, he condemns identitarianism! This shows an utter lack of understanding on part of Teltumbde, what identity politics means.

That the small elite Dalit intelligentsia is aiding the ruling class in giving impetus to identity politics is an issue of wonderment for Mr. Teltumbde! There is no need for this stupefaction, though. The only thing that Mr. Teltumbde forgot is class analysis. Oppressed communities in every corner of the world have produced a small elite class, which as a class, has always betrayed the cause of fighting for the liberation of that oppressed community as a whole, has aligned with the ruling classes, has become a beneficiary of the state and the ruling class. Dr. Ambedkar also was regrettably disappointed with this class towards the end of his life when he said, “my own people have betrayed me.” However, this betrayal was bound to happen and not understanding it only shows a lack of understanding regarding class dynamics. Therefore, it is not about forgetting the teachings of Ambedkar for which Teltumbde is rebuking and cursing this shamefully ungrateful lot! After all, it was Ambedkar who had called upon them to become government servants because government is the most important institution of the society and the brain of the government is the brain of its employees! In fact, he said that if a few educated Dalit boys and girls become magistrates and collectors, then they would act as an armoured shelter over the entire Dalit community and save them from the scorching sun! Now, that there has emerged an elite class among the Dalits, Teltumbde is abusing them for not obeying the directives of Dr. Ambedkar! This is not fair.

Thus spoke Teltumbde!

In the end, Teltumbde is again standing on the pulpit built of misappropriations, distortions, lies and half-truths and is preaching! Well, we are all ears! Let us see what sermons he has delivered us this time.

“Standing at this point, firstly, it must be realized by both Dalits as well as Communists that no ism, howsoever it might have worked in the past, is going to be applicable to the volatile contemporary and future world. The world is changing with an increasingly accelerated pace. Its essence may not be grasped by the frameworks that worked for its previous versions. These isms could only be beacons but the specific path shall have to be carved out by the people themselves in the concrete situation they find them in. With this realization the identitarian obsession should melt away.” (ibid, p. 77-78) There we have Teltumbdeism, a new variety of Deweyan Pragmatism! No ism! It is the same slogan that was raised by Dewey and repeated by Ambedkar. The curious case of pragmatist antipathy to isms is that this itself is an ism! And Teltumbde has produced a new variant of this ism, repeating the old sweet nothings about isms and in the process constructing a new one. The allusion here is clearly that Marxism was relevant in a bygone era (which was not changing rapidly, or as rapidly as today, according to Mr. Teltumbde!), but in the present swiftly-changing world, no ism would work (except Teltumbdeism!). The concrete situation has to be studied every time and new specific path has to be charted out! The universality of approach and method are totally negated by Teltumbde and here he reveals that he has a deep admiration for Deweyan pragmatist ideas of instrumentalism and progressive experimentation. The fact is that Marxism is not a particular program of action, or an aggregation of whatever Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao said. It is an approach and a method. Nothing more, nothing less. The question is whether the approach and method of dialectical materialism is sufficient to understand the present world or not. However, Mr. Teltumbde indulges in making claims to novelty by uttering basically non-sense! Which Marxist would disagree that we have to analyse concrete situations and make concrete plan? However, what is your approach and method of this analysis? Deweyan pragmatism or Marxism? In other words, we can ask Mr. Teltumbde in the vein of great poet Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh: what is you politics, partner?

Secondly, look at this phrase “Dalits and Communists”! What is this? So the Dalits are not or cannot be Communists and Communists are not or cannot be Dalit? This is the kind of identitarianism that I have been alluding to. Teltumbde uses Dalit movement and Ambedkarite movement synonymously; but a wall of China is erected between the communists and the Dalits, whereas the reality is that if we take the history of entire country, more Dalits have struggled and martyred under the red flag, rather than under the leadership of the Ambedkarite movement. However, Teltumbde intentionally juxtaposes ‘communists’ with ‘Dalits’ which are two different kinds of categories. One refers to a political group/ideology, whereas the other is a social group. Such sleights of hand are common in Teltumbde, which attempt to show that the Dalits are by-default and naturally, Ambedkarites. Then it becomes easy for Teltumbde to argue that “the onus is theirs (communists’) to join hands with the Dalit masses and it must be genuine.” (ibid, p. 79). Here Teltumbde shows the characteristic arrogance of a middle-class intellectual. So many communists have sacrificed their lives in the cause of Dalit landless, that there is no need for them to hear this kind of patronising sermonising from an armchair intellectual like Mr. Teltumbde. Revolutionary communists (the CPI before 1951, the ML camp after 1968) has been known as party of ‘chamaars and dusadhs’ as it fought and sacrificed for their rights, even though they failed to understand the question of caste in its historicity and contemporaneity, from Aara-Bhojpur to Jahanabad and from Telangana to Tebhaga and Punapra-Vylar. The intellectual weakness to devise a program of Indian revolution is a different issue, but as far as merging with the Dalit working class masses and fighting for their demands is concerned, the revolutionary communists do not need this kind of arrogant sermonising from intellectuals like Anand Teltumbde.

Further. The preaching continues: “the communists should realize that revolutions are not a point concept but a line concept; the numerous tactical reforms that drive the revolutionary strategy, are themselves part of the revolution. The familiar models of revolutions were fundamentally misconceived that future revolutions are certainly not going to conform to them.” (ibid, p. 78) Lo and Behold, readers! Another revelation! The revolutions are line concept? Wrong! The revolutions follow a trajectory of a spiral, not a line. It is not a line concept, because there is an element of continuity and change in the progress of history. It does not develop along a line with every point being totally unique and unprecedented. The impact of scientism on Teltumbde, in fact, is only a part of impact of Deweyan Pragmatism itself which believed in a linear concept of “progressive experimentation”, which is assumed to be the “laboratory method”. However, science, either of nature or of society, simply does not evolve through a process of “progressive experimentation” but on the basis of review and sum-up of previous experiments also. Therefore, the element of past is always there. However, according to Dewey, past plays no role in the construction of present, one of the assertions that Dewey had borrowed from Emerson’s Transcendentalism. Teltumbde is clearly affected by this idea of Deweyan pragmatism and that is why he has the audacity to preach this stupid principle to the communists, as if he is saying something profound.

The argument that familiar models of revolutions (Russian and Chinese?) were misconceived and future revolutions are not going to conform to that, shows the lack of historical understanding on the part of Teltumbde. First of all, no revolution follows predetermined model. Neither Russian revolution followed the strategy and general tactics of 1848 or 1871, nor did the Chinese revolution follow the strategy and general tactics of 1917. This is stating the obvious.

However, the first part of the statement is problematic. What was misconceived about the model of Russian revolution or the Chinese new democratic revolution? On the one hand, revolutions are a motion or dynamics and every dynamics is a contradiction itself; therefore, no idea of revolution as smooth and perfectly planned things can be harboured by communists; however, if by ‘the model of revolution’, Mr. Teltumbde means the program, strategy and general tactics of revolution and the path of revolution (armed insurrection or protracted people’s war), what was misconceived about the Russian Revolution or the Chinese Revolution? Obviously, mistakes are committed during revolutions and will be committed during the revolutions; as Mao said, “A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.” We can humbly add, with people like Anand Teltumbde, revolutions are no lab experiments, they are gigantic social experiments with innumerable human agencies active simultaneously. Therefore, mistakes and lapses are inevitable and that is not the issue here. The question is what is wrong with the idea of socialist revolution with revolutionary class alliance of proletariat, poor peasantry and middle class; the idea of socialist revolution with armed insurrection; the idea of socialist revolution with smashing of the state? Or, what is wrong with Mao’s idea of new democratic revolution with revolutionary class alliance of proletariat, peasantry, national bourgeoisie and middle class? What was wrong with its path of revolution as a protracted people’s war? Though the path of revolutions of future revolutions cannot simply copy the path of revolution of past revolutions and Lenin and Mao had repeated this argument many a times. However, when Teltumbde says that models of these revolutions were misconceived, what does he mean? I am not sure whether Teltumbde himself is sure what does that mean. Every critique is also a positive proposal. If he critiques these models as being irrelevant and incorrect even in their own times (because only then one can say that they were misconceived), then he must be having an alternative model for Russian and Chinese revolutions, the models that these revolutions ought to have followed. What is that model, Mr. Teltumbde? Enlighten us!

Obviously, every genuine communist critiques past revolutions and learns from its positives and negatives as well. We too critically analyse the experiences of the Bolshevik Revolution and Soviet Socialism as well as the Chinese New Democratic Revolution and the Chinese Socialist experiment. However, to claim that the “models of these revolutions” (whatever that means!) is misconceived is ludicrous.

Teltumbde is shuddering at the swift pace of technological changes today that threatens the very existence of human species and thinks that the developments in today’s world have become much faster and much more rapid. This too is a non-dialectical statement. It is true that the dazzling pace of technical inventions is unprecedented in some sense. However, as far as the real scientific and technological developments are concerned, there is a stasis and stagnation today. No qualitative leap is taking place in science; no new revolutions are taking place in the arena of science, the kind of revolutions which have always led to a positive “crisis” in the arena of science. In fact, a number of scientists have claimed that since the first part of the Twentieth century, we have not witnessed any tectonic shift in science comparable to invention of fire, or wheel, Newton’s laws, or Watt’s steam engine, discovery of micro-world, theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. One of the reasons for this stasis is the fact that we are living in the epoch of long reversal, when the first socialist experiments have collapsed, the bourgeois triumphalism has emerged with unprecedented political obscenity, the forces of revolution are scattered and demoralized, old dogma still have a strong grip over Marxist revolutionaries who are unable to understand the changes in the modus operandi of ruling class in the era of Globalization and post-Fordism, the highest phase of Imperialism. The fact is that the pace of changes in history does not increase/decrease in a simple incremental process. Sometimes it is fast, at others it is slow. As Lenin said, “there are decades when nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen.” The pace of development is a function of the contradictory motion of history. As compared to the few months from October 1917 to May 1918, much more happened as compared to decades from 1990s to the present. I do not know what is the yardstick of Teltumbde to measure the pace of history when he says, “the world is changing with an increasingly accelerated pace.” If it is not changes in the real social relations and character and modalities of power, then this concept of historical time is positivist and empiricist, not a dialectical one.

In the end, Teltumbde claims that the incomplete writings of Ambedkar “inspire the Dalits and communists to complete this belated task to shape India’s, and the world’s future!” (ibid, p. 79) As we have showed above, that if Teltumbde means by this statement that the unfinished writings of Dr. Ambedkar show his affinity to Marxist philosophy, he is distorting history, facts, Marxism and also Ambedkar’s political thought. We have shown above with the quotes from Ambedkar’s writings and speeches from the last days of his life that he was firmly opposed to communism and Marxism, not simply the practice of Indian communists, as Teltumbde claims. Moreover, I do not think that revolutionary communists share anything more than the concern and intent to fight against caste, with Dr. Ambedkar. As sooon as we move to the Ambedkar’s historical analysis of caste, his political program, his economic program, his view of society, his understanding of ‘socialism’, his notion of ‘democracy’ and ‘dictatorship’ and his concept of an ideal society, there is nothing that revolutionary communists share with Ambedkar. Therefore, as far as the question of what Ambedkar can teach revolutionary communists philosophically, ideologically and politically, the answer would be – ‘Nothing.’