javeed alam, caste and left politics April 2010

what makes Left practice increasingly difficult in India? and not worried about leaving a pessimistic impression.

here discussing the failure of the Left to win over its core constituency (the 'peasantry').

the Left has seen a relative decline amongst this population [here, it seems, quite clear that the Left means the CPI-M].

the question of the worker-peasant alliance—and its importance, not just for the seizure of state power, but also for buidling the foundations of social democracy.

revolution, let's be clear, is not predicated on the depth of knowledge about a society.

here, then, speaking of the specificity of the class formation, in India. new classes are forming within peasant communities in India—you have a big growth of poor peasants, for example. but because of stregnth of 'caste', you have fragmentation—poor peasants are not coming together.

the way to understand this phenomenon is to begin to look at international differentiation within caste communities

1. a long period of capialist development, followed by land reforms, moderniztion, education, etc. after independence, the backward castes all became proprietary peasants, where they were, before, tenant farmers. new modern classes have emerged amongst the castes.
2. where land did not often go to the direct tiller (in the land reform), many dalits were forced to remain agricultural laborers. if the land reforms had been of a different nature (gone to the tiller), the pattern of development would not have come about in the way that it did.

within the class formation, the middle class (largely drawn from the rich and middle peasants) has also been in the course of formation within these caste communities. these are central to the process.

many larger/intermediate caste formations have been breaking up (the dravidian movement, for example, is breaking up)

a new, white-collar middle class, which is seen as the only path to success. and this unification under these classes is, simultaneously, the domination of the rich peasants.

this is a kind of absence of freedom which is forced, collectively, by one jat on another.

and also, the reality that the call for caste social justice (for dalit justice) is a bourgeois demand—there is hardly any economic agenda in the demand. whether it is a democratic advance is not germane, right now. but this shows a shift, in the conception of democracy.

major argument, in sum: casteism has emerged as a major phenomenon because of the decomposition of the consciousness of the middle classes.

caste has typically been thought of as a 'superstructural' pheonemon. here contesting that—the development that I have traced are conditioned by a historically-grounded material force (what has been the nature of the bondage of the direct producer? by asking the question, you shift the terms of debate from the earlier discussions. this is central, even today. because what you call the 'dailt', today, were actually the producing classes in india, either in agriculture or secondary manufacture. pre-capitalist social relations linger on, in the current mode of production. all these sections of society were made up of dependent jatis on the upper-castes—what is important to note is that the dependence was of a collective nature, which has long-term implications for the form of struggle that emerged later. the nature of the unfreedom of the producer was of a collective kind, which was different than the unfreedom of the european serf.)

[here, starting to say something absolutely absurd—the degradation of manual work, here, explains why indian immigrants come to the US and become white-collar!]