Saturday, August 27, 2011

D D Kosambi on Marxism in India

"Certain opponents of Marxism dismiss it as an outworn economic dogma
based upon 19th century prejudices. Marxism never was a dogma. There is
no reason why its formulation in the 19th century should make it obsolete
and wrong, any more than the discoveries of Gauss, Faraday, and Darwin,
which have passed into the body of science. Those who sneer at its 19th
century obsolescence cannot logically quote Mill, Burke, and Herbert
Spencer with approval, nor pin their faith to the considerably older and
decidedly more obscure Bhagwad Gita. The defense generally given is that
the Gita and the Upanishads are Indian; that foreign ideas like Marxism are
objectionable. This is generally argued in English, the foreign language
common to educated Indians; and by persons who live under a mode of
production (the bourgeois system) forcibly introduced by the foreigner into
India. The objection, therefore, seems less to the foreign origin than to the
ideas themselves, which might endanger class privilege. Marxism is said to
be based open violence, upon the class-war, in which the very best people do
not believe nowadays. They might as well proclaim that meteorology
encourages storms by predicting them. No Marxist work contains incitement
to war and specious arguments for senseless killing remotely comparable to
those in the divine Gita."

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