Marxism’s rediscovery of Indian village communities is more than relevant now!
Marxism ideologically advocated a society not fuelled by greed but fuelled by a harmonious creative base. Where men wouldn’t need to scamper for survival but create. Marx believed. Ancient Indian village communities had already achieved such a society.
Karl Marx in his various articles published in the Tribute in the late 1800s wrote extensively about Ancient India. His articles put forward many facts about a beautiful economical system in place in Ancient India.
Marx even described Ancient Indian society as “unresisting and unchanging” (Tribune, 8 August 1853).
In the Communist Manifesto, only two pre-capitalist systems of social orders were cited, one was Ancient Rome and Europe in the ‘Middle Ages’. The third system, Marx discovered was in Ancient India. A different type of social order neither based on feudal serfdom or slavery. Marx also wrote about a concept now known as Grundrisse, “this order was based on two institutions, ‘village community’, minus communal cultivation, and a ‘despotic’ state (‘Oriental despotism’) which took in tax what amounted practically to landlord’s rent. This conformed neither to the classical slave system nor the feudal form so that Marx in the Preface to his A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) puts the ‘Asiatic’ alongside the ancient, feudal and capitalist modes of production”. [1]
Marx wrote that in the pre-modern Indian economy “it is the surplus alone that becomes a commodity, and a portion of even that, not until it has reached the hands of the state.”7 In other words, a ‘natural’ economy prevailed in the villages, but commodity circulation outside of them in towns and markets, while under capitalism every sector becomes subject to a commodity economy, based on the universal use of money for every transaction.
Karl Marx went on to write about the Ancient Indian economy as follows, “It is surplus along that becomes a commodity, and a portion of even that, not until it was reached the hands of the state.”
In simpler terms, Marx asserted a natural economy prevailed in the village, unrelated or perhaps not corrupted yet by Crony Colonial Capitalism. But commodity circulation in bigger towns and cities were slowly coming into the capitalistic fold.
Marx described an example, with even more depth, saying:
“Under this form of municipal government, the inhabitants of the country have lived from time immemorial. The boundaries of the village have been but seldom altered, and though the villages themselves have been sometimes injured and even desolated by war. famine and disease, the same name, the same limits, the same interests, and even the same families have contributed for ages. The inhabitants gave themselves no trouble about the breaking up and the division of kingdoms; while the village remains entire, they care not to what power it is transferred or to what sovereign it devolves: its internal economy remains unchanged.” [2]
But perhaps, an even concise description of the beautiful Indian village system was given by Sir Charles Metcalfe who described it as the following:
“The village communities are little republics, having nearly everything that they want within themselves, and almost independent of any foreign relations. They seem to last where nothing else lasts. Dynasty after dynasty tumbles down; revolution succeeds to revolution; Hindoo. Pathan. Moghul. Mahratta. Sikh, English. are all masters in turn, but the village communities remain the same. In times of trouble, they arm and fortify themselves: a hostile army passes through the country: the village communities collect their cattle within their walls and let the enemy pass unprovoked. If plunder and devastation he directed against themselves, and the force employed be irresistible, they flee to friendly villages at a distance; but when the storm has passed over, they return and resume their occupations. If a country remains for a series of years the scene of continued pillage and massacre, so that the villages cannot be inhabited, the scattered villagers nevertheless return whenever the power of peaceable possession revives. A generation may pass away, but the succeeding generation will return. The sons will take the places of their fathers; the same site for the village, the same positions for the houses, the same lands, will be reoccupied by the descendants of those who were driven out when the village was depopulated; and it is not a trifling matter that will drive them out, for they will often maintain their post through times of disturbance and convulsion, and acquire strength sufficient to resist pillage and oppression with success”. [3]
As the Covid-19, forces millions of India’s labor force, and even white-collar labor to migrate to Rural India again. A large amount of population will be back to Rural India again, perhaps after decades of urbanization.
Rural India will undergo a massive transformation once again, as major cities of India are desolate and empty now. Perhaps now is more than ever, the best time to re-organize the Indian village system, in present-day which stands more like a desolate old, building kept at bay by a sheer sense of disorganisation, greed, casteism, and ideological spats.
Into a harmonious community can that can be enhanced, and that remains unbattered by the ever-changing circumstances of capitalism and its “invisible hand” as Adam Smith described it.
Marx leads the way, for us to introspect and review the modern Indian system of Indian villages in 2020. His extensive work is a clear pathway to do so.
REFERENCES:
[1]https://cpim.org/sites/default/files/marxist/201703-marxist-marx-india-irfan.pdf
[2]https://www.epw.in/system/files/pdf/1960_12/37/the_myth_of_selfsufficiency_of_the_indian_village.pdf
[3]https://www.epw.in/system/files/pdf/1960_12/37/the_myth_of_selfsufficiency_of_the_indian_village.pdf
