Class and Class Struggle

Arup Baisya

The history of human civilization is the history of class-struggle and the pre-history is the classless class-struggle. This law of society is applicable and valid for all systems and histories. However, the concept of class ever remains the point of departure and divergent Marxian politics. In the history of practicing Marxism, especially during the post-Russian Revolutionary era, a deterministically skewed concept of class remains in vogue.

While analysing the capitalism of his time, Lenin concluded that the transition from the historically ‘undeveloped’ form of merchant capitalism to industrial capitalism was a result of the development of the class struggle. But it is evident that the concept of class in this deep insightful observation, Lenin considered the class as a certain category. To broaden the scope of identifying class, Lenin later extended the concept of class to include historically determined social categories to the economic categories of class. If the law of society based on class struggle is valid everywhere, how one can isolate class from its struggle and identify it deterministically?

Lenin erred but still succeeded in leading the Bolshevik party for the Russian Revolution. This was because the social velocity of motion which Lenin identified as much higher than the pre-capitalist society, was still very low to enable the observer to delineate certain phenomena based on economic and social categories as perceptible entities to interact with.

In practicing Marxism in India, caste always remains a point of debate. The two distinct streams of thought compete with each other to include caste in the arena of the Marxian practice of class struggle. One stream of thought formulates that communists should lead both class and caste struggle simultaneously. But in reality, simultaneity collapses as soon as the point of reference changes. If the point of reference is class, the simultaneous existence of caste becomes unfathomable and vice versa. Other streams of thought strive to include caste within the broad definition of class following Leninist principle. But this is also erroneous as class cannot be isolated from its struggle, otherwise, the law of society based on class struggle collapses on such separation. Beyond this Marxian endeavour, there is another Ambedkarite stream of thought. Ambedkarite version of the caste as a feudal class does not fit well with Marxian practice.

In daily mundane affairs, one can adequately explain the behaviour of perceptible objects based on gravitational forces of attraction. But when Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetic field was considered along with the Newtonian concept of gravitational forces of attraction for a unified theory, gravitation is defined as Einstein’s conception of the Bending of Space. The class struggle which is considered a universal component of the law of society contains such a field surrounding diverse categories. One cannot isolate class from its struggle and identify it to interact and intervene.

Then how can one define class so that one can intervene and interact with the struggle for societal change? One can identify diverse categories. But in reality, they exist as mutually interacting with each other. So, one can describe this reality as the function of a matrix whose elements consist of diverse categories. Again, this function is part of the changing dynamics of the struggle, and as such, the reality is closely associated with a derived version of that function. So, the class can be defined as a continuous derivative of that function and thus class is identified within its struggle and in motion.

How does such conceptualisation of class influence practice for societal change? Predefined and predetermined classes as certain categories lead one to establish a mechanical relation between practising Marxists and the specific social or economic category of educator and educated and vice versa. But if one considers individual beings bear a changing field of consciousness in the process of transformation of being to becoming, and similarly class in its struggle with a field of consciousness, then both can interact to change each other and thereby modulate the direction of the systemic change. The class struggle becomes visible only when the field of consciousness represented by individual thought process interacts with the field of consciousness of class in struggle. Furthermore, such interaction with one category in struggle must similarly influence other categories in struggle as they are mutually interacting and entangled. This vibrant and living relationship can only lead the class struggle for a radical societal change. This becomes the foundation of the Marxian process of concrete analysis of concrete situations and continuous up-gradation of that analysis in any conjuncture.

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Frontier
Vol 57, No. 37, March 9 - 15, 2025