Marxism, Hinduism and Indian History
Introduction
Marxism is essentially an understanding of history
which understands the fundamental dynamic of historical
change as something rooted in changes in the technical
‘means of production’ – human beings relation to nature –
and their consequent effect on what he called human
‘relations of production’ – in particular relations between
those classes who owned the means of production
(whether as slaves, land, or manufacturing capital) and
those who did not.
Marxist economics is also based on a fundamental
distinction between the use value of any product of human
labour and its exchange value. It is only through processes of
exchange – leading to the creation of money as a principal
medium of exchange – that products of labour take on the
principal character of exchange values ie. what Marx
defined as commodities. In primitive and isolated tribal
societies of the hunter-gatherer sort no surplus product for
exchange was produced. In later forms of pre-capitalist
economy such as slavery the human being himself became
a commodity to be bought and sold on the market. And in
feudal economies land itself was a commodity – the private
property of a land-owning aristocracy.