The Spectre’s Second Coming: Das Kapital, Historical Materialism, and the Unresolved Question of Class in Modern India

 

-Ramphal Kataria

Abstract

The paper re-examines Karl Marx’s Das Kapital—its theoretical corpus, philosophical foundations, and continuing relevance in the twenty-first century—against the background of global financial capitalism and India’s caste-fragmented society. It argues that the critique of capital has not only endured but gained new urgency in an age where digital platforms, speculative finance, and precarious gig work have restructured the mechanisms of surplus extraction. While mainstream discourse after the fall of the USSR proclaimed “the end of history,” the resurgence of inequality, ecological devastation, and oligarchic state-capital alliances reasserts the need for Marx’s analytical method rather than its doctrinaire imitations.

Marx’s analysis of value, surplus, and exploitation—anchored in his dialectical materialism—offers a powerful framework to understand the contradictions of the contemporary world: the persistence of poverty amid technological plenty; the commodification of human life through data capitalism; and the global reorganization of labor through digital and supply-chain imperialism. The paper traces the historical development of societies from primitive communism to capitalist modernity, situating the logic of exploitation within historical materialism’s central dialectic: the contradiction between the forces and relations of production.

The philosophical discussion revisits Marx’s inversion of Hegel’s dialectic—locating contradiction in material, not ideal, conditions—and his polemic against Proudhon’s “bourgeois socialism,” which sought to preserve private property while eliminating exploitation. It demonstrates that Marx’s insistence on the unity of theory and praxis remains a revolutionary epistemology: a method to expose how ideology masks material domination.

In the Indian context, the paper argues that caste and religion operate as material structures of domination that distort and divide class consciousness. Drawing upon B.R. Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste, it suggests that Marx’s theory must be indigenized: the superstructure in India often precedes and determines the base, as caste functions both as an economic and social relation of production. The segmentation of the working class along caste and communal lines—seen in labor markets, informal economies, and political mobilization—has sustained capital’s hegemony even within democratic institutions.

By weaving Marx with Ambedkar, the paper concludes that liberation in India demands a dual struggle: against both capital and caste. The “spectre” of Marx thus returns not as a remnant of the Cold War but as the only framework capable of interpreting a world where exploitation has become algorithmic and ideology digital. Far from being outdated, Marx’s and Engels’s teachings are indispensable to any emancipatory politics that seeks to transcend the interlocked structures of economic and social oppression in the global South.

Part I: The Engine of Capital – A Thematic Analysis of Das Kapital

Karl Marx’s Das Kapital is less a “book” than an ongoing scientific investigation — a project that sought to reveal the laws governing the motion of capitalist society. Across its three volumes, Marx dissects the anatomy of capital — from its simplest cell, the commodity, to the global system of accumulation and crisis. The method is dialectical: beginning with abstraction and unfolding toward the totality of social relations. In this part, we trace the conceptual development of Capital across its volumes, emphasizing how Marx exposes exploitation not as moral accident but as structural necessity.

1.1 Volume I – The Production of Surplus Value

The Commodity: The Cell-Form of Capital

Marx begins Capital with the simplest unit of bourgeois wealth — the commodity. Every commodity possesses a dual character: use-value (its material utility) and exchange-value (its quantitative worth in exchange). This duality embodies a hidden social relation. When we buy a smartphone, we treat it as an object with intrinsic value; yet its “value” is the crystallized labor of thousands — miners in Congo, assemblers in Shenzhen, coders in Bengaluru. Marx calls this inversion commodity fetishism — a process where social labor appears as a property of things. The world of commodities thus conceals human relations of domination behind the apparent equality of exchange.

From Money to Capital: The Circuit of Self-Expansion

In pre-capitalist exchange, the sequence was C–M–C: sell one commodity to buy another. In capitalism, the logic inverts: M–C–M’ — money advanced to yield more money (M’). The difference (M’–M) is surplus value. Capital’s essence, then, is not production for need but for expansion. Profit is not the accidental outcome of trade but the raison d’être of the entire system. Every enterprise, from a 19th-century textile mill to a 21st-century start-up, must reproduce this logic of infinite accumulation.

Surplus Value: The Secret of Profit

Where does this surplus come from? Marx’s answer is radical: only labor creates value. Machines transfer existing value; only human labor adds new value. When the worker sells labor-power to the capitalist, they receive wages equivalent to the cost of subsistence — but their labor produces more value than this. The excess — surplus value — is appropriated by the capitalist. Exploitation, therefore, resides not in unfair exchange but in the very form of wage labor. Marx distinguishes two forms:

Absolute surplus value: Extending the working day (e.g., 12-hour shifts in sweatshops).

Relative surplus value: Reducing necessary labor time through technology (e.g., automation, Taylorism).

Both intensify exploitation, though the latter hides it under “productivity.”

Primitive Accumulation: The Bloody Genesis of Capital

Contrary to liberal myths of “peaceful trade,” Marx shows that capitalism’s birth was drenched in blood — the so-called primitive accumulation. In England, peasants were expelled from commons during the Enclosures; in the colonies, resources and labor were violently expropriated. “Capital,” he writes, “comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.”
In India, the colonial revenue system and forced cultivation (indigo, opium) represent this same logic — transforming self-sufficient peasants into wage laborers. Primitive accumulation, far from a historical stage, persists today in land grabs, mining displacement, and privatization.

1.2 Volume II – The Circulation of Capital

In Volume II, Marx moves from production to circulation — the movement of capital through its three circuits:

1. Money Capital (M–C): Purchase of labor-power and means of production.

2. Productive Capital (P): The process of creating commodities.

3. Commodity Capital (C’–M’): Sale of commodities for profit.

The cycle must continuously renew itself — interruption means crisis. Marx introduces turnover time: the speed with which capital completes its circuit. A shorter turnover increases the annual rate of profit — explaining modern capitalism’s obsession with logistics, “just-in-time” production, and instant delivery platforms like Amazon or Flipkart.

The credit system, analyzed here, foreshadows later financial capitalism. Credit lubricates accumulation by anticipating future value, but also breeds instability. Marx’s insight into “fictitious capital” begins here — claims on future labor that may never materialize. The 2008 global financial crisis, born from speculative debt pyramids, is a textbook manifestation of this logic.

1.3 Volume III – The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole

In Volume III, Marx unites production and circulation to present the capitalist totality.

The Transformation of Surplus Value into Profit

Through competition, different organic compositions of capital (ratios of labor to machinery) yield varying surplus values. The market equalizes these into an average rate of profit. Hence, prices of production deviate from “values” — not because Marx’s theory is wrong, but because value is realized through competition. The apparent harmony of profit conceals its exploitative source in labor.

The Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall (TRPF)

As capital accumulates, the share of machinery (constant capital) rises relative to living labor (variable capital). Since only labor creates surplus value, the profit rate tends to decline. This internal contradiction produces periodic crises — overproduction, unemployment, and destruction of value.
Globalization and automation in the 21st century confirm this: tech-driven productivity expands supply faster than demand, leading to stagnation and speculative bubbles.

Fictitious Capital and the “Trinity Formula”

Marx exposes how, in capitalism’s mature stage, money breeds money seemingly without labor — through stocks, bonds, derivatives. Yet this fictitious capital represents mere claims on future surplus value. When expectations collapse, crises erupt.
The “Trinity Formula” — profit (capital), rent (land), and wages (labor) as three “independent” sources — is an ideological mystification. It naturalizes class relations and hides the social process of value creation.
In today’s India, this trinity manifests in the nexus of corporate capital (Adani, Ambani), real estate speculation, and wage stagnation — an oligarchic capitalism that Marx would instantly recognize.

    Across the three volumes, Marx reveals the movement of capital as a total social process — production, circulation, and realization bound by the relentless drive for self-expansion. Exploitation, crisis, and inequality are not moral aberrations but logical necessities of this system. What emerges is a dynamic yet destructive organism, devouring labor and nature alike. Das Kapital is thus not a relic but a living anatomy of the world we inhabit — one where digital algorithms, not factory bells, now dictate the rhythm of surplus extraction.

Part II: The Philosophical Foundations of the Critique

Karl Marx’s Das Kapital is as much a philosophical revolution as it is an economic one. Behind the technical analysis of value and accumulation lies a profound reorientation of human thought — from speculative idealism to concrete materialism. To grasp the theoretical force of Marx’s critique, one must return to its philosophical roots: his inversion of Hegel’s dialectic and his decisive break from utopian or reformist socialism represented by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. This section reconstructs those foundations, clarifying how Marx’s materialism transforms philosophy into a science of historical movement.

2.1 Turning Hegel on His Head: From Dialectical Idealism to Historical Materialism

Hegel’s Dialectic: The Movement of the Idea

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, writing in the early 19th century, had built what he saw as the most comprehensive system of philosophy — a grand account of how reality itself unfolds through contradictions within the Idea. For Hegel, contradiction was not an error but the engine of development: every concept (thesis) generates its opposite (antithesis), and their resolution (synthesis) propels thought to a higher unity. This process, he argued, culminates in the realization of the Absolute Spirit — the moment when reality becomes fully self-conscious.

In Hegel’s universe, the material world is the manifestation of an underlying spiritual logic. History moves as Spirit comes to know itself — from oriental despotism to the rational state. For him, freedom is realized in thought; for Marx, this was an inversion of reality.

Marx’s Inversion: The Material Ground of Ideas

Marx famously declared that he had “stood Hegel on his head.” The world, he argued, does not proceed from ideas to matter but from matter to ideas. Human consciousness does not determine existence; rather, human existence — the conditions under which people produce and reproduce their lives — determines consciousness.

In his Theses on Feuerbach, Marx summarized this break:

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”

Here, dialectic ceases to be an abstract logic and becomes a material process — the contradiction between forces of production (technology, human labor) and relations of production (property, class) drives social change. Unlike Hegel, for whom contradiction was self-resolving within thought, Marx saw contradiction as real — rooted in economic relations, and resolved only through struggle.

Dialectical Materialism: The Logic of History

Dialectical materialism, therefore, is not a metaphysical doctrine but a method: to understand social phenomena as dynamic, internally contradictory, and historically specific. Every society develops productive forces — tools, machines, forms of labor — that eventually come into conflict with existing property relations. When these relations become “fetters” on further development, revolution occurs.

For instance, the Industrial Revolution represented the maturation of productive forces (machinery, factory labor) that clashed with feudal relations (guilds, hereditary privilege). Out of this contradiction emerged capitalist society. Similarly, capitalism’s contradictions — between capital and labor, private property and social production — generate the conditions for its own transcendence.

Marx’s dialectic thus transforms the philosophical problem of “change” into the scientific study of historical motion. Where Hegel’s Spirit reconciles opposites in thought, Marx’s materialism exposes irreconcilable conflicts in life — conflicts that can only be abolished through praxis, through human collective action.

2.2 The Critique of Bourgeois Socialism: Marx versus Proudhon

If Hegel represented the idealist foundation that Marx overturned, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon represented the reformist socialism that Marx dismantled. The intellectual encounter between them — culminating in Marx’s The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), a response to Proudhon’s The Philosophy of Poverty — reveals the depth of Marx’s economic and moral critique.

Proudhon’s Moral Economy

Proudhon, often called the “father of anarchism,” sought to expose the injustices of capitalism but within a moral and juridical framework. In The Philosophy of Poverty, he argued that the economic system was distorted by “bad” institutions — monopoly, interest, rent — which violated natural principles of equality and fairness. His solution was to reform exchange, not abolish it: to create a world of fair producers, exchanging equivalent values without exploitation. In his famous paradox, Proudhon proclaimed, “Property is theft!” — yet he simultaneously defended small-scale private property as the basis of liberty.

For Proudhon, exploitation resulted from unequal exchange: workers did not receive the full product of their labor. If only the market could be purified of parasitic elements (usury, speculation), a just society could emerge. In modern terms, Proudhon was the first advocate of ethical capitalism.

Marx’s Rejoinder: The Poverty of Philosophy

Marx’s The Poverty of Philosophy is not merely polemic but a methodological intervention. He accused Proudhon of mistaking historical relations for eternal ideas. Economic categories, Marx argued, are not moral distortions of an otherwise natural order; they are products of specific social relations. To speak of “justice” or “injustice” in exchange is meaningless because these notions themselves arise from the legal framework of property that capitalism presupposes.

“To desire freedom of exchange without the conditions of freedom of exchange,” Marx wrote, “is to desire capitalism without capitalists.”

Exploitation does not occur because exchange is unequal — commodities, in fact, exchange at their values. It occurs because the worker sells labor-power, not labor. The value produced by this labor exceeds the value paid as wages. This difference — surplus value — is the source of profit, rent, and interest. The system is exploitative not because of cheating but because of its very structure. Thus, reform within capitalism cannot eliminate exploitation; only the abolition of private property in the means of production can.

Proudhon’s vision of “fair exchange” is therefore utopian. It moralizes what must be understood scientifically. Marx exposes that value itself — the abstract quantification of labor — is not a neutral measure but a social relation expressing the domination of dead labor (capital) over living labor (workers).

2.3 The Concept of Value, Price, and Profit

Value: The Substance of Capitalism

At the heart of Marx’s critique lies the labor theory of value, inherited from classical economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo but transformed radically. For Marx, value is not a property of things but a social relation expressed through things. It measures the socially necessary labor time required to produce a commodity under average conditions of production.

This insight transforms the understanding of economy: value is historical, not natural. Under feudalism, the value relation did not exist because production was for use, not for exchange. Only when labor becomes commodified — when human activity itself is bought and sold — does value emerge as the universal regulator of social life.

Price: The Form of Appearance of Value

Prices fluctuate around values, shaped by supply, demand, and competition. Yet these market movements merely redistribute value; they do not create it. The “price form” conceals the origin of value in human labor, just as commodity fetishism conceals the social nature of production. The worker’s product confronts them as an alien power — as capital.

In today’s digital economy, the same logic persists: the app that appears “free” (Google, Meta) is paid for by the user’s data labor. Value continues to govern, even when disguised by the rhetoric of innovation and connectivity.

Profit: The Disguised Surplus

In Capital Vol. III, Marx shows how surplus value transforms into profit — the mystified form through which exploitation appears as technical efficiency or entrepreneurial genius. Capitalists imagine profit arises from capital itself, not from labor. This ideological inversion naturalizes exploitation. When an Indian tech CEO proclaims that AI “creates” value, what actually occurs is that human creativity and time are converted into quantifiable surplus for shareholders. The fetish remains — only the language has changed.

2.4 From Philosophy to Science: Marx’s Method

Marx’s philosophical transformation was not merely theoretical but methodological. He rejected both Hegel’s idealism and Proudhon’s moralism to establish a scientific approach to society — historical materialism. In this method, the study of capitalism is not a moral evaluation but an uncovering of its laws of motion.

Where Hegel saw the evolution of consciousness, Marx saw class struggle. Where Proudhon saw moral imbalance, Marx saw systemic contradiction. History, in Marx’s vision, is not the unfolding of divine reason but the continuous conflict between productive forces and the social relations that constrain them. This is what gives his theory predictive power: it explains why capitalism, even in its most modern digital form, cannot escape crises, because its contradictions are structural.

2.5 The Philosophical Relevance Today

The significance of Marx’s philosophical critique extends beyond 19th-century Europe. In an era when the ideology of “innovation” replaces religion as the justification of inequality, Marx’s analysis of fetishism and false consciousness acquires renewed clarity. Technology, rather than abolishing exploitation, has created subtler forms of it: algorithms determine labor intensity; data is the new commodity; human attention becomes a resource.

Hegel’s dialectic, transposed into the digital age, appears as the contradiction between connectivity and isolation, abundance and precarity. Marx’s inversion reminds us that ideas and technologies do not float freely — they are embedded in material relations of power. The iPhone, symbol of modern progress, is also a monument to global exploitation — from cobalt mines in Africa to assembly lines in China.

In the Indian context, this materialist insight is indispensable. The persistence of caste and communal divisions is not merely cultural but economic. They function as material forces reproducing inequality by legitimizing differential access to labor and resources. To grasp why the working class in India remains fragmented, one must apply Marx’s dialectic — but extended, as Ambedkar urged, to the caste structure. Just as capital divides labor through the wage relation, caste divides laborers through social hierarchy.

2.6 Synthesis: Marx’s Philosophical Revolution

Marx’s departure from Hegel and Proudhon produced a philosophy of praxis — a fusion of thought and struggle. He did not reject dialectics but grounded it in the material movement of history. He did not deny morality but replaced abstract ideals with concrete analysis of production.

In Hegel, contradiction reconciles itself through thought; in Marx, contradiction demands revolution through action.
In Proudhon, justice is an eternal idea; in Marx, justice is historical, born of class struggle.
In bourgeois economics, value is a neutral measure; in Marx, value is the crystallization of alienated labor.

This transformation marks the birth of a new science — the critique of political economy — and the death of philosophy as mere contemplation. As Engels later remarked, Marx found the “law of motion” of modern society. It is this law — the contradiction between capital’s drive for accumulation and humanity’s need for life — that continues to animate the crises of our time.

The philosophical foundations of Das Kapital thus rest on a profound inversion: from consciousness to existence, from justice to production, from idea to material practice. Marx dismantled the illusions of both idealism and moral socialism to reveal that exploitation is not an ethical deviation but the essence of the capitalist mode of production.

In our contemporary world — where digital labor, ecological degradation, and global inequality define daily life — this inversion remains revolutionary. It insists that liberation cannot emerge from reforming markets or moral appeals, but from transforming the social relations that make those markets possible.

Just as Marx once turned Hegel on his head, the task today is to turn the complacency of modern capitalism on its head — to see beneath its shiny technological surface the same old relation: the domination of living labor by dead labor, the perpetuation of inequality by the very systems that proclaim freedom.

Part III: The Grand Narrative – Historical Materialism

3.1 The Materialist Conception of History

At the heart of Marx’s intellectual revolution lies what he called the “materialist conception of history.” Against both idealist philosophy and moralist reformism, Marx insisted that history is not driven by the evolution of ideas or divine intentions but by the mode of production—that is, the way humans collectively produce and reproduce the material conditions of their life.

In The German Ideology (1846), co-written with Friedrich Engels, Marx famously declared:

“It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but their social being that determines their consciousness.”

Every epoch, therefore, rests upon a certain mode of production, defined by two interrelated elements:

1. Forces of Production — the tools, technology, labor, and knowledge through which human beings transform nature; and

2. Relations of Production — the social relations governing ownership and control of these productive forces (such as slave and master, serf and lord, worker and capitalist).

When the relations of production become fetters on the further development of productive forces, social revolution erupts. This dialectic—between technological progress and the social order restraining it—is the engine of historical change.

3.2 Primitive Communism: The Egalitarian Origins

The first stage, which Marx and Engels referred to as primitive communism, corresponds to tribal societies without private property or class divisions. Production was organized around kinship; cooperation was essential for survival; and the products of labor were distributed collectively.

Engels, in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884), drawing on Lewis H. Morgan’s ethnographic work, described such societies as characterized by communal ownership of land, collective labor, and absence of exploitation. Surplus production was minimal, and hence no permanent class could arise.

Indian Context:
Archaeological and anthropological studies of early Dravidian and tribal communities, such as the Gonds or Santhals, exhibit similar structures of collective land use and reciprocal exchange rather than commodified markets. Many Adivasi groups still embody vestiges of these communal forms, though under severe assault from capitalist extraction and displacement.

The key contradiction here was between limited productive capacity and growing human needs. As tools, agriculture, and animal domestication developed, surpluses emerged, giving rise to private appropriation—the seed of class division.

3.3 The Asiatic Mode of Production: The Indian Exception

Marx’s most debated category, especially relevant to India, is the Asiatic Mode of Production (AMP). While not a fully fleshed-out stage, Marx used it to explain societies where communal land ownership coexisted with despotic state power.

In his Notes on Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations and Grundrisse, Marx observed that in parts of Asia—particularly India, China, and the Ottoman world—village communities remained largely self-sufficient, while the centralized state extracted surplus in the form of tribute or taxation, rather than through private landlords.

This model contrasts with European feudalism, where surplus was appropriated by an autonomous class of nobles. The AMP emphasized hydraulic agriculture, absence of private property in land, and despotic centralization—conditions that stunted internal class struggle and thus delayed the development of capitalism.

India under Precolonial Empires:
From the Mauryas to the Mughals, the Indian subcontinent reflected many features of this mode. The village remained the basic unit of production, tied together by caste-based occupational hierarchy and land relations, while the emperor or local zamindar extracted rent through bureaucracy and tribute.

As Marx noted in his 1853 articles on India for the New York Daily Tribune, the stability of the Indian village commune—its “unchangeableness”—was both a strength and a weakness: it provided local self-sufficiency but also insulated the peasantry from broader social transformation.

This absence of internal contradictions in production relations, combined with the rigidity of the caste order, prevented the rise of an independent bourgeois class—until colonial capitalism violently disrupted the equilibrium.

3.4 Ancient (Slave) Society: Property and Citizenship

With technological advancement and conquest, the communal mode gave way to societies organized around private property and slave labor, exemplified by Greece and Rome.

The slave mode of production marked humanity’s first systematic division into exploiting and exploited classes. The citizen class monopolized political rights and property, while slaves were denied personhood and compelled to labor under coercion.

Here, for the first time, the state arose as an instrument of class domination—a point Marx later emphasized in his Critique of the Gotha Programme and Engels in The Origin of the Family....

Indian Parallels:
While India did not witness a pure slave mode in the Greco-Roman sense, forms of bonded labor and hereditary servitude—embedded in caste—served similar economic functions. The Shudra’s subjugation to the Dvija castes institutionalized unfree labor through ritual sanction rather than chains. Thus, caste served as an indigenous equivalent of the class structure found in ancient slave societies, linking ideology directly to production.

3.5 Feudalism: The Agrarian Order

Following the disintegration of ancient empires, feudalism emerged across medieval Europe as a decentralized agrarian system based on land tenure and serfdom. The land was owned by lords, who provided protection to vassals and peasants in exchange for rent or labor services.

Production was still largely for use, not exchange; but with the growth of trade, towns, and money economy, the seeds of capitalism were sown within feudal society itself.

Marx described feudalism as a system where the immediate producer is tied to the means of production—a condition historically superseded by the “free” wage laborer of capitalism, who is legally free yet economically compelled to sell labor power.

Indian Feudalism:
Debates among Indian Marxists such as R.S. Sharma, Irfan Habib, and D.D. Kosambi have examined whether India experienced feudalism. While Marx’s AMP model applies partly, medieval India from the 8th to 18th centuries bore many feudal features—fragmented polity, surplus extraction through rent and corvée labor, and limited commodity production.

The Zamindari system, crystallized under the Mughals and later institutionalized by the British Permanent Settlement, fused feudal and colonial forms—creating an intermediary landlord class that mediated between peasant and state, appropriating surplus through rent rather than productive investment.

The contradiction here lay in the stagnant agrarian relations obstructing emerging commercial forces—a contradiction resolved violently under colonial capitalism.

3.6 Capitalism: The Bourgeois Epoch

The transition from feudalism to capitalism marked a revolutionary transformation of both production and social consciousness. Feudal obligations gave way to free wage labor, land became a commodity, and production shifted from use-value to exchange-value.

In Capital Vol. I, Marx described this as the age where “all that is solid melts into air.” The capitalist mode of production universalized commodity exchange, uprooted traditional communities, and subordinated every sphere of life to the logic of profit.

The Key Mechanism: Surplus Value.
Capitalism’s distinctiveness lies in its exploitation of labor power as a commodity. Unlike feudal rent or slave appropriation, surplus is extracted through the difference between the value produced by labor and the value paid as wages.

The Industrial Revolution and Primitive Accumulation

This transformation was not peaceful or natural. In Chapters 26–33 of Capital Vol. I, Marx exposed the myth of “original accumulation” as a story of theft and violence:

“The so-called primitive accumulation is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production.”

In Europe, it took the form of enclosures, the Atlantic slave trade, and colonial plunder—processes that created a propertyless proletariat and immense capital reserves for industrial expansion.

India and Colonial Capitalism:
The British Raj exemplified primitive accumulation on a continental scale. Through land revenue systems (Permanent Settlement, Ryotwari), drain of wealth, and destruction of indigenous industries (e.g., Bengal textiles), colonialism forcibly inserted India into the global capitalist order as a supplier of raw materials and consumer of British goods.

The violent deindustrialization of Bengal and the famines of the late 19th century were not aberrations but intrinsic to capitalist accumulation—Marx’s own letters on India (1853–58) recognized this.

3.7 The Dialectic of Capitalist Development

Marx saw capitalism as both the most dynamic and the most self-contradictory system in human history. Its constant drive for profit compels technological innovation, which simultaneously increases productivity and undermines profitability.

This contradiction manifests in recurring crises—overproduction, falling rate of profit, and unemployment. In Capital Vol. III, he formalized this as the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall (TRPF), rooted in the rising organic composition of capital (greater investment in machinery relative to labor).

Capital, therefore, is both progressive—liberating productive capacities—and destructive—immiserating workers and commodifying all life.

As Marx put it:

“Capitalism produces its own gravediggers.”

3.8 From Capitalism to Socialism: The Unfinished Transition

According to historical materialism, no social order perishes before its productive forces have matured within it. When capitalism’s contradictions become unmanageable—when automation displaces labor, and wealth polarizes—the conditions for socialism ripen.

Socialism represents the socialization of the means of production, where surplus is collectively appropriated and distributed according to need. Yet, Marx did not provide blueprints; he offered a method. The transition, he argued, must emerge from class struggle—the collective consciousness of workers realizing their power as the creators of value.

The revolutions of the 20th century—Russia, China, Cuba—were early attempts, often deformed by historical conditions. Their failures do not invalidate Marx’s analysis but illustrate how the superstructure (state power, ideology) can distort the material foundation of socialism.

3.9 Historical Materialism and India’s Path

Applying this grand narrative to India reveals a non-linear, hybrid trajectory. Unlike Europe, India experienced capitalist penetration without a prior bourgeois revolution. Colonialism implanted capitalist relations upon pre-capitalist structures—creating a composite social formation where feudal, capitalist, and caste-based modes coexist.

Even after independence, agrarian semi-feudalism persisted through landlordism, bonded labor, and caste hierarchies. The post-1991 neoliberal phase merely restructured exploitation—from landlords to corporations, from fields to platforms—while retaining the social logic of hierarchy.

The “informal economy”—over 90% of India’s workforce—functions as a reservoir of cheap labor, replicating primitive accumulation daily. Caste determines occupational segregation (manual scavenging, sanitation work, artisanal labor), while religion and nationalism provide ideological cover for class inequality.

Thus, India’s capitalism is not merely economic—it is caste-capitalism, where surplus extraction is mediated through social hierarchy and state complicity.

3.10 The Present as History’s Contradiction

If history is the record of class struggles, the present moment stands as its most intense contradiction. The forces of production—digital technology, AI, automation—have reached an unprecedented scale, capable of abolishing scarcity. Yet the relations of production—private ownership, wage labor, and national rivalry—remain archaic fetters, ensuring inequality and ecological catastrophe.

In the Global South, especially India, this contradiction is sharper: high-tech enclaves coexist with agrarian distress; billionaires multiply as farmers commit suicide.

Marx’s dialectic thus remains prophetic: capitalism carries within itself the conditions of its own transcendence. But whether this will result in emancipation or barbarism depends on the reawakening of collective consciousness—the reuniting of the divided working class against the triumvirate of capital, caste, and creed.

Historical materialism reveals that human progress is not linear morality but dialectical necessity. Each mode of production generates the conditions of its overthrow. From primitive communism’s equality to capitalism’s alienation, history moves not towards a predetermined utopia but through contradictions that humanity itself must resolve.

For India, understanding this trajectory means recognizing that true revolution demands not only a transformation of property relations but also a cultural annihilation of caste and the ideological structures sustaining inequality.

Marx’s historical vision thus remains both global and profoundly Indian: a call to interpret the world not only to understand it—but to change it.

Part IV: The Afterlife of Marx – Beyond the USSR

4.1 The “End of History” and the Triumph That Never Was

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, Western commentators rushed to announce the “death of Marxism.” Francis Fukuyama’s now-infamous thesis — The End of History and the Last Man (1992) — declared liberal democracy and free-market capitalism the final stage of human evolution. According to this narrative, all ideological conflicts had been resolved; capitalism had not only triumphed but proven itself to be the natural order of things.

Yet, even as red flags came down in Moscow, the contradictions Marx had diagnosed over a century earlier only intensified. The neoliberal age that followed was not an era of liberation but one of renewed class domination under new guises: financialization, privatization, digital surveillance, and global inequality.

Far from disappearing, exploitation adapted. The fall of the Soviet bloc did not refute Marx — it vindicated his insight that state ownership alone does not abolish class; what matters is the control of surplus, the social relations of production. The Soviet state had substituted the capitalist bourgeoisie with a bureaucratic elite — the nomenklatura — whose interests ultimately clashed with those of the workers they claimed to represent.

Thus, the collapse of “actually existing socialism” marked not the failure of Marx’s theory but the failure to apply his theory dialectically — the ossification of a revolutionary method into a dogma.

4.2 Marx vs. Soviet Practice: The Critique of State Capitalism

Marx envisioned socialism as the self-emancipation of the working class, not the rule of a party bureaucracy. The early Soviet state, born out of revolutionary upheaval, initially embodied this spirit through workers’ councils (soviets) and collective control. But as civil war, isolation, and material scarcity set in, the Bolshevik regime centralized power in the Party and bureaucracy — a process Lenin warned against in his final writings and which Trotsky later called the “degeneration of the workers’ state.”

By the 1930s, Stalinism had transformed Marx’s dialectic into a static orthodoxy: historical materialism was reduced to “five stages,” class struggle was declared complete, and the party became infallible. The command economy replaced capitalist markets, but the social relations of domination persisted — the worker still lacked control over production, and surplus was still appropriated by a ruling class, albeit in the name of socialism.

Marx’s own writings offer no justification for such substitution. He opposed all forms of alienation — whether from the capitalist market or the bureaucratic state. As he wrote in his Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875),

“Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of revolutionary transformation... The state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.”

That “dictatorship,” in Marx’s sense, was not police rule but the democratic control of production by the majority, which the Soviet model failed to achieve. Thus, what collapsed in 1991 was not Marxism but its caricature — a distorted system that had severed Marx’s theory of emancipation from its humanist foundation.

4.3 The Neoliberal Counter-Revolution: Capitalism without Alternatives

The 1990s inaugurated what David Harvey termed “the neoliberal counter-revolution.” Capital, having defeated its rival model, embarked on a global offensive to dismantle welfare states, deregulate markets, and reassert class power in the name of efficiency and growth.

Under neoliberalism, the capitalist state no longer presented itself as a protector of the poor but as an enabler of capital accumulation. Privatization, free trade, and the ideology of the “self-made individual” replaced collective welfare and labor solidarity.

Marx’s theory of value found new relevance here. The rate of profit, which had fallen during the Keynesian era due to rising wages and regulation, was restored by outsourcing production to the Global South, informalizing labor, and financializing accumulation.

Neoliberalism’s apparent prosperity was built on fictitious capital — speculation, credit, and debt rather than real production. The 2008 financial crisis exposed the fragility of this system, confirming Marx’s warning in Capital Vol. III:

“The credit system appears as the main lever of overproduction and over-speculation in commerce.”

The crash did not end neoliberalism; it merely deepened its contradictions. Governments that once preached austerity poured trillions into rescuing banks while slashing social services — privatizing profit, socializing loss. The working class was left to bear the brunt through unemployment, inflation, and debt.

4.4 The New Exploitation: From Factories to Platforms

If industrial capitalism exploited the worker’s body, digital capitalism now exploits the worker’s time, data, and attention. Marx’s concept of surplus value—the extraction of unpaid labor—has expanded beyond the factory floor into the very fabric of everyday life.

4.4.1 The Gig Economy and the Return of Piece-Work

Companies like Uber, Zomato, and Swiggy epitomize this new regime. Their rhetoric of “flexibility” and “entrepreneurship” masks the reality of algorithmic servitude. The gig worker owns no capital, assumes all risk, and earns only for productive moments, while the platform captures the surplus through digital control and data analytics.

In Marxian terms, this is absolute surplus value in its most refined form — the intensification of labor time without extending the formal working day, achieved through digital surveillance and incentive manipulation.

The platform worker’s “freedom” mirrors the classical worker’s “freedom” under capitalism: legally free to sell labor, but economically compelled to do so under precarious conditions.

Indian Example:
According to a 2023 NITI Aayog report, India has over 7.7 million gig workers, expected to rise to 23 million by 2030. These workers lack social security, collective bargaining rights, or stable income — an informal proletariat for the digital age. The 2022 Zomato IPO, which valued the company at over $12 billion despite persistent losses, demonstrates how capital now profits not from production but from speculative valuation—a direct manifestation of Marx’s “fictitious capital.”

4.4.2 Digital Labor: The Unpaid Workforce of the Internet

In Marx’s time, capital extracted surplus from labor’s productive activity. In the 21st century, it also extracts surplus from user activity. Every click, post, and scroll becomes a data point, commodified and sold to advertisers.

As Christian Fuchs and Shoshana Zuboff have shown, social media corporations like Meta (Facebook) and Google accumulate profit not by selling products but by commodifying human behavior. Users are both the producers and the product.

Marx’s concept of “the general intellect” in the Grundrisse—collective social knowledge—has been appropriated by capital. The internet, a potential commons of knowledge, has been enclosed and monetized by tech monopolies. In this sense, digital capitalism is the new enclosure movement, privatizing attention, data, and creativity.

Example:
An influencer on Instagram may “appear” autonomous, but the platform controls visibility, advertising revenue, and algorithmic reach. Labor is self-exploited, unpaid, and internalized — what Franco “Bifo” Berardi calls “semiocapitalism,” where subjectivity itself becomes a site of production.

4.4.3 Global Supply Chains and the New Imperialism

In Marx’s time, the factory condensed exploitation within national boundaries. Today, production is fragmented across continents, creating global value chains where surplus flows from the Global South to the North.

Example: An iPhone assembled in China contains parts mined in Congo, designed in California, and financed through speculative capital. The total surplus value produced by workers in the South is disproportionately realized as profit by corporations in the North.

Marx’s theory of unequal exchange, elaborated later by Lenin and dependency theorists like Samir Amin, explains this: the global proletariat is divided not only by nation but by geography — a hierarchy of labor values sustained by imperialism.

India’s Role:
India’s integration into this global system as a site of cheap IT labor, pharmaceutical production, and back-office outsourcing reflects this logic. The “Make in India” campaign rebrands what Marx would call cheap labor export capitalism — value produced domestically, appropriated internationally.

4.5 Ideology Revisited: From Religion to Nationalism to Consumerism

Marx described ideology as the inversion of reality — where social relations between people appear as relations between things. In the 21st century, this inversion has only deepened.

If religion was the “opium of the people,” consumerism has become its synthetic successor. The promise of happiness through commodities functions as the ideological glue of neoliberal society. Advertising and social media produce the illusion of individuality while concealing structural exploitation.

In India, this ideology fuses with Hindu nationalism to form a potent weapon of class distraction. The working poor, instead of uniting across economic lines, are divided along religious and caste identities — precisely the form of “false consciousness” Marx foresaw.

The BJP’s economic agenda of corporate-friendly reform coexists seamlessly with its cultural agenda of majoritarianism, because both serve capital: one through accumulation, the other through pacification. As Ambedkar warned in 1936, “Caste is not merely a division of labor; it is a division of laborers.” The same logic now applies to religion and nationhood.

4.6 The Ecological Crisis: Capitalism Against Nature

Marx, often caricatured as anthropocentric, was among the first to identify capitalism’s rupture with nature — what John Bellamy Foster calls the “metabolic rift.” The endless accumulation of capital demands infinite growth on a finite planet, destroying ecological balance and human survival.

Climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution are not “externalities” but intrinsic to the capitalist mode of production. The same forces that commodify labor commodify the earth.

India’s Ecological Contradictions:
Rapid industrialization and extractivism — from the mining belts of Chhattisgarh to the deforestation of the Aravallis — expose how primitive accumulation persists under neoliberalism. The displacement of Adivasis for corporate projects mirrors the enclosures of 18th-century England.

Marx’s framework thus expands beyond economics: it is also an ecological critique of unsustainable growth, reaffirming his relevance in an age of climate catastrophe.

4.7 The Relevance of Marx Today

Despite proclamations of his obsolescence, Marx’s analytical lens remains unparalleled for decoding 21st-century capitalism. The commodification of everything, the automation of labor, the global inequality, and the ideological manipulation through media and nationalism — all were anticipated in his dialectic of capital.

Modern thinkers — from David Harvey to Slavoj Žižek, from Nancy Fraser to Prabhat Patnaik — have extended Marx’s critique to new terrains: gender, ecology, finance, and culture. But the foundation remains the same: the pursuit of profit through the exploitation of labor.

Marx’s enduring power lies not in prophecy but in method: dialectical materialism as a living tool to analyze and transform reality. As long as inequality persists — and today, it is greater than ever — Marx’s ghost continues to haunt the world’s ruling classes.

4.8 India After 1991: Neoliberalism, Caste, and Capital

The 1991 economic liberalization in India marked the nation’s decisive turn toward neoliberal capitalism. Privatization, deregulation, and foreign investment were heralded as engines of progress. Yet, beneath the rhetoric of growth lay deepening precarity and inequality.

According to Oxfam’s 2024 report, the richest 1% of Indians own over 70% of national wealth, while over 800 million people depend on food subsidies. The informal sector employs 90% of workers, with no protection or stability.

Caste remains the invisible infrastructure of this economy. Dalits and Adivasis are concentrated in the most exploitative jobs — sanitation, construction, and manual labor — while upper castes dominate managerial and financial sectors. The ideological fusion of Hindutva and neoliberalism has produced a regime where religious pride conceals material dispossession.

Thus, in India, the class struggle cannot be separated from the annihilation of caste — a point Marx himself might have missed but Ambedkar made explicit. Without addressing social hierarchies, economic revolution becomes incomplete.

4.9 Toward a New Marxism: Reclaiming the Dialectic

The failure of both Soviet centralism and neoliberal capitalism invites a renewed Marxism—not dogmatic but critical, intersectional, and ecological. This new Marxism must integrate the insights of feminist theory, Dalit thought, and decolonial critique, while remaining grounded in the material analysis of production.

Marxism’s future lies in its capacity to reclaim universality without erasing difference — to recognize that the working class today is not only male or industrial but also digital, informal, and transnational.

In India, this means linking the struggles of gig workers, farmers, sanitation workers, and students into a collective movement against both economic exploitation and social domination.

The fall of the USSR did not end Marx’s relevance; it clarified it. The 21st century’s crises — financial, ecological, digital, and ideological — are the globalized versions of contradictions Marx exposed in the 19th century.

Capitalism has changed its form but not its logic: profit over people, accumulation over life. The task today is not to resurrect old Marxism but to revive Marx’s method — the critical, historical, and dialectical understanding of society as a system of contradictions capable of transformation.

As the world faces new enclosures — of data, nature, and democracy — Marx’s words ring truer than ever:

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”

Part V: The Indian Conundrum — When Class Is Blurred by Caste and Creed

5.1 Introduction: The Paradox of Indian Modernity

If Marx’s Europe witnessed the revolutionary unmasking of feudal and clerical power by bourgeois industry, India’s trajectory fused pre-capitalist hierarchies with capitalist accumulation. The subcontinent’s entry into modernity was not linear but composite: caste, land, and religion—older modes of domination—did not vanish with capitalism’s advance; they became its instruments. India’s “transition to capitalism” thus produced what sociologist A.R. Desai called a caste-capitalist formation: the old order refracted through new relations of production.

Marx’s dialectic of base and superstructure—where the economic base determines and is reciprocally shaped by ideology—requires re-examination here. In India, the “superstructure” of caste has assumed a material character, structuring access to property, education, and labor. As Ambedkar warned, “Caste is not merely a division of labour; it is a division of labourers.” The Indian proletariat, before it can be class-conscious, must confront the stigma that stratifies its very body.

5.2 Caste as Material Base and Superstructure

Marx conceived the superstructure—law, politics, culture—as deriving from the economic base. Yet in India, caste functions both as superstructure and as part of the base itself. It allocates productive roles, regulates marriage, and sanctions property transfer; it is a mode of production embedded in ritual. The jati system prescribes economic destiny at birth, creating a hereditary labor market.

Economic Function of Caste

Land and Ownership: NSSO data show over 60 percent of Dalits and Adivasis are landless agricultural laborers, while upper-caste groups control disproportionate acreage.

Credit and Capital: Informal credit networks and kin-based business cartels restrict Dalits’ and OBCs’ entry into capital ownership.

Education and Skill: The “merit” discourse in private industry reproduces caste capital—elite engineering colleges and IT firms remain dominated by upper-caste managers.

Thus caste is not a cultural residue but a living economic infrastructure. It performs what Marx described as the “division of labour,” but ossified into hereditary ranks.

Example 1: Textile and Leather Industries

The Tiruppur garment cluster in Tamil Nadu, hailed as India’s export success, depends heavily on Dalit and OBC migrant labor. Supervisory and ownership positions remain with intermediate or upper castes. Similarly, the leather sector—long stigmatized—concentrates Dalit workers in hazardous tanning units, while profits accrue to caste-Hindu exporters. Capital has not erased stigma; it has monetized it.

5.3 Ambedkar and the Marxist Debate

Ambedkar’s confrontation with Indian Marxists—especially in the 1930s and 1940s—was not a rejection of class analysis but an expansion of it. In Annihilation of Caste, he argued that economic equality without social equality was a contradiction in terms. Marxists sought to subsume caste under class; Ambedkar saw caste as the precondition for class exploitation.

Ambedkar’s Critique of Orthodox Marxism

1. Base/Superstructure Reversal: For Ambedkar, caste determines economic relations as much as the reverse.

2. Subject of Revolution: The Indian proletariat is fragmented; the Dalit must first become human before becoming worker.

3. Means of Change: While Marx foresaw economic revolution, Ambedkar demanded social and constitutional revolution—law as instrument of emancipation.

Towards a Synthesis

Ambedkar and Marx share the principle that human emancipation requires abolition of private property in labor—be it property in men (slavery), in land (feudalism), or in caste status (Brahmanism). A Dalit-Marxist synthesis thus recognizes that caste is India’s oldest form of private property: the ownership of social honor.

5.4 Religion and False Consciousness

Marx called religion “the opium of the people”—a solace that masks suffering and justifies domination. In India, religion operates not only as consolation but as an instrument of state and capital. The communalization of politics redirects class anger toward inter-faith hostility.

Example 2: Communal Polarization in Industrial Labor

In many industrial belts—Moradabad (brassware), Aligarh (locks), Surat (textiles)—workers are divided along Hindu-Muslim lines. Trade unions that once mobilized jointly under CPI or INTUC banners now mirror communal politics. In 2013, the Muzaffarnagar riots displaced thousands of Muslim sugar-mill laborers; factories quietly replaced them with non-Muslim migrants, fragmenting class solidarity.

Religion as State Superstructure

Post-1991 neoliberalism witnessed the alliance of market fundamentalism with religious majoritarianism. The ruling class offers “spiritual nationalism” as compensation for economic dispossession. The Ram Mandir spectacle coincides with privatization of public assets: faith becomes distraction from the expropriation of labor. Marx’s “false consciousness” here finds its perfect stage set.

5.5 Neoliberalism and the New Indian Bourgeoisie

The liberalization of 1991 produced a new capitalist elite whose composition, far from meritocratic, remained caste-encoded. The “New India” of start-ups, stock exchanges, and digital finance is driven by an upper-caste managerial class closely intertwined with the state.

Oligarchic Capitalism

Crony Nexus: Conglomerates such as Reliance and Adani exemplify Marx’s Volume III “trinity formula”—Capital, Land, and State united in rent-seeking.

Financialization: The rise of fictitious capital—stocks, bonds, speculative assets—has detached profit from production. Yet the material base remains sweatshops and informal labor.

Corporate Appropriation of Social Policy: CSR and “philanthropy” echo Proudhon’s bourgeois socialism—ethical façade masking extraction.

Example 3: Gig Economy as Neo-Serfdom

Food-delivery riders and app-based drivers embody both freedom and bondage. They own their means of work (vehicles, phones) yet remain trapped by algorithmic control. Studies of Zomato and Ola show average earnings below minimum wage once fuel costs are deducted. The platform’s surge pricing mirrors Marx’s “piece-wage system,” intensifying exploitation while individualizing risk.

Caste resurfaces here too: surveys indicate disproportionate representation of Dalit and OBC workers in gig sectors, mirroring their historical relegation to precarious manual labor.

5.6 Persistence of Feudal Relations within Capitalism

Indian capitalism coexists with remnants of feudalism. Landlordism persists in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, and Telangana, where bonded labor and caste violence remain endemic. The 1996 Bathe massacre, in which upper-caste landlords killed 21 Dalits, was not merely feudal cruelty—it was a defense of property relations threatened by labor mobilization.

Example 4: Agrarian Contradictions

Despite mechanization and corporate agribusiness, the peasantry remains stratified by caste. Land reforms of the 1950s were subverted through benami transfers and bureaucratic collusion. The 2020 farmers’ protests revealed both class and caste complexity: rich Jat farmers opposed corporate entry, while Dalit landless laborers lacked voice within the movement. Capitalism thus absorbs and redeploys feudal contradictions rather than resolving them.

5.7 Gender, Caste and Reproduction of Labor

Marx located women’s unpaid domestic labor at the foundation of surplus value realization; in India, this labor is doubly caste-marked. Dalit women perform the most degrading manual tasks—sanitation, construction, domestic servitude—reproducing both the worker and the caste hierarchy.

Example: The persistence of manual scavenging, outlawed yet normalized, demonstrates the intertwining of patriarchy, caste, and capital.

Insight: Silvia Federici’s theory of reproductive labor complements Ambedkar’s view that caste reproduces itself through control over marriage and sexuality—material and biological reproduction fused.

5.8 Trade Unions and Fragmented Class Consciousness

Class organization in India remains fractured. Unions historically linked to political parties (INTUC, AITUC, BMS) mirror the ideological divisions of the ruling class. Efforts at pan-worker solidarity repeatedly fail due to caste and regional segmentation.

Example 5: Maruti Suzuki Manesar Strike (2012)

The 2012 strike brought together workers from diverse backgrounds demanding regularization and wage parity. Management’s divide-and-rule tactics exploited caste tensions among contract laborers. The subsequent imprisonment of 13 workers on dubious charges symbolized how state and capital collaborate to suppress even embryonic class unity.

5.9 Towards a Dialectic of Liberation

Marx envisioned the proletariat as the universal class—the agent whose emancipation would free all humanity. In India, that universality demands the annihilation of caste as prerequisite. Ambedkar’s social revolution and Marx’s economic revolution must converge.

A Dual Struggle

1. Economic: Against privatization, informalization, and corporate capture of the state.

2. Social: Against caste endogamy, religious chauvinism, and patriarchy that perpetuate alienation.

Emergent Movements

Dalit-Bahujan Mobilizations: The Bhim Army, student movements at JNU and HCU, and manual scavengers’ unions articulate caste-class consciousness.

Labor Collectives: Gig-worker associations (Swiggy Union, Indian Federation of App Based Transport Workers) revive Marxist praxis through digital platforms.

Farmers’ Alliance: The 2020–21 protests signaled a potential rural-urban unity, though still uneven.

These struggles suggest that India’s revolutionary subject may not be the industrial proletariat alone but a coalition of dispossessed groups—Dalits, Adivasis, women, informal laborers—whose shared material deprivation transcends ritual barriers.

Reclaiming the Spectre

Caste and religion have long disguised exploitation in sacred garb; capitalism universalizes that disguise through consumerism and nationalism. The result is what Gramsci called a passive revolution: structural change without social emancipation. To pierce this illusion, India requires what Marx called the “ruthless criticism of all that exists.”

The future of Marx’s thought in India thus depends on its indigenization—its merger with Ambedkarite ethics and subaltern realities. The path to liberation lies not in repeating 19th-century formulas but in extending Marx’s dialectic to the caste-colonial context. Only when the scavenger, the gig worker, and the displaced peasant recognize their shared condition—as embodiments of alienated labor—will the “spectre” that haunted Europe find its second coming in South Asia.

Conclusion: The Spectre Returns – Marx, Ambedkar, and the Future of Liberation

1. Marx After Marxism

The fall of the Soviet Union was not the death of Marx; it was the exhaustion of a distorted reading of his ideas. The bureaucratic ossification of “state socialism” replaced dialectics with dogma. The dialectical method, however, remains the most penetrating lens to understand contemporary contradictions. In the neoliberal epoch, surplus value is extracted not merely through the factory floor but through invisible circuits of finance, algorithms, and data. The “fictitious capital” Marx described in Volume III—money breeding money, detached from real production—now defines global capitalism’s architecture.

Speculative bubbles, crypto-finance, and venture-capital-fueled monopolies like Amazon and Meta embody the same inner logic Marx identified: accumulation for accumulation’s sake, regardless of human need. The crisis tendencies he foresaw—falling profit rates, overproduction, and the immiseration of labor—reappear under new technological guises. What the world faces today is not post-capitalism but hyper-capitalism, a system that has colonized even leisure, attention, and identity.

2. The Digital Proletariat and the New Exploitation

Marx’s “factory worker” has been reborn as the Uber driver, the content moderator, the warehouse picker, and the unpaid social media user generating profit through their data traces. This “digital proletariat” lacks fixed workplace, wage security, or collective bargaining. Marx’s concept of “surplus value” thus finds a new expression: platforms extract labor-time without formal employment, capturing not only the worker’s time but also their behavior, emotions, and creativity.

Gig platforms such as Swiggy or Amazon Mechanical Turk exemplify primitive accumulation in the digital age—dispossessing labor of its autonomy while narrating it as empowerment. In Das Kapital, Marx wrote that capitalism “vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour.” In 2025, that vampire feeds on attention spans, data points, and algorithmic prediction.

3. India’s Contradiction: When Class Meets Caste

If Marx’s Europe confronted the bourgeois-proletarian divide, India’s reality is more layered. Capitalism in India did not destroy the old order; it co-opted it. The caste system became capitalism’s most efficient infrastructure of labor segmentation. As Ambedkar argued, caste is not merely a ritual hierarchy but a graded economic division of laborers. It ensures cheap, hereditary, and docile labor, rendering solidarity nearly impossible.

In factories and service sectors alike, caste determines occupational stratification—from Dalit sanitation workers to dominant-caste managerial elites. Trade unions often replicate these hierarchies, diluting the collective consciousness Marx saw as the precondition for revolution. Religion, too, functions as what Marx called the “opium of the people”—a means of ideological control. The rise of communal nationalism has turned class anger into sectarian rage, protecting capital behind the smokescreen of cultural identity.

Thus, India’s proletariat is fragmented by what Gramsci might call “historical residues”: pre-capitalist identities that capitalism itself instrumentalizes. To borrow Ambedkar’s insight, “You cannot build socialism upon the foundations of caste.” The annihilation of caste is therefore not a moral question but a material prerequisite for class emancipation.

4. Reinterpreting the Base–Superstructure Dialectic

The Indian case demands a rethinking of Marx’s schema: here, the superstructure (caste, religion) often determines the base. The ideological becomes material. For instance, caste-based monopolies over land, credit, and political representation reproduce economic inequality across generations. The base–superstructure model, when reinterpreted through Ambedkar, reveals a cyclical causality—where social and economic oppression reinforce each other.

This synthesis of Marx and Ambedkar represents perhaps the most promising route toward an indigenous critical theory: one that understands India’s capitalism as a “caste-capital nexus,” where economic accumulation and social hierarchy are intertwined.

5. From Historical Materialism to Ecological and Digital Materialism

Marx’s materialism was industrial; today’s must be planetary. The crisis of the twenty-first century is ecological: climate change, extractivism, and the commodification of nature. Marx anticipated this in his notion of the “metabolic rift”—the rupture between human labor and the earth’s regenerative cycles. Contemporary capitalism deepens this rift through relentless consumption and digital waste, externalizing costs to the global South.

In this context, Das Kapital becomes an ecological text: a warning that capital’s drive for expansion is incompatible with the finite nature of the planet. Likewise, digital capitalism introduces a new materialism—where data, code, and algorithm function as new “forces of production,” shaping subjectivity itself. The proletariat of the future may be both organic and synthetic, its exploitation measured not only in working hours but in extracted attention and compliance.

6. The Future of Marxism: Between Spectre and Praxis

To speak of Marx today is to speak of survival. His critique is not a relic of the nineteenth century but a living grammar of resistance. Marx’s method—historicizing every social form, revealing the hidden labor beneath commodities—remains the only credible alternative to ideological mystification. The real failure of the twentieth century was not Marxism but its institutionalization into dogma.

In contrast, Marx’s true legacy lies in his insistence that humans can change their world by understanding it. His partnership with Engels established a tradition of scientific socialism rooted in material reality yet open to transformation. When adapted to India’s conditions through Ambedkar’s anti-caste radicalism, it yields a revolutionary synthesis: emancipation not through seizure of the state alone but through dismantling the social hierarchies that sustain exploitation.

7. Closing Reflection: The Spectre’s Second Coming

The “spectre of communism” that haunted Europe in 1848 now haunts a world disillusioned by neoliberal promises. From agrarian distress to gig worker strikes, from environmental protests to campus mobilizations, the signs of revolt persist. Marx’s relevance endures not as prophecy but as method—a way of unveiling the historical logic of domination.

In India, this means reading Das Kapital alongside Annihilation of Caste, grasping that economic revolution without social annihilation is hollow. In the digital world, it means reasserting the labor theory of value against the myth of “free” data and “neutral” technology.

The true “second coming” of the spectre lies not in resurrecting old regimes but in reimagining solidarity. Only by uniting the struggles against capital, caste, and communalism can humanity reclaim what Marx called its “species-being”—the capacity to create, share, and live free from domination.

The paper thus concludes where Marx began: with the call not merely to interpret the world, but to change it.

BIBLIOGRAPHY (Thematic and Comprehensive)

I. Primary Works by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

1. Marx, Karl. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Trans. Martin Milligan. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1959.

2. Marx, Karl. Theses on Feuerbach. In The German Ideology, 1845.

3. Marx, Karl. The Poverty of Philosophy. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1955.

4. Marx, Karl. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970.

5. Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vols. I–III. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965–1970.

6. Marx & Engels. The Communist Manifesto. 1848. In Marx & Engels Collected Works, Vol. 6.

7. Engels, Friedrich. Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970.

8. Engels, Friedrich. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972.

II. Secondary Marxist Literature

1. Althusser, Louis. For Marx. London: Verso, 1969.

2. Althusser, Louis. Reading Capital. Trans. Ben Brewster. London: Verso, 1970.

3. Anderson, Perry. Considerations on Western Marxism. London: Verso, 1976.

4. Bottomore, Tom (ed.). A Dictionary of Marxist Thought. Oxford: Blackwell, 1983.

5. Cohen, G. A. Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978.

6. Harvey, David. A Companion to Marx’s Capital. London: Verso, 2010.

7. Harvey, David. Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

8. Lukács, Georg. History and Class Consciousness. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971.

9. Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964.

10. Marx, Karl & Engels, Friedrich. Selected Correspondence. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975.

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12. Sweezy, Paul M. The Theory of Capitalist Development. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1942.

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2. Habermas, Jürgen. The Theory of Communicative Action, Vols. I–II. Boston: Beacon Press, 1984–87.

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6. Patnaik, Prabhat. Accumulation and Stability Under Capitalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

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8. Omvedt, Gail. Dalits and the Democratic Revolution. New Delhi: Sage, 1994.

9. Guru, Gopal, and Sundar Sarma (ed.). The Cracked Mirror: An Indian Debate on Experience and Theory. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012.

10. Chatterjee, Partha. The Nation and Its Fragments. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.

11. Chibber, Vivek. Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital. London: Verso, 2013.

12. Deshpande, Satish. Contemporary India: A Sociological View. New Delhi: Penguin, 2003.

13. Banaji, Jairus. Theory as History: Essays on Modes of Production and Exploitation. Leiden: Brill, 2010.

14. Bhattacharya, Sabyasachi (ed.). Rethinking 1857. New Delhi: Orient BlackSwan, 2007.

15. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.

16. Namboodiripad, E. M. S. The Mahatma and the Ism. Bombay: People’s Publishing House, 1959.

17. Beteille, André. Caste, Class and Power. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965.

18. Chatterjee, Partha (ed.). State and Politics in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997.

V. Contemporary Global and Digital Capitalism

1. Fuchs, Christian. Digital Labour and Karl Marx. New York: Routledge, 2014.

2. Srnicek, Nick. Platform Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017.

3. Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. New York: Public Affairs, 2019.

4. Mason, Paul. PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future. London: Allen Lane, 2015.

5. Dean, Jodi. The Communist Horizon. London: Verso, 2012.

6. Fraser, Nancy. Cannibal Capitalism. London: Verso, 2022.

VI. Supplementary and Interpretive Sources

1. Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Capital: 1848–1875. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1975.

2. Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation. Boston: Beacon Press, 1944.

3. Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. New York: International Publishers, 1971.

4. Luxemburg, Rosa. The Accumulation of Capital. London: Routledge, 1913.

5. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000.

6. Linebaugh, Peter. The Magna Carta Manifesto. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.

7. Chomsky, Noam. Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order. New York: Seven Stories Press, 1999.