By a young worker in Kerala, South India
Dr. B.R. Ambedkar played a great role in bringing the issue of caste oppression to the centre of Indian politics. His fight for Dalit dignity, education, and legal rights inspired generations. But from a Marxist perspective, Ambedkar’s political theory and methods were not enough to destroy the caste system because they lacked a revolutionary, class-based foundation.
Ambedkar believed caste originated mainly through Vedic religious practices and purity rules. But serious historians like D.D. Kosambi and Suvira Jaisawal have shown that caste developed as a historical social system rooted in material conditions, class division, surplus production, and state formation. Caste was not invented in one stroke by religion; it evolved alongside feudalism, patriarchy, and private property. The earliest mentions of varna in the Rig Veda lacked caste’s key features—endogamy, hereditary labor, and untouchability.
Ambedkar also rejected the Aryan migration theory, claiming the Aryans were indigenous to India. However, modern DNA and archaeological studies contradict this view. The idea that caste came solely from Vedic texts and that Aryans never migrated is not supported by historical science.
He also argued that unity of labour is impossible without first destroying caste. Marxists disagree. While caste is a real divider, working-class unity does not begin in theory but in shared struggle, against landlords, bosses, and police repression. Most Dalits are poor workers and landless peasants. They face both caste and class oppression. To delay class struggle until caste ends only benefits the ruling class.
Ambedkar’s proposed solutions, inter-caste marriage, education, religious conversion, are not wrong, but they are insufficient. Even today, many educated Dalits suffer violence, humiliation, and poverty. This proves that caste cannot be uprooted through ideas or legal rights alone, it must be destroyed by transforming the socio-economic system that uses caste as a tool of exploitation.
A crucial point often ignored by Dalit reformers and Ambedkarites is that caste also functioned as a system of reserve army of labour locked into self-sufficient village economies. It ensured a fixed, immobile workforce to support surplus production for the ruling classes. The caste order guaranteed cheap, hereditary labour and social control at the village level. This role of caste as an economic structure rooted in production relations is vital to any materialist analysis, yet is often neglected by caste-based identity politics that focus only on symbolic dignity or representation.
Ambedkar placed his faith in the Indian Constitution and legal reforms. But a Marxist knows the bourgeois state is not neutral, it serves the ruling class. The police, courts, and bureaucracy uphold the Brahmanical-capitalist order Ambedkar hoped to dismantle. The system may promise equality, but it protects private property and class domination, not justice.
Ambedkar’s education under John Dewey in the U.S. shaped his belief in liberal reformism rather than dialectical materialism. Dewey promoted gradual, legal change, not revolutionary transformation. As a result, Ambedkar focused more on law, rights, and representation rather than organizing for a socialist revolution.
Today, identity politics in Ambedkar’s name often reduces mass politics to cultural symbolism. Funded by Western academia and NGOs, it fragments the oppressed into narrow identities and discourages class unity. The oppressed become consumers of victimhood rather than fighters for power. This benefits neither Dalits nor the broader working class.
However, the biggest betrayal did not come from Ambedkar, but from the mainstream Indian Left, particularly the CPI and CPI(M). These Stalinist parties gave up on revolution in favour of electoral alliances and the “two-stage theory.” According to this Stalinist line, India must first pass through a “bourgeois-democratic” phase under capitalist leadership before socialism can be attempted. Among the unprincipled alliances engaged in by the CPI(M) was its support for the Janata government in the early 1980s, which included the Jana Sangh, forerunners of the BJP.
This theory led CPI and CPI(M) to ally with parties like the Congress and DMK. In states like Bengal and Kerala, where they ruled for decades, they protected landlords, suppressed militant peasant struggles, and maintained caste hierarchies. Their land reforms were half-hearted, their trade unions bureaucratic, and their anti-caste work largely symbolic. They became managers of the capitalist state, not revolutionaries.
Caste-like systems existed in other societies too. As historian Bruce Lincoln showed, some ancient pastoral societies had divisions like priests, warriors, and labourers. But nowhere else were these roles religiously codified and locked in for thousands of years like in India. The rigidity of caste stems not only from economic necessity, but also from Brahmanical ideology, ritual purity, divine hierarchy, and fatalism.
The British colonial state further entrenched caste. They formalized it through censuses and legal categories, promoting upper castes while deepening Dalit oppression. Their aim was not social justice, but divide-and-rule and administrative convenience. Caste became a tool for building a loyal, stratified bureaucracy to serve the empire.
A genuine Marxist movement must reject both Ambedkarite reformism and Stalinist class betrayal. We must build a revolutionary party that unites the most oppressed, Dalits, Adivasis, Muslims, women, and working youth, not through token identity claims, but through collective struggle against capitalism and caste.
Caste will not disappear automatically under socialism. It has deep roots in ideology, culture, and daily life. But caste cannot be abolished within capitalism, because it was born alongside private property and patriarchy. It can only die when those systems die. That means only a socialist revolution can provide the material basis to annihilate caste, through workers’ power, radical land redistribution, equal access to education and employment, and mass political re-education.
Ambedkar’s courage and contribution deserve respect. But to truly destroy caste, we must go beyond his methods. We must not only demand legal rights, we must fight for workers’ rule and the end of all exploitation. That is the only path to a casteless and classless India.