SEMINAR COURSE

Title

COURSE BACKGROUND

In 1936, as part of the new Independent Labour Party’s manifesto, the party’s founder Dr
Ambedkar announced the reform and eventual dismantling of the traditional watan system in the
Bombay Presidency. This meant that Ambedkar was intensely preoccupied with intervening in a
‘village system’ that considered the work performed by castes treated as “untouchables”- the
mahar caste being a case in point- as a ‘service’ for which they were to receive not wages in cash
but’ gifts’ in kind. What appeared to be a natural fact of caste society, was a problem for
Ambedkar- a problem of being excluded from the principle of labour.

Did marx consider labour to be a principle, that is, as something that can be abstractly thought as
a universal form beyond its historical manifestations? This is an interesting question because we
find that marx does recognize labour to constitute a ‘principle’ but a principle that through and
through appears in its full force in an alienated historical form which is part of the system of
“capitalism”. This leads to the following critical dialectic: the “principle” in its abstract truth
appears in the historical form of a capitalist economy enshrined as the labour theory of value in
classical political economy and the “principle of labour” is decisively demonstrated by marx to
be a social relation that is not a mere abstract truth at all. So we are compelled to think seriously
of something apparently contradictory as a “historical principle” along the lines of what Marx
himself called a concrete abstraction.

This return us to the conjuncture where ambedkar makes the “historical principle” of labour act
as a force of intervention, as a programme underlying the question of organization. The question
of organization here is not simply one of a vehicle of implementation of a so called programme;
it is a subject trying to orient itself across all its constituent actors- Ambedkar himself here-
several other Mahar members among others from untouchable castes as well as some caste
hinuds- given the historical discrepancy, if not contradiction, between the traditional watan
system (“village system”) and the modern “ideal form” and principle of labour.

But through ambedkar’s life and work- from annihilation of caste in 1936 to Buddha or marx in
1956- is deeply engaged with the irony of the modern economic idea or principle of labour,
which is structurally and historically inseperable from the equally modern experience of
inequality, exploiutation and alienation. Nevertheless for both Marx and Ambedkar, the modern
“ideal” is ironic, which leads, in the case of marx, to a kind of ironic praise of capitalism as
“progressive injustice” and in the case of ambedkar, an ironic praise of modernity as the
destratified or freed alienation (particularly in the new urban centres such as Bombay in contrast
to the Maharashtra villages).
Yet the Marxian irony and the ambedkar hyphen irony are not symmetrical. For marx, the
pioneering analytical task is to uncover the irony of the “principle of labour”, his revolutionary
poltical task is to emancipate the future of society from that very principle, from the value of the
theory of value as it were. For ambedkar, the task of constituting the principle of labour is
already poliittcal; it must be consciously enforced by organized means at specific historical
conjenctures. So, not for no reason is ambedkar far more involved than marx in active politics,
while both are saturated by scholarly passion.Not for no reason is marx far more oriented to a
future revolutionary class called the “proletariat”as the horizon promised to the present irony or
negativity that labour in its relation to capital performs- while ambedkar in 1936 must think the
category “class” in the present, politically, even while not sparing the last bit of scholarly
labour(!) of penetrating the “mystery of caste” so as to emancipate onself from it in the future.
Thus for ambedkar, within his own lifetime, that future is already being signified as “Buddhist”
while clearly for marx, the name of the future is, in the long run, “Communist” and in the short
run, “Ploretariat”.

The course will nevertheless risk enunciating the following negaticve common prescription
across a vast distance: both futural dispositions must traverse as well as free themselves from the
“principle of labour”.

Proposed topics

Class 1

 Principles, problems, questions/truths, histories, subjects

 Ambedkar in 1936- the Independent Labour Party (ILF) and the Annihilation of
Caste(AOC)
 Marx in 1857- the dialectic method of Gundreisse (eg the dialectic between the
workers’ labour and the labour of capialtalist as non worker.)

CLASS 2:
 Labour, Labour power, surplus labour time/from alienation to exploitation-from
1844 manuscripts to Capital
 The specificity of grundeiss ( the concept of General Intellect) and the Italian
autonomist reading of labour power as ontological affirmation.
 Species being and generic humanity- Alain Badiou’s departure from the science
of Capital

CLASS 3
 Division of labour and division of labourers, class and caste
 Ambedkar’s ironic relation to Mao, thoughts on the overcoming of division of
manual and intellectual labour
 What is “service”? The watan system in Maharasthra, the system of liturgies in
Anciet greek and other societies.
Class 4
 Liturgy and the image of the “oriental/ Asiatic” state created from the figure of
the despot and public works
 Liturgy as a system of debt and debt servicing
 The disappearance of the proletariat in the figure of the worker in late capitalism,
the masked ending of the principle of labour in the neoliberal figure of the
consumer-deter- citizen
Class 5
 Who is a Shudra? The translation of Anusuya in different versions of the
Manusmriti
 Shudrafication, feminization and sexualisation of labour-as-service as the
condition for a new global ‘performative proletariat’
 On a possible mistake in the Italian autonomist reading of Marx with interesting
political results (Paulo Virno, Antonio Negri)

Class6

 Schematisation of organisations as objective form (organic and machinic, Rosa

Luxemburg and Lenin)
 Organisation as a question of subjective orientation between ‘principles’ and
‘problems’- chapters from Sarte’s Critique of Dialectical Reason and Alain
Badiou Theory of the Subject’
 On a possible misunderstanding around the use of ‘hegemony’ in current
polemics- slavery, hegemony, counter-hegemony and free association beyond
hegemonic politics in democracy (Phule and Ambedkar, Ambedkar and PC Joshi)

CLASS7
 Concluding lessons- recapitulating of use value, exchange value, value-form and
society of capital (Wolfgangstiek)
 Labour, land, money as “fictitious commodities” (Karl Polany) and freedom from
the fiction of value
 How to read the German Ideology as a communist text for a future without the
value form ?
CLASS8
 A ‘disposition’ beyond labour-- Buddha or Marx and Ambedkar’s new Book of
the General Intellect
 Indianest blockage of the General Intellect—RSS of labour and the RSS of
BJP(Walter Anderson’s interesting but doubtful thesis)
 “Leisure is higher than labour”, Ambedkar’s critique of gandhism- a dalit
aristocracy reminiscent of dictatorship of proletariat?
 A note on the attempted neutralization of the thought of reservation through
economic quota.