Ambedkar paid keen attention to the debate with Marxism. In his speech delivered in Kathmandu, he states, “I was a professor of economics and I have spent a great deal of time studying Karl Marx, communism and all that”. In his article on Buddha and Karl Marx, Ambedkar introduces himself as a person “having read both (Buddha and Karl Marx) and being interested in the ideology of both, a comparison between them just forces itself on me”.

We find that Marxism was the only ideology Ambedkar respected in any of his discussions on social analysis and social transformation. Although the methodology of Ambedkar was not a Marxist one, the economic works of Ambedkar clearly evidence the anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, anti-feudal and radical democratic direction of his economic analysis.

Ambedkar indicates the economic inefficiency of the caste system all through Indian history and asserts that the caste practice reduces the mobility of labour as well as capital. Social and individual efficiency and the capacity of an individual to choose and to make his own career are violated in the caste system. The caste system appoints tasks to individuals in advance, selected not on the basis of trained or original capacities, but on that of the social status of the parents.

The caste system contains not only economic exploitative mechanisms but operates on the basis of the dogma of predestination, formulated and safeguarded by the Hindu religion. The caste system is able to mobilise cheap labour or free labour under capitalism. Ambedkar goes on to state that the burdens of economic crises are laid upon the oppressed castes by maintaining the caste system in current times.

... contd.