Indian society presents a layered dialectic of oppression, in which the social contradictions are not merely linear but historically entangled across multiple structural layers. At its foundational level, caste functions as a pre-capitalist form of social stratification, deeply rooted in religious ritualism, kinship codes, and hereditary occupational divisions. This rigid system predates modern economic structures and operates as a decohesive force, fragmenting society into endogamous and unequal units, thereby arresting horizontal solidarity. On the other hand, class emerges from the capitalist mode of production, dividing people based on their relationship to the means of production—owners and laborers, capital and wage. Class represents a more dynamic, historically contingent cleavage tied to economic roles and surplus appropriation, functioning as a cohesive force capable of unifying the oppressed under collective material interests. In the Indian context, these two axes—caste and class—do not exist in isolation but interact dialectically, producing a complex matrix of exploitation where caste inflects class, and class struggle is mediated through caste identities, necessitating a layered analytical and strategic framework for any genuine emancipatory politics.
The superposition of capitalism and feudalism in India is a defining feature of its historical social formation—a unique configuration where pre-capitalist and capitalist modes of production do not merely succeed one another in linear sequence but coexist and interact, producing a layered system of exploitation. In this superposed reality, caste-based oppression functions as the remnant and living residue of Indian feudalism, while class-based exploitation constitutes the structural foundation of Indian capitalism. The caste system, rooted in ritual purity, hereditary occupation, and social hierarchy, was historically the ideological and institutional scaffolding of agrarian feudalism—distributing labor, land, and status along immobile lines of birth. Even as India transitioned into capitalist modernity, this feudal caste structure did not dissolve, but was reconfigured to serve the needs of emerging bourgeois relations.
Today, dominant castes often occupy positions of capitalist power—owning land, controlling capital, and dominating political institutions—while Dalits, Adivasis, and marginalized OBCs are disproportionately concentrated in precarious, informal, and stigmatized forms of labor, forming the base of the modern working class. Thus, capitalist class relations are not caste-neutral; they are caste-mediated, with feudal social divisions shaping access to opportunity, mobility, and dignity. This results in a dual system of domination, where capital exploits labor and caste polices identity—one extracting surplus, the other enforcing social exclusion. These two forms of oppression do not operate independently; they reinforce one another, creating a complex dialectic where caste legitimizes class inequality, and class structures reproduce caste-based marginality.
From a quantum dialectical standpoint, this coexistence is not an anomaly but a superposed contradiction—a historical field where decohesive forces of caste fragmentation and cohesive forces of capitalist integration are entangled, producing both economic exploitation and ontological degradation. Revolutionary praxis in India must therefore address both layers simultaneously—dismantling the caste system not merely as a cultural injustice but as a feudal social technology embedded in capitalist relations, and confronting capitalist exploitation not in abstraction but as a caste-inflected process of labor alienation and surplus extraction. Only by recognizing and sublating this historical superposition of feudalism and capitalism can Indian society move toward a truly egalitarian, casteless, and classless future.
Ambedkarism and Marxism—though often treated as ideologically divergent or even mutually exclusive in academic and political discourses—are, in essence, two profound emancipatory visions grounded in the critique of structural oppression and the unwavering commitment to human dignity, equality, and collective liberation. Ambedkarism arises from the lived experience of ontological humiliation and social exclusion rooted in the caste system, and seeks to dismantle this pre-capitalist system through moral revolt, constitutional reform, and spiritual reorientation. Marxism, emerging from the critique of economic exploitation and alienated labor in capitalist societies, aims to overthrow class rule through collective struggle and the transformation of the material base. While Ambedkarism emphasizes identity-based injustice and social annihilation of caste, Marxism prioritizes class struggle and the abolition of private property. However, when viewed through the lens of Quantum Dialectics—a conceptual framework that understands reality as constituted by the continuous interplay of cohesive and decohesive forces, contradiction, dynamic equilibrium, and the dialectical movement of sublation—these two ideologies appear not as antitheses, but as dialectical counterpoles of a unified field of liberation. Their tensions, rather than being contradictions to be resolved by exclusion, are productive contradictions—generating a field of higher-order synthesis where the caste question and the class question are not collapsed into one another, but are integrated as entangled layers of social reality. In this light, the emancipatory project becomes not a matter of choosing between Ambedkar or Marx, but of sublating both into a quantum dialectical praxis that is historically grounded, structurally comprehensive, and ontologically transformative.
Caste, when viewed through the lens of Quantum Dialectics, emerges as a deeply decoherent fossil of the pre-capitalist past—a structural residue that continues to exert entropic force upon the evolving dynamics of Indian society. It represents a rigid architecture of social fragmentation, in which individuals are hierarchically categorized based on birth, ritual purity, and hereditary occupation, thereby obstructing the natural flow of cohesive social integration. Unlike class, which arises from dynamic relations within the productive base and can potentially evolve through struggle and transformation, caste is a static codification of difference—a frozen contradiction that institutionalizes inequality not merely in material terms, but in symbolic, cultural, and psychological realms. Its persistence is not tied to its utility in the modern economy, but to its non-economic base—reproduced through religious doctrine, cultural hegemony, social customs, and state complicity. Even as India transitions through phases of capitalism, neoliberalism, and technological modernization, caste continues to mediate access to education, land, employment, political representation, and social capital, functioning as a decohesive force that resists dialectical motion and reinforces social entropy. In this sense, caste is not simply a backward relic—it is an active mechanism of fragmentation that weakens class solidarity and impedes the emergence of a unified emancipatory consciousness, unless consciously confronted and sublated through a combined strategy of moral, cultural, and material transformation.
Caste is not a mere ideological reflection or cultural superstructure resting atop economic class relations—it is an embedded, foundational structure of decoherent inertia, historically sedimented within the very fabric of Indian society. Unlike the classical Marxist assumption that caste will dissolve as capitalism advances and class relations intensify, caste persists as a non-linear, self-replicating force that intertwines with, and often overrides, economic categories. It obstructs the dialectical cohesion necessary for building class solidarity by imposing pre-class divisions of status, purity, and identity, which precede and reconfigure the way labor itself is perceived and organized. From the perspective of Quantum Dialectics, this creates a condition of “entangled oppression”—a multi-dimensional contradiction in which a Dalit proletarian is not only exploited as labor within the capitalist system but is simultaneously dehumanized and disqualified ontologically within the caste order. This oppression is not purely material; it operates at the level of being and knowing—subjecting Dalits to ontological humiliation, where their existence is marked as impure or subhuman, and to epistemic invisibility, where their knowledge, experience, and agency are systematically erased or discredited within dominant discourses. This dual burden—of class-based exploitation and caste-based negation—generates a form of social suffering that cannot be reduced to economic metrics alone. It requires a dialectical framework broad enough to capture the superposed layers of structural violence, capable of resolving not only economic contradictions but also the deeper civilizational fissures embedded in the Indian social consciousness.
Ambedkarism, when understood through the prism of Quantum Dialectics, emerges not merely as a protest against social injustice, but as a profound counter-decohesive force—a conscious effort to dismantle entrenched structures of fragmentation and replace them with a higher-order synthesis grounded in universal human values. Rather than seeking mechanical unity through assimilation or token inclusion, Ambedkar envisioned a radical reconstitution of Indian society through the triadic principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity—not as abstract ideals, but as the living foundation of a casteless democracy. His call for constitutional morality was not a mere appeal to legalism, but a demand for a new ethical ontology—a mode of collective being in which hierarchical relations based on birth would be irreversibly dislodged. Ambedkar’s political philosophy recognized that economic redistribution alone could not annihilate caste, for caste operated not just through material deprivation, but through ritual degradation, epistemic disqualification, and social invisibilization. Thus, he proposed a multidimensional strategy of epistemic rupture (challenging the legitimacy of Brahmanical knowledge systems), spiritual revolt (rejecting the metaphysics of inequality), and institutional redesign (building democratic structures rooted in equality). His conversion to Navayana Buddhism was not a retreat into religious symbolism but a dialectical act of negation and transcendence—a conscious refusal to remain within the metaphysical logic of caste Hinduism and a leap into a new civilizational paradigm. From a quantum dialectical perspective, this was a quantized moral transition—a revolutionary leap that collapsed the wavefunction of inherited oppression and generated a new field of ethical resonance, capable of re-coding the Indian social psyche on egalitarian and rational foundations. Ambedkarism, therefore, is not a deviation from revolutionary praxis but a revolution at the level of being itself—a necessary counterpoint to any materialist transformation that seeks to be complete and enduring.
Marxism, in its foundational orientation, focuses on the class structure as the cohesive axis of social reorganization—emerging from the material relations of production between labor and capital, and generating a dialectical contradiction that binds the oppressed into a collective historical subject. Unlike caste, which fragments society through rigid hierarchies of birth and ritual, class arises from the social process of production, where individuals are positioned based on their control over, or alienation from, the means of production. Class struggle, therefore, is a cohesive contradiction—it does not atomize but unifies the exploited through their shared experience of economic domination, pointing toward a collective emancipatory potential. In Marxist theory, the proletariat is not merely a victim of the capitalist order, but its dialectical negation—the conscious agent of revolutionary transformation, destined to abolish class itself and usher in a society based on equality and collective ownership. However, traditional Marxism has often treated caste as part of the ideological superstructure—a secondary phenomenon to be resolved through changes in the economic base—a view criticized by Ambedkarites and other anti-caste theorists as economically reductionist and blind to the autonomous, ontological violence of caste. Yet, from the standpoint of Quantum Dialectics, Marxism reveals a deeper potential: class is not a fixed or monolithic identity, but an emergent, layered totality, shaped by historical processes, ideological formations, and its entanglement with other structural contradictions, including caste. A quantum dialectical re-reading of Marxism thus allows for a non-reductionist, non-linear understanding of class struggle—one that recognizes caste as a decohesive contradiction embedded within class relations in India. For Marxism to become fully coherent in the Indian context, it must integrate the specificity of caste as both a social reality and a material condition, thereby evolving into a composite revolutionary praxis capable of confronting the full spectrum of oppression.
Quantum Dialectics teaches us that contradictions are not obstacles to be eliminated, but engines of transformation—dynamic tensions that, when properly engaged, give rise to emergent properties and higher forms of organization. In this framework, contradictions do not negate or cancel each other out; rather, they exist in a state of productive superposition, where their mutual interaction creates the conditions for synthesis and sublation. The apparent dualism between caste and class, or between Ambedkarism and Marxism, should not be seen as an irreconcilable impasse or ideological deadlock. Instead, it constitutes a field of dialectical potential, wherein each polarity holds within it the seed of its transcendence through the other. Just as quantum fields can coexist, interfere, and entangle—producing novel outcomes beyond classical prediction—social contradictions can coexist and co-produce new forms of consciousness, struggle, and solidarity when dialectically mediated. Ambedkarism, with its ethical critique of ontological injustice, and Marxism, with its structural analysis of economic exploitation, are not antagonistic poles, but entangled waveforms within the broader field of liberation. Their interaction, when consciously theorized and organized, can catalyze an emancipatory praxis that is neither blind to identity nor oblivious to material relations. In this way, Quantum Dialectics offers not only a philosophy of contradiction but a science of revolutionary emergence—where the fusion of caste and class struggles opens a higher phase of collective becoming.
Caste and class in the Indian context are not merely parallel structures of oppression, nor can they be reduced to a simple hierarchy of cause and effect; rather, they are interpenetrating and co-constitutive fields that dynamically shape and reinforce one another. The caste system, though rooted in religious and cultural codes, manifests with profound economic consequences—governing land ownership, access to education, patterns of labor, and mobility across generations. Simultaneously, class structures in India are deeply caste-inflected—where ownership of capital, control over institutions, and access to employment are disproportionately concentrated among dominant caste groups, while Dalits and Adivasis are overrepresented in the most precarious and stigmatized forms of labor. From this perspective, oppression is not dual but dialectical—a complex mesh where caste mediates class, and class reinforces caste. A revolutionary politics, therefore, must transcend the exclusive binaries that pit caste politics against class politics, and instead embrace a synergic dialectics that understands their mutual conditioning and historical entanglement. Such a praxis requires a strategic and theoretical shift: not merely adding caste to class analysis, or vice versa, but developing an integrated framework that acknowledges how economic exploitation and social humiliation co-produce the material and psychic conditions of subjugation. Only by embracing this entangled contradiction can a truly emancipatory movement be forged—capable of dismantling both the ritualized hierarchy of caste and the extractive machinery of capital, and thereby ushering in a new horizon of social justice and collective liberation.
Ambedkarism and Marxism, when dialectically interpreted, offer two essential and interdependent dimensions of revolutionary transformation—each addressing a distinct layer of social reality and human suffering. Ambedkarism brings forth the decohesive critique, acting as a force of rupture that challenges the sanctity of inherited tradition, ritualized inequality, and the spiritual and social legitimacy of caste hierarchy. It speaks in the language of moral indignation, existential dignity, and civilizational disobedience, demanding not just reform but a radical break from the ontological foundations of Brahmanical dominance. In contrast, Marxism offers the cohesive drive, focusing on the reorganization of the material base, the abolition of exploitative class relations, and the establishment of collective ownership over the means of production. Where Ambedkarism exposes the soul-deep scars of caste-based humiliation and insists on legal, ethical, and spiritual reconstitution, Marxism maps the structural roots of economic exploitation and articulates the path to material emancipation through class struggle. A truly dialectical revolution in India must sublate these two trajectories—merging Ambedkar’s moral rebellion with Marx’s structural transformation—so that the social body is not only materially restructured but also ontologically healed. Without this synthesis, one risks collapsing into identity essentialism and the other into economic reductionism; only together can they forge a total revolution that liberates both the body and the soul from the interlocked chains of caste and class.
To achieve a genuine synthesis of Ambedkarite and Marxist emancipatory visions, a set of dialectically grounded principles must be consciously operationalized—principles that do not merely aggregate perspectives, but fuse them into a quantum dialectical praxis. First, Epistemic Synergy must be established by integrating Ambedkar’s legal-ethical rationalism, grounded in moral justice and constitutionalism, with Marx’s historical-materialist critique of capitalism and class exploitation. This convergence allows truth to emerge not from dogmatic absolutism, but from the collision and creative interpenetration of distinct modes of knowing—a sublation of ethical normativity and structural analysis into a unified cognitive force. Second, any revolutionary political program must treat class struggle and caste annihilation not as parallel or competing projects but as interwoven contradictions—entangled layers of oppression that reinforce one another and must be resolved together for meaningful liberation. Third, Revolutionary Subjectivity must be centered in the Dalit working class, who embody the convergence of both caste-based degradation and class-based exploitation. They constitute the dialectical fulcrum—the social node most capable of catalyzing a transformative leap, as they carry within their experience the full weight of India’s layered contradictions. Fourth, Dialectical Organization is essential; political parties and mass movements must abandon mechanical hierarchies and rigid ideological silos to adopt fluid, quantum-layered structures that can accommodate both identity-based mobilizations and class-based organizing in principled yet flexible unity. Finally, the Sublation of Identity and Class is key: identity politics must transcend mere cultural assertion to engage in structural transformation, and class politics must shed its reductionist tendencies and acknowledge the ontological weight of social humiliation. Through this mediated synthesis, identity becomes a revolutionary force when it merges into the collective process of material reorganization and cultural emancipation, thus allowing the contradictions of caste and class to not only coexist but evolve toward a higher emancipatory totality.
Ambedkarism and Marxism, when viewed through the integrative lens of Quantum Dialectics, emerge not as mutually exclusive or antagonistic ideologies, but as differentiated yet complementary energies within a shared emancipatory field—each representing a distinct axis of resistance against structured domination. Ambedkarism targets the ontological and civilizational core of Indian social oppression—the caste system—as a force of social atomization, humiliation, and denial of human dignity. It exposes how hierarchy is naturalized through birth, ritual, and culture, and how this system fragments the social body into incommensurable units, denying any possibility of collective becoming. Marxism, on the other hand, critiques the economic alienation and commodification inherent in capitalist production, where human labor is estranged from its own product, its purpose, and its potential for self-realization. It seeks liberation through the collectivization of property and abolition of exploitative class relations. These two visions—Ambedkar’s battle against caste-based ontological exclusion and Marx’s critique of class-based material alienation—are not competing truths, but entangled dialectical polarities, each addressing a dimension of the same fractured reality. From a quantum dialectical standpoint, liberation is not possible through the linear application of either ideology in isolation, as each by itself risks being partial, stagnant, or co-opted—Ambedkarism lapsing into identity essentialism without structural change, and Marxism degenerating into economic reductionism without social healing. Only their sublated synthesis, grounded in a dynamic interplay of cohesive (class solidarity) and decohesive (caste rupture) forces, can generate a higher-order praxis—one capable of dismantling the multidimensional architecture of oppression and giving rise to a just and unified social totality.
The issue of caste-based reservations in India is a complex and contested terrain, reflecting the deep historical injustices and structural inequalities embedded within the caste system. Far from being a mere policy of affirmative action, reservations are a dialectical response to centuries of systemic exclusion, marginalization, and the denial of access to education, employment, and political power for historically oppressed communities, particularly the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and Other Backward Classes. Critics often portray reservations as anti-meritocratic or divisive, but this view overlooks the ontological inequality produced by caste itself—a system that predetermined one’s life chances long before modern notions of merit emerged. From a quantum dialectical perspective, reservations function as a counter-decohesive mechanism—not to fragment society further, but to restore equilibrium by rebalancing access to institutional space that has long been monopolized by dominant castes. They serve as a transitional tool within a broader historical process of social sublation, aiming to transform the entrenched contradictions of caste-based privilege into a more just and inclusive social order. Ultimately, caste-based reservations are not about appeasement or charity—they are about structural justice, epistemic recognition, and the dialectical reconfiguration of the Indian social contract.
Ambedkarite politics and Hindutva politics represent two fundamentally opposed visions of Indian society, grounded in contradictory ontological and political premises. Ambedkarite politics is rooted in the struggle for social justice, dignity, and the annihilation of caste; it seeks to dismantle Brahmanical hierarchies through constitutional rights, legal safeguards, and the moral force of equality, drawing from both Enlightenment rationalism and anti-caste spiritual traditions like Navayana Buddhism. In contrast, Hindutva politics represents a reactionary consolidation of upper-caste Hindu identity, aiming to homogenize India under a theocratic-cultural nationalism that denies the historic injustices of caste while instrumentalizing Dalit and Adivasi identities for electoral mobilization. From a quantum dialectical perspective, Ambedkarite politics acts as a decohesive liberatory force—disrupting inherited hierarchies and catalyzing emergent social formations—whereas Hindutva operates as a cohesive reactionary force, artificially imposing unity through mythic symbols, cultural majoritarianism, and caste-blind nationalism. While one strives for the democratization of society through structural transformation, the other seeks a return to hierarchical order masked as cultural unity, making their contradiction not merely ideological but ontological and civilizational in nature.
The anti-communist sentiments among sections of Ambedkarite movements arises from both historical experience and ideological divergence, rooted in the perceived failure of Indian communists to adequately address caste oppression within their class-based frameworks. Many Ambedkarites argue that communist parties, while championing proletarian revolution and economic justice, have historically downplayed or even dismissed the ontological violence of caste, treating it as a secondary contradiction that would dissolve automatically through class struggle. This reductionist approach led to a deep mistrust, especially among Dalit intellectuals and activists, who saw in Marxist politics an insensitivity to the lived realities of untouchability, social exclusion, and symbolic degradation. Furthermore, the upper-caste dominance within leftist leadership reinforced suspicions that communism in India had internalized the very hierarchies it claimed to oppose. From a quantum dialectical perspective, this conflict is not merely a strategic disagreement but a deeper contradiction between structural analysis and existential recognition—between a cohesive economic narrative and a decohesive identity-based lived experience. However, this antagonism need not be permanent; it reflects a sublatable contradiction, one that can be transcended through a dialectical synthesis where Ambedkarite and Marxist insights are integrated into a unified emancipatory praxis that simultaneously confronts caste and class as interpenetrating modalities of oppression.
Communist parties in India must urgently and consciously integrate the anti-bourgeois class struggle with the anti-feudal caste struggle, recognizing that their historical superposition is not an abstract theoretical construct but a material reality etched into the Indian socio-economic formation. Unlike in many other capitalist societies where class emerged as the primary axis of exploitation, the Indian context is marked by a deep entanglement of class and caste, where feudal remnants of caste hierarchy persist even within capitalist relations of production. Here, caste is not merely a cultural residue, but a mode of social control and labor segmentation that reinforces capitalist accumulation and class exploitation. The bourgeois class, particularly in India, is often caste-insulated, drawing its power from both control over capital and inherited social privilege, while the Dalit and Adivasi working classes remain doubly oppressed—exploited economically and degraded socially.
From a quantum dialectical perspective, these two contradictions—capital vs. labor and caste vs. dignity—coexist in superposition, forming a multi-layered matrix of oppression where neither can be resolved in isolation. A revolutionary strategy that ignores caste in favor of pure class politics will remain blind to the decohesive fault-lines that prevent proletarian unity, while a politics that focuses solely on caste without addressing the class foundations of inequality risks lapsing into reformist identity assertion without systemic transformation. Therefore, Indian communists must dialectically fuse anti-bourgeois and anti-feudal struggles, treating caste annihilation and class abolition not as parallel tasks, but as interpenetrating moments of a unified revolutionary process.
This demands a restructuring of political programs, leadership composition, cadre training, and ideological formulations—embedding anti-caste consciousness within Marxist theory and practice, and elevating the struggles of Dalit, Adivasi, and OBC workers as central to the revolutionary project. It also requires alliances with Ambedkarite movements, not through tactical opportunism, but through a principled recognition of their shared goal of human emancipation. Only by transcending the false dichotomy of caste vs. class and embracing their dialectical entanglement can Indian communism evolve into a truly liberatory force, capable of confronting both the bourgeois state and the Brahmanical social order, and realizing a revolutionary synthesis that is both materially transformative and ontologically redemptive.
The quantum dialectical strategy of revolution in India must emerge not through negating these traditions, but by integrating their contradictions into a new ontological praxis—a politics that transforms not only material relations but consciousness itself. In this sublated paradigm, the Indian revolution becomes not only possible—but necessary, inevitable, and historically emergent.
Ambedkarite movements, while rooted in the righteous and necessary struggle against caste-based discrimination, must also recognize the strategic and historical importance of integrating their anti-caste struggle with the broader class struggle led by working-class and communist movements in India. Caste oppression, though distinct in its cultural and ontological violence, is not sustained in a social vacuum—it is structurally embedded within the economic architecture of the bourgeois-feudal order. The persistence of caste is not merely due to religious dogma or cultural inertia, but because it serves as a functional tool of social control and labor segmentation within the present mode of production. Dominant castes, particularly in rural India, continue to control land and resources, often as remnants of feudal landlordism, while also participating in urban capitalist accumulation, thereby forming a composite ruling class that draws legitimacy from both tradition and capital.
Ambedkarites must therefore see that true caste annihilation cannot be achieved solely through legal reform or identity assertion; it requires a revolutionary restructuring of the socio-economic base—the abolition of private property in land and capital that sustains caste hierarchies in material form. While Ambedkar’s vision was rooted in justice, equality, and dignity, he also warned that without economic democracy, political democracy would remain hollow. To realize his radical legacy fully, Ambedkarites must consciously align with class-based movements, especially the working-class struggles and communist movements that challenge the core of capitalist and feudal exploitation. This does not mean subordinating the caste question to class, but rather dialectically integrating both, recognizing their mutual conditioning and historical entanglement.
From a quantum dialectical perspective, caste and class are not separate vectors but entangled contradictions—each reinforcing the other in a superposed field of oppression. Hence, only a unified revolutionary front, grounded in both anti-caste and anti-capitalist praxis, can confront and overthrow the bourgeois-feudal ruling bloc that maintains its dominance by dividing the oppressed along caste and identity lines. By forging principled alliances with class movements, Ambedkarites can elevate their struggle from fragmented resistance to systemic transformation, helping to build a casteless, classless, and truly democratic India. This fusion would not dilute the Ambedkarite project—it would complete and empower it, aligning it with the deeper structural forces required to dismantle the intertwined engines of exploitation and humiliation.
Only when the caste-based decohesion of Indian society is synthesized with the class-based cohesion of revolutionary politics can we envision a society free from both exploitation and humiliation—a society where difference is not hierarchy, and where collective labor is dignified by collective freedom. That, in essence, is the dialectical becoming of liberation.
QUANTUM DIALECTICS - BLOG ARTICLES 
Leave a comment