4 Social Scientist
'bourgeois* and ignore them brings no conviction. They have to be rationally analysed. In India every day we find ourselves face to face with chauvinistic, communal and regional approaches to history, which we must answer by detailed arguments. But there are other and more fundamental challenges too. Gramsci, in criticising Bukharin's ABC of Communism said that in the war of ideas, unlike ordinary war, you have to attack the enemy's strongest, and not weakest points. This, of course, demands constant preparation and self-examination: the refining and extension of Marxist positions. This examination must cover everything from general principles to specific facts, because both are all the time being brought into question by others. We have to answer not by denunciation—that is always a bad counsellor—but careful scrutiny and investigation.
Finally, I believe that Scientific Socialism requires constant debate within itself, without need for polemics from outside. Long before the current recognition of the virtues of 'plurality*, Mao Tse-tung had urged that truth could belong to a minority, and all truths are at first espoused only by a minority. This applies to a revolutionary party as well as society at large.
'MIND AND MATTER' IN HISTORY
One of the common obscurities in popular understanding about Marxian historiography has been caused, I believe, by the text-book view of Marxism as 'determinism'. While Marxists have protested against this characterization, their own description of 'Historical Materialism1 (as in Stalin's essay on Dialectical and Historical Materialism) is often in fact couched in deterministic terms. We are told that the production technology ('forces of production') determines the social relationships ('relations of production'). These together constitute the 'mode of production', which determines the world of ideas and culture ('the superstructure'). For has not Marx said, 'It is their social being that determines their consciousness'? Clearly the relationship of technique—class relations and mode of production—and culture, are crucial, but in what way exactly does one part of the relationship 'determine' the configuration of the other part? It has been said that 'Marxism is a product of capitalism'. It could not have arisen before capitalism created the working class. But that the different aspects of Marx's thought were inevitably or automatically just what they were, having been directly formed by the conditions created by capitalism, would be a statement very difficult to substantiate.
One would rather propose that capitalism set the context, rather than the structure, for Marxism—and this is very different from determinism of any recognisable kind. (For the moment, I am not going into Althusser's discussion of 'determination1 and 'ovcrdetermination').
Marxist text-books often suggest that the 'mode of production', but especially the 'forces of production', represent the 'material' base, whereas ideas form a separate superstructure seated upon it. But long