COMMUNALfsM AND THE STRUGGLE AGAINST COMMUNALISM 5 logy, culture and so on—in which communalism, an 'insanity* itself, has become functional at the present historical conjuncture. But it is not these methodological issues that I am going to explore in this presentation. My purpose here is to share, with a few additional considerations, an argument which I have already elaborated elsewhere," namely, a Marxist understanding of communalism and its implications for our struggle against it. Questions of tactical nature have, of course, an importance of their own in such a struggle. But, obviously, it is not possible for me to deal with them here, especially in view of the rapidly changing positions and alignments in contemporary Indian politics. My concern is primarily with the problem of how to think in these matters, with sketching an approach to communalism in India which should also be suggestive of the Marxist method of analysis in dealing with several similar problems which we are currently beset with in our country. The exercise is worthwhile, for Left thinking in these matters has often little or nothing to do with Marxism—it tends to operate almost entirely on the essentially bourgeois terrain of left-nationalism. And what passes for Marxist analysis is either an economic version of the empiricist 'theory of factors', or, when it is not downright reductionism— 'communalism today is the product of capitalism,' etc—only exercises in economic interpretation which, it is well to remember, is as old as Plato. II As Marxism views it, society is not merely an aggregate or random togetherness of parts, factors, levels or instances. It is a social whole, or totality, a historically specific structured interdependence of parts, with an economic-structural base and loaded with contradictions that account for its dynamics, its concrete over-determined historical development. In other words this determination, insofar as we must use the term, is neither unique, nor is it to be understood in any economic or class reductionist manner; it is something far more complex and problematic, realized on an economic base, but through any number of interactions and mediations. The important point is that the parts, aspects or instances, generally referred to as super-structure, along with their contradictions, are not some epiphenomenal manifestations of the economic base. On the contrary, they may and often do have an autonomous, irreducible, historically specific existence of their own. But this is an existence of dialectical, determined and determining, relationship to each other and to the social whole. And the dynamics of this existence, the working out of their contradictions, is most decisively conditioned by the basic economic contradictions, the structural logic of the economic base. One might add that it is only * See Of Marxism and Indian Politics, especially the essay 'Theorising Communalism in India', Ajanta Publications (India), New Delhi, 1990.