6 SOCIAL SCIENTIST within the necessities and constraints of the given objective, economic-structural situation, within this 'determination by the economic in the first instance* that whatever happens, every complex historical effect or outcome is ultimately determined by the activity of men in pursuit of their needs or purposes. Viewed thus, from a Marxist perspective, different parts or problems of Indian society with all their conflicts and contradictions—relating to religion or politics, caste, language or region, ethnicity or nationality, ideology or culture, women's oppression or national integration, etc—do not exist totally apart from each other or from society, the social whole. And while these often do have a historically specific autonomous reality of their own, their dynamics is decisively conditioned by the economic structural logic of the continental social formation that is India today. And this is the logic of a development, which is essentially capitalist in nature, though it has a historically specific character of its own which scholars variously refer to when they speak of a state or government-supported capitalism, weak or retarded or backward capitalism, underdeveloped capitalism or capitalist underdevelopment or even 'peripheral* or 'compradore-bureaucratic' capitalism, etc. It is in this sense alone that the problems or conflicts mentioned above, including those relating to religion or communalism, are economy or class dependent. A class perspective today has to accommodate the rich diversity of contemporary Indian social reality even as it lays emphasis on the crucial importance of the economic base and its structural logic that conditions the dynamics of this diversity. Needless to add, without such emphasis Marxism would be theoretically indistinguishable from any other 'sociology'. And it is not without reason that today, especially in the absence of class based people's politics, all the identities, all the divides and fissures of Indian society are simultaneously becoming significant and explosive. This is equally true of the explosive emergence of communalism in recent years. In its effort to understand communalism, Marxism does not decry the work»of non-Marxist scholarship, whether carried out from the nationalist perspective, or with an empiricist orientation, or in any other manner. Its contribution is most useful for understanding communalism in contemporary India and for waging an effective struggle against it. Thus it is important to recognize that communalism is in a sense a false ideology (even if the concept of 'false consciousness' is not very helpful); or that it is a corruption of even bourgeois-democratic politics (which in a way it is); or that economic factors significantly contribute to the rise and spread of communalism (which they indeed do); or that communalism is a 'modern' phenomenon (which perhaps could be said of just about everything today barring odd 'historical substrata'). . . All this, the 'truths' so discovered, is certainly important and therein lies the value of the work done in the empiricist mode. But we must seek an understanding of communalism