REFLECTIONS ON THE NATURE OF THE INDIAN BOURGEOISIE 5 By the end of the nineteenth century, Germany had become the most powerful European country, economically speaking. There, the ruling group was a combination of feudalised bureaucrats, military men and business men in combination with a set of aristocrats directing the state apparatus for the goal of maximising the economic and military power of Germany. Germany also had the largest Social Democratic Party professing a Marxist ideology. Explicit codes restricted the political activities of the socialists. A parliamentary set-up existed but with a final veto power exercised by the Kaiser. Germany also contained a capitalist class whose leaders exercised paternalistic control over the workers and the employees. It was not again a society of free capitalists. Landlords and landlords' values, monarchical values were intermingled in it. We have thus the sorry spectacle of the largest Marxist Social Democratic Party then supporting the First World War—a party which was then designated by Lenin as a social imperialist party. We can see that just because something grows for the first time in a country, it does not necessarily triumph. Neither pure capitalism nor a pure working class hegemony could triumph in Germany in 1914. The point about this sketchy reference to the development of capitalism elsewhere is that while with the work of Marx, Engels and Lenin and other Marxists we have a large body of literature dissecting the anatomy of capitalism, we must remember that the development of that system has not followed any pure lines in any country. Nor did the leaders of the Marxist tradition expect any such purity in the development they had analysed. Lenin's work on the development of capitalism in Russia can be read as a delineation of the peculiarities of that capitalism as well as a demonstration that the system could grow on that social matrix, in spite of, and sometimes, because of, those peculiarities. Hence, when we turn to a study of Indian capitalism there is no use looking for an ideal type. An ideal type can be used to understand some particular structure at a moment of history, or to explain better the evolution of one slice of reality—but not to capture the complexities of the Indian society as it evolved. The theory and history of capitalism in the North Atlantic seaboard, in the Mediterranean countries and in Japan have been studied far more intensively than in India, or for that matter, in any third world country. In order to gain a comparative perspective, we will have to glance at some European, Japanese and American analogies from time to time. But we must not take the pattern of development in any country as an ideal or norm. For, the serpentine history of capitalism does not permit the illusion that its destructiveness could be eliminated by some optimal social arrangement or development sequence. There is no such entity as optimal capitalism. Capitalism has always been a horrible system