MARXISM AND THE CASTE SYSTEM 71 -wing from Marx and Weber, Furnivall and Lenin in a way that most non-Marxist but ^progressive^ schloars might do. Though I wanted to develop a class-based analysis of the transformation of caste in colonial India, what emerged instead was only a kind of combination of categories, an attempt to aggregate ^economic", ^political" and ^cultural" levels and to define concrete events, individuals and structures in terms of the mixing of ^class" and ^caste/' Such an approach ends up by opposing the two categories as if they existed separately and eternally; it explicitly or implicitly sees ^class^9 in very crude (and non-Marxist) ^economic" terms and ^caste" as a ^culturaF' feature; and it results in such statements as: ^caste is more inportant than class", ^class is more crucial", ^caste is giving way to class", and so on. This is an essentially bourgeois-liberal approach that remains dominant today only in the absence of a real Marxist alternative, and fails to grasp the essence of either class (understood in terms of the relations of production) or caste. Source of the Theoretical Weakness This theoretical weakness was perhaps inevitable. My dissertation was written in 1972-73 for the University of California, Berkeley—a university that has produced both some of the most militant and radicalized student movements in the U S and intellectuals involved in such lovely affairs as the GIA-backed 1965 massacre in Indonesia. At the time, there were thousands, tens of thousands of us coming out of the student movement, the anti-war movement, the Black movement and the women's movement who were moving in a Marxist direction. But there was no live Marxist tradition in scholarship; the American working class movement had its traditions of militancy and violence but no living socialist ideology (so much so that May day is unknown to the vast maj^ ority of American workers and I had to first learn about its origins from celebrations in India); the purging of communists from unions and universities in the 1950s had still not been overcome; and the process by which activists in the democratic movements of the 1960s were turning to real study of Marxist classics had just begun. Thus, while by 1973 it was barely possible for a graduate student writing a dissertation in a major university to call oneself a "Marxist" (but not a^Marxist-Leninist; I was forced to remove that term as well as the term "third world" from my dissertation), this was more a matter of identification and aspiration than anything else; it was not possible at the time to get any real training in analysis based on historical materialism. Today the situation has changed somewhat. There is a growing Marxist and radical tradition in scholarship as well as some increased communist presence in the union movement. There are courses on capitalism and imperialism in major universities and the possibility of some systematic exposure to basic Marxist theory both at the undergraduate and post-graduate levels.