Editing BR Ambedkar (section)

=== Buddhism and Marx ===

In a late essay, "Buddha or Karl Marx," Ambedkar directly compared Buddhism with Marxism as rival diagnoses of, and remedies for, social suffering. He credited Marxism with correctly identifying exploitation and the necessity of eliminating private property in the means of production as a route to human welfare, but rejected the Marxist means of violent revolution, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and a purely materialist account of history and morality; he argued that Buddhism achieved a comparable commitment to economic justice and the abolition of exploitation while grounding it in individual moral transformation, non-violence, and democratic, gradualist means.<ref name="BKM">Ambedkar, B.R. (1956). "Buddha or Karl Marx". In: ''Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches'', Vol. 3: 441–462. Dr. Ambedkar Foundation (2019 reprint). The editors' note on p. 439 says that the Committee found three typed copies of an essay on "Buddha and Karl Marx" in loose sheets, two with the author's handwritten corrections, and compiled the text from them; the chapter heading and the first paragraph (p. 441) say "Buddha or Karl Marx". No manuscript date appears in the volume.</ref> The essay's fuller structure is an introduction and eight sub-topics, running from the creed of the Buddha and the original creed of Marx to a comparison of means and the withering away of the state. Ambedkar accepts as surviving from Marx only a "residue of fire" (p. 444) and rejects the "inevitability" of class struggle and the progressive impoverishment of the working class; he allows that a proletarian dictatorship might be a necessity for backward countries but argues that it must give way to a democratic phase.<ref>BAWS 3, pp. 444, 459, 461–462; Geetha (2021), ''Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar'', pp. 310–314. Geetha compares this to Bernstein-style revisionism and thinks it likely that Ambedkar's route to it was Vladimir Simkhovitch's Columbia course on Marxian and post-Marxian socialism (p. 313).</ref> In the last section he says that the Russians pay no attention to Buddhism as an aid in sustaining Communism once force is withdrawn, and that "the wonder of all wonders" is that the Buddha established communism within the Sangha without dictatorship.<ref>BAWS 3, p. 461 (section VIII of the essay).</ref>

The same arguments appear in speeches of 1956. At the Nagpur conversion he contrasted "the school of Karl Marx", which holds that economic change comes first and everything else follows, with his own view that people also need to feel enthusiastic and creative and be gripped by energy to change things, which only religion could supply; and he asked what Marx taught that differed from the Buddha's saying on sorrow.<ref>Geetha (2021), ''Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar'', p. 305; Ambedkar, B.R. (1956). "The Buddha Dhamma Will Be the Saviour of the World". In: BAWS 17, part 3: 537–543 (the Nagpur speech of 15 October 1956; the Marx remarks are at pp. 537 and 543).</ref> At Kathmandu on November 20, 1956, delegates insisted on the subject of "Buddha or Karl Marx"; Ambedkar himself called it "Buddhism and Communism". He argued that the Buddha used ''dukkha'' in the sense of poverty, that the rules of the Sangha were stricter than any Communist rule in Russia, that Buddhism would not stand in the way of abolishing private property because the Sangha had already conceded it, and that a Marxist must say how long a dictatorship lasts and what replaces it; he ended with the injunction not to be allured by Communist successes.<ref>Ambedkar, B.R. (1956). "Buddha or Karl Marx" (Kathmandu speech, 20 November 1956). In: BAWS 17, part 3: 549–558 (source: ''Report of the 4th Conference of the WFB'', p. 558 n. 1). The headnote (p. 549) records that the speech was delivered in the palace of the King of Nepal, that Chandramani gave the Three Refuges and Five Precepts, and that Ambedkar was first asked to speak on non-violence in Buddhism. The volume contains no reference to Periyar and no 1954 visit to Nepal. The phrase "wonder of all wonders" does not occur in the speech.</ref> The speech and the essay overlap on dukkha and poverty, property in the Sangha, and dictatorship.

How far Ambedkar's Buddhism should be read as a form of socialism has been much debated. He explicitly refused the label and criticized the Communist Party of India's disregard for caste as a category of oppression distinct from class; his insistence that the state must play an active role in economic life, expressed programmatically in his 1947 memorandum ''States and Minorities'', which proposed state ownership of key industries and agriculture, and his description of Buddhism's economic content as aiming at the abolition of poverty and exploitation, place him in close, if unresolved, tension with socialist thought.<ref>Geetha (2021), ''Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar'', ch. 8.</ref> Geetha judges that the essay takes an ethical lens to Marxism and a socialist lens to Buddhism, pressing Buddhism into the service of distributive justice more emphatically than ''The Buddha and His Dhamma'', without ever quoting Marx or citing specific Marxist texts.<ref>Geetha (2021), ''Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar'', ch. 8.</ref> Skaria offers a different, avowedly interpretive reading that claims no textual influence: Ambedkar's most sustained engagement with Marx lies on the shared terrain of the "minor", in the way a "religion of the principle" sits between civil religion and Marx's critique of religion and secularism in "On the Jewish Question", and Ambedkar is, for Skaria, more faithful than Marx to the spectrality of that essay's argument. Skaria himself says he has not ascertained that Ambedkar read "On the Jewish Question", and Ambedkar says only that he studied Marx at length and taught economics.<ref>Skaria, Ajay (2015). "Ambedkar, Marx and the Buddhist Question". ''South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies'' 38.3: 450–465, esp. pp. 450–454, 462–464; BAWS 17, part 3, p. 556. Skaria's date for the essay's completion, 2 December 1956 (p. 450), is given without a footnote and is not supported in BAWS 3. Skaria also refers to the essay as published "posthumously".</ref> The secondary debate in a recent anthology gives several positions: Guru holds that Ambedkar's Buddhism can be neither reduced to Marxism nor opposed to it, credits the [[Dalit Panthers]]' manifesto as the first to bring Ambedkar and Marx together, and argues that the annihilation of caste is a precondition for the annihilation of class (and reports, on an inference from the editors' note, that the original title was "Buddha and Karl Marx"); Bagade stresses Ambedkar's rejection of "rigid Marxist economism" and his treatment of a socio-religious revolution as the prerequisite of a socialist one; and Gokhale notes that the essay reduces what survives of Marx's creed to four points all found already in Buddhism, differing on means.<ref>Gokhale (Ed.) (2021), ''Classical Buddhism, Neo-Buddhism and the Question of Caste'': Guru, ch. 6, pp. 111–126 (pp. 113–115 on the title and the Panthers; Guru's claim of an "original title" is an inference from BAWS 3, p. 439, and the reference is unverified); Bagade, ch. 9, pp. 161–170; Gokhale, ch. 13, pp. 257–272 (pp. 266–269); see also Kumar, ch. 12, pp. 244, 251, who says Ambedkar "brings Buddhism parallel to Marxism". Endnotes of these chapters are missing from the text consulted. Page numbers are printed pages (PDF minus 20).</ref>

Ambedkar's practical relations with the organized Indian left were uneasy. Ober, citing Anupama Rao, notes his personal distrust, the dominance of Brahmins in the Communist Party, and direct competition over shared Dalit constituencies in Maharashtra, so that his comparison of Buddhism and Marxism as "two universalisms" in his last months does not imply warmth toward the Left in practice.<ref>Ober (2023), ''Dust on the Throne'', ch. 7 and endnotes (citing Rao 2009). Ober's phrase that Ambedkar wished "to prevent communism from making any further inroads into Buddhist Asia" (n. 25, p. 332) is Ober's characterization, not a documented statement by Ambedkar.</ref> Nehru's government did not invite him to the 1952 Sanchi relic ceremony and refused his 1956 request for funds to distribute ''The Buddha and His Dhamma''.<ref>Ober (2023), ''Dust on the Throne'', ch. 7.</ref> Ambedkar also insisted that his conversion, and the Dhamma he articulated, remained continuous with an "Indic" civilizational identity, distinguishing his choice of Buddhism from Islam or Christianity on the grounds that it did not require his followers to abandon their attachment to the subcontinent's own religious and cultural inheritance, even as it constituted a definitive and public rejection of Hinduism.<ref>Gokhale (1999), "Theravada Buddhism and Modernization", pp. 43–44.</ref> Ambedkar's comparison of Buddhism and Marxism is thus his own interpretation of Buddhist doctrine and history, joined to active religious leadership and a personal conversion; it is not an adoption of Marxism.