The Indian Transition

When a society moves from one stage of the material base of production and, consequentially, different social relations of production, to another historical stage, it has to go through an extremely complex and long process of dialectics of social transition. The process of birth and maturing of the new forces of production is a winding process of ups and downs because the old materialforces of social production and the ideological and cultural superstructure of social relations of the ‘old’ persist even when the new mode of production is in the process of taking birth. While Karl Marx had alerted us that the ‘New’ is born out of the ‘Old’, the persistence and resilience of the ‘Old’ social relations of production continues to be an integral part of the living social realities of every society that has moved from feudalism to capitalism. The statement that a social and material transition from the old mode of production to the new takes centuries is validated by the history of the long journey of transition from feudalism to capitalism in Europe. This journey also witnessed the overlapping of the past and the emerging ‘new’, and, among European countries, only the bourgeois revolution of France marked to a large extent a break with the feudal ‘ancient regime’ and the beginning of a new journey after overthrowing the baggage of its past feudal history