India: Caste and Great State Nationalism: An Exchange

Abstract

We have certain misgivings about Ellen Meiksins Wood's interview with Aijaz Ahmad printed in the October, 1996 issue of Monthly Review (Vol. 48 No.5). His criticisms of the political implications of certain post-modernist projects seem all too easy, especially since he has not worked through multi-culturalism and globalization as these have emerged in the context of India. In this sense his responses are geared towards an assimilation into a Marxist perspective which has for a long time been ably represented by journals such as Monthly Review, rather than towards illuminating the theoretical and practical impasses in the practice of Marxism in India. We will refer only to major but astonishing limitations in his arguments about globalization and the (Indian) nation-state.

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