FIFTEEN DAYS before his death on December 6, 1956, Dr. Ambedkar delivered what would become his final major lecture. He was frail. The State gallery hall in Kathmandu was full. And his subject - a comparison between the Buddha and Karl Marx - was, by his own admission, likely to "sound odd."
He opened with characteristic directness: "A comparison between Karl Marx and Buddha may be regarded as a joke." He acknowledged that Marxists would find it absurd to place their modern, scientific revolutionary alongside an ancient religious teacher - "Marx so modern and Buddha so ancient!" - and then refused to be deterred.
His challenge was simple: "If the Marxists keep back their prejudices and study the Buddha and understand what he stood for I feel sure that they will change their attitude."
In an intellectual climate where Buddhism was seen as otherworldly quietism and Marxism as the only serious theory of liberation, Ambedkar refused both caricatures. What followed was one of the most original works of political philosophy produced in twentieth-century India. It remains, seventy years later, among his most under-explored writings.
A common end, but divergent means
Ambedkar's method was to strip both systems down to their surviving essentials. Much of the original Marxian structure, for instance, he argued, had been "demolished both by logic as well as by experience." The inevitability of socialism had not materialized. The progressive immiseration of the proletariat had not occurred. What survived was a residue of four propositions: that philosophy must reconstruct the world, not merely explain it; that class conflict exists; that private property concentrates power in one class while generating misery in another; and that this sorrow must be removed.
