On Religion
Ambedkar felt that the Dhamma was 'sacred morality' and served the function of social integration.
Marx viewed religion was simply looked upon as alienation and never considered as a solution to human exploitation.
Marxism did not account for was that death, disease and old age are human realities that continue even in a classless society, thus Marxism does not have an answer or solution to the universal nature of human suffering that cuts across class boundaries.
Buddhism and the Economy
For the Marxists religion is seen as part of the 'ideological superstructure' which is produced by the socio-economic structures, but having no independent causal influence on them. But Ambedkar maintained that religion and cultural change could indeed influence the economic base.
The Sangha realized that though itself it had collective property, this model could not be applied to the lay people. It was not a socially realistic prescription for economic life.
Unlike Marxism, Buddhism does not ask the wealthy to give up their private property, but asks them to feel for those less fortunate and show greater concern for human relations.
Marxists would criticize this idea as serving the interests of the bourgeois and being status quoits.
The Buddhist ethics is what would be called by Marxists to be an ethics appropriate to capitalism, and not to a classless society. .
Differences between Ambedkar and the Marxists
Ambedkar was disillusioned by the Marxists as they had been rather unreceptive about the Poona Pact, which was to deal with the issues of the Dalits.
The indifference to caste by the communists becomes a central lacuna at a time when Marxism was penetrating India as a powerful ideology.
The communists fight for untouchable rights proposed a confrontation with Ambedkar, denouncing him as 'separatists' 'opportunistic' and 'pro-British'. It also treated caste prejudice as 'bourgeois divisiveness', it made no effort to go into the specificity of caste exploitation and asked untouchables to join the 'democratic revolution'.
Ambedkar about the Marxists in India were their upper caste origins and incapable of handling caste or other 'non-class' contradictions.
Ambedkar believed that a science of historical materialism, which Marx had initiated was not capable of handling 'non-class' factors such as caste and patriarchy.'
To him the effect of the Marxists on the social movements of Dalits was to pull them away from solutions that were socio-cultural in nature. Thus Ambedkar turned upside down the Marxian concept of base-superstructure.
He believed that property was not the only source of power, religion and social status too could generate power and felt India needed a social-religious revolution rather than an economic one.
He believed that if caste was annihilated the economic base would automatically change. Buddhism he stressed was an all round alternative to Marxism, capable of solving the problems of conflict and suffering as Marxism could not.
Amberkar did not agree with the Marxian concept of the 'Withering away of the State'.
He also felt that the communists were unable.
He observes: “But to the Communists, Religion is anathema. Their hatred to Religion is so deep seated that they will not even discriminate between religions which are helpful to Communism and religions which are not. The Communists have carried their hatred of Christianity to Buddhism without waiting to examine the difference between the two.” [Buddha and His Dhamma]
Ambedkar had problems with the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat that the Marxists proposed as he felt that any sort of dictatorship was violent and undemocratic.
He felt that the communists did not recognize the fact that the Buddha had established communism within the Sangha without any force or violence.
He agreed with Marx that there was a need to reconstruct the world so as to make it more beneficial to the marginalized and bring about equity. But he argued that this need not be done through force and violence.
He believed that the world could be reconstructed effectively through non-violent means, through the Buddhist Dhamma and Sangha.
Marxists criticized Ambedkar as being 'petty bourgeois', identifying the idealism (return to religion) and reformism presumed to be implicit in his theory with a kind of backward 'peasantist' consciousness.