Annihilation of caste: Why capitalism is more likely to do the job than redistributive ideas of communism

However, this framework misses a counter-intuitive argument. What if the faster path to annihilating caste is through capital?

A growing body of thought suggests that markets, entrepreneurship and access to capital can dissolve social hierarchies more effectively than centralized redistribution.

Caste as a system of power asymmetry: A helpful framework for understanding the system’s multi-nodal hold on structural inequality could be the ‘power asymmetry octagon’ outlined by one of this oped’s authors in his work, Institutional Change and Power Asymmetry in the Context of Rural India (Patnaik, 2018).

This approach argues that inequality in India arises from eight overlapping asymmetries of power: economic power, political power, social status, cultural legitimacy, access to information, skills and technology, opportunity and capability.

A caste hierarchy has concentrated privilege across land and capital (economic power), social prestige (social power), cultural legitimacy (ritual authority), political influence and access to education and information. Meanwhile, marginalized communities are excluded across almost every side of the octagon. This multi-dimensional asymmetrical power structure makes the caste system extremely resilient.

Interventions aimed at reducing asymmetries often address only one dimension—say, through redistribution policies—and leave the broader structure intact.

Markets reduce multiple asymmetries and erode traditional hierarchies: Capital can compress multiple sides of the power asymmetry octagon simultaneously. When individuals gain access to credit, entrepreneurship, digital platforms and markets, power shifts. Capital expands economic power. Entrepreneurship expands opportunity power. Digital platforms expand information power. Skill-based employment expands capability power. Markets reconfigure the entire structure of opportunity and commerce quietly dissolves barriers that ideology struggles to dismantle.

This is visible in India. Platforms like Zomato and Swiggy have normalized millions of ‘anonymous transactions’ everyday. Consumers order food without knowing the caste of the cook or delivery partner—something that would have been unthinkable earlier, when notions of ritual purity governed food exchanges. Plus, gig work, digital marketplaces and startup ecosystems have made occupational identity fluid. A person can be a delivery partner today, a small entrepreneur tomorrow and a digital creator next.

Our economy is thus becoming dynamic rather than hereditary. If wealth, innovation and influence increasingly come from entrepreneurial success rather than lineage, social hierarchies begin to rearrange themselves. Our markets are not morally neutral, but they are redistributing status in real time.

The cultural legitimacy of capital: Economic historian Deirdre McCloskey in her works on ‘bourgeois dignity’ argues that societies flourish when commerce and entrepreneurship gain social legitimacy.

When merchants and innovators are respected, economic dynamism spreads and social mobility expands. Europe’s transformation after the Enlightenment, according to McCloskey, was not driven merely by capital accumulation but by a cultural shift that dignified commerce.

In enterprising societies, individuals from modest backgrounds could rise through markets. Our economy is seeing a similar shift. Economic participation increasingly depends on what one can build or deliver rather than on one’s birth. While caste asks who one was born to, markets ask: Can you create value?

Bottom of the pyramid capitalism: Chandra Bhan Prasad has argued that capitalism may be the most effective emancipatory force for historically marginalized communities. He argues that Dalit entrepreneurship, business networks and private sector participation represents not just economic advancement but a structural challenge to caste hierarchy.

When the once-marginalized become employers, investors and entrepreneurs, they alter power across multiple dimensions of Patnaik’s octagon. This is not just symbolic mobility as the ability to generate value in an economy changes status perceptions.

Redistribution versus mobility: The former attempts to level inequality by reallocating existing wealth. This can address immediate deprivation, but can’t transform structural opportunity the way capital formation can.

Markets are not morally neutral, but since they are active agents of status redistribution, they offer us a path to the annihilation of caste—one of India’s most urgent moral and social goals.

Caste is resilient because it is embedded in both culture and the economy. Ideology-driven cultural reform and political mobilization has struggled to achieve it. However, markets and capital, if widely accessible, have the capacity to reduce several asymmetries simultaneously and annihilate caste. Not because markets are morally superior, but because they are structurally indifferent to lineage.

If India can democratize capital deeply enough, caste may not need to be overthrown through any dramatic action. It may simply become economically obsolete.

The authors are, respectively, a lawyer, a former Comptroller and Auditor General bureaucrat, and former member of Parliament; and director of Global Policy Research Foundation.