The Bengal Renaissance - pg. 237

Marx emphasised the following characteristics of the village system: these villages were 'stereotype form of social organism'; in them there was the domestic union of agricultural and manufacturing pursuits; the domestic industry combined 'hand-weaving, hand-spnning and hand-tilling agriculture'; this village system was 'the solid foundation of oriental despotism'; this village system was 'the solid foundation of oriental despotism'; they restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies; these villages took all calamities, like the ruin of empires, cruelties perpetrated in society, the massacre of populaations in towns etc., as nothing more than 'natural events'; human life in these village systems was 'undignified, stagnatory, and vegetative'; the passivity of life in the village systems 'evoked on the other part, in contradistinction, wild aimless, unbounded forces of destruction, and rendered murder itself a religious rite in Hindustan.' Caste and slavery were contaminating distinctions to mark life in the villages; man living in them surrendered to nature and external circumstances without ever seeking to master them for his own good; and these village systems 'transformed a self-developing social state into neverchanging natural destiny.'