10 The Real (of) Marx Adivasi Worlds as Tombstone of the Illicit ANUP DHAR T his paper is a play on the Moebius: the Real of/in Marx, i.e. the work of the (Lacanian) Real in Marx and the real Marx. It could also have been titled the Moebius between‘Te Other of Marx’ and ‘Te Other Marx’. In 2001–2002, I had titled an assignment I was writing for Anjanda in terms of the Other (question), wherein I focused on the ‘non-West’ and how it featured in the late Marx. It was Anjanda who had directed my attention—then wedded uncritically to historical materialism—to the ‘non-West’ in Marx, and how it inaugurated the question of non-capital (not necessarily pre-capital), and what could be called ‘non-wage’ or ‘non-capitalist’ labour practices within the womb of capitalism, practices that do not feature in ‘Classes’—Chapter 52 of Capital, Volume 3—but which also bring Marx’s work and refection on class and‘what makes classes’ 1 , as he asks in the chapter, to a seeming halt; the text breaks of at this point. It is interesting to note that the text of Capital breaks of the moment Marx engages with the theorisation of class or classes. Is class then the Real of Capital? Does Capital, the ‘book’, hit Lacan’s inassimilable Real once it hits the question of class? Or is non-West (as also non-capital) the inassimilable Real in the Marxian schema? Is it the non-West (as also non-capital) that is taking (the late) Marx beyond the merely objective historical trend, fashionably called historical materialism? Or is it class that All Chapters.indd 259 6/29/2020 10:41:10 AM