A Letter to Comrade Hamlet

Murzban Jal

[This essay in the form of a ‘letter’ is addressed to the anonymous ‘Comrade Hamlet’ now found roaming around in India, the Comrade who while being anonymous, at the same time typifies the bureaucrat-apparatchik running the parliamentary communist parties, who instead of confronting global capitalism which is in permanent crisis and the right-wing fascist ethno-nationalist political culture emerging thereon, is possessed by ghosts of revisionism and reformism. This letter analyses the 2024 Election Manifesto of the principal parliamentary communist party, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), and juxtaposes this with Marx’s alternative to capitalist society, an alternative which Comrade Hamlet is alas blind to.]

Dear Comrade Hamlet,

This letter is written to you with direct reference to the Election Manifesto of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) for the 2024, 18th Lok Sabha Elections and the consequent debacle that the parliamentary left parties suffered, despite there being a definite resurgence of the anti-Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (I.N.D.I.A.), especially the resurgence of the Grand Old Party, namely the Congress party that saw a jump of seats in the Indian parliament from 44 to 99 seats, along with the gain in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh by the Samajwadi Party (SP) and in the southern state of Tamil Nadu by the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK). In the state of West Bengal, where the Left Front once upon a time held fort for 34 uninterrupted years, it was expected that the Left should have made gains, if not overturned the apple cart there with the mafia-type crypto-fascist rule of the Trinamool Congress (TMC) led by Mamata Banerjee. Likewise, in the southern state of Kerala, where the state government is the Left Front government, it was expected that the Left should have won, but it was the Congress Party that overran the Left, winning 18 of the 20 seats, one going to the Left Front and the other to the BJP.

Simple common sense says that if the Congress, SP, DMK and TMC not only made gains but stopped the BJP juggernaut from assuming complete and absolute power, the Left should have made at least some gains. Alas, this was not so. It is thus necessary to see the reasons for this sorry state of affairs. The reasons can be found in your Election Manifesto, itself where it is clearly discernible that there is a great distance separating your party from Marxism.

The first question that emerges is that why have you retreated to such an extent that you have forgotten not merely Marxism, but also your own past of the politics of the Left Front where the main parliamentary communist parties got together to form at least some form of vague social democratic bloc to now get into an electoral alliance with a multitude of bourgeois parties with no progressive anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-fascist politics, parties that are run by kulak clans whose sole interest is to protect their little feudal areas of interests? What then is the basis of this unity?

In India, General Elections or National Elections (Lok Sabha Elections) are distinct from State Elections or Legislative Assembly Elections. The drubbing that the Left Front got from the Congress party in Kerala was at the 2024 General Elections. The Left front yet remains in power in Kerala because it won the Legislative Elections in 2021.

It is in this sense that one says that while reading your Election Manifesto that one recalls Marx’s 1875 Critique of the Gotha Programme, penned in response to the Gotha Programme of the nascent socialist movement in Germany where the Eisenachers—the members of the Social-Democratic Workers’ Party (Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei or SDAP) founded in 1869 in the city of Eisenach, headed by August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht, two comrades who followed Marx’s thinking—and those who followed the line of Ferdinand Lassalle’s the General Union of German Workers (Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein, or ADAV) founded in 1863 got together to form a single organisation, the Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany (Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands or SAPD) at a unity congress in the German city of Gotha. It is important to talk of Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme because he states absolutely clearly what petite bourgeois socialism is with its ideas of ‘just distribution of wealth’, of ‘state aid’, of emancipation within the ‘framework of the present-day national state’ where the socialists ‘strive by all legal means for the free state’. Now you know, dear Comrade Hamlet, that Marx opposed these statements for the simple reason that they leave capitalism intact while being involved in mere socialist rhetoric. One of the important reasons for Marx’s difference with the Lassalleans was that for them, socialism is premised on ‘state aid’. You too, dear Comrade Hamlet, intend to usher in your version of ‘socialism’ with the aid of the state, to be precise, the bourgeois state. You will thus ally with the kulak parties and with their help usher in your magical ‘socialism’ just as Ferdinand Lassalle allied with the Prussian landowners to ‘fight’ capitalism. The ‘fight’ of the Lassalleans was a phantom-like ‘fight’ not very dissimilar from the legendary Don Quixote’s ‘fight’ with the windmills of his imagination. But you are neither Don Quixote nor Sancho Panza. You are, of course, Hamlet, since you neither sit on a horse (like the good Don) nor a donkey (like Sancho) to ‘fight’. In fact, you do not want to fight at all. That is understandable, for you are Hamlet. You only roam around muttering: ‘to be or to not to be’. You are haunted by ghosts. You cannot see capitalism and the havoc that it is creating. And like Freud’s legendary patient you too are suffering from ‘hysterical blindness’, blindness not caused by a real ailment, but blindness caused by psychogenic disturbance of the mind, quite like the original Hamlet from Shakespeare’s immortal tragedy.

Yes, dear Comrade Hamlet, you are indeed involved in rhetoric while staying blind to capitalism and its terrible entourage. For Marx, capitalism is the problem from which emerge colonial plunder, poverty, totalitarian fascist regimes, and wars of genocide, and no amount of ‘state aid’ or ‘just distribution of wealth’ could mitigate the massive economic problems or help real, progressive democratic movements. You, ‘State aid’ was the basis of the Lassalleans and was part of their 1875 programme. See Frederick Engels’ critique of this in his ‘Letter to August Bebel’, London, 18–28 March 1875, in Marx. Engels. Collected Works, Vol. 24 (Moscow: Progress, 1989), p. 67, besides Marx’s critique of this in his Critique of the Gotha Programme.

For the idea of ‘hysterical blindness’ see Sigmund Freud, ‘The Psychoanalytic View of the Psychogenic Disturbance of Vision’, in The Penguin Freud Library, Vol. 10, On Psychopathology: Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety and Other Works (London: Penguin Books, 1993), p. 107. Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme (especially the new Marxist-Humanist edition) is brought in here for discussion, specifically because the new translation completely dispels the wrong idea that Marx advocated for the existence of the state in socialism. This new edition is also important because of the introduction by Peter Hudis, which says that the terms ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’ were inter-changeably used by Marx. Socialism is not to be confused with the ‘lower phase’ of communism, while the ‘higher phase’ would be communism proper. In fact the terms that we inherit that socialism is the first phase and communism the second one, are strictly wrong and belong to the post-Marx Marxist theoretical problematic.

It is thus extremely necessary to bring in Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme in order to see that, at best, all your demands belong to the post-Marx theoretical realm of petite bourgeois socialism of the Lassallean variety. Let us thus have a look at this and relate your plea to bring down prices, etc., with the Lassallean politics of state aid along with the just distribution of wealth. There is, however, a fact to be noted that while the Lassallean idea of just distribution of wealth was utopian at best, for it left the capitalism mode of production intact and while Lassalle himself had invented the idea of the ‘iron laws of wages’, he did advocate (even in an utopian manner) its abolition. You have not even gone that far. Thus what the Lassalleans tried in the 19th century, you cannot even attempt that.

[abridged]

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Vol 57, No. 44, Apr 27 - May 3, 2025