“A Letter to Comrade Hamlet”

Pradosh Nath

It is not easy to understand what made Muzaban Jal (A Letter to Comrade Hamlet, Frontier, April 27-May 3, 2025) to take on CPM. His focus is on the CPM Election Manifesto for the 2024 parliamentary Election. Maybe, MuzabanJal turns out to be the only person who bothered to read it. And while trying to be dismissive and writing the critique, he invoked Marx. It is the 1875 ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’ where he finds the reasons behind the irrelevance of CPM–leaving ‘capitalism intact while being involved in mere socialist rhetoric’. In truth, the problem has a much wider dimension, beyond volumes of Marx’s wisdom. It would be unfair to Marx, whose wisdom is now more than 150 years of vintage, to find an answer to all the political and social issues being faced in today’s world. After all Marx did not live long enough to see that the countries, after a fairy-tale-like revolutionary drive towards socialism, turned out to be uglier faces of capitalism.

Once, in a different context, Meghnad Saha, the scientist, sarcastically said, ‘everything is there in Byada (a twisted word for Veda)’. This was for those who used to find the answer to everything in the Veda. A misogynist version popular in the non-Marxist social circles is that Marx and Madam (respective wives) know everything. Marx deserves better.

Coming back to the CPM Manifesto–even if they wanted to outline a programme to not to keep Capitalism intact–do people know what would be those programme? And even if there is a programme of not keeping capitalism intact, who does one expect to mobilise behind? Every now and then, there is news in TV channels on the number of Naxalites/Maoists killed. Is there any popular or working-class support for them? Now the fundamental question is–how is it that the class solidarity/consciousness withered away? After all, India has a long history of the left movement. The answer is not there in the ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’. In fact it raises more questions than it provides answers to. Within the Marxian scheme of dialectics, understanding capitalism would require an in-depth understanding of class, class conflict, means of production, unleashing of productive forces, and also the whole question of the predictability of social transformation. The essence of Marxism remains in the incisive articulation of the capitalist mode of production. In the mode of labour as a surplus generating factor of production, is denied its share, exploited. This being the source of conflict, emancipation comes through the arduous process of labour taking over the ownership of the means of production. In this, ‘labour’ is treated as a unit of great virtue, unblemished unity. Marx had explained the crisis in capitalism in its failure to unleash productive forces beyond a point, accompanying the peak of labour-capital conflict.

‘Class’ and ‘class conflict’ are the driving factors of the dialectic that lead to social transformation. Is class identity so sacrosanct, and class conflict so imminent that they can together predict social transformation? There is too much of and too many oversimplifications in this understanding. First, the very idea of ‘class’ as the supreme and ultimate identity is contestable; and not falsifiable even when it refers to labour, those who have nothing else to lose.

Another intriguing question is, if Capitalism is broken (not intact anymore), where do people arrive at? The projected scheme is to create a socialist state and ultimately move towards a communist state. There is a concept of Jannat in Islam, Heaven in Christianity, Swarg in Hinduism, and similar things, probably in other religions as well. While these are spiritually conceptualised, in the Marxian scheme, the process of transformation is claimed to be scientific. Dialectical Materialism is passed as appropriate for the prediction of social transformations from capitalist to socialist and finally to a communist society. Marxists in general are oblivious of the fact that science being defined as interdependence of time and space (Hawking, 1989), where one does not exist without the other, social theories (Marx, Weber, Smith, and Marshall), while dealing with progress, ‘have tended to emphasise temporality, the process of becoming, rather than being in space and place’ (Harvey 2008, 205). And hence cannot claim to be scientific, unless there is an extra physical definition of science. Foucault ( 1984, 70) observed that ‘space was treated as the dead, the fixed, the undialectical, the immobile, while time, on the contrary, was richness, fecundity, life, dialectic.’ In Aesthetic theory, on the contrary, the relationship is reversed through spatialisation of time (clock, paintings) ‘in such a way as to redeem us from time’s tyranny (Harvey, 20028, 206). Scientific, and predictability thereof, being questioned, once the much vaunted socialist countries’ volte-face to autocratic state capitalism indicates the banality of predicting social transformation.

Marx was lured to prediction to problematise the question–How does a society change? Marx asked the wrong question and hence arrived at the banality. In reality, social transformation is an extremely complex issue, which would have been captured if Marx investigated the question–Why does a society not change? Eternalisation of the present is the governing principle of any ruling dispensation in a given social system. Documentation of the process of eternalisation in different socio-cultural milieu would have been a document on social transformation or lack of it. The Indian caste system did that by devalourising labour; so-called socialist countries did that by making the ‘Party’ the all-powerful agency. Capitalism has reinvented itself by addressing the Marx highlighted conflict between labour and capital. Capitalism has overcome the crisis by transforming a part of labour into human capital, as an integral part of capital (or in other words, co-opting labour in its fold as human capital). The process helps deferring the crisis related to unleashing productive forces. It does raise the question about the sanctity of labour as a class and proletarianism as the clarion call for unity for a new world order. On the other hand, it makes the rest of the labour force redundant. In countries like India, this redundant labour force constitutes the unorganised sector, and to a great extent, depends on state aid/doles for their subsistence.

The ‘headless chicken’ state of existence of CPM is then understandable. What is it when capitalism is not intact, and what is to be done with the post-capitalism state–all these being unknown, a CPM manifesto has to read more like the dos and don’ts in Barnard Shaw’s0150 ‘The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism’. In fact, all the manifestos across party lines would read more or less the same, difference being target groups, communities, religion, caste, and any other possible ways to fractionalise the society. By virtue of being named as a communist party, CPM is inept in divisive politics, and hence outdone by TMC and BJP.

TMC could capitalise on the fractured class identity through state aid/doles, and won over the CPM ideology of revolution and golden days thereafter, as reflected in the mass defection of CPM loyalists to TMC. Broadly speaking, it is the politics of arithmetic that defines the landscape of present-day Indian politics. Regional parties have mastered the trick. Take the case of TMC in West Bengal, where roughly 30% is the Muslim vote share. While the remaining 70% (say Hindu voters) is divided among Left, Congress, BJP, and TMC, the arithmetic for TMC is to garner at least 15%.The rest 55% then remains for other parties. BJP lost wherever this 55% has been divided, leaving less than 45% for BJP. It is to be noted that while TMC could ensure 30% Muslim vote bank through its declared ‘Milch-cow’ politics, it could not garner, on average, more than 15% of non-Muslim votes even after a plethora of state doles for different segments of the marginal section of the population. The arithmetic, therefore, shows that swings in the Congress/CPM vote share decide the fate of TMC and BJP. BJP is quite successful in increasing its single-digit vote share to a double-digit number of seats. In different shades and forms, this is broadly the ongoing political theatre in India.

Unable to create an alternative political agenda, the CPM, therefore, takes recourse to verbosity when facing politics of Hindutva, or Muslim appeasement, caste, regionalism, and jingoism. An alternative narrative could be built around the issue of corruption, which is endemic in Indian politics and administration, perpetrated by high and mighty elites and the rich, pushing the hapless citizen at the receiving end. The massive popular support to the anti-corruption movement spearheaded by Anna Hazare, later hijacked by AAP, shows where the wound is. Recent massive public support for the R G Kar protest and also for teachers who lost their jobs has brought to the surface the importance of the fight against corruption. Does it indicate that politicking has to leave time and space for civil society movement? It is time to refine and lessen the burden of the ideological juggernaut by recasting it in emerging reality.

References:
1.    Foucault, M, (1984), The Foucault Reader, Harmondsworth.
2.   Harvey, D. (2008), The Condition of Post-Modernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, Blackwell, UK.
3.    Hawking, S, W. (1989), A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black holes, Bantam Books, UK.

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Frontier
Vol 57, No. 52, June 22 - 28, 2025