Your insinuation that I was gloating is incorrect. My primary concern is convincing the signatories of the original letter, and their allies, to amend their political position in view of recent events. There is no place for the ego in this conversation, nor "if-your-erection-lasts-more-than-four-hours-please-go-to-the-hospital-immediately erections."
McIntyre wrote: "What lessons are we to draw from this? Are we to conclude that all communist parties that achieve a degree of electoral success are bound to become rent-seeking political machines? If that's the case, then why don't we just go all the way with Robert Bates or even Gordon Tullock, become good public-choice theorists, and renounce the communist project entirely? Or shall we find some ad hoc bullshit excuse like the CPI(M)'s failure to break with Stalinism, its gerontocratic leadership, or various faults of individual leaders?"
I did suggest the contours of an answer to your first three questions in my original posting. I urge you to re-read that e-mail and formulate different questions. With respect to the third question, however, feel free to conduct polemics against public-choice theorists and I shall happily join the chorus. Your fourth question is not helpful.
McIntyre wrote: "This was, at one time, a real communist party with a mass base throughout India and a dominant position in two states with a combined population of around 100 million. The party's degeneration is a disaster for the left, in India and out of it."
We can agree on this point.
McIntyre wrote: "This piece you've posted here is the worst kind of ersatz left political "analysis" of India's politics: large pronouncement unsupported by evidence but larded with references to Gramsci and the other usual suspects with whom the author has only the most perfunctory acquaintance."
You do not provide evidence to support your claim that the author has "the most perfunctory acquaintance" with the writings in question. I leave it to readers to make such a judgment. If your view is that the only kind of admissible evidence consists of a regression table, or statistical analysis in general, then we have a disagreement that will probably not be resolved over e-mail.
McIntyre wrote: "In India, the level of understanding of local detail needed to get anything like a comprehensive picture of Indian national politics is an order of magnitude higher."
I do not doubt that this point is correct, although we would probably argue about the weight assigned to each.
epoliticus