Cornelius Castoriadis: Political and Social Writings, 1961-1979

The third volume of Castoriadis’s Political and Social Writings covers the longest period, 1961-79, and traces the movement of his thought beyond the framework originally formulated by Socialisme ou Barbarie and toward the position he would fully set forth in The Imaginary Institution of Society. The previous volumes relentlessly attacked Stalinist Russia, the bureaucratized socialist parties, and the reformist trade unions. This volume begins by completely breaking with classical Marxism, and especially with its assumptions about the inevitability of the socialist revolution. Castoriadis explains, “Marxism remains for us an unequaled source of theoretical inspiration, but it ceased to be a living theory forty years ago.” The Socialisme ou Barbarie group itself dissolved in 1967 because, Castoriadis argues, its theoretical work was no longer tied to real political activity and its journal contributed to would-be intellectuals becoming “passive consumers of ideas.” The group therefore played no unified or central role in the events of May ’68, which, ironically, in many ways affirmed and advanced the ideas the group had set forth over the previous two decades. Castoriadis offers an ambivalent response to the movement of May’ 68 in “The Anticipated Revolution,” an article composed at the end of that month. He begins by praising the movement, and particularly the students, for recognizing and unleashing on an everyday level the creative potential of society. The movement also “dissolves away the mystifying notion of a well-organized, well-oiled, good society, where only a few marginal problems remain and where radical conflict no longer exists.” It offers a condensed political education, so that “In a few days, twenty-year-old youths are gaining an understanding and a political wisdom that sincere revolutionaries have not yet achieved after thirty years as militant activists.” But Castoriadis faults the movement for not developing a form adequate to its potential. He writes, “One can take the ‘best’ of all the extant tiny groups, multiple its membership a thousandfold, and still have nothing capable of rising to the exigencies and the spirit of the present situation.” Part of this failure is due to the difficulty of expanding the student movement to the level of society. Castoriadis argues that the student movement “has shown an admirable tactical sense, using methods of action that cannot at present be transposed, as such, onto the scale of society as a whole.” He adds, “It has short-circuited the most difficult organizational problems because it acted in professionally and locally concentrated and unified collectivities. And now it is obliged to confront the heterogeneity and diversity of the society and the nation.” As it opens itself to a wider population, the student movement confronts the possibility of cooptation from all sides. Castoriadis writes, “From early on, many revolutionary students have been worried by the danger that the movement will be ‘coopted’ by the old forces.” But he responds, “Someone who is afraid of cooptation has already been coopted. . . . The deepest reaches of his mind have been coopted, for there he seeks guarantees against being coopted, and thus he has already been caught in the trap of reactionary ideology: the search for an anticooptation talisman or fetishistic magic charm. There is no guarantee against cooptation; in a sense, everything can be coopted, and everything is one day or another.” But, “We should also point out . . . that the coopters coopt only corpses.” A living, autonomous movement need not worry, since “Everything can be coopted – save one thing: our own reflective, critical, autonomous activity.” Castoriadis continues, the “movement must maintain and enlarge its openness as far as possible. Openness, however, is not and can never be absolute openness. Absolute openness is nothingness – that is to say, it is immediately absolute closure. Openness is that which constantly displaces and transforms its own terms and even its own field, but can exist only if, at each instant, it leans on a provisional organization of the field.” Although the movement must reject the microbureaucracies of the left such as the Maoists and the Trots, some level of organization and organized activity and communication is necessary: “One cannot overcome bureaucratic organization by refusing all organization, nor the sterile rigidity of platforms and programs by refusing all definition of objectives and means, nor the sclerosis of dead dogmas by condemning true theoretical reflection.” These questions lead Castoriadis to the problems of demands and reformism. He begins: “Are the demands put forward concerning the universities ‘minimum’ or ‘maximum,’ ‘reformist’ or ‘revolutionary’? In a sense, they may seem ‘revolutionary’ according to the terms of traditional language, since they could not be achieved without an overthrow of the social system (you cannot build ‘socialism in one university’). In other people’s eyes, they appear ‘reformist’ precisely because they seem to concern the university alone, and because one can easily conceive their being realized in a watered-down, coopted form, the better to keep present-day society functioning. . . . In this case, however, it is this very distinction that is false. The positive and underlying meaning of these demands lies elsewhere: being partially applicable within the framework of the existing system of rule, they make it possible to put the system constantly into question.” In other words, through demands “The self-management of the University can and should become an unhealable wound on the flanks of the bureaucratic system.”