Since the peak of the radical movements of the 1960 and 70s, there has been a “resigned surrender,” a new “deference towards the capitalo-parliamentarian or ‘Western order.’” In many ways, according to Badiou, this widespread aversion to communism, and even socialism, resembles a return to a 1950s-style liberal anti-communism more busy dogmatically hunting out the roots of totalitarianism than taking an interest in the possibility of genuine change. Capitalist realism today assumes that “socialisms, which were the communist Idea’s only concrete forms, failed completely in the twentieth century. Even they have had to revert to capitalism and non-egalitarian dogma. That failure of the Idea leaves us with no choice, given the complex of the capitalist organization of production and the state parliamentary system. Like it or not, we have to consent to it for lack of choice.” Rather than accept this description of the failure of an Idea, Badiou asks what is the idea of failure being deployed here? He writes, “What exactly do we mean by ‘failure’ when we refer to a historical sequence that experimented with one or another form of the communist hypothesis?” Taking from mathematics the example of Fermat’s theorem, which took three centuries of “failures” to be proven, Badiou argues, “failure is nothing more than the history of the proof the hypothesis, provided that the hypothesis is not abandoned.” His book is therefore structured around three examples – May ’68, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and the Paris Commune – that show that “failures of events closely bound up with the communist hypothesis were and are stages in its history. At least for all those who are not blinded by the propagandist use of the notion of failure.” His first chapter elaborates on different kinds of failures by using selections from his L’Echarpe rouge and L’Incident d’Antioche, and offers a rare glimpse in English into his literary writings. Unfortunately, the rest of the book is not a systematic new text on the Idea of Communism, but rather a collection of conference presentations and articles that have appeared elsewhere, the most notable being his presentation at the 2009 “The Idea of Communism” conference. The first major section of the book deals with May ’68, and consists of two more recent essays and one (more flawed and less interesting) text written by Badiou in the heat of the moment in 1968. The wave of commemorations of May’ 68, particularly around its 40th anniversary, can be interpreted in two pessimistic ways: May ’68 is truly dead and therefore it is harmless to remember and celebrate it; or, May’ 68, in its “individualism and the taste for jouissance,” was the true birth of “neo-liberal capitalism,” which can now openly admit this fact. Badiou contrasts these two dark interpretations with two more optimistic ones: interest in May ’68 is “an anti-Sarkozy reflex;” or, once again spreading is the “idea that a different political and societal world is possible.” Badiou concludes that such contradictory interpretations of May ’68 are possible because it was a “heterogeneous multiplicity,” “an “event of great complexity.” In fact, there were “four different ‘May ‘68s.’” They include: 1) an uprising of students, who, although only a small minority, demonstrated “the extraordinary strength of the ideology and the symbols, the Marxist vocabulary and the idea of revolution” and a new “acceptance of violence.” 2) a massive general strike that originated outside of “official working-class institutions,” made “systematic use of factory occupations” as well of “kidnapping bosses,” and revealed that something “rebelled against the attempts to find a classic negotiated settlement to the general strike.” 3) a “libertarian May” that entailed moral, sexual, and cultural innovations. Speaking of these first three May ‘68s, Badiou claims they “were represented by great symbolic sites: the occupied Sorbonne for students, the big car plants (and especially Billancourt) for workers, and the occupation of the Odéon theatre for the libertarian May.” Then Badiou turns to the fourth May ’68, which he explains was “crucial, and it still prescribes what the future will bring. It is more difficult to read because if unfolded over time and was not an instantaneous explosion. . . . it dominated the period between 1968 and 1978, and was then repressed and absorbed by the . . . miserable ‘Mitterand years.’” This fourth May’ 68 involved “the conviction that, from the 1960s onwards, we are witnessing the end of an old conception of politics” and a “search for a new conception of politics.” This May ’68 entails giving up the idea of a privileged revolutionary subject as well of the assurance that objective forces would produce the revolution (the party aimed to bring these subjective and objective agencies together). Nonetheless, according to Badiou, the major actors of May ’68 shared the “same language” of classes and class struggle and “united under the red flag.” “But the secret truth, which was gradually revealed, is that this common language, symbolized by the red flag, was in fact dying out. There was a basic ambiguity about May ’68: a language that was spoken by all was beginning to die out. There is a sort of temporary lack of distinction between what is beginning and what is coming to an end.” Badiou summarizes: “The fourth May ’68 is seeking to find that which might exist beyond the confines of classic revolutionism. It seeks blindly because it uses the same language as the language that dominated the conception it was trying to get away from.” He adds, “The fourth May is the diagonal that links the other three. All the new initiatives that allowed us to circulate between these three heterogeneous movements, and especially between the student movement and the workers’ movement, were our treasure-trove.” Badiou singles out the interaction between students and workers, both of whom refused to stick to assigned positions and roles, as embodying the communist ideal of a “polyvalent society, with variable trajectories, both at work and in our lives.” Badiou argues we are “contemporaries of May ’68” because “we have the same problem, and are the contemporaries of the problem revealed by May ’68: the classical figure of the politics of emancipation was ineffective.” Our “fidelity to May ‘68” must therefore entail a “reformulation of the communist hypothesis,” which, stated negatively, asserts that “the existing world is not necessary,” and that therefore “a different world is possible.” The second section of the book deals with the Cultural Revolution, which, Badious argues, “has been a constant and lively point of reference for militant activity throughout the world, and particularly in France, at least between 1967 and 1976. It is part of our political history and the basis for the existence of the Maoist current, the only true political creation of the sixties and seventies.” The “dominant historiographical version” attributes the Cultural Revolution to the failure of the Great Leap Forward and to a voluntarist attempt by Mao to regain power from the rest of the party-state bureaucracy. Badiou instead wants to consider the Cultural Revolution as a real political question, and therefore offers his own account of the Cultural Revolution as a narrower “sequence that runs from November 1965 to July 1968.” He justifies this frame by arguing: “The criterion is the existence of a political activity of the masses, its slogans, its new organizations, its own places. Through all of this an ambivalent but undeniable reference is constituted for all contemporary political thought worthy of the name.” Badiou maintains that “the Cultural Revolution is the last significant political sequence that is still internal to the party-state (in this case, the Chinese Communist Party), and fails as such.” By “saturat[ing[ the form of the party-state,” the Cultural Revolution demonstrates the need to develop a politics “outside the spectre of the party-state.” Mao turned to “political mass mobilization” to revolutionize the ossified party-state structure, but, Badiou argues, Mao always had to contain those very revolutionary forces and their innovations back within the form of the party-state. Badiou writes: “This recourse assumes that one admit uncontrolled forms of revolt and organization. Mao’s group, after a great deal of hesitation, will in fact impose that these be admitted, first in the universities and then in the factories. But, in a contradictory move, it will also try to bring together all organizational innovations of the revolution in the general space of the party-state.” To illustrate his hypothesis that “the Cultural Revolution is the historical development of [this] contradiction,” Badiou examines seven Cultural Revolution referents: the “Sixteen Points” decision in 1966, the rise of the Red Guards, the “revolutionary rebel workers” and the Shanghai Commune, power seizures, the Wuhan incident, the “workers’ entry into the universities,” and “Mao’s cult of personality.” These examples show how the Cultural Revolution “marks an irreplaceable experience of saturation, because a violent will to find a new political path, to relaunch the revolution, and to find new forms of workers’ struggle under the formal conditions of socialism ended up in failure when confronted with the necessary maintenance, for reasons of public order and the refusal of civil war, of the general frame of the party-state.” Badiou concludes: “We know today that all emancipatory politics must put an end to the model of the party, or of multiple parties, in order to affirm a politics ‘without party’, and yet at the same time without lapsing into the figure of anarchism, which has never been anything else than the vain critique, or the double, or the shadow, of the communist parties, just as the black flag is only the double or the shadow of the red flag.” The third section of the book turns to the Paris Commune of 1871, which, Badiou argues, “for the first and to this day only time, broke with the parliamentary destiny of popular and workers’ political movements.” Writing on the Commune, Marx, according to Badiou, praised the Commune for those features that seemed to dissolve the state (direct arming of the people, the end of the separation of powers, internationalism) while faulting the Commune for lacking features closely tied to the state form ( “weak military centralization; its inability to define financial priorities;” etc). That is, the Commune is at once praised for its freedom from the state and criticized for its failure to exercise state power. Badiou claims, “The fact of the matter is that the ambiguity of Marx’s account will be carried both by the social-democratic disposition and by its Leninist radicalization, that is, in the fundamental motif of the party, for over a century.” Badiou explains: “the party realizes the ambiguity of the Marxist account of the Commune, gives it body. It becomes the political site of a fundamental tension between the non-state, even anti-state, character of a politics of emancipation, and the statist character of the victory and duration of that politics.” The “party-state” seems to be the solution to the contradictions of the Commune, but, according to Badiou, it empties the Commune “of all properly political content.” Resisting that dead end approach, Badiou proceeds to examine the development of the Commune using the philosophical framework of his Logics of Worlds, whose complexity and terminology I’ll not attempt to reproduce here. Badiou claims that the 18th of March is a site whose content is “the appearing of a worker-being . . . in the space of governmental and political capacity.” The “Commune event, begun on 18 March 1871, did not have the effect of destroying the dominant group and its politicians. But something more important was destroyed: the political subordination of workers and the people. . . . The absolutization of worker political existence (the existence of the inexistent), convulsive and crushed, had all the same destroyed the necessity of a basic form of subjection; that is, the subjection of a possible proletarian politics to the scheming of (leftist) bourgeois politicians. Like every veritable event, the Commune had not realized a possible, it had created one. This possible is simply that of an independent proletarian politics.” The final section more directly discusses the Idea of Communism. He presents “the Idea of communism” as an operation involving “three basic elements – a political, a historical and a subjective one.” A political truth “is a concrete, time-specific sequence in which a new thought and a new practice of collective emancipation arise, exist, and eventually disappear.” But there is also “a historical dimension of a truth,” and the truth’s “historical inscription encompasses an interplay between types of truth that are different from one another and are therefore situated at different points in human time in general.” Finally, in the subjective element, an individual becomes a Subject by deciding to be “a militant of this truth.” He adds, “an Idea is the possibility for an individual to understand that his or her participation in a singular political process . . . is also, in a certain way, a historical decision. Thanks to the Idea, the individual, as an element of the new Subject, realizes his or her belonging to the movement of History.” “The communist Idea is what constitute the becoming-political Subject of the individual as also and at the same time his or her projection into History.” As he states in an earlier chapter, “We have to say that we cannot live without an idea. We have to say: ‘Have the courage to support the idea, and it can only be the communist idea in its generic sense. . . . living without an idea is intolerable.’”
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Alain Badiou: The Communist Hypothesis (2010)
Since the peak of the radical movements of the 1960 and 70s, there has been a “resigned surrender,” a new “deference towards the capitalo-parliamentarian or ‘Western order.’” In many ways, according to Badiou, this widespread aversion to communism, and even socialism, resembles a return to a 1950s-style liberal anti-communism more busy dogmatically hunting out the roots of totalitarianism than taking an interest in the possibility of genuine change. Capitalist realism today assumes that “socialisms, which were the communist Idea’s only concrete forms, failed completely in the twentieth century. Even they have had to revert to capitalism and non-egalitarian dogma. That failure of the Idea leaves us with no choice, given the complex of the capitalist organization of production and the state parliamentary system. Like it or not, we have to consent to it for lack of choice.” Rather than accept this description of the failure of an Idea, Badiou asks what is the idea of failure being deployed here? He writes, “What exactly do we mean by ‘failure’ when we refer to a historical sequence that experimented with one or another form of the communist hypothesis?” Taking from mathematics the example of Fermat’s theorem, which took three centuries of “failures” to be proven, Badiou argues, “failure is nothing more than the history of the proof the hypothesis, provided that the hypothesis is not abandoned.” His book is therefore structured around three examples – May ’68, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and the Paris Commune – that show that “failures of events closely bound up with the communist hypothesis were and are stages in its history. At least for all those who are not blinded by the propagandist use of the notion of failure.” His first chapter elaborates on different kinds of failures by using selections from his L’Echarpe rouge and L’Incident d’Antioche, and offers a rare glimpse in English into his literary writings. Unfortunately, the rest of the book is not a systematic new text on the Idea of Communism, but rather a collection of conference presentations and articles that have appeared elsewhere, the most notable being his presentation at the 2009 “The Idea of Communism” conference. The first major section of the book deals with May ’68, and consists of two more recent essays and one (more flawed and less interesting) text written by Badiou in the heat of the moment in 1968. The wave of commemorations of May’ 68, particularly around its 40th anniversary, can be interpreted in two pessimistic ways: May ’68 is truly dead and therefore it is harmless to remember and celebrate it; or, May’ 68, in its “individualism and the taste for jouissance,” was the true birth of “neo-liberal capitalism,” which can now openly admit this fact. Badiou contrasts these two dark interpretations with two more optimistic ones: interest in May ’68 is “an anti-Sarkozy reflex;” or, once again spreading is the “idea that a different political and societal world is possible.” Badiou concludes that such contradictory interpretations of May ’68 are possible because it was a “heterogeneous multiplicity,” “an “event of great complexity.” In fact, there were “four different ‘May ‘68s.’” They include: 1) an uprising of students, who, although only a small minority, demonstrated “the extraordinary strength of the ideology and the symbols, the Marxist vocabulary and the idea of revolution” and a new “acceptance of violence.” 2) a massive general strike that originated outside of “official working-class institutions,” made “systematic use of factory occupations” as well of “kidnapping bosses,” and revealed that something “rebelled against the attempts to find a classic negotiated settlement to the general strike.” 3) a “libertarian May” that entailed moral, sexual, and cultural innovations. Speaking of these first three May ‘68s, Badiou claims they “were represented by great symbolic sites: the occupied Sorbonne for students, the big car plants (and especially Billancourt) for workers, and the occupation of the Odéon theatre for the libertarian May.” Then Badiou turns to the fourth May ’68, which he explains was “crucial, and it still prescribes what the future will bring. It is more difficult to read because if unfolded over time and was not an instantaneous explosion. . . . it dominated the period between 1968 and 1978, and was then repressed and absorbed by the . . . miserable ‘Mitterand years.’” This fourth May’ 68 involved “the conviction that, from the 1960s onwards, we are witnessing the end of an old conception of politics” and a “search for a new conception of politics.” This May ’68 entails giving up the idea of a privileged revolutionary subject as well of the assurance that objective forces would produce the revolution (the party aimed to bring these subjective and objective agencies together). Nonetheless, according to Badiou, the major actors of May ’68 shared the “same language” of classes and class struggle and “united under the red flag.” “But the secret truth, which was gradually revealed, is that this common language, symbolized by the red flag, was in fact dying out. There was a basic ambiguity about May ’68: a language that was spoken by all was beginning to die out. There is a sort of temporary lack of distinction between what is beginning and what is coming to an end.” Badiou summarizes: “The fourth May ’68 is seeking to find that which might exist beyond the confines of classic revolutionism. It seeks blindly because it uses the same language as the language that dominated the conception it was trying to get away from.” He adds, “The fourth May is the diagonal that links the other three. All the new initiatives that allowed us to circulate between these three heterogeneous movements, and especially between the student movement and the workers’ movement, were our treasure-trove.” Badiou singles out the interaction between students and workers, both of whom refused to stick to assigned positions and roles, as embodying the communist ideal of a “polyvalent society, with variable trajectories, both at work and in our lives.” Badiou argues we are “contemporaries of May ’68” because “we have the same problem, and are the contemporaries of the problem revealed by May ’68: the classical figure of the politics of emancipation was ineffective.” Our “fidelity to May ‘68” must therefore entail a “reformulation of the communist hypothesis,” which, stated negatively, asserts that “the existing world is not necessary,” and that therefore “a different world is possible.” The second section of the book deals with the Cultural Revolution, which, Badious argues, “has been a constant and lively point of reference for militant activity throughout the world, and particularly in France, at least between 1967 and 1976. It is part of our political history and the basis for the existence of the Maoist current, the only true political creation of the sixties and seventies.” The “dominant historiographical version” attributes the Cultural Revolution to the failure of the Great Leap Forward and to a voluntarist attempt by Mao to regain power from the rest of the party-state bureaucracy. Badiou instead wants to consider the Cultural Revolution as a real political question, and therefore offers his own account of the Cultural Revolution as a narrower “sequence that runs from November 1965 to July 1968.” He justifies this frame by arguing: “The criterion is the existence of a political activity of the masses, its slogans, its new organizations, its own places. Through all of this an ambivalent but undeniable reference is constituted for all contemporary political thought worthy of the name.” Badiou maintains that “the Cultural Revolution is the last significant political sequence that is still internal to the party-state (in this case, the Chinese Communist Party), and fails as such.” By “saturat[ing[ the form of the party-state,” the Cultural Revolution demonstrates the need to develop a politics “outside the spectre of the party-state.” Mao turned to “political mass mobilization” to revolutionize the ossified party-state structure, but, Badiou argues, Mao always had to contain those very revolutionary forces and their innovations back within the form of the party-state. Badiou writes: “This recourse assumes that one admit uncontrolled forms of revolt and organization. Mao’s group, after a great deal of hesitation, will in fact impose that these be admitted, first in the universities and then in the factories. But, in a contradictory move, it will also try to bring together all organizational innovations of the revolution in the general space of the party-state.” To illustrate his hypothesis that “the Cultural Revolution is the historical development of [this] contradiction,” Badiou examines seven Cultural Revolution referents: the “Sixteen Points” decision in 1966, the rise of the Red Guards, the “revolutionary rebel workers” and the Shanghai Commune, power seizures, the Wuhan incident, the “workers’ entry into the universities,” and “Mao’s cult of personality.” These examples show how the Cultural Revolution “marks an irreplaceable experience of saturation, because a violent will to find a new political path, to relaunch the revolution, and to find new forms of workers’ struggle under the formal conditions of socialism ended up in failure when confronted with the necessary maintenance, for reasons of public order and the refusal of civil war, of the general frame of the party-state.” Badiou concludes: “We know today that all emancipatory politics must put an end to the model of the party, or of multiple parties, in order to affirm a politics ‘without party’, and yet at the same time without lapsing into the figure of anarchism, which has never been anything else than the vain critique, or the double, or the shadow, of the communist parties, just as the black flag is only the double or the shadow of the red flag.” The third section of the book turns to the Paris Commune of 1871, which, Badiou argues, “for the first and to this day only time, broke with the parliamentary destiny of popular and workers’ political movements.” Writing on the Commune, Marx, according to Badiou, praised the Commune for those features that seemed to dissolve the state (direct arming of the people, the end of the separation of powers, internationalism) while faulting the Commune for lacking features closely tied to the state form ( “weak military centralization; its inability to define financial priorities;” etc). That is, the Commune is at once praised for its freedom from the state and criticized for its failure to exercise state power. Badiou claims, “The fact of the matter is that the ambiguity of Marx’s account will be carried both by the social-democratic disposition and by its Leninist radicalization, that is, in the fundamental motif of the party, for over a century.” Badiou explains: “the party realizes the ambiguity of the Marxist account of the Commune, gives it body. It becomes the political site of a fundamental tension between the non-state, even anti-state, character of a politics of emancipation, and the statist character of the victory and duration of that politics.” The “party-state” seems to be the solution to the contradictions of the Commune, but, according to Badiou, it empties the Commune “of all properly political content.” Resisting that dead end approach, Badiou proceeds to examine the development of the Commune using the philosophical framework of his Logics of Worlds, whose complexity and terminology I’ll not attempt to reproduce here. Badiou claims that the 18th of March is a site whose content is “the appearing of a worker-being . . . in the space of governmental and political capacity.” The “Commune event, begun on 18 March 1871, did not have the effect of destroying the dominant group and its politicians. But something more important was destroyed: the political subordination of workers and the people. . . . The absolutization of worker political existence (the existence of the inexistent), convulsive and crushed, had all the same destroyed the necessity of a basic form of subjection; that is, the subjection of a possible proletarian politics to the scheming of (leftist) bourgeois politicians. Like every veritable event, the Commune had not realized a possible, it had created one. This possible is simply that of an independent proletarian politics.” The final section more directly discusses the Idea of Communism. He presents “the Idea of communism” as an operation involving “three basic elements – a political, a historical and a subjective one.” A political truth “is a concrete, time-specific sequence in which a new thought and a new practice of collective emancipation arise, exist, and eventually disappear.” But there is also “a historical dimension of a truth,” and the truth’s “historical inscription encompasses an interplay between types of truth that are different from one another and are therefore situated at different points in human time in general.” Finally, in the subjective element, an individual becomes a Subject by deciding to be “a militant of this truth.” He adds, “an Idea is the possibility for an individual to understand that his or her participation in a singular political process . . . is also, in a certain way, a historical decision. Thanks to the Idea, the individual, as an element of the new Subject, realizes his or her belonging to the movement of History.” “The communist Idea is what constitute the becoming-political Subject of the individual as also and at the same time his or her projection into History.” As he states in an earlier chapter, “We have to say that we cannot live without an idea. We have to say: ‘Have the courage to support the idea, and it can only be the communist idea in its generic sense. . . . living without an idea is intolerable.’”
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