From Nina Power’s “Is Badiou a Modernist” – this is the last part, giving an account of Badiou’s thinking on politics, from the late 80s to the present. As preface she says, “This is a slightly longer version of the paper I gave at UEL’s recent workshop on modernism/postmodernism and also contains bits of the very short presentation I gave at the Badiou day at the Venezuelan embassy last Friday. As such, it’s a bit patchy, but what are you gonna do…”
A couple of excerpts -
If the category of class drops out of Badiou’s later conception of politics it does so in a complicated way: Class struggle, he argues in ‘Philosophy and Politics’, ‘is a category of History and of the State, and only under entirely singular conditions does it constitute a material for politics.’ (p. 161) Badiou comes very close to the later Sartre here on this point, particularly the Sartre of the Critique of Dialectical Reason, where class analysis is for the most part replaced by a critical description of the emergence of atypical political groupings: if politics is one of philosophy’s conditions, then the model of political action is of the order of an event: not perceptible from the standpoint of the situation, and not amenable to the kinds of economic and class analyses that form the bulk of classical Marxist readings.
It is true that Badiou explicitly avoids any discussion of the role of the economy in his conception of politics as thought – politics is a rare singularity, it is predicated on the rationalist premise that ‘people think’, and that political truths are always the seizing of a collective subject by an event.
Badiou on the Subject
by Nina Power
‘Does the act of proposing, for our time, a space of compossibility within thought of the truths which proliferate there, demand the maintenance and usage of the category of the Subject, even profoundly altered and subverted?’ Badiou, (Manifesto, p. 44)
Despite the patent nature of the play on words at work in the term ‘subject’, its political and philosophical connections have been severely dislocated in much philosophical usage of the term; more specifically, the dominant (phenomenological-Cartesian) tendency in contemporary thinking on the ‘subject’ begins with a specifically philosophical conception of the term and presupposes that this is the precondition for any further discussion of politics (if, indeed, any discussion of politics is ever produced by this tendency). Contemporary thinking simply assumes that the philosophical meaning takes precedence. What this means is that a certain concept of a self-reflexive, individuated subject has stifled any discussion of the subject that would treat the subjectivity of that subject as a primarily collective fact, in spite of such precedents as Feuerbach’s discussions of the immediately generic nature of consciousness, Marx’s early claims about humanity and Sartre’s notion of the shared aims of the group-in-fusion.
Following his turn to meta-ontology in Being and Event where politics is understood as one of philosophy’s four conditions (along with art, science and love), Badiou continues to take a step back from the antagonistic conception of politics formulated in the earlier Theory of the Subject. In a paper given in 1991 entitled ‘Philosophy and Politics’ (republished in 1992’s Conditions), Badiou asks whether ‘revolutionary’ politics has reached a point where it attests to nothing other than ‘philosophy’s disaster’, that is to say, whether politics as thought has culminated only in tragedy. On the surface this seems close to many of the democratic analyses that accompanied the collapse of the Berlin wall and the crumbling of Soviet-supported states in Eastern Europe. But far from triumphantly proclaiming the end of history and the inevitability of the free markets and democracy, Badiou’s conception of politics seeks to reestablish the ‘existence of politics at the point of its apparent impossibility’, as one of the sections in the ‘Philosophy and Politics’ essay has it. Badiou’s politics is never that of the ‘lesser evil’, it only ever seeks to establish what lies at the heart of every truly democratic project. It is this impulse, in the face of supposed defeat, to remain true to the founding impulses of emancipatory politics – equality, collectivity, and as he will later term it ‘the communist hypothesis’ that characterises Badiou’s later approach to politics.
Stripped of a certain kind of rather forbidding Maoist-Hegelianism that characterised the earlier work of Theory of the Subject, Badiou returns in some ways to the problematics of the critics of Hegel of the 1840s: how to adequately describe philosophy’s relation to politics, how to best understand the emergence and possibilities of communism in the face of inequality and what it means to remain true to a concept of universality in the face of ever-proliferating difference. If the category of class drops out of Badiou’s later conception of politics it does so in a complicated way: Class struggle, he argues in ‘Philosophy and Politics’, ‘is a category of History and of the State, and only under entirely singular conditions does it constitute a material for politics.’ (p. 161) Badiou comes very close to the later Sartre here on this point, particularly the Sartre of the Critique of Dialectical Reason, where class analysis is for the most part replaced by a critical description of the emergence of atypical political groupings: if politics is one of philosophy’s conditions, then the model of political action is of the order of an event: not perceptible from the standpoint of the situation, and not amenable to the kinds of economic and class analyses that form the bulk of classical Marxist readings.
It is against the backdrop of the collapse of ‘real socialism’ and the set-theoretical turn of the late 1980s and the idea of philosophy’s ‘conditions’ (an idea first formulated in Manifesto for Philosophy, published in France in 1989) that Badiou’s later conception of politics must be understood. Nevertheless, Badiou remains true to certain key elements (justice, universalism, emancipation) in the history of 20th century revolutionary politics, which he describes as ‘sequences’. These moments (typically for Badiou, the French Revolution, the Paris Commune, the Bolshevik Revolution, The Cultural Revolution, May ‘68) share certain key features: politics is collective, it exhibits the ‘infinity’ of the situation by rejecting finitude, politics invokes subjective universality. In later works, Badiou will claim that there are two communist sequences – from the French Revolution to the Paris Commune and from the 1917 Russian Revolution to 1976, and that following this latter sequence we are in a kind of ‘interval phase dominated by the enemy’ (Sarkozy, p. 113). Politics becomes a question of determining the modality by which we can begin to think through a third communist sequence.
In the Preface to the English Edition of Metapolitics (first published in France in 1998 and in English in 2005), Badiou presents four more specific, late twentieth-century periods of political concern that directly relate to his own philosophical and political development. Firstly there is the period around 1965, where the PCF and questions of colonialism (particularly Algeria) dominated the political scene, followed by the ‘red decade’ of 1966-76 which continued both the Chinese Cultural Revolution and May 68, where ‘everyday life was entirely politicised’ (p. xxxiv). Then followed a long counter-revolutionary period (1976-1995), in which the rise of ‘human rights’, ‘humanitarian’ but in practice imperialist ‘interventions’ took place and the domination of America, which Badiou describes as a ‘betrayal’ of the previous period. Finally, there is the period from 1995 onwards, which is seen as a complicated break from the previous period, still possessed of many of the same features, but with the addition of popular anti-globalisation movements. Whilst Badiou is not sympathetic to the ‘vain adventurism’ of these groups, he nevertheless sees hope in the juncture of a ‘new political thought’ and ‘organised popular detachments’ (Metapolitics, p. xxxv).
As part of his turn away from classically Marxist concerns, Badiou in his later writings on politics stresses the importance of taking what he describes as ‘distance from the state’. This includes a refusal to engage with parliamentary politics and to break with what commonly gets called ‘political philosophy’. Indeed, Badiou’s definition of the alternative, ‘metapolitics’, is described as ‘whatever consequences a philosophy is capable of drawing, both in and for itself, from real instances of politics as thought’. ‘Political philosophy’, the academic discipline that in the 1980s and 1990s concerned itself, according to Badiou, with human rights discourse and ethics above all, is in essence the denial that politics has anything to do with thought. Whilst Badiou’s claim that a politics worthy of the name should be primarily a question of thinking seems, on the face of it, to be a profoundly idealistic statement, on a continuum with Platonic and Aristotelian claims about the relationship between the polis and human nature (most centrally, the claim that man is a political animal), it should be understood in the context of the pact between academic political philosophy and what Badiou calls ‘capital-parliamentarianism’. Here politics is only a description of the realm of public opinion – of polls, statistics, ad campaigns and media portrayal. Contemporary politics, and the political philosophy taught in academia has nothing to do with a politics of truth. As Badiou acerbically puts it: ‘If our knowledge of planetary motion relied solely on suffrage as its protocol of legitimation, we would still inhabit a geocentric universe.’ (Metapolitics, p. 15).
Building on the work of his long-time associate, Sylvain Lazarus, Badiou’s later work on politics builds upon this idea of politics ‘as thought’. In an essay on Lazarus’s Anthropology of the Name, Badiou writes: ‘There is certainly a “doing” of politics, but it is immediately the pure and simple experience of a thought, its localisation. Doing politics cannot be distinguished from thinking politics.’ (Metapolitics, p. 46). Inevitably, Badiou’s complicated relationship to Marxism is implicitly invoked in his rather classical formulation: didn’t Marx break with the idealism of Feuerbach and the other ‘merely’ critical post-Hegelians by turning to the real abstractions of political economy? It is true that Badiou explicitly avoids any discussion of the role of the economy in his conception of politics as thought – politics is a rare singularity, it is predicated on the rationalist premise that ‘people think’, and that political truths are always the seizing of a collective subject by an event. Objective conditions are irrelevant, and as such, true politics for Badiou always happens at a distance from the state. It is clear that for Badiou those who ‘believe’ in the state are little more than mystics: ‘…for the patient who prays to the Virgin and gets better, all well and good; but if the patient dies it is because She willed it. Similarly, if I implore our State to be good towards workers and illegal immigrants [sans-papiers], either it does something, and it’s wonderful, or it does nothing, in which case this is put down to the merciless law of reality in crisis-ridden times. Either way, I have done my duty’ (Metapolitics, p. 71).
In the 1990s, Badiou is preoccupied by the ‘names’ associated with politics. One of the reasons for this analysis of the terms most typically associated with the history of left-wing movements (party, masses, proletariat, commune) is in order to break with the ‘suturing’ of philosophy to politics. What this means, and for Badiou it in part explains the disasters of twentieth century politics, is that particular concepts or proper names come to stand in for the whole of political thought and action: In other words, ‘the reduction of the diversity of names of politics to a single and primordial name … But if these names get sutured to the potential eternity of a philosopheme, it then comes to be that there is only one genuine name, and this name inevitably becomes the unique name of politics … As History has shown, such a name then becomes a sacred name’ (Conditions, p. 157). As such, Stalin and Mao are ‘creations, or creatures, of philosophy,’ because in this circumstances politics has become fused with philosophy so completely that neither has any way out, and disaster can only ensue. Badiou’s post-Soviet politics remains true to the guiding impulses of the kind of emancipated communism presented by Marx and Engels in The German Ideology. As Badiou writes, ‘[a] genuinely political organisation, or a collective system of conditions for bringing politics into being, is the least bound place of all.’ (Metapolitics, p. 76)
As a corollary to this break with historical communism, Badiou’s political writings in the 1990s and onwards are also an exploration of the question of a politics without a party. The party-form for Badiou is nothing but a state-form and as such is devoid of both thought and subjective militancy: ‘The central subjective figure is the political militant’ (Metapolitics, p. 122). Badiou’s alternative to the party form is in no way an anarchistic model but rather ‘one organised through the intellectual discipline of political processes’ (p. 122). Badiou’s own involvement during this period with L’Organisation Politique, a small group of militants primarily concerned with the struggle and status of the sans papiers (illegal immigrants) in France, attempts to put this ‘intellectual discipline’ into practice.
By turning to questions of the collective nature of politics (‘An event is political if its material is collective’, Metapolitics, p. 141) Badiou seeks to introduce a purer notion of communism than the one witnessed by the twentieth century, with its proper names and dogmatic concepts. Stripped of the obligation to defend really existing communism, Badiou, in his most recent work on politics, to defend what he calls ‘the communist hypothesis’. In his study of the French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, Badiou declares that ‘communism is the right hypothesis’ (p. 97), and that ‘[w]ithout the perspective of communism, without this Idea, nothing in the historical and political future is of such a kind as to interest the philosopher’ (Sarkozy, p. 115). According to Badiou, then, The current task of philosophy vis-à-vis politics becomes the duty to help a new modality of the communist hypothesis to come into being. It is towards outlining this new modality that Badiou’s latest work on politics tends, with a frank admission that in many ways we are returning to the problems, not primarily of the twentieth century, but of the nineteenth:
We are dealing, as in the 1840s, with absolutely cynical capitalists … All kinds of phenomena from the nineteenth century are reappearing: extraordinarily widespread zones of poverty, within the rich countries as well as in the zones that are neglected or pillaged, inequalities that constantly grow, a radical divide between working people – or those without work – and the intermediate classes, the complete dissolution of political power into the service of wealth, the disorganization of the revolutionaries, the nihilistic despair of wide sections of young people, the servility of a large majority of intellectuals, the determined but very restricted experimental activity of a few groups seeking contemporary ways to express the communist hypothesis. (Sarkozy, pp. 116-117)
Among the bleakness of the contemporary situation, Badiou sees however, a duty and a task: ‘through a combination of constructions of thought, which are always global or universal, and political experiments, which are local or singular but can be transmitted universally, we can assure the new existence of the communist hypothesis, both in consciousness and in concrete situations.’ (Sarkozy, p. 117). Badiou thus attempts to overcome the theory/practice divide in the name of a new approach to an old question: a return to the mid-nineteenth century in the name of the 21st.
No related posts.
John Steele on 
Nick Paretsky on 
Politics & Evil Part 3: Engaging Bill Martin’s Ethical Marxism « Kasama on 
Don Hamerquist on 
worker antagonism on 
David Ranney on 
http://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2010/01/barack-badiou-and-bilal-al-hasan.html
from:
We are left with the problem placed by Bilal al Hasan in a more limited context:
“…the question here is what comes after the end of a revolution and its failure.” Bilal al Hasan (this was part of a commentary on the Palestinian movement on the Gathering Forces website. G.F. 11/09).
Badiou argues for a conceptual return to the standpoints of the 19th century, but not on the premise that a simple class polarization can be resurrected through some act of political will. He is concerned with an issue of philosophical stance – with posing the idea of communism in terms of the “conditions of its identity” – a 19th century problem – and not as a question of “…the victory of the communist hypothesis” – the problem of Lenin and the party/state and of the revolutionary movement for most of the past century.
This line of argument is relevant to the revisiting of third world revolution. Badiou indicates the elements of the communist hypothesis in the nineteenth century as combining, “…the idea of communism as a popular mass movement with the notion of savior of all.” (P. 15). The original conception of communism was that of a multiform struggle that would embody and culminate in universal emancipation through, the “…process of the Decline of the State.” (P.14)
In my opinion the core element in this conception is the inseparable linkage of the notion of, “savior of all”, stressing the universality of the project, with the destruction of the state – a state that is sometimes defined inclusively by Badiou as; “…all that limits the possibility of collective creation” (P. 14). The vanguard parties and revolutionary blocs characteristic of the 20th century had a different orientation. In Badiou’s terms they were party/state formations which might seize and hold power locally but could not transform social relations because their essential character incorporated features of a state. Thus they inevitably became the antagonist of the mass “Communist movement” (Badiou’s term). But only through such a movement, that is necessarily, “beyond the state” (Badiou), can communism be achieved.
It is quite clear that even the best of the national liberation fronts were essentially party/state formations. They functioned even more as shadow governments than did the vanguard parties. The discipline they enforced was more overtly military and not subject to even the more or less hypothetical democratic forms of vanguard parties or to the objective limits that are inherent in a defined class base.
Thanks for posting this comment. There’s a lot to think about, both in the excerpt above, and in the complete essay, which is posted at the link at the top of c. alexander’s comment, and which I recommend to readers of this site.
It’s certainly true that both Communist and national liberation movements of the 20th century were very closely tied to the state form, either in practice or in aspiration. This was tied, for Communists and most Marxists generally, to the theory of the movement from socialism, as a first stage, to communism at a later point. And this was tied (imo) to the realities of political struggle, which have seemed to operate very, very preponderantly on a national level, which in turn devolved into the question of control/capture of the state/construction of a new machinery of state.
This sort of strategy has reached a dead end as an animating principle of real mass struggle (not completely, by any means — see the important struggle by the Maoists in Nepal for control of that state, for example — but generally). Given that fact (as I take it to be), what lessons to draw?
This is where Badiou comes in, as well as Negri and others, in attempting to theorize the present (and inevitably the past) in a way that will shed light on how to go forward.
Well — there is everything to say about this question (how to go forward in a truly emancipatory way when previous templates no longer seem applicable), which is the pivot of all the theoretical ruminations on this site.
Negri? Really? While I really appreciate the work of Negri on some issues, such as the nature of the capitalist state, I have heard that he isn’t even the best writer in the Italian Operaismo tradition and that Tronti is far better. While I definitely don’t agree with this tendency, I think it would be more interesting to look at the work of Tronti than Negri.
Have Lenin’s arguments in The State and Revolution really been proven false in any way by the 20th century communist movement? I really don’t believe they have, and actually feel that some of what you are saying in the above could be very harmful to the communist movement. The way you present the problem of the state in relation to the communist movement, you make it sound as if we need to totally re-invent communism before we even engage in any sort of revolutionary practice and actually take concrete positions on particular issues. While I am sure you believe that we need to be engaged in practice and put forward positions based on our existing knowledge, I think we must have much more confidence in our ideas and our tradition rather than questioning one of the central theses in Lenin’s The State and Revolution.
Although I definitely agree with the importance of exploring new ideas, I don’t think this necessitates throwing away the primary ideas that we actually base our tradition on, including the thesis that the state needs to exist under the lowest stage of communism (socialism).
Just because Badiou doesn’t agree with this doesn’t in any way solve the problem for any of us, as Badiou has yet to come up with a concrete alternative for revolutionary practice and transformation that we can actually apply to our practice today. While I hope that he eventually does, he hasn’t yet and may not do so, as I’m not even sure this is one of his main interests. While he is involved in L’Organization Politique, he couldn’t possibly believe that this kind of work (advocating for sans-papiers and immigrant workers’ rights) is the new and better form of communist struggle that those in the imperialist centers should adopt. While this kind of activism is undoubtedly important, there must be much more to communist struggle today in the imperialist centres than this single-issue work, as we are fighting for an entirely new society that is supposed to be built by all working people.
Michael –
This topic is a large discussion – which we should have.
Just to start things off, you say that Lenin’s arguments in State and Revolution have not been proven false. Could you be more specific, and spell out the arguments or theses of S&R which you’re referring to?
Michael,
I’m presuming that I am the “you” to which you refer and here is an initial response in a discussion that I would like to see continue. You say:
“I think we must have much more confidence in our ideas and our tradition rather than questioning one of the central theses in Lenin’s The State and Revolution.
Although I definitely agree with the importance of exploring new ideas, I don’t think this necessitates throwing away the primary ideas that we base our tradition on, including the thesis that the state needs to exist under the lowest stage of communism (socialism).”
First, do we agree that “our ideas and our tradition” include massive failures culminating in the worst forms of the systems of oppression and exploitation that we initially aimed to overthrow? I don’t argue that this is the entirety of left history as some do, but it is enough of a chunk of it, that it is unreasonable to object to a critical consideration of what happened on the grounds it might be, “…harmful to the communist movement”.
Second, what is your basis for asserting that you are advancing and I am challenging “…the primary ideas.” in the tradition. In fact, you emphasize certain elements of our ideas and tradition, probably including conceptions of the vanguard party and of the dictatorship of the proletariat, while I emphasize others, including the notion of communism as universal emancipation through the elimination of class domination and as the “withering away of the state”. I am certainly willing to regard my “primary ideas” as hypotheses and welcome challenges to the way I see them. I would suggest that you should have a similar attitude.
That said, I like State and Revolution a great deal and do not believe I challenge any of its “central theses”. I do challenge big parts of what is often accepted as Marxist Leninist doctrine and common sense and this does include other positions that are associated with Lenin.
I’m keeping this short, but you should know, if you don’t already, that I’m old and I write a lot on these topics. I’d welcome a criticism of how I present Negri’s Empire and Multitude in “Response to Paretsky” on 3Way Fight. If you are interested in pursuing an interpretation of Lenin, including State and Revolution, I’d welcome a criticism of “Lenin, Leninism, and some Leftovers” which is on the Sketchy Thoughts blog. Finally, you are welcome to criticize my approach to political work argued in “Thinking and Acting in Real Time and a Real World”. It’s on the Bring the Ruckus and the Gathering Forces sites among others.
Don Hamerquist
Huh? I was responding to John Steele. Your points are interesting, though I have no idea how you thought I was responding to anything you said anywhere at any time.
I also don’t emphasize the vanguard party. I believe in the need for political parties, including revolutionary ones at the present time. Until we have gone through world socialism and achieved communism (the end of all classes), parties will be necessary. Under communism, parties and politics will no longer be necessary. But until then, I think they are.
Oh, you must be c. alexander. I guess I was responding to John, though his points are similar to yours.
Michael,
Well, I’m thoroughly embarrassed. I apologize for my contribution to the confusion.
Don
Just to add a couple of points that may not have been clear as to my point of view -
I am not “opposed to the state” per se, as it were; I am not an anarchist. I do think that the tying of revolutionary aspirations to the state form has become problematic at this time, principally because the structure and dynamic of capital has changed. I do not see how a real severing from capital is possible within the national state form.
Retrospectively, with the benefit of present knowledge, it is hard to see that this was possible in the past, either. Needless to say, this is not to condemn or censure the revolutionary movements of the past which worked within that framework. I situate myself within that tradition, gladly and proudly.
But that tradition does not have the resources to solve our problems today. We should do the historical work necessary to analyze the great revolutions and the theory that accompanied them. But it is not the case that if we analyze their mistakes, and then attempt to do what they did, but avoiding the errors, that we will have any sort of success. Quite the reverse; it’s a recipe for impotence and irrelevance to the great problems of the present.
As for Negri and Badiou, I think it’s obvious that neither of them has discovered a way to practice a revolutionary or emancipatory politics. But they are both attempting to forge a new theoretical structure which will link with a new practice, and they (as well as others of course) are needful and useful in that respect (Badiou far more than Negri imo, but he points in some useful directions too).
But this is what we very greatly need – theoretical explorations aiming toward an emancipatory politics, which is the aim of this site.
John,
I think these explorations will be interesting and important, though I also think that any science of emancipation that isn’t somehow linked to actual strategies and tactics and a theory-practice dialectic will be hindered in its development until such links are made.
We are still dialectical materialists.
Also, the central theses I refer to are the following:
1) that the working class, in alliance with and leading all other oppressed classes, must seize state power in individual states.
2) that the final processes of the withering away of the state can only begin once world socialism has been achieved and not before that time.
Michael,
I have the feeling I may be inserting myself in other people’s ongoing discussions without an adequate understanding of where things stand. If what I say is not helpful in clarifying issues and differences, just say so and I’ll return to the small crowd that I irritate on a regular basis.
You initially referred to “central theses in Lenin’s ‘State and Revolution’, and in response to a question spelled out two of them:
1) that the working class, in alliance with and leading all other oppressed classes, must seize state power in individual states.
2) that the final processes of the withering away of the state can only begin once world socialism has been achieved and not before that time. (1/29)
I do think these theses accurately represent the dominant Marxist-Leninist view and I agree that they have some basis in Lenin’s positions – although not in State and Revolution.
However, I think that nothing that has happened over the past 90 years has demonstrated even a provisional validity for the perspective in which these points are embedded, at least not if it is intended to be a perspective for the overthrow of capital, the abolition of class society, and for communism. We know that mass revolutionary movements have been able to, “seize state power in individual states”, but we also know where this has led and at what costs. This history doesn’t provide an unchallenged base of unquestioned achievements; it doesn’t even hold clear answers to the questions it raises. Nothing can be more “harmful to the communist movement” than to fail to critically evaluate how the worst forms of capitalism emerged out of the victories of the movement against capital, and not primarily because that movement was defeated by an external force but through the corruption of its leading elements.
I will say some more about this in relation to Badiou’s conceptions as I understand them in a moment. First, back to State and Revolution and its “central theses”. Seizing the state was the conception of the reformists and gradualists in the First and Second Internationals who did not actually see the state as an instrument of class domination. Lenin’s counter argument in State and Revolution was to smash, not “seize” the bourgeois state. Recognizing that the effects of class domination could not be erased instantaneously and that counter-revolution was a distinct possibility, he argued for a transitional state of new type, a commune state, that would be a dictatorship over the toppled ruling class and a more comprehensive and participatory democracy for the working classes. This new type of state would involve significant immediate steps towards communism as it is defined by Badiou following Marx; “the process of the decline of the state”. (Communist Hypothesis, p.3 Kasama). These included the replacement of the police and standing army by the armed people and the replacement of bureaucratic administrative structures by delegated popular representatives subject to immediate and unconditional recall by their constituencies.
State and Revolution was definitely animated by the prospects for an international revolution. While revolution might be initiated in “individual states”, there was never the sense that it would be so confined for an extended period or that the “process of decline of the state” must be delayed until its triumph was global. That would conflict with the entire treatment of the Paris Commune experience which is central to the piece.
Your notion of “world socialism” is extremely ambiguous, and I don’t believe it is contained or implied in State and Revolution – although there are such implications in Lenin’s writings which have a theory of the productive forces flavor, e.g. his speech to the 11th Congress of the CPSU. I am in agreement with Negri’s recent position that the concept of socialism as a distinct objective or stage of revolutionary struggle is misconceived and should be scrapped.
The fundamental problem lies in the way the issue of the revolutionary party has become intertwined with the question of the state both prior to and following successful and unsuccessful attempts at revolution. His emphasis on this question and the way he approaches it is an important contribution of Badiou in my opinion. You know that the issue of the revolutionary party is not a focus of State and Revolution, so the question of whether and in what sense the working class makes it own revolution is not posed there. However, it is certainly a real issue, and the manner in which Lenin dealt with it conceptually, for example; by ridiculing the potential of a contradiction between the “vanguard” and the class in the opening sections of Left Wing Communism, played an important role in the emergence of the “party/state” phenomena. Here I agree very much with Badiou:
“Under the form of the party-state – like in Russia, China, and other places – a new form of state, which was authoritarian and imperialist was instated. And this state was negative, very far from the practical law of the people, and very far from the ideal of the decline of the state.” (Communist Hypothesis, Kasama, p. 5)
I think that one way to start looking at this history and these issues is to reconsider the mythologized Bolsheviks and Lenin – perhaps by contrasting Althusser’s treatment of the revolution in Contradiction and Overdetermination (For Marx, p. 98 as I remember) with Badiou’s in Politics Unbound (Metapolitics, p.74-75).
Don Hamerquist
In regards to seizing state power and smashing it, for Lenin, the first objective seems to be necessary for the second. Of course state power must not merely be seized and wielded by the proletariat, but the whole nature of the state must be fundamentally altered once it is seized. Again, it is not a matter of merely seizing state power, but fundamentally altering it so that it begins to wither away, which first requires seizing it, according to Lenin. However, I think it is impossible to believe that the final processes of the withering away of the state can begin before world socialism has been achieved. I am not sure how anyone could possibly make such an argument, especially considering the history of 20th century revolutions. I would be very interested to see an argument that explained how this might be possible considering the objective conditions of the world capitalist system in which any single revolutionary society would be embedded.
While I believe that the process of the withering away of the state must start immediately after a seizure of state power, following Lenin, I also don’t think there is any evidence that this process can be completed before world socialism has been achieved.
Michael -
Just a note – Dan Hamerquist is the author of the paper from which c. alexander gives an excerpt above. The full title of the piece is ‘Barack, Badiou, and Bilal al Hasan’, and it can be found in its entirety at the link c alexander gives at the beginning of his comment, namely
http://threewayfight.blogspot.com/
The full piece is quite interesting, and relevant to our beginning discussion here.
hello,
I’ve not read all of this, let alone digested it…. that goes for a lot on Khukuri and Kasama actually, sadly… but I’d still like to mention some things that might interest some of you (or at least Michael). One, I think Don Hamerquist’s recent essay on Lenin should be taken seriously, details here:
http://gatheringforces.org/2009/10/26/don-hammerquist-on-lenin-and-leninism/
Second, on Negri vs Tronti, I tend to agree with Michael on this, but at this point I’m only compelled by the earlier (pre-1980s) writings I’ve seen by either. (I’d also mention the few essays in English by Raniero Panzieri, all findable by google.) If anyone’s interested, some friends and I put some notes up from our reading of Tronti’s major work, Workers and Capital, here – http://leggiamotronti.blogsome.com/
That book is online somewhere in French (I think there’s a link from that blog) and has been translated into Spanish, but hasn’t been translated into English.
Finally, here’s a link to recent comments by Tronti and by Badiou on the economic crisis:
http://chtodelat.wordpress.com/2008/10/21/tronti-and-badiou-on-the-crisis/
Sorry to post off topic like this. I’ll come back with on topic comments later.
cheers,
Nate