How do we, how should we, approach the radical reconception of revolutionary theory? Within this, what part should be played by a critical reexamination of past approaches and experiences?
These are the questions — some of the questions — of this important essay by Bill Martin, which will be published here in three parts.
Martin is the author of Ethical Marxism: The Categorical Imperative of Liberation, which has recently been the subject of an extended essay on this site by Vern Gray, appearing in three segments here, here, and here.
The real problem is that, to put it in stark terms, to be against philosophy is to be against communism.
Into the wild: Badiou, actually-existing Maoism, and the “vital mix” of yesterday and tomorrow – 1
by Bill Martin
“The task facing us … is to bring the communist hypothesis into existence in a different modality from that of the previous sequence; this is why our research is so complicated, so erratic, so experimental.” (Alain Badiou, The Meaning of Sarkozy, p.115; word order altered)
Can we fashion an approach to the communist project that allows us to sift through certain experiences and ideas and evaluate them without becoming stuck in a backward-looking posture? Can we forge some new roads, or find these roads, or perhaps let these roads find us, without entirely forgetting some of the places where we have been? Can we truly go someplace new, “into the wild”?
For those of us who want to set out on this journey, and who see the necessity of it, it might help to have a “workbook” of sorts (or several of them). Our theoretical work in this phase cannot help but be a bit “raw,” which is not to say that we should not aim for as much refinement as we can attain along the way. But the point is that it is “theory” done “along the way,” in something closer to “real time,” what Edward Said called “traveling theory.”
Two somewhat rough-and-ready terms that I would like to introduce in what follows are “actually-existing Maoism” and the “vital mix.” I will also introduce the term “socialist hypothesis,” in contrast to Badiou’s term, the “communist hypothesis.” I hope that these terms will help our work and that they might gain some currency.During the (long) process of completion of this (ridiculously) long piece, the first issue of the RCP’s announced “online theoretical journal,” Demarcations, was released Presented in this first issue of Demarcations is a book-length analysis of the ideas of Alain Badiou. I will come back to this text at the very end of this article, but my main goal here is to present some thoughts subsequent to my response (“Dear Prof. Badiou”) to the RCP’s earlier, “draft chapter,” on Badiou. However, this article is a very long “postscript”! My aim is to not only dissect some bad methodology and to carry forward the larger project of the debriefment of Maoism, but even more to lay some ground for the next steps that need to be taken, practically and theoretically. Let me be clear: the next steps also need to be taken even as the debriefment unfolds, otherwise we will get stuck in this project of debriefment.
However, let me say at the outset that (and this is a topic covered in more general terms below), this approach in which there is no basic respect for intellectuals, and especially not for philosophers and for the history of philosophy, this approach of only reading a particular contemporary philosopher with no intention of being open to learning anything, but only with the aim of picking him or her apart, this approach is odious and needs to be rejected by anyone who hopes to contribute to radically changing the world.
There are some who do not see this project of “debriefment” as a particularly important task, especially some who supposedly moved beyond this stage of things long ago. Perhaps this question doesn’t “divide into two,” exactly, but there are at least two important aspects to it. The aspect which I would take as principal, or that I try to take as principle (though I probably fail in this respect here and there), is taking it as baseline that Maoism generates a “problematic” (as Althusser called it) from which we communists need to advance. That means building on the positive experiences, and understanding and criticizing the problems, and asking what it means to go forward from a certain place or a certain trajectory. This also means considering the contributions of Maoism after Mao. The problem is instead one of creating a framework where the really important contributions can be carried forward.
This also means understanding better some of the problems and contradictions of those contributions. By contradiction in this case I mean places where there is a definite advance, but where there is also a cost, and the cost is not understood or recognized. The key example of this kind of advance in the history of the international communist movement is the establishment of socialist state power itself.
The related methodological question that is central to how we deal with the “Maoist problematic” concerns continuity and discontinuity, whether we need a new synthesis that has continuity as its principle aspect, or whether we need something really new.
Clearly, the RCP is unable to really deal with this as the central question (and this inability is what generates, ultimately, all of the methodological difficulties of Avakian’s New Synthesis, including the silly ones, such as constant self-referencing); however, 1) there are many others (within the various camps of Maoism, Marxism, communism, or socialism) who don’t want to deal with discontinuity, either, they would rather take recourse to the accepted verities of twentieth-century Marxist theory and practice, in whatever form is comfortable for them; 2) more to the point, we who hope to contribute to the next phase of communism do need to take full stock of this question of discontinuity—and Badiou’s work can help us with this.
We won’t be helped by Badiou or anyone if we don’t gain a bit of dialectical subtlety. Badiou supposedly sets aside the category of class, but then he goes on to talk about the proletariat; he sets aside even “Marxism” and the history of socialist states, but also says that “it should be understood that in one form or another we shall retain the theoretical and historical teachings that issued from the first sequence [the Paris Commune and Marx’s naming of the proletariat as the “central void” of capitalism] and the central function of victorious discipline that issued from the second” [from the Bolshevik Revolution to the Chinese Cultural Revolution; this is also from The Meaning of Sarkozy, p.114]. We need to understand what it would mean to take both sides of Badiou’s formulations (putting certain things—essentially “presentations and modalities of the communist hypothesis”—in the past tense, and yet also affirming them, not abandoning fidelity to them) and to understand them not only dialectically, but also fundamentally in terms of discontinuity rather than continuity.
The other aspect of debriefment, which, as I’ve said, I hope to keep secondary but may fail at doing so here and there, is that some of us need to get some things out of our systems, so to speak. For those of you who weren’t around the RCP for long periods of time, I realize this can be annoying. I think there is more here than simply an exercise in looking backwards, I think it goes to some things that we don’t want to repeat in our efforts of regroupment and reconception. But, if you can’t accept that, then, I don’t know, I suppose you should just look away. There are some lessons to be learned about how we can really have effective organization without being merely sectarian, and about how intellectuals and artists can actually play a vital role in radical social transformation, and furthermore how, if we treat our comrades in a merely instrumental way, we are just reflecting and replicating and reifying (in the sense of contributing even further to) the very social forms that need to be overthrown..
Some object to the line of inquiry here, or the part of it that continues to deal with the RCP and Bob Avakian, because it seems to them to afford too much centrality and significance to that experience. But part of what I am saying is that, in addition to the need for some of us to get some things out of our systems, there is a need in the larger discussion toward reconceiving communism, and regrouping around this reconception, to dissect the ways that dogmatism and cultishness seem to return repeatedly even in the midst of radical experimentation.
We might think here about how Albert Einstein not only could not bring himself to accept some of the basic ideas of quantum mechanics, beyond this he tended to fall back upon “constants” that were already more or less discredited by his own discoveries. (I think there is something here for how we understand the critique of the Nepali Maoists, too; it isn’t that there might not be some deep problems there (with the revolutionary process unfolding in Nepal), but what does it mean if we simply fall back upon “classical Maoism” when we ourselves have seen the need to forge ahead to a new paradigm?)
We might also consider the relationship between the genuinely new and the good in Badiou (or in Plato, for that matter!), where the good, the true, and the new are essentially the same thing. As Oliver Feltham puts it in his helpful introduction to Badiou, “Drawing his inspiration from the Maoist theme of the battle of old and new ideas, Badiou concludes that all truth is new. This thesis will become a cornerstone of his philosophy” (Alain Badiou: Live Theory, p.51). I don’t know that I agree with this (all truth is new)—but that is not the point, I’m just recommending that we think about it.
For those who have managed to stay with me thus far, I think you’ll find that I’ll be less fixated on the Avakian/RCP experience by and by, but let me try one more time to frame the whole effort in general terms, with the plea that you consider these terms. Accept in good faith, please, that I am also trying to understand these terms myself. I propose that the debriefment of Maoism is necessary for the reconception and regroupment of revolutionary communism. I propose that Bob Avakian and the RCP made contributions to the Maoist problematic. If we want to forge a new road in revolutionary communism, and to be open to events (or, to be more strictly Badiouean about it, an event) that could show us a whole new way forward, we need this debriefment. If instead we want to think in terms of anarchism, socialism, or Trotskyism, and their respective debriefments, that is a somewhat different project. I’m not saying these are not valid projects, and I’m not saying that we cannot learn from these projects, but let’s not mash all of this too quickly together, either, and let’s not allow some purely quantitative measure of the significance or lack thereof of the RCP and Bob Avakian (as compared, for instance, to some other relatively small group of anarchists, socialists, or Trotskyists, or what-have-you, or to some other relatively-unknown leader or theorist) to undermine our ability to make qualitative distinctions. More will be said on these issues below, especially in relation to anarchism, Badiou’s concerns about the “party-state,” and what I’m going to call the “socialist hypothesis.”
Additionally, I would like to remind everyone that I am simply hoping to contribute to the work that we do here; we need many tribunes and tributaries, and we need a theoretical methodology and a form of organization that allows us to bring forward all of the constructive energies and positive elements and that helps us focus these energies on the work of creating a new society. Is there a way to say, without being merely “eclectic,” that not everything that needs to be united in practice has to be united in theory? (Part of my response to this question is found in sections 6 and 7, on the idea of the “vital mix.”) Is there a way to say that not everyone has to take up all theoretical questions at the deepest possible level without giving way to anti-intellectualism? Conversely, is there a way to pull together the theoretical work we need without sanctioning “theoreticism”? (Here the experience and work of Althusser is again relevant.) A great deal hinges on how we work through these questions—indeed, I would say everything hinges on this work, even if there are still a few more questions on which everything may hinge.
This is a long essay that doubles back upon itself in various ways, coming at some of the same basic themes from different angles. When I do propose an alternative idea or approach, I try to make it clear that I am doing that, and most likely I will construct an additional essay, “for more popular consumption,” as they say, that concentrates these points more succinctly. Here, although there is some rough going (reflecting at times, I’m sure, my own limitations in writing and conceptualization, but also reflecting the difficult terrain that we need to traverse), I hope there is at least some valuable grist for the mill that will go toward constructing the “workbooks” that we need.
1. Into the wild
If you’re not sometimes confused in this crazy world, then you’ve probably abdicated on being human, and certainly on being an intellectual. And who isn’t sometimes confused? Fundamentalists and dogmatists and people sealed up inside a small, locked-up universe are the ones who are never confused. Charges of “agnosticism” and “relativism” do not do justice to the fact that sometimes we have to bracket what we know (or supposedly know or think we know) in order to be open to something new. Revolutionaries have to be willing to go into the wilderness, and this is, I think, the main point at stake in Lenin’s having taken up Hegel’s Logic in 1916. One reading of this is that Lenin felt the need to reground his sense of how the dialectic works in Marx, especially in Capital. This is how Lenin’s “return to Hegel” is understood in the Marxist-Humanist trend of Raya Dunayevskaya, as represented for example in the excellent book by Kevin Anderson, Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism.
This trend has, I think, produced some good work over the years—and, again, I don’t think that is a matter of agreeing with it on all points. Methodologically, the point is that you’ll never actually engage with philosophy or theory if your approach to it is to simply see a systematically-developed argument as a set of propositions that can be summed up as either true or false. You will miss truth this way or you will miss some valuable ideas that could help us get to the truth.
Dunayevskaya and the other well-known neo-Trotskyist theorist of state-capitalism, Tony Cliff (and some of their respective followers, such as Alex Callinicos and Peter Hudis) are quite wrong, I think, about Mao, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t help us think through the ways in which Maoism was too much continuous with Stalinism. And they were wrong, but less wrong, about Stalin, but the difficulty is that they were in some respects not entirely wrong. I know Cliff’s work less well, but at least in the case of Dunayevskaya, Callinicos, Anderson, and Hudis (and some others), you could not fault them on not actually bothering to read philosophical works and the works of twentieth-century Marxist thinkers, from Lukacs to Althusser (Hudis wrote a good review of Derrida’s Specters of Marx; Callinicos wrote an essay on it that I really do not like, but at least he bothered to dig into the thing).
But you can imagine how people around the RCP dealt with this sort of stuff—“if you think what they’re doing is so great, why don’t you go join them?” A bit like the old, “If he’s so great, why don’t you marry him?” Anything to not have to go beyond the narrow canon; I think we have to understand how this is a mindset that mixes all kinds of bad methodologies and attitudes, from dogmatism and absolutism to—with the New Synthesis and the conception of Avakian as cardinal question—narcissism, resentment, and, perhaps worst of all, fear.
2. Fear and trembling
I realize now, with no small amount of hindsight (but I had some sense of this even then and raised it as such) that perhaps the central factor driving the person who argued with me over the inclusion of the Zizek Foreword in the Conversations book was fear. Fear of Avakian’s disfavor, which in this person’s mind amounted to fear of being excluded from the revolution. I’m sure of this because I felt that sort of fear myself over the course of twenty-five years of interacting with the RCP, though I also rebelled against it from time to time. Since I do believe that the RCP was doing revolutionary work up to a point, the important methodological point is to understand how such fear can exist in such a context.
If you don’t believe the RCP was the pole of revolutionary communism in its time (and up through some point between about 2002 and 2006), there is still an important question to be answered: is it possible that there could be a revolutionary pole that has some element of this kind of fear (fear of breaking out of narrow bounds, but also fear of what’s outside of those bounds), but is still revolutionary, or is it that the presence of this kind of fear itself is an indication that this is not a revolutionary pole?
For my part, I think the first of these alternatives is possible—up to a point, there is a point where quantity (of fear) goes over to quality (of the organization, and perhaps that is the point where the organization is for all intents and purposes a “cult” even if this is a term I find somewhat unhelpful even in the context—of expressly religious groups—in which it is ordinarily applied). Given that this is a possibility (that a revolutionary organization could involve some of this fear), wouldn’t the point be to avoid this where possible and to “counter” it in some way?
This goes to the whole question of “ease of mind” and “making revolution in a hothouse” that was spoken to over the years in the original RCP programme and other places. As I told many RCP people over the years, I rarely if ever experienced “ease of mind” around them. Their response (again back to the relationship analogies) was, essentially, “that’s you, not us.” Certainly there were things about me that were me rather than them, you could say, in that I was trying to relate to the RCP as a musician and philosopher (even if in a formative stage on the latter point), though I hope to remain philosophically “formative” for the remainder of my days.
One answer I was sometimes given on this point is that the “as” part was the problem (“as” a musician or philosopher); that what I needed to do was to approach things as a communist. I think there is something to this, I don’t want to dismiss it, but I felt pretty sure that, if I did this the way my RCP contact person was looking at it, I would no longer be a musician or a philosopher. And, of course, one could say, “well, what’s one less musician or philosopher in the world, more or less?” This is probably true, and yet it is also a completely non-constructive, indeed destructive and reactionary way to look at the question.
The RCP did better than most on these sorts of questions, just looking at it in terms of “organization,” and leaving aside the outlook and aims of other “left” organizations. The latter are happy to have anyone, they will sign you up on the spot (as readers here may know, I’m not exaggerating), but that didn’t mean they really wanted to engage with radical philosophy, either, except perhaps in the sense that an articulate person (or a person who uses fancy words, at any rate) can do well in what might be called a “rhetorical democracy of big talkers.”
“What’s one less musician or philosopher, what’s one less artist or intellectual?” was indeed the perspective of the RCP; it was mostly the perspective of other “socialist” or “Marxist” groups, even some of the ones that had some heavy hitters, theoretically speaking. There were moments when the RCP at least tried to have a better line on this; while I think some of this was sincere, perhaps even in Avakian’s own mind, eventually this always came up against Avakian’s role as the decider and the definer.
But there is an actual methodological and epistemological question in the midst of all this, quite apart from one’s perspective on Avakian and the RCP. There are/were groups that have a more lively theoretical scene in their midst, by which I mainly mean that they are willing to consider ideas from outside of some narrow canon, but either these are not revolutionary parties, in the Leninist sense, or their guiding principle is not revolutionary communism. Alex Callinicos and the Socialist Workers Party is a good example. (The SWP in the U.K. is a neo-Trotskyist group that follows the theory that state-capitalism was restored in the Soviet Union with the ascendancy of Stalin’s leadership, and that the Chinese Revolution was never socialist, but rather a bourgeois revolution in a predominantly feudal society, a revolution that brought to power the Stalinist model of state capitalism, as they understand this.) Callinicos does his homework and says some interesting things, or helpful things, but then he can also be quite rigid at times, not always but quite often bringing things back under the “classical Marxist” model of the SWP, which is essentially trade-union based economism. I’m not saying these things as smears, this is the SWP’s own self-conception.
Now, I have seen fear and emotional manipulation in these other groups, too, and the question is whether these things will almost certainly be a part of any kind of group that has radical aims. Then, is it also the case that, the more radical the aims, the more of this sort of thing there will be? Leave aside for the moment what is “really radical.” One answer that is generally given to this is that the real revolution is the one that aims to ultimately abolish the “four alls.” That sounds right to me; there is a difference between communists, who work according to this aim, and socialists, who view things in a qualitatively different—and often supposedly more “realistic”—way. (We’ll come back to the anarchists.)
Wouldn’t it necessarily be the case that, on this reading, there would need to be a higher level of commitment, I would say a qualitatively higher or deeper level of commitment, to being a communist rather than a socialist? For one thing, a greater degree of selflessness is required, and even different kinds of selflessness, to fight for long-range goals that not only cannot be connected to the interests of the individual communist (they are not, and cannot be, simply fighting for themselves) but in fact cannot be connected very closely to the interests of the greater part of the people, at least in an imperialist society. For the proletariat and the oppressed globally, yes, but that is a very different question and requires a completely different approach than one based on the notion of interests—and this approach requires a higher level of commitment and selflessness.
An essential, ineliminable, part of this discussion is that communists believe, and I believe, that we need communism to save the world. The one remaining “inevitablism” that remains after all others have been cleared away is that capitalism will destroy this world if humanity does not get beyond capitalism and save the world. Our fear of what capitalism is doing to this world, and what it will ultimately do if it is not stopped, is quite justified. Postmodern capitalism adds the twist on this, again ironically joined by religious fundamentalisms but especially fundamentalist Christianity (though seen as well, as Slavoj Zizek argues, in “Western Buddhism”), that the world doesn’t matter, so don’t worry about saving it. And perhaps there will be an even further step, where postmodern imperialism really does bring about a world that is not worth saving. (Read the Dune novels for a sense of worlds of such cruelty that it would be better if they simply were destroyed altogether.) We ought to fear all of these things.
As on so many points, the experience of the bicycle is a source of lessons. If you’re a cyclist, you’ll know what I’m talking about (or, frankly, if you’re a cyclist and you don’t get what I’m talking about, you may not be a cyclist for much longer). When you’re riding on a country road, and you hear a motor vehicle roaring up from behind, you’d better be a bit wary of what might happen when that vehicle comes into closer proximity with you and your bike. After some experience, you are able to interpret the sound of the approaching vehicle and to respond accordingly. (More generally, a bicyclist needs to be able to “read the body language” of motor vehicles.) The point is that a cyclist needs to have the right amount of wariness and even fear regarding what can be a fearsome situation, but if the cyclist is overcome with fear, she or he will be paralyzed with fear and not be able to ride at all. Believe me, I’ve seen it happen.
Indeed, as I’m sure most people reading this know, this dynamic—paralysis by fear–is at the core of what is going on with people who break from Marxist organizations and then go away from politics altogether. Or, the paralysis is some combination of fear and exhaustion. The question of exhaustion is then complicated by the experience of different paradigms, ones that were never too good to begin with, or ones that had some element of truth to them, but that element, that paradigm, has run its course. Then fear comes back in a slightly different form, fear of leaving what one has known for the big world of unknowns.
Neither should it be surprising that some people then go in a more avowedly “religious” direction, really for two reasons. The obvious one is that there is a certain comfort in returning to this dynamic of fear and exhaustion, but under a supposedly transcendent paradigm that is supposedly inexhaustible and where some sort of “victory” is assured. The less obvious reason is that there is something “religious” about the dynamic of fear and exhaustion that is an ineliminable part of a real commitment to revolutionary communism. To put this in more complex but also, I would hope, more subtle terms, there is something about a certain kind of “religious perspective” that presents a real epistemological problem, and it has to do with believing in things that are, at the very least, “highly unlikely,” and in things that, at least in some sense, “do not exist.”
Let us come back to some of these questions; for the moment, let us try to reach an understanding of this dynamic of fear, and then move on to resentment.
I experienced fear at various times in my dealings with the RCP. I experienced fear of two kinds. The kind of fear that I want to focus on here is the one associated with “leaving the revolution.” The point is to avoid a merely “liberal,” “it’s my life” kind of response to this dynamic of fear.
However, the other fear is worth mentioning, as it is not unrelated, and that was the fear that, from the perspective of “what’s one less artist or intellectual, more or less?”, there were times when I could see the philosophical and theoretical work I was doing as not only not being valued, but instead being flushed down the toilet, and the material circumstances that allow for the development of this sort of work (that is, my “not uncomfortable” academic position and my adherence in some ways to certain kinds of “academic niceties”) along with it. What happens for an intellectual or artist, in the context of the main kind of fear I am pointing to, is that one can easily convince oneself, and there have been times when I was close to convincing myself, that the “what’s one less intellectual, more or less?” perspective is true. Or something close enough to this: “sure, your work matters (I guess—we’re not really familiar with it), but the Revolution needs something else from you right now—urgently!”
Here’s the problem or set of problems. First, it certainly could be the case that the revolution needs something else, either in general or at any given point. (This is apart from the argument, from Zizek and Badiou, that “the revolution has no needs,” which I am straining to understand. [see The Parallax View, pp.326-327].)
Second, most artists or intellectuals are certainly replaceable, and I count myself in this group of those who are “replaceable.” For one thing, I know full well I could go out on my bike after today’s writing session and be run over by some testosterone-poisoned motorist, and yet I would hope that one of my dying thoughts would be the same as one of my constant living thoughts, namely that I hope that humanity can somehow go on and get itself out of its present bad patch and make something truly good and beautiful and just of itself.
There might be—indeed, I think there are—intellectuals and artists and others who are in a sense “irreplaceable,” but this is again where Badiou can help us. What is irreplaceable about them is not their being the “subjects” who they “are,” it is not the “subject” who has being, at least not fundamentally. Rather, it is the discovery, for instance, of general relativity that makes a certain person “an Einstein,” and it is the discovery of how to make a socialist revolution in a Third World country, and how to make a revolution in the revolution, “a Mao.”
(The distinction between “invention” and “discovery” is perhaps the biggest difference between Derrida and Badiou; from Badiou’s perspective, Derrida’s question, “What can I invent?”—which opens, for example, Derrida’s essay, “Psyche: Inventions of the Other”—places the subject before the event, and shows the co-implication of subjectivity, consciousness, language, meaning, and interpretation; this is the Kantian problematic that Badiou hopes to surmount with the turn to mathematics as ontology, the return to Plato via Cantor’s set theory. Let me note that none of these philosophical questions, which are central to Badiou’s work, figure even the slightest into the RCP’s “critique” of Badiou.)
Third, it is probably a necessary and even good thing that we might feel fear about changing our commitments. If we could just shake off a commitment to something that we think has to do with the possibility of the future flourishment of humankind, something that is necessary for avoiding the destruction of humankind, and something that is necessary for getting out of the past and present misery of the far greater part of humankind, if such a “commitment” could be shrugged off like water running off the back of a duck, then clearly the commitment didn’t amount to much to begin with. A real and deep commitment should not be easy to walk away from, but the other side of this coin is that, when a commitment does require a major reorientation, then one’s life is necessarily going to come unraveled to some extent, probably to a large extent. Absolutely this is a fearsome thing, and yet it doesn’t do justice to a real commitment to say that it shouldn’t contain this element.
On the first point, however, one big problem with the RCP was that too often it was not able to tell the difference between the “general” and the “any given point.” It had little sense of the “general intellectual and cultural scene” beyond itself and a few things it had latched on to (the Clash or whatever horror movie Avakian had just watched), and so its view on why some people should be doing something other than what the RCP were doing was often uninformed, often arrogantly so.
On the second point, while it may be the case that most artists or intellectuals are “replaceable,” it is clearly a very bad thing to proceed with work with artists and intellectuals on such a basis. I expressed many frustrations on this point in the “What is the opposite of bullshit?” interview. While at the time of the interview (the first months of 2008) I didn’t openly express these frustrations in terms of the RCP, of course I was thinking of them and what I was hearing about how the thinking had been completed on the New Synthesis. But, if anything, what the declaration of Bob Avakian’s New Synthesis reveals is that hard and creative intellectual work is not so easily done, much less replaced.
And, on the third point, there is the difficult question of how the ease of mind that will allow for the creative initiative of revolutionary communists can co-exist with deep commitment and political discipline and a sense of a collective project. This “co-existence” problem exists (or, it should exist) for all revolutionary communists, whatever work they are doing.
However, there are specific issues within this general problematic concerning the work of intellectuals and artists. Here we are up against the division of labor that capitalism and imperialism has created. The temptation is to say that, since these seemingly semi-autonomous spheres of artistic and intellectual work are the products of imperialism, and of forms of commodification and valuation that are specific to the imperialist world system, we can just ignore the specific issues of these spheres altogether. Hardly anyone will openly put forward this solution anymore, but there are variations on it that amount to the same anti-intellectualism.
Badiou’s separation of the truth domains (politics, art, science, love) gives us something to think about here, as does Adorno’s notion of the autonomous artwork and his critique of the “committed artist” (in the essay, “Commitment,” which is a critique of Sartre’s politicized conception of aesthetics). I always thought it was interesting but somewhat dubious that Raymond Lotta presented work in public as “a Maoist political economist.” What does that mean, exactly? Does it help if I look at Bertolt Brecht as a “Marxist writer,” or Hans Eisler as a “Marxist composer”? In the cultural sphere, I would say that the main impression of such an appellation is that somehow the modifier (“Maoist,” “Marxist”) represents some sort of shortcut or way around the academic niceties.
I don’t have the answer on this, I just want to underline it as a question, but it seems to me that there are two good reasons to not engage in intellectual self-definitions such as “Maoist political economist” or “Maoist philosopher” (or “Maoist pastry chef”). The first is that it takes away from the idea that a person needs to have done a certain amount of work to legitimately call her- or himself a political economist or a philosopher (or a bike mechanic). Please understand that I am not saying that intellectuals working in these fields cannot have acquired their educations outside of narrow academic channels. As a rock musician and writer on (mostly) rock music, I think I have sufficient sensitivity on this question. (Musicians in the field of Western classical music quite commonly think of themselves as “real musicians playing real music,” and everyone else as “not legit,” much to the frustration of everyone else. Of course there are some very significant exceptions.) Still, there are some basics that need to be acquired one way or another, and then one looks for a certain amount of development, and of course for some creativity or at least something that couldn’t already be obtained somewhere else.
The second reason for avoiding these sorts of self-definitions brings us back to the larger question of fear. To do real intellectual work, and, perhaps more importantly, to do anything political that would go beyond reformism and economism, requires willingness to experiment, and willingness to go into the wilderness. Experimentation cannot occur at all points at all times, of course, any more than a revolution can simply happen at any time even if a sufficient number or sufficiently strategically-placed group of people want it to happen. However, even keeping in mind Thomas Kuhn’s distinction between “normal” and “revolutionary” science, even under conditions where we are filling out the picture in a new and rising paradigm (or, to use Imre Lakatos’s term, “research programme”), our work needs to be guided by a spirit of creativity and openness to experiment. We should not take our commitments lightly, but there is a version of taking them “heavily” that crushes the life out of them. “Pre-definition,” a heavy setting of parameters in advance, stifles critical and creative work. What is more to the point here, pre-definition is a phenomenon of fearful recoil; within Marxism, it is a form of what might be called “pathological materialism,” a “materialism” based on a pathological recoil from anything that could even conceivably prove to be insufficiently materialist.
Under such a pathology, as evidenced by such intellectual designations as Maoist pastry chef, fear can take the intellectual beyond paralysis—into pervasive fear of the wild, fear of deviation and fear of coming under suspicion for having a critical thought. This fear can lead to having a brain that is running so hot it is boiling over, a brain in perpetual “fugue state.” Anyone who has been a committed religious believer and who has significantly changed his or her perspective knows what this is about. And I would lay very strong odds that anyone who has done intellectual work in or close to the RCP knows what this is about.
To return to earlier themes, I am not saying that there might not be moments when it is necessary to risk such an outcome. Putting intellectual or artistic work on an unending “war communism” footing, however, is just another way of destroying this work or preventing it from ever getting off the ground. This occurs in the context of a world where real creative work counts for very little, and it is hard to see the “war communism” way of destroying intellectual and artistic work as being so different from ordinary, everyday anti-intellectualism.
3. It will eat you up: resentment
Imagine someone who believes he can make a contribution to music on the cello, but who has never heard of Yo-Yo Ma. And who, now having finally heard of the esteemed maestro in the midst of a joint project with a musical collaborator, can only respond by saying, “I sure wish that guy didn’t exist, it takes attention away from me.” Suppose our resentful cellist is in some other genre of music besides Western classical music, however; wouldn’t he be entitled to pay no more attention to Yo-Yo Ma than maestro Yo-Yo has paid to him?
Well, some of these resentments are perfectly understandable—just to be fair, I’ll admit that it bothers me quite a bit that my own work isn’t more in the mix of these recent discussions around “the idea of communism,” as I think my work has a real contribution to make, and this has nothing to do with any desire for “fame” in and of itself. (It should go without saying that any such “fame” for this sort of thing comes with a price, and is viewed by many as instead being infamy.) More needs to be said about this problem of resentment; suffice it to say for now that, 1) functioning in the academic world, where resentment is rife, I am not only very aware of this problem, I think on the whole I do a pretty good job of not getting mixed up in it, and 2) the pursuit of “fame” per se is bound up with too much attention to some particular subject—some central, defining personality—and to a “culture” of hype.
Over the course of my life in philosophy and social theory, especially as a graduate student and then a professor, I have devoted a significant amount of energy to the fact that my colleagues in Marxism and otherwise radical politics and theory were devoting insufficient attention to Lenin, Mao, the problematics of the Soviet and Chinese experiences, and to the contributions of Bob Avakian on these problematics. Indeed, the reason I was approached, at least as it was explained to me, to engage in the conversations that ultimately became the book with Bob Avakian, was that I was the person out there who had consistently engaged with Maoism and Avakian in my work—and if you look at my books you’ll see that this is the case.
Now, undoubtedly some would interpret these engagements as “eclectic,” since I was engaging with other diverse thinkers and subjects at the same time, everything from Sartre and Derrida to progressive rock music to Mormon communitarianism. I will try to write a little something on dialectics and “eclectics” by and by, but here again I find Badiou helpful: in the non-reducibility to one another of the domains in which truth-events are possible, but even more in the idea of the “communist hypothesis” itself. From time to time, for narrow “professional” reasons (for instance in coming up for tenure and promotion) I’ve had to answer the question, what is it that brings the diverse aspects of my work together, or am I just “all over the map,” as they say.
Well, for one thing, forming a conception of the “map” itself is a difficult problem, especially if it turns out that we cannot ultimately create a coherent conception because in reality there is no “map,” no “common coordinate system” built into the structure of reality itself. (This raises some of the important issues that are at stake between Badiou on the one side, and Jacques Derrida and Donald Davidson on the other; on this point about the “map” or “coordinate system,” see Davidson’s essay, “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme.”) However, if there is really only one philosophical idea, from Plato to now, and that is the idea of communism, then we also have a basis for seeing diverse contributions, if they really are contributions (if they either initiate or develop a living truth sequence), as contributions to the possibility of a world of mutual flourishment.
In Badiou’s work (and it has more in common with Derrida’s on this point than some might recognize) there is a systematically-articulated ground for recognizing the irreducibility of these domains of truth, their real difference and diversity, and therefore for appreciating the actual contributions that occur in these domains. Here the question of continuity and discontinuity again comes to the fore, but also simply the problems of dogmatism and know-nothingism.
But what is the real reason for this strange and sad and messed-up view of intellectual work? Beyond fear, it is resentment, of a sort that fits in all too well with the world of academic niceties.
Yo-Yo Ma, on the other hand, is a wonderful exemplar of what it means to be open to learning from many sources; he is a great humanist in music, in the mold of Pablo Casals. And he seems to be pretty good in the chops department, too.
4. Responsibilities of philosophy
As I said, and as I think most anyone reading this would know, I engaged with Bob Avakian’s work more than anyone outside of the RCP ever did. There are some who find that a problem, that any of us ever engaged with Avakian, and that some of us continue to, to take him seriously and therefore treat him as someone who should have been taken seriously, up to a point. You could say they offer the Richard Rorty/pragmatist version of deconstruction on this point: the way to get out of a certain vocabulary or a certain discourse is not to work through it and then out of it (as Derrida does). Instead, our pragmatists aver, we need to simply drop the language and get out of that conversation—whether the conversation concerns ancient Greek philosophy (Rorty wondered why Derrida still traveled or trafficked in the land of the Greeks, so to speak), theology, or Bob Avakian.
This point has special applicability to the question of religion. In the famous (at the time) debates between Frederick Copleston and Bertrand Russell on religion (from 1948), the former argued that the persistence and pervasiveness of religion must account for something, and this something must speak to religion’s having a measure of truth to impart. One could say that this is a good Hegelian argument, about truth being “in history” and historical through and through. (Copleston was a Jesuit priest who wrote a still much-used history of Western philosophy.) Russell, despite not being exactly a logical positivist, gave an essentially positivistic response to this historicist claim. That is, Russell’s contrary answer to the claim represents a synthesis of two-valued logic (a proposition is either true or false and not some other, “middle” value) with a world constituted by atomistic “facts.” In this perspective, the existence of God, or the asserted validity of any other bits of religion, is conceived propositionally. That is, “God exists” is a proposition that is either true or not true, and we look at the “logic of the concept” (for internal coherence or contradiction) and the empirically-verifiable facts of the world to form a judgment. So, for Russell, the persistence and pervasiveness of religion means something about the failure of people to reason well and look around in the actual material world.1
But isn’t it also the case that the way we approach the question of religion shows something important about our general methodology and approach to reality and the human condition in general? I will say again, and will continue to repeat as many times as seems necessary, that there is too much approaching this “question of religion” without grappling very deeply with what religion is, or what might be understood by some of its key terms and ideas, especially apart from the taken-for-granted or completely unexamined “propositional” approach. Soren Kierkegaard already gave an excellent critique of this idea of religion as simply a set of propositions to which one either assents or dissents (with the proposition, “God exists,” as the centerpiece). From roughly the same historical period (roughly!), William James’s argument from The Will to Believe concerning “optimism and pessimism as definitions of the world” bears further thought in this connection.
That is, I suppose, if reading the work of actual philosophers is worth doing, and my larger point here is that it is this very idea that the RCP’s recent demarcations are set against.
Where you end up under such a conception is a sui generis “philosophy” that just reinvents the wheel—at best, and often not very well.
The particular wheel that Bob Avakian has reinvented on the question of religion is not only positivism, it is a far less interesting or valuable positivism than what we had from Russell, Carnap, Neurath, Schlick (and others of the Vienna Circle, including the youngsters Ayer and Quine), or certainly the early Wittgenstein.
And that’s the story on much supposedly Marxist critique of religion, it’s just warmed-over and crude positivism and secular rationalism. But my point here wasn’t to go so much further with this discussion of religion, but instead to point to the methodological problems of the secular rationalist approach that prevent us from contributing to the needed radical transformation of the world. Historicism and questions of language, meaning, and interpretation are related but also analytically-independent issues that would also divert us from the central focus of the moment, but again let me underline the point that a certain “religious problematic” has features that are very close to a certain “revolutionary communist problematic.”
Badiou’s answer on this, simply put, is mathematics—it could be said that mathematics is how we can have a communist problematic that is not a religious problematic. For my part, I want to understand this better; but even when I do understand it better, I don’t know why my main reaction would be to figure out a way to make a demarcation against it. My own general heading for understanding how Derrida approaches these questions in Specters of Marx (and elsewhere) is “Marxism’s ghost of a chance,” and I don’t think it bothered Derrida that there was a kind of “religious” resonance there, that’s where the investigation took him. But I don’t know that Badiou ends up entirely somewhere else, either, I really don’t know if mathematics entirely escapes this resonance either.
Derrida and Badiou are often placed with the thinkers of immanence, and certainly there is a question here regarding how either could be materialist or what kind of materialist either could be (“intertextual”? “mathematical”?). For my part, I think there is a transcendental aspect to each (or “quasi-transcendental,” as Derrida put it), and yet I think they both contribute to materialism.
However, even while I think we have to be systematic (and scientific) about what approach to the communist problematic we ought to have, I think we also ought to have an appreciation for what it means to try to make a contribution (that’s my Kantian side speaking up), and an appreciation for the idea that, as I said before, not everything that needs to be united in practice (in the sense of a united front against the existing system and for a new social system) needs to be united in theory, especially if the latter unification is simply forced and crushes the creativity out of our efforts.
My other main comment about the positivist or secular rationalist critique of religion (and here is where the comparison of the “deconstructions” of Rorty and Derrida is helpful) is that the “empiricism plus bivalent propositional logic”-approach leads us to a unitary conception that is simply the “flipped-over” version of what we had before. In other words, you don’t dispel logos and telos (the “one,” the “center out of which everything unfolds,” the “unfolding” in which “the end is in the beginning”) by simply turning them upside-down.
It would be so much more valuable than what Bob Avakian did in Away With All Gods! to look at the ways in which Marx’s conception emerged against the problematics of Western monotheism (and here we can still learn so much more from Althusser’s arguments about how Marx broke with humanism—or, one might say, Althusser’s conception of how Marx should have understood this break in philosophical terms) and how Mao’s conceptions were formed against the background of “godless” China. Everywhere one goes in the world, one finds gods or God—except China..
Furthermore, there are ways in which Mao’s approach to Marxism is more like Kant and Derrida, and others in which it is more like Plato and Badiou, and what is the harm in developing these questions?
What is a new synthesis in Marxism without logos or telos, and is that something we actually want? Is the result a kind of piecemeal “synthesis,” a set of working hypotheses without any claim on a larger unity?
If this (piecemeal hypothesis formation) is itself objectionable, does that mean we have to bite the bullet and reaffirm a logocentric perspective, as is recommended, for example, by the advocates of “radical orthodoxy”—John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and others?2 They are thinking in terms of Christianity, but the questions they raise can be developed in terms of Marxism readily enough, and of course this similarity or parallelism is instructive in itself.
This is not only heavy stuff, it is the tip of the iceberg of heavy stuff. Or it is the tip of one among many icebergs. The point is not the familiar but wrong idea that, until one has read and mastered a boatload of books, then one has no role to play in theoretical discussion. The point instead is that it is unacceptable to approach these heavy ideas without a sense of respect and responsibility and willingness to do some work.
It is unacceptable in itself, I would say, because we ought to show respect for people who have put in the time to try to think through some things and to write things up and put them out there—especially, one would think, if the aim of such work is to try to participate in the possibility of a fundamentally better world.
One form in which this disrespect and irresponsibility is sometimes found is in the “Aw shucks, I don’t know about your book-learning, mister, but I sure do know that we need to get out there and do something”-school of thought. But what is very important to note is that a good deal of this “aw shucks”-ism comes not from “honest, everyday working people,” but instead intellectuals and would-be intellectuals who place this anti-intellectual construction on the consciousness of “ordinary people” in order to advance their own agendas.
A variation on “aw shucks”-ism that is often heard in anti-intellectual America and that is too often heard among even the opponents of this America is the “I’m not an expert on X [Badiou, etc.], but …”-line of presentation. This is reminiscent of the people who love to quote Marx’s having said “I am not a Marxist” (in response, very significantly, to the rendering into mere social-democratic economism of his ideas by the formulators of the Gotha Programme), as a way of taking their own distance from both Marx and Marxism—when no one would have ever suspected them of being Marxist in the first place. When you hear, “I’m not an expert on X, but …”, please, friends, be on guard!
The real problem, then, is with these would-be intellectuals who have little appreciation for what it really takes to do intellectual work, and this is where the allergies and inoculations against philosophy, specifically, come into play.
My guess is that there is not a single chess grandmaster out there, not even someone with the ego of Bobby Fischer or Garry Kasparov, who will claim to have completely mastered chess. Philosophy is that way, too–and so is music and so on—and again the point is that the greatest practitioners are precisely the ones who will most dispute the possibility of complete expertise. So, beware the one who says “I’m not an expert, but …,” and also be wary of the one who claims mastery—especially in philosophy.
There is much to be said about this disrespectful and irresponsible approach to philosophy, something that runs deeper than mere utilitarianism, but the utilitarian statement of the problem should not be completely ignored, either. In other words, it ought to be asked, Of what utility has the disrespect of philosophical work ever been to the International Communist Movement?
In discussing the work of Paul de Man, as I recall, there is a point in his Literary Theory where Terry Eagleton asks of what use is this theory to the guerilla fighter in the jungles of Guatemala? Well, perhaps. Then again, perhaps not! However, it also has to be added that what Prof. Eagleton said on this point doesn’t do anything for the guerilla, either. In other words, perhaps it is the case that deconstruction has nothing to do with the specificities of a particular fighter in a particular struggle, but what is at stake in glibly pointing this out and making a generalization out of it?
I will say again that, at least on the level of appearance and at least in some ways, the RCP usually did not fall to that level of instrumentalism and utilitarianism when it came to theory. On the other hand, when it comes to philosophy, perhaps this doesn’t matter anyway, since they didn’t pay attention to philosophy beyond a very narrow range of figures and questions. This is to avoid for the moment the question of bad faith in some of what was presented as an anti-instrumentalist perspective.
The real problem runs deeper and it needs to be considered by anyone who aims to contribute to the long march of communist revolution—and I thank Prof. Badiou especially for helping us understand this problem. The real problem is that, to put it in stark terms, to be against philosophy is to be against communism.
Prof. Derrida helps us here, too, I think: What is this fear of philosophy?
Even apart from Badiou’s specific argument about the communist hypothesis—that it is the one idea toward which all philosophy aims—we might simply ask what it means to be willing to dismiss and disrespect the intellectual inheritance of humankind.
On this question of fear (are we back where we started, with fear?) we might consider the term “homophobia.” As many have pointed out, there is something missing in the term, since the problem we want to address is hatred of gay people, not fear of gay people. But there is something to the term: what homophobes fear are the homosexual desires that may become manifest in themselves. Philosophobes fear the openings that might be created by critical philosophical questioning. Better to cut that off at the get-go, especially through inoculation; in other words, the RCP’s polemic on Badiou is not meant as encouragement for people to read Badiou—on the contrary.
Sure, we put up with a lot of bullshit in the institutions of philosophy, and we spread a lot of bullshit too (or “academic fluff” or whatever), but our luminaries don’t make explicit demands for awe and reverence (with the possible exception of a few Wittgensteinians and Heideggerians!).
(I could tell an amusing story here about how I once got into an argument with Jacques Derrida in his seminar, and how later that day someone from literary theory upbraided me harshly for this—“How dare you argue with Professor Derrida!” Prof. Derrida himself thought it was fine, as far as I could tell—we had a few arguments over the years, some of which affected our friendship but didn’t undermine it—and my response to this other person was, “we’re philosophers, we argue.”)
Please consider that these arguments have nothing to do with whether one is a philosopher or not, by whatever criteria a person may claim to be (or not be) a philosopher. That isn’t the question, and neither is it the question that “not everybody can be a philosopher.” This latter may be a question, but it’s not the question here. Here the point is simply that to be against philosophy — to be against critical questioning and to be against the intellectual inheritance of humankind — is to be against communism.
Notes
1. Russell changed his basic positions on basic philosophical questions on a regular basis, though his book, Logical Atomism, was meant as a refutation of Hegel—or of a certain Hegelianism and of Leibniz’s concept of internal relations—and it was a key inspiration to the Vienna Circle. There are different paths through this argument, and I have conflated Russell, Carnap, and Wittgenstein a bit here, for instance on this notion of an ontology of “facts”—Wittgenstein’s famous, “The world is all that is the case.” But this account is close enough for present purposes. I go more deeply into some of these issues in Ethical Marxism, pp.402-445, considering especially Rudolph Carnap and Daniel Dennett.
2. See not only their works, especially Theology and Social Theory and After Writing, but also the collection jointly edited with Creston Davis, Theology and the Political, as well as the more recent encounter between Slavoj Zizek and John Milbank, also edited by Davis, The Monstrosity of Christ.
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