This is the second segment of Bill Martin’s essay, the first having been published Monday. The third and final installment will appear on Friday.
I hope there is some material here that will be useful in the larger context of rethinking the question of the state, the question of forms of revolutionary organization, and questions of authority and legitimacy. It might be helpful if we think about how on every level this has to do with politics, and politics always has to do with the masses. So, a good deal of what I concentrated on in the foregoing may be overly focused on what might be considered a circumscribed field—philosophy, academia, intellectual work in general. But the larger point is, that which unleashes politics also unleashes thought.
Into the Wild: Badiou, actually existing Maoism, and the “vital mix” of yesterday and tomorrow – 2
by Bill Martin
5. Of standing and drawing lines
Let us now relate the foregoing—which however I want to underline as a core concern of what I hope to communicate in this essay—to questions of “standing” and demarcations.
Clearly we communists do not want to replicate the academic niceties on this question, we know we need to be very careful about anything that leads us down the road of starting with the question, “Who are you to say such and such?” Obviously we don’t want to contribute to bourgeois procedures of credentialing. On the other hand, hasn’t the real problem been more the tendency to reject, under the heading of “academic niceties,” the work that people do to investigate questions, and, concomitantly, the construction of a model of specifically “communist authority”?
I will add, however, that over the course of about twenty-five years, when I did express sharp criticisms of some theoretical or practical work of the RCP, the initial response was almost always, “Who do you think you are, that you are going to say something to the RCP?” In one case, back in the early 1980s, the response took the form of, “This is the RCP, motherfucker!” This was from someone with whom I worked closely and continued to work for another couple of years. In the 1990s, around 1993 as best I recall, I wrote up a document under the title, “Doing intellectual work and relating to the party.” The initial response from my party contact was, in an accusatory mode, “You think you’re going to tell this party something.”
We can discuss in other contexts the tone of these sorts of expressions. I’m not in favor of “enforced politeness,” and sometimes we have to be harsh and we ought to be harsh. On the other hand, having said that, in general I don’t know why it helps “among the people,” so to speak, to be uncivil and gratuitously insulting.
I’ll throw in an example that I’m sure some will dislike on at least two levels, and here I’m not even talking about “among the people,” exactly, though I’m not talking about the ruling class, either. The example is that I don’t call police “pigs.” On one level, the problem is that this sort of dehumanizing rhetoric tends to be expansive—a clearer example would be the idea that it is acceptable to use misogynistic terms (and worse, actions) as long as the objects of such language are not from among the people. With Eldridge Cleaver and the Black Panther Party this misogyny expanded to take in white women in general. Even “theoretical anti-humanism” (Althusser, Foucault, Badiou, or, from another angle, Adorno) doesn’t aim to add to the expansive dehumanization of capitalism (though whether it entirely succeeds in this is another question). On another level, what did pigs ever do to anyone?One of the things that first attracted me to Jacques Derrida’s work in the early 1980s (and, I see now, more and more as I felt that I needed to get away from the direct influence of the RCP for a few years—I went off to Kansas to work on my Ph.D., though I still read the party press and Avakian’s books, and I entered into communication again after about three years) was its critique of the very idea of authority. This is a longer discussion, obviously, but it seems to me that the conclusion to be drawn from Derrida’s critique (of authority, the concept of the author as originating voice, of logocentrism, phonocentrism—of the fully-present to itself voice, and of what Derrida calls “phallogocentrism,” and of “arche”—the notion of an overarching “order of things”) is that even “legitimate authority” can only ever be temporary, even momentary, and the moment such authority takes itself to be self-justified, which is usually betokened by a certain smugness and a certain “how dare you question?” attitude, then even this authority is passing over to being illegitimate.
There are differences between this view and anarchism, but we desperately need a deepening of theory on this question. Just to say something superficial about the Stalin period, I don’t think anyone can doubt that there were extenuating circumstances. At the same time, I don’t think anyone can doubt that Stalin had very few issues regarding, shall we say, the authoritarian imposition of authority. I don’t think it is wrong to argue that Stalin thought his authority was grounded in the underlying logic of proletarian revolution and the security needs of the socialist state. No doubt the person who said,
“This is the RCP, motherfucker!” to me felt similarly authorized. Well, perhaps there are moments and circumstances when authority can be legitimated even that far—I mean concerning the Stalin period. I know there are different views on the film “Enemy at the Gates” (which in Europe I think was titled “Stalingrad”), and I might even be willing to recognize that the underlying logic of the film is reactionary, but I thought the film did a good job of showing just what the Soviet Union was up against, even while exposing pretty well the deeply flawed political and military line that was leading the Soviet Union at that point. No doubt there will be further occasions for emergency measures in future socialist societies (even while some of these measures in the past were not at all warranted, they were almost gratuitous, and certainly arbitrary, exercises of authority—indeed, some of these exercises of authority were precisely meant to be arbitrary), but why is it that these measures tend to become the norm? One might say this norm is formed out of the same process by which authority takes itself to be fully grounded.
In light of Badiou, and in light of the experience of Stalin, Mao, and the Maoist movement since Mao, it is coming more into focus for me what the critique of “State philosophy” has been all about. This is a critique that more recently has its basis in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Antonio Negri, and before that in various currents of anarchism, situationism, and Italian autonomism. (Before they became famous as the thinkers of Empire and Multitude, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri wrote Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of the State-Form [1994, but some of Negri’s material goes back to the early 1970s].) Without at this juncture pursuing this critique so much in its own terms (of these anarchist or quasi-anarchist arguments), in Ethical Marxism I did raise the question of the common roots of the terms “polis” and “police,” and the way that a vanguard party seems to face the necessity of prefiguring the socialist state, in other words the dictatorship of the proletariat. It’s not a big step to see that the “This is the RCP, motherfucker” response has more than a little bit of “cop mentality” behind it. What might be more useful is to see that the “This is the New Synthesis, you fucking [spitting it out] Rousseauist!” is also cop mentality. But then take the next step, too: “Who needs all this philosophy shit, whether it’s the New Synthesis or Badiou or whatever?” is also cop mentality and “state philosophy.”
What we need to understand better is the revolutionary communist alternative to state philosophy, as opposed to the anarchist alternative. On this point I find Badiou both helpful and elusive. In his essay on the Cultural Revolution, Badiou says some suggestive things about how Mao was up against the contradiction of the state, or of the “party-state”—even that Mao was “the man of that contradiction.” All right. But all that Badiou says there regarding the alternative is that “our flag is red, not black.”
More helpful is his more abstract argument about the difference between the state and politics; the latter is a thought, while the former is unthinking. It is clear, reading his memorial talk on Sartre from 1980 (in the recently translated Pocket Pantheon), that Badiou owes a good deal to Sartre’s distinction in Critique of Dialectical Reason between a “group” (a self-active collectivity) and an “institution.” It is not hard to see why some might align Sartre’s and Badiou’s arguments with some form of anarchism, since the institution always seems to be playing a conservatizing role. There is of course a whole discourse on this question that comes from Rousseau, Kant, Jefferson, and others, up through Mao—a discourse in which Marx’s philosophy is situated and ought to be understood as situated—where there is a tension between the ongoing revolution of the self-activity of the masses and the creation of the stable social institutions of a civil society, even if a civil society of a “new type” (perhaps!). There is a tendency with the “permanence of the revolution” folks—with whom I have always aligned myself, please don’t misunderstand—to either see institutions in wholly negative terms (in Sartre, and I think this is true for Badiou as well, the “congealment” of the revolution into an institution or set of institutions is the end of the revolution), or at least not to take the question of institutions very seriously.
What I don’t have a clear sense of from Badiou is how we could even conceivably be done with some form of state in the foreseeable future—especially when he himself says that sometimes it is necessary to make demands upon the state. But didn’t Mao, through the experience of the Chinese Revolution and Cultural Revolution, provide the basic template for how we need think about this question, summed up under the concept, “politics in command”? Perhaps we would want to fiddle with the sense of “command” a little, perhaps it would be better said, “politics in the lead,” or even “politics decides.”
What I do think is clear is that there is a sense in which philosophy is always set against the state, and thinking is always set against “state philosophy.” And so, to bring this back to the main point here, when a party mainly understands itself in terms of anticipating the creation of a state (even if a new state, and even if a dictatorship of the proletariat), then it will draw lines of demarcation in theory in a way similar to the way that a state sets up and defends borders. To put the matter quite simply and directly, the policing of philosophy is not a philosophical activity—indeed it is the opposite.
Are there other ways in which lines of demarcation can be drawn in theory and philosophy, lines that aren’t the policed borders of the unthinking state?
In other words, where does philosophy find its possibilities? The police maneuver is always to shut down thought. It’s not hard to imagine that one weapon in this policing of thought would be to sum up a philosophy under a label, such as “Rousseauist,” and then dismiss it as such.
Perhaps there are demarcations that close down and others that open things up, and here again we need to think about the relationship between being against philosophy and being against the communist project. Clearly, the history here is difficult, there has been a great deal of activity against philosophy in the ICM, and again we need to wonder why there has been such fear of philosophy. I don’t know that fundamentalist communism is really so different from fundamentalist Christianity or Islam, at least on this point, and in the latter pair of fundamentalisms it is certainly the case that anything that might open up questions is feared and condemned.
Perhaps to really open up and explore philosophical questions, one has to have two things: some decent amount of background in philosophical work, and a passion for these sorts of questions. One of the responses to my initial posting at Kasama (“Going Forward From Here”) really gave me a jolt. Sophie wrote, “While Avakian drew from other people’s works it was, unfortunately, most often to “second” his own theory or conclusion. I rarely remember Avakian expressing the delight and excitement of discovering someone else or an approach that surpassed his own.” This pretty much nails it other than to add that, while Avakian might have “drawn” from a narrow range of other people’s works, he has rarely engaged with anyone’s work outside of the narrow canon.
The “delight and excitement” point is not only valid, it needs to be underlined in the face of not only the criticism of that initial post by a self-proclaimed “Stalinist” to the effect that “interesting discussions may be nice, but is that really the point?” but also in the face of the critique of the RCP’s polemic against Badiou that does not really rise to the defense of Badiou or philosophy. Philosophy is interesting and exciting and delightful when it opens up important questions and provides an analysis that gets people thinking. When philosophy doesn’t really do that, then it probably isn’t philosophy. For sure, not everyone is in a position to be receptive to this, and not everyone is turned on by the same philosophical work at the same time.
Even so, it is still the case that to dismiss Badiou is to dismiss philosophy itself. (It can be added that there is too much of this kind of dismissiveness in the institutions of philosophy itself.) What is interesting is how this works both ways. The larger dynamic that shapes the RCP perspective is that of course Badiou is no good because philosophy in general is no good. What needs to be appreciated from the other side is that, even if there is unfairness and ideology and contingency at work in who gets to be regarded as a “major figure” in philosophy, and even if we ought to be wary of getting overly agog at any contemporary figure, generally there are good reasons that someone is being accorded the status of an important figure.
Maybe that’s one of the good things about “academic niceties,” at least in philosophy, and despite the difficulties of the analytic/continental split. It’s true, and also an interesting question, that many major figures, perhaps especially of the last two centuries, have had significant numbers of detractors who go so far as to claim that this or that figure is actually a fraud—famous examples being Wittgenstein, Quine, Davidson, Rorty, Heidegger, Sartre, Althusser, Derrida, and so on. And it’s also true that we cannot exactly vet “results” in philosophy the way that we can in the sciences (though it is also the case that scientific work is itself guided by philosophical and ideological conceptions, though often conceptions that are hidden). And yet I don’t have any problem with the simple idea that, if someone’s work is attracting a lot of interest from what appear to be smart and well-prepared people, then there is probably something there worth checking out. What I don’t do (though, again, some academics do have this response, which is deplorable) is to say, “Oh crap, a lot of people are looking over at that theory and they might be misled—because we already have the one true theory; I’d better call the police!”
It might be argued that the sort of person or organization that has that sort of response is in fact demonstrating that they have no standing to offer a real critique.
I suppose you could say that the RCP and Bob Avakian ought to have standing on this question because they come out of Maoism, and Alain Badiou came out of Maoism, though the RCP doesn’t accept Badiou’s Maoist credentials (or the credentials of any of the French Maoist groups, as I understand it). Well, okay, there’s something to discuss there, but this discussion too would take us into Avakian’s dismissal of philosophy and his discovery of truth. One significant point on the latter issue is that, if the various Maoist groups in France had wrong conceptions, it appears that Avakian’s discovery of truth means that the RCP was working with the wrong conception for a long time too. But what is more important is that we need some new conceptions in order to advance the communist project in our time (this includes new conceptions regarding the character of our time), and thinking through Badiou’s ideas can help us with this, whereas thinking through Avakian’s fragmentary, self-referential offerings does not.
While all of the foregoing fits well enough under the heading of “debriefment of Maoism,” let me sum up a couple of points in a way that goes beyond that supposedly narrow project.
First, imagine that we are being presented with a dichotomy: either Badiou or the New Synthesis of Bob Avakian. Fortunately, reality is larger than that dichotomy, there are many other possibilities out there that ought to be considered. And neither of these possibilities—AB or BA (these initials and the way they work together appeal to my deconstructive side!)—should be understood as standing or falling simply in contrast to the other. They could both be wrong, though in saying this I want to repeat something I said in my initial response on the Badiou polemic, that if Badiou is wrong, he is wrong in his large-scale, systematic project, whereas if Avakian is wrong (or “right,” even), he is wrong in his non-systematic, fragmentary, self-referential scheme, and not in either case because of some simplistic “correspondence to reality” or lack thereof. However, having said all this, it is still significant that it is this dichotomy that the RCP and Avakian are working with, either Badiou or the New Synthesis. (Let’s not forget, too, that even in what I understand as a more creative period of the RCP, during which time it was at least possible for some RCP people to say that Badiou was “pretty interesting,” was also characterized by a dichotomy: either the vision of George W. Bush and the Christian fascists or the vision of Bob Avakian.) In that case, I choose Badiou, and I hope I’ve given some reasons for this, and I will give some more reasons in the future—but one reason that I especially want to underline is that, in this dichotomy, to choose Badiou is to choose philosophy, and to choose the New Synthesis is to choose the idea that philosophy is at best worthless and for the most part harmful and “wrong.” Critical thought absolutely has to draw a line of demarcation against that perspective.
Second, I hope there is some material here that will be useful in the larger context of rethinking the question of the state, the question of forms of revolutionary organization, and questions of authority and legitimacy. It might be helpful if we think about how on every level this has to do with politics, and politics always has to do with the masses. So, a good deal of what I concentrated on in the foregoing may be overly focused on what might be considered a circumscribed field—philosophy, academia, intellectual work in general. But the larger point is, that which unleashes politics also unleashes thought. How do the “two unleashings” (to give it a nice Maoist formulation) come about? Notice that I didn’t ask, “How do we accomplish these unleashings?” This goes to Badiou’s conceptions of truth, event, truth procedure, fidelity, and so on. But we do still have work to do in understanding how these unleashings are impeded, or at the least not helped, and this is where we need to think about the depth at which it is true that, to be against philosophy is to be against communism.
One little coda on this question of “standing”: those of us with experience in Maoism do have something to bring to the discussions around Badiou, especially if we really do engage with the philosophical arguments involved (and, yes, struggle with the math a bit, too)—and I think we should get in there and do that. Yes, I realize that there are many who are gravitating toward Badiou for whom the communist hypothesis is almost purely abstract and not much grounded in any association with practice. But this is a general problem with intellectuals who are attracted to radical ideas, and the people who are attracted to Badiou and who engage seriously with his work are not entirely of this sort, and furthermore there is clearly something exciting going on when people gravitate toward someone who talks about communism. Why would we not want to get into the mix of that?
6. “Taste this, it’s terrible!”, or, Death to the philosophers
Is there a slippery slope involved in raising the question of “standing,” even if in the form of simply saying that, “If you don’t respect philosophical work and don’t intend to do any real philosophical work, then perhaps you ought to remain silent on such topics, especially if you’re putting yourself out there as taking responsibility for revolution everywhere on the planet”?
Obviously, the real question here is why I or anyone would need to go on at such length about this bad methodology, when a good deal of the critique can be stated much more succinctly—and pretty much already has been. Even for those of us who feel bad and sad about it, why should we impede the RCP’s own drive toward irrelevance? I have a number of answers to this question, most of which I have rehearsed already, but the point I want to underline here is that there is something significant in how we understand this “irrelevance.” This “irrelevance” has to do with quality first of all, not quantity.
I think many of the detractors of Avakian and the RCP, basically the ones who say that Avakian was never relevant to their sense of left or radical politics (I would say more of the former than the latter), are looking at this question in terms that are more quantitative than qualitative. Certainly it is the case that, if indeed Avakian and the RCP were never really relevant to the kinds of changes we need in the world, then the project of “debriefment” would only be about two somewhat narrowly circumscribed questions: 1) the need for some of us who were around the RCP and who now want to go forward from Maoism to sort ourselves out; 2) the need to make a decisive break with certain conceptions that were influential not only in the RCP but more broadly in the International Communist Movement, Marxism, radical theory and practice, and the left in general.
But it’s this last category, “the left in general,” about which I am most skeptical, and I think some of the people who have always been dismissive of Avakian/RCP come from the perspective that the problem with the RCP is that it didn’t relate very well to the broader left, and thus it is was destined to remain “small” and “irrelevant.” I don’t want to stretch this analogy too far, though in fact I think it could be taken a good deal further than I will develop it here, but if you think of the RCP as a musical group, with Avakian playing a special role as leader and visionary, something analogous to the John Coltrane Quartet, then you can at least say of the RCP that they played the music they thought they should be playing. Walter Benjamin said that “no great work of art was created with an audience in mind,” and Jon Anderson of Yes said that he tried to make the music he thought he ought to make, and then he hoped that someone would like it. At least in aesthetic terms, this seems entirely right to me, and we might think more on two questions: 1) the relationship between experiments in art and experiments in politics; 2) what is the deeper meaning of the “mass line,” especially in terms of the way that it attempts to “concentrate” the aspirations of the masses, especially the “higher aspirations.”
This is an old debate by now, the tendency in left and radical politics to be dismissive of aesthetic experimentation, as not “coming from the people.” Of course, the theory of neutron k-leptons as the building blocks in the physics of time didn’t exactly come “from the people,” either, so we might think about that.
But let us take stock also of the fact that we would not want the achievements of experimental artists to be understood in mainly quantitative terms, and, from the other side, we also can’t fall into “ten million Elvis fans can’t be wrong!” Apart from the academic niceties and the pedigree system, and apart from the question of “standing” in some sort of established system, we need a qualitative assessment of Avakian’s work and of other work that is premised upon Avakian’s conceptions.
Why do we need this?
Let us consider an idea that may seem paradoxical and probably is paradoxical. There is intellectual work that is of the first rank, it represents really penetrating and profound thinking, and yet it might not be “indispensable,” at least for politics. At the same time, there is intellectual work that does go to the core of certain political questions, and is therefore indispensable, but it isn’t work of the first rank.
We might ask ourselves if we need some depth and profundity. It might seem like a silly question, but, for instance, Richard Rorty and Don Cupitt are two major thinkers who answer this question in the negative. Their answers hold, essentially, that everything is surfaces, and it is a fool’s errand to look into the depths. There are Marxist versions of this idea that are all too prevalent. One version of this idea holds that it is a mistake to aim for philosophical profundity, that this is simply the realm in which the imagination runs wild, but where the entities discovered in this realm do not exist and are not real. In other words, in this view, most of what calls itself philosophy is just the construction of a fantasy world. If there is any distinction to be drawn between appearance and (a “deeper”) reality, the Marxist version of this perspective holds that the distinction should be drawn in political economy, not philosophy. This is the path toward positivism and instrumentalism, and not very far along this path one finds there is little use for philosophy after all.
Certainly one might wonder if, in rejecting this path, Badiou (not unlike Heidegger in this respect) has bent the stick too far in the other direction. It is clear that he is not much interested in political economy, but one might wonder if political economy has at least some status in his work under one of the “conditions of philosophy,” namely science.
What if we were to replace the question about the need for depth and profundity with a question about the need for philosophy? It isn’t only in Marxism that the need for (or value of) philosophy has been put in question, though this does describe a good bit of Marxism in the twentieth century and certainly there is a major strain of this devalorization in Marx’s own work. But it is also the case that a dominant strain in Western philosophy as a whole in the twentieth century tends to see philosophy as mostly something to be gotten rid of, along with depth and profundity as anything that can be explored in a systematic way.
This positivist strain remains alive in the work of even ostensibly post-positivist analytic philosophers, especially Quine and Rorty. Not that they don’t have their arguments for this strain, and these arguments are worth studying (as opposed to the kind of non-argument in Avakian’s work that is not worth studying—I’m going to turn to an example in a moment). The manifestation of this strain in Quine and Rorty is the idea that the main purpose of philosophy in our time is to move the scientific questions out of philosophy and into the specific sciences where advances can be made, and then to move the “non-scientific” questions either into the dustbin or, at best, into the realm of the “poetic,” which is not a realm of truth (as they understand it). That art can be a realm of truth is one reason why, despite other appearances to the contrary, Badiou is not a positivist. For Quine, philosophy is this sorting operation plus a kind of minimal ontology.
One interesting way to come at this question is to ask for which philosophers is death a question, and what sort of question is it for philosophers. Depth and profundity are often found in proximity to the question of death and mortality—if mortality is a “question,” or if it is a philosophical question—so we can situate philosophers somewhat readily in relation to this question.
For Carnap, who gave us some of the most important formulations of logical positivism, not only is death not a philosophical question (it may be something—not a question, exactly—for poetry or for what he broadly called a “worldview”), an intellectual preoccupation with death is an indication that one is not doing philosophy.
Badiou, reacting especially to Derrida I think, has said that we have heard enough about death for the time being, as well as mortality and finitude, and that it is time to reorient philosophy toward immortality and infinity.
To be sure, Derrida was all about death, especially in the last ten years or so of his life and work, and I don’t intend it as any insult to say that there was a deeply morbid strain in his later thought, especially. (In an interview given in the last year of his life, when he was dying from pancreatic cancer, Derrida said that not five seconds passed when he did not think about dying.) But Derrida was also all about temporality and the future, while one of Badiou’s “Platonic” and mathematical arguments is to insist that truths (real truths, as opposed to mere facts) are atemporal, ahistorical, and eternal (add to this that Badiou has said that he only knows of one idea, namely that of communism).
Placing this question in a larger frame, it isn’t so much whether or not there is a question about the future of humanity, or a question of a possible future in which there is human co-flourishing, but instead whether or not this is a properly philosophical question.
To my knowledge, there is not a single comment on death, as a philosophical question or otherwise, in the work of Quine and Davidson. My guess is that, for them, death is a “scientific” question that has only to do with the biological finitude that humans share with other animals. The same might be said for Badiou, except for him human life has possibilities of immortality—and it is from this side, of life, that we ought to address the question.
To cut this discussion short, my aim has been to frame some of the philosophical context in which a discussion of meaning and mortality ought to take place if it is going to contribute anything to our understanding. And this is even to leave aside the main discourses on death from the history of Western philosophy—the Greek tragedians, the German Idealists (whose work relates to the Greeks), the German Romantics (and, I would say, because this is underappreciated, English Romanticism as well), and of course Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and what Bob Avakian brushes off as the “existential literature.”
Now, we might wonder what any of this has to do with politics, or at least whether our thinking about politics and radical change has much need for exploring this question of meaning and mortality.
Simply as a matter of philosophy, it seems to me that the question of death (and questions relating to the interconnections of meaning, mortality, and morality) is either deep or, if for some reason it is not deep, there must be some profound reason for this as well. What I have a very hard time with is people who want to just screw around with such questions, especially if they think they are speaking to the problem of “meaningful revolutionary work” and “a life with meaning,” as Bob Avakian purports to do in the “Ruminations and Wranglings” piece.
For my part, I think these are important questions for politics, and my thinking here is probably closer to Derrida than Badiou; for both of them, however, it might be said that their deeper explorations on these questions (death, mortality and immortality, meaning, morality, finitude and infinity) give them more of an appreciation for the philosophical insights of religious traditions, communities, and writings, whereas Avakian’s superficial treatment of these questions is of a piece with his superficial treatment of ‘religion”—but also, it could be said, of science. Even apart from the problem of whether these questions matter to politics, there is still a political cost to treating these questions superficially and carelessly. It is again the cost of being against philosophy and therefore against communism.
Before turning to other things, let us spend a moment with a testimonial that appeared in Revolution newspaper on March 22, 2009—a testimonial deemed so important that it was made a cover story. This is an unsigned piece with the title, “An Open Letter to the Revolutionary Communists and Everyone Seriously Thinking About Revolution: On the Role and Importance of Bob Avakian.”
Fortunately, the second paragraph (of approximately eight single-spaced pages) of the testimonial contains many of the questionable claims of the piece as a whole.
How one evaluates the role Bob Avakian has played in the revolutionary movement in the U.S. and internationally over the last almost 40 years has, in the final analysis, proven itself to be a question of how one views communist revolution itself: are you for it, or not. Not to make an absolute of this nor to suggest that at any particular point every person who is not clear on the role Bob Avakian has been/is playing, is therefore consciously against communist revolution: such a mechanical view would be both wrong and harmful. Knowledge and understanding are something in motion, they develop (as has the role Bob Avakian is playing). So it is a question of “in the final analysis”. At the same time—and as actual experience has repeatedly shown—it is objectively true and this truth will sooner or later assert itself in someone’s subjective understanding as well.
I’m sure that, for many of those reading this here, there is little needed by way of analysis, but let me just point to a few things.
In the first sentence alone I want to point to two issues. First, what is the form in which this question of how one evaluates the role of Avakian has “proven itself” to have the dividing-line status that is claimed for it here? This sort of claim is repeated throughout the testimonial; while not being completely vacuous, the author never gets into the question of how this “proving” occurs, exactly. Second, the sentence does indeed put forward Bob Avakian as a dividing-line question. This again is repeated throughout the piece, but so is the equivocation that follows this line. Clearly there is something here that the author doesn’t quite know how to deal with—as well he would not. This dividing line is not “an absolute” and yet it is a matter of “in the final analysis,” because “it” (“the role of Avakian” appears to be the reference) “is objectively true … .” One hardly knows where to begin, but I am assuming that, with the present audience, I don’t have to.
(At the expense of sounding like a pedantic schoolmaster, let me underline what I think is actually a substantive theoretical question, namely the endemic trouble that Bob Avakian and other writers from the RCP have always had with pronouns. This especially applies to “this” and “that,” and more than any of them to “all this.” I’m sure I’ve committed similar mistakes and such mistakes are not hard to make, but this is not really so much the question of the “dangling pronoun”—which is the problem with “it” in the line I quoted—but instead with the idea that “all this” can stand in for a massive, dialectical synthesis, a “this truth” that will “sooner or later assert itself in someone’s subjective understanding.” Someone’s? Whose?)
So, Bob Avakian’s role has “proven itself” again and again, and you’re either for it—and therefore for communist revolution—or you are not for it (and therefore “in the final analysis,” we might presume, against it). These are the basic themes of this testimonial. It could be said that these are the basic themes of the RCP in general, since about 2002 or 2003. Of course these themes were around from the start, but now they are the ur-themes that guide all else—in fact, there isn’t much else anymore.
However, there is a methodological point here that is difficult to grasp. There is a point where the testimonial refers to Avakian in an almost-offhand way, saying, “he is also a visionary.” The testimonial also goes on to speak to Avakian’s emphasis on the imagination. (Of course, let us go nowhere near the fact that, of the figures in the philosophical canon, it was Immanuel Kant who first developed the theory of the imagination and its role in cognition.) Less offhandedly, the author refers to “a ‘communist imagination’ of exceptional quality and strategic sweep,” and “that rare kind of radical visionary who, so far at least, has only appeared once or twice in a generation—if that often.”
Well, these things—imagination and vision—are lacking in the world today, for sure. Even more, integral to postmodern capitalism as I understand it is what might be called an “organized and enforced failure of the imagination.” So, it is indeed a problem that Avakian has actually not been an imaginative visionary on the level that is claimed for him, though, again, this does not cancel the fact that he has made some important contributions. And yet, the methodological point that needs emphasizing is the way that vision and imagination are not simply lacking, but rather become increasingly drained by the dialectically-related elements of 1) the saturation of the Maoist revolutionary sequence, and 2) the global articulation of the anti-imagination program of postmodern capitalism. (When I say this program is “organized,” I don’t mean in the sense of a conspiracy, but more like in the way that the culture industry is organized and integrated.) In other words, of course we need more imagination and vision, but we especially need them in terms of a new sequence or at least in terms of the anticipation of a new sequence. This means that our work is of necessity not only visionary and imaginative, but also complicated, erratic, and experimental.
Put another way, the problem of the exhausted sequence that is still the object of fervent persistence is similar to that of one of those “bands that tour every summer but with only one or two original members. It’s essentially a cover band that is still capable of doing a good rendition of the old tunes, but we can’t expect anything really new from it.”
I’ll come back to this question (in section 10) in terms of Badiou’s assessment of the revolutions of the twentieth century. I have some disagreement with his use of the term “disaster” as a summation of this experience, though I would want to understand better how Badiou is using this term. What we might concern ourselves with is what there is to show for all of this experience, which was, shall we say, purchased dearly. Looked at from this end of things, “disaster” is not the only word that comes into play (and neither is it the only word in Badiou’s summation), but it is one of them. In that light, while again I do not want to minimize the contributions that Bob Avakian has made, these “theoretical consolidations” representing almost forty years work just don’t add up to much, especially when one considers that they are “consolidations” within and aimed toward the previous, saturated sequence of communism.
I’ll say again what I’ve already said numerous times: I take no pleasure in this assessment, and neither do I think any of us should. However, apart from the descent of the RCP into mere cultishness, it is worth thinking about, from a methodological standpoint, how to respond to statements such as the following: “Some of those who make these “what has he done” arguments either state, or imply, that in order to make the theoretical advances that Avakian has made, one must have first led a successful seizure of power—or at least a major revolutionary war. But this argument is, again, just another expression of pragmatism and empiricism … .” There’s a subtle problem here, even if as usual the RCP is just hitting the question over the head with a hammer. Of course we don’t want just “pragmatism” or “empiricism” as they are understood here, and yet we do need a way to be able to back up and talk about something that has been tried for a long time but isn’t really getting anywhere. I feel pretty sure — and the whole effort at Kasama is in a sense predicated on this point — that the lonely hour of the final analysis, at least as the author of this testimonial understands it, is not going to come. And, again, the real testimonial is the “body of work” that has been created over these four decades, and the idea that this body of work has supposedly, magically (since clearly not systematically) congealed into a new synthesis.
Lastly, by way of transition from this testimonial into a typical example of what Bob Avakian really thinks of philosophical questions, let us consider a few more comments that, to put it mildly, really burn me up. “When it comes to Bob Avakian and important questions of political principle, there is never even a hint of superficiality.” I think it will be clear in the passage on mortality and meaning that I am going to quote that there is nothing but superficiality, but perhaps this means that the issues touched upon are not “important questions of political principle.”
The testimonial writer refers to “over 25 years of continuing analysis, leaps and advances in evaluating, summarizing and synthesizing the experience of the communist project: the political economy of imperialism; the question of democracy; the collapse of revisionism; the question of communist morality, ethics, etc.; the role of intellectuals, art, and “awe and wonder” more broadly; epistemology and philosophy in general . . ..” The first one in this list, yes, there’s some good stuff there; for the rest, less good. On art, forget about it. And on “epistemology and philosophy in general” — please.
Still further, the claim that Avakian “has deeply immersed himself in . . . the philosophical, ethical, and political debates and discourse of our times.” Again — please. Where? When? What?
So, let’s look at an example of this immersion. This is from “Ruminations and Wranglings: On the Importance of Marxist Materialism, Communism as a Science, Meaningful Revolutionary Work, and a Life with Meaning,” from the sections titled: “Life With a Purpose: Different Experiences, Different Spontaneous Views, and Fundamentally Different World Outlooks” and “Human life is finite, but revolution is infinite” (Revolution newspaper, April 13, 2009; the second section title is a quotation from Mao and is in quotation marks in the transcript of the original).
Going further, there are two things that are relevant to all this, things which do bear very significantly on human life, human relations and human thinking: one, all human beings die; and two, human beings are not only conscious of this but in many ways acutely aware of it. Now the point is not to “wax existential,” or to lapse into existentialism as a philosophical outlook, but there is a value, if you will, to exploring this, at least a little bit. Why do I raise this? Well, often, for example, in existentialist literature, but more generally in a lot of literature which seeks to deal with “profound ironies and tragedies of life,” this contradiction—that human beings are living beings but all human beings die, and that human beings are conscious of this—forms a significant theme, a significant phenomenon with which people wrestle. This is true in philosophy but also in the arts. Especially in a society which places so much emphasis on “the individual,” in an ideological sense, even while it grounds down individuals in material reality—and this is particularly true of U.S. society and U.S. imperialism—it is not surprising that this phenomenon, that human beings die and they are conscious of this, has a prominent place in the culture.
This is also one of the main elements that factors into religion, and in the way people understand and explain the phenomenon of—and, as many portray it, the need for—religion. Some people even argue that you will always have religion because people will need a way to deal with death—not only their own death, but perhaps even more the death of loved ones. It is interesting, I was recently reading one of these pulp novels, by these two sisters, the O’Shaughnessy sisters (they write these legal thrillers—”page turners”—fun to read for a little diversion), and they actually made an interesting comment in passing in this book about how American society is so litigious these days (one of the two sisters is a former lawyer). They were speaking specifically of all the litigation that goes on around wrongful death, which of course is a big phenomenon in the U.S.: somebody dies, well very often there is going to be a lawsuit for wrongful death—unless it’s one of the basic masses, and then generally nobody in a position of authority or prominence cares and, while there are some prominent cases of people suing when a loved one is murdered by police, the death of one of the basic masses is not the kind of thing that usually ends up in litigation. But, in any case, in this book the point was made that in countries like the U.S., where there is a certain decline in religious belief (at least of the more “traditional” kind), there has been an increase—I don’t even know if this is actually true, but it’s an interesting point to think about—there has been an increase in wrongful death suits because people have to find somebody to blame. And especially if you can’t get the false consolation that religion offers—”they’re in a better place, god had a plan for them,” and all these other outrageous things that are said when someone dies—then somebody’s got to be held accountable, so you sue somebody for wrongful death. Now I thought that was an interesting and provocative point. I’m not sure this is capturing an essential aspect of reality, but it’s a little bit interesting as a side point.
The main point I’m exploring here, briefly, is that the fact that human beings die is often used to justify religion, or in any case to argue that human beings will always need religion: in order to deal with death, the argument goes, human beings will always need some sort of consolation in the form of religion of one kind or another.
“Human life is finite, but revolution is infinite”
This is something worth exploring a bit—precisely from a materialist standpoint and in relation to our communist outlook and communist objectives. First of all, it is necessary to recognize that while death is universal for human beings—all human beings die, sooner or later—there is not one common viewpoint about death: people in different social conditions have different experiences with and different viewpoints on all kinds of phenomena, including death.
In this connection, I was thinking of a statement attributed to Mao near the end of his life—I believe it was in a letter that he was reported to have written to Chiang Ching in which he talked about what he had tried to achieve through the revolution in China, and as part of the world revolution, and the ways in which he’d run up against obstacles in this. His statement was something to the effect that “human life is finite, but revolution is infinite.” Now (assuming he said this) I don’t think Mao meant this literally—that revolution is literally infinite—because Mao was materialist enough to know that human existence as such, the existence of human beings as a species, is not going to be infinite. Or, perhaps, as another leading comrade has suggested, Mao was actually thinking more broadly—beyond just human existence—to reality overall, and the fact that all of reality proceeds not just in a gradual and linear way but is marked by profound leaps and ruptures, involving qualitative changes from one state of matter in motion to another. In any case, and in the dimension in which Mao was speaking about human beings and human society, he was pointing to the contradiction that individuals can play a certain role—and specifically if they become conscious of the need for revolution, and more especially if they take up the outlook and method of communism, they can contribute a great deal to radically transforming human society—but, in all cases, their role and their contributions will still be limited, not only by their particular abilities (and shortcomings) and by their circumstances, but also by the fact that human life is finite, that people live only a few decades. But revolution—that is, not only the overthrow of exploiting classes but, even far into the future in communist society, the need for the continual transformation of society, the need to recognize and transform necessity into freedom—will constantly pose itself and human beings will constantly, and with varying degrees of consciousness, act in relation to that. So, with regard to human society, that is the essential meaning of the statement (attributed to Mao) that human life is finite, but revolution is infinite.
As with the testimonial, I’m not going to dissect this bit of writing as much as I could—clearly I must be at least a little nuts to spend the amount of time with it that I have already. For most readers here these passages pretty much critique themselves, and so most of what could be said in response to the passages is pretty obvious stuff.
So what is the point? The point is to underline once again that to be against philosophy is to be against communism. One way to be against philosophy is to have no respect for what people working in philosophy have tried to understand, and instead just to screw around with heavy ideas as if no one else ever said anything worth thinking about.
The crux of this problem is seen at precisely the point where Avakian mentions “existentialist literature” and then goes on to discuss a point about wrongful death litigation made in a pulp novel. It should not be necessary to say that I have nothing against such “diversions,” as Avakian calls these particular novels. It is pretty clear by now, I hope, that I find such artifacts of “pop culture” to be both valuable as barometers of social trends and sometimes better as works of art than some give them credit for. (And neither do I begrudge anyone a bit of diversion.) The issue instead is that here was a chance to get into some deep questions deeply, some questions where it is an insult to people, and not just philosophers, to just screw around with them, but this is what we get—and this is too often what we get from Bob Avakian when it comes to philosophy.
This superficiality extends to pretty much everything Avakian has written on religion — again, it is an insult. To mention in passing that religion “is a way that people deal with death.” Oh, interesting. And, is it wrong for people to want a way to deal with death? Is death—and its meaning or lack of meaning — a purely “scientific” question?
In the next section, “infinity” is dealt with in a similarly superficial and ham-fisted way. I don’t see how anyone who deals with any of these issues in this way could be called a “radical visionary.”
It’s not fair, really—I quoted this long passage (which, Dear Reader, you may or may not have read), mainly in order to say that this sort of thing is not worth the time of day.
So, that’s more than enough of that for now, let’s just leave it that such superficiality is death to the philosophers and death to philosophy.
7. Debriefment and beyond, I: the vital mix
The simple question—that is in fact vastly complicated—that I want to develop here is whether there is a “beyond” without debriefment.
By “debriefment,” I mean going back through the history and experience (of radical theory and practice, but also of all sorts of things), to see what we can build on and to see what needs to be set aside.
One (very large) complication is that we have to carry out this sifting work in terms of both the coherence of the previous synthesis and in terms of the need for new, experimental theorizing that is in essential respects discontinuous from what came before.
It is helpful for us to think of this project in terms of Maoism and post-Maoism and the relationship between the two. If post-Maoism is in some real sense discontinuous with Maoism, there is still a relationship. The relationship is named, I would argue, by the term communism. One way to look at this is that there is a difference here with, say, Trotskyism and post-Trotskyism, though we might also define this relationship in terms of the term “socialism” or “leftism,” and think, in Badiouean terms, of the difference between “presentations” of the “communist hypothesis,” and presentations of the socialist hypothesis.
Some of our Trotskyists and other socialists and leftists might think about this a little bit, and of course we post-Maoists need to think about it too. I haven’t seen where anyone has really defined or articulated “post-Trotskyism” as anything other than what is really neo-Trotskyism. But perhaps, similarly, some of us “post-Maoists” are only and simply, neo-Maoists. It is worth thinking about the fact that Badiou sometimes refers to “Trotskyists and ossified Maoists” in the same breath, and one argument might be that, when a form of presentation of the communist hypothesis becomes exhausted, there is a reversion to what might be called the “socialist hypothesis.” But the socialist hypothesis, in my view, is the “left side” of what is possible in terms of the logic of bourgeois right and capitalist social relations. (If this is the case, then we can see by contrast why socialism is not an idea, and that the only idea is communism.) There is a larger discussion to be had about what it means to make demands on the (existing) state—it seems to me that one kind of demand can be made on the basis of the communist hypothesis, and another kind on the basis of the socialist hypothesis, and that the directionality of these demands is fundamentally different, but that in certain circumstances alliances are also possible. However, it also seems to me that something that starts out ensconced in bourgeois logic will not only stay there, this “leftism” will make whatever compromises are necessary to stay there. And it is already hard enough to keep the possibility of another idea—communism—from being assimilated by the logic of capitalist society.
Another way to come at this problem is in terms of the question, “Who needs debriefment?” Let’s just come at this issue directly. Please tell me if I am wrong, but it seems to me that the people who don’t think we need any of this debriefment, or any further engagement with either the past or the present of the RCP and Bob Avakian (for example with their critique of Badiou), are almost to a one people who did not engage with the RCP/Avakian to begin with, and were never interested in engaging with them. Their attitude is, “I never thought the RCP was worth engaging with, so why would I engage with them now?”
There are of course good reasons, on the whole, to not keep engaging with the RCP and even with its history, and certainly not with every statement or text or whatever that comes from them. For the people who never knew much about the RCP, or, especially young people who are gravitating toward not just leftism but even to communism, to spend too much time with the past or the present of the RCP just seems like building something up in order to tear it down, and it all seems irrelevant to the momentous and difficult tasks of the present.
In addition, there are ways of coming at this history that do seem too much caught up in merely “personal” issues and that therefore come across as “gossipy.”
These are real issues, and it is right that they be raised when some of us want to go back into RCP history or respond to some recent document from the RCP.
However, it is also very interesting that the people who raise these issues are mainly those who are somewhat familiar with the RCP but who were never especially impressed by it.
Suppose it really is the case that, to use Badiou’s language, we really are, or at least we really hope that we are, on the precipice of a new “sequence” in the “presentation of the communist hypothesis.” This is also to suppose that it really is the case that the previous “sequence” is “saturated.”
Significantly, for all of their talk about a “new stage,” the RCP clearly do not believe these things. The failure of the “New Synthesis” to be either new or a synthesis has to be understood in this respect. In their book-length critique of Badiou, where there is vastly more actual “homework” than in anything from Bob Avakian or anything else associated with the New Synthesis, there is still a methodology of cherry-picking in order to critique Badiou for not lining up with the previous orthodoxy. The result is that the problems of the previous sequence are addressed by shouting that, “next time, we’ll have a constitution!” and the like.
Okay, sure, you could say that sort of thing critiques itself, we don’t need to spend much time with it. But there is also the need to put things a little more charitably. The RCP needed to turn a corner, they needed to do something really radical, but they weren’t able to do it. My own interpretation of the period from about 2000-2006 is that there were some creative openings (which is most of what I saw, as someone not a member of the party), but also some further narrowing of the basic conception of the communist project and the leadership appropriate to this project, resulting in this fragmentary “New Synthesis” and the declaration that Bob Avakian is a leader and theoretician of the “caliber” of Lenin and Mao; the New Synthesis is purportedly a development within Marxism of world-historic importance, and Avakian himself is a cardinal question for the international communist movement.
It is important to understand that this is what became of the most revolutionary current in Marxism and the most creative and least dogmatic expression of that current; in other words, this is where we see the Maoist current running its course and depleting its resources. It is important that we understand how this happened.
Is it our most important work, or is it work that we need to put front and center in our attempts to reconceive and regroup? Absolutely not. The case for not having this focus has been stated very well, and I agree with it, even if sometimes it may seem as if I don’t and am reacting too much out of frustration.
However, it then seems that some people want to go a good deal further, and say that we don’t need to engage with any of this material again. I think it was John Steele who said that we need to increasingly “put the RCP in our rearview mirror.” That’s right, but there are others who don’t even want the RCP or Bob Avakian there.
Again, I would say there are two tracks to pursue on this question, one of which is less important, to be sure, but I don’t know that this means it shouldn’t exist. By this I mean the fact that some of us who were closer to this experience (of Maoism, the RCP, and Bob Avakian’s leadership and theoretical work) need to work through some things and get them out of our system, or at least come to grips with them. I suppose you could call this “settling accounts.” Again, I find it interesting that the people who think none of us should be engaged in this are the ones who do know a bit about the RCP and its history. For sure, there is a large element of this aspect (“track”) of sorting things out that is a good deal like looking back on failed personal relationships. In my own case, this was especially acute in the cases where my involvement was intense, and yet where the conception of what we were doing together (the RCP and I) was not really what I was led to believe. (I’m thinking especially of the time when I went to Lima, Peru, in 1992, and my co-authorship of the Conversations book with Bob Avakian.) Is it really the case that there is nothing instructive here, nothing that we can take a lesson from? Are these things really of no interest to anyone outside of a fairly small circle? Or is the “interest” that some have in these things only counter-productive, simply an “interest” in the completely-understandable but not always helpful desire to “share something”? Perhaps to engage in this way is only backward-looking, or perhaps some forms of this engagement amount to little more than gossip in the large scheme of the work we really need to be doing.
I think there might be something worth thinking about in the frustrations some of us have (and that others do not have), and there might also be something worth thinking about in the fact that some say they do not share these frustrations and are not interested in hearing about them. The latter perspective is grounded in the idea that, “You are coming out of a conceptual framework and a set of practices that we were never a part of in the first place, so your frustrations do not mean anything to us and are a diversion from the new things we need to do; we would all be better off—you too—if you would just let go of your frustrations.”
Perhaps a few of us would like to think we could do something productive with our frustrations and our desire to settle accounts, but perhaps we are wrong. We do need to put these questions in the frame of how they could conceivably matter in the future—and, not to be narrow or philistine about it, we might wonder how some of these things even matter in this particular moment or even simply in the coming next while. I do think the “Who really gives a shit?” approach covers some of this, but perhaps not quite.
I think of all the “minor” debates that Marx and Lenin were involved in, with various characters who are only vaguely known (if that) even to most of us in the contemporary Marxist milieu. We might wonder “who gives a shit” about Lasalle or Martov today. And yet there might be something to the fact that Marx and Lenin thought these debates were important, and again let’s keep in mind that what we are trying to do is to regroup and reconceive communism—which, to take a not-insignificant example, Marx was also trying to do in response to Lasalle, one product of which is still one of Marx’s most important texts for our time, Critique of the Gotha Programme.
But it certainly may be that there are no important debates today, that our wretched culture of postmodern capitalism has rendered everything into “Who gives a shit?” The person who said this (in the context of “who gives a shit” what the RCP says about Kasama, Badiou, etc.) also said some things that were, analytically and politically, on a much higher level, and it has to be admitted, again, that the “Who gives a shit” question is not entirely off the mark, either, but it does divide into two a bit, as well, there is something of cynical realism to it, when, instead, we need to go ahead with certain things in the hope that they will matter, or in the hope that there is at least some chance they will matter, even if this is a very difficult hope to maintain in our postmodern culture.
But obviously this doesn’t mean that everything we say matters very much, and certainly there are some engagements that are better avoided and that can be simply counter-productive. What is possibly as important, though, is the basis on which we make these determinations, and my point is that this depends on two things: where we’ve been, where we hope to go. (I suppose that, since I’m temporalizing it, there’s the question of where we are now, and, to be a bit Derridean about it, how these different collectivities—the “we”s—are constituted in these temporalities—and so on, e.g., how the temporalities are constituted.) To be sure, the latter has to be by far the more important consideration—where we hope to go.
There has been an interesting discussion at the Kasama site that circles around this question—of anything mattering anymore—in terms of the spirit of Woodstock. Some were saying that there never really was a rebellious core to the Woodstock experience, it was simply another staged bit of rebelliousness in the context of a thoroughly commodified culture. This has been said about the “student rebellion” aspect of the 1960s and its aftermath as well (one famous critique back in the day was when Alasdaire McIntyre referred, in an argument against Herbert Marcuse, to the “parent-financed student movement”).
Let’s bring Badiou into this a little bit, without thinking we are going to sort out Woodstock at this juncture. To say that Woodstock or the student movement, etc., were “mixed bags” is not in itself to say that these were not also real instances of rebellion. Both were expressions of the rebellious sixties, which had many different sides to it, but of course some of these sides were perhaps too much shaped by the commodity culture to begin with. If we take the logic of the commodity as being the core of what we are up against, and if we understand the ways in which this logic took extraordinary leaps in the twentieth century (and, arguably, qualitative leaps since the sixties, which is what the “postmodern capitalism” thesis is all about), then we would also recognize that there is no way any kind of rebellion against this culture would not be a mixed bag. But, if what we saw, in May 1968, say, was an actual event, then there is also in that event something like a pure moment—even if this moment only truly exists in the abstract—around which we might form fidelities and truth procedures. But in Badiou, it is also the case that the event is rare and fragile, and it is always possible, after the fact, to say that the event didn’t really occur, or that it was a pseudo-event.
In this discussion around Woodstock, one person brought in Thomas Frank’s book, The Conquest of Cool, which makes an argument that is especially important in this context. In terms of where we have been, certainly we need to understand that there were at least some moments within the rebellions of the sixties that did not escape the logic of the commodity and were in fact inhabitations of rebellion by this logic. However, I would go so far as to say that, if the argument that the entirety of the sixties rebellions was nothing but a ruse of commodity logic is really true (as one person argued persistently in the case of Woodstock), then we are probably doomed in our present, where commodity logic has gone a good deal further to preempt rebellions impulses.
The naïve hopes of some of the sixties rebels, perhaps more on the side of the student rebellions and the hippies and other idealistic utopians (I mean “idealistic” in all of its senses, and both in good and bad ways), while still charming and at times inspiring, cannot be our form of hope today, at least not in the main, and at least if we not only hope for a better future, but also want to work actively to create openings for the renewal of the communist project. We have to have a better sense of what we are up against, and that is where work such as Thomas Frank’s comes in. In the past I have called this the “Lenin and Adorno” question, and I hope to elaborate further on this soon.
Another way of coming at this, recognizing that the names I’m deploying here are more in the order of place-keepers for present purposes, is that the Marxists (of whatever stripe) of the sixties and after tended to be economistic and even too narrowly “political,” where “political” means a kind of narrow “realism” about how political power works (in other words, the usual “grind it out” dogmatic Marxism), while the anarchists and situationists, who brought a focus on culture, tended to be a bit aesthetically-oriented, if I can put it that way. (What is left out of this dichotomy, especially in terms of how things unfolded in the U.S., is the role played by Black liberationists and radical feminists and gay liberationists in bridging these poles.) The problem is that it was in this domain that the festival of the oppressed actually took off in a way that was inspiring.
When I think of 1968, I try to have a more global view than Badiou seems to have, where it’s all about the Events of May 1968 in Paris. On the other hand, the Events of May stand out in the way that they brought together a new level of worker-intellectual alliance and even integration. Despite Badiou’s criticisms of “anarcho-desirers” and situationists, May 1968 and the fidelities that were unfolded from it would not have been at all the same without these elements (any more than the sixties would have been what they were in the U.S. without the hippies, the Yippies, Abbie Hoffman, and so on—and Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, for that matter), and we might think on this.
But do we think on this purely for understanding where we were? I don’t see anything wrong with thinking on the vital mix that made the sixties even from the “mere” perspective of historical scholarship. There is a kind of scholarship that seeks to keep all of this stuff in the past, to lock it away and be done with it, and that I don’t appreciate so much. But even there something can be learned from grappling with the motivations of these efforts. (Significantly, Badiou frames his discussion in The Meaning of Sarkozy around this attempt to once and for all lock away May 1968.) However, I think there is a lot more to learn for the present and future of struggle as well.
Much good work has already been done regarding the elements of the “vital mix” of the sixties and May 1968 and its aftermath, but more theoretical work needs to be done on how the actual synergies of this mix worked. What might be said about this in terms of the RCP’s Maoism can be said even more of other Marxist trends, and it is in a way simply pitiful and shameful that Marxist trends have never gotten much beyond simply saying that we need certain elements in order to lay the ground for responding to revolutionary possibilities that might open up—elements such as “culture” or “theory” (or “intellectuals”) that are never pursued much beyond square one.
This is not simply a question of not being so hard on the intellectuals or artists (though, again, the shameful thing is that this is about as far as anything has ever gotten), but is in fact the question of how a real united front emerges and develops.
(We might also do some theoretical work on the relationship between the vital mix and the mixed bag, and my point is that it seems unlikely that the former will ever be found without the latter—though the reverse does not necessarily hold, there are mixed bags with no truly vital elements. Was this the case with Woodstock, or, for that matter, the history of the Soviet Union during the Stalin period? For my part, I don’t accept the “mixed bag with no vital elements” assessment in either case.)
What does this seeming digression have to do with the project of debriefment? Simply this: that in both the United States and France, and in several other places, Maoism was part of the vital mix of the experience of the sixties and of 1968, and so were some other trends (in France, situationism and psychoanalysis as well), but what was not part of the vital mix was Soviet “Marxism” and the varieties of Trotskyism and reformist “socialism.” Yes, in some cases these trends were represented on the streets, but their “contribution” was the opposite of vital, these trends always sought to limit the scope of struggle.
Another version of the “mixed bag” came in with the shift from the sixties to the seventies in the U.S., when the student movement aspect of the rebellions ran its course and radicals aimed for a grounding in the working class that had not developed in the immediate aftermath of the struggles of 1968. When people are converging, even if from different angles, on an economistic-workerist approach, then I suppose all that matters in debates about history (Stalin and Trotsky, etc.) are ways that different groups are trying to “brand” themselves.
Even so, there were two differences that were important. First, the Trotskyists and CPUSA people were not turning to economism, they were recommending that the left and socialists and radicals who had gotten caught up in the excitement of the sixties return to what was supposedly the real deal. They came through the sixties with their orthodoxies intact, and then they were able, after things settled down, to wear that passage as a badge of some kind of honor. Whether it was Woodstock or Black Liberation or radical feminism, none of these things really “happened,” from an economistic perspective.
The Maoists, broadly speaking, instead saw themselves as making a “turn” to the working class, and here is where a second difference arose. Groups such as the Communist Workers Party and the Communist Party Marxist-Leninist went to the same part of the working class upon which the CPUSA and the Trotskyist groups were focused.
The Revolutionary Union and then the Revolutionary Communist Party went substantially in this direction as well, but not completely. Why not? Long discussion, but I want to offer a very short answer and say that it was precisely because of what was vital in the mixed bag that was the sixties.
Now, clearly this also played out in terms of what was happening in China from about 1972 onwards, where there was tremendous contention over continuing the Cultural Revolution, against the background of threats from the Soviet Union and the opening to the United States, and ultimately the seizure of state power by the counter-revolutionary capitalist roaders, led by Deng Xiaoping.
In terms of the mix of all this, what is significant is that, the points where the RCP was going wrong (probably the two biggest examples of which were the Boston busing issue and the line on homosexuality) were closely connected to a kind of workerist orientation, while the places where the RCP was going in a more revolutionary direction had very much to do with what was vital in the mix of the sixties.
(Why were questions of sexuality and homosexuality so intractable within this mix? That remains a worthwhile question to pursue.)
So, again, what were some of the elements of this mix? Very broadly: internationalism, anti-imperialism, the sense that we need to understand and support the socialist experiments in China, the sense that we need to understand and forge an alternative to Stalin’s version of socialism, the rise of the New Left, a certain Third Worldism, a certain sense of anti-revisionism that was also wary of dogmatism and the forging of new orthodoxies, a sense that the constellation of questions and struggles around race and gender are not simply secondary or subordinate, certainly the experience of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Movement generally, and then let us not forget the general culture of rock music and rebellion, and, finally, but not insignificantly, what might be called a certain Bay-area trippiness.
All good stuff—that’s a good mix!
And, again, this is not the mix one finds in Trotskyism or CPUSA “communism” (and obviously not in Hoxhaite Stalinism).
Significantly, the parts of the counterculture where this mix was also prevalent, or at least more parts of it, were more toward the anarchist and situationist end of things.
There is always a tremendous temptation to go down into the economist ditch, or to get into an economist rut. It seems to me this is not unrelated to the temptation in materialism to get into a reductivist rut. (Again, I’m calling this a “pathological” materialism.) These temptations always affected even the most vibrant strains of anti-economistic radicalism, including the Maoism of the RCP and Bob Avakian. But it is still important to mark the difference between the eagles that sometimes fly low and the other birds that cannot soar so high. The difference is that the low-flyers are never out of the rut and the ditch and they make a principle out of being there. For the eagles, it is important to both understand how they can be tempted by the ditch, but also what was in the mix that kept them from staying in the ditch. Additionally, it is important to see the relationship between the economist ditch (or, changing images, the swamp, as Lenin put it) and the moment when even the eagle becomes exhausted and is not able to sufficiently change course.
The irony here is that we need to understand how postmodern capitalism has as a central cultural strategy the undercutting of even the possibility of a counterculture—and we need to figure out what, if anything, we can do about this—but it is this very exhaustion of experimental, countercultural vibrancy that keeps us from turning the corners that need to be turned. Indeed, too much activist Marxism, even coming from the most vibrant trends, has been complicit in the reductivist idea that experimental culture (and theoretical work) is so much epiphenomenal “fluff.” (An “epiphenomenon” is akin to a shadow; it is “there,” but it is not “really real,” and it has no existence apart from the entity that casts it.) There are still elements from the vital sixties mix that can help us here, but: 1) these elements must be reconfigured, and 2) ultimately a new mix is needed, one that is shaped in relation to the new configurations of capitalism that have emerged since the sixties and in many respects in deliberate reaction to the sixties.
Notice that the term “vital mix” is at least in some important ways replacing the word “synthesis” for the moment, and this is for at least two reasons.
First, it is unclear that even now we really grasp the Maoist synthesis. This is one of the reasons why Badiou’s work is exciting, especially Theory of the Subject. There may be problems and omissions in this work, Badiou’s version of the Maoist synthesis, but there are whole new dimensions that are opened up as well, and a whole new framework, things that were invisible within the context of the often insightful but philosophically ham-fisted perspective of Bob Avakian’s generally non-rigorous, non-systematic, non-scientific work.
The irony is that Avakian’s work is at times almost the Nietzschean, aphoristic version of Marxism, and it is about telling stories, but with the addition of the condemnation of “narrative” as a methodology and the continual chanting of “science” as a mantra. In fact, despite his more recently-expressed distaste for the idea of “narrative,”the central theoretical contribution of Bob Avakian to the communist project is a reading of parts of the revolutionary experience since Marx and especially in the twentieth century. As I said earlier, I was always very frustrated with Marxists (of whatever sort) in academia who did not see the need for such a reading; they frustrate me still. (Let us be clear that some one-word “summation” of the experience as “totalitarianism,” “horror,” “genocide,” “megalomania,” “disaster,” and the like is neither a reading nor at all helpful.) It seemed to me, and it continues to strike me, that, despite some of the serious limitations of Bob Avakian’s theoretical work, this reading is still very valuable and helpful.
What still needs to be done is for this reading to be set out systematically. Where there are aporias and lacunae, there is still valuable work to be done—in either solving these problems or taking stock of the significance of our inability to find a solution.
Put another way, and more straightforwardly: did Bob Avakian deepen our understanding of the communist revolutions of the twentieth century and of Maoism, and did he develop Maoism in some important ways? Were these important and valuable things to do?
Even while being resolutely angry with Bob Avakian and the RCP for the hash they’ve made of all this, we still need this chapter in our “workbook of post-Maoism,” our workbook of the next phase of the communist hypothesis and the new possibilities for a vital mix.
But my larger point is that there is still work to do in forming the larger sense of Maoism as synthesis—and then to ask what it might mean to view this synthesis in the past tense.
Second, with his placing of the event before the subject, Badiou is also giving us another way of understanding the primacy of practice over theory. Why is it the case that our theorizing not only is complicated, erratic, and experimental, but that it ought to be and necessarily is such? The answer to this question, it could be said, is in the necessity of contingency and the contingency of necessity.
There is a primary need for a new synthesis even while there is also a secondary need to continue to sort out the previous synthesis. However, in light of the primacy of the event and of practice, it has to be understood that our work toward this new synthesis is anticipatory.
This goes to questions of complexity (our work is “complicated”), contingency, and the “vital mix.” We should continue to study and try to understand and theorize the vital mix of the sixties and its aftermath. We should try to understand something of how a vital mix works and how it emerges, even while holding firm to the truth that such study will not yield a fully-worked out “science” of how any previous vital mix emerged, and neither will it provide a complete template for either creating or recognizing a new vital mix.
In the Critique of Judgment, Immanuel Kant argues that a scientist can be “formed” (through education) in a way that an artist cannot be. Kant’s distinction might be refined using Thomas Kuhn’s distinction between “normal” and “revolutionary” science, to read instead that social institutions can “make” a “normal scientist” but not quite a “revolutionary scientist,” a real innovator who opens up “new continents,” so to speak. This doesn’t mean to toss away the training in the basics of scientific investigation, or the basics in artistic technique for that matter. The emergence of the new, however, is underdetermined, and so our work has to be anticipatory—and complicated, erratic, and experimental.
This is a point that the book-length RCP critique of Badiou just does not want to come to terms with, despite circling around it a bit and despite the opening to it that was created in the Notes on Political Economy and in the discussions that Bob Avakian and I had concerning “inevitablism.” And it is indeed a very difficult complex—of indeterminacy, underdetermination, and contingency—to come to terms with; it may even be that something very deep in our human cultures and histories and experiences is set against coming to terms with contingency, as coming to terms with contingency seems to lead to the various forms of nihilism.
There are of course many rich discourses on these questions, from ancient times, from diverse cultures—as always, I would point toward what seems to be the Buddhist discourse and the attraction of Western intellectuals have toward at least certain readings of it, and of course from Nietzsche and twentieth-century French philosophy.
As I tried to demonstrate in the previous section, Bob Avakian avoids all of this discussion, in a way that would almost seem studious and careful, if it didn’t so much more betoken simple intellectual laziness. But this is again where the project of “debriefment,” here understood simply and straightforwardly as digging ourselves out of certain holes, is important, because this kind of avoidance (1) is widespread through everything that has called itself communism, socialism, anarchism, the left, radical activism, or what-have-you; (2) can be characterized as pathological or as symptomatic of a pathology—one that I am calling pathological materialism; (3) has real practical effects. Even people who do not want to grapple with all of this theoretical or philosophical stuff need to take some sort of stock on this last point.
A very simple, but I think worthwhile summation of the foregoing is that we need to begin to think politics in light of contingency. Two corollaries to this point: (1) we need to understand better what it means to think, period, in light of contingency, as well as what it means to act, in light of contingency; (2) “in light of contingency” does not mean that there is never any moment when there are law-like motions in “brute” materiality or in “social reality” or in abstract thought; what it means is the primacy of contingency over necessity. But what this means is something we need to understand a whole lot better!
I don’t want to leave this issue of anticipatory practical and theoretical work without quoting some very interesting formulations from Mike Ely, in a Kasama post on electoral politics and revolutionary organizing:
If you conceive of a revolutionary united front capable of seizing and holding power in the U.S. — and you imagine the demographic support you would need…. you get (more or less) the social forces who now make up the Democratic party base. (Plus, one might hope a chunk of farmers — who are largely trapped these days in some version of Republican politics… or worse.)
And to imagine a revolution in the U.S., that Democratic party has to shatter, lose its base and become profoundly de-legitimized as the alternative to the ugliest, racist, uber-capitalist right.
Forgive my history-geek reference: but I personally see an analogy (in American history) in the way the status-quo Whig party shattered on the eve of the Civil War, and a new (more radical and ultimately revolutionary) Republican Party emerged on the basis of opposing the dominance of the slaveocracy.
In some ways, that kind of repolarization has to happen in the U.S. — where the social base of the Democrats simply abandon them, and recongeal in a number of other movements, which in turn need to be unified around a revolutonary program of transitional demands in the midst of a profound social crisis.
That’s what the pre-history of a revolution looks like in a future America.
And the question is, how do we prepare now, in ways that help the repolarization of American politics to include a powerful revolutionary pole attracting millions?
We really don’t have much of a mix these days, vital or otherwise. This again has to do with postmodern capitalism, which I would say is a “stage” of capitalism within imperialism, as opposed to “beyond” imperialism, even though there are qualitative developments. One of these developments has to do with the degree and qualitative depth of post-60s social pacification in the United States, even despite significant counter-examples (in a moment we will turn to the most important of these, the L.A. rebellion of 1992). In terms of the emergence of a vital mix, we might wonder if we are in “pre-pre-history.”
On the other hand, there is a sense in which we not only do not know everything that is simmering under the surface of our present social configuration, we cannot know—or, we cannot know what dynamic synergies might lead to a true eruption. This doesn’t mean we don’t look around and try to understand and unite with “the central void of capitalism” (as Badiou characterizes Marx’s understanding of the proletariat), and it doesn’t mean that we cannot learn from the ways in which the vital mixes of the past emerged.
However, to shift terrain to music again, we won’t get the new Beethoven or Coltrane or Beatles simply by studying the previous exemplars. It may well be that we (or someone) won’t get to something new in music without studying the “past masters,” and my own thinking tends this way (because we still have to try to be methodical, even if in light of contingency and even while aiming to experiment)—but then the problem is not to become a slave to this tendency. Ironically, there is something in the very nature of Bob Avakian’s actual contribution to the development of Maoism and the communist project that at the same time prevented him from really breaking out with a new synthesis or at least a real contribution to an emergent, new vital mix.
I’ll turn to this question in a moment, but one aspect of recognizing this “something” is the further recognition that Badiou’s work, in being experimental, can make more of a contribution to the next phase of things, even where it might be “wrong” on some particular point, than Avakian’s work, in being “merely methodical” (in continuing to unfold the Maoist problematic in a certain way and along a certain path), even where Avakian and the RCP might be more “right” on a particular point. A good deal hinges on our being able to understand how this could be the case.
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