In this book a number of contemporary thinkers (Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Daniel Bensaid, Wendy Brown, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Ranciere, Kristin Ross, and Slavoj Zizek) were asked to respond to the questions, ”Is it meaningful to call oneself a democrat? And if so, how do you interpret the word?” Reprinted here from Columbia University Press blog. A longer extract from Badiou’s essay can be accessed here.

Our concern is le monde, the world that evidently exists, not tout le monde, where the democrats (Western folk, folk of the emblem) hold sway and everyone else is from another world — which being other, is not a world properly speaking, just a remnant of life, a zone of war, hunger, walls, and delusions. In that “world” or zone, they spend their time packing their bags to get away from the horror or to leave altogether and be with—whom? With the democrats of course, who claim to run the world have jobs that need doing….

In sum, if the world of the democrats is not the world of everyone, if tout le monde isn’t really the whole world after all, then democracy the emblem and custodian of the walls behind which the democrats seek their petty pleasures, is just a word for a conservative oligarchy whose main (and often bellicose) business is to guard its own territory, as animals do, under the usurped name world.

Badiou concludes by writing:

What I have aimed to do here is to set brackets around the authority the word democracy is likely to enjoy, or have enjoyed, in the mind of the reader and make the Platonic critique of democracy comprehensible. But as a coda, we can go right back to the literal meaning of democracy if we like: the power of peoples over their own existence. Politics immanent in the people and the withering away, in open process, of the State. From that perspective, we will only ever be true democrats, integral to the historic life of peoples, when we become communists again. Roads to that future are gradually becoming visible even now.

No related posts.

The following talk by Alain Badiou was given at the Miguel Abreu Gallery in New York about a year ago (10/13/2010). The following transcript, prepared by Richard James Jermain, is taken from the symptom, where a video of the talk can also be found. Some obvious errors and typos in the transcript have been corrected; unclear words are indicated by a question mark.

So I propose to distinguish an art which is close to the State power, in dependency to state power, and a properly militant art. We shall name the first artistic creation inside the space of the State power an official art; and we must say that to mistake official art for militant art has been the great problem during the last century. In real militant art ideology is the subjective determination not of an apparatus but of a process, a struggle, a resistance.

In a more aesthetic language, we can say that the first (the official art) under the Idea of le grand art, the great art, the high, monumental art of the glorification of the result, under militant art is under the idea of experimental art, of avant-garde, in some sense of this word. So we can clearly distinguish between the two and recognize that from the same subjective conviction two completely different formal orientations can be defined.

But there is also a sort of dialectics between the two. The militant art can be, and is very often a critique of the official art, it’s true; and we know that the official art is very often a critique of the militant art. But the official art uses some new means of the militant art because the militant art is very often of the same ideology. And the militant art is also stimulated by the potency of the official art when the offical art is of the same ideology. The fact that the same ideology is realized in the artistical field in two different forms creates by necessity an historical dialectics betwen the two. There is a sort of exchange between the two, and some great common moments where official art and militant art are something in common.

And so when we have to expose today the question of the possibility of a militant art we cannot immediately expose our thinking in the parameters of the distinction between official art and true militant art. And why? First, there is today no common strong ideology. There is no vision – a global vision – for another possibility of the world as such, for the historical world as such. Naturally, there exists opposition, there exists revolutionary movement, there exist struggles and so on. But it’s clear that we cannot affirm purely and simply the existence of another possibility as such, which was clearly affirmative in the second part of the last century.

Does the Notion of Activist Art still have a Meaning?

Alain Badiou

My question this evening will be “Is it possible to propose a general definition of a militant vision of artistic creation?” The first and simple possibility is to say something like that. A militant vision of artistic creation is when an art – a work of art – is a part of something which is not reducible to an artistic determination. For example stained-glass windows in churches. It’s a symbol of the Light of God, and it’s also a part of artistic creation. Greek temples, which are also something for collective cult; military music, which is something inside the creation of patriotic courage; Egyptian pyramids, which are works of art certainly, but also the old symbolic question of the death of the king, and so on.

In all these cases we have the phenomena of artistic creation, certainly, but which is included in something else which is the ? of something which is outside of artistic determination. We can speak of an official artistic activity much more than a militant one. Finally, it’s the artistic creation in the space of the State, of the power.

In this situation – the space of the State, of the power, – we can have some magnificent works of art. It’s not an objection to the existence of creative activity. Cantatas of Johann Sebastian Bach, Gothic castles – all of the castles of aristocracy, a large part of painting and so on. The point is that artistical novelty is inscribed in the continuity of the State including the church, and so on. In fact, the goal is to find a use of artistic creation for the glory of conservative institution.

We have, for example, in France the case of the King Louis XIV. Certainly it’s the purely despotic power, but it’s also the personal protection of so great artists as Molière or Racine, and so on. The price that we must pay is that the artist must sing the praises of the king, and they do in any case. In fact it has been the same thing from some great artists under the power of Stalin or Mao Zedong. In all these cases we have the determination of artistic creation by the space of power, which probably creates, on one part a new possibility for artistic creation with the protection of the king, the protection of the power, and the means of the power; and, on the other side, a limit which is the necessity to be inscribed inside the pure, political necessity of the power itself.

So I propose to distinguish an art which is close to the State power, in dependency to state power, and a properly militant art. This distinction is very important and sometimes is unclear. We shall name the first artistic creation inside the space of the State power an official art; and we must say that to mistake official art for militant art has been the great problem during the last century. Some artists, sometimes some genius, has been at the center of that sort of confusion. We can quote Bertolt Brecht or Heiner Müller for the theater, Eisenstein for the cinema. ? and Pasternak for the novel Aragon or Eluard for the French poetry and even, in some circumstances, Picasso for painting. In all these cases it’s very difficult to clearly distinguish between the pulsion of official art and the freedom of militant art. And so during the last century we have had some difficulty we have found some difficulty concerning the definition, the clear definition of militant art.

What official art and militant art have in common: that is the point of the confusion, the possible confusion, between the two. We can say that what official art and militant art have in common is ideology. By ideology I understand a subjective conviction which is exposed in the language with a universal destination. We can have for example democratic ideology, communist ideology, human rights ideology, but also religious ideology or a conservative one, or monarchic ideology in the case of great artistic creation under the King Louis XIV. It’s very important to understand that ideology is common is some sense to official art and militant art, but that ideology is not at the same place in the two. And so the difference between official art – ideological art in the space of the power of the State – and militant art which is not enclosed in the power of the State, is not an ideological difference but much more a difference concerning the place of the ideological conviction in the work of art itself. In an official art the point is that ideology is realized as a power. The subjective function of ideology is inscribed into an objective apparatus, the party of the State, of the Party-state like in Soviet Union or in Communist China. So you see in official art ideology is realized in an objective form, and the inscription of the work of art is in the space of that sort of objectivity.

In real militant art ideology is the subjective determination not of an apparatus but of a process, a struggle, a resistance. An official art describes the glory of what exists. It’s an art of victory. I think that is the most important point. An official art with an ideological determination is fundamentally an act of victory that is an art not of weakness but of strength. A militant art is the subjective expression not of what exists but of what becomes. Its an art of the choice and not an art of victory. An official art is an art of affirmative certainty. A militant art is an art of the contradiction, an art of the contradiction between the affirmative nature of principles and the dubious result of struggles. And the point where ideology is inscribed in the work of art is not at all the same. In an official art, the place of ideology is the glory of the work of art itself. In a militant art the place of ideology is the place of the contradiction and also of the dubious result of the struggle. And so we are, in some sense, an art of the glorious victory and an art of the dubious struggle.

There is in fact an ontological and formal difference between the two. Ontologically, in its proper being, the official art is an art of the result, of what has been victoriously decided. In my jargon it’s on the side not of the situation but of the state of the situation. On the side not of presentation but on the side of representation. In fact, very often, official art must be a representation of the result, of the ideological potency of the victory, of the historical potency. Militant art is the reverse. It’s an art of what has been showed but not yet decided or completely decided. It’s an art of the situation and not an art of the state of the situation. And, probably the most important, it’s an art of the presentation and not an art of representation. And so militant art can only be the image of something which exists but must be the pure existence of what is becoming, and the difference is not only an ontological difference but also as you can see a formal difference, and in the same background. Formally, that is the second point, the first – the official art – uses old established means to glorify the new result, and it is why there is always something conservative in the official art. What is new is the political result, the new power if you want. And to glorify this result, this novelty, the use is the use of all old means, and it is why generally speaking official art under a new ideology is conservative in the sense of a sort of neo-classicism, which can see something like that not only in the socialism, [socialist realism] under Stalin, but also in fact under all the sequence where the new result of political struggle is glorified by the mobilization of old means established in the field of artistic creation.

In the case of a true militant art we must create a new means to formalize the novelty, and we have not the mobilization of old means of creativity to glorify the result because the result is not here. We have the process and not the result, so we cannot glorify the result by the mobilization of old means, but we must create new means to formalize the process itself, to glorify, if you want, what does not exist because the result is not here. And it is why the militant art is always in some sense an art of something which is presented in its proper non-existence and in its weakness, and not in the glorification of its existence as a result. And in fact not only you have to formalize the process but you must also formalize the uncertainty of the novelty itself. In the official art we have – always – the affirmative glorification of the result, but in the militant art we have something which is much more near the process, near something which does not existence, near something which has a real weakness, and so something which is an uncertainty. And so that sort of hesitation ? which is inside all a very real process, is also a formal necessity. And it is why in militant art we cannot have the glorification of the form. We must have something in the form itself which is the [translation] of the uncertainty of the process.

And so – all that may be in the same ideological background, I insist on this point. Maybe we have in any case an artist or artistic creation with a subjective determination which is in some sense the same, but the formal activity, the formal artistic creativity is completely different because in one case we have the glorificaition of the result and in the other case we have something which [is] the attempt to be inside the uncertainty of the process. So in a more aesthetic language, we can say that the first (the official art) under the Idea of le grand art, the great art, the high, monumental art of the glorification of the result, under militant art is under the idea of experimental art, of avant-garde, in some sense of this word. So we can clearly distinguish between the two and recognize that from the same subjective conviction two completely different formal orientations can be defined.

But there is also a sort of dialectics between the two. We cannot stop to the point of their difference, of their opposition – official art on one side, militant art on the other side. The militant art can be, and is very often a critique of the official art, it’s true; and we know that the official art is very often a critique of the militant art, because the glorificaiton of the result is not the love of the glorificaiton of uncertainty of the process. But the official art uses some new means of the militant art because the militant art is very often of the same ideology. And the militant art is also stimulated by the potency of the official art when the offical art is of the same ideology. The fact that the same ideology is realized in the artistical field in two different forms creates by necessity an historical dialectics betwen the two. There is a sort of exchange between the two, and some great common moments where official art and militant art are something in common.

We can quote for example the congress of anti-fascist intellectuals in paris or Moscow in the ’30s, or even as a small example the portrait of Stalin by Picasso. Is the portrait of Stalin by Picasso official art? Certainly. But is it something which is a real militant cereation? Certainly. Yes, [that] too. And even the Mao of Andy Warhol which is finally something ironic but ironic in the shadow of the existence of official art. And we can quote many a situation concerning the great artist like Brecht or Pasternak or Prokoviev where we cannot distinguish clearly between the potency of official art, the means of official art, and the experimentation, and the pure presentaiton of militant art. So we have something which is in common: there is a tension between the two, there is a contradiciton between the two, but also they are in the same ideological space and so there exists an historical exchange between the two.

The condition of all that – first the clear distinction between offical art, official revolutionary art if you want in the space of the space and true militant art, so the distinction between the two; and also the point of exchange and unity between the two – the condition of all that is the existence of a strong ideology. What I name a strong ideology is an ideology which presents or proposes a complete different vision of the history of human being as such. A strong ideology cannot be only a difference between forms of democratic vision and so on, a strong ideology . . . is something which creates the idea, the global idea, of another posibility. Ideology is not a simple concept, naturally. There exists a strong ideology but also a soft ideology, something like that. And in the case of the historical existence of the strong ideology we can have a clear vision of what is the existence of an offical revolutionary art, what is in the sense of a true militant art, what is the difference between them, and also what are the common points between them. So we can say that the situation today is in my opinion really different.

And so when we have to expose today the question of the possibility of a militant art we cannot immediately expose our thinking in the parameters of the distinction between official art and true militant art. And why? First, there is today no common strong ideology. There is no vision – a global vision – for another possibility of the world as such, for the historical world as such. Naturally, there exists opposition, there exists revolutionary movement, there exist struggles and so on. It’s not true that there exists nothing at all. I am not at all in the space of nihilist’s vision of the history of humanity, but it’s clear that we cannot affirm purely and simply the existence of another possibility as such, which was clearly affirmative in the second part of the last century. So there is no common ideology and we must observe that democracy, for example, which is a clear example of a weak ideology and not of a strong ideology, because it’s too consensure, it’s a complete equivocation between reactionary camp and the revolutionary camp, between progressive and conservative and so on. In fact everybody is [a] democrat today. But when everybody [is a] democrat we can see that the ideology may be something and not nothing, but is certainly a weak ideology. It was impossible in the fifty years before – something like that, or much more- it was impossible to affirm that everybody was communist. It was a difference. And it’s independent of the value of the determination. I am not saying that communism was something exciting and democracy was something very sad. I am just saying that communism was a difference and was not a consensure concept, and democracy is a consensure concept, so the ideolgical situation is not the same it’s different. We are today maybe for a moment, not forever, but we are now in the context of the existence of weak ideological constituation. And it’s the first point.

So when there does not exist a strong ideology it is much more diffictult to explain what is precisely, first militant art because the subjective conviction is unclear, and second to explain what is the difference between official art and militant art on the same ideological background, is the first point of difference. And the second point is that there is no -today – carismatic power of the result of history, and so there is no possibility for a strong official art because there is no space of the power, space of the State, where something like an official revolutionary art can be given and inscribed. So the two major conditions of official art, militant art, and the difference between the two are not realized today. We are in a completely different situation.

So the question today is the question of an isolated militant art, a militant art which is not in relationship – in the dialectics – with an official art on the same ideological background. But what is an isolated militant art, what is the strange determination the condition of existence of that sort of art?

The difficulty – I think, but we can discuss all that – the difficulty is that without a content in relationship with a strong ideology, the militant art cannot be clearly distinguished from purely experimental art. The difficulty is that it’s very difficult – practically impossible to distinguish between the formal level of experimenation and the political level of militant art as such. And it is ? because the formal novelty, in the condition of today, the formal novelty cannot be inscribed in clear references to progressive contexts because this inscription in a progressive context was in fact always in relationship with a strong ideology: direct, mediate, indirect, explicit, inexplicit, but finally we can find in the sequence of the past that the formal novelty in the case of militant art is in relationship to the strong ideology by successive mediation. In the absence of strong ideology, the absence also of the space of a power and the same background, it’s very difficult to create the relationship between the formal novelty and the progressive position in the political field.

So the tempation today is to say that artistic creation, formal novelty, are by themselves sufficient to define politcal destiny of the arts. And much more sometimes to say that in the weakness, the contemporary weakness of the political novelty, artistical creation as such, has a political content, a political determination. Finally to say that art, as a novelty, as a creativity, is by itself political. It’s a temptation and we must understand that this tempation is today a necessity. A necessity in the context where [there] does not exist a clear mediation between the field of artistic creation on one side and the field of poltical activity on the other side, because this mediation was in fact for one part the existence of a strong ideolgical context, and for the other part the existence of a power, a space of power, which can define an official art. But this tempation is a tempation of avant-garde as such, or maybe the temptation to identify, purely and simply, artistic avant-garde and political avant-garde.

We know the last century has been the century of very complex relationship between artistic avant-garde and political avant-garde. It has been the century of difficult relationship between surrealist and communist, between the question of formalism in art and the question of realism in politics and so on. And certainly this is not simple at all and with many conflicts, tensions, difficulties and so on. But it was a real history, it was a histroy of a real mediation betweeen the two separated fields of creativity, artistic creativity, in the form of different avant garde and the current of revolutionary politics with its proper organization and the state power of Soviet Union, and so on.

This history is finished, it’s clear, because the components of this history does not exist today. There is no strong ideology, there is no real power with differences to the strong ideology, and in fact there is no clear vision of artistic avant-garde, so all the components of this history have disappeared. So the temptation is that in every field where we create something, we decide that the field is by itself also a political one. And I think all our problem today is to refuse this tempation, is my position. To refuse this position and to say that certainly, art, work of art can be a subjective anticipation of some political event. Art is not separated from politics, it’s not my idea. Art can be a preparation, a subjective preparation to the reception of a political event, because art is really an effective subjective process, the transformation of subjectivity. The old forms of contemporary artistic experience – performances, installations, and so on and so on – also subjective mobilization in the direction of acceptation of the possibility of a political event, but art cannot be the creation of the political event as such because the political event as such has its proper laws. So the political consequences of an event are not of artistic nature. So we can accept that the situation today of militant art is complex and unclear situation because there is something like an autonomy of artistic creation without the possibility to say that this autonomy is by itself of political nature. So we can only give some rules, some indication, in the direction of what is today a militant art, condition which assume that there is a real weakness of the possible relationship between art and politics today. And this weakness is precisely our problem and we cannot substitute to this problem the weakness of the relationship between the two by the affirmation of a pure identity between the two. It’s a tempation but it’s a tempation which cannot have good results. So to finish this presentaiton I propose four provisial rules concerning the question of a weak militant art.

First I think that it’s a necessity to be in concrete relationship with localized political experiences. I think it’s a necessity to create the common space. The first common space was precisely the existence of strong ideology and strong organizations. In the absence of all that the common space must be a practical common space, a real proximity. And so I think the artists must search and find the form of a concrete relationship with some local political experiences which exist today. Could be the Palestinian situation, could be mobilizaiton of minorities, could be what you want. But I think it’s not possible to be at a distance from all that. We have a new imperative for artists, for possibility of militant art, which is to be in effective relationship with all that. In fact my proposition for this first point is to substitute an ideological proximity by concrete or real proximitiy. In the abscence of the strong ideology we must be really near the local experiences in the field of politics; the first point. And I think we can find new formal means in this proximity itself.

Second we must know and assume the attempts, the contemporary attempts to organize progressively the return to a strong idea. So the first point is to accept the weakness, but the second point is to accept also the possibility to go beyond the weakness. And so to know and to participate in the different attempts to return to a strong ideology concerning the global destiny of human beings.

Is it possible today to propose one small global idea of the transformation of our destiny? I don’t know if it is possible, but if we want the creation of a new form of militant activity in the field of artistic creation, we must know and participate in the attempts to go in that sort of direction. And so there is a necessity for the contemporary art to have a strong intellectuality, to know and practice really the intellectual disposition of today and not only concerning the formal means of creativity itself but also to have an intellectual space really as great as possible.

And so the third point is to participate, naturally, in the inventions of new forms in the direction . . . which substitutes presentation for representation, so in the militant direction, the formal direction, which is as much as possible in the direction of a purely presentative function of artistic vision.

So the three imperatives of today. First: concrete relationship to political activities in local forms, because globally there is no strong vision, but there is really intense local experiences, so to go in the direction of what is intense locally much more than in the direciton of what is powerful globally. And so it’s the imperative of weakness if you want. Intensity, weak intensity – but intensity. The second imperative is to assume all the attempts, which are of a philosophical nature in some sense, in the direction to return to a strong idea, from the weakness itself. From the weakness, inside the weakness, to find the new way for the possibility of a strong idea. And first in the formal, to appropriate to all that, the new formal means in the clear direction of presentation and not representative glorification of the result because, as we know there is no results of the mark. And so the glorificaiton of the result is really something void. So that’s the first three imperatives.

And after that, I think that the fourth point – and it’s a point, which is of really an artistic nature, is to propose the possibility of synthesis of the first three points. Synthesis between relationship to local experiences, knowledge of the attempts of something much more strong and global, and a new formalization in the direction of pure presenation. Doing something which is really like a sensible concrete synthesis of these three determinations. So to propose work of art which is really in relationship to action (first point) local action, local transformation, which is intellectually ambitious, and not poor, and which is formally avant-garde – avant-garde in the classical sense of substitution of presentation for the fundamental vision of representation. And, you know, if something can be done in that direction, and I think it’s possible, we can have a militant art in a strong sense, a militant art which is really inside the contemporary possibility of actions, but which is also at the level of intellectual activity and in the direction of a strong idea and which is in the descendancy of the new formal invention of the last century and of today. And so to conclude all that, I think that a militant art today is possible, not as a direct illustration or realization of a strong ideology, but as a sort of composition, a sort of montage of these three determinations. And so I hope that what exists today concerning artistic creation, which is a great existence, all that progressively constitutes a sort of reference for the passage of the first stage of our history which is close to another stage which is the opening of a new potency of the idea.

Thank you.

_______________

Q: Hi, I’m interested in your translation of Plato, and I’m wondering if you consider that act of translation to be a work of militant art. And I’m wondering how you might relate that to going toward local intensity, and to the other three.

B: You know I think that maybe in some sense, yes, in a sense, because it’s a proposition of writing a book in a form which is completely different of the classical form of what is a classical book. And so, it’s the possiblity of saying that Plato writes today. So in this sense it’s the artistic transformation of myself in Plato, or the monstrous transformation of Plato in myself. And so, in this sense, there is seomthing like the metamorphosis which is not exactly of a philosophical nature but which is also a formal operation. But in the I end I state a philosophy. But maybe it’s philosophy with the consciousness of the necessity of new means and new formal means for philosophy itself.

Q: I was wondering whether the fundamentalist movements all over the world, whether it’s American fundamentalism or Asian fundamentalism, is not a powerful ideological presence in our time that could serve the model that you set out.

A: Naturally, during all my talk concerning strong ideology, naturally, not reactionary strong ideology was implicit. We are exposed today in fact, I agree with you in some sense, we are exposed today to return to some forms of reactionary, strong ideology. It is a possibility in this crisis and so on. It’s clearly no ? We can observe the development of some ideology of closed identities, rationalist ideology and so on, which are pre-fascist in nature, but all that is not our problem.

Our problem is to create, against all that, the new possibilty, maybe, of a strong revolutionary ideology; or a strong, progressive ideology as you want; or a strong democratic ideology – we can change the word. And naturally there is no possibility of real artistical creativity in the field of reactive ideology. And so this sort of strong ideology is something which is much more, for us, a condition of a new fight, a new struggle. And naturally the question of art when there is the possibility of a new struggle it is also a very important question, because in all the sequence of the history of humanity there is a correlation between the new forms of struggle and the new forms of artistic creation, naturally. And so the problem of what is today an avant-garde, new militant form of art, is also a very important question in the context of the reactive possibility of the world today.

You know, I think it’s very important to observe that we are between two historical sequences. There is one sequence which is closed, certainly, which has been the sequence of the dream of a final victory. Something like that, we can say that. The dream, the terrible dream, the brutal dream of the final victory of the revolutionary form. This sequence where the fundamental idea was the idea of a victory is closed. We know that that sort of final victory does not exist. And so the background of an official revolutionary art is closed too, because official art was really the art of that sort of victory, the glory of the final victory.

So we have that but we have not a clear other possibility, and we are between two sequences. And so the militant art must be an art of anticipation, an art of possibility, an art which proposes the existence of new local possibilities which open the subjectivity. I think it’s the destiny of art today, to create some opening of subjectivity to something else, and not only the purely negative critique of the world as it is, but the creation of something like a new possibility, a new opening, and fundamentally a new courage. Because, finally, the existence of art, of artistic creation has been in all the history of humanity has been very useful to have some courage in existence. It’s true. Without painting, without cinema, without great novels, without poetry, the existence is in some sense a closed existence. Naturally there is also scientific invention and so on, but in the subjective field the opening of the subjectivity by the work of art is a necessity and not only something which is of secondary importance. Or today, precisely because we are (in my conviction) between two different sequences of the progressive history of the human being and with the real possibility of operation of reactive, purely reactive vision, we must have creative activity in the artistical field not only to say the world as it is is not good – which is clear in my opinion – but to say that it’s not our final destiny, and we can open our subjectivity to something else. And if this something else is not the global possibility which is inscribed in strong ideology, if this new opening of the subjectivity must be localized and much more weak than before, then the work of art is a good means for that. And so there is really (my conviction) an historical responsibility of artistic creation today.

Q: You spoke a lot about the role of the militant artist and the work of militant art. I was wondering, unfortunately – maybe for better or worse – we’re not all artists, so what’s the work of the militant spectator? What are the responsibilities there?

B: I cannot distinguish between the two finally, because artistic creation naturally is at a beginning. It cannot be an audience without a spectacle. But precisely in the new forms of artistic creation there is always distinction between the two. And we have a solicitation of the audience and intervention of the public and so on. And all that is precisely the direction of what I name presentation much more than representation. But if we have presentation much more than representation, we have naturally a sort of difficulty of distinction between purely creative objectivity the public or the audience. And so it’s also the point where the relationship between artistic creation and political experiences can be less separated than before. Maybe artistic creation can be much more inside the process of political experience than before. And it is also beacuse we cannot have the big Art of glorification of the result.

Q: Here there might be some connection with what he asked. Let’s say that there is no separation of the artist and the spectator in the forms you are talking about, how would the affirmation happen if there is not also a militant institution? You know if there’s no institution that will affirm that this is art or not, how can you actually know that this is art? If we are sure that this kind of equality comes, we can say that there is a militant institution that provides that sort of equality.

-Is there?

No, it’s not. But, let’s say in this idea he’s talking about, of these new forms of militant art, maybe there is the possibility of militant institutions.

B: You know it’s a part of a much more difficult and important problem which is the question of what is today a political organization.

-Yeah.

And what is today a political organization is precisely the most obscure question for clear reasons. Finally, the failure of forms of revolutionary power during the last century has been the failure of the dominant type of organization. It is the failure of the party, as the form of power and which finally has created a form of state which was oppressive and which has been a complete failure after the dissipation of the Soviet Union. And so in all fields today the question of what is a good institution, what is an institution which is really a creative one is a difficult question.

It’s not only the problem of artistic institutions, it’s the more general problem of organization. And I think we have only one rule: an organization can be an organization of a process and not an organization of the state, of this position. And so we must construct something from the concrete situation, from the concrete problem, from the process, from the struggle, and not in the pure vision of the global result or something like that. So, finally, in the artistical field there is no general solution of the problem of institution…And in fact, the question of organization or institution is always a problem between the open and the closed. And precisely the party, the form of the party, the Communist party, of the revolutionary party, has been the choice for a closed.

And why? Because the closed form was the form of the military action, of the violent action. And it was the form where something like military victory was possible against the reactionary state. And the choice, by Lenin in fact, but finally by Trotsky and the others – Mao too – the choice of the party form has been the choice of the victory of the result absolutely. Before, during the all 19th century, all insurrection, all revolution has been crushed by military means. And so the conclusion has been: we must create a new form of organization which is disciplined and closed. And with that form we have a chance to be victorious. And if the Soviet revolution of 1917 has been so popular, has been with millions of people enthusiastic for all that, it was because for the first time that popular insurrection has been victorious. There is no other reason.

And so after that we have a long sequence in which everybody is convinced that the key of the revolutionary trend is to construct a closed organization. And we can understand all that. The victory is really something extraordinary, in fact. It really was a new sequence in the history of human beings after all. But we know today that maybe the closed organization, the instutitions, the specialized institutions in any field, maybe is the possibility of some result, but that it’s impossible to continue after that sort of victory, is the direction of human emancipation in general. The closure, finally, is victorious itself. It’s not that you have first the victory by the means of closed organization, but after that we have the victory of closure as such. And so the victory becomes a sort of new, complete failure. And we are here.

And so the problem is really: what is an open organization? But the problem of an open organization which is not reducible to the problem of no organization at all, I understand your question. No organization at all – it’s too distant from any possible victory. And so the general philosophical, material, empirical question today is to find something which is to find something which is in fact neither closed nor open. Something between the two. It’s a topological problem and it’s also an artistical problem, because in fact, in many tendencies of the artistical creation today, there is something which also finds a way between the strict closure of the work of art as an object, and the complete opening of the work of art as something which is completely dissipated into the ordinary life.

And the two tendencies are different. And we find something which is not reducible to the closure of an object, which is not completely dissipated in the opening into ordinary life, and this problem is in fact the general problem of our historical sequence – to find something which is neither reducible to closure nor reducible to the pure opening, and so the point is to have not only the victory but the continuation. How to continue in the direction of emancipation, and to find the victory only as the beginning and not as the goal. Because after the 19th century the idea was that victory was the goal. But we know that after the victory we must continue, and if it is impossible to continue, if you have finally the construction of a monstrous State, oppressive and so on, we have nothing. But in the field of art, we’re having the same problem. Certainly, we cannot repeat the pure glorious objectivity of the work of art in its classic representative form, but it’s not possible to finally identify the work of art to the ordinary life. There must be a difference, and in the political field it’s the same thing. We must have something which is a difference of political activity to something else, but this difference cannot be the closure of an organization. And if I know the solution, I [will] give [it to] you immediately. But it is only our experience. It’s our experience today to find that sort of direction in any field: philosophy, artistic creation, political activity, and so on. And it’s only because we have, certainly, between two different sequences of history. One is closed, but we cannot know exactly when the new sequence begins.

Related posts:

1. John Steele: Why is Badiou of political value?

blowing across this globalized world, from Tunisia to Egypt to Greece to Spain to Occupy Wall Street. How do the theoretical investigations of this site relate to this, to what’s new and emerging? 

This question of the emergence of novelty, of understanding this very changing world so as to help to change it fundamentally, has always been central to this site. And some pivotal issues of the Occupy movement (Who are the 1%? for example) have been explored here as well.

At the urging of Mike Ely from Kasama, we’ve put together a guide to some important writings on khukuri, organized by topic:

What is current the structure of global capital? See essays concerning a transnational capitalist class (TNC) — truly the global 1% (or less) – by Leslie Sklair, by William Robinson, Jerry Harris, and by William K. Carroll, as well as in the recent piece on global corporate networks.

How do we analyze the present crisis, and how do we go forward from it? See this by David Harvey, as well as essays by Don Hamerquist, on the crisis of both capitalism and the left, and hollow states in a time of austerity and chaos, and John Steele’s notes from a conference devoted to this subject.

What is the relevance of Marxism today? This important question is explored in this essay by Vern Gray and in these by John Steele:

Our Relation to Revolutionary Tradition;

We Need a Politics We Haven’t Got;

and To what extent is revolutionary theory detachable?

as well as Bill Martin’s extensive essay Into the Wild.

How can we understand the present historical moment in a way that can also prepare us for the eruption of something new? And what is the relevance of the contemporary thinker Alain Badiou?

John Steele has written a series of essays: Another take on revolutionary theory; on Badiou and the event; Revolutionary fidelity and the radically new; on Badiou’s political value; and on Badiou’s Maoism.

Relatedly, there is J. Ramsey’s essay addressing the question.

And see these by Don Hamerquist: Barack, Badiou, and Bilal-al-hasan; and “…that which in them divides itself from the old”.

(And here too, Bill Martin, in the essay cited above.)

Finally, in terms of understanding the “new wind,” although this is a topic we’ll have more on, for now it’s worth noting an essay by Don Hamerquist on the earlier parts of this sequence.

Related posts:

1. Could the present crisis be an opening to communism?
2. Financialization and hegemony
3. Marxism, politics, and evil, part 2

The talk was obviously given several years ago, and was originally published in lacanian ink 29 (Spring 2007). It is republished here from the symptom.

My proposal will be in three parts.  First, a very short ontological part.  What is our concept of being qua being?  The answer will be: multiple, a multiplicity.  Second, what is our concept of the localization of something which is?  What is being-there? The answer will be: a transcendental field, without subject.  Third, what is existence? The answer will be: the degree of something’s identity to itself in a world is its existence in this world.

Towards a New Concept of Existence

Alain Badiou

No related posts.

Creating Space for Communist Re-Emergence: Approaching Badiou

By J. Ramsey

I would like to begin by thanking the Platypus Affiliated Society, the organizers of the conference, as well as Chris Cutrone for organizing this panel, and inviting me—inviting us—to speak with you today. I do not at all take it for granted that there are groups of people who come together to share views and engage in thoughtful discussion about capitalism, marxism, communism, and the path to human emancipation…. Ours is an age—and in particular, the US, is a society—where the very existence of what Badiou calls the Communist Hypothesis is in no way guaranteed. In this context, the very idea of Communism –indeed the very idea of Big Ideas!—needs to be defended, nurtured, and deliberately developed. And so it is important that we not take forums like this conference, or each other, our fellow-travellers on this revolutionary road, for granted.

The Platypus panel description we were given asks several questions. They are certainly not exhaustive of the topic of Badiou, (post) Maoism, or Communism. But they do seem to me to be a reasonable, if not the only, place to start. I want to use my time, in part, to deepen and unpack, just the first of the really quite loaded questions that were put to us.

First, we are asked by the blurb, “How does the prominence of Alain Badiou’s approach to communism speak to the present historical moment and its emancipatory possibilities?”

This question like many questions has embedded within it a number of aspects. 1. The prominence of Badiou’s thought. 2. Badiou’s approach to communism. And how each of those relates to: 3. The present historical moment. 4. And its emancipatory possibilities. 1.2.3.4. + aspects. Each of these aspects brings forth another question, complex in and of itself—questions that deserve full treatment in themselves—among them: 1. What is the prominence of Badiou’s thought today? 2. What is the nature of Badiou’s approach to communism? 3. What is the best way to understand the present historical moment? 4. And what are the emancipatory possibilities within in this moment? Finally, 5. How does Badiou’s thought relate to #3 and #4 , to the contemporary moment and its emancipatory possibilities?

In this paper I would like to take a stab at just the first couple of these, beginning with:

1. How prominent is Alain Badiou’s thought today, and what is the nature of this prominence?

At a minimum, Badiou’s rise to prominence would seem to signal a growing open-ness—at least in academic circles—to the issue of communism, or at least to the radical opposition to capitalism, which is to say, a waning of certain cold war era prohibitions, a fading of the “end of history” Fukuyama-ist haze that has blanketed academia for so long. Badiou’s prominence, at least within humanities, English, and philosophy departments would likewise appear to signal a certain moving beyond the limits of what is often called “postmodernist” discourse, with its fetishization of plurality, irony and uncertainty, its privileging of difference, and its ethics of respecting the Other at a distance, even at the expense of meaningful intervention…His “prominence” suggests a re-emerging interest in questions of unity, universality, truth (with a capital T), and politics (with a capital P), as well as thinking in terms of transforming inherited situations in fundamental ways, rather than ‘subversively’ playing on their hybrid margins. It’s also worth considering the radical difference between Badiou and say the empirical approach of Noam Chomsky, an invaluable thinker whose critical work of exposing the system’s crimes is still haunted, nonetheless, by a prohibition on thinking “Big Ideas.” As already noted, Badiou identifies this prohibition as one of the symptoms of our time, as well as one of the major obstacles to breaking out of the present capitalist system. In my view, these developments are largely positive!

Of course Badiou’s prominence is not the only sign of this moment’s open-ness to Big Ideas, or to communism in particular. A recent Rasmussen poll for instance found that 11% of “likely voters” in the US found Communism “more moral” than the current US political and economic system. Breaking down these numbers (for their “Platinum members only”) the pollsters found that 26-7% of 18-29 year olds interviewed reported that communism was both moral and that it worked better than the current US system. (And keep in mind here of course that “likely voters” tend to be wealthier and, by definition, more committed to the political existing system than, say, non-voters, let alone say, non-citizens, or the un-documented.) To me these are exciting and encouraging numbers. To what extent are Badiou and the discourse around him and other emerging philosophers of communism have contributed to this support vs. merely benefited from it in increased attention and readership?… It is difficult to say.

But what does seem likely to me is that aside from matters of direct influence, many of these people who are now reporting themselves as in favor of communism, are likely coming at communism, like Badiou, in new and what may appear to us as “strange” ways, not primarily through a reading of Marx’s Capital, but through other vectors of discourse, experience, reflection, and influence. (Though undoubtedly in many cases Marx or Marxism continue to play an important role, as well they should.)….

This brings us to the second question within the given question:

2. What is Alain Badiou’s approach to communism?

I would start by noting an assumption that is built into this question. Namely, that there is only one singular Badiou-ist approach to communism. While I haven’t yet read let alone made a close study of Badiou’s complete oeuvre, I have read enough to learn that there is, in fact, more than one Badiou—as there is more than one Marx for that matter! There are tensions, competing trajectories, and changes that move through Badiou’s work, regarding many elements of his philosophy, including several that are quite directly linked to communism and to politics.

I do not mean to throw open the door to a kind of textual indeterminacy, as if we can “never generalize about Badiou because he is not even identical with himself.” Rather I aim to suggest that in dealing with Badiou—or other complex thinkers such as Hegel, Marx, Lenin, Adorno, or Mao—we would do better to imagine Badiou’s work as a kind of layered terrain, a textual topology with which we best familiarize ourselves before pronouncing a totalizing judgment, that is, if we want to stand a chance of entering that terrain, to grapple with Badiou seriously, and/or to engage students of Badiou in a meaningful way.

For example, in reading Bruno Bosteels recent essay (“The Leftist Hypothesis” from the Idea of Communism book, based on talks from the Birkbeck conference), it becomes clear that there are differences between Badiou of the early 1980s and the Badiou of today, as regards, for starters, such “fundamental concepts of Marxism” as class struggle, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and revolution. Similarly in his 1969 essay “Outline of a Beginning,” curiously reprinted in the middle of Badiou’s most recent book, The Communist Hypothesis, (in a section entitled “We Are Still Contemporaries of May 1968,”) Badiou appears very much open to the notion of something like a maoist party of “a new type,” one that puts into practice the mass line, (“from the masses to the masses”) with cadre dialectically engaging mass movements, in a process of movement party mutual transformation. A Party that continually struggles against bureaucratization, ossification, as well as fragmentation and anarchic isolation—a party that would incorporate the very mass friction it encounters as the means of its radical renewal and transformation, as well as the masses’ (self)transformation. For this Badiou of 1969 or even of 1982, “the party-state” is not simply “exhausted,” as it appears in much later work (though even here there are variations and competing tendencies).

For instance consider Badiou’s rather sympathetic description of the notion of the Party as it was grasped by Marx and for that matter, Lenin (from his book Metapolitics): “It is crucial to emphasize,” Badiou states, “that for Marx of Lenin, who are both in agreement on this point, the real characteristic of the party is not its firmness, but rather its porosity to the event, its dispersive flexibility in the face of unforeseeable circumstances.” To quote a long passage that Bosteels finds in Badiou on this point:

Rather than referring to a dense, bound faction of the working class…the party refers to an unfixable omnipresence, whose proper function is less to represent class than to de-limit it by ensuring it is equal to everything that history presents as improbably and excessive in respect to the rigidity of interests, whether material or national. Thus, the communists embody the unbound multiplicity of consciousness, its anticipatory aspect, and therefore the precariousness of the bond, rather than its firmness.” (Metapolitics, 71).

Tracing the development of Badiou’s thought into his later writings, in relationship and in contrast to these writings of the 1980s and 1990s, Bosteels (in “The Leftist Hypothesis” essay) asks, skeptically, but not dismissively: “What happens when of these four fundamental concepts [class struggle, the dictatorship of the proletariat, revolution, and communism] only communism is retained?…Moreover…what are we to make of Badiou’s recent calls for the complete separation of the communist hypothesis both from the party form of politics and from the figure of the State”? (Bosteels, 50). We too should raise and pursue such critical questions. Note: they are not simply rhetorical questions aimed as disqualifying Badiou’s project as anathema to Marxism or “true communism,” but, rather, real questions that demand investigation and clarification. That is: If we cannot rely solely on the concept of class struggle producing a revolutionary communist subject, (the party being the official, and even historically destined leader of that struggle) then where might—where will, where must—such communist subjectivity come from? Similarly if the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat—as embodied in a socialist state—has proven historically to not in itself adequate to guaranteeing the progress of the revolutionary transformation of capitalism, through socialism to communism, then what new concepts and new forms are necessary and available to us to prepare the way for this radical transition? Considering a history of socialist states that have had difficulty “withering away,” how ought communists to relate to the notion of “socialism” today?

Moreover, we might ask (in ways that challenge Badiou): Does reckoning with the limitation of these “fundamental” concepts of Marxism to date necessitate their retirement (as “exhausted”), or merely their revision, reconception, or perhaps their being supplemented by other additional concepts and organizational forms? And if so, what are these concepts and forms? What in these concepts is still worth fighting for and reclaiming, albeit “against the current” of the times? Moreover we should ask to what extent has Badiou carried out the investigation of past communist events and sequences necessary to justify these rather bold theoretical generalizations? To what extent does our understanding of these previous sequences support, confirm, complicate, or contradict Badiou’s conclusions?

Personally, I should note, that while my thinking has been provoked on Badiou this point, I have yet to be convinced by Badiou’s more recent conclusion (which derives from Sylvian Lazarus, as I understand it) that the “Party-State” form of emancipatory politics is totally “exhausted.” In my estimation the quite informative and thought-provoking historical examination that Badiou gives the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China—Badiou’s prime example for the exhaustion of the party-state organization as a communist form of politics—does not provide a conclusive evidentiary basis that could justify the rather universalizing conclusions he then draws about politics in general.

At the same time, I unite with Badiou when he writes (in the Communist Hypothesis) that Mao remains the name of a problem we still face; that is the contradiction between maintaining power for a revolutionary order on the one hand, and unleashing further emancipatory currents that threaten to destabilize even the main institutions of that new order, on the other. I can at least unite with Badiou in that it is clear to me that the problem of the communist party must be thought again, whether or not we retain this name “party” in the end at all.

These days Badiou continues to reconsider and reframe his position with respect to the state. For instance, as Bosteels has pointed out, Badiou’s essay “The Idea of Communism,” in its published book form, differs subtly but importantly from the talk version of the essay he delivered at the Birkbeck conference some months prior. At the conference Badiou put forth his frequently quoted point about the “party-state” being “exhausted.” Yet, in the published version Badiou argues that it may still be possible for the Idea of Communism to include a projected figure of ‘another state’ so long as this post-capitalist state to come is on the one hand, subtracted from the present State and secondly is figured so that it’s essence is to “wither away” (CH 248).

I don’t mean to wade too deeply into this particular—and important– thicket of the Party-State. The main point here is that both historically, and even in our present moment, Badiou’s thinking is an active and developing project, one that—as Bosteels has sugggseted, is still subject to the pressure and effect of ideological struggle. Indeed, as Badiou himself argues, we are in a time of political experimentation, the experience and summation of which then ought—indeed must—be figured back into theoretical constructions. To do otherwise would be to fall into dogmatism.

But to get back to the issue of what communism means for Badiou.

Badiou offers several different Communist concepts, each of which have a distinct meaning and position within his thought, the main being:

What he calls “generic communism”

What he calls The Communist Hypothesis

And also what he calls The Idea of Communism

To get at the meaning of the first two concepts, we might do well to quote the following passage, from The Meaning of Sarkozy, one of Badiou’s most recent books.

In its generic sense, ‘communist’ means first of all, in a negative sense—as we can read in its canonical text The Communist Manifesto—that the logic of classes, of the fundamental subordination of people who actually work for a dominant class, can be overcome. This arrangement, which has been that of history ever since antiquity, is not inevitable. Consequently, the oligarchic powers of those who possess wealth and organize its circulation, crystallized in the might of states, is not inescapable (98).

As Badiou continues, moving to the second concept:

The communist hypothesis is that a different collective organization is practicable, one that will eliminate the inequality of wealth and even the division of labor; every individual will be a ‘multi-purpose worker,’ and in particular people will circulate between manual and intellectual work, as well as between town and country. The private appropriation of monstrous fortunes and their transmission by inheritance will disappear. The existence of a coercive state separate from civil society, with its military and police, will no longer seem a self-evident necessity. There will be, Marx tells us—and he saw this point as his major contribution—after a brief sequence of ‘proletarian dictatorship’ charged with destroying the remains of the old world, a long sequence of reorganization on the basis of a ‘free association’ of producers and creators, which will make possible a ‘withering away’ of the state. (98-99).

Generic communism here appears as an actuality of resistance. The actuality of this resistance and rebellion then makes possible the self-consciousness of that historical movement: the communist hypothesis. From this point on, for Badiou it becomes possible—at least in partial and fragmentary ways—to raise the issue of communism as a question and a problem to be solved, in its own right.

To offer a few further reflections on this passage: It is statement about possibility; and about the non-necessity of the current order of things. It is not to be confused with the hopefully hopelessly vague World Social Forum slogan that “Another World is Possible” in some clear and positive sense, as if the “alternative” is simply there for the taking (without a major revolutionary reckoning that involves the negation and overcoming of many aspects of the present situation). It is a statement aiming to deprive the ruling capitalist order of classes and states of its aura as ‘natural’ and ‘inevitable.’ That aims to clear the ideological fog that obscures the path(s) forward: Things do not have to be this way. We can make the world on new foundations.

There is more that we might say about even this short passage, namely its emphasis on the transformation of society not simply in terms of overcoming wealth inequality but also the division of labor, and in particular the division between mental and manual labor, and between town and country. (The debt to Marx and to Mao here are unmistakable.) Badiou, contrary to his critics is not simply calling for some radical egalitarian democracy of a “pre-marxian” sort.

The communist hypothesis for Badiou is a projected negation of the present conditions, and a posited horizon, not only to be strived towards but to be used as a critical—what he calls a “heuristic”—a Kantian “regulatory idea”; a means of “produce lines of demarcation between different forms of politics” that contend in the actuality of the present. It is not itself a path to be followed but a kind of lens, a perspective through which to evaluate and to decide between paths that present themselves. As he writes, “By and large, a particular political sequence is either compatible with these principles or opposed to them, in which case it is reactionary. Communism in this sense is a heuristic hypothesis that is very frequently used in political argument, even if the word itself does not appear.”

As Badiou elaborates on this point, with rhetorical flair:

If it is still true, as Sartre said, that ‘every anti-communist is a swine’, it is because any political sequence that, in its principles or lack of them, stands in formal contradiction with the communist hypothesis in its generic sense, has to be judged as opposed to the emancipation of the whole of humanity, and thus to the properly human destiny of humanity. Whoever does not illuminate the coming-to-be of humanity with the communist hypothesis—whatever words they use, as such words matter little—reduces humanity, as far as its collective becoming is concerned, to animality. As we know, the contemporary—that is, the capitalist name of this animality—is ‘competition’. The war dictated by self-interest, and nothing more. (Meaning of Sarkozy, 99-100).

Indeed, for Badiou, capitalism strives to make ‘animals’ of us all.

Badiou’s framing of the communism in terms of the Communist Hypothesis, of course, draws an analogy between the historical struggle to achieve communism and the proof of a mathematical theorem. I see at least three implications of this framing: 1) It suggests an approach of testing and experimenting, of persistent inquiry rather than doctrinal certitude; 2) In contrast with, say the language of Manifestation, to frame communism as a hypothesis emphasizes the importance of thought and learning in communism’s emergence; communism is not something whose emergence is simply immanent to the dynamics of capitalism and the class struggle, though its possibility is suggested—and its hypothesis established—for Badiou even by pre-modern slave uprisings like Spartacus, etc. The working out of communism is something that requires abstraction and reflection, as well as conscious testing in theory and practice. 3) By speaking of Communism as a hypothesis, Badiou reframes previous (unsuccessful) attempts at achieving communism as merely the “prehistory of the proof of the hypothesis.” Failure, and the summing up and learning from failure, through close and situated analysis of those sequences, is absolutely crucial, to any scientific endeavor. Certainly for an experiment to fail, or rather to produce negative results, does not impugn the project as a whole. Past failures are nothing to be ashamed of, so long as you learn from them and persist in the proof! Indeed, they are often necessary to bring about the rare and precious positive breakthroughs. Likewise with the history of the communist movement.

I will at this point bring in a fourth aspect which seems to me more of a danger implicit in this hypothesis framing. Namely 4) that the mathematical rhetoric here may lead some to read Badiou as suggesting that the problems and questions of communism can be resolved solely within the context of controlled laboratory experiments, or through theoretical abstractions shared at conferences like these (or via websites even). Certainly, in academic contexts many a thinker—Marx himself for one—has been domesticated in this way, divorced from practice that engages the world beyond the seminar table. But is this tendency one that Badiou seeks to encourage? I would say no. For alongside the imperative to learn from the failures of the communist movements and socialist states of the past, and to draw abstract and universal lessons from these studies, Badiou also calls us to examine the partial successes and failures of contemporary political movements whose actual politics and ideology are far from communist.

As he writes, for instance, “Today we need to investigate the real nature of the link to the people from the standpoint of the universal lessons to be drawn, of organizations limited by their religious allegiance: Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine. We should also pay attention to the countless worker uprisings in China, and the actions of the ‘Maoists’ in India and Nepal. The list is by no means closed” (Sarkozy, 111). The point here I want to underscore is that alongside Badiou’s mobilization of the communist hypothesis (and the communist Idea, to be discussed further below) and his emphasis on abstractions and subjective dynamics, is a perhaps less pronounced, but equally important imperative to investigate political situations past and present, with an eye to how the new communist sequence can be helped forth.

The Idea of Communism

Badiou’s Idea of Communism, which he describes as more of an operation—I might suggest projection or even project—than a fixed “utopian ideal,” has a distinct meaning, related but different from The Communist Hypothesis. Basically, it is the operation through which an individual becomes Subject to a communist Truth-process, symbolically bridging the gap between the singularity of particular political practices and the great historic collective project of human emancipation. If the Communist Hypothesis aims to open our eyes and help us see the possibilities and lessons of the past and present more clearly, than the Communist Idea, is an essentially subjective operation, one that makes the individual communist subject a part of something bigger than him/herself. To quote Badiou, at several key points:

An Idea is the possibility for an individual to understand that his or her participation in a singular political process…is also , in a certain way, a historical decision. Thanks to the Idea, the individual, realizes his or her belonging as an element of a new Subject, realizes his or her belonging to the movement of History (Communist Hypothesis, 235).

In other words, the communist Idea is the imaginary operation whereby an individual subjectivation projects a fragment of the political real into the symbolic narrative of History. (CH, 239).

The Idea is a historical anchoring of everything elusive, slippery and evanescent in the becoming of a truth. But it can only be so if it admits as its own real this aleatory, elusive, slippery, evanescent, dimension (CH, 247).

The role of this Idea is to support that individual’s incorporation into the discipline of a truth procedure, to authorize the individual, in his or her own eyes, to go beyond the Statist constraints of mere survival by becoming a part of the body-of-truth, or subjectivizable body (CH, 252).

In short, Badiou asks us to anchor communist subjectivity in the imagination, not in the necessities of history. The state of being a communist subject is not, for Badiou, something that can be reduced to, or read off of objective determinants, whether of class position, or party affiliation—certainly not just by adding the adjective “communist” to some pre-existing or half-thought practice or organization. It is not something organic or stable or something guaranteed but something that is sustained only so long as the communist Idea is operative. It is not guaranteed by History, which remains an imagined projected narrative, albeit a necessary one, if we are collectively to think, and through our thoughts, and actions supported by those thoughts, to actualize global human emancipation.

We may hear in Badiou’s language here a certain secularized communist recasting of Christian communion. Through the operation of the Idea we become aware of our potential to join our individual self as part of a larger greater body of truth, and a movement of History. Contrary to a certain vulgar secularism, within our age of cynicism, I find, this notion of the Communist Idea of interest as a way to simultaneously (on the one hand) en-courage and sustain the fidelity of lonely and depression-visited radical anti-capitalists in a moment of Sarkozys and Obamas. At the same time it is a notion that encourages rather than squelches local experiments in political practice. For no practice can be deemed in itself in advance to be “communist” or “non-communist” based on simply its location or its immediate import; it is the way that practice is bound up with and mediated by, and becomes a site of the idea operation of communism that they will have become communist. The Idea remains an Idea not a certainty. Just as a hypothesis demands proof in practice.

Which then brings us to the final two questions in the assigned blurb:

3+4) What is the nature of the “present historical moment”? And what are its “emancipatory possibilities?”

I might reverse this question and instead ask : What are some of the things that stand in the way of the emergence of a movement capable of cultivating, organizing, and mobilizing these emancipatory possibilities?

A quick list comes to mind:

Fragmentation, pessimism, isolation

The TINA notion that “there is no alternative” to the capitalist system

Cynicism and nihilism (both on and beyond the left)

Dogmatism and Sectarianism (including a fetishization of or premature dismissals of tactics and forms)

Facile anti-communist dismissals of actually existing communists movements, past and present

I would argue that Badiou offers us perspectives and approaches, and a spirit of enthusiastic engagement , that can play a role in helping us in addressing all of the above weaknesses. No magic bullet. But an element of the mix!

**

In closing, a few notes on an additional question put to us by Platypus and by Chris Cutrone:

“How does Badiou’s conception of communism relate to the history of Marxism in the 20th century, with its roots in the 19th century?

As is well known, Badiou places particular emphasis and pays close attention to the moments of the Paris Commune, and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, as well as May 1968.

He places great emphasis on learning from failure. Failure not as it was “doomed from the start” but as it was worked through in actual historical experience, theory and practice.

He places a particular focus on Mao as a name that still embodies a the practical-theoretical knot of the communist movement, even today, namely: How to build an organization that is massive and powerful enough to overthrow the present order, to sustain state power (in a capitalist-imperialist world), and yet is able to stave off ossification, bureaucratization, capitalist roaders—to remain a revolutionary agent encouraging, not suppressing the initiative of ‘spontaneous’ mass organization and social transformation.

Obviously, we are not in the position of picking up where Mao left off….The practical question for us is not “what could or should have Mao or the revolutionary cadre in China have done to transform their possibilities in the 60s or 70s?” But how to organize NOW in light of the limits and the tangles that communist revolutionaries come up against in the past.

To briefly and provocatively conclude: what I take from Badiou in this vein is the necessity for us today to conceive of communist revolution as from the start—not simply after supplanting the present state power—a cultural revolution. We need not just a revolutionary party, but a revolutionary people. For which we need revolutionary intellectuals and activists who sink deep roots in the people not simply to build a core of cadre oriented towards exposing and eventually overthrowing of the current state power as well as the construction of a new and different one, but whose aim is to stir up and support emancipatory ideas and practices so as to cultivate new cultural and social spaces that can now prepare the field, so that we have a shot of avoiding those pitfalls that have constrained and even toppled those who have come before us.

Related posts:

1. How can communism come to be?
2. On The Idea Of Communism: Communism 2.0?
3. Zizek on our situation — and communism

Cutrone’s paper strongly attacked Badiou, whom he characterized as a typical ’60s new leftist, deeply anti-Marxist, who would “reduce communism to the perennial complaint of the subaltern.” The others of us on the panel looked far more favorably on Badiou.

Parenthetically, what became far more clear to me at the conference is that, despite the group’s stated orientation of “self-criticism and self-education,” Platypus represents a very defined political position. In a nutshell: Marxism as the self-consciousness of the bourgeois revolution,and proletarian revolution as the fulfillment and culmination of the bourgeois revolution. I don’t raise this in order to discuss it, but simply as an observation.

The following is not really a discussion of Badiou’s thought — certainly not a deep one — and does not attempt to assess his central philosophical positions. I’m simply, rather, attempting to address a question on a somewhat more crude level: Is Badiou, as a thinker and actor in today’s intellectual/cultural/social milieu, playing a valuable role, politically?

Why is Badiou of political value?

John Steele

I assume we all start out from “Marxism” (certainly I do) – but what does this mean?  There have been, and will be, many Marxisms, and the way to deal with this fact is not to believe that we have somehow to excavate the “true and only” Marx or Marxism, but to recognize that the fact of many Marxisms is based not just in history but in the writings of Marx himself (as well, of course, as those of his close associate Engels). Marx did not create a completely integrated and self-consistent theoretical structure – let alone an integrated theoretical/strategic/practical edifice.

It is obvious that there are several (or many) strands and interpretations within the Marxist tradition. Most of these accept the “unitary Marx” thesis. In actuality, though, several strands of thinking co-exist in Marx and his writings, which do not necessarily form (in fact do not form) a self-consistent, integrated whole. Even within the critique of political economy, the most fully developed part of Marx’ work, there is (notoriously) more than one crisis theory.

But leaving all that aside, let’s preface the question of Badiou’s value by asking: Why is Marx of political value? First a point of clarification on the sort of politics I mean: the politics – to say it very broadly and for the moment without further elaboration – of human emancipation. Given that this is our politics, or our broad political aim, then what is of political value can be characterized, equally broadly, as what conduces to, or what is helpful in working toward this aim. (Obviously this will be relative to historical situation.)

So Marx is of political value if his works conduce toward this, and for quite a bit of the last hundred and fifty years he’s been thought, on a very broad scale, to be valuable in precisely this way. Now of course a lot of the finding-Marx-of-political-value during this period was built upon an understanding of Marx as the creator of a science of society and a metaphysic of history which limned a sure course of development and eventual victory – a thesis, and an understanding of Marx, which I reject, as I’m sure do most here. That was a Marx, and it’s a Marx which has lost the political value it may once have had, but this is not the only Marx.

Turning to my subject, my thesis is that for us, at this historical moment, Badiou, in his writings and his public stance, is of political value. Or perhaps, less sweepingly: He speaks to the situation and dilemmas of this historical moment in a way that I think can help us move forward politically.

Marxism

Part of the reason for his value is the fact that he does not pose his work as a development of Marxism. Although I would claim Badiou for Marxism (and for Maoism, as I’ve written elsewhere), it’s salutary to find a thinker who defines himself politically in terms of communism, who traces a complex identity with all that communism has meant in the 20th century, including the Russian and Chinese revolutions and their ramifications, but who does not seek to derive, deduce or define a contemporary emancipatory politics simply in those terms, nor in the language (for the most part) of this tradition.

This is a good thing, part of why Badiou is of political value, because this trajectory of revolutionary politics, along with much of its language and terminology, is dead – dead in the sense of being a living force in the world socially and politically. Let me make make sure what I’m saying is clear here, and guard against misunderstandings.

Marx is an intellectual and political resource – and Lenin, to cite just one other name, but along with many, many others – and it would be unthinkable for any contemporary emancipatory politics to attempt to do without this resource of past thinkers and actors. So I don’t mean at all that the works and example of Marx (& etc.) are dead, useless, outmoded. As I said, we always need to beware of imposing a false unity and integration on this past, and to be alive to its contradictions, unevennesses, gaps, anomalies. But to say that Marx (etc.) is a necessary resource for rebuilding is clearly not to say that Marxism (or “Marxism-Leninism,” or —) is a living political/social force: it was – and there were many problematic aspects, but there was a living movement with a broad commonality of thinking and acting in the political realm: a subject pursuing a truth-process, in Badiou’s terms. This no longer exists as a real and living social/political force – that’s obvious. What’s often not so obvious to leftists is that the point is not to resuscitate or resurrect what has died.

Badiou: some terms

Before moving on into Badiou, let me just mention some of Badiou’s key concepts as they apply politically:

Event (this term has a specialized meaning in Badiou). A Badiouian event is a momentary break in the ruling or hegemonic structure of things, an opening out of which a new truth process may be born. To quote Badiou from his recent Communist Hypothesis, it is “a rupture in the normal order of bodies and languages as it exists for any particular situation….What is important to note here is that an event is not the realization of a possibility that resides within the situation or that is dependent on the transcendental laws of the world. An event is the creation of new possibilities. It is located not merely at the level of objective possibilities but at the level of the possibility of possibilities.”  (242-3.) Not the realization of an already existing possibility but the creation of new possibilities.

Truth process. Politics – that is, a particular political sequence – is conceived as a truth-process. Politics is an autonomous realm, which forges its own truths through truth processes. Thus political truth processes and their truths are not derivative from those of another realm (such as philosophy, ethics, economics, etc.). Emancipatory politics as truth-process: both terms are notable and important. After a certain point a particular truth process becomes saturated (Badiou’s term) – in effect it reaches an impasse. The truth-process beginning from the Russian Revolution has (long since now) become saturated.

To sum up what I’ll call the beneficially destructive aspect of Badiou:

I think this emphasis on the autonomy of politics is important and valuable. Is he correct in saying this? I’m not completely sure. But what is valuable is this emphasis – because it helps to pry us loose from a century or 150 years of making, or trying to make, politics an appendage of something else – of economics, often, or of philosophy. This illustrates a prominent way in which Badiou can be, and is valuable politically: not because he outlines a new, grand theory to which all should give assent (and this is not at all the way it is, btw, in Badiou’s stance or in the attitudes of his fans and students), but in marking a new possible approach, which will at the very least have the virtue of challenging wellworn and habitual left platitudes, which have shown themselves by this point (in fact by long ago) to be thoroughly unfruitful.

Truth

Politics as truth – why truth? Why is that valuable? Actually of course, what Badiou says is not that politics is truth, or that a real emancipatory politics represents truth, but that any real politics is constituted by a truth process. Both words should be taken in full weight.

Let’s take the second word first: politics is process – not achieved or hoped-for result, and also not a proceedure based on recipe or body of knowledge (at least not knowledge taken as knowledge, so to speak – on which see more below).

Rather, it is a process beginning not from what exists or from knowledge of what is (including its contradictions or tendencies), but from an axiom (or axioms). Now this insistence on an axiomatic beginning might seem to introduce a strong element of decisionism – as if the starting point is something arbitrarily decided upon, or some wished-for thesis taken as beginning point: a sort of utopianism. But this is not Badiou’s thinking. Rather, this axiomatic beginning is taken up as a starting point in view of an event, another key term (as we all know) in Badiou’s thinking.

An event, in Badiou’s rather technical sense, is not a grand happening. It is not even a noteworthy “thing that occurred.” It is, rather, more like a little flicker, which might easily pass unnoticed, and which will pass unnoted in the historical annals unless it becomes the beginning of a truth process. An event gives a momentary glimpse, not of possibilities inherent in what exists, or in history, but (to repeat) a glimpse of the possibility of possibilities. And the axiomatic beginning of a truth-process is the taking of a stance: it is to assume that these possibilities are real. Or even more: to explore the world, to act, as if these possibilities will have already become true.

Thus politics – actual, emancipatory politics – is a leap in the dark. It is not action based on what we know, or what can be known. It is action based on a gamble, on the making of a very serious bet, not even on a possibility (to say it again), but on what would be the case if the implications of that initial glimpse of the possibility of what might be are followed out and made true.

To take up political truth-process is to assume that axiomatic beginning in practice, to take it up fully and follow out its implications – that is, to act on the supposition of what will have become true, given the axiom’s truth. This is not a toe-in-the-water attitude, or a testing-it-out-to-see-whether stance. It’s a leap which can only be made with courage and confidence – a confidence which cannot be founded in the world which surrounds the one who leaps.

So we can clearly see the process part; and we can also start to see what’s meant by truth here. Badiou makes a strong distinction between knowledge and truth. Knowledge is achieved and relates solely to an existing state of affairs – a situation or a world, in Badiou’s terminology. Truth, on the other hand, is always processual: always in process, never achieved (else it changes to knowledge, and relates to a new and achieved world or situation). The reference of truths is in the future perfect: what will have been the case should the political practice which is the truth process come to fruition and succeed in changing the world (making a new world). Truth can only reach a state of achievment (when it then becomes knowledge) retrospectively.

If we want to say that what is true must correspond to a state of affairs, then we have to say that truths, for Badiou, correspond to a state of affairs to be brought about only through the agency of a subject and its associated truth process.

Now I just mentioned the subject associated with a truth process. Badiou’s theory of the subject is a big topic, which I will gloss over here. But let’s at least note that the subject here is not an individual person or consciousness, but something trans-individual. Badiou describes the subject as a new body, constituted by the trace of an event, and oriented around a truth process.

Political value

But leaving that thorny topic aside, let’s return to the question of political value.

The concept of event is what’s most often taken from Badiou. This is important, yes, but there’s much more to Badiou than simply the admonition to be on the lookout for what is new, or for upsurges of rebellion. There is this admonition, if it’s understood with sufficient openness: what we’re on the lookout for is the possible beginning of a new truth process, not something we’re calling on to conform to an already-existing political template. (A good place to see how this works for Badiou is in his recent remarks on the uprisings on Tunisia and Egypt, one of which have been reprinted here, the other on Kasama.)

Communism as process and axiom – not goal

Marxism as it has existed, and to a lesser and more ambiguous extent in the writings of Marx, has built politics upon a theory of history, a progressive historical schema (obviously very much part of enlightenment thinking) which projects a sequence from pre-capitalist society through capitalism to socialism and thence to communism, within which socialism becomes the proximate revolutionary goal, and communism is over the horizon, but a state of things to be achieved in the end. In this context politics becomes an activity which is both teleological (guided by a particular goal to be achieved), and instrumental (a process serving as an instrument for the achievement of this goal).

Badiou’s conception is a challenge precisely to this: Communism is immanent within the process of emancipatory politics: an axiom, not an objective, a process, not a program. (I owe this formulation to Don Hamerquist.)   The “communist hypothesis” informs the political truth process, not as a plan or program, nor as a goal, but as the general and over-riding defining axiom. (In fact, Badiou holds, nothing will count as a political truth-process which is not defined by this axiom: he says that it is the only real political Idea – another term used in a technical way by Badiou, which I will dodge for now.) Communism (note: not socialism – another question to discuss another time) communism as axiom and process restores real contingency to politics, and at the same time cuts against a pragmatic orientation. Politics is a process of agency, a subjective process – that is, proceeding through a subject.

This process is not a strategically mapped-out march toward a pre-established goal, but an aleatory process, following a necessarily chance-ridden path.  And in fact – isn’t this how revolutionary politics has actually proceeded, even though it is not how it has conceived of itself as proceeding?

The 2nd and 3rd Internationals (as well as Trotskyist variants of the latter) understood politics to be a matter of proceeding from scientific and historical analysis – and yet whatever real politics took place (and I do think it did, in particular places and times during this long period), was much more along the lines of what Badiou outlines, than the mythical self-understanding which was its ideology: real politics here too was, in practice, a leap in the dark, guided by a basic postulate, without assurance of success or where exactly what the end result would be. Look at any of whatever you may choose as great instances of revolutionary politics in the 20th century, or in your own experience, and I think this will hold true, if examined with full honesty. It certainly holds true in my own experience.

That aside, though, and whether you grant that this has been the case, I think it would be hard to deny that any emancipatory politics of the present historical moment would or must – if it’s going to take place – fit Badiou’s open but anchored process.

Related posts:

1. John Steele: When Everything Seems to Change — Badiou and the Event
2. John Steele: Badiou — Another Take on Revolutionary Theory
3. John Steele: Marxism, Politics, and Evil

Reprinted from the symptom (edited slightly for typos and paragraphing).

The Tunisian and the Egyptian people are telling us: raise up, build up a public space for the communism of movement, protect it by all means while inventing the sequential course of action.

The universal reach of popular uprisings

Alan Badiou

The wind of the east carries away the wind of the west

Until when the idle and crepuscular West, the “international community” of those who still believe themselves to be the rulers of the world, will continue to give lesson in good management and good behavior to the rest of the world? Is it not laughable to see some well-paid and well-fed intellectuals, retreating soldiers of the capital-parliamentarism that serves us as a moth-eaten Paradise, offering their services to the awe-inspiring Tunisian and Egyptian people, in order teach these savages the ABC of “democracy?”

What pathetic persistence of colonial arrogance! In the situation of political misery that we’ve been living for the last three decades, is not evident to surmise that it is us who have everything to learn from the popular uprisings of the moment?

Don’t we have the urgency to give a close look to everything, that, over there, made possible, by collective action, the overthrow of oligarchic and corrupt governments, who — or maybe especially — stood in a humiliating position of servitude to the Western world?

Yes, we should be the students of these movements, and not their stupid professors. For they give life, with the genius of their own inventions, to those same political principles that for some time now the dominant powers try to convince us of their obsoleteness. And in particular the principle that Marat never stopped recalling: when it is a matter of liberty, equality, emancipation, we all have to join the popular upheavals.

We are right to revolt

Just as in politics, our States and those that benefit from them (political parties, unions and complaisant intellectuals) prefer management to revolt, they prefer peaceful demands and “orderly transition” to the breach of law. What the Egyptian and Tunisian people remind us is that the only action appropriate to the sentiment of scandalous takeover by State power is the mass upraising. In this case, the only rallying cry capable of linking together the disparate aspirations of those making a crowd is: “you there, go away!”

The exceptional significance of the revolt, namely its critical power, lies in the fact that its rallying cry, which is repeated by millions of beings, gives the measure of what will be, undoubtedly, irreversibly, its first victory: the flight of the designated man. And whatever happens next, this triumph, illegal by nature, of popular action, will be forever victorious.

Now, that a revolt against the power of the State can be absolutely successful is an example of universal reach. This victory points out to the horizon over which any collective action unencumbered by the authority of the Law outlines itself: what Marx called “the deterioration of the State.” The knowledge that someday the people, freely associated and resorting to their creative power, will be able to throw away the funereal coercion of the State. That’s the reason why this Idea arouses boundless enthusiasm in the entire world and will trigger the revolution that ultimately will overthrow the authority in residence.

A spark can set the plain on fire…

It began with the suicide, a self-immolation by fire, of a man who has been downgraded to unemployment, and to whom was forbidden the miserable commerce that allowed him to survive; and because a female police officer slapped him in the face for not understanding what in this world is real.

In a few days this gesture becomes wider and in a few weeks millions of people scream their joy on a distant square and this entails the beginning of the catastrophe for the powerful potentates. What is at the root of this fabulous expansion? Are we dealing with a new sort of epidemics of freedom? No. As Jean-Marie Gleize poetically said: “The dissemination of a revolutionary movement is not carried by contamination. But by resonance. Something that surfaces here resounds with the shock wave emitted by something that happened over there.”

Let’s name this resonance “event.” The event is the sudden creation, not of a new reality, but of a myriad of new possibilities. None of them is the repetition of what is already known. This is the reason why it’s obscurantist to say “this movement claims democracy” (implying the one that we enjoy in the West), or that “this movement pursues social improvement” (implying the average prosperity for the petit bourgeois de chez nous). Starting with almost nothing, resonating everywhere, the popular uprising creates unknown possibilities for the entire world.

The word “democracy” is hardly uttered in Egypt. There is talk about “a new Egypt,” about the “true Egyptian people,” about a constituent assembly, about complete changes in everyday life, of unheard-of and previously unknown possibilities. There is new plain that will come after that that no longer exists, the one that was set on fire by the spark of the uprising. This plain to be stands between the declaration of an alteration in the balance of forces and the holding of new tasks. Between the shout of a young Tunisian: “We, children of workers and of peasants, are stronger than the criminals;” and what said a young Egyptian: “As from today, January 25, I take in my own hands the matters of my country.”

The people, only the people, are the creators of universal history

It’s amazing that in our West, the governments and the media consider the insurgents in a Cairo square are “the Egyptian people.” How can that be? Aren’t the people for them, the only reasonable and legal people, the one usually reduced to the majority of a poll, or the majority of an election? How did it happen that suddenly, hundreds of rebels are representative of a population of eighty million?

It’s a lesson that should not be forgotten, and that we will not forget. After a certain threshold of determination, of stubbornness and of courage, the people, in fact, can concentrate their existence in a square, an avenue, some factories or a university… The whole world world will be witness of the courage, and especially the wondrous creations that go with it. These creations prove that there, there is a People. As an Egyptian rebel strongly put it: “before I watched television, now television is watching me.”

In the stride of an event, the People is made of those who know how to solve the problems brought about by the event. Thus, in the takeover of a square: food, sleeping arrangements, watchmen, banners, prayers, defensive actions, so that in the place where it all happens, the place that is the symbol, is kept for the safeguarded for the people, at any price. Problems that, at the level of the hundreds of thousands of risen people mobilized from everywhere, seemed insoluble, all the more that in this place the State has virtually disappeared.

To solve insoluble problems without the assistance of the State becomes the destiny of an event. And this is what makes a People, suddenly, and for an indeterminate time, to exist where they have decided to assemble themselves.

Without a communist movement, there is no communism

The popular uprising we speak about is obviously without a Party, without an hegemonic organization, without a recognized leader. In time, we can assess whether this characteristic is a strength or a weakness. In any case, this is what makes us, in a very pure form, undoubtedly the purest since the Paris Commune, to call it a communism of movement.

“Communism” here means: a common creation of a collective destiny. This “common” has two specific traits. First, it is generic, representing, in a place, humanity as a whole.There we find all sort of people who make up a People, every word is heard, every suggestion examined, any difficulty treated for what it is.

Next, it overcomes all the substantial contradictions that the State claims to be its exclusive province since it alone is able to manage without ever surpassing them: between intellectuals and manual workers, between men and women, between poor and rich, between Muslims and Copts, between peasants and Cairo residents. Thousands of new possibilities, concerning these contradictions, arise at any given moment, to which the State — any State— remains completely blind.

One witnesses young female doctors from the provinces taking care of the injured, sleeping in the middle of a circle of fierce young men, and they are calmer than they have ever been, knowing that no one will dare to touch a single hair from their heads. One witnesses, just as well, an group of engineers entreating young suburbanites to hold the place and protect the movement with their energy in battle.

One witnesses a row of Christians doing the watch, standing, guarding over bent Muslims in prayer. One witnesses merchants of every kind nourishing the unemployed and the poor. One witnesses anonymous bystanders chatting with each other. One can read thousands of signs where individual lives mix without hiatus in the big cauldron of History.

All these situations, these inventions, constitute the communism of movement. For two centuries the only political problem has been how to set up in the long run the inventions of the communism of movement? The only reactionary assertion affirms that “This is impossible, verily harmful. Let’s trust the in the powers of the State.” Glory to the Tunisian and Egyptian people because they conjure the true and only political duty: the organized faithfulness to the communism of movement takes on the State.

We don’t want war, but are not scared of it

Everywhere was mentioned the peaceful calm of the gigantic demonstrations, and this calm was associated with the ideal of elective democracy that was attached to the movement. Let’s point out nevertheless that insurgents were killed, hundreds of them, and that there are still being killed every day. In more than one instance, those killed were fighters and martyrs of the event, they died for the protection of the movement. The political and symbolic places of the uprising had to be defended by means of ferocious fighting against the militiamen and the police forces of the threatened regimes. And who did pay with their lives but the youth from the poorest communities? The “middle class” — of which our preposterous Michèle Alliot-Marie said that on them, and only on them, depended the democratic outcome of the events — should remember that, at the crucial moment, the persistence of the uprising was guaranteed only by the unrestricted engagement of popular contingents. Defensive violence is inevitable. It still continues, in difficult conditions, in Tunisia after the young provincial activists were sent back to their misery.

Can anyone seriously think that these innumerable initiatives and these cruel sacrifices have as their main objective to prompt people “to choose” between Souleiman and El Baradei, as it happens in France where we pitifully surrender our will in choosing between Sarkozy and Strauss-Kahn? Is this the only lesson of this majestic episode?

No, a thousand times no! The Tunisian and the Egyptian people are telling us: raise up, build up a public space for the communism of movement, protect it by all means while inventing the sequential course of action; such is the real of the politics of popular emancipation.

Certainly, the Arabic States are not the only countries that are against the people and, notwithstanding elections, are illegitimate. Whatever will happen, the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings have a universal meaning. They prescribe new possibilities and thus their value is international.

translated by Antonio Cuccu, revised by Jorge Jauregui

No related posts.

Another book by Badiou just out in Engish, this one on a surprising topic. Richard Wagner is not someone about whom I have much knowledge, either artistically or politically, aside from the usual background that he’s often been classed as a racist and reactionary. This is a verdict against which Badiou argues in Five Lessons on Wagner (translated by Susan Spitzer, with an afterword by Slavoj Žižek).

Characterizing Badiou as a “radical philosopher and keen Wagner enthusiast,” publisher Verso says the book “offers a detailed reading of the critical responses to the composer’s work, which include Adorno’s writings on the composer and Wagner’s recuperation by Nazism as well as more recent readings by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and others.”

Louis Proyect on marxmail, who mentions with reference to this book that “I suppose I am going to have to find the time to read Badiou one of these days since he is such a fave over on the Kasama Project,” also references George Bernard Shaw’s earlier defense of Wagner from a left perspective. The following, concerning Wagner’s Das Rheingold from the Ring cycle, is taken from Shaw’s book-length essay The Perfect Wagnerite, and republished here from the Literature Network.

Wagner as Revolutionist

George Bernard Shaw

Before leaving this explanation of The Rhine Gold, I must have a word or two about it with the reader. It is the least popular of the sections of The Ring. The reason is that its dramatic moments lie quite outside the consciousness of people whose joys and sorrows are all domestic and personal, and whose religions and political ideas are purely conventional and superstitious. To them it is a struggle between half a dozen fairytale personages for a ring, involving hours of scolding and cheating, and one long scene in a dark gruesome mine, with gloomy, ugly music, and not a glimpse of a handsome young man or pretty woman. Only those of wider consciousness can follow it breathlessly, seeing in it the whole tragedy of human history and the whole horror of the dilemmas from which the world is shrinking today.

At Bayreuth I have seen a party of English tourists, after enduring agonies of boredom from Alberic, rise in the middle of the third scene, and almost force their way out of the dark theatre into the sunlit pine-wood without. And I have seen people who were deeply affected by the scene driven almost beside themselves by this disturbance. But it was a very natural thing for the unfortunate tourists to do, since in this Rhine Gold prologue there is no interval between the acts for escape. Roughly speaking, people who have no general ideas, no touch of the concern of the philosopher and statesman for the race, cannot enjoy The Rhine Gold as a drama. They may find compensations in some exceedingly pretty music, at times even grand and glorious, which will enable them to escape occasionally from the struggle between Alberic and Wotan; but if their capacity for music should be as limited as their comprehension of the world, they had better stay away.

And now, attentive Reader, we have reached the point at which some foolish person is sure to interrupt us by declaring that The Rhine Gold is what they call “a work of art” pure and simple, and that Wagner never dreamt of shareholders, tall hats, whitelead factories, and industrial and political questions looked at from the socialistic and humanitarian points of view. We need not discuss these impertinences: it is easier to silence them with the facts of Wagner’s life. In 1843 he obtained the position of conductor of the Opera at Dresden at a salary of L225 a year, with a pension. This was a first-rate permanent appointment in the service of the Saxon State, carrying an assured professional position and livelihood with it In 1848, the year of revolutions, the discontented middle class, unable to rouse the Church-and-State governments of the day from their bondage to custom, caste, and law by appeals to morality or constitutional agitation for Liberal reforms, made common cause with the starving wage-working class, and resorted to armed rebellion, which reached Dresden in 1849. Had Wagner been the mere musical epicure and political mugwump that the term “artist” seems to suggest to so many critics and amateurs–that is, a creature in their own lazy likeness–he need have taken no more part in the political struggles of his day than Bishop took in the English Reform agitation of 1832, or Sterndale Bennett in the Chartist or Free Trade movements.What he did do was first to make a desperate appeal to the King to cast off his bonds and answer the need of the time by taking true Kingship on himself and leading his people to the redress of their intolerable wrongs (fancy the poor monarch’s feelings!), and then, when the crash came, to take his side with the right and the poor against the rich and the wrong.

When the insurrection was defeated, three leaders of it were especially marked down for vengeance: August Roeckel, an old friend of Wagner’s to whom he wrote a well-known series of letters; Michael Bakoonin, afterwards a famous apostle of revolutionary Anarchism; and Wagner himself. Wagner escaped to Switzerland: Roeckel and Bakoonin suffered long terms of imprisonment. Wagner was of course utterly ruined, pecuniarily and socially (to his own intense relief and satisfaction); and his exile lasted twelve years. His first idea was to get his Tannhauser produced in Paris. With the notion of explaining himself to the Parisians he wrote a pamphlet entitled Art and Revolution, a glance through which  will show how thoroughly the socialistic side of the revolution had his sympathy, and how completely he had got free from the influence of the established Churches of his day. For three years he kept pouring forth pamphlets–some of them elaborate treatises in size and intellectual rank, but still essentially the pamphlets and manifestoes of a born agitator–on social evolution, religion, life, art and the influence of riches. In 1853 the poem of The Ring was privately printed; and in 1854, five years after the Dresden insurrection, The Rhine Gold score was completed to the last drum tap.

These facts are on official record in Germany, where the proclamation summing up Wagner as “a politically dangerous person” may be consulted to this day. The pamphlets are now accessible to English readers in the translation of Mr. Ashton Ellis. This being so, any person who, having perhaps heard that I am a Socialist, attempts to persuade you that my interpretation of The Rhine Gold is only “my socialism” read into the works of a dilettantist who borrowed an idle tale from an old saga to make an opera book with, may safely be dismissed from your consideration as an ignoramus.

If you are now satisfied that The Rhine Gold is an allegory, do not forget that an allegory is never quite consistent except when it is written by someone without dramatic faculty, in which case it is unreadable. There is only one way of dramatizing an idea; and that is by putting on the stage a human being possessed by that idea, yet none the less a human being with all the human impulses which make him akin and therefore interesting to us. Bunyan, in his Pilgrim’s Progress, does not, like his unread imitators, attempt to personify Christianity and Valour: he dramatizes for you the life of the Christian and the Valiant Man. Just so, though I have shown that Wotan is Godhead and Kingship, and Loki Logic and Imagination without living Will (Brain without Heart, to put it vulgarly); yet in the drama Wotan is a religiously moral man, and Loki a witty, ingenious, imaginative and cynical one. As to Fricka, who stands for State Law, she does not assume her allegorical character in The Rhine Gold at all, but is simply Wotan’s wife and Freia’s sister: nay, she contradicts her allegorical self by conniving at all Wotan’s rogueries. That, of course, is just what State Law would do; but we must not save the credit of the allegory by a quip. Not until she reappears in the next play (The Valkyries) does her function in the allegorical scheme become plain.

One preconception will bewilder the spectator hopelessly unless he has been warned against it or is naturally free from it. In the old-fashioned orders of creation, the supernatural personages are invariably conceived as greater than man, for good or evil. In the modern humanitarian order as adopted by Wagner, Man is the highest. In The Rhine Gold, it is pretended that there are as yet no men on the earth. There are dwarfs, giants, and gods. The danger is that you will jump to the conclusion that the gods, at least, are a higher order than the human order. On the contrary, the world is waiting for Man to redeem it from the lame and cramped government of the gods. Once grasp that; and the allegory becomes simple enough. Really, of course, the dwarfs, giants, and gods are dramatizations of the three main orders of men: to wit, the instinctive, predatory, lustful, greedy people; the patient, toiling, stupid, respectful, money-worshipping people; and the intellectual, moral, talented people who devise and administer States and Churches. History shows us only one order higher than the highest of these: namely, the order of Heroes.

Now it is quite clear–though you have perhaps never thought of it–that if the next generation of Englishmen consisted wholly of Julius Caesars, all our political, ecclesiastical, and moral institutions would vanish, and the less perishable of their appurtenances be classed with Stonehenge and the cromlechs and round towers as inexplicable relics of a bygone social order. Julius Caesars would no more trouble themselves about such contrivances as our codes and churches than a fellow of the Royal Society will touch his hat to the squire and listen to the village curate’s sermons. This is precisely what must happen some day if life continues thrusting towards higher and higher organization as it has hitherto done. As most of our English professional men are to Australian bushmen, so, we must suppose, will the average man of some future day be to Julius Caesar. Let any man of middle age, pondering this prospect consider what has happened within a single generation to the articles of faith his father regarded as eternal nay, to the very scepticisms and blasphemies of his youth (Bishop Colenso’s criticism of the Pentateuch, for example!); and he will begin to realize how much of our barbarous Theology and Law the man of the future will do without. Bakoonin, the Dresden revolutionary leader with whom Wagner went out in 1849, put forward later on a program, often quoted with foolish horror, for the abolition of all institutions, religious, political, juridical, financial, legal, academic, and so on, so as to leave the will of man free to find its own way. All the loftiest spirits of that time were burning to raise Man up, to give him self-respect, to shake him out of his habit of grovelling before the ideals created by his own imagination, of attributing the good that sprang from the ceaseless energy of the life within himself to some superior power in the clouds, and of making a fetish of self-sacrifice to justify his own cowardice.

Farther on in The Ring we shall see the Hero arrive and make an end of dwarfs, giants, and gods. Meanwhile, let us not forget that godhood means to Wagner infirmity and compromise, and manhood strength and integrity. Above all, we must understand– for it is the key to much that we are to see–that the god, since his desire is toward a higher and fuller life, must long in his inmost soul for the advent of that greater power whose first work, though this he does not see as yet, must be his own undoing.

In the midst of all these far-reaching ideas, it is amusing to find Wagner still full of his ingrained theatrical professionalism, and introducing effects which now seem old-fashioned and stagey with as much energy and earnestness as if they were his loftiest inspirations. When Wotan wrests the ring from Alberic, the dwarf delivers a lurid and bloodcurdling stage curse, calling down on its every future possessor care, fear, and death. The musical phrase accompanying this outburst was a veritable harmonic and melodic bogey to mid-century ears, though time has now robbed it of its terrors. It sounds again when Fafnir slays Fasolt, and on every subsequent occasion when the ring brings death to its holder. This episode must justify itself purely as a piece of stage sensationalism. On deeper ground it is superfluous and confusing, as the ruin to which the pursuit of riches leads needs no curse to explain it; nor is there any sense in investing Alberic with providential powers in the matter.

No related posts.

This book is not only one of the “stages on Badiou’s way,” but an important work in itself. Bruno Bosteels, the translator and author of the introduction to Theory of the Subject, has long been an exponent of the work’s importance and centrality to Badiou’s thinking, and it’s notable some of its themes reappear in Logics of Worlds (see Introduction to Book I of LW, and the notes to it).

Badiou introduces the term ‘scission’ in an original reading of Hegel’s Logic, a reading that seeks to assert the centrality of irresolvable antagonism and ‘force’ in any truly materialist dialectic.  To theorise this antagonism is, for Badiou, to theorise the constitutivity for revolutionary politics of that which is inherently ‘out of place’. Indeed, Badiou makes much in Theory of the Subject of those eccentric elements which cannot be assimilated to a structural or topological mapping, elements that must be sustained for any revolutionary project to succeed.

Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject

by Tom Eyers

The reputation of Alain Badiou’s philosophy in Anglophone academia has risen exponentially in the last decade. With the death of most of the leading lights of French structuralism, Badiou’s work has filled the gap, although generationally he can be situated slightly after the heyday of post-War French Left anti-humanism, remaining its fiercest defender during the long years of reaction and non-thought that blighted French philosophy in the 1970s and 1980s.

If, as Peter Hallward enjoins us, we divide the tradition of 20th Century French thought into two broad camps, one defined by the active subject of experience as analysed by phenomenology and existentialism, the other by a turn to formalism and the rejection of phenomenal experience as the basis of any rigorous philosophy, Badiou can be associated very much with the latter, although his work is distinctive enough in its treatment of ontology, and in particular its use of mathematics, for it to suggest a break from the structural tradition as much as a continuity with it.

Unlike a number of his near contemporaries, Badiou stridently rejects the turn to language as the cornerstone of philosophical enquiry, resuscitating a grand, Platonic concept of truth through the equation of ontology with mathematics. The latter ‘discovery’ was announced in what remains Badiou’s masterwork, Being and Event, from 1988. There, Badiou fused a complex ontology of ‘inconsistent multiplicity’ with a new, philosophical account of radical change, the ‘Event’, that, under the four potential conditions of love, art, science or politics, reorders the prevailing situation and produces a universal truth.

It is his uncompromising political radicalism, intially expressed via a fervent Maoism and now manifested in his compelling critique of liberal parliamentarianism, that lifts Badiou far above the level of fame that would normally befall a philosopher with a predilection for Cantorian set theory. His most ferociously political work of philosophy, Theory of the Subject, predates his equation of ontology with mathematics, but it is almost certainly Badiou’s most successful marriage of rigorous philosophical rationalism and political polemic.

It’s a rich, strange, often highly abstract text, delivered in 1978 as a series of seminars, the high oratorical style of which is undoubtedly modelled on one of Badiou’s most important influences, Jacques Lacan. Readers most used to the patient, systematic clarity of Badiou’s later work may be shocked by the tone here, equally allusive and strident, but the rhetorical edge rings in harmony with the text’s sense of theoretical experimentation, and especially with the flinty political resolve that lies behind even the book’s most abstract passages.

Badiou’s aim is to delineate the theoretical basis of a subject of radical post-Marxist politics, through an inventive appropriation and critique of Lacan’s ‘logic of the signifer’. If the Badiou of Being and Event and the recent Logics of Worlds signals a firm distance from a focus on signification as the locus of critical philosophical practise, the model of significatory analysis in this text cleaves to the expanded and singular linguistic materialism that dominated Lacan’s late seminars.

In a broad sense, Theory of the Subject is one of the most important documents of the brief but fruitful collaboration between French post-Althusserian Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis, and the book stands simultaneously as perhaps the most inventive and convincing philosophical appropriation of what Badiou today calls Lacan’s ‘anti-philosophy’ to date. Commenting on the centrality of an understanding of Lacan for any rigorous theoretical project, Badiou writes: “Like Hegel for Marx, Lacan for us is essential and divisible. The primacy of the structure, which makes of the symbolic the general algebra of the subject … is countered ever more clearly with a topological obsession in which what moves and progresses pertains to the primacy of the real.” (133)

In this short passage, Badiou hints at both his appropriation and critique of Lacanian theory. Lacan, Badiou argues, moves from a static concept of the subject as defined by its constitution in the Symbolic, broadly within the domain of language conceived as the subject’s immovable transcendental horizon, to a topologically derived search for the ‘consistency’ of the subject in its shifting relationship to contingency, to the movement and displacement that characterises the Real. Whilst Badiou endorses the move from the reification of the signifier in Lacan to the complexity of a topological figuration of the subject, such a move remains insufficiently materialist. If Marx stripped Hegel of his idealism, so too must Lacan be purified, and the ‘scission’ proper to the revolutionary subject in its relationship with any prevailing Symbol context must be acknowledged.

Badiou introduces the term ‘scission’ in an original reading of Hegel’s Logic, a reading that seeks to assert the centrality of irresolvable antagonism and ‘force’ in any truly materialist dialectic. “It is a major strength of the dialectic”, Badiou writes, with overtones of Mao, “to grasp how the One of the unity of contraries supports contrariness in its very being.” (9) To theorise this antagonism is, for Badiou, to theorise the constitutivity for revolutionary politics of that which is inherently ‘out of place’. Indeed, Badiou makes much in Theory of the Subject of those eccentric elements which cannot be assimilated to a structural or topological mapping, elements that must be sustained for any revolutionary project to succeed. As Bruno Bosteels notes in his excellent translator’s introduction, Badiou borrows the concept of ‘force’ from Hegel’s Science of Logic to oppose the logic of place or spacing, the ordering of elements that precludes radical change. In turn, the potentially voluntarist associations of subjective forcing will be replaced by the time of the publication of Being and Event with the systematic conceptualisation of the Event, as the breach with the static ‘state of the situation’.

This is by no means the only point of continuity between this ‘early’ work and Badiou’s later, more familiar books. As in his recent Logics of Worlds (2006), Badiou elaborates a number of subjective features common to revolutionary praxis. Anxiety, Badiou writes, “is that inevitable side of subjectivization which, caught in the web of the dead order, makes an appeal to the reinforced sustenance of the law.” (292) The anxious subject appeals to the superego, Freud’s internalised representative of the Law, and the maintenance of a revolutionary moment is threatened. The alternative, if not antithetical, subjective position is courage, persistence in the face of the threat of change that will, in Badiou’s later works, be conceptualised as fidelity to a revolutionary Truth. When courage sustains the irruption of disorder into the placing of elements, the subject reaches its full manifestation, as that which, “subservient to the rule that determines a place … nevertheless punctuates the latter with the interruption of its effect.” (259) If Lacan, by virtue of his concept of the Real as the order that disturbs the consistency of the Symbolic, leaves open the potential for radical change while foreclosing any positive definition of its features, Badiou insists on precisely such a positive elaboration of the subjective agent of change.

Intermingled within Badiou’s innovative readings of Lacan, Hegel, Lenin and Marx are compelling reflections on the status of the revolutionary party, a treatment of Greek ontology through a reading of Sophocles and Aeschlylus, and barbed references to his contemporary opponents on the liberal wing of the French academy and in the French political establishment. The text has the flavour of a bricolage, teeming with potential lines of enquiry that frequently remain unresolved, and there are some frustrating inconsistencies in the overall architecture of the argument. Chief among these is Badiou’s treatment of Lacan, who at the very time of the writing of this text was, in his seminar, questioning the division between an ‘algebraic’ and ‘topological’ treatment of the subject that Badiou insists on throughout the text and that he credits to Lacan. Badiou accuses the so-called ‘early Lacan’ of idealism as a result of his theory of signification, but it is Badiou who makes the idealist error of assuming an irrevocable antimony between an insistence on the primacy of the signifier in subjectivity and the materialist potential for agency and change. Lacan’s seminars in the late 1970s, with their critique of a static model of structural theory and their conjoining of the non-linguistic elements of bodily existence with an exploration of the material, non-signifying elements central to language, are, for all their flaws, more radical in their subversion from within of the structural tradition than Badiou’s efforts here.

That said, Theory of the Subject, impeccably translated by Bruno Bosteels, stands as one of the most successful attempts to integrate a psychoanalytic appreciation of subjectivity with the demands of revolutionary politics, and for that alone, and for its signal importance in the broader sweep of Badiou’s philosophical project, it remains necessary reading.

No related posts.

The following essay (posted here as a pdf) was composed by Badiou in 2002 as part of a series of lectures mounted by L’Organization Politique, the political group in which Badiou plays a leading role. Its first translation into English (by Bruno Bosteels) appeared in the journal positions during Winter 2005, in an issue devoted to Badiou, the Cultural Revolution, and its political implications. The essay has now become a chapter in Badiou’s new book, The Communist Hypothesis, a chapter which will be the next topic for discussion in the Communist Hypothesis Study Circle. I hope we can develop some discussion of this essay (and on this important topic) here.

The Cultural Revolution: The Last Revolution?

As a sort of appendix, the following is the important “Sixteen Points” document on which Badiou hangs much of his discussion. Surprisingly rare on the web in anything approaching its complete form, I take it from here.

DECISION CONCERNING THE GREAT PROLETARIAN CULTURAL REVOLUTION (“the Sixteen Points”)

(Adopted on 8 August 1966, by the CC of the CCP)

1. A NEW STAGE IN THE SOCIALIST REVOLUTION

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution now unfolding is a great revolution that touches people to their very souls and constitutes a new stage in the development of the socialist revolution in our country, a stage which is both broader and deeper.

At the Tenth Plenary Session of the Eighth Central Committee of  the Party, Comrade Mao Tse-tung said: to overthrow a political power, it is always necessary first of all to create public opinion, to do work in the ideological sphere. This is true for the revolutionary class as well as for the counter-revolutionary class. This thesis of Comrade Mao Tse-tung’s has been proved entirely correct in practice.

Although the bourgeoisie has been overthrown, it is still trying to use the old ideas, culture, customs and habits of the exploiting classes to corrupt the masses, capture their minds and endeavour to stage a comeback. The proletariat must do the exact opposite: it must meet head-on every challenge of the bourgeoisie in the ideological field and use the new ideas, culture, customs and habits of the proletariat to change the mental outlook of the whole of society. At present, our objective is to struggle against and overthrow those persons in authority who are taking the capitalist road, to criticize and repudiate the reactionary bourgeois academic ‘authorities’ and the ideology of the bourgeoisie and all other exploiting classes and to transform education, literature and art and all other parts of the superstructure not in correspondence with the socialist economic base, so as to facilitate the consolidation and development of the socialist system.

2. THE MAIN CURRENT AND THE TWISTS AND TURNS

The masses of the workers, peasants, soldiers, revolutionary intellectuals, and revolutionary cadres form the main force in this Great Cultural Revolution. Large numbers of revolutionary young people, previously unknown, have become courageous and daring pathbreakers. They are vigorous in action and intelligent. Through the media of big-character posters and great debates, they argue things out, expose and criticize thoroughly, and launch resolute attacks on the open and hidden representatives of the bourgeoisie. In such a great revolutionary movement, it is hardly avoidable that they should show shortcomings of one kind or another; however, their general revolutionary orientation has been correct from the beginning. This is the main current in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. It is the general direction along which this revolution continues to advance.

Since the Cultural Revolution is a revolution, it inevitably meets with resistance. This resistance comes chiefly from those in authority who have wormed their way into the Party and are taking the capitalist road. It also comes from the force of habits from the old society. At present, this resistance is still fairly strong and stubborn. But after all, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is an irresistible general trend. There is abundant evidence that such resistance will be quickly broken down once the masses become fully aroused.

Because the resistance is fairly strong, there will be reversals and even repeated reversals in this struggle. There is no harm in this. It tempers the proletariat and other working people, and especially the younger generation, teaches them lessons and gives them experience, and helps them to understand that the revolutionary road zigzags and does not run smoothly.

3. PUT DARING ABOVE EVERYTHING ELSE AND BOLDLY AROUSE THE MASSES

The outcome of this Great Cultural Revolution will be determined by whether or not the Party leadership dares boldly to arouse the masses.

Currently, there are four different situations with regard to the leadership being given to the movement of Cultural Revolution by Party organizations at various levels:

(1) There is the situation in which the persons in charge of Party organizations stand in the van of the movement and dare to arouse the masses boldly. They put daring above everything else, they are dauntless communist fighters and good pupils of Chairman Mao. They advocate the big-character posters and great debates. They encourage the masses to expose every kind of ghost and monster and also to criticize the shortcomings and errors in the work of the persons in charge. This correct kind of leadership is the result of putting proletarian politics in the forefront and Mao Tse-tung’s thought in the lead.

(2) In many units, the persons in charge have a very poor understanding of the task of leadership in this great struggle, their leadership is far from being conscientious and effective, and they accordingly find themselves incompetent and in a weak position. They put fear above everything else, stick to outmoded ways and regulations, and are unwilling to break away from conventional practices and move ahead. They have been taken unaware by the new order of things, the revolutionary order of the masses, with the result that their leadership lags behind the situation, lags behind the masses.

(3) In some units, the persons in charge, who made mistakes of one kind or another in the past, are even more prone to put fear above everything else, being afraid that the masses will catch them out. Actually, if they make serious self-criticism and accept the criticism of the masses, the Party and the masses will make allowances for their mistakes. But if the persons in charge don’t, they will continue to make mistakes and become obstacles to the mass movement.

(4) Some units are controlled by those who have wormed their way into the Party and are taking the capitalist road. Such persons in authority are extremely afraid of being exposed by the masses and therefore seek every possible pretext to suppress the mass movement. They resort to such tactics as shifting the targets for attack and turning black into white in an attempt to lead the movement astray. When they find themselves very isolated and no longer able to carry on as before, they resort still more to intrigues, stabbing people in the back, spreading rumours, and blurring the distinction between revolution and counter-revolution as much as they can, all for the purpose of attacking the revolutionaries.

What the Central Committee of the Party demands of the Party committees at all levels is that they persevere in giving correct leadership, put daring above everything else, boldly arouse the masses, change the state of weakness and incompetence where it exists, encourage those comrades who have made mistakes but are willing to correct them to cast off their mental burdens and join in the struggle, and dismiss from their leading posts all those in authority who are taking the capitalist road and so make possible to recapture of the leadership for the proletarian revolution.

4. LET THE MASSES EDUCATE THEMSELVES IN THE MOVEMENT

In the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, the only method is for the masses to liberate themselves, and any method of doing things in their stead must not be used.

Trust the masses, rely on them and respect their initiative. Cast out fear. Don’t be afraid of disturbances. Chairman Mao has often told us that revolution cannot be so very refined, so gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. Let the masses educate themselves in this great revolutionary movement and learn to distinguish between right and wrong and between correct and incorrect ways of doing things.

Make the fullest use of big-character posters and great debates to argue matters out, so that the masses can clarify the correct views, criticize the wrong views and expose all the ghosts and monsters. In this way the masses will be able to raise their political consciousness in the course of the struggle, enhance their abilities and talents, distinguish right from wrong and draw a clear line between ourselves and the enemy.

5. FIRMLY APPLY THE CLASS LINE OF THE PARTY

Who are our enemies? Who are our friends? This is a question of the first importance for the revolution and it is likewise a question of the first importance for the Great Cultural Revolution.

Party leadership should be good at discovering the left and developing and strengthening the ranks of the left; it should firmly rely on the revolutionary left. During the movement this is the only way to isolate the most reactionary rightists thoroughly, win over the middle and unite with the great majority so that by the end of the movement we shall achieve the unity of more than 95 per cent of the cadres and more than 95 per cent of the masses.

Concentrate all forces to strike at the handful of ultra-reactionary bourgeois rightists and counter-revolutionary revisionists, and expose and criticize to the full their crimes against the Party, against socialism and against Mao Tse-tung’s thought sos as to isolate them to the maximum.

The main target of the present movement is those within the Party who are in authority and are taking the capitalist road.

The strictest care should be taken to distinguish between the anti-Party, anti-socialist rightists and those who support the Party and socialism but have said or done something wrong or have written some bad articles or other works.

The strictest care should be taken to distinguish between the reactionary bourgeois scholar despots and ‘authorities’ on the one hand and people who have the ordinary bourgeois academic ideas on the other.

6. CORRECTLY HANDLE CONTRADICTIONS AMONG THE PEOPLE

A strict distinction must be made between the two different types of contradictions: those among the people and those between ourselves and the enemy. Contradictions among the people must not be made into contradictions between ourselves and the enemy; nor must contradictions between ourselves and the enemy be regarded as contradictions among the people.

It is normal for the masses to hold different views. Contention between different views is unavoidable, necessary and beneficial. In the course of normal and full debate, the masses will affirm what is right, correct what is wrong and gradually reach unanimity.

The method to be used in debates is to present the facts, reason things out, and persuade through reasoning. Any method of forcing a minority holding different views to submit is impermissible. The minority should be protected, because sometimes the truth is with the minority. Even if the minority is wrong, they should still be allowed to argue their case and reserve their views.

When there is a debate, it should be conducted by reasoning, not by coercion or force.

In the course of debate, every revolutionary should be good at thinking things out for himself and should develop the communist spirit of daring to think, daring to speak and daring to act. On the premise that they have the same general orientation, revolutionary comrades should, for the sake of trengthening unity, avoid endless debate over side issues.

7. BE ON GUARD AGAINST THOSE WHO BRAND THE REVOLUTIONARY MASSES AS ‘COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARIES’

In certain schools, units, and work teams of the Cultural Revolution, some of the persons in charge have organized counter-attacks against the masses who put up big-character posters criticizing them. These people have even advanced such slogans as: opposition to the leaders of a unit or a work team means opposition to the Central Committee of the Party, means opposition to the Party and socialism, means counter-revolution. In this way it is inevitable that their blows will fall on some really revolutionary activists.

This is an error on matters of orientation, an error of line, and is absolutely impermissible.

A number of persons who suffer from serious ideological errors, and particularly some of the anti-Party and anti-socialist rightists, are taking advantage of certain shortcomings and mistakes in the mass movement to spread rumours and gossip, and engage in agitation, deliberately branding some of the masses as ‘counter-revolutionaries’. It is necessary to beware of such ‘pickpockets’ and expose their tricks in good time.

In the course of the movement, with the exception of cases of active counter-revolutionaries where there is clear evidence of crimes such as murder, arson, poisoning, sabotage or theft of state secrets, which should be handled in accordance with the law, no measures should be taken against students at universities, colleges, middle schools and primary schools because of problems that arise in the movement.

To prevent the struggle from being diverted from its main target, it is not allowed, under whatever pretext, to incite the masses or the students to struggle against each other. Even proven rightists should be dealt with on the merits of each case at a later stage of the movement.

8. THE QUESTION OF CADRES

The cadres fall roughly into the following four categories:

(1) good;

(2) comparatively good;

(3) those who have made serious mistakes but have not become anti-Party, anti-socialist rightists;

(4) the small number of anti-Party, anti-socialist rightists.

In ordinary situations, the first two categories (good and comparatively good) are the great majority.

The anti-Party, anti-socialist rightists must be fully exposed, refuted, overthrown and completely discredited and their influence eliminated. At the same time, they should be given a chance to turn over a new leaf.

9. CULTURAL REVOLUTIONARY GROUPS, COMMITTEES AND CONGRESSES

Many new things have begun to emerge in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The Cultural Revolutionary groups,committees and other organizational forms created by the masses in many schools and units are something new and of great historic importance.

These Cultural Revolutionary groups, committees and congresses are excellent new forms of organization whereby the masses educate themselves under the leadership of the Communist Party. They are an excellent bridge to keep our Party in close contact with the masses. They are organs of power of the proletarian Cultural Revolution.

The struggle of the proletariat against the old ideas, culture, customs and habits left over by all the exploiting classes over thousands of years will necessarily take a very, very long time. Therefore, the Cultural Revolutionary groups, committees and congresses should not be temporary organizations but permanent, standing mass organizations. They are suitable not only for colleges, schools and government and other organizations, but generally also for factories, mines, other enterprises, urban districts and villages.

It is necessary to institute a system of general elections, like that of the Paris Commune, for electing members to the Cultural Revolutionary groups and committees and delegates to the Cultural Revolutionary congresses. The lists of candidates should be put forward by the revolutionary masses after full discussion, and the elections should be held after the masses have discussed the lists over and over again.

The masses are entitled at any time to criticize members of the Cultural Revolutionary groups and committees and delegates elected to the Cultural Revolutionary congresses. If these members or delegates prove incompetent, they can be replaced through election or recalled by the masses after discussion.

The Cultural Revolutionary groups, committees and congresses in colleges and schools should consist mainly of representatives of the revolutionary students. At the same time, they should have a certain number of representatives of the revolutionary teaching and administrative staff and workers.

10. EDUCATIONAL REFORM

In the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution a most important task is to transform the old educational system and the old principles and methods of teaching.

In this Great Cultural Revolution, the phenomenon of our schools being dominated by bourgeois intellectuals must be completely changed.

In every kind of school we must apply thoroughly the policy advanced by Comrade Mao Tse-tung of education serving proletarian politics and education being combined with productive labour, so as to enable those receiving an education to develop morally, intellectually and physically and to become labourers with socialist consciousness and culture.

The period of schooling should be shortened. Courses should be fewer and better. The teaching material should be thoroughly transformed, in some cases beginning with simplifying complicated material. While their main task is to study, students should also learn other things. That is to say, in addition to their studies they should also learn industrial work, farming and military affairs, and take part in the struggles of the Cultural Revolution to criticize the bourgeoisie as these struggles occur.

11. THE QUESTION OF CRITICIZING BY NAME IN THE PRESS

In the course of the mass movement of the Cultural Revolution, the criticism of bourgeois and feudal ideology should be well combined with the dissemination of the proletarian world outlook and of Marxism-Leninism, Mao Tse-tung’s thought.

Criticism should be organized of typical bourgeois representatives who have wormed their way into the Party and typical reactionary bourgeois academic ‘authorities’, and this should include criticism of various kinds of reactionary views in philosophy, history, political economy and education, in works and theories of literature and art, in theories of natural science, and in other fields.

Criticism of anyone by name in the press should be decided after discussion by the Party committee at the same level, and in some cases submitted to the Party committee at a higher level for approval.

12. POLICY TOWARDS SCIENTISTS, TECHNICIANS AND ORDINARY MEMBERS OF WORKING STAFFS

As regards scientists, technicians and ordinary members of working staffs, as long as they are patriotic, work energetically, are not against the Party and socialism, and maintain no illicit relations with any foreign country, we should in the present movement continue to apply the policy of ‘unity, criticism, unity’. Special care should be taken of those scientists and scientific and technical personnel who have made contributions. Efforts should be made to help them gradually transform their world outlook and their style of work.

13. THE QUESTION OF ARRANGEMENTS FOR INTEGRATION WITH THE SOCIALIST EDUCATION MOVEMENT IN CITY AND COUNTRYSIDE

The cultural and educational units and leading organs of the Party and government in the large and medium cities are the points of concentration of the present proletarian Cultural Revolution.

The Great Cultural Revolution has enriched the socialist education movement in both city and countryside and raised it to a higher level. Efforts should be made to conduct these two movements in close combination. Arrangements to this effect may be made by various regions and departments in the light of the specific conditions.

The socialist education movement now going on in the countryside and in enterprises in the cities should not be upset where the original arrangements are appropriate and the movement is going well, but should continue in accordance with the original arrangements. However, the questions that are arising in the present Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution should be put to the masses for discussion at the proper time, so as to further foster vigorously proletarian ideology and eradicate bourgeois ideology.

In some places, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is being used as the focus in order to add momentum to the socialist education movement and clean things up in the fields of politics, ideology, organization and economy. This may be done where the local Party committee thinks it appropriate.

14. TAKE FIRM HOLD OF THE REVOLUTION AND STIMULATE PRODUCTION

The aim of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is to revolutionize people’s ideology and as a consequence to achieve greater, faster, better and more economical results in all fields of work.If the masses are fully aroused and proper arrangements are made, it is possible to carry on both the Cultural Revolution and production without one hampering the other, while guaranteeing high quality in all our work.

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is a powerful motive force for the development of the social productive forces in our country. Any idea of counterposing the Great Cultural Revolution to the development of production is incorrect.

15. THE ARMED FORCES

In the armed forces, the cultural revolution and the socialist education movement should be carried out in accordance with the instructions of the Military Commission of the Central Committee of the Party and the General Political Department of the People’s Liberation Army.

16. MAO TSE-TUNG’S THOUGHT IS THE GUIDE TO ACTION IN THE GREAT PROLETARIAN CULTURAL REVOLUTION

In the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, it is imperative to hold aloft the great red banner of Mao Tse-tung’s thought and put proletarian politics in command. The movement for the creative study and application of Chairman Mao Tse-tung’s works should be carried forward among the masses of the workers, peasants and soldiers, the cadres and the intellectuals, and Mao Tse-tung’s thought should be taken as the guide to action in the Cultural Revolution.

In this complex Great Cultural Revolution, Party committees at all levels must study and apply Chairman Mao’s works all the more conscientiously and in a creative way. In particular, they must study over and over again Chairman Mao’s writings on the Cultural Revolution and on the Party’s methods of leadership, such as On New Democracy, Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art, On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People, Speech at the Chinese Communist Party’s National Conference on Propaganda Work, Some Questions Concerning Methods of Leadership and Methods of Work of Party Committees.

Party committees at all levels must abide by the directions given by Chairman Mao over the years, namely that they should thoroughly apply the mass line of ‘from the masses, to the masses’ and that they should be pupils before they become teachers.They should try to avoid being one-sided or narrow. They should foster materialist dialectics and oppose metaphysics and scholasticism.

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is bound to achieve brilliant victory under the leadership of the Central Committee of the Party headed by Comrade Mao Tse-tung.

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