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?

Zizek spoke October 26 at St Mark’s Bookshop in Manhattan. What follows is not the complete talk, but some interesting parts. Reprinted from impose (with a few corrections),  where the complete transcript can be found.

Bill Clinton says ominously, “because your demands create a vacuum, and if you don’t bring quickly concrete proposals which will fill in this vacuum, who knows who will fill in this vacuum?” But at this point, I claim, precisely we should maintain this openness in all ominous directions. We don’t need dialogue with those in power. We need critical dialogue with ourselves. We need time to think. We effectively don’t know. And nobody knows. On the one hand we should reject the cheap — because Mao was never so stupid — psuedo-Maoist idea, “Learn from the people, people know”. No, they don’t know. Do we intellectuals know? Also, we don’t know. I mean, any intellectual who says, “Okay, people now have some confused ideas, oh I have a ready and precise plan of what to do,” they are bluffing. We don’t know where we are.

But I think that this openness is precisely what is great about these protests. It means that precisely a certain vacuum open the fundamental dissatisfactions in the system. The vacuum simply means open space for thinking, for new freedom, and so on. Let’s not fill in this vacuum too quickly.

Zizek speaks at St. Mark’s Bookshop

So, while the standard reaction of the Wall Street itself against the protest is the expected, vulgar bullshitting, I want to draw your attention to a more intelligent, but I think even more disgusting reaction; a critical rejection of Wall Street; a very liberal, sophisticated one: it was done a couple of days ago by Anne Applebaum, you know, the lady who wrote a book on gulag and so on. Again, it’s a very sophisticated argumentation. She even, in a slightly tasteless but almost convincing way, she [?] the [?] Monty Python film, The Life of Brian, where this Brian, the new Christ figure shouts to the people, “You are free individuals!” and then all of them shout, together as a crowd, “Yes we are free individuals!”; claiming that my functioning of repetition reminds her of that.

Okay, but nonetheless I claim… her reaction to it, and I will just read you two long paragraphs; I think they are worth quoting. It’s ideology at its purest, precisely in the way they make her argumentation appear convincing.

So again, the basis of Applebaum’s reasoning is the idea that the Wall Street type protests around the world are:

similar in their lack of focus, in their confused nature, and above all in their refusal to engage with existing democratic institutions. In New York, marchers chanted, “This is what democracy looks like,” but actually, this isn’t what democracy looks like. This is what freedom of speech looks like. Democracy looks a lot more boring. Democracy requires institutions, elections, political parties, rules, laws, a judiciary and many unglamorous, time-consuming activities...

“Yet,” she goes on:

in one sense, the international Occupy movement’s failure to produce sound legislative proposals is understandable: Both the sources of the global economic crisis and the solutions to it lie, by definition, outside the competence of local and national politicians…

The emergence of an international protest movement without a coherent program is therefore not an accident: It reflects a deeper crisis, one without an obvious solution. Democracy is based on the rule of law. Democracy works only within distinct borders and among people who feel themselves to be part of the same nation. A “global community” cannot be a national democracy. And a national democracy cannot command the allegiance of a billion-dollar global hedge fund, with its headquarters in a tax haven and its employees scattered around the world.

Unlike the Egyptians in Tahrir Square, to whom the New York protesters openly (and ridiculously) compare themselves, we have democratic institutions in the Western world. They are designed to reflect, at least crudely, the desire for political change within a given nation. But they cannot cope with the desire for global political change, nor can they control things that happen outside their borders. Although I still believe in globalization’s economic and spiritual benefits — along with open borders, freedom of movement and free trade — globalization has clearly begun to undermine the legitimacy of Western democracies.

“Global” activists, if they are not careful, will accelerate that decline. Protesters in London shout,“We need to have a process!” Well, they already have a process: It’s called the British political system. And if they don’t figure out how to use it, they’ll simply weaken it further.

End of quote. For this, in my universe, you go to gulag. Why? Let me explain. Firstly, the first thing to note, you notice how Applebaum reduces Tahrir Square protests to the calls of Western-style democracy. It’s as if, you know, they really want what we already have here. Once we do this, it of course becomes ridiculous to compare the Wall Street protests to the Egyptian event. How can protestors here demand what we already have? That is to say, democratic institutions? What is there lost from view — that’s why I oppose this idea — is the general discontent with the global capitalist system which obviously acquires different here and there. So I again claim that she misses the point.

Different as they are, protests here, in Southern Europe, in Egypt, whatever; what unites them is they’re precisely not political in the narrow sense of more democracy, or whatever. They signal a kind of a shared global discontent with their capitalistic system. And now I come to the crucial point: the most shocking part for me of Applebaum’s argumentation, a truly weird gap in her line of reasoning occurs at the end of the passage I read to you. After conceding that the catastrophic economic consequences of global capitalist financial dealings are due to their international character out of control of democratic mechanisms, she remembered to make this point clear: what happens at the level of international capital is simply out of control of democratic mechanisms. And she draws from this the necessary conclusion. Here, we should agree with her, I quote it again: “Globalization” — she means capitalist globalization — “has clearly begun to undermine the legitimacy of Western democracies.”

Because again, things happen there which are out of control of at least normal, the way we have them, democratic processes. Okay, so far, we can agree because I claim this is precisely what the protestors are drawing attention to, that global capitalism undermines potentially democracy.  But instead of drawing the only logical, further conclusion that we should start thinking about how to expand democracy beyond its state multi-party political forum, which obviously leaves out destructive consequences of economic life; instead of this, Applebaum performs a weird turnaround and she shifts the blame on protestors themselves who raise these questions.

Her last paragraph deserves to be read again. Listen.

“Global” activists, if they are not careful, will accelerate that decline. Protesters in London shout,“We need to have a process!” Well, they already have a process: It’s called the British political system. And if they don’t figure out how to use it, they’ll simply weaken it further.

End of quote. So her logic is, since global economy is outside the scope of democratic politics, any attempt to expand democracy to be will only accelerate the decline of democracy. What then can we do? Remember, she says, we should engage in the existing political system. But wait a minute. Paragraph above, she says that precisely this system cannot do the job. So it’s very strange, her conclusion. Her conclusion is basically we cannot do anything. We have our democracy. If you buy it, you have to accept that global capital movement and so on are outside its scope. If you try something more, democracy no longer functions. But it is here I claim that you should go to the end. To the end, even in anti-capitalism.

There is no lack of anti-capitalism today. We are even witnessing an overload of the critique of the hours of capitalism. Books, newspaper, in-depth investigations, TV reports. You know, you cannot open a newspaper without reading this company is polluting environment, corrupted bankers continue to get fat bonuses while their banks are saved by public money, sweatshops in the third world where children work over time and so on.

There is, however, a catch to all this overflow of critique of capitalism. What is, as a rule, not in question in this critique is the democratic, liberal political frame of fighting against these excesses. The explicit or implicit goal is to democratize capitalism. By this it’s meant not to think deeply about our democracy, but simply to extend our standard notion of politics, party politics, representative democracy into more interventionist one. Extend democratic control of economy through the pressure of the public media, parliamentary inquiry, harsher laws, honest police investigations, and so on. But never questioning the democratic institutional framework of our state of law. This remains the sacred cow even when we are dealing with the most radical forms of this, I call it, ethical anti-capitalism — Seattle movement, Porto Allegre, and so on. I think their moralism, like greedy bankers, dishonest companies, is a sign of their weakness.

It is here that Marxist key insight remains valid today, I claim, more than ever. For Marx, and this is for me the true lesson of Wall Street protests, the question of freedom should not be located primarily into the political sphere proper: Does a country has free elections? Are the judges independent? Is the press free from hidden pressures? Are human rights respected? And the similar list of questions, different independent Western institutions apply when they want to pronounce a judgment on a country.

The key to actual freedom rather resides in the apolitical, what appears to be apolitical. Network of social relations. From the market to the family where the change needed if we want an actual improvement is not political reform but a change in apolitical social relations of production.

So Anne Applebaum is right. We do not vote about who owns what, about relations in a factory and so on. All this is left to process outside the political sphere proper. And it is illusory to expect that one can effectively change things by simply extending our parliamentary democracy into this sphere, for example, by organizing democratic banks under people’s control. Radical changes in this domain should be made outside the sphere of legal rights. Such democratic procedures, of course, can play a very positive role. No matter how radical their anti-capitalism is, the solution they seek resides in applying representative democratic mechanisms but again, and Applebaum is right, they live out of control; the economic sphere proper and so on.

In this sense only, don’t misunderstand here, I think that Alain Badiou was right in his claim that today — it sounds terrible — the name of the enemy, he wrote once, is not capitalism, empire, exploitation or anything similar, the name of the enemy today is democracy. Now you will say, “ha ha, now we got you, totalitarian!” or whatever. No no no, I claim, what he only wanted to say is that our too blind attachment to formal democratic party state mechanism prevents our approaching a true problem. So again, I think what Applebaum accepts as the fact, “We can’t do anything, that’s it”. This precisely I claim is the starting point of the deep dissatisfaction which exploded in all anti-Wall Street protests. This precisely they feel that we have certain political multi-party system, obviously we are witnessing dangerous, even catastrophic phenomena in economy, and it’s obviously that this type of democratic system, the way it is now, cannot do the work; because it implies precisely this duality which is very nicely emphasized in Applebaum, between political sphere where we are all free but we have to follow the procedures, proper democratic procedures and so on, and economics sphere of private relations, whatever, which is left out. It is obvious that the urgent task today is precisely to find a way to control or to regulate — I don’t like the word ‘control’ here — precisely that sphere without of course returning to old 20th century totalitarian notions and practices.

So I think what Applebaum is complaining about, “Oh these protests are not clearly formulated, they don’t know what they want.” Let’s return briefly to psychoanalysis. This is a typical dialogue between a patriarchal husband and a hysterical wife, you know. The wife complains, of course in a confused way, and the standard male chauvinist answer is, “say clearly what do you want?” This is of course oppression at its purest. It means “either shut up or formulate it in my terms.”

Preserving the Vacuum

Bill Clinton said this very nice in a sympathetic reaction to Wall Street protestors — which is why I claim Bill Clinton practices clinching; you know what is clinching, you embrace the enemy no? Like we should talk and so on but show us, tell us, give us concrete proposals, what do you want? Well my simple answer is that — and Bill Clinton says ominously, “because your demands create a vacuum, and if you don’t bring quickly concrete proposals which will fill in this vacuum, who knows who will fill in this vacuum?” But at this point, I claim, precisely we should maintain this openness in all ominous directions. We don’t need dialogue with those in power. We need critical dialogue with ourselves. We need time to think. We effectively don’t know. And nobody knows. On the one hand we should reject the cheap — because Mao was never so stupid — psuedo-Maoist idea, “Learn from the people, people know”. No, they don’t know. Do we intellectuals know? Also, we don’t know. I mean, any intellectual who says, “Okay, people now have some confused ideas, oh I have a ready and precise plan of what to do,” they are bluffing. We don’t know where we are.

But I think that this openness is precisely what is great about these protests. It means that precisely a certain vacuum open the fundamental dissatisfactions in the system. The vacuum simply means open space for thinking, for new freedom, and so on. Let’s not fill in this vacuum too quickly. Because the only way to fill it in is either by stupid utopian thinking — “we should have a Leninist party back” or whatever — or with this pragmatic approach: “raise the taxes for the rich by 2%” or whatever. Okay, nothing against this second one, first of all. But my god, this is not the solution, you know what I mean? The system is in crisis, the important thing is precisely that vacuum is open. And if some people experience this as terror, something violent, “Look they don’t want to even talk with us.” Yes, precisely I like this ominous dimension, you know? “You want to talk with us. No thanks.” At this point, no dialogue. We have to keep the situation open.

So who knows then?, if neither intellectuals nor so-called ordinary people know. What I would like here to propose a solution. No, not a solution, just a metaphor.  In a book that I advise you to buy, it’s my favorite Soviet writer who was of course a dissident practically not published, and you have back there, I think, on a table some New York Public Library books or whatever, I bought here a week ago, a book on some kind of special discount. It’s a book by Andrei Platonov, an incredible Russian writer, which has afterword by John Berger, well known European progressive writer. In referring to all these protests, although he referred to older protests, but I think he gives a wonderful analysis. Here is what he says, I quote: “The multitudes” — here I don’t like it, it has to be censored, it sounds too much Negri:

The multitudes have answers to questions which have not yet been posed, and they have the capacity to outlive the walls. 

The questions are not yet asked because to do so requires words and concepts which ring true, and those currently being used to name events have been rendered meaningless: Democracy, Liberty, Productivity, etc.

With new concepts the questions will soon be posed, for history involves precisely such a process of questioning. Soon? Within a generation.

Who has the answer and who the question?

What I like in this idea is not that it turns around the usual relationship between intellectual vanguard and ordinary people; “ordinary people are stupid, oh we are not.” According to this vision, “Oh we don’t know what we want. We ask the question to the intellectual, he will provide answers.” Here, you make notice, it’s the opposite. It’s really as in psychoanalytic treatment. Ordinary people have the answers, they even are the answers. Like a symptom. What they don’t know is the proper question to which they are an answer. This is what maybe we intellectuals know. You know, we should refer here to a wonderful point by Claude Lévi-Strauss, apropos the prohibition of incest. Where he says, no, prohibition of incest is not an enigma in the sense of we don’t know what it is. He says, prohibition of incest is an answer, but we don’t know to what question it is an answer. And I think this is how, if we approach in this way the protests, I think we intellectuals should not patronize those immediate non-intellectual protestors. We should — the worst patronization would be to celebrate them as ‘oooh, the wisdom of ordinary people’, like, you know, Mao in late fifties in China. ‘Go and learn from farmers’ and so on. You know, whenever a leader tells you this, it always means “Learn from the people, but we in the central committee of the party know better than the people what the people really want” or whatever. So, no, do not patronize the people.

Start asking critical questions, like Udi Aloni, who is now somewhere to stab me into my back, I think, draw my attention to this famous 99%. We are 99%, you the enemies are 1%. The point is not only like how many of Americans would really recognize the protestors as 99%. What is more interesting for me is that, Who are these 99%? Not Wall Street. Are they Wall Street protestors? Probably they are. But I raise the question, Are they ready to recognize that the true 99% are not only they, dissatisfied Americans, but the poor starving, I don’t know, in Somalia, in Congo, all around the world. These are the true 99%.

For example, if you want a battle, I’m not saying we should now just listen to its other silences and do nothing. There are battles to be fought. But nonetheless, my message is: time for thinking. Be patient.

And again, the crucial thing is to avoid this duality of either “oh we just have a good time, forget consequences” or this call for cheap pragmatism. What is important is that that taboo is broken. We know the system is potentially in a serious crisis. At the same time we know that the 20th century is over not only in the mechanic calendar sense. Which is to say that the 20th century solution — Stalinist communism, the traditional democracy and so on — don’t work. There is work to be done and I think only this refined interaction between educated intellectuals and so called ordinary people, where again we should not, absolutely not act as the ones — as we say in Lacanian theory — subjects supposed to know. All we can do is provide the tools to formulate the right questions. And with this interaction with those apparently formless demands from the people, maybe there is a hope that something new will emerge. Because, you know, what always — I repeat this always, I’m sorry, some of you already know these phrases; what terrifies me is this idea of “oh now we have a wonderful carnival.” Yeah but screw it, what interests me is the day after. My primordial fear is that the movement will slowly disperse and then what? Ten years after you will meet with your friends, drink bear, and “oh my God, what a wonderful time did we have there but now I have to go back to my banking job now.” Someone has to imagine. The process of thinking has to begin. So again, it’s patience. It’s precisely — sorry, for some of you may be obscene — what in Christianity they call the work of love, which is slow, patient, hard work.

A new era

So again, this is all I can offer you. This slow work, where we avoid this false leftist melancholy, which is a very comfortable position of enjoying your situation. I’m here a puritan, you know. Okay, I’m a puritan also protestant in the sense that, you know, my favorite rule about sexuality is the protestant one. As they say, ‘Everything is permitted as long as you feel guilty about it.’ But what I’m saying is that it’s really this eager carnivalesque or melancholic pleasure in pain. Like I already see some of my friends who say, Oh my god, I see Wall Street, they are already tired, it will be over. You know this, this is typical melancholy; they are still there, demonstrating; these people already cannot conceal their joy at imagining how beautiful it will be to be sad when it will be over.

Work, work, this is the good protestant attitude. Work, work. Don’t be afraid of words like work, discipline, community and so on. We should take all this from the right wingers. Don’t allow enemy to take from you to determine the terrain of the struggle. People think today that if you mention work, discipline, soldiers, fight, ‘Oh you’re a neo-fascist.’ No, are you aware that this idea of workers in uniforms marching in discipline; sorry to tell you, Hitler took this from social democracy. And maybe it’s time for us to get it back. Don’t allow the enemy — this is so important today; Don’t allow the enemy to blackmail you in the sense of determining the terrain of the struggle. We shouldn’t decide in opposition to the enemy.

So again, there is room for cautious optimism. With all problems I know dangers are always on the horizon. But remember nonetheless a new era is here. A certain taboo fell down. People are accepting the fact that we don’t live in the world of Pelican Brief and All the President’s Men, where they’re very anti-capitalists but the guilty are a couple of corrupted managers, CEO’s, politicians.. and then we get rid of these guys and everything will be okay. No, the problem is in the system, and we have to start to think, bearing in mind the tragic experience of 20th century. So in other words, at least I can say as a philosopher, we live in maybe potentially tragic times, but there is more than enough job for us philosophers. It’s our time. Thank you very much.

Related posts:

1. Zizek on our situation — and communism
2. Zizek and Badiou

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.

Don Hamerquist has published several essays previously on khukuri.

“…that which in them divides itself from the old”

Don Hamerquist

I would like to say a few things on the form and the content of the argument in Anselm Jappe’s article, in order to open up some issues that hopefully will go beyond this starting point.

Jappe, who I only know through this short piece, advances a generic Marxist conception of the limits of capitalist accumulation as if that is sufficient demonstration that most of what the contemporary left is writing and thinking about the current crisis is just stupidity – and probably reformist as well. While the conclusion has undeniable merit, the method falls well short of what we need. Jappe states:

(Karl Marx) also foresaw the eventuality that some day the capitalist machine would stop running on its own, through the exhaustion of its dynamic. Why? Capitalist commodity production contains, from its very inception an internal contradiction, a veritable time bomb built into its very structure.

We have waited a long time on this… “veritable time bomb.“

I have big questions about any explanations and prescriptions from decades in the past (in this instance, centuries) that are presented as what is needed for us to properly understand the politics of our present and immediate future.

It’s not as if propositions such as “…the capitalist machine would stop running on its own…” have been validated by historical experience. Putting questionable hypotheses from a distant past in a more forceful manifesto or a better set of theses tends to be a waste of our political resources. Whether Jappe provides a good rendering of Marx is open to a discussion that I will avoid for now, but regardless of what Marx said or meant – and both questions are quite debatable – it will hardly be sufficient for current circumstances.

My friend and long time comrade, Ken Lawrence, has written an interesting draft piece on his experience with C.L.R. James and the Facing Reality political tendency that relates to some of these issues. Lawrence reluctantly comes to some political conclusions – not ones that I fully share – from a critical appraisal that I do share of another familiar proposition from the Communist Manifesto:

All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.

As Ken argues, little in our collective experience demonstrates a capitalist compulsion on the working class to soberly confront, “real conditions” and “relations” and a good deal of our experience supports very different conclusions. This highlights the common problem with the proclamatory first principles methods of Jappe and too many others. They gloss over the indeterminacy and the reversibility of the processes through which a revolutionary anti capitalist subject will develop. But without such a subject, armed with a revolutionary program and the organized will to respond to the mass potentials created in a capitalist crisis, communism will “…remain an ideal that will be always yet to come.” (Bosteels, Badiou and Politics, p. 280)

Ken approaches these issues through the concept of “punctuated equilibria” that he adapts from evolutionary science. In this framework, moments of “great upheaval”, the punctuation, are normally followed by a more prolonged period of a new equilibrium with its unique functional methods of incremental adaptation. Assume, at least for purposes of discussion, that we are experiencing a disruption of a previous equilibrium, perhaps the situation that the Italians describe as “Fordism”, combined with what others of us have termed “imperialism”. We might be seeing some hopeful signs in these circumstances of disrupted equilibrium, but it seems quite clear that these fall well short the necessary and sufficient grounds for revolutionary outcomes. Without a plausibly adequate revolutionary subject, a new equilibrium –- but one that is still essentially capitalist, or at least not emancipatory and communist – will be the most likely outcome.

We know very well that every upsurge of mass resistance contains a tendency to fetishize various short- of-revolution possibilities that are more likely to fit into a new, non-emancipatory, equilibrium than to provide a foundation for a revolutionary advance. The elasticity of capitalist power is shown in limitations on the anti-capitalist counterpower that emerges at the moments of heightened contradiction and crisis. This conservative elasticity facilitates the elevation of illusory popular objectives into political substitutes for revolutionary communism that can dominate radical politics for generations.

So how should we respond? I like this formulation from the younger Badiou (circa 1975) as a starting point – and it is also the point where I will end this piece when I eventually get there:

It is never ‘the masses’, nor the ‘movement’ that as a whole carry the principle of engenderment of the new, but that which in them divides itself from the old.” (Cited from Badiou in Bosteels, p. 136)

The new potentials that develop in the explosively expanded struggles of periods of capitalist crisis aren’t necessarily cumulative and irreversible. They don’t emerge in a linear process. I think that Badiou’s formulation raises the contradictory character of this process and the necessity to counter the strategic unevenness through organized political interventions in a strong and beneficial way. Before capitalism can be overthrown, a number of very uncomfortable elements of the internal dialectic between a revolutionary communist component of a mass movement and the mass popular constituency of that movement will have to be worked through. This will be necessary to prevent popular insurgencies from overdosing on their own victories – real and illusory. As Badiou also points out, far too often: “…once the mass festivals of democracy and discourse are over, things make place for the modernist restoration of order among workers and bosses.” (Cited in Bosteels, P.279).

Capitalism will not topple “…through…exhaustion…”. It will not “…stop running on its own…” as Jappe suggests. It must be overthrown by a politically conscious mass counter force, and the primary issues for us concern how such a force might develop. I’m more a Leninist than a Marxist on such questions which will probably raise eyebrows – and not only from the anarchist crew. I think that this particular strategic process and its associated dilemmas underscore the importance of Lenin’s position on the ‘art’ of revolution. And, although Lenin would certainly have disagreed, I think that rather than an extension and elaboration of Marx, this is a break with Marx – certainly it is a break with the Marx of Jappe, that implies that capitalism might collapse from the working out of a simple internal contradiction.

Financialization

These issues of inevitability and of the complex relationship between the necessity and the possibility of revolution are important, but there is a different, and perhaps more relevant, weakness in the Jappe article. He shows little interest in any connection between such general questions of revolutionary process and this particular capitalist crisis. He dismisses the possibility that “financialization” might provide a key to features of this crisis without proposing any alternative way to understand the specific features that it does exhibit. Unlike Jappe, I think the development of financialization is a root source of a significant and unique disturbance to the capitalist equilibrium of our recent past, and this disturbance is central to this current crisis. I will try out a tentative approach to these issues below, but first, I want to spend a moment on Jappe’s view as I understand it.

He argues that the expanded system of financialization may have deferred and redirected a more basic crisis in capitalist accumulation, but it is not an important causal factor in its own right. Instead, it is more of a surface manifestation of an underlying reality that it partially disguises by projecting a false opposition between a ‘good’ and a ‘bad’ form of capitalism. In a certain sense this is right, but, in this same general sense it is also not particularly controversial among anti-capitalist revolutionaries. It’s true enough that the global financial system and its crisis should not – really cannot – be approached separately from the global circumstances for capitalism. But who on the anti-capitalist left thinks differently on this question? For the most part, the distinctions between a ‘bad’ capitalist financial system and a ‘good’ productive capitalism are features of populist tendencies and institutional reformists – with some neo-fascists among the former, and some social democrats among the economic nationalists in the latter. Not many of those folks regard themselves as revolutionary anti-capitalists and fewer still merit such a description.

When this ‘bad capitalism’ approach appears to be adopted by a genuinely radical tendency, perhaps through fixating on bank nationalization as a strategic political demand; the cause is less likely to be a mistaken understanding of the “capitalist machine”, than a reasonable, although slightly desperate, lack of confidence that Jappe’s ‘veritable time bomb’ will ever actually detonate. And as I have said above, there are grounds for such pessimism that Jappe would be well advised to consider. (This shouldn’t be seen as a backhanded endorsement of the Panitch/Gindin approach to bank nationalization which I think it is mistaken, but for reasons related to ‘transitional demand’ strategic conceptions that are not apparently a part of Jappe’s critique.)

When financialization is seen as an independent variable with only a contingent relationship to some idealized capitalism, or when it is reduced to that same idealized ‘simple’ capitalism; our ability to understand its actual impact will be severely reduced. And in the same process, so will our ability to clarify and implement the political interventions that can counter the tendencies for the emerging mass resistance to collapse back into itself; greasing the emergence of some new non-liberatory stage that might or might not be something that looks like an equilibrium.

I’d like to develop a counter argument to Jappe’s with respect to financialization and the unique role the capitalist state assumes in the current crisis, but some preliminary points are needed. What I intend to argue begins from material that is fairly new to me – although possibly not so much to others – and I’d welcome questions and challenges. In part this material is based on the Bosteel’s book on Badiou, Badiou and Politics, which I’ve cited a few times in the earlier argument. I find Bosteels useful, although I disagree with a major thrust of his argument that is peripheral to this discussion. This area of disagreement covers what appears to me to be an impressively academic, but rather unpersuasive attempt to project Badiou as a Marxist critic of “pure leftism” (Bosteels, p. 283-286). (“Pure leftism”, now that’s a camp where I probably fit, but perhaps not so pure).

Arrighi

However, my primary point of reference is the argument presented in Giovanni Arrighi’s book, The Long Twentieth Century. Arrighi covers a different subject matter than Bosteels, one that is primarily historical rather than philosophical. In my opinion, he also has far more to offer than Bosteels (although not Badiou). If his book hadn’t been finished well before the current crisis, Arrighi might have worked out some better resolutions of the dilemmas of juxtaposing patterned long wave historical cycles of capitalist accumulation with chaos theory. These are problems that that he shares with his friend and co-thinker, Wallerstein, in my opinion.

I did find some debatable themes in what I have read from Arrighi. One that is relevant to an understanding of this crisis is his recurring fixation on finding a new capitalist hegemon emerging between the “signal” and the “terminal” crisis of the current, “’organic core’ of the capitalist world-economy” (Arrighi, p. 332). At an earlier date, a greater Japan was Arrighi’s candidate for hegemon. More recently, shortly before Arrighi’s death and with Japan in a prolonged stagnation that was stretching into its third decade, he appears to assign the role to China. Laying aside whether or not these estimates were properly based in socio-economic fact, this strand of Arrighi’s approach is biased towards the possibility of a new long wave of capitalist accumulation, a ‘new equilibrium’, with all of the non-revolutionary implications that this would involve.

In my opinion this lingering reluctance to see a break in the pattern of essentially repetitive cycles of capital accumulation, although on larger scales and with shorter durations, is a major weakness. This is the case even taking into account Arrighi’s recognition that there are some qualitative changes from one cycle to the next that do imply broader and deeper questions about future possibilities. However, I think that this limited approach is at odds with another strand of Arrighi’s presentation that I like much more. Consider this passage from the concluding chapter of the book:

The uncontainability of violence in the contemporary world is closely associated with the withering away of the modern system of territorial states as the primary locus of world power…Combined with the internalization of world-scale processes of production and exchange within the organizational domains of transnational corporations, and with the resurgence of suprastatal world financial markets, these unprecedented restrictions and expectations have translated into strong pressures to relocate the authority of nation-states both upward and downward.” (Arrighi, p. 331)

“Hollow states”

Arrighi died in early 2009 and all versions and updates of this book were finished well before the events of 2008. Nevertheless I find this passage extremely relevant to the period that was initiated by the current crisis. The ‘withering away of the modern system of territorial states” seems to me to raise the ‘hollow state’ issue that I’ve been kicking around recently. The “suprastatal world financial markets,” that Arrighi sees as major active factors precipitating the “withering” process, are just another way of presenting the disruptive impacts of an active and growing – and increasingly problematic – global financial system.

I wouldn’t characterize the results quite as Arrighi does in this citation: “strong pressures to relocate the authority of national-states both upward and downward.” Rather than relocating the authority up and down, it seems to me that the new sources of authority trends are relocating at a diagonal from the previous institutional frameworks. More important, the processes of breakdown in hegemony and command occur at a distance in both space and time from the counter processes of that might activate new and relocated sites of command and acquiescence; the new “…networks of coercion…” (Arrighi, p. xi), that will be essential to any new cycle of capitalist accumulation. But perhaps this is more a disagreement with language than substance. In any case, I like this Arrighi. Consider another aspect of his argument:

In the scheme of things proposed here, the close historical tie between capitalism and the modern inter-state system is just as much one of contradiction as it is one of unity…capitalism and national states grew up together, and presumably depended on each other in some way, yet capitalists and centers of capital accumulation often offered concerted resistance to the extension of state power…the division of the world into competing political jurisdictions does not necessarily benefit the capitalist accumulation of capital.” (Arrighi, p. 32)

According to Arrighi, the emergence of the worldwide capitalist system has involved distinct historic cycles of accumulation that have been linked to the emergence of dominant hegemonic  political structures, primarily nation states, that, “…can credibly claim to be the motor force of a general expansion of the collective power of rulers vis a vis subjects” (Arrighi, p. 30 his emphasis). These hegemonic political structures play a distinct role in both expediting and defending specific capitalist accumulation processes. However, Arrighi perceptively notes that they also are the center of “territorialist” complexes of state formations and civil societies that embody, “…modes of rule… logics of power…” (Arrighi, p. 33), that are distinct from those of capitalist modes of production.

These differences are currently exacerbated to the point of rupture by the increasing influence of the suprastate elements of capital accumulation; transnational corporations; global productive processes and labor flows, and, above all, global financial markets dealing with magnitudes far in excess of any measure of the values of actual production, and more and more commonly, far in excess of the economic resources commanded by and encompassed within any state formation. All of this becomes less and less compatible with the viability and the success of any of these, “competing political jurisdictions”.

So let me turn around the Arrighi citation a bit and ask, isn’t it also true and perhaps more relevant, that the current mode of “…accumulation of capital…”, the business model as they say on CNBC, does not fully “benefit” any “…political jurisdiction…”? And if the growing organization of production within transnational economic structures and the pervasiveness of the global pursuit of ficticious capital translates, “… into strong pressures to relocate the authority of nation-state both upward and downward…”; these same pressures also qualitatively disrupt the traditional state forms, and raise the question of the viability of the essentially bourgeois category of nation-state. This makes for large difficulties in either relocating the various state functions “upward,” to the transnational level, or “downward,” to more local forms or to those emerging quasi-state functional capacities in what previously was considered the private sphere. (Perhaps this latter development shouldn’t be depicted as “downward.”) Thus the emergence of the phenomena of ‘hollow states’ which can’t effectively provide the essential ‘networks of coercion’ and the viable common ruling class project on which further development of new sites of capitalist accumulation depend.

I think that where Arrighi emphasizes the division of the world into competing territorial political jurisdictions that don’t adequately facilitate capital accumulation; the other side of the contradiction is equally, if not more, important. The current accumulation of (ficticious) capital does not benefit any unique array of ‘political jurisdictions’, and, indeed, it undermines most without much discrimination. This extends from the inability of local and regional governments to control adequate revenue streams to allow them to deliver political goods to their constituents, to the inability of supranational capitalist governmental structures to impose discipline on their national or regional components – or on particular segments of capital. I think that the tendency towards various types of financial crisis in this late stage of a cycle of capitalist development is presenting the ‘territorialist’ state complexes with major dilemmas. Specifically, it is proving very difficult to implement a capitalist resolution of a financial crisis through the existing territorial nation state institutional structures without disrupting those structures and eroding essential elements of their internal hegemonic character. This is a reality that we can see in the news of the day – and I mean this quite literally.

State power

I would like to end this by briefly attempting to tie it to some recent discussions of the state and state power. Let’s begin with another reference from a different article, on Marx and the State. (I owe this reference to John Garvey, an editor at Insurgent Notes.) The following is a surprisingly valuable passage from an article which otherwise is a routine defense of a ‘good’ Marx against a bad Kautsky and, particularly, a bad Lenin. The article argues that, according to the relatively early Marx:

The state is alien and detached from civil society precisely because bourgeois civil society is inherently divided. As Marx would put it in The German Ideology, “the practical struggle of these particular interests, which actually constantly run counter to the common and illusory common interests, necessitates practical intervention and restraint by the illusory ‘general’ interest in the form of the state.

This conception of the capitalist state, and note that it is the capitalist state, not the state in general that we are discussing, clarifies some potential stress lines. Capitalist political stability requires a state form that can effectively embody a common (capitalist) class interest derived from a mess of conflicting “particular (capitalist) interests”. But this same state form must integrate this common capitalist interest with a set of “illusory common interests,” based in the subordinated side of the consciousness of the oppressed and exploited; the side in which their needs and possibilities are confined within the limits of capital. This all then is aggregated into a “general interest” which is illusory in the sense that it needs to abstract from real differences and disguise real antagonisms as commonalities. Capitalist stability depends on the maintenance of an “…illusory ‘general’ interest”; illusory precisely because it integrates the real, but divergent interests common to capital with the fake ‘illusory common interests’ that rest on capital’s hegemony over the classes it oppresses and exploits. (I see this as an argument of Marx’s that anticipates Gramsci’s notion of the hegemonic capacity of the “classe dirigente.”) And as the earlier references to Badiou implied, it is the inadequacy of the break with this “illusory common” that dilutes revolutionary consciousness and deflects the trajectory of insurgent movements.

Nevertheless, capitalism does have this complex functional problem of disguising the fact that they are ‘ruled’ to those that actually are ruled – a problem with constantly changing characteristics requiring that the shape of the ‘rule’ must constantly be reset to adapt to changing circumstances, but without jeopardizing its capacity to appear as a manifestation of “common interest.” In terms of this discussion, these changing circumstances are those provided by the metastasized crisis of the global financial system and that is why it is so specifically important to the current situation.

Transnational financialization has created situations where particular competitive interests of blocs of capital can’t be adequately restrained by the intervention of any state since they have accumulated and can wield economic and political power that often exceeds and always compromises that which is available to any existing state or sub-state formation – including the most powerful of them, the U.S. nation state. This inability of the capitalist state formations to discipline the disparate competing tendencies in the class(es ?) they represent, undermines the material foundation for maintaining the illusory common interests on which the incorporation and subordination of the working classes have depended. This brings the issues of the legitimacy of state power closer to the surface and challenges to it develop more frequently and sharply. And, of course, any forceful exercise of state power against the working classes evokes a broader and deeper resistance, while exacerbating the contradictory elements of the “particular interests” within the ruling class.

I want to cut this off here with just one disconnected conclusion. While it will never be self evident just what this involves; our efforts should go to exacerbate this contradiction by focusing on the aspect of collective resistance that, as Badiou said, “divides itself from the old.” Not as easy to do as it is to say – but a point to be kept in mind.

Related posts:

1. A crisis of financial hegemony?
2. The crisis, financialization, and “cognitive capitalism”
3. Some contributions to thinking in the present moment

The following is republished here from the symptom.

Our task is thus to remain faithful to this eternal Idea of communism: to the egalitarian spirit kept alive over thousands of years in revolts and utopian dreams. The problem is how to avoid the choice between radical social uprisings which end in defeat, unable to stabilize themselves in a new order, and the retreat into an ideal displaced to a domain outside social reality.

……

Our situation is the very opposite of the classical twentieth-century predicament in which the Left knew what it had to do, but simply had to wait patiently for the opportunity to offer itself. Today, we do not know what we have to do, but we have to act now, because the consequences of inaction could be catastrophic. We will have to risk taking steps into the abyss of the New in totally inappropriate situations….

Communism is today not the name of a solution but the name of a problem….

Why the Idea and Why Communism?

Slavoj Zizek

The Left is facing the difficult task of emphasizing that we are dealing withpolitical economy—that there is nothing “natural” in the present crisis, that the existing global economic system relies on a series of political decisions—while simultaneously acknowledging that, insofar as we remain within the capitalist system, violating its rules will indeed cause economic breakdown, since the system obeys a pseudo-natural logic of its own. So, although we are clearly entering a new phase of enhanced exploitation, facilitated by global market conditions (outsourcing, etc.), we should also bear in mind that this is not the result of an evil plot by capitalists, but an urgency imposed by the functioning of the system itself, always on the brink of financial collapse. For this reason, what is now required is not a moralizing critique of capitalism, but the full re-affirmation of the Idea of communism.

The Idea of communism, as elaborated by Badiou, remains a Kantian regulative idea lacking any mediation with historical reality. Badiou emphatically rejects any such mediation as a regression to an historicist evolutionism which betrays the purity of the Idea, reducing it to a positive order of Being (the Revolution conceived as a moment of the positive historical process). This Kantian mode of reference effectively allows us to characterize Badiou’s deployment of the “communist hypothesis” as a Kritik der reinen Kommunismus. As such, it invites us to repeat the passage from Kant to Hegel—to re-conceive the Idea of communism as an Idea in the Hegelian sense, that is, as an Idea which is in the process of its own actualization. The Idea that “makes itself what it is” is thus no longer a concept opposed to reality as its lifeless shadow, but one which gives reality and existence to itself. Recall Hegel’s infamous “idealist” formula according to which Spirit is its own result, the product of itself. Such statements usually provoke sarcastic “materialist” comments (“so it is not actual people who think and realize ideas, but Spirit itself, which, like Baron Munchhausen, pulls itself up by its own hair . . .”). But consider, for example, a religious Idea which catches the spirit of the masses and becomes a major historical force? In a way, is this not a case of an Idea actualizing itself, becoming a “product of itself”? Does it not, in a kind of closed loop, motivate people to fight for it and to realize it? What the notion of the Idea as a product of itself makes visible is thus not a process of idealist self-engendering, but the materialist fact that an Idea exists only in and through the activity of the individuals engaged with it and motivated by it. What we have here is emphatically not the kind of historicist/evolutionist position that Badiou rejects, but something much more radical: an insight into how historical reality itself is not a positive order, but a “not-all” which points towards its own future. It is this inclusion of the future as the gap in the present order that renders the latter “not- all,” ontologically incomplete, and thus explodes the self-enclosure of the historicist/evolutionary process. In short, it is this gap which enables us to distinguish historicity proper from historicism.

Why, then, the Idea of communism? For three reasons, which echo the Lacanian triad of the I-S-R: at the Imaginary level, because it is necessary to maintain continuity with the long tradition of radical millenarian and egalitarian rebellions; at the Symbolic level, because we need to determine the precise conditions under which, in each historical epoch, the space for communism may be opened up; finally, at the level of the Real, because we must assume the harshness of what Badiou calls the eternal communist invariants (egalitarian justice, voluntarism, terror, “trust in the people”). Such an Idea of communism is clearly opposed to socialism, which is precisely not an Idea, but a vague communitarian notion applicable to all kinds of organic social bonds, from spiritualized ideas of solidarity (“we are all part of the same body”) right up to fascist corporatism. The Really Existing Socialist states were precisely that: positively existing states, whereas communism is in its very notion anti-statist.

Where does this eternal communist Idea come from? Is it part of human nature, or, as Habermasians propose, an ethical premise (of equality or reciprocal recognition) inscribed into the universal symbolic order? Its eternal character cannot, after all, be accounted for by specific historical conditions. The key to resolving this problem is to focus on that against which the communist Idea rebels: namely, the hierarchical social body whose ideology was first formulated in great sacred texts such as The Book of Manu. As was demonstrated by Louis Dumont in his Homo hierarchicus, social hierarchy is always inconsistent, that is, its very structure relies on a paradoxical reversal (the higher sphere is, of course, higher than the lower, but, within the lower order, the lower is higher than the higher) on account of which the social hierarchy can never fully encompass all its elements. It is this constitutive inconsistency that gives birth to what Rancière calls “the part of no-part,” that singular element which remains out of place in the hierarchical order, and, as such, functions as a singular universal, giving body to the universality of the society in question. The communist Idea, then, is the eternal demand co-substantial with this element that lacks its proper place in the social hierarchy (“we are nothing, and we want to be all”).

Our task is thus to remain faithful to this eternal Idea of communism: to the egalitarian spirit kept alive over thousands of years in revolts and utopian dreams, in radical movements from Spartacus to Thomas Müntzer, including within the great religions (Buddhism versus Hinduism, Daoism or Legalism versus Confucianism, etc.). The problem is how to avoid the choice between radical social uprisings which end in defeat, unable to stabilize themselves in a new order, and the retreat into an ideal displaced to a domain outside social reality (for Buddhism we are all equal—in nirvana). It is here that the originality of Western thought becomes clear, particularly in its three great historical ruptures: Greek philosophy’s break with the mythical universe; Christianity’s break with the pagan universe; and modern democracy’s break with traditional authority. In each case, the egalitarian spirit is transposed into a new positive order (limited, but nonetheless actual).

In short, the wager of Western thought is that radical negativity (whose first and immediate expression is egalitarian terror) is not condemned to being expressed in short ecstatic outbursts after which things are returned to normal. On the contrary, radical negativity, as the undermining of every traditional hierarchy, has the potential to articulate itself in a positive order within which it acquires the stability of a new form of life. Such is the meaning of the Holy Spirit in Christianity: faith can not only be expressed in, but also exists as, the collective of believers. And this faith is itself based on “terror,” as indicated by Christ’s insistence that he brings a sword, not peace, that whoever does not hate his father and mother is not a true follower, and so on. The content of this terror thus involves the rejection of all traditional hierarchical and community ties, with the wager that a different collective link is possible—an egalitarian bond between believers connected by agape as political love.

Democracy itself provides another example of such an egalitarian link based on terror. As Claude Lefort notes, the democratic axiom is that the place of power is empty, that there is no one directly qualified for the vacancy, either by tradition, charisma, or leadership qualities. This is why, before democracy can enter the stage, terror has to do its work, forever dissociating the place of power from any natural or directly qualified pretender: the gap between this place and those who temporarily occupy it must be maintained at all costs. This is also why Hegel’s deduction of the monarchy can be given a democratic supplement: Hegel insists on the monarch as the “irrational” (i.e. contingent) head of state precisely in order to keep the summit of state power apart from the expertise embodied in the state bureaucracy. While the bureaucrats are chosen on account of their abilities and qualifications, the king is the king by birth— that is, ultimately, he is chosen by lot, on account of natural contingency. The danger Hegel was trying to avoid here exploded a century later in Stalinist bureaucracy, which was precisely the rule of (Communist) experts: Stalin is not a figure of a master, but the one who “really knows,” an expert in all imaginable fields, from economy to linguistics, from biology to philosophy.

We can well imagine a democratic procedure maintaining the same gap on account of the irreducible moment of contingency in every electoral result: far from being a limitation, the fact that elections do not pretend to select the most qualified person is what protects them from the totalitarian temptation (which is why, as was already clear to the Ancient Greeks, choosing rulers by lot is the most democratic form of selection). That is to say, as Lefort has again demonstrated, the achievement of democracy is to turn what for traditional authoritarian power is the moment of greatest crisis—the moment of transition from one master to another, the panic- inducing instant at which “the throne is empty”—into the very source of its strength: democratic elections thus represent the passage through that zero-point at which the complex network of social links is dissolved into a purely quantitative multiplicity of individuals whose votes are mechanically counted. The moment of terror, of the dissolution of all hierarchical links, is thereby re-enacted and transformed into the foundation of a new and stable political order.

Measured by his own standards of what a rational state should be, Hegel was thus perhaps wrong to fear universal democratic suffrage (see his nervous rejection of the English Reform Bill in 1832. It is precisely democracy (universal suffrage) which, much more appropriately than Hegel’s own State of estates, performs the “magic” trick of converting radical negativity into a new political order: in democracy, the negativity of terror (the destruction of everyone who pretends to identify with the place of power), is aufgehobenand turned into the positive form of the democratic procedure.

From democracy to —

The question today, now that we know the limitations of that formal procedure, is whether we can imagine a step further in this process whereby egalitarian negativity reverts into a new positive order. We should look for traces of such an order in different domains, including in scientific communities. The way the CERN community functions is indicative here: in an almost utopian manner, individual efforts are undertaken in a collective non-hierarchical spirit, and dedication to the scientific cause (to recreate the conditions of the Big Bang) far outweighs any material considerations. But are such traces, no matter how sublime, merely that—marginal traces?

In his intervention at the 2010 Marxism conference in London (organized by the Socialist Workers’ Party), Alex Callinicos evoked his dream of a future communist society in which there would be museums of capitalism, displaying to the public the artifacts of this irrational and inhuman social formation. The unintended irony of this dream is that today, the only museums of this kind are museums of Communism, displaying its horrors. So, again, what to do in such a situation? Two years before his death, when it became clear that there would be no immediate European revolution, and that the idea of building socialism in one country was nonsense, Lenin wrote: “What if the complete hopelessness of the situation, by stimulating the efforts of the workers and peasants tenfold, offered us the opportunity to create the fundamental requisites of civilization in a different way from that of the West European countries?”[1]

Is this not the predicament of the Morales government in Bolivia, of the (former) Aristide government in Haiti, of the Maoist government in Nepal? They came to power through “fair” democratic elections, rather than insurrection, but having gained power, they exerted it in a way which was (partially, at least) “non-statist”: directly mobilizing their grassroots supporters, by-passing the Party-State network. Their situation is “objectively” hopeless: the whole drift of history is against them, they cannot rely on any “objective tendencies” pushing in their direction, all they can do is to improvise, do what they can in a desperate situation. Nevertheless, does this not give them a unique freedom? (And are we—the contemporary Left—not in exactly the same situation?) It is tempting to apply here the old distinction between “freedom from” and “freedom for”: does their freedom from History (with its laws and objective tendencies) not sustain their freedom for creative experimenting? In their activity, they can rely only on the collective will of their supporters.

According to Badiou, “The model of the centralized party made possible a new form of power that was nothing less than the power of the party itself. We are now at what I call a ‘distance from the State.’ This is first of all because the question of power is no longer ‘immediate’: nowhere does a ‘taking power’ in the insurrectional sense seem possible today.”[2] But does this not rely on an all too simple alternative? What about heroically assuming whatever power may be available—in the full awareness that the “objective conditions” are not “mature” enough for radical change— and, against the grain, do what one can?

Let us return to the situation in Greece in the summer of 2010, when popular discontent brought about the delegitimization of the entire political class and the country approached a power vacuum. Had there been any chance for the Left to take over state power, what could it have done in such a situation of “complete hopelessness”? Of course (if we may permit ourselves this personification), the capitalist system would have gleefully allowed the Left to take over, if only to ensure that Greece ended up in a state of economic chaos which would then serve as a severe lesson to others. Nevertheless, despite such dangers, wherever an opening for taking power does arise, the Left should seize the opportunity and confront the problems head-on, making the best of a bad situation (in the case of Greece: renegotiating the debt, mobilizing European solidarity and popular support for its predicament). The tragedy of politics is that there will never be a “good” moment to seize power: the opportunity will always offer itself at the worst possible moment (characterized by economic fiasco, ecological catastrophe, civil unrest, etc.), when the ruling political class has lost its legitimacy and the fascist-populist threat lurks in the background. For example, the Scandinavian countries, while continuing to maintain high levels of social equality and a powerful Welfare State, also score very well on global competitiveness: proof that “generous, relatively egalitarian welfare states should not be seen as utopias or protected enclaves, but can also be highly competitive participants in the world market. In other words, even within the parameters of global capitalism there are many degrees of freedom for radical social alternatives.”[3]

Engendering monsters

Perhaps the most succinct characterization of the epoch which began with the First World War is the well-known phrase attributed to Gramsci: “The old world is dying away, and the new world struggles to come forth: now is the time of monsters.” Were Fascism and Stalinism not the twin monsters of the twentieth century, the one emerging out of the old world’s desperate attempts to survive, the other out of a misbegotten endeavor to build a new one? And what about the monsters we are engendering now, propelled by techno-gnostic dreams of a biogenetically controlled society? All the consequences should be drawn from this paradox: perhaps there is no direct passage to the New, at least not in the way we imagined it, and monsters necessarily emerge in any attempt to force that passage.

One sign of a new rise of this monstrosity is that the ruling classes seem less and less able to rule, even in their own interests. Take the fate of Christians in the Middle East. Over the last two millennia, they have survived a series of calamities, from the end of the Roman Empire through defeat in crusades, the decolonization of the Arab countries, the Khomeini revolution in Iran, etc.—with the notable exception of Saudi Arabia, the main US ally in this region, where there are no autochthonous Christians. In Iraq, there were approximately one million of them under Saddam, leading exactly the same lives as other Iraqi subjects, with one of them, Tariq Aziz, even occupying the high post of foreign minister and becoming Saddam’s confidante. But then, something weird happened to Iraqi Christians, a true catastrophe—a Christian army occupied (or liberated, if you want) Iraq.

The Christian occupation army dissolved the secular Iraqi army and thus left the streets open to Muslim fundamentalist militias to terrorize both each other and the Christians. No wonder roughly half of Iraq’s Christians soon left the country, preferring even the terrorist-supporting Syria to a liberated Iraq under Christian military control. In 2010, things took a turn for the worse. Tariq Aziz, who had survived the previous trials, was condemned by a Shia court to death by hanging for his “perse- cution of Muslim parties” (i.e., his fight against Muslim fundamentalism) under Saddam. Bomb attacks on Christians and their churches followed one after the other, leaving dozens dead, so that finally, in early November 2010, the Baghdad archbishop Atanasios Davud appealed to his flock to leave Iraq: “Christians have to leave the beloved country of our ancestors and escape the intended ethnic cleansing. This is still better than getting killed one after the other.” And to dot the i, as it were, that same month it was reported that al Maliki had been confirmed as Iraqi prime minister thanks to Iranian support. So the result of the US intervention is that Iran, the prime agent of the axis of Evil, is edging closer to dominating Iraq politically.

US policy is thus definitively approaching a stage of madness, and not only in terms of domestic policy (as the Tea Party proposes to fight the national debt by lowering taxes, i.e., by raising the debt—one cannot but recall here Stalin’s well-known thesis that, in the Soviet Union, the state was withering away through the strengthening of its organs, especially its organs of police repression). In foreign policy also, the spread of Western Judeo-Christian values is organized by creating conditions which lead to the expulsion of Christians (who, maybe, could move to Iran . . .). This is definitely not a clash of civilizations, but a true dialogue and cooperation between the US and the Muslim fundamentalists.[4]

Our situation is thus the very opposite of the classical twentieth-century predicament in which the Left knew what it had to do (establish the dictatorship of the proletariat, etc.), but simply had to wait patiently for the opportunity to offer itself. Today, we do not know what we have to do, but we have to act now, because the consequences of inaction could be catastrophic. We will have to risk taking steps into the abyss of the New in totally inappropriate situations; we will have to reinvent aspects of the New just in order to maintain what was good in the Old (education, healthcare, etc.).

The journal in which Gramsci published his writings in the early 1920s was called L’Ordine nuovo (The New Order)—a title which was later appropriated by the extreme Right. Rather than seeing this later appropriation as revealing the “truth” of Gramsci’s use of the title—abandoning it as running counter to the rebellious freedom of an authentic Left—we should return to it as an index of the hard problem of defining the new order any revolution will have to establish after its success. In short, our times can be characterized as none other than Stalin characterized the atom bomb: not for those with weak nerves.

Communism is today not the name of a solution but the name of a problem: the problem of the commons in all its dimensions—the commons of nature as the substance of our life, the problem of our biogenetic commons, the problem of our cultural commons (“intellectual property”), and, last but not least, the problem of the commons as that universal space of humanity from which no one should be excluded. Whatever the solution might be, it will have to solve this problem.

NOTES

[1] Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 33, p. 479.

[2] Filippo Del Lucchese and Jason Smith, “‘We Need a Popular Discipline’: Contemporary Politics and the Crisis of the Negative.” Interview with Alain Badiou, Los Angeles, 7/2/2007. All unmarked quotes that follow are from the manuscript of this interview.

[3] Göran Therborn, “The Killing Fields of Inequality,” in From Linnaeus to the Future(s), Göteborg: Linnaeus University Press 2010, p. 190.

[4]I rely here on the analysis of Ervin Hkladniuk-Milharcic, Ljubljana.

Related posts:

1. How can communism come to be?
2. On The Idea Of Communism: Communism 2.0?
3. Zizek: Preserve the vacuum

We’ve had a continuing discussion on this site of the status, relevance, and use of Marxism (and other ‘-isms’ – Lenin, Mao, and anarch) today, in relation to revolutionary work or the possibilities of an emancipatory politics in today’s world. Most recently, we’ve had some debate and a series of contributions, beginning with my “Marxism or Anarchism or —-,” continuing through Vern Gray’s response, “One, Two, Many Marxisms?” and the comments to this by Nat W., myself, and Vern Gray.

Here I want to continue one strand of that discussion: the question of the adequacy of Marxism (or Maoism, or —) as the basis for an emancipatory politics today. My own position is that, although I’ve been and in some sense still am a Marxist and a Maoist (a sense which will hopefully be made clearer below), I don’t believe that either or both provide such a basis. We need what we haven’t got.

At one point in the discussion I polemicized against the model of moving from Marxist (or Marxist-Leninist, or MLM) theory and its conclusions, applying them to our present situation, using creativity and “the Marxist method” to overcome the problems stemming from the fact that the world has changed, and thereby creating a revolutionary synthesis which would serve as a foundation for a revolutionary praxis.

I then said,

This is the model that I am contesting. Such a process will not result in a revolutionary praxis today. Something like this model may have been sufficient in the past (and this is worth discussing much further), but it’s radically inadequate today. Why? Not simply because the world has changed. But because the basic Marxist template, in all its permutations, has become exhausted—not Marxism as analysis, but Marxism as an unfolding nexus of social theory-and-practice. (In Badiou’s terms, this truth-process has become saturated.)

Vern Gray replies:

 I must admit that I do not understand how it could be that Marxism as analysis has not been “exhausted,” but that it has become exhausted as an “unfolding nexus of social theory-and-practice.” What sort of process of unfolding theory-and-practice is not informed by, and then more than that, integrated with, a good analysis?

Nat W. states that he looks at

MLM [Marxism-Leninism-Maoism] as method and a launching pad from which to start reconception…. It maybe true that starting from any method of analysis (and certainly any “body of doctrine”) will not necessarily lead to a revolutionary praxis. That being said, I think that certain methods of analysis (particularly MLM) give us a better chance at arriving at such a praxis….If it is indeed true that Marxism has become saturated then that is one thing. That must be shown in its own right.

What’s at issue

The issue that has been most explicit within this back-and-forth is that of Marxism (and Maoism) in their relation to an active politics, especially today. The relation between these, in my view, is not simple and requires delicate and thoughtful treatment (which some of our formulations, mine included, have not embodied).

In the intellectual work and questing which is a strong aspect of what we need today, we need a wide intellectual horizon, and active exploration, including in unlikely places. But the idea that all our resources are on a level, that every thinker is of equal potential value – this sort of flaccid eclecticism (which what I’ve said has been taken to imply) is very far from anything I’ve ever held or thought. We are situated historically in relation to a revolutionary tradition which is broadly Marxist, and so we have a particular and continuing relation to Marx. (At the risk of drawing fire from a different quarter, I would say that this is also true of anarchism in its revolutionary strands. But that’s another discussion.)

But the nature of this relation, as well as of its terms, require careful delineation. Above I used the phrase “a revolutionary tradition which is broadly Marxist,” and it is here that the question of “many Marxisms”should be situated. Analytically the unity and diversity of Marx’s work, as well as of Marxism, is an important and interesting topic, which would require a very long discussion. Politically the question is simpler, in that a politics which takes there to be a “one true Marxism” whose articulation and defense is a primary political task, or which will guide the “one true revolutionary politics” – this, I hold, is a mistaken and sterile approach to politics and to the search for a political way forward, especially now. Likewise, if the thought is that Marx formulated a science which has been and should be the basis of a politics (a position which has historically had currency) – no.

What is needed, and what has sometimes existed (but does not now), is theory within the context of which an actual emancipatory politics is situated, lives and grows. Marxism has played that role – or, rather, Marxism is the name for a trajectory of a nexus of revolutionary striving and aspiration, of thinking/acting,

This mention of thinking/acting points to what I believe is the central issue here. I will use, for the purposes of this short essay, some of the vocabulary with which we’re all familiar – practice/theory, primarily – rather than Badiou’s terminology (event, truth-process, fidelity, etc.), and I want to start with some remarks about the concept of practice as I understand it.

The primacy of practice

We are all familiar with the thesis that practice is primary within the practice/theory dialectic. This statement has, as I conceive it, two senses, which are analogous to the two senses of the priority of production in relation to distribution, exchange and consumption, delineated by Marx in the Introduction to the Grundrisse. Production is primary within the entire process described by the four terms, in that it is the point of departure within a process, which overall forms unity; but production is also primary over all the elements of the process, including itself in its more restricted identity within the process.

Likewise, practice is primary in that it forms the point of departure within the process of practice/theory; but practice is also primary overall, in relation to both itself and theory as elements within the process. (There are analogies in this – but also disanalogies – to Mao’s distinction between principal aspect of a contradiction and principal contradiction.)

To state it in another way: we could say that there are certain practices in which we are engaged. Within a practice – a project, a life activity – there is both theory and practice: these are the dialectical moments within the process. Of these moments, practice is the point of departure, primary as between them. But practice as the overall project, which may be said to constitute a practice, is primary or principal with regard to both its moments. (It was this relation that I have been trying to point to, no doubt obscurely, by talking of the “practice/theory nexus.”)

Detachability

I think that this understanding of practice has strong implications for how we construe the body of what we’ve been accustomed to call revolutionary theory. Specifically: Is this theory a knowledge, achieved and detachable, or is it the theory of a revolutionary practice – in the larger sense of practice sketched above – integral to that practice and bound to it by a thousand threads? I hold that it is the latter.

(I borrow the term detachable from logic: once a conclusion – a theorem perhaps – has been proved, it can be detached from the premises and the proof-process through which it was generated, and asserted in itself.)

It will be objected that this contrast is too stark, that this is not a strict dichotomy; and in a certain complex way (which I hope to be able to explain at a later time) this is true. But drawing the contrast sharply serves a purpose: it is the integrality of emancipatory theory to its practice which requires emphasis – always, but especially today.

What happens when that practice, the practice to which the theory is bound and of which it is a part, comes to an end (or virtually so)? That is the question that frames our situation, the question that has been at issue, in reality, for more than 30 years (unrecognized though it may have been by many of us). It is the question, in Badiou’s terms, of the saturation of a truth process.

Continuity and break

There is a strong continuity – recognized by us and felt by those who participated – running from Marx and Engels, the “red edge” of the revolutions of 1848, and then later the Paris Commune, through Lenin and the Russian Revolution and the Chinese Revolution and Mao. (For Badiou there are some discontinuities and differences of truth-processes here, but I’ll leave that aside for now.)  I do not view this sequence, let me make clear, as a march of orthodoxy or “the correct line,” proved through “successful revolutions” and excluding assorted others (anarchists, Trotskyists, council communists, “Western Marxist” thinkers, etc.) as traitors, heretics, or utterly mistaken wanderers in the swamp. The relationships here are far more complex.

Historically there is a relatively continuous trajectory. That continuity has been broken, not simply as a form of thinking or as a theoretical matter, but as a practice or chain of practices in the world. Popular upheavals from the late 1970s on, from the Iranian Revolution and Solidarity inPoland, through the recent “Arab spring,” have not occurred, have not had their reference points, within this Marxist tradition. The continuity of this trajectory has been decisively broken.

Thirty years plus – this is a long stretch of world history, which demands real investigation, thought, and explanation. To declare that “nonetheless, I remain true to the principles of Marxism (of Maoism, of —)” is not an instance of any of these. And to attribute this more than thirty-year break to the errors or betrayals of leaders or “the subjective forces,” or on the other hand to “objective factors,” is not an explanation but simply a refusal to think. (To be clear, none of these descriptions is a reference to anyone who has contributed to the discussion on this site; but we’re probably all familiar with exemplars of these attitudes.)

We are left with the residue of an exhausted truth-process, or to put it differently, theories for which the social practice has for the most part died or ceased – the social practice, that is, of which these theories were once a living, changing part.

We cannot simply use these theories as a basis or guide to resurrect the practice or practices of which they were once an integral part. Nor can we wait for an outbreak or an upsurge, then expect to come into them with our assured theories (our Marxism, our Maoism, our specific strand of anarchism) and have those theories take hold and play a leading role. (All of us with much political experience can think of tens or hundreds of examples here.)

But we also stand in a position to this revolutionary tradition, and to the theories which have been part of it – a trajectory which is not just “our tradition” but that of the struggles and highest aspirations of “the masses” – of humanity in fact, which is a continuing tradition and present actuality. The question now is what form – in both practice and theory – these strivings can take, in order to continue as a communist quest, to reassert “the communist hypothesis.”

That, in short form, is our situation today, and the conditions of our work.

Related posts:

1. John Steele: Badiou — Another Take on Revolutionary Theory

Vern Gray has written several essays appearing on khukuri.

I think it is confusing, and leads in a wrong direction, to conclude that there were or are “many Marxisms.”… I would argue that some ideologies and politics should be assigned a “privileged position”—not that our conclusions should be limited by them (we have to see where our investigation and exploration go) but that they should be given emphasis in the “palette” we draw from in going forward…I am a Maoist but not an “unreconstructed Maoist.” I am not prepared (not yet, anyway) to uphold the idea of “post-Maoism.”

Two, Three, Many Marxisms…?

Vern Gray

Here I will make some comments on John Steele’s article “Marxism or Anarchism or —?“ and discuss at more length a few of the questions it addresses. I will go beyond what he has written but, I hope, maintain a focus on the logic of it so as to see where some of his arguments may lead.

Steele is right, I think, that there is no clearly existing “left,” certainly on a world scale, either subjectively or objectively. The reason is not that the imperialist system does not create the urgent need for the formation of a left; the core reason is that there is nowhere near the clarity, coherence, or correctness of political and ideological line that needs to be at the core of it. Accordingly, forging that kind of line, and the practical/political experimentation that Steele speaks of, are of critical importance if there is to be a chance of revolution.

I agree, completely, that circling the wagons and posing the question as “Marxism vs. anarchism” is not a fruitful way of approaching the need for a new understanding of a politics that can change the world. Rather, there is clearly a need to learn from both of these trends, to take the insights of both, critically sum up the history of revolutionary practice, and dig into the enormous problems facing us.

So the pivotal thing is to begin to make progress on identifying key questions and finding the answers to them. Here, we need to draw on all possible sources of understanding in every sphere. To the extent that Marxism, as developed up to this point in history, is able to help us chart this course, it is of value; to the extent that it is not, it needs to be shed. And the same for anarchism. The point is not to declare an allegiance to either or an opposition to the other but to deeply investigate and analyze conditions, engage in political experimentation (Steele borrows from Badiou and I think it’s a phrase that conveys the right novelty and flexibility), and forge an ideology and politics that can guide and learn from revolutionary practice. This is a brief summary of my understanding of the basic points in Steele’s article, and as far as this goes, I agree with it.

That said, I think there are some problems in his approach. Here I will speak to three of them: (I) the question of “many Marxisms”; (II) the character of Marxism as a science (or not); (III) the role of practice in evaluating the history and current status of Marxism. I want to draw out some of what I consider to be potential implications of Steele’s approach to these questions, even where he does not state them. I don’t mean to say that all these implications necessarily follow from what he has written, any more than the historical development of Marxism consisted of a simple emergent process that was all coded in the fundamental DNA of Marx’s views—a position whose invalidity Steele points out. (That point leads to an interesting discussion that I will take up at another time.) But it’s important to get into the logic of some of Steele’s arguments. In doing so, I may run the risk of putting some words into his mouth. But if I do so, I’m sure he’ll point it out.

I

Steele is right to call attention to the fact that during his life Marx’s thought underwent considerable development and change on many key issues. It would be wrong to look at only one or two aspects or periods in it and generalize to all the others. His views on the state changed, particularly as a result of the Paris Commune experience. In political economy, Capital went well beyond, and contradicted, some of his earlier writings. In philosophy, an earlier, more abstract view of dialectics increasingly gave way to an integration of dialectics and materialism into his writings on economics (and history). His views on the possibility of basing a communist politics on rural communes in Russia in the 1880s constituted a significant departure from his earlier and largely exclusive focus on the proletariat’s class struggle as a revolutionary instrument. These are all very important considerations, and it would be possible to multiply them. Anyone who latches on to only one or a few of the aspects of Marx’s thought and declares them to be the whole of Marxism commits a grave error.

Nevertheless, I think it is confusing, and leads in a wrong direction, to conclude that there were or are “many Marxisms.” Part of the reason I want to look at this is that Steele used the same formulation in his article “Why Is Badiou of Political Value?” I will digress briefly here to compare the situation in a few other fields.

Darwin’s work showed major shifts in emphasis between his beginning, overwhelmingly empirical summations of his vast collection of specimens in the 1830s, to the theoretical structure he began to build in the late 1830s and early 1840s (which reflected a significant reliance on Malthusian economics), and on to the later refinement and further development of his views on a vast range of questions including selection, speciation, extinction, the pace of change, the relationship of biological and geological changes, sexual selection, the implications of evolutionary theory for human prehistory, and so forth. Yet summing up his work in terms of “many Darwins,” or the work of those who have followed in his wake as “many Darwinisms,” is very problematic.

Similarly, Einstein’s early writings do not “contain in embryo” or imply his most significant theoretical contribution, the general theory of relativity, formulated roughly a decade after the special theory and his work on the particle-like character of light. Bohr formulated his theory of the atom more than a decade before the discovery of quantum mechanics, which developed a new atomic theory that supplanted his, but he nevertheless became the leading exponent of the new theory. But were there many Einsteins? Many Bohrs? Would there be some advantage to seeing things in those terms?

It seems to me that the theoretical understanding of these thinkers underwent development as they considered new problems, applied their best understanding of method, and came to new, sometimes contradictory conclusions. Further, it was the more developed, later views at which they eventually arrived that were most comprehensive and characteristic of their thought as a whole (even while they addressed new problems, and even though some of Einstein’s later thinking about quantum mechanics was, I believe, incorrect).

But wasn’t this the case with Marx as well?—a difference being that he was concerned with phenomena that were actually changing during his lifetime whereas the physicists, for example, studied parts of reality that had existed for a much longer period and did not undergo significant change during their lives.

There is a systematic, comprehensive character to Marxism as it has developed since the 1840s, Marx’s famous statement that he was “not a Marxist” notwithstanding. Althusser argues as much in the article that Steele linked to his own (I am grateful to Steele for making me aware of this article). While making many criticisms of the methodology and some of the conclusions of Capital, delving into Marx’s and Lenin’s theories of the state, dissecting Lenin’s (and Kautsky’s) views on the relationship between the development of theory and the workers’ movement, and identifying many of the contradictions, “gaps,” and “silences” to which Steele refers, Althusser nevertheless says:

Let us sum up. If we untangle all the theoretical, political, semantic and other difficulties in the texts of Marx and, especially, Lenin—difficulties that all too often encumber these texts and turn them against the ‘general line’ of a body of thought which has to be given its coherence if we are to think what it designates—we discover, precisely, a coherent body of thought. (“Marx in His Limits,” in Philosophy of the Encounter, p. 94.)

A “general line”; a coherent body of thought; but one whose overall contours and substance is only arrived at through a rigorous process of “untangling” and synthesis (which, of necessity, continues). There is no “ready-made” Marxism in final form whether in the texts of Marx, Lenin, or Mao.

I believe the emphasis on “many Marxes” points away from this understanding and tends to elevate some of the positions that Marx discarded for sound reasons to the level of others that he did not. It tends to flatten out a variety of “Marxisms” and in doing so to make Marxism a less sharp—and, perhaps, less flexible—instrument for understanding and changing the world. According to Steele, because any Marxism might hold something of value, no version of it, nor Marxism as a whole, holds a “privileged position.”

My point here is not that various trends should not be critically studied, or that anything of value in them can be ignored and not critically assimilated. Rather, it is that the starting point cannot simply be “let’s look anywhere, let’s not close any doors.” Now there is, of course, an element of truth to that. But if we let things rest there, we will not be able to find our way through the maze and come out the other end with the new revolutionary ideology and politics that Steele wants to create. I would argue that some ideologies and politics should be assigned a “privileged position”—not that our conclusions should be limited by them (we have to see where our investigation and exploration go) but that they should be given emphasis in the “palette” we draw from in going forward.

Again, this does not mean that we will necessarily end up with Maoism, or “post-Maoism,” or even Marxism more generally, as the basis for revolutionary politics. Mao himself did not make this assumption. As he comments in his speeches, after Khrushchev came to power in the USSR, the Chinese Communist Party, striving to understand what had happened, considered the possibility that Marxism itself was wrong.

Obviously very different from Steele’s perspective: Lenin’s view of the “three sources and three component parts of Marxism”—French socialism, German idealist philosophy, and English political economy. Marxism also drew on other sources, for example Greek philosophy, anthropological studies, environmental studies, and many others, and it developed beyond all those sources. But even though Lenin’s formulation is narrow, looking at Marxism as a whole, there is an overall body of work that adopted some basic positions and had a certain orientation toward them after Marx and Engels had died. The same is true of Lenin’s and Mao’s theoretical and practical work taken as a whole. They developed it “on the shoulders” of Marx and Engels’s contributions even as they took up new, more complex problems and constructed new theories.

I am not well versed in anarchist thought but I do not believe that it has this overall systematic character. If that is correct, it is fundamentally different from Marxism in this respect. This does not mean that anarchists have not had some penetrating insights about capitalism—and about elements of Marxism. But there is a huge gap between the two in terms of historical impact, theoretical development, revolutionary advances to learn from—but also, Marxists must honestly admit, errors and disasters to learn from.

II

Regarding the scientific character of Marxism: There is a tendency now, and it is expressed in Steele’s article, to deny or perhaps more precisely to marginalize the idea that there is any. This denial is often associated with certain other positions. One, which he explicitly suggests, is that the idea that there are scientific aspects to Marxism rests on the idea of a science of history, and further, that the idea of a science of history is bound up with the view that class society passes through a determined series of stages, from slavery to socialism and ultimately issuing forth with communism, whose eventual triumph is inevitable. It is true that this view is part of Marx’s thinking, from the Communist Manifesto to his later work, but it is not true that it is essential to Marxism as such or that it is a necessary consequence of a view that aspects of Marxism constitute a science. This is one of the things that must be “untangled.”

Marx of course did view his later work as a science. This is particularly evident regarding the science of political economy (or the scientific “critique of political economy”) in Capital, with its well-known statement at the beginning of the book about the need for science if one is to penetrate beyond surface appearance.

But in twentieth-century Marxism there are numerous other areas that should be understood as science: for example, Mao’s military theory; his views on the class struggle in socialist society; Lenin’s (now outdated) analysis of imperialism, etc. The fact that these are theories that were forged in times and places where the terrain has changed significantly, but in only very partially understood ways, does not mean that the approach in those theories was not scientific. Even though errors were made, and there are new phenomena that require going beyond the old theories, that does not mean that those theories were not, or not principally, scientific. For example, that socialism and communism are not truly inevitable does not refute the scientific character of (parts of) Marxism but upholds it; don’t we arrive at the “post-inevitablist” conclusion, in part, by applying a scientific Marxism (as well as other sciences)? Likewise, Marxist political economy is scientific even though Marx made some unwarranted assumptions. If the criterion of “true science” were that it be perfect, then, never mind a “science of history”—there would be no history of science either.

I am concerned about the tendency of some people nowadays to restrict the idea of science to natural science, or controlled laboratory experiments, or highly quantified science. These views restrict the idea of science and set up a gap between phenomena that can allegedly be understood scientifically, usually seen as those in the natural world, and those that cannot, whether those that are studied in politics, anthropology, or other fields (and some of these phenomena cannot be placed only in the natural or in the social world alone). This view not only rules out most of Marx’s work, but Darwin’s as well. Now it must be said that in various ways, greater quantification does not always make these theories more scientific. But a one-sided focus on that fact does not mean the theories are not nevertheless scientific, unless, again, one holds the view that quantification is a defining characteristic of any science.

To be clear, I am not on board with the notion that Marxism as a whole is a science. There are many components of it, including ethics, aesthetics, and some aspects of politics, that do not and need not meet the criteria of science; and while not denying that there is a dialectic between these aspects and the scientific aspects of Marxism, I think it is wrong to reduce everything to a science. It makes the idea of science lose all specificity, gives rise to “scientistic” errors, and contorts much of Marxism. I think that Marxism overall is a philosophy and at its core is Mao’s view that it is an orientation toward revolutionary practice.

The idea that there is a scientific character to aspects of Marxism, such as political economy, actually goes against the dogmatic tendency that Steele identifies—to see it as a set of pat answers to already articulated questions that have been already thought through, leaving us only to apply the pat answers to arrive at an overall path to liberation that can deviate from what is expected only with regard to some secondary contingencies and relatively unimportant details.

We have many new phenomena to analyze and come to grips with, and while Marxism offers a method and an example of how some perhaps similar problems have been solved in the past, a theoretical understanding of the new phenomena is yet to be forged. An orientation toward science is an essential part of this effort. This work largely remains ahead of us. At present the understanding of any number of areas is entirely inadequate to guide revolutionary practice, though there are seeds of understanding.

I do not attempt here to analyze the statement by Badiou that Steele cites, concerning what Marxism is and is not (and in particular that it is not a science of history). I will note, though, that in some ways it is similar to Mao’s “It’s right to rebel!” in its emphasis on creative human activity rather than some sort of deterministic view. (Mao not only “boiled down” Marxism to “one Marxism” but to one sentence!) But I hope Steele will write more about this.

III

On how to evaluate different political practices, ideologies, theories, etc.: I believe the principal criterion must be revolutionary practice in the broadest sense, historically and today. Steele makes no reference to this. As a result, a certain detachment from practice creeps in and affects some of his formulations. He does not pose the central question: which elements of Marxism (or often at the heart of his stated conception, which of Marx’s writings, or “which Marxism”) have been associated with a revolutionary practice that has actually changed the world at various times and places, moving in the direction of classless society, even though the efforts that drew on and were guided by Marxism eventually failed or were defeated (that time around, and so forth)?

He does not even raise this criterion when briefly referring to his own political history. He writes: “I take up Marx and Marxism simply because this is the tradition out of which I come, and which I know well. (And Marx is a figure—I’ll admit it—dear to me.)” That is all well and good, but it doesn’t get down to bedrock. Why does he come out of the Marxist tradition? Why did he enter it in the first place? Why is it the tradition he knows well? Because he engaged in revolutionary practice and he studied Marxism, not to the exclusion of anything else but as what became for him a core set of ideas. I have known Steele for a long time, and I think he took up, and takes up, Marxism because, first, of what happened in the world in the 1960s—and the role within the Chinese revolution, the Black liberation movement, or other movements that he came to understand Marxism, especially Maoism, to play—and then further because he studied it and found that it helped give him a method with which to take up many questions, not only in politics but in philosophy, political economy, and the arts. In other words, because, at least in its revolutionary form, Marxism was a key part of changing the world: this is what drew him to it. Here again, the criterion of revolutionary practice emerges as dominant. That, at any rate, is roughly how I understand Steele’s political history.

None of this is negated by the more critical, questioning attitude toward Maoism that he has developed over the years following the defeat of the revolutionary forces in China, the smashing or petering out of revolutionary movements in nearly all the other countries where they existed in the 1960s and 1970s, and the fractionation, disorientation, paltriness of vision, and ultimate passing of “the left” today.

Despite all these reversals and setbacks, there is much to learn from Maoism and the 1960s, and I think it is essential to differentiate between a Marxism that led a revolutionary struggle that came to victory and built a socialist society that advanced along the revolutionary road to a certain point, much further than any other; and the variety of “Marxisms” that have never succeeded in changing anything on anywhere near this level. This is not to dismiss the contributions of other Marxists (or “semi-Marxists,” etc.)—how wrong (and “Cominternist”) that would be. But there is a huge difference “on the scales of history,” so to speak.

This may be, or may seem to be, less “ecumenical” in its attitude toward anarchism, but it is accurate nonetheless.

This is the criterion of revolutionary practice. Steele does not refer to it in his article. His basic point, that we need to reexamine and learn from what is best in different ideologies and political trends, within the context of and focus on identifying and solving new problems, is right. But again, he has defined a plane of resources so that, in a sense, everything is everything. That’s the wrong “topology.” If the orientation is not firmly based on looking at things from the angle of changing the world, and centering our study of history on how different theoretical and political approaches have related to that standard, then it is not possible to learn the appropriate lessons from history and really put them to the service of changing the world.

It is on the basis of this criterion more than any other that I believe that in the history of hitherto existing Marxist or semi-Marxist trends, the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist trend is distinguished. We can learn from all these trends but first and foremost from this one. The question of its efficacy in changing the world on a large scale, up to a certain point, in the twentieth century is closely related to its being the most systematic and, yes, scientific trend in Marxism. The only real Marxism? I do not think it is correct to say that but if I had to choose between saying that and saying that there are “many Marxisms” and not distinguishing among them on the basis of practice, theoretical cogency, and effect, then yes, I would say that the only real Marxism of the second half of the twentieth century was Maoism. But I would prefer not to be boxed into that position.

While I do not think the position of “many Marxisms” is correct, I do think we should recognize a broad Marxist current that has mainly not been part of the Leninist tradition, akin to what Bill Martin calls the “philosophical Marxists,” that has maintained its radical integrity and not been co-opted into the social democratic or modern revisionist trends. I don’t know that “philosophical Marxists” is the best way to refer to these thinkers, but I do not think Marxism should be defined so narrowly that they are not under its umbrella. Mapping out the political and ideological field within today’s Marxism in this “bipartite” way—Maoism and philosophical Marxism—is, I think, preferable to the “many Marxisms” formulation. (To be clear: these are not the only revolutionary trends—there are revolutionary anarchism, revolutionary nationalism, and others.)

It is possible that the reason why Steele assigns less emphasis to what have been the most world-changing events and how they bear on what ideology should get a “preferential position” today is that, either he does not think the advances, especially in the USSR and China, were so profound as they are thought to be by the Maoists (and perhaps some of the post-Maoists); or that he thinks that the world has changed so much that today, Maoism no longer has such great currency as I am saying; or maybe that, in a world that has changed quite a bit, he finds it unproductive and distracting to spend much time contemplating the history of previous socialist revolutions. Or perhaps it’s a combination of all of these, or something else. But then it would be interesting to know what Steele thinks about those questions, or whether they bear very much on his views about revolutionary ideology and politics in today’s world.

In conclusion

So then where do things stand now? It is surely no good simply to “stand on Maoism” as though it were some sort of perfect, frozen system. I am a Maoist but not an “unreconstructed Maoist.” Yet I am not prepared (not yet, anyway) to uphold the idea of “post-Maoism” (though I respect the work of many who do, more or less, take this position, including Steele, Martin, and some of the other writers on this site). I think the question of “Maoism or post-Maoism” is related to the question of “many Marxisms,” so I will explore it a bit.

It seems that to be a post-Maoist one would have to have a fairly clear notion of what parts of Maoism would need to be discarded or were “saturated,” of at least a few of the key problems it cannot solve, and why. And then I think even more is required: there should be not only an identification of some problems that elude the “old paradigm,” but some serious movement toward new solutions. Without this, I don’t think the “post-“ prefix is merited. (To draw on another analogy from physics: I would say that Einstein was not yet a “post-Newtonian” because he realized, sometime in the 1890s, that Newtonian physics contained certain contradictions and could not explain certain phenomena, such as the results of the Michelson-Morley experiment in 1887. But the designation “post-Newtonian” probably was appropriate, or at least partially appropriate, by the time he published the special theory of relativity in 1905.)

By this argument, it would be right to see Maoism as it developed over several decades as a (form of) “post-Leninism.” But it would not be right to call it that (and it was not yet Maoism either) merely on the basis that, by the mid- to late 1920s, Mao had realized the disastrousness of the Leninist inheritance of urban insurrection as a military strategy for China.

The fact that Maoism did not solve some of the old problems—and I think Badiou is right in identifying the “party-state” formation as one of the key ones—or that it has not, and truly cannot on its own, come to a clear understanding of many of the new phenomena (such as today’s global economy) does not yet, in my view, mean that we should see ourselves as being in the stage of “post-Maoism.”

One of the most important questions is precisely: how do we understand today’s global economy? The understanding of objective conditions in this overall sense is basic to any revolutionary undertaking, certainly on a world scale, which is the only possible and sustainable one in today’s world. Pre-existing Marxism, even in its most advanced twentieth-century form, Maoism, has no ready answer to this. Neither does anarchism. Another example: how do we understand the type of political organization needed to lead and sustain a revolution; how is it similar to or different from previous forms of revolutionary (including Leninist) organization; and how does all of that relate to the construction of a “people’s state” (if there is such a thing) under socialism? Here, it seems to me, both Marxism and anarchism have some important things to say.

With regard to these questions, and others, both Marxism and anarchism have to be learned from (though I am, clearly, far from saying to an equal extent). But in some sense they have to “fall into position” with regard to a number of big, challenging, urgent questions. It is particularly in this light that the formulation of “Marxism vs. anarchism” begs the question. We must focus on identifying and solving the problems. The value of Marxist, anarchist, or other understandings, including entirely new ones, will come to be appreciated in this process.

Toward the end of his article, Steele writes:

The question is: where does politics, and communist praxis, begin—where does it start from? What I am saying: it does not start from Marxism (or any other basic philosophy or theory). Rather, Marxism is a resource for politics.

Now there are all kinds of ways in which a theory can be a resource (in the case of Marxism, some of these might be: to help understand the dynamics of capitalism, to help understand human history, perhaps, to help understand the relation of emancipatory politics and communist praxis to history). In this sense of resource, though (as a help to understanding, for example), Marxism has no privileged status: it’s a rich resource, but not the only one. It’s certainly not a complete theory that ‘explains everything,’ as it’s sometimes been taken to be.

My first observation is that most of this does not really go beyond Maoism. Yet more important, there is a straw-man argument running through it. Politics and communist praxis do not start from Marxism, philosophy, or theory: yes, Mao was very clear on that. He gave an argument, however, for where it does start from, and if we do not understand that so narrowly as “just our own practice” but as “world-historic revolutionary (and communist) practice,” which is then theorized, as in Marxism—then we have an answer to Steele’s question, at least a good one to start from. But he does not venture any answer.

Contrary to Steele, as I’ve argued above, Marxism does have a privileged status. Of course this does not mean it’s the only resource; but Steele blurs these two questions. Of course it does not “explain everything”: again, Mao is quite clear, with his formulation about how Marxism embraces but does not replace scientific and artistic theories, and so forth.

Why make these straw-man or question-begging arguments? What purpose do they serve?

By no means are they necessary in order to oppose the dogmatic, fruitless dance of “Marxism vs. anarchism” that he rightly rejects, or to look at all ideologies from the standpoint of what needs to be understood and how to understand it, grounded in what needs to be transformed.

No related posts.

Communism as actual

Bosteels begins by talking about the Idea of communism as a Kantian regulatory idea (a framing which Badiou broaches, and then seemingly retreats from, in The Idea of Communism), brings in Hegel on actuality as well as Marx’s statement in the German Ideology that communism is the real or actual movement which abolishes the present state of things, and then brings forward his own aim or hope:

The point is somehow to perceive communism not as a utopian not-yet for which reality will always fail to offer an adequate match, but as something which is always already here, in every moment of refusal of private appropriation, and in every act of collective reappropriation. (39)

All of this in the book’s Introduction. In the chapters, as said, he examines particular thinkers – Alberto Moreiras, Roberto Esposito, Jacques Ranciere, Alvaro Garcia Linera, of course Alain Badiou, and the inevitable Slavoj Zizek (in particular the last four) – with the aim, he says. of asking whether their proposals “open up a perspective for the actualization of communism.” In all of these he shows himself to be a very sensitive critic (see in particular the chapter on Zizek: “In Search of the Act,” obviously much expanded and revised since its original 2001 version). And whatever the original context of these essays (all of which have been revised for their appearance here) it becomes clear in reading them that this question – what he’s calling “the actuality of communism” – has been for some time one of Bosteels’ most basic concerns.

It’s in the last chapter (the fifth), though, reworking the final section of his contribution to the 2009 London “Idea of Communism” conference, and here titled “The Actuality of Communism,” that this concern comes to a certain sort of crux. The chapter is a meditation on the writings – and career – of Alvaro Garcia Linera, who as mentioned above has gone from guerrilla fighter to Vice President of Bolivia.

After a few pages outlining some themes from Garcia Linera’s work, Bosteels draws two conclusions with regard to our tasks in the present era. The first concerns actively continuing to historicize the communist hypothesis, and in particular carrying it “beyond the confines of Western Europe and the ex-Soviet Union.” (238) Drawing from Badiou’s work on communism as Idea and hypothesis, Bosteels continues,

The key concept in this regard is not the orthodox one of stages and transitions in a linear dialectical periodization but rather that of the different aleatory sequences of the communist hypothesis in a strictly immanent determination, with all that this entails in terms of the assessment of failures…and of the legacy of unsolved problems handed down from one sequence to the other.

The second task (and one that directly speaks to Bosteels’ concern with “speculative leftism”), involves the realization that

Communism must not only be rehistoricized outside all suppositions of historical necessity and stageism, it must also be actualized and organized as the real movement that abolishes the present state of things….Communism must again find inscription in a concrete body, the collective flesh and thought of an internationalist political subjectivity.

Returning to Garcia Linera, and taking up specifically his thinking concerning his entering the state and its relation to the ‘communist horizon’ which he invokes, Bosteels quotes him as aiming “to support as much as possible the unfolding of society’s autonomous capacities.” (247) Socialism, he says,

Is not the ideal to which destiny will have to be adjusted by force; it is above all the practical movement of the common struggles of living labor in communitarian form to recuperate its expropriated capacities. (252)

I will not pursue Bosteels’ examination of some of Garcia Linera’s reasoning and the disputes to which they may give rise. But a general admonition (as it were) by Bosteels, characteristic of his outlook and approach, is worth quoting:

I would argue that we need to avoid two extreme and equally nefarious answers: on the one hand, the wholesale condemnation of all such articulations of the communist hypothesis and the State…; and, on the other, the relativist conclusion that what may be bad for Paris or Bologna may be good for Kathmandu or Cochabamba…. We have use for neither blind and arrogant universalism nor abject and ultimately patronizing culturalism. Instead what is needed is a comprehensive and collective rethinking…of the links between communism, the history and theory of the State, and the history and theory of modes of political organization. (248)

Concluding

In the book’s “Conclusion,” Bosteels seeks to draw out multiple conclusions, particularly concerning the relation of politics to philosophy, to history, and to morality:

As might be expected, Bosteels seeks to rein in the overweening pretensions of philosophy, which he believes has often, in Europe in recent decades, taken its own reflections on politics to be politics:

My goal is to instill a degree of modesty and realism in the reflection concerning politics and philosophy. (274)

With regard to history, Bosteels is even more modestly cautionary and corrective. At present, he says with reference to Badiou and Zizek, “this recourse to the eternal, the invariant, or the ahistorical can certainly be justified, given the depoliticizing effects of the call constantly to historicize…. (277)

Whereas dissolving the supposedly natural and eternal into the historical (as Marx and others did) may once have been liberatory,

Today, the drive to historicize everything is rather part and parcel of late capitalist ideology as such, as is the emphasis on difference, flux, and multiplicity. (277)

And yet:

And yet, given the equally pressing need to avoid lapsing into an ultraleftist purification of communism outside of any given time and place, I would also want to argue for a dialectical articulation of the nonhistorical with concrete analyses of the historicity of leftist, socialist, and communist politics. (278)

Bosteels’ third conclusion, he says, “involves the effects of a growing moralization of politics,” which has “tended to rephrase questions of power and strategy in the melodramatic vocabulary of Good and Evil.” (279)

Here again, while in accord with the necessity of escaping “the pseudopolitical rhetoric of moral outrage and indignation,” this cannot be effected through seeking “a return to pure politics outside of morality, history, economics, or the social.” (282) This sort of “Gnosticism or Manichaeism” as Bosteels calls it here, is of course precisely the sort of speculative leftism against which he has earlier aimed his fire.

What Bosteels proposes against such speculative leftism, though, is “not to adopt the attitude of the Marxist-Leninst-Maoist thought police” by denouncing it as an infantile disorder or the like, but rather that we go forward as a “communism of communisms” in which speculative leftism can have a sort of corrective place (serving as “a constant source of revitalization”) – an “actuality of communism in which there is room for movements and hypotheses no less than for tactics and strategy.” (283)

Finally – and this will be his fourth conclusion –

Communism cannot and will not be actual without also being international…. This means that we cannot let Western European history lessons…determine the agenda for the rest of the world. It also suggests…that we look elsewhere for models or counter-models to put to the test the hypothesis of the actuality of communism. (284, 286-7)

What do we need?

We might say, then, that what Bosteels is arguing for is a politics, or a specifically political thinking, which is which is taken up from a perspective which is in/of the world, historically situated, and internationalist.

He wants a little less philosophy and a little more politics in the concrete (and a lot less Eurocentrism) than he finds among current European left-radical thinkers. He wants a communism which has roots in what is actual and not simply ideal (and certainly not the stance of “the beautiful soul relying on its ineffectiveness as proof of its moral superiority over and above politics as usual” [127-8]).

He believes that communists should be able to see and think the actuality of communism in the world today – the seeds, the roots, the stirrings, the actual potential. That communists should be able to think and see a connection between communism and the world today – and not one which derives from the ideality of philosophy or the majesterial presence of a master thinker.

It would be hard to dissent from this desire and this belief, and difficult to deny that Bosteels has a point with regard to the theorists he examines. Who hasn’t grumbled, winced or cursed at the apparent over-theoreticism and esotericism of many of these thinkers? And, whatever the merits of Garcia Linera, Eurocentrism is a charge that hits home.

However.

A major question must be whether in fact it is speculative leftism which is our main danger today – the chief pitfall for communists or political radicals more broadly. This seems, sometimes, to be Bosteels’ position.

To answer this question, everything will depend on the context. But for most of “the left,” even “the radical left” (and particularly in this country) it seems that this diagnosis does not fit at all.

From the standpoint of movement activism, theoreticism and speculative leftism are not even on the horizon. “Enough talk about theory and doctrinal differences, let’s do something,” with practice far predominating over any sort of theory, is strongly characteristic in my experience. And in the US generally, with its deep legacy of pragmatism and anti-intellectualism, succumbing to the rightist temptation of union and Democratic politics is the characteristic vice, not over-involvement in a theoretical point of view.

Among the organized “hard left” too, rituals of dogma notwithstanding, speculative leftism is hardly a danger; here too, rather, various forms of rightist practice, movementism, and actionism predominate. Even the academic left at present tends far more strongly toward social democracy (including in its theorizing), than toward anything describable as speculative leftism.

But as a critique and diagnosis of a specific intellectual environment – a certain (important!) current of European and especially French politico-philosophical thinking – Bosteels’ analysis of speculative leftism is quite valuable. Respectful and written with care and close attention to details of text and argument, I like it a lot and I think Bosteels has articulated a problem and danger within this current, which tends toward surfacing even among those who (like Ranciere and Badiou) explicitly wish to avoid  it.

What about khukuri?

The charge of over-emphasis of theory has been sometimes raised against this site, with its slogan of radical reconception of revolutionary theory. What about practice? Is Khukuri dedicated to the proposition that the solution to our problems lies simply in the realm of theory?

Well – the fact that khukuri is a site dedicated to theory doesn’t imply on anyone’s part that theory is the only thing needed. But it is true, I believe, that without a basic reconception of revolutionary theory we can’t go forward. It’s an absolutely necessary part, in the present era, of the project of human emancipation. Necessary, although obviously not sufficient.

Our needs again

Practice – this is basic — is not only necessary but primary, in an overall sense. “The overthrow of all existing social conditions” (to quote the Manifesto) is not accomplished – actually accomplished – in the realm of theory. “The weapon of criticism,” to quote the wellknown passage from early Marx, “obviously cannot replace the criticism of weapons. Material force must be overthrown by material force.”

Of course the next sentence is: “But theory also becomes a material force once it has gripped the masses,”  bringing in the theory/practice, idea/matter dialectic (to use those old simplistic terms for a moment). It’s tempting to conclude that the theoretical task is to create that theory which will grip the masses, and in an overall sense that’s true. (And it’s a ready index of our present impoverishment that there is no such theory at present – no truly emancipatory theory which has gripped and become embodied in the struggles of the masses).

But it’s also true that it’s vain to think that one can enter a future period of intense social struggle with the needed theory already in place. A new emancipatory synthesis, a new path, a theoretical structure which actually grips the masses, will undoubtedly arise only in the context of a new mass practice. What do we do in the meantime? Wait for something new to arise? Well, yes, partly and in some sense. But in the meantime no one is preaching complete abstention from practice (not me, anyway).

But is “practice” so straightforward? “Just do something” is worse than useless as a political recommendation – that’s pretty obvious to all, I’m sure. Do what, and where (there are many possible fields of action), and how?

It’s easy enough to say that whatever one does, it needs to be revolutionary, not reformist practice. But what are the forms of revolutionary practice today? I submit that this is a question without a clear answer at all. Not to sit on our hands, but in my view what’s needed is deep and wide-ranging experimentation with new forms and new venues of practice.

Practical experimentation and theoretical reconception – if I could propose a slogan, that would be it.

And to return to the latter:

The taking assessment of our position, thinking in a deep and exploratory way about how a new revolutionary current might arise, understanding the structure and dynamics of capitalism and its classes as they exist now, really taking clear-eyed stock of our history, of the history of emancipatory movements and institutions – all these are theoretical tasks that cry out to be done. Nor are they simply interesting projects – “yeah, it would be nice if we had all that”; these are pressing revolutionary tasks. It’s certainly not clear to me how we can possibly get our bearings at present, and not simply engage in the mindless repetition of everything we’ve done before, without this sort of theoretical work.

To give one variation of something Zizek has recently often admonished: “Don’t just do something – Think!”

Related posts:

1. Zizek on our situation — and communism
2. What is Badiou’s communism?
3. On The Idea Of Communism: Communism 2.0?