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

Creating Space for Communist Re-Emergence: Approaching Badiou

By J. Ramsey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What he calls “generic communism”

What he calls The Communist Hypothesis

And also what he calls The Idea of Communism

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

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

As Badiou continues, moving to the second concept:

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

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

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

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

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

As Badiou elaborates on this point, with rhetorical flair:

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

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

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

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

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

The Idea of Communism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A quick list comes to mind:

Fragmentation, pessimism, isolation

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

Cynicism and nihilism (both on and beyond the left)

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

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

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

**

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related posts:

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

We are reposting the video, and then below that, J.’s remarks.

HardTalk with Alain Badiou:
Some Thoughts on the Contradictions of Representing to the People a Truth-Process in the Making

“Grateful as we may be—I certainly am—for the “space for thought” that Badiou’s philosophy seeks to make, and for the legitimacy his voice may lend to discussions of communism and rebellion (in academic circles, and perhaps beyond them), we must not turn into mere fellow-travelling “fans” of his philosophy… Chief among these concerns is the way in which Badiou seems to me to concede too much in assenting to the idea (here articulated by the BBC host) that 20th century experiences with Communism amounted, basically, to “nothing but failure” and ‘authoritarianism.’ “

“Nicholas Brown writes: ‘Despite every protestation to the contrary, Badiou’s system cannot address the question ‘What is to be done?’ because the only thing to do is to wait for the Event. What happens when the precipitation of the Event is precisely what needs to be done?’”

By J. Ramsey

Watching a major radical intellectual appear on TV may raise high our hopes. So rarely are progressive, not to speak of radical—let alone communist!—perspectives acknowledged—let alone invited to speak at length—within bourgeois mass media; a radical gets excited upon learning that one of “ours” has broken through to center stage. It’s easy to invest heavily in such a figure’s performance.

On the other hand, it is all too easy for the radical philosopher once out on that stage to disappoint. Unschooled in the art of the sound-byte and tending towards long-windedness, the “professor” is likely to meander onto “enemy terrain,” spending those precious, quick-ticking public minutes bogged down in concocted “controversies,”—allegations of anti-Semitism vs. Sarkozy for instance—or else trailing off into a discourse on the details of some half-obscure concept, losing the forest for the trees…The essence of the matter too often goes unmarked; the call to action which we long to hear proclaimed through the captured bourgeois bullhorn goes unsounded.

Truly though, no matter how well one performs in the three or five or twenty minute segment, there always remains so much more to say…so much more that ought to have, that must be said—an entire system to expose and to overthrow, in thought (not to speak of action)! Eventually, even on the BBC, they cut, if not to commercial, then to the regularly scheduled programming. The system remains in place, as the professor and host shake hands. And the lights go out.

One finishes viewing the above interview with the sense that Alain Badiou, has much more to say to us, that he is just, at the end, warming up…And yet that said, one can, from this HardTalk interview catch at least a glimpse of why Badiou is an important thinker today, why he is relevant to the project of grasping the radical possibilities of our present moment, and why he is someone that those of us interested in communism and revolution should be “keeping our eye on.” He is someone whom we should be engaging openly and actively, on a number of levels, with care, but also, I would argue, critically.

What is Dominant is Not Therefore Legitimate

To my thinking, Badiou’s work as a critic of his immediate situation (and of contemporary discourse) is of more clear and immediate value than his more ponderous theorizing. Badiou has done brilliant work exposing the contradictions, limitations, and hypocrisies that are embedded in dominant modes of contemporary thought, (including electoralism, liberal multiculturalism, and humanitarianism, including the discourse of human rights). In numerous realms he has challenged—often eviscerated – reigning “common sense,” in a way that is informed by a global, egalitarian, anti-imperialist, and more recently, a communist perspective.

We see his critical challenge to reigning practice in a few places here on HardTalk. His argument that the role of philosophers and philosophy is not to accept the ways of the world precisely because of the way the world now is, for example, is refreshing and admirable…and, it seems to me, all to rare in philosophical circles.

He states:

“Never accept something as legitimate [just] because it is dominant.”

That Badiou extends this philosophical refusal to the “electoral mandates” recently recorded through “democratic” politics in France puts his refusal some ways ahead of many so-called “radicals” in this country, who often shore up popular belief in the promise of “American democracy” even while mounting radical criticisms of US government and society.

In this clip above, Badiou offers a number of insights that need to be heard on the Left.

For instance, while he argues that the recent crisis signals “the end of a certain sequence” in which the present social system is proclaimed to be “the best of all possible worlds,” he refuses to predict that this crisis will necessarily or easily (on their own) lead to opportunities for radical transformation. He points out quite properly, (as did Mike Davis in the previous interview posted on Kasama) that such moments of crisis have often ushered in great disasters; the unmistakable specter here of course, is that of 1930s fascism. This represents an important cautionary check on knee-jerk leftist “optimism” that too quickly points out—like a disaster capitalist trying to make a score—that a moment of “crisis” translates into a moment of “opportunity.”

In a different vein, Badiou’s smiling, grandfatherly acceptance that much of his radical conviction is at present based in little more than “faith”, but that “faith may be a great thing sometime” poses a healthy challenge to dogmatic “scientistic” Marxisms that clings to a narrow and vulgar secularism.

Evaluating Our “First Attempts”

Moving towards the heart of the matter, Badiou’s pointing out that the mere fact that the “first attempts” to achieve communism “failed” does not in any way amount to a proving of the idea itself to be false or in itself impossible to reach is refreshing to the ear, even as it grants too much to the enemy camp in terms of the actual record of the 20th century with respect to Communism.

But it might as well be said: there are several elements here, elements not attributable to the confines of the interview-form, that leave me unsatisfied, and that, I think, ought to leave us unsatisfied. These dissatisfactions indicate zones of concern not just with Badiou-as-mediated-through-HardTalk, but with Badiou’s thought and his approach to reclaiming Communism (or the “communist hypothesis” as he prefers to call it) more broadly. Grateful as we may be—I certainly am—for the “space for thought” that Badiou’s philosophy seeks to make, and for the legitimacy his voice may lend to discussions of communism and rebellion (in academic circles, and perhaps beyond them), we must not turn into mere fellow-travelling “fans” of his philosophy. Certainly not just because he is the one on TV.

Chief among these concerns is the way in which Badiou seems to me to concede too much in assenting to the idea (here articulated by the BBC host) that 20th century experiences with Communism amounted, basically, to “nothing but failure” and “authoritarianism.”

As if there was only “tragedy,” none but pyrrhic victories, in these long struggles, as if any lessons that 20th century Communists may offer us today are only negative ones, lessons in “exhaustion” and “saturation,” as if the true core of communism is to be reconstructed only by returning to its “primitive” sequence, to the work of Marx and other 19th century thinkers.

Granted, this on-air concession with respect to “actually existing” socialism and Communism (with that frightening capital “C”), may be in part a tactical maneuver. (And also it is worth noting that for Badiou “tragedy” is in some ways a term of respect or even honor, one that places the “tragic” experience of 20th Communism far closer to Badiou’s notion of the “good” than the cowardly, cynical, anemic, and ultimately “nihilist” crusading for “human rights” and “democracy” that characterizes the dominant “politics” our present moment—see his Ethics, for more on this.)

Nonetheless this maneuvering should give us pause. Tactics have a way of becoming strategy. And strategy determines where one is ultimately going.

Of course it is clear to those who are somewhat familiar with Badiou’s work, (including essays published in Positions and in his book Polemics, or even his recent essay in New Left Review ) that he has in fact conducted a rather rich exploration of these twentieth century revolutions—in particular the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

Badiou has spilled considerable ink on the struggles and experiments involved with these emancipatory events. Indeed his narrative of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (in the closing chapter of Polemics) is quite a bit more sympathetic and nuanced than he here lets on. But you wouldn’t know it from the interview.

In truth, a close reading of his recent and influential article from New Left Review, “The Communist Hypothesis,” while it demonstrates Badiou’s broader engagement with what he calls the communist “sequences” of both the 19th and 20th centuries, further suggests this communist’s limited use for the 20th century Communist movement.

Consider for example, the end of that article, wherein Badiou sketches the outlines of the coming “3rd sequence” of communist politics, a 21st century project which he argues

“will involve a new relation between the political movement and the level of the ideological.”

Badiou writes that this new sequence must

“still retain the theoretical and historical lessons that issued from the first sequence, and the centrality of victory that issued from the second [emphasis added].”

Perhaps I am about to make too much of one line here. But Badiou seems to me to be implying that while there is much to be learned from studying the 19th century sequence, the essential element to retain from the 20th century sequence is not to be had by studying these revolutions—in their particularities, their successes, innovations, setbacks, defeats, as well as failures—but rather by appreciating the sheer will to victory that they represented (and keeping fidelity to that).

But is this the extent of what this revolutionary record (Lenin and Mao and many others, including, I would argue many American communists and socialists of the 20th century) has to offer us?

Similarly his claim in the same essay that our present situation cannot be addressesed adequately simply by “revising the methods” of the second communist sequence, turns on something of a straw-man argument, once one recognizes that Badiou has not here (or to my knowledge elsewhere) clearly defined what exactly the “methods” of the 20th century communist movements were, in any sort of situated particularity.

Certainly it would be dogmatic foolishness to think that the methods of the Bolsheviks or of the CCP (or of the CPUSA) can simply be dug up, dusted off, gripped tight, and “applied” in some immediate way to our present, unfolding situation.

As John Steele points out in his recent post, our conditions have changed—though they are not I would argue altogether “new”—and hence so too have even those “traditional ideas” changed in relationship to this altered situation, even where they would “stay the same.” Admittedly, in contrast to the stale odor of mechanical MLM(A) Badiou’s openness to the new and the unexpected feels like a breath of fresh air.

But let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater either.

Until one has engaged in a situated critique of the “method(s)” represented and deployed by the 20th century communist movement, how can one possibly reach a verdict (and a sweeping one at that) as to such “methods” and their “uselessness” today? Badiou’s figure of the “iron discipline” of the Communist Party is barely the beginning of a description, let alone an analysis of “method” here; indeed, one might argue that it is a stock-figure that stands in the way of such a sober critique. In any event, I would like to see more—not less—critical re-examination of “actually existing” Communism of the 20th century, from Badiou and from others. (and again here, let me emphasize that I mean not only developments in the USSR or China, but elsewhere, including here in the USA, and that I mean not only the political lines of these movements but the social and cultural and mass work that they engaged in at all levels).

[Here it is perhaps worth noting that Slavoj Zizek takes a markedly different approach in is recent work, taking the 20th century attempts to construct socialism and Communism somewhat more seriously, albeit often in the mode of a provocateur…But I will leave a critical examination of Zizek’s defensive “reloading” of Communism and other “Lost Causes” for another time!]

A Red by Any Other Name…

When asked in this interview if he is, in fact, a “communist,” and then later, if he is in favor of “overthrowing the current system,” Badiou defers, opting instead to go on about how we need to “reconstruct a new idea” of communism, rather than proclaiming himself to be “one.”

No doubt this deferral can be justified in terms of Badiou’s own philosophical approach, which frames communism as a truth-process in the making, a sequence that does not as yet exist, but will have existed only through and after the (practical and theoretical) labor of bringing it into being, in fidelity to an Event, whose Event-ness is also yet-to-be-established. (Stephen Mauldin discusses this eloquently in his recent Kasama post.)

Still, I want to ask: Can the process of communism unfold (or become itself) without being represented, presumptuously, and indeed somewhat “prematurely” and in advance by those who seek to bring its truth into being? As if it actually existed, so to say?

Must we wait until communism has clearly “arrived” to call ourselves as such?

What does keeping fidelity to the event mean if not to dare “I am a communist” and yes even “I believe in the expropriation of the expropriators, the overthrow of the oppressive and exploitative social conditions and relations that stem from this system,” even when one has no guarantee at this moment as to what form this specter of communism will (have) taken, or for that matter, whether or not communism will ever in fact find a movement worthy of its name?

Indeed, does not the necessarily “performative” nature of such proclamations (about which Badiou has much to say) and the not-even-here-yet-ness of 21st century communism make this invocation of its name all the more vital? After all there would be no need for faith or fidelity (a key notion for Badiou, as has been pointed out) if communism were “there and ready for the taking”?

Need Revolutionary Theorists

Badiou addresses this paradox, of the name that precedes the thing named, with respect to the French May 1968. Talk of “Revolution” at this moment, he points out, was pervasive, and yet what exactly “revolution” meant in that context—even as the students and workers were in the street—was anything but clear. Certainly the meaning of “Revolution” today would seem all the more unclear. I am tempted to credit Badiou, at least at the level of philosophical truth, for admitting as such.

And yet here I cannot help but recall a recurring joke in Slavoj Zizek’s recent work where he likens this type of philosophical call to re-think revolution to the doctor, who when called to bedside, after examining the patient, proclaims “What you really need is a doctor.”

Conceding that there are—there must be!—important elements of the communist hypothesis yet to be discerned or discovered let alone developed and detailed, is it not still safe to say that part of this unfolding process of reconstruction in theory and in practice necessitates involving the broad masses of people in an active, critical, radical interrogation of the present capitalist-imperialist system in which they now live?

And so then, when asked if he is in favor of overthrowing the current system, mightn’t Badiou and the truth-process that keeps fidelity to his communist hypothesis have been better served by proceeding dialectically, negatively, that is, by giving an account of all those things which he is fact in favor overthrowing or overcoming—even not knowing in advance what the positive form of this overthrowing will (have) take(n)?

One might start with the 1 billion people (predicted to grow to 2 billion as result of the current capitalist crisis) who chronically go hungry in the world; or the looming environmental catastrophe; or the tens of millions of people thrown out of work; or the growing disparities of wealth and power both between and within countries that characterize the present global system.

Badiou of course knows all of this well, and has even written at some length about, most if not all of these developments. The point is not to “teach Badiou” something about the current state of capitalism that he does not already know. The point is rather for us to consider the possibility that the very intrigue and open-ness, the principled refusal to declare one-self and to thereby in advance to potentially delimit the subject and object of the communist project, which is to say perhaps, the thing that makes Badiou’s communist hypothesis perhaps so inviting and refreshing to so many these days, may, at times, or in certain contexts—for instance, when trying to speak with everyday people, whether through mass media or in person—become something of a liability and an obstacle.

I am tempted here to probe deeper, with some help, for a more philosophical explanation for Badiou’s approach to some of these above issues. In contrasting Badiou’s ontological understanding of stasis and transformation (Being end Event) to the Hegelian dialectic, Nicholas Brown writes:

“Despite every protestation to the contrary, Badiou’s system cannot address the question ‘What is to be done?’ because the only thing to do is to wait for the Event. What happens when the precipitation of the Event is precisely what needs to be done?”

“Yes, we can be faithful to a previous event, as Badiou says Lenin was to the Paris Commune. But surely this solution mitigates the power of the Event as the irruption of the void into this situation. The dialectic, on the other hand, conceives the void as immanent contradiction. While both contradiction and void are immanent to the situation, contradiction has the tremendous advantage of having movement built in, as it were: the Event does not appear out of an immanent nowhere, but is already fully present in itself in the situation, which it explodes in the movement to for-itself.”

Presumably from a dialectical perspective then—one that Badiou does not hold—it would seem that “merely” describing (and popularizing the understanding of) the immanent dynamics of capitalism and what it is doing to the world today, could help to lay the basis for making the Event or Revolution possible (helping the global proletariat to move closer from being a class “in itself” to a class “for itself” ).. Thus, that Badiou does not use his precious face-time with the masses on HardTalk to pursue this kind of critical elaboration, may not be just an expression of tactical considerations, let alone a coincidence.

Beyond philosophical justifications, of course, in more narrowly pragmatic (or tactical) sense, to “declare oneself” a communist in this way, especially absent a clearly defined movement with defensible program, party or leadership, runs the risk of provoking one’s audience, and not only in productive ways. As any self-identifying communist knows, to dub oneself a “red,” in “polite company” at least, risks bringing out all the old anti-communist myths, half-truths, accusations, and condemnations, along with here and there a legitimate concern about what became of the 20th century parties, movements, and states that went by that name.

Sometimes the resulting exchange yields more heat than light; often – in more “left” literate company — one will get lodged in debate about particular historical events and persons at the expense of neglecting the big picture of the communist movement in the 20th century, losing the chance to delve more deeply into the question of what communism could look like today. As Badiou points out, after all, we do have a much bigger, much more auspicious project on our hands than “merely” sorting out sectarian squabbles about the true nature of Soviet of Chinese socialism in the 1950s, etc.; we have a full-fledged communist response to the present situation to develop, to be listening for and helping to give voice and form to.

And yet the question arises as to whether deferring (or indeed, evading) such questions about the defeat or failure of socialism/communism in the 20th century in fact allows us to “move on to more important and pressing things” or whether it leads us to suppress crucial issues, bypassing a broad range of lessons that are there to be learned (positively and negatively) from this revolutionary experience. (And I am not just speaking of events in the Soviet Union or in China here.) This deferral threatens to cede the ground of history and practice to the enemy, taking haven in the realm of (pure) primitive theory, and even, as the BBC hosts points out, mere faith. Faith, as Badiou points out quite rightly, “can be a wonderful thing”—a point which many a “scientific” Marxist would do well to contemplate—but it is no substitute for critical historical analysis, (to which, yes, it remains a vital supplement).

Attention to the Situation

What will revolution or communism look like in the 21st century?

Badiou is reluctant to do more than gesture towards the increasingly crucial “ideological” sphere, and to negate (prematurely, I have argued) past “methods” and “saturated” concepts inherited from the previous communist sequence (“party-state” “class struggle” etc.). Beyond this he calls for re-conceptualizing communism, and for paying attention to the new forms of struggle and organization that are now emerging in the world.

This last is a crucial call: the imperative to closely attend to the actual movement of the people out in the world—movements past as well as present. It is a must that is much in keeping with Badiou’s call (in Ethics among other places) to keep fidelity not only to Events, but to situations as well. In fact one of the most powerful criticisms that Badiou levels against the reigning “ethical” discourse of human rights in Ethics is that such discourse tends to abstract from the historical and political singularity of concrete situations, chronicling the injuries of “victims” (posited as “passive”) by violators (understood as “evil”) in such a way as to make true political intervention in actual situations impossible (even while often smuggling neo-imperialist agendas into the mix).

Questions then, to close with: To what extent does Badiou’s work call us—and call others—to attend more and more closely to the situations that we are in? To what extent does it tend to call us away from this work of concrete and critical elaboration and into ungrounded abstraction and a new “ethical” formalism? Despite our changed conditions, does not the work of popularizing an immanent critique of capitalism still have a crucial role to play in bringing about the Event that we are waiting for? And how so does Badiou—in his work and in his spectacular persona—help (or hinder) us in doing this most vital communist work?

Such questions of course cannot be answered in the abstract or in thought alone, but only through a thoughtful engagement with present concrete situations, and with the people who make up those situations.

Here the “old methods” of the “saturated second sequence,” including most notably mao’s development of the “mass line,” would seem to remain of chief importance. Certainly Badiou has yet to prove this crucial concept to be “exhausted.” Nor has his own practical “experimentation,” as far as I can tell, yet produced a method to replace the dialectic captured in the slogan: “from the masses, to the masses.” I for one, though tempted to delve deeper into Badiou, am not holding my breath on this one.

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