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

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

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

Why is Badiou of political value?

John Steele

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

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

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

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

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

Marxism

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

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

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

Badiou: some terms

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

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

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

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

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

Truth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Political value

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

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

Communism as process and axiom – not goal

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

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

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

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

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

Related posts:

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

Khukuri features several essays by Bill Martin, and he is a participant in the Kasama Project, with which both this site and Kasama are associated. He is the author of a number of books, including Matrix and Line: Derrida and the Possibilities of Postmodern Social Theory, The Radical Project: Sartrean Investigations, Listening to the Future: The Time of Progressive Rack, 1968-1978, and (with Bob Avakian) Marxism and the Call of the Future: Conversations on Ethics, History, and Politics, as well as others.

This is the second engagement with Ethical Marxism to appear on this site. The first, by Vern Gray can be found here.

Marxism, Politics, and Evil:  A Critical Engagement with “Ethical Marxism”

John Steele

In this essay I’ll be attempting to come to grips with Ethical Marxism: The Categorical Imperative of Liberation, a major effort by Bill Martin to map out the sort of theory he believes to be necessary in the 21^st century for revolution and human liberation. I’ll first try to lay out Martin’s principal claims and lines of thought, followed by some questions and critique.

This is a large book which brings a number of themes, subjects and questions into play. I will only be dealing with the essential line of argument and thought, concerning Marxism, politics and ethics. Specifically, I will not be able to enter into some concrete questions which Martin casts as ethical and to which he devotes a large proportion of space in the book: imperialism, animals and the human consumption of meat, and the question of place. These are major parts of the book, not only in bulk but conceptually too, as attempts to both configure political questions ethically (imperialism) and to situate ethical questions (meat-eating) within a Marxist context. But although this study does examine some of the forms of argument which emerge in these areas, I have not been able to consider the substance of these questions, as they are framed in Ethical Marxism.

As will become clear, I think the theory sketched in Ethical Marxism is seriously flawed, and I will often be sharply critical. But I want to salute at the outset Martin’s attempt at the great and necessary task undertaken here, the refiguration of Marxism in the light of past impasses and present needs. I hope I’ll succeed in making clear the ways and extent to which I believe that the questions and problems which Martin is attempting to solve by means of this approach are very real and unresolved problems for all revolutionaries in this era.

I

The principal and overall thesis of Ethical Marxism (EM) is that ethics and politics need each other, that neither by itself is sufficient – sufficient for a just society, for revolution, for the emancipation of humanity, for the redemption of the world. On the one hand “ethics does not have, by itself, what it takes to be ethical” (25; numbers in parentheses refer to page numbers in EM). That is, ethics in itself does not have the power to make effective its own insights and conclusions, cannot of itself bring the good and the right into being in the world: “to make these things a real force in the world, we also need something like Marxism” (26). On the other hand, neither does politics (or history or economics) have what it takes to be other than realpolitik, another way of regulating or taking part in the scramble among human beings and groups in pursuit of self-interest.

Martin argues that there is a “kind of vision that is absolutely necessary for the transformation of society and yet is underdetermined by systematic study of the ‘social evidence.’ In terms of modalities, the vision is necessary for the transformation, but the vision does not represent the necessity of the transformation itself.” (x) This vision springs, Martin believes, from what he calls “the religious perspective.

Since the vision of the future does not spring directly or necessarily from a study of the present, but yet this vision does not represent or imply its own necessity, there is still a gap, which Martin proposes to bridge through ethics: “There are gaps in the world, and there are gaps in whatever telos [end or goal] might be constructed on the basis of history and economics alone and only the intervention of the ethical can begin to bridge these gaps.” (49)

Martin relates these three aspects or moments – scientific description/explanation, ethical prescription, and future-oriented vision – to the three questions, which Kant thought encompassed the concerns of reason: What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope? He also seems to relate them, as Kant did, to what he sees as three discontinuous discourses: science, ethics, and religion. (Although at one point Martin makes ethics central, as well, to vision: “…the argument of this book is that this vision has to have the question of ethical relation at its core” [160]. In general the emphasis throughout is on the discontinuity of science from both ethics and “the religious dimension,” with little or no theorization of differences between the latter two.

Thus “this book is about how the ethical point, or what I sometimes call the ‘ethical moment’, is indeed needed, and along with it intentionality and responsibility (and agency) and even a discourse that partakes of transcendence and theology.” (4) Such a perspective, he argues, is vitally needed in order to strengthen Marxism to enable it to “become a more powerful instrument for guiding humanity in going from an unjust and unsustainable world to a global community of mutual flourishing.” (4)

On the one hand this is posed as an external critique, in that it is grounded outside of Marxism as such, in both religious and ethical perspectives. (In the latter case Martin takes Kant to be the definatory figure.) But on the other hand Martin believes he is pointing to something that is present but unacknowledged and untheorized, both in Marx (“Marx’s work is permeated with moral concepts” – 2) and in the life of revolutionary movements. In pointing to the need for “the ethical moment” he is reaching for “a conception that is at work in actual revolutionary processes, and that would play an even greater role in human emancipation and critical emancipatory theory if it were clarified and embraced for what it is.” (14)

Although at one point describing the project of the book as one of making explicit and fleshing out what is already implicit or taken for granted in Marx (230), generally and on the whole Martin seems to be working from the conception of a Marx and Marxism which has no place for ethics (or intentionality either), but only for the description and projection of material forces.

Martin’s most basic thesis, then, is that Marxism and revolutionary theory generally, on the one hand, and ethics and the religious dimension, on the other, need each other in order to fulfill their own most basic aims and functions. The aspect that receives by far the most attention in this book is the need that Marxism has for ethics. This is a work addressed chiefly to those who see themselves as within or deriving from the Marxist tradition, arguing for the necessity of “the ethical moment.”

(Although the religious perspective would appear to be equally important to Martin’s overall conception, this aspect receives little sustained focus here, although it does make a reappearance in the book’s Conclusion, where religious narratives are described as “stories that people themselves tell in the living of their lives under specific conditions, but under the twin imperatives of mortality and the possibility of redemption,” a sort of story and language which is “both near and far from Marx.” [397])

Argument

The argument for Ethical Marxism in a nutshell is that the creation of a ‘social society’ has to issue both from a political-economic analysis and a moral recognition of what is morally wrong about the antisocial form of society. (179)

This is one of Martin’s most succinct statements of what he aims to show (it’s not actually an argument). In the process of attempting to show this, the principal argument of the book is that Marxism has not and cannot in itself generate the ought which is necessary for a process which is truly revolutionary and emancipatory, and that Marxism’s attempted theorization of a revolutionary imperative in terms of interests is radically insufficient and must be supplemented by a separately-based ethical imperative.

Obviously this depends on the supposition that Marxism posits a purely interest-based motivation and imperative for revolution. We’ll return to this important question, which is related to Martin’s conception of a Marxism which positions itself as a positivistic science. But first let’s look at how the argument of Ethical Marxism develops.

At one point Martin lays it out along the following lines:

The most pressing ethical concern is the hardest thing not only to accomplish, but even to thematize, even to begin to get people to grapple with….Certainly there are ways in which power and ‘things’ work, and…even while these workings have to be studied and understood and grappled with from a strategic perspective, it is precisely the reduction to causal ‘thingness’ that is the essence of economism, or, to put the point the other way around, it is the complete setting aside of any consideration of the thing that ought to be done in some matrix of pure causality and interest that is the essence of economism. Lenin saw this, in his critique of economism, and yet, out of the orthodox Marxist refusal of the ethical, did not thematize the point this way….This refusal has had consequences, indeed dire consequences [and] overcoming this limitation is absolutely essential for any future Marxist project. (189)

(The “dire consequences” here would seem to refer to events in the Soviet Union during Stalin’s ascendancy, and indeed Martin later points to the Stalin period as “probably the main reason why there has to be a way of articulating the ethical with Marxism – or else it would probably be better not to have Marxism any more.” [302])1

Martin’s analysis is that Marxism, conceived simply as a science which describes and explains the dynamics of capitalism and projects an historical sequence, offers at best the sort of interest-based politics which follows from its explanation of history in terms of class struggle, and that such a politics will be equivalent to a realpolitik power-politics and can easily (or perhaps is bound to) issue in the perversions of the revolutionary process seen in the Soviet Union under Stalin. For Marx, he holds, “it is only a happy by-product that socialism and ultimately communism would be good for humanity…; instead, these social forms are inevitable… these forms are simply what will occur in the objective unfolding of the material dialectic of history.” (392)

Just the realization that more is needed, or the merely implicit exemplification of this realization (as seen, Martin believes, in the example of Lenin’s polemic against economism in What Is To Be Done) – this is quite insufficient. The only remedy is the explicit “thematization of the ethical” and the bringing of the ethical into politics, for “…a significant part of humanity (a critical mass) has to intend to defeat the existing, evil form of society and it has to intend to create a better form of society, in order for a better form of society to come about.” (392)

Materialism

One concern in pursuing this thesis (which takes Martin in many directions) is to maintain a philosophically materialist outlook:

The aspect of the struggle to overcome capitalism that has to do with justice and the aim of creating a good society remains subordinate and epiphenomenal [in Marx]. My argument in this book is that, if there are not at least key moments when these terms are not explicitly thematized and pursued in their own right, then this struggle cannot be carried through. The question remains how this thematization and motivation can be understood within an historical materialist framework, but my hope is that it can…. (155)

Obviously the concern here – what Martin at times calls “the ethico-ontological problem” (220), is to ground ethics immanently, that is, in this world, as opposed to an other, transcendent, world. Martin, it seems clear, wants to remain on the materialist ground of Marxism; but he wants to expand the meaning of that materialism. But although this is clearly his desire, it can’t be said that he is able to resolve the ethico-ontological problem, how to explain the genesis and status of the ethical within a general materialist ontological framework. At best he expresses a hope (as above), or points to a need, as in the following passage:

…there ought to be an argument for the material role that the ethical, and the discourse of the good, needs to play in creating a good society. In other words, if economics, politics and history cannot do what they were supposed to do, then we had better consider the materiality of the ethical – which means grappling with the materiality of evil. (48)

He does, though, point to indications that there must be some sort of materiality of the ethical, or indications that he thinks imply this. He points to what he believes to be gaps, gaps which can only be bridged by the ethical: “There are gaps in the world, and there are gaps in whatever telos might be constructed on the basis of history and economics alone and only the intervention of the ethical can begin to bridge these gaps” (49), and “…there are gaps in Marx’s analysis that can only be addressed in irreducibly normative terms” (103).

Gaps

Over the course of the book, Martin describes several gaps of different character, in each case only bridgeable, he believes, by the ethical. These gaps could be grouped under the following headings:

Most obviously, there is the gap between description and prescription, the gap between description/explanation and normative prescription which is demonstrated, he says, by “the irreducibility of vocabularies (the causal and the value-driven)” (403).

This is clearly the underlying thread of the book: that no amount or depth of description and explanation of the workings and dynamics of capitalism and imperialism, such as Marx and Marxism gives us, will generate the sort of moral imperative, the “ought,” which is necessary both to overthrow this system and to go beyond a “reaction formation” to build a genuinely different society. Further, that this gap is made larger and more pressing by the phenomena of colonialism, and in the 20^th century (and the 21^st) by imperialism. (See 102 – 155 or so, within the section of the book on “Imperialism as the Ethical Problem of Our Time”; “reaction formation” is introduced on 121.)

There is also the gap between necessity and possibility, between what must happen and what may potentially be brought into existence. This is the argument that historical necessity would obviate human freedom and particularity. But, given that the necessity of Marx’s historical template is questionable today in any case, we face the question (present in any case but brought home by the failure of Marxist inevitabilism) of how to understand the generation and actualization of possibilities. (At one point Martin describes his aim as “a ‘postinevitablist’ Marxism that is reconfigured in terms of ethical themes” – 191.) Such an understanding, he believes, must centrally involve the ethical.

His argument runs along the following lines:

Such a scheme presented as inevitability is either theology or strategic audacity; it is only in such a scheme presented as possibility, however, that the history and possible future of humanity actually matters….We are back into the problem of theodicy…in which case ‘redemption’ is not really redemption, this life is not a ‘real fight’ (James), there are no actual people who actually matter involved in history, but only the god of historical inevitability…. (158)

Rather than laws necessarily generating certain results, the laws of history “ought to be understood instead as ‘laws of possibility’, ways of theorizing where the openings might occur in the existing society that would allow for something different and better to arise,” thus introducing “an irreducible element of normativity.” (160, 268)

In order for this better world to come into existence, there is “the question of what vision can galvanize the popular understanding that the existing society needs to be overthrown and a new form of society needs to be created. This ‘vision thing’ is not an optional add-on, and the argument of this book that this vision has to have the question of the ethical at its core.” (160)

The question of vision is also conceived by Martin as invoking “the religious dimension.” and it’s worth pausing a moment to ask how he conceives the relation of ethical and religious. At one point he speaks of a confidence that is needed which “holds central faith in the principles that exploitation, domination, and oppression are wrong, that we are ethically compelled to struggle against every form that these things take, and that another world is possible.” (409) He believes such a confidence is not only ethical but also religious in the sense that it is a faith both in these ethical principles and in the possibility of a different world.

The “vision thing” also brings us to the gap between destruction and construction. Revolutions involve both, but there is a danger of a construction which is merely a “reaction-formation,” a new which will not be qualitatively different or better because it is simply built through a negation of or reaction to the old. Only ethics, once again, can bridge the gap between revolutionary negation and destruction, and the vision of a redeemed future (a vision whose source he finds in “the religious dimension” of human existence).

The dialectic of negation and the (shall we say) necessarily open dialectic of redemption have to work together; the bridging principle is, in my view, the ethical impulse. (380)

Now these gaps are supposed to show, not only the necessity of the ethical, but to imply its materiality (see above). The argument for this would be along the following lines (this is strongly implied, I think, in Martin’s account, although not quite stated as suchⁱⁱ): If there are lacunae and gaps in Marx’s schema of explanation and projection, such that the gaps can only be bridged normatively, then (a) there is a need for the normative in order to make Marx’s account complete or coherent, and (b) if Marx’s account is overall materialist, then whatever it takes to fill these gaps must have some material status.

Presuming that I’ve correctly captured Martin’s argument, it’s a troublesome one logically, and I don’t think it really goes through very well. For one thing, although it’s asserted that this is so, it is never really demonstrated that only the ethical or normative can bridge these gaps. Why cannot there be some other way of filling these gaps? (In fact I believe there are other ways, as I’ll try to indicate below.)

Even more bothersome from a logical point of view is the status of (b): from the fact that there are gaps in a materialist account, it’s hard to see why it would necessarily follow that whatever is needed to fill the gaps must also be material. Take, as a rather highly charged parallel, the anti-evolutionist argument that there are irreducible gaps in the Darwinist (materialist) theory of evolution, which can only be bridged by a divine creative force. Suppose we granted that argument, would it follow that this “divine force” is therefore material? Of course the creationists and others who put this forward believe, on the contrary, that the “argument from gaps” shows the incompleteness of a materialist explanation, which must therefore be supplemented by an independent spiritual reality. But if materialism is ones axiomatic basis then presumably the argument would simply mean that the “divine force” is actually material: if there is an explanatory gap in a theory, then the presumption would be that whatever is necessary to bridge that gap will have a material status. But if materialism is already presupposed, it’s hard to see how the “argument from gaps” can be an argument for the materiality of ethics.

Sometimes Martin takes a different tack, which, at least as I see it, is more promising as a way of finding a basis for an ethics in human social materiality. Proposing “flourishment” as a translation of the Greek eudaimonia (an important term in Aristotle’s ethical discussions), Martin says that “even if flourishment might be understood in different ways in different times or places, or even if it is barely understood at all, we humans are good at recognizing what is not flourishment, and in knowing we need something else,” and that even if this sense may be little more than a bare feeling or reaction, “it is from this feeling that normative social theory develops.” (59) The overall human project, in which human good is based, would then be “to create possibilities for human flourishment.” (64: he calls it “the Aristotelian answer,” but it seems clear, at least during these pages, that it is also Martin’s answer.) Although these ideals of flourishment would differ historically, the notion would provide a common (formal) criterion of the good, with evil occurring “when possibilities for flourishment are cut off through the efforts of some human agency….” (63)

This seems, as I say, more promising, both with regard to the material rooting of morality and as a conception which can be integrated with Marxism, or which it might be argued is something presupposed by Marx. But although this line of thought is taken up by Martin over the course of ten pages or so at one point, it is not pursued systematically in the book.

II

In some sense Ethical Marxism is a long meditation on the crying need for liberation from the brutalities and morass of today’s world, but also the need to surpass Marxism-as-it-has-been. Indeed, Martin’s point is that these needs are crucially interrelated and that fulfillment of the former depends upon accomplishment of the latter. I think this is true and important – in fact I could not agree more. But when we come to the question of how we are to surpass the now-dead Marxism of our fathers, we have some differences. Most basically, I do not believe that the most essential thing, in order for Marxism to become an emancipatory theoretical structure, is that it be reoriented around “the ethical moment” as its basis. I believe that an ethics is founded upon the revolutionary project, rather than founding it, as Martin argues. Rather than morality being the core or foundation of a truly revolutionary politics, as Martin argues, I believe that the political is more basic, and that ethics finds its foundation within larger human projects, including that of an emancipatory politics. Obviously this is a basic point, and thrashing it out (or at least indicating a direction of argument) is one basic aim of the remainder of this paper.

There are also some matters of detail relating to Ethical Marxism which have their own importance, and which will also consume much of the space in what lies below. My concern is with several characteristic ways of arguing and framing things that Martin makes use of, which I believe are unfruitful or worse, and will not take us very far in terms of the discussion we need to be having. (These will be the subject of Part III of this essay.)

The movement from Is to Ought

Martin often tends to pose issues in terms of dichotomies (science/ethics, interest-based vs. ethical motivation, etc.); one of the most pervasive and basic in his thinking is the contradiction he proposes between a politics based on what at one point he calls “real ethics,” and a politics based “mere utilitarianism and calculation based on interests.” (211-12) Now one could question the adequacy of this and others of the dichotomous contrasts Martin sets up (and I’ll touch on this below), but for the moment I want to explore some of the tensions and problems that arise in Martin’s argument from it.

I’ll start from the following passage:

In Marx’s perspective, people do not question their circumstances (in general, broadly, deeply) except when motivated by material interests. Interests are experienced differently in different strata of society…; for there to be a larger change in society, however, there has to be a more general crisis, indeed a crisis felt by all sectors of society. In Lenin’s memorable description, the crisis has to be such that people cannot any longer live in the ways in which they have been living, and the ruling class cannot any longer rule in the ways in which it has been ruling. The Marxist perspective is that, short of an actual deep crisis in the social system, people do not (again – generally, broadly, deeply) go into motion against the existing order. People do not set themselves against the existing order simply because it is an unjust order. (187)

On the one hand it seems that Martin accepts that this is the case. Although he does not say so directly, contextual indications are that Martin believes this to be so – that people generally do not go up against the established order in ordinary circumstances (in “times of ‘normal functioning’,” as he puts it), even though it is an unjust order. (And how would it be possible not to believe this? It seems quite clear that it’s the case.)

On the other hand, at several points throughout the book Martin advances the thesis that without ethical/moral motivation and intention, a better world cannot come to be: that moral motivation is necessary to a revolution which is not merely a ‘reaction formation’. And as noted above, Martin believes that “…the Kantian thesis is right: a significant part of humanity (a critical mass) has to intend to defeat the existing, evil form of society and it has to intend to create a better form of society, in order for a better form of society to come about.” (392)

So it almost seems that Martin has, on the one hand, set up a problem which he believes must be solved, in order for any revolution to be truly a step in the actual liberation of humanity: The revolution must be made out of a moral motivation. But at the same time he also seems to believe that this is not (is never?) the case: “People do not set themselves against the existing order simply because it is an unjust order.” So he has set a problem for any revolution, it seems, which must be solved but which has not been solved and perhaps cannot be solved.

I do not mean to give an argument simply based on this contradiction of phrases. But I do want to ask what it indicates. It is very much as if Martin’s position is that although people broadly do not make revolution out of moral motivation, they ought to do so. Clearly this reproduces the is/ought gap at a higher level (the meta-level): why should we be moral? But when it is posed this way it is clear, I think, that Martin does not provide a way of bridging this gap.

Why should we be moral?

Martin proposes that, in addition to the Marxist description of the structure of the present world, only ethics can bridge the gap between the wretched present and what he sometimes calls the “redeemed world” of a possible future. Suppose we accept that ethics can perform this function. There would still remain the problem of: why take up this ethical stance? Ethics can’t itself provide the reason, or the motive, to be ethical, or to take the ethical bridge to the future. We might answer that it’s necessary to begin from “the ethical moment” because that’s the only way to reach “the redeemed world.” But that would presuppose that we already have the impetus toward that redeemed world – yet it was precisely this impetus which ethics was supposed to be necessary in order to provide in the first place.

I don’t want to seem unnecessarily paradoxical or logic-chopping here. The problem that Martin runs into, as I see it, can be described more simply from another angle. He has written a book which is addressed, in the main, to Marxists and to those who believe in the great desirability or necessity of gaining or moving toward the “redeemed future.” And he is arguing that Marxism does not provide the resources for reaching this possible future, but that a revamped theory, with ethics at its core, an Ethical Marxism, is necessary if such a future is to be reached. Martin believes, moreover, that moral feeling is the actual basis of people’s entering into revolutionary practice or oppositional political engagement in the first place, and his claim is that this “ethical moment” has not been theorized, and must be. (That, at least, is one of the lines of thinking in this book.) In this context the “why be moral?” question does not arise, given the assumption that those addressed already operate, in their basic political outlook, from a moral motivation.

But Martin also believes that, not only must this moral basis be realized and made explicit within the consciously revolutionary ranks, but it must also form the basis, very broadly among the people, in a mass revolutionary upsurge. “Ultimately, people have to want to create a good society, or else they won’t.” (155)

I think it actually is true that a problem has been set which cannot be solved within the terms in which it is posed. But perhaps the quandary stems from these terms as they are understood in Ethical Marxism. I want to pursue this thought by exploring briefly some of the central concepts or markers which Martin deploys – ethics/morality – politics – Marxism and Marx’s thinking – all of which I believe should be understood or taken (along with their interrelations) differently than he does.

Ethics and politics

This is a large and important topic, in my view, and there’s far more to be said about it than I can possibly say here, or that I’m capable of saying generally. This should be a topic of discussion among all who work for human liberation, or want to. But I think I can say enough to make clear why I believe that Martin’s approach to the question will not lead very far.

Let’s begin from the following passage in Ethical Marxism:

Yes, the new society has to be against the ancien regime, but even more it has to be for the future and future possibilities…. It could be said that the dialectic of negativity is essential, but it is also in danger of becoming purely reactive without the notion of an underdetermined, redeemed future…. The dialectic of negation and the (shall we say) necessarily open dialectic of redemption have to work together; the bridging principle is, in my view, the ethical impulse. (379-80)

Let us accept (as I do) that we need both of these dialectics, as Martin describes them, that we will be lost unless the necessary negation is interwoven with a striving toward the open redeemed future. The question is whether ethics is necessary to provide a link or bridge between the two, and whether ethics is adequate or sufficient to link them. (The question is not, it should be clear, whether “Marxism is ready, in a new synthesis, to accept that ethical questions are real questions” [256]; to deny that ethics is necessary for the “bridging” function is not to deny that ethical questions are real.)

Early in the book Martin talks about “the call of the future,” which he links with the concern expressed by Kant for “the most distant future generations,” and which he characterizes as an ethical demand. “In some sense,” he goes on to say, “my only argument in this book is the concern itself is the ground of the ‘science’, of systematic theorizing. That is the essence of Ethical Marxism.” (27)

Here the ethical demand embodied in a concern for the future is seen as both motive-force and ground for the sort of theorizing that Marx gave us. Sometimes this “call of the future” is characterized in terms of vision. In order for this better world to come into existence, there is “the question of what vision can galvanize the popular understanding that the existing society needs to be overthrown and a new form of society needs to be created. This ‘vision thing’ is not an optional add-on, and the argument of this book is that this vision has to have the question of the ethical at its core.” (160)

Unless this sort of ethically-motivated vision motivates and frames the intentions of those who are involved in making a new future, Martin believes, a “redeemed future” will not come about. (“Ultimately, people have to want to create a good society, or else they won’t.” – 155)

Ethics-based vs. interest-based?

It’s true, I think, that without a vision of the future, no popular uprising or revolutionary upsurge will change the social fundamentals of class society. Both a vision of communism (in a general way) and the conviction that it is possible are necessary to a coming about of a communist future. But why must this vision be founded, independently from the social and historical process, and even independently of a communist political project, in an ethics or morality? Martin’s predominant line of thinking, as I understand it, is that this sort of independent ethical basis is necessary if a would-be revolutionary politics is not to become an interest-based realpolitik. But his argument for it crucially depends on a series of dichotomous bifurcations: fact/value, history/morality, interest-based and ethically-based actions (as well as on a strictly Kantian-derived definition of the ethical), as in the following passages:

Either I take the core of moral theory to be the treatment of the other as an end-in-herself or -himself, or I simply take it as realpolitik that I find myself in the midst of a war of all against all…. (69)

It can…be argued that, without an “ethical grounding”…, “politics” can only mean a set of tactical considerations concerning the machinations and mechanisms of power, and not a “thinking of the polis,” particularly a thinking of the just polis…. (391)

The hold of these sorts of bifurcations on Martin’s thinking can be seen in his claim that Lenin’s internationalism should be seen as ethically-based. Why? Because “it goes against the grain of the existing society, and it does this on the basis of principle,” a principle “not based on a narrow conception of interest.” (164)

Do these alternative bases for a politics, interest-based and ethically-based, exhaust the field? To see how this may not be the case (and I don’t think it is), I want to look at a couple of observations by Mao Zedong, whom Martin characterizes as having “restitched” the ethical into Marxism. (391).

Mao said, speaking of his youth, “First we were revolutionaries, and as a result we became Marxists.” That captures very well what I am trying to capture with the idea of Ethical Marxism: first we see that there is something very wrong about the way that society is set up, and as a result we look for a systematic understanding of society that will allow us to move forward and try to make things right.”\ (340-41)

Martin takes it that becoming a revolutionary, that is, one who becomes dedicated to the systematic restructuring of social relations, must be based upon a primary insight which is ethical in character, and which provides guidance in the enterprise and a linkage to the “redeemed future” in this intial insight that “something is very wrong.”

There are a couple of things to be said initially about this schema. First, note how this passage brings out again the dual function which Martin depends upon the ethical to perform: both beginning and bridge, providing both the initial impetus which brings the actor into revolutionary practice, and the linkage to the redeemed future (the vision of which is to be provided by the basically untheorized religious dimension).

At the same time, it is clear here why Martin needs the “bridging” function. For there is no reason why an initial perception that “something is very wrong” will not go in a sort of revenge direction, or toward what Martin calls a reaction-formation. But if this is true, what justifies calling the initial perception ethical? We seem to be in the same position, whether we say that the initial impetus to revolutionary politics is ethical insight or an interest-based motivation. In either case we need (on Martin’s set-up) a more fully-fledged ethics to act as “bridge.”

The role of practice

We seem to be consistently drawn into conceptual and logical tangles as we trace the implications of what’s said in Ethical Marxism. I think this should be taken as a marker of some basic inconsistencies or jumbles in the theory advanced in this book. I hope to point to some possibilities in the way of emerging from this thicket. I want to proceed by way of one more quotation, both from Martin and from Mao.

…many of [Mao’s] popular formulations have a distinctively “categorical imperative” ring to them – probably most of all the famous statement, “Marxism consists of thousands of truths, but they all come down to one thing: It is right to rebel against reactionaries.”  (194)

Let’s start from a fuller quotation of Mao’s famous statement in its original context:

The immense complexity of Marxism can be summed up in one sentence: ‘It is justifiable to rebel’ For centuries people have been saying: ‘It is justifiable to oppress or to exploit people, but it is wrong to rebel’. Marxism turned this thesis upside down. That is a great contribution, a thesis established by Marx from the struggle of the proletariat. Basing their action on this thesis, people have shown defiance, struggled, and worked for socialism.³

In making an interpretation here, a lot turns on a question of priority. Should the Marxism put forward by Mao in this passage be understood as beginning from a primordial ethical judgment (rebellion is right, justified)? Or should rebellion be seen as the primary action, generating a for-or-against field, with Marxism beginning from affirmation of the rebellion, putting oneself on the side of those who rebel? In the latter case, which I’d argue for, the justifiability is not an abstract (or an a priori) judgment, but a practical one which is simultaneous with ranging oneself with those who rebel.

Putting this together with the “first revolutionaries, then Marxists” statement, we can see how (as I see it) the basic movement is from rebel or revolutionary practice to Marxism as the affirmation and comprehension of that practice within a larger, deeper context, and then movement forward from there. This primacy of practice is essential for Mao, as for Marx and a revolutionary Marxism. Ethics in this conception is formed upon and around a basic practical orientation. (The movement here is similar to Badiou’s sequence of event, subject and truth-process, where it is the recognition of the event which founds both subject and truth-process, with an ethics following out of this nexus.⁴)

What is primary is the movement in the world, practice, and it’s this which generates the need which is not only what has led, historically, to taking up Marx, but which is also necessary in order to come at Marx in such a way as to see his theory as an understanding of the present which shows a different future as possible. At that point, in coming to grips with the revolutionary political vista thus opened up, there are many problems to be solved, including ethically. None of this movement from practice to theory guarantees anything, of course, and certainly not a good or fruitful understanding of Marx. The point is not a sure-fire method of getting everything right, but a conceptual relationship and construal of what’s going on.

The point in all this is not, of course, justification through quotations from Mao or l’explication du texte. But it is significant that these statements can (and I think should) be understood differently than they are taken by Martin.

But as well, I do believe that something along the lines of the above is how we need to understand the relation, not only between ethics and Marxism, but ethics and an emancipatory politics, and between each of these and a primary social stirring in the world.

Let us sketch the differences by way of a few questions. Are we, principally, Marxists because we are revolutionaries, or revolutionaries because we are Marxists? I think it is clear that the primacy must go to the first: Marxists because revolutionaries.  But how about the question with a closer relevance to Martin’s argument: Are we revolutionaries due to our ethical principles (ethical stance, an ethical insight or vision), or is there an ethics which crucially follows upon the taking up of the revolutionary project, which stems from an emancipatory political project? I believe the latter is true.  And finally, is politics an autonomous field of human social practice (or of truth-processes, as Badiou argues), or does it require to be founded upon a religio-ethical vision, as Martin believes? Here my own answer is less certain (I am not sure whether, or to what extent, the political field should be seen as autonomous), but I would not see it as needing to be founded in ethics or religious vision.

Thus I am arguing that both our taking up Marxism (and the sort of Marxism we take up), and our ethics (and the character of this ethics) follow upon and stem from our primary step in practice, which must be understood politically. There is no automaticity here, that is, it is not the case that anyone who takes up a revolutionary project thereby takes it up in the best way or draws the right conclusions. There is plenty of scope, and necessity, for thinking, argument, and investigation. And the whole matter is far more complex than the schemata I’ve offered might seem to indicate. On the one hand there are many ways and even degrees of “being a revolutionary”; and on the other, there are many types and aspects of ethics, for ethics are associated with overarching projects (understood in the Sartrean manner), and there is more than one project in any human life.

Without going into these complications, though, I hope to have said enough to indicate a different way of coming at the questions of ethics, politics, and Marxism.

III

In this final section I want to work through a number of topics, including the adequacy of Martin’s take on Marx’s thought, and some characteristic moves and modes of thinking in Ethical Marxism. I will be critical here, because I think these are matters that are important to get right.

Marx

Let’s go back to the opening sentence of a passage quoted above: “In Marx’s perspective, people do not question their circumstances (in general, broadly, deeply) except when motivated by material interests.” This doesn’t ring true, to my ears. Where does Marx talk about what leads or motivates people to question their circumstances broadly/deeply? And when does he talk about motivation on a broad scale by “material interests”? This is quite alien, it seems to me, to the way in which Marx approaches the question, and his conception of the relation between human activity and the materiality of their circumstances. He says, for example, in a wellknown passage, that history only poses problems for which there are solutions (“mankind…sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve”) meaning that problems are revelatory of social contradictions which contain their own supercession, that solutions are immanent within the problems themselves. Now whether we believe that this Hegelian-derived view of history and social contradictions is on the right track or not, the relation of materiality to human practice and its possibilities is very different from the view that it is only material interests which motivate people, which I believe is really a mischaracterization of Marx.

This is an example of a view and portrayal of Marx in this book which is rather remote from the thinking of Karl Marx, to my understanding. Now I do not hold that our problems as revolutionaries would be solved or solvable if we just understood Marx or Marxism correctly. Far from it. On the other hand, it is of high importance from the standpoint of the emancipatory project to understand Marx aright, and it often looks to me that Martin does not.

A basic aspect of Martin’s delineation of Marx with which I take strong issue is his characterization of Marx as a positivist, as in the following passages.

As with the positivists, for Marx a ‘scientific’ theory of society and history would be purely descriptive, not normative…. Marx aimed to be scientific, not normative. It might even be said that Marx aimed to be scientific as opposed to normative. (34, 103)

Marx aimed to add the processes of human social and cultural development to a universal science of all material processes. The algorithms that represent (or govern) material processes that occur in different domains of the material world (the different fields of scientific investigation) are themselves related through algorithms: this is reductionism…. (411)

An algorithm is a process which will always produce the same result of a certain sort whenever it runs. (The easiest example is a set of rules for solving a problem which will invariably give the correct answer if followed precisely. Thus the process of solving a problem in long division which we all learned in grade school is an algorithm: you have simply to follow the sequence of rules, and the correct answer will be generated.) Martin represents Marx as believing that history works through an algorithmic process, and that he had discovered the algorithm of history (that is, the invariable rules governing the process, such that a certain outcome is predictable). (411, 429, 432, 479)

This is coupled (as it would have to be) with a portrayal of Marx’s view of historical processes as completely deterministic, so that the general future course of things would be determined with a great degree of inevitability. Thus Marx is described by Martin as simply talking “about the way the capitalist system works and that this systemic working would lead to things working out by and by [that is, leading to communism].” (104)

Is this Marx?

Is this a fair account of Marx’s thinking, or of Marxism? Yes, perhaps of some forms of Marxism, often dominant ones; but no, not of Marx’s thinking, and not of all Marxisms. On the one hand the sort of positivistic, utilitarian and even Hobbesian Marxism which is the object of Martin’s critique has certainly been a strand, even a prominent strand (especially within “actually existing” socialisms). But there is far more to Marx (and to the more vibrant strands of Marxism) than this, and some of Martin’s characterizations border on caricature.

So I think there is a basic inaccuracy here, a great deal of one-sidedness and misunderstanding of Marx. I’ll reiterate that Marx’s being right or wrong is in itself of not much moment. The importance of the question lies in the context of developing an adequate revolutionary thinking and theory. What is crucial is whether we have a theory or theories adequate to comprehend and bear fruit in the process of human liberation and the transformation of our social being. But then, Marx’s usefulness to this great enterprise will depend on what his thinking is, so let’s pursue that question for a moment. And here we need to make some basic distinctions.

First, there’s a differentiation to be made between the explicit statements of a theoretical program and historical schema which Marx sometimes makes (that in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy being the most obvious and wellknown⁵), and the actual theoretical and historical work which he carries out. Thus while of course Marx does make several grand programmatic announcements, many have noted that when it comes to concrete historical studies (notably The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon and The Civil War in France), although he is certainly understanding historical events from within the theoretical framework he has developed, he does not reason from a schema, but through (in Lenin’s phrase) a concrete analysis of concrete conditions, which in turn represent complications in, and often problems for, his general program.

It’s really impossible to see how this procedure, which is entirely characteristic of Marx (including in Capital), is accurately captured by either description, or algorithm, or positivistic notions of science. These do not describe what “science” is for Marx, and they are very far from capturing the analyses that Marx actually carried out.

The adequacy of this sort of conception of Marx’s thinking is made even more implausible when we take into consideration the various phases of his thought. Marx, in company with most great thinkers, goes through several discernible stages in his thought. Everyone is familiar with the distinction between early and mature Marx (the 1844 MS, on the one hand, and Capital on the other, say). But there are differences here too; for example The German Ideology, usually cited as if it were an instance of Marx’s later thinking, expresses a rather crude and somewhat positivistic programmatic standpoint, which is almost completely absent from Capital. (Martin at one point says that Marx has an affinity with John Stuart Mill on the basis that “both claimed that their work could proceed on a ‘purely empirical basis’,” [362-3] drawing these words from The German Ideology but also claiming that Marx repeats the claim elsewhere, which I do not believe is the case (at least not in works later than German Ideology).⁶)

It is true that while the theory and program of Capital are certainly not positivistic, there is an expression in several places of a rather deterministic historical scheme. But this too becomes no longer characteristic given the changes that occur in Marx’s thinking in the 1870s, as he came to grips with the three phenomena of the Paris Commune; the growth of the workers’ movement in Germany and its associated Marxism (of which Marx was very critical); and the increasing study of Marx in radical Russian circles, and the questions raised for the application of Marx’s schema in this situation. All of these raised questions as to the projections which could be drawn from Capital (not to mention the earlier programmatic statements of the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy), and Marx’s responses to these newly arisen occasions (Class Struggles in France, Critique of the Gotha Programme, and his reply – and its various drafts – to Vera Zasulich) sketch a much more open and undeterministic stance and theory than is to be found earlier. (Martin does mention the correspondence with Zasulich [275-77], but only to criticize Marx’s failure to raise “the question of place.”)

There is far more that could be said in relation to this question – about the explanatory structure underlying Capital (which bears no relation to a descriptive positivistic idea of science), about Marx’s explanations of contemporary history, etc., and quite a bit has been written on these topics – but what I’ve said is probably enough to make my point.

Reverse implication to origins

Continuing for a moment the discussion of Martin’s picture of the figure of Karl Marx and his thinking, let me cite what I find to be some quite astonishing statements:

One of the paradoxes of Marxism is that Marx by himself is not so interesting or exciting…. (360)

For Stalin, but perhaps even for Marx, Engels, and Lenin, intellectual ferment was not a good thing. (352)

…for Marx, all you need to know about agriculture is that it represents an outmoded form of production. (274)

I term these statements astonishing in that I find it difficult to believe that these judgments, peppered through the book on a diverse array of subjects, could come from a straightforward reading of Marx and an attempt to understand his thinking. Perhaps we simply differ in what we find in Marx. But my guess is that glosses on Marx like these arise from a bent towards reading Marx through the history of Marxism, and in particular reading Marx (and Engels and Lenin) through Stalin – or rather, through a fear of Stalinism. This becomes clear, I think, in a passage like that on 189-90, where Martin argues for a strong link between “Marxism’s resistance to the ethical ‘as such’, and Marxism’s tendency, an inherent tendency I would argue, toward economism.” This passage continues,

Indeed,…the difficulty is that Marxism (or simply the thought of Karl Marx, to be direct about this) entails a critique of reification, and yet Marxism, especially when it becomes only a structural “science” of the causality of things and interests…seems itself to reify. In practice, especially in the practice of Stalin in the Soviet Union, but not only there, this orientation has had, again, dire consequences. (190)

This reasoning, along the lines of holding that the seeds of Stalin were planted by Marx, is an example of an all-too-common mode of argument in Ethical Marxism, one of “reverse implication” from the characteristics of a phenomenon back to the attribution of those characteristics to its origins.

The sort of move I mean is exemplified in some of Martin’s arguments concerning human meat consumption, as well as with reference to 20^th century or contemporary imperialism, where he will begin by pointing to modern industrial meat production, or to imperialism. Having taken it as clear that this is obviously wrong (“the immense cruelty done to animals in the current food-production system and through human participation on that system is a great wrong that calls us to ethical action” [213], for example), he will generalize or hypostasize the basis in either case: carnivorism as the basis of industrial food production, or commodity-production as the basis of capitalist imperialism. Finally, the conclusion is drawn that, given that the final form (industrial food production, imperialism) is clearly wrong or evil, this basis must be ethically wrong.

The argumentative move, in other words, begins from the wrongness (evil) of a phenomenon, X; the basis of X is then generalized; this generalized or hypostasized basis (carnivorism, commodity production) is then projected back to a beginning or seed of X, which is then itself presumed to be wrong or evil.

This beginning is often characterized by Martin as the crossing of a boundary or threshold by human beings, a step that brought them into the territory of evil. If this sounds a lot like myths of the fall of man and the original sin, he has no problem with such similarities: “My own view…is that myths of a human fall point to a time when humans first began to eat inhuman animals on a regular basis.” (87) And “the fall into alienation is the emergence of the commodity form and the process of commodification” (266). On a different subject: “a threshold had to be crossed which allowed one half of a population (male) to understand the other half of the population (female) as objects of domination.” (236)

To draw this out a little more: The argument is that commodity-production, with its concomitant reduction (Martin believes) of everything to a “mere thing,” marks the threshold after which “all bets are off” ethically: “If you will do this, what will you not do? If you will cross this line, what line will you not cross?” (245)

There is a similar line of reasoning in relation to the animal question, and in this case Martin holds that the step into carnivorism was also the threshold of commodity production as well:

At some point in this transition, there must have been a moment when a fundamental distinction between animals and humans began to be made, as regards cruelty and some sort of basic standing in the world, and here we can see the roots of reification…. We can see the beginnings of commodity production. (260)

The projection backward presumes, for its argumentative legitimacy, a causal process leading from this threshold beginning to the present form. And Martin clearly believes this to be the case:

The first forms of commodity production initiate humanity into a world of things. The emergence of capitalism places the reification of humanity on a purely calculative basis, and from there all human relationships are brought under the brutal cash nexus. (250)

Bad reasoning

There are many aspects of this form of reasoning which are both untenable and disturbing. It is also, we should note parenthetically, not very congruent with Martin’s opposition to “inevitablism.” For here he appears to presuppose a deterministic unfolding from that beginning point, indeed a sort of teleological determinism – the end (industrial meat production, imperialism) is presumed to be in the beginning (the “fall” into carnivorism, commodity-production).

The form of Martin’s reasoning here also has a disturbingly close similarity to that which is often used by opponents of abortion, who project backward, beginning from the wrongness of killing a person, to the threshold whose crossing results in a complete human being (the moment of conception is the obvious line-crossing boundary), and conclude that wrongness can also be imputed to any deliberate ending of life following the crossing of that threshold.

And in fact the form of reasoning employed in this sort of reverse implication to origins (as I’m terming it), has nothing to recommend it.

It certainly does not generally follow, from the fact that a certain characteristic is true of the end result of a process, that the same characteristic can be attributed to the origin or beginning of that process. If this were the case, then the properties of a fully grown oak tree would be true of the acorn which was its seed — a very unsound inference. To reason in this way is to ignore real changes which occur in the development of any phenomenon, and the emergence of new and unique characteristics at new levels of development.

In Ethical Marxism, the idea of a threshold, a fall, the original evil of commodity production and an increasing evil with capitalism, involves a great deal of romanticization of pre-capitalist societies (see 102, 130, 149). Agricultural society “keeps people sane,” Martin says, while industrialization and mechanization “destroys human sanity” (55)

The ‘cell-form’ in Marx

The idea of a boundary or threshold is also related by Martin to another concept, that of the “cell-form” of a phenomenon, drawing this term from Marx:

The cell-form of a world that is upside-down is the commodity.…we might draw a line between [that is, connecting] the present functioning of systems and the cell-form of which Marx wrote. (250, 256)

In the Preface to the first German edition of Capital (Vol. 1), Marx analogizes the role of the commodity in capitalism to that of the cell of an organism, and terms the commodity-form the “economic cell-form.” (This is his only use of the term, to my knowledge.) He makes this analogy by way of explaining both why he begins with analysis of the commodity-form (although “to the superficial observer, the analysis of these forms seems to turn upon minutiae”) and why previous investigators have not done likewise (“because the body, as an organic whole, is more easy of study than are the cells of that body”).

Martin, however, identifies this term with his own idea of the seed from which the present system grows, and attributes this to Marx and Engels:

One could argue that, for both Marx and Engels, part of what it means for there to be a given social system is that there is a prefiguration of the present in a “cell-form,” and that this cell-form can be seen in a threshold that is crossed by humankind. (239)

He then goes on to identify the “cell-form,” not only with his notion of a threshold, but with the irremediable fall of humanity:

…there is with Marx’s conception of the “cell-form” the notion that the first forms of commodity production let the cat out of the bag and there is little or no chance of putting the cat back in the bag. …there was a conjuncture, in prehistory, where the seeds of patriarchy, private property, commodity production, and even the state…and eventually capitalism were planted, in a single go. (243, 239)

It should be clear that the uses Martin makes of it have nothing to do with Marx’s use of this phrase. Indeed, looking to the analogy drawn in this metaphor to the cells of an organism, it’s clear that the cells of an organism only exist within the context of the whole organism; likewise with the relation of the commodity to the “organism” of capitalist society, from which Marx’s analysis proceeds by abstraction. (Continuing the comparison to the analysis of organic cells, Marx says, “In the analysis of economic forms, moreover, neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of use. The force of abstraction must replace both.”)

This point is important not chiefly because it represents a misreading of Marx, but principally for the light it sheds on the character of the difference between Marx (and Marxism) and the manner in which Martin proceeds and the theory which he builds. For Marx the commodity is reached and known through abstraction from the whole of capitalism, and this “cell-form” in turn serves as a means of understanding the working of the whole at the most basic level of analysis. It is out of the sort of understanding of the present illustrated here that Marx draws his historical remarks (the path to the present) and – most importantly – his vision of future possibilities.

For Marx, communism is an inherent possibility of the present configuration of human society, of its contradictory social dynamic; his analysis points to this possibility. Communism is not for Marx, as it is for Martin (often), an ethico-religious vision, derived in some sense prior to any social analysis. And for Marx, I would argue, the ethical judgment on (that is, against) capitalism derives from the reality of this possibility or possibilities, not from an absolutist and logically prior judgment of capitalism or commodity-production as evil.

Obviously to say that Marx’s thinking differs in this way from Martin’s is not to decide the issue, but the way in which it differs does complicate both the picture drawn of Marx in Ethical Marxism and the use to which Martin often wants to put Marx’s “science.” For if Marx is to be simply used instrumentally for the achievement of a prior ethical project, then what is used will not really be Marx. Further, if we read Marx in this way, many of the sharp dichotomies set up by Martin – between fact and value, history and morality, etc. — fall away, at least within the ambit of Marx’s thinking.

One more thing

On the very first page Martin gives his approval to the thesis (pioneered in a neo-Aristotelean vein by G.E.M. Anscombe) “that there are basic ethical questions about which nothing can be said, and that it would be a violation of ethics to presume to give an ‘explanation’ as to why it is wrong to do certain things…that the violation occurs even in the idea that certain situations might become questions, brought into the discursive realm.” (1) At several points in the book, Martin’s judgment concerning a phenomenon is a simple “it is evil” or “it is wrong” (see for example 27, 43, 44, 353), and at one point he describes his aim as being “to establish the place of evil in social theory.” (33)

There are several problems, as I see it, with this way of proceeding. Most obviously, this sort of thesis would seem to lend itself all too easily to the confirmation of parochial prejudices of a particular time, place, or culture. But more broadly, such a stance seems to pose itself, as a matter of principle, against investigation and discussion of certain issues, to say in effect, “This is obviously wrong; end of discussion.”

This is not to say that it’s  sometimes not be appropriate to make this sort of simple judgment (“it is wrong”); but this is a matter of context, not of principle. And what makes this principle particularly problematic in the circumstances of this book, is the way in which it can interrelate to the “reverse implication” method described above. For here the end-phenomenon, from which the “reverse implication” begins, is first made the subject of a categorical judgment. The beginning “cell form” or boundary point is then also supposed to be subject to the same judgment. (“This is evil.”) But if the initial judgment is not itself supposed to be liable to any further discussion, then the reverse-implication procedure becomes even more dangerous.

In conclusion

To recapitulate the general thesis of Ethical Marxism in a very simplified form (and which I hope is not a caricature), Martin’s stance is that a moral impulse is needed as the beginning point of the revolutionary project, and that a more fully developed ethics is needed as both continuing impetus and guide toward a possible future “redeemed world,” the vision of which stems from “the religious perspective.” The role of Marxism is to provide a description of the lineaments of the present and to help map out the means toward this future (means which must themselves be evaluated ethically). If this is a fair, albeit extremely bare-bones, account, then there is a strong similarity here to a very familiar picture of a dichotomy of fact and value, of description and prescription, in this case with Marxism describing the facts and ethics supplying the values. Such a bifurcation seriously under-represents the role of explanation, which is certainly not strictly factual or descriptive, and the ways in which all of these – describing, explaining, valuing – interrelate and interpenetrate as aspects (moments, if you will) of an overall process which Marx terms (human) practice.

In fact I think we have to begin at least from this point, from a picture of human life and social activity in which thinking, evaluating, projecting, theorizing, and acting are aspects of a continuous social process, in which all social life is understood as essentially practical, and “all mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and the comprehension of this practice.” (Thesis 8)

This may seem too much like the “work from what exists in the world and everything will work out bye and bye” stance which Martin criticizes strongly in Marx. But where else can we begin than from the existing world, understood not in a flat, descriptive, positivistic way, but in its dynamic motion, self-cleavages, differentiating processes, and the idealizing and idea- and truth-processes which human practice (praxis) creates – and of course with no guarantee or promise that it will all work out?

If I end here on what is in a sense all-too-familiar ground — an evocation of praxis, and of a particular strain of Marxism⁷ – this is surely an indication of the limitations in my own attempts to rethink the revolutionary project. I certainly hold by the above sketch as a minimal orientation, but, as may be obvious, the critical examination of Ethical Marxism put forward here has not been carried out from the vantage point of any worked out solution to the problems which Martin has attempted to solve.

*******

This is a strong aspect of wandering, even meandering, in the development of themes and topics in Ethical Marxism, and the book’s order is generally associative and train-of-thought rather than by topic and development or logical deployment of argumentation. Themes are dropped and then picked up later but in a different key, arguments are left undeveloped, and emotive expression sometimes seems to overwhelm the cognitive development of content. As anyone knows who’s read his work, this is Martin’s style, and it has its strengths and its charms; but it’s not a style of writing and intellectual construction which make it easy to be certain that one has, in a paraphrase or account such as I’ve attempted, captured exactly what he intends. If I haven’t captured his meaning, though, I trust that others will set me right.

More importantly, the question at issue in this book and in my engagement with it, is the shape of the communist project in the present era. Bill Martin has been striving (here and in previous and subsequent writings) to explore and put forward a view of what that project must encompass. I’ve indicated the ways in which I think the approach he wants to take is seriously flawed. But I’m conscious, too, of how incomplete are my own views and how pressing is the necessity of collective work on this urgent political and intellectual and practical task.

Notes

Related posts:

1. Marxism, politics, and evil, part 2
2. Marxism, Politics, and Evil, part 1
3. Marxism, politics, and evil, part 3

What about Alain Badiou, the contemporary philosopher? Like Zizek, he has attracted much attention among people looking for new avenues both intellectually and politically. A friend in Latin American studies has told me his name is everywhere in Latin American intellectual circles.

Badiou’s background is within Marxism and Maoism. He was a student of the French communist philosopher Louis Althusser in the early sixties, an activist within the French uprisings of May 1968, and a Maoist activist and theorist in the 1970s. He has concluded, beginning in the 1980s and for a nest of reasons both political and philosophical, that this tradition of political practice (that is, basically, the international communist movement as it had emerged that far), has reached a point of “saturation,” as he terms it, and that a new beginning – a new truth-process, as he calls it – is necessary. He has gone on since then to outline a new approach in some very basic fields of philosophy.

In a February 2006 interview at University of Washington, he summed up:

“Since the mid-80s, more and more, there has been something like a saturation of revolutionary politics in its conventional framework: class struggle, party, dictatorship of the proletariat, and so on. So we have to find something like a fidelity to the fidelity. Not a simple fidelity…. Today we have an experimental sequence from the point of view of political practice. We have to accept the multiplicity of experiences. We lack a unified field — not only in something like the Third International, but also in concepts there is no unified field. So you have to accept something like local experiments; we have to do collective work about all that. We have to find — with help of philosophical concepts, economic concepts, historical concepts — the new synthesis.”

So, does he have worth for us, for our moment, our project, our need to “reconceive as we regroup”? Speaking for myself here, I believe we have, very much, something to learn from him.

Alain Badiou has developed a distinctive philosophical system over the last decades – one sharply focused on understanding the way in which something new, a radical rupture, can jump out of nowhere, changing how we understand ourselves and the situation, and profoundly changing the status quo. His view of ethics revolves around understanding how to have “fidelity” to powerful breaks with conventional thinking, and militantly pursue those breaks as far as they can go – in theory and practice.

His philosophy covers many wide areas, but what relates most closely to concerns on this site is his thinking around the question of how to understand the emergence – the eruption — of deep breaks in the social and political world that challenge (or even demolish) the status quo (which Badiou calls “the situation” and “the state” of affairs).

Such a rupture – Badiou calls it an event, which becomes a special term in his philosophy – such a rupture or event is the start of a process which changes both the world and the people involved in it, and creates and synthesizes new truths. The event is the starting point for both a truth-process and a subject, in Badiou’s terminology. (The subject is not the particular person, but all who participate in the truth-process.)

He gives as examples of “events” such things as the upheaval in France of May 1968 – or equally the birth of modern physics in the time of Galileo. I think it’s easy to see how we could say that out of these was born both a new subject (socially collective, not merely individual), and a truth-process. Neither subject nor truth-process is possible without the other, and they construct each other.

Studying Militancy, Examining Paul

Like most philosophers, Badiou writes very systematically, and to grasp a particular point or passage, some grasp of his overall argument is needed.

I think we can get a better sense of what Badiou is saying by looking a just one of his works – the influential book he wrote on Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism.

Paul is generally viewed as a deeply reactionary character by Marxists and even by many progressive Christians. One could say that Paul took an early egalitarian Jewish sect, and played a pivotal role in transforming it into an established Church with a novel, codified doctrine, and the ability to “take over” the Roman empire, Europe and beyond.

So why does a revolutionary like Badiou write about Paul? Well – we don’t need to just examine an historical figure like this from the point of view of “was his doctrine correct?” or “do we see him as reactionary?”

Badiou is examining Paul as an archetype of militancy – as a person with “fidelity” to a world historic “event” and the “truth-process” emerging from it (in this case, a resurrection [undocumented to be sure] and a certain universal set of messages that were unprecedented for their times.)

On the second page of this book, Badiou characterizes Paul as someone who “practices and states the invariant features of what can be called the militant figure.”

Badiou goes on to say, “there is currently a widespread search for a new militant figure¼called upon to succeed the one installed by Lenin and the Bolsheviks at the beginning of the century, which can be said to have been that of the party militant.”

He thinks that now, when such a step forward is needed, a look back at the distant and apparently very dissimilar case of Paul is highly illuminating.

Badiou says he wants to trace the connection, embodied in Paul, “between the general idea of a rupture, an overturning, and that of a thought-process which is this rupture’s subjective materiality.” It’s the connection, in other words, between an event and the truth-process and the subject which are both born out of it. The “militant figure” is the militant of a truth-process and part of a new subjectivity. (Subjectivity in this philosophical sense does not mean, as in Maoist usage, being un-objective or anti-scientific. It means in this case, being a new subject (or part of a new social subject), a newly defined and awakened actor on the social stage and within the new process of truth-formation.)

To rephrase slightly, Badiou’s quest is for a new way to be a revolutionary in our present circumstances. He approaches Paul in this light, for those reasons, and interprets Paul’s life and practice in terms of his own (Badiou’s) philosophy of event, subject, truth-process, and fidelity. A “new militant figure” would be the militant of a new truth process.

That’s the background of his concern with Paul. He goes on to say that what he’s going to focus on in Paul’s work is “a singular connection, which it is formally possible to disjoin from the fable [that is, Christianity] and of which Paul is…the inventor: the connection that establishes a passage between a proposition concerning a subject and an interrogation concerning the law.”

What Paul contributed, Badiou believes, is the insight and practice of separating truths (and truth-processes) from their particular historical context. Badiou opposes this to the contemporary practices of dissolving truths into forms of cultural, linguistic or historical relativisms.

A Universal Singularity

In the world today, Badiou says, on the one hand there is a vast “extension of the automatisms of capital,” which imposes “the rule of an abstract homogenization,” while “on the other side there is a process of fragmentation into closed identities, and the culturalist and relativist ideology that accompanies this fragmentation.” Both of these processes, and their ideological expressions, are inimical and deadly to the creation of new truth today. Moreover, the two processes are complementary:

“Capital demands a permanent creation of subjective and territorial identities in order for its principle of movement to homogenize its space of action….”

A new truth-procedure, Badiou believes, will on the one hand interrupt and disrupt the repetition of the same which is the logic imposed by capital. On the other hand: although the eruption of new truth is a singular process, “its singularity is immediately universalizable.” In other words: a truth-process originates in a particular event, breaking out at a particular time and place; but the process is one which brings into being new truths which are universal, or which can be universalized. So the truth-process also breaks with particular identities and relativist logic.

Badiou concludes in this line of thought:

“Breaking with all this (neither monetary homogeneity nor identitarian protest; neither the abstract universality of capital nor the particularity of interests proper to a subset), our question can be clearly formulated: What are the conditions for a universal singularity?” (All quotes in the last few paragraphs are from the first chapter of Badiou’s Saint Paul.)

It is precisely on this question that he thinks it’s helpful to look at Paul, because this is his (Paul’s) question. A dispute arose between Paul and the historic apostles in Jerusalem (Peter and some others), apparently concerning whether all Christians need be circumcised, that is, whether they needed to take on the traditional marks of belonging to the Jewish community. The position in Jerusalem was yes, because they saw Jesus as fulfilling the process of Judaism. Paul said no:

“In his eyes, the event renders prior markings obsolete, and the new universality bears no privileged relation to the Jewish community.” (Badiou, 23)

Badiou sides with Paul on the general issue involved. The question, rephrased in Badiou’s terms, is this:

“What is the relation between the supposed universality of the postevental truth (that is, what is inferred from Christ’s resurrection) and the evental site, which is, indubitably, the nation bound together by the Old Testament?” (22)

This becomes for Badiou a general question about the relation between the old and the new, after the occurrence of an event: Does the new truth incorporate the old within it, or is there a decisive break? Badiou believes there is a break.

This relates to what Badiou is getting at in talking of “universal singularity.”An event is singular and unique: it breaks with the boundaries and categories of the situation out of which it erupts. But the event marks the beginning of a truth-process, which is a process of creating universal truths.

So you could say that the break-out represented by an event, and its initiation of a truth-process, is how singular –> universal works. But Badiou also wants to stress what is something like the reverse process: how the truth which is essentially universal, traverses the differences and particularities of the world: “With regard to the world in which truth proceeds, universality must expose itself to all differences and show, through the ordeal of their division, that they are capable of welcoming the truth that traverses them.” (106)

Mass Line

This becomes one of Badiou’s chief themes in this book: the way in which new universal truths “traverse” or travel through and incorporate the differences and particularities of the world. “It is in fact the search for new differences,” he says,

“New particularities to which the universal might be exposed, that leads Paul beyond the evental site properly speaking (the Jewish site) and encourages him to displace the experience historically, geographically, ontologically. Whence a highly characteristic militant tonality, combining the appropriation of particularities with the immutability of principles, the empirical existence of differences with the essential nonexistence, according to a succession of problems requiring resolution, rather than through an amorphous synthesis.”

Badiou then quotes Paul from Corinthians I (First Letter of Paul to the Corinthians, in the New Testament):

“For though I am free from all men, I have made myself a slave to all, that I might win the more. To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win the Jews; to those under the law, I became as one under the law—though not being myself under the law—that I might win those under the law. To those outside the law I became as one outside the law—not being without law toward God but under the law of Christ—that I might win those outside the law. To the weak I became weak, that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all men. “(Cor. I.9.19-22)

Badiou says:

“This is not an opportunist text, but an instance of what Chinese communists will call ‘the mass line,’ pushed to its ultimate expression in ‘serving the people.’ It consists in supposing that, whatever people’s opinions and customs, once gripped by a truth’s postevental work, their thought becomes capable of traversing and transcending those opinions and customs without having to give up the differences that allow them to recognize themselves in the world.” [St. Paul, page 99]

What to think? Well, let’s take a more familiar political example. Suppose you are a revolutionary militant or cadre. You have been grasped in your life and activated by a great eruption in the world, and the experience has completely up-ended the conventional system of facts and categories and hierarchies – all that you thought you knew. You have entered into a process of synthesizing and recognizing and establishing new truths in the world, a process which is not just yours, but yours along with many others. I am sure many of us on this site have experienced this, and have entered into such processes, and have had this shape our lives.

Let’s say that these new truths are universal (in the sense of being “addressed to all” as Badiou often puts it). These truths demand to be made real in the world, which means changing the world. Wrong ways of approaching this demand: either preaching to people (“here’s the truth; accept it, believe it”), or enforcing it as truth, if you have the power to do that (“here’s the truth; you must accept it or else”). Rather, the truth has to be made real in the world, not by opposing itself abstractly to the differences and particularities of people and groups, but through them. This would be what the mass line is about, as Badiou is interpreting it here. “From the masses, to the masses” – taking “the ideas of the masses,” synthesizing them through the universal truth in a way that does not dissolve their particularity, and bringing them “back to the masses.”

And this is what Badiou sees in this text of Paul: an expression of how a truth, universal in character and sweep, can come to “seize the masses” in a way which does not obliterate or abolish “the differences that allow them to recognize themselves in the world.”

Mao’s “mass line” has often been understood as addressing questions of methods of leadership (“learning while leading, leading while learning”) or political work (concentrating and sifting out correct from incorrect in the ideas of the masses, then “returning” them in the form of line and policy). As such, it remains on the level of means and policy. Badiou, however, is seeing it as a way in which the universal becomes particular, and how a new truth becomes materially expressive within and through individual people and groups. It is a profound philosophical question, as well as profoundly political.

There’s much more to his thinking, which is very rich and variegated. There’s a lot in Badiou that one can argue with, and I am still grappling with his thought. But he’s one of the very few really original, deep, and path-breaking philosophers of the present – and someone who’s seriously trying to think or rethink the questions of revolution (or of a truly emancipatory politics, as he prefers to say). These ideas are not repackagings of our own familiar Marxisms… they are often strange to us, as if the same world and problems are suddenly seen from a new angle with fresh eyes. It is provocative and thought-provoking. And for those reasons alone, there’s a lot of value in his work (we need it, in fact) and he needs to be seriously engaged — irrespective of whether we adopt his philosophical system as a whole, or any particular aspects of it.

Related posts:

1. John Steele: Revolutionary Faithfulness and the Radically New
2. John Steele: When Everything Seems to Change — Badiou and the Event
3. John Steele: Why is Badiou of political value?

How much is it the very structure of class society that gives rise to a revolutionary people, and how much is it exceptional moments and crisis within particular societies?

Why did a great eruption of consciousness and revolutionary hope break out around 1968? When does tremendous discontent jell into movements for something radically better? How much can coming crises of the society be anticipated, and how can we prepare ourselves for them?

Central here are these questions: How much are the transitions here defined by continuity and how much by discontinuity? How much of what we now believe will be outdated and discarded as part of the past, and how much will be crucial for navigating and understanding the new?

The radical philosopher Alain Badiou has focused a great deal of his life’s work on understanding conjuncture, through a concept he calls “the event.” This is the subject of the following essay.

by John Steele

Several times in his recent Kasama #3 essay, ‘Elements of Exhaustion, or, Rubber and Glue’, Bill Martin uses Alain Badiou’s concept of “the Event.” And that appearance gave me the impetus to try to articulate this concept, which forms such an important part of Badiou’s work and which helps, I believe, open up genuinely new philosophical territory in a way that is directly relevant to rethinking the great project of revolution and human emancipation.

What is Badiou’s conception of an Event? (I will capitalize the word when the reference is to Badiou in order to avoid confusion with “event” as used ordinarily.)

Very roughly speaking, an Event is an important sort of “eruption” in some basic field of human social activity and thinking. It is, Badiou says, something which has happened “that cannot be reduced to its ordinary inscription in ‘what there is’,” and “which compels us to decide a new way of being.” [1]

It is something which Badiou believes is literally unpredictable and indescribable within the situation in which it occurs. It is a thrusting forward, as it were, of something that is truly new, and the status quo, the situation of things as they are and as they are accounted to be, does not have the resources to either predict or even describe the Event.

Some examples of Events in the political sphere are, for Badiou, the French and Russian Revolutions, and the Cultural Revolution in China. He also cites, among other examples, “the appearance, with Aeschylus, of theatrical Tragedy; the irruption, with Galileo, of mathematical physics; an amorous encounter which changes a whole life,” [2] as well as “the creation of the Topos theory by the mathematician Grothendieck, the creation of the twelve-tone scale by Schoenberg….” [3]

Clearly Events occur in several areas of human endeavor. (Actually Badiou thinks there are exactly four: science, art, and love, as well as the political.)

Obviously none of these are just “things that occurred.” Not only are each of these major revolutions in their (different) areas, but they are phenomena involving human desire, work, and thinking. For Badiou, in order for Events even to exist, it is necessary that people recognize and grasp them; “only an interpretive intervention can declare that an event is presented in a situation.” [4]

That recognition, in turn, means little unless it is followed by an embarkation upon a new course as a result. To recognize an Event is to recognize it as potentially life-changing (and society-changing), and to catch a glimpse of a whole line of thinking and practice that follows from it. There is thus a tight linkage between the being or existence of an Event; its being recognized as such (as the eruption of the new); and the unfolding of what are seen as the consequences of the Event.

What follows from the Event

Because the Event is not describable or knowable within the parameters of the situation-as-it-is, Badiou says that the Event is supplemental to the situation. So: In order for an Event to have occurred, it must not only have been seen and recognized, there must not only have been an interpretive intervention, but a decision must have been taken to relate to the world as it is “from the perspective of its evental supplement.” [5]

For those who recognize the Event, in other words, it is something that will shift their perspective on the world, opening up a whole new landscape, so to speak – and this begins a process of re-thinking, acting, and relating to the world in terms of this Event.

Through this process – the decisions to intervene, to think and act in the light of the new perspective offered by the recognition of the Event – there comes into existence what Badiou terms a new subject: those who make a basic decision to follow this out, to relate to the situation and live their lives with reference to the Event and to follow the consequences. (Note that the subject is social, not individual.) And the process that unfolds off of the Event, propelled by this subject, is what Badiou calls a truth-process: it is the creation of new truths. (In fact, for Badiou, who makes a sharp distinction between knowledge [roughly, the summing-up of what is] and truth [= the enunciation of something new], these truth processes, born from Events, are the only means by which truths come into the world.)

Finally, just to finish an outline of the points of Badiou’s thinking about the Event, there is the question of “fidelity.” This fideligy is simply the process, ever renewed through continuing decision, of tracing out the consequences of an Event. As such, it is necessarily oppositional: “An evental fidelity is a real break (both thought and practised) in the specific order within which the event took place.” [6]

You could say that a fidelity, then, is a process of remaining faithful to the Event, not in the sense of a reverent worship or dogged hanging-on, but in a process of ever pushing-forward development of new consequences and truths. As an example Badiou cites, for instance, “the politics of the French Maoists between 1966 and 1976, which tried to think and practise a fidelity to two entangled events: the Cultural Revolution in China, and May ‘68 in France.” [7]

No guarantees

There are no guarantees in any of this, no way of proving oneself right in terms that the world recognizes, and no assurance of success in the venture. “An event is linked to the notion of the undecidable,” says Badiou. “Take the statement: ‘This event belongs to the situation.’ If it is possible to decide, using the rules of established knowledge, whether this statement is true or false, then the so-called event is not an event….On the basis of the undecidability of an event’s belonging to a situation a wager has to be made.” [8]

Event, truth-process, subject, fidelity: all of these have to be understood together; they are co-defined and highly interdependent concepts (that form a basic framework within Badiou’s philosophy). And they are each highly subject to contingency and human choice.

Without an Event there is no truth-process; equally, without the intervention which touches off a truth-process, there is no Event. But the recognition of an Event and initiation of a truth-process is at the same time the birth of a subject. And “the procedure of fidelity” [9] is simultaneously a truth-process and constitutive of the subject of that truth-process.

None of this is necessitated or determined; it is a matter of choice and active intervention without assurance or guarantee: “The undecidability of the event induces the appearance of a subject of the event. Such a subject is constituted by an utterance in the form of a wager. The utterance is as follows: ‘The event has taken place, it is something which I can neither evaluate, nor demonstrate, to which I shall be faithful’.” [10]

Is an Event Coming to Redefine Our Times?

Badiou’s philosophy in all its ramifications, including his theory of the Event, raises many questions for Marxism (as well as for other world-views and outlooks), and I believe it’s important – vital even – to pursue these systematically. But for now I’ll just come back to some questions about the Event, and the utility and appeal of this theory for us right now.

Bill Martin spoke, in his last post, of “the extreme ‘anti-evental’ character of postmodern capitalism.” Without knowing precisely what he meant by this phrase (and I look forward to some further discussion on this point), I think all of us who have lived through the past 25 years have a deep sense of what he is pointing to. For this has been a period in which the logic of capital, in its most savage form, has remorselessly engulfed and more deeply penetrated the globe; a period in which wars, imperial and local, raged almost without cease, virtually none with any higher reason than aggrandizement of narrow interest or group; a period in which oppositional movements popped and fizzed, none able to gain a purchase in the situation for more than a few brief years; a period which in the imperial metropoles saw new modes of thought and styles of life proliferate, opposed by reactionary counter-movements – the culture wars – in a spectacle of both thinking and popular energies mobilized in such a way as to be without effect on the functioning of capital and empire.

It has been a time, in brief, which has cried out for fundamental change, for turning the world over, for a basic redefinition of terms – without anything of the sort coming forth. It has been a time without an Event.

I think this sense of fundamental stasis, of a longing for a breakthrough, is very widespread today, and by no means only among those who see themselves as revolutionary or oppositional (in fact many “revolutionaries” underwrite their own version of stasis). This widespread sense is in effect addressed and articulated and given theoretical form by Badiou, and is I think a reason for his burgeoning popularity as a thinker over the past decade. And deservedly so, for he speaks deeply and creatively to one of the central issues of our time.

If we accept that something like this is an accurate depiction of our situation today, where does this leave us? It’s worth noting that although an Event, in Badiou’s theorization, is not predictable, its occurrence is not a miracle either, not something which comes from nowhere. As Badiou emphasizes, “what composes an event is always extracted from a situation, always related back to a singular multiplicity, to its state, to the language connected to it, etc….an event is nothing but a part of a given situation, nothing but a fragment of being.” [“The Event as Trans-Being,” Theoretical Writings, 98]

But nonetheless, what do you do while “waiting for the event”?

I don’t want to address this question here, so much as open it up.

* * * * * *

Notes

[1] Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (originally appeared 1993), 41.

[2] Badiou, “Philosophy and Truth” in Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return to Philosophy, 62.

[3] Ethics, 41.

[4] Badiou, Being and Event, 181. This results in a paradoxical reflexivity of Event and intervention: Whereas “the event alone…founds the possibility of intervention,” it is also true that “if no intervention puts it into circulation…the event does not exist.” [Being and Event, 209]

[5] Ethics, 41.

[6] Ethics, 42.

[7] Ethics, 42.

[8] “Philosophy and Truth”, 62.

[9] Being and Event, 239

[10] “Philosophy and Truth”, 62.

[11] “The Event as Trans-Being,” Theoretical Writings, 98.

Related posts:

1. John Steele: Badiou — Another Take on Revolutionary Theory
2. John Steele: Why is Badiou of political value?
3. John Steele: Revolutionary Faithfulness and the Radically New

“In many ways this is the crux of Badiou’s thinking and work, over the past 25 years: how to ‘keep the faith’ in a creative way; how to do justice, theoretically, to a greatly changed world while remaining true to the project of a politics of emancipation.”

by John Steele

Over the past week and more there have been daily posts on this site – news, commentaries, interviews, videos – about and from the recent London conference On the Idea of Communism. The conference, as I understand it, was organized by Slovoj Zizek, who holds a visiting post at the college in London which sponsored the conference, but it was French philosopher Alain Badiou whose advocacy of “the communist hypothesis” provided the governing theme of the conference.

Why was (is) the conference important? And why are Zizek and Badiou important – both as the thinkers and philosophers they are, and as figures within the larger political-intellectual landscape today? And by important I mean important for the purposes around which Kasama is organized: the going-forward of communism, important for reconceiving and regrouping. Those are the questions I want to address in this post, paying particular attention to the thinking of Badiou. Address these questions – not answer them in any final way but open them up for engagement.

A recent report from the Idea of Communism conference posted here[Frieze], noted that

“Badiou doggedly kept faith with the concept of communism at a time, after 1989, when it was both pronounced dead and criminalized, identified with the totalitarianism that a triumphalist liberal capitalism defined itself against.”

Well, one might respond, weren’t there others who did too – many readers of this site, for example, or some left groups and parties around the world? Certainly that’s true, and taking up this question can begin to get at what’s at issue and at stake here. The issue (or one of them) is this: how to respond to a crisis, to a change in the world, to a new situation. We’re all familiar with some wellworn reflexes: the nothing’s-really-changed, or the go-with-the-tide response.

Or you can respond by saying, yes, a new synthesis is called for in a changed world, and then produce something which is not very new and not really a synthesis. And we’re familiar with that response as well.

A Quick Look at Where We Are

The last 30 years have seen the brutal ascendency of capital worldwide – practically, politically, ideologically. For 20 years “the death of communism” has been proclaimed.

Now, in the midst of a capitalist crisis which is just beginning its work of laying waste to people’s lives around the world, a conference is held, organized by Zizek around some of the ideas of Badiou, proclaiming that the participants in the conference “share the thesis that one should remain faithful to the name ‘Communism’: this name is potent to serve as the Idea which guides our activity, as well as the instrument which enables us to expose the catastrophes of the XXth century politics.”

And the theme was expressed in a quote Kasama posted earlier:

“Zizek opened the conference by saying that the time for guilt was over, that in the 21st century we needed to reclaim the name of “communism” from the ill repute into which it has sunk.”

A thousand people, at least, flock to London to the conference, while thousands more – who knows how many? – heard about it, talked about it, read about it, and thought about these questions.

In a word – Wow!

How could this not be something to celebrate, to look at, to pay attention to, to discuss? Doesn’t this provide wonderful openings for talking about communism – not preaching, but really getting into these topics and concepts, including the ways in which the people who spoke at this conference unfold their thinking? How could this not be an important event in the political-intellectual realm?

But I know there are those – and I keep being surprised by how many – who don’t see it this way. So let me try to explain why I do.

A Changed World

I have myself been very excited, over the past several years, to discover and begin studying Badiou and Zizek. These are genuinely innovative and radical thinkers: radical intellectually and radical politically. They’re exciting in both those dimensions and particularly in the combination. It’s not just that their work is interesting and exciting (as it is); it’s necessary work – or at least work of this sort, and this sort of depth, is profoundly necessary today.

Maybe I can begin to make clear why I believe that’s so, by playing it off against two viewpoints which take up positions to the contrary, which I’m going to enunciate in a fairly crude way just for the sake of argument and contrast:

The first is that we don’t need this sort of purely theoretical or philosophical exploration; we need actual struggle (and real communists should be engaged in, or organizing, such struggle). And we’ve seen this expressed a few times on this site.

The second might be put as, we need theory, but not what people like Badiou and Zizek are doing – we have Marx (Lenin, Mao – or Bakunin – or Trotsky – or Avakian) – that’s what communism is all about: those principles, those theories, which we already have. So what’s Badiou’s problem with that?

The crux of the matter is this: Although seemingly viewing the question from opposite ends, these positions are two sides of the same coin. This coin could be characterized in various ways. But rather than throw labels around, I’ll just say that mostly what this is about is not seeing that the world has changed, and how much it has changed, and what that requires of us.

How has the world changed? A huge question, of course, and I’ll only point to a few features and indications.

Economically, the world is still is still capitalist (duh), and in fact more widely and deeply than it was 30 or 50 years ago. But the structure of our capitalist world is very different than it was 15, or 30, or 50 years ago. The structures and circuits of capital have changed, as has the structure of imperialism.

The world has seen huge demographic shifts in recent decades: massive urbanization (more than half the world’s population now dwells in urban areas – an historic shift) and great flows of human migration both within and between countries. The roles that different populations and age groups play has shifted, as well as the roles and social positions of women. Look at the demographic shifts in this country: by 2050 whites will no longer be the majority in the US – a dramatic marker of some of these rather rapid changes of recent decades.

The structures and dynamics of communication and social interaction have altered and shifted.

And intellectually too. Take any field of study or investigation, from physics to anthropology to history to philosophy: the prominent theories, the terms of reference, the axis of discussion and dispute – all these things have changed, often fairly radically, over the past, say, 40 years.

The question is not whether these changes have been for good or ill (or to what extent it divides into two); the point is that the intellectual landscape has changed.

Nothing is timeless, nothing is changeless (a cliché, to be sure, but worth keeping in mind) – not in the physical world, not in the human social world – and not in the intellectual world of concepts and theories.

If one is to navigate and do work in a changing world, your tools, including theoretical tools, have to undergo change as well. Or let’s approach it from the other side. Of course, if we hope to change the world we have to be very aware of what’s happening around us, and we have to understand it, not just perceptually, but conceptually as well. But in that case our concepts cannot be hidebound or remain static. This seems obvious and unexceptional enough.

But there’s more to it than that.

It’s not just that a changing world requires changing concepts; it’s that the concepts will change in any case. The intellectual world, and each individual’s conceptual apparatus, is not separate from the larger world, but part of it, and changes unavoidably. Even those who “stay the same” are changing in fact. First because the context changes: my beliefs in context y are no longer the same as they were in context x simply because what they mean in the new context is not the same as what it was in the old. An obvious example – the meaning of a “golden oldie” played on the radio today versus its meaning in the context of the time in which it originated.

As the world changes, the social landscape of human thinking changes too. This is part of the materiality of human thinking, that it is essentially social and that like the larger world of which it is a part, it changes, and its changes have a relationship (complex and far from one-to-one, but a relationship) to the changes in the larger world.

There’s much more to say and develop around this topic. But for the moment, just one more thought. In adapting what we have to new circumstances, there’s obviously no ready-made process to arrive at a needed “new synthesis.” But one thing that’s certainly necessary is ruthless criticism of previous automatic assumptions. Or the seeking out of critiques from others, and taking them seriously.

Hanging on to what we believe we know — doesn’t this sort of defensive hugging-tight pretty obviously betoken a lack of confidence in those very assumptions? Of course even worse is the “back to the basics” old-time religion response – not just because it’s mistaken, but because it’s a self-deceptive illusion. An old idea in new circumstances is not the same idea as it was originally.

There’s a further twist to this, though, in the contemporary situation. For it sometimes seems that nothing has so perversely marked our era for some time now as the endless recycling of themes, songs, tropes, styles, forms, genres, what-have-you — a proliferation of endless variety in which “everything old is new again” but nothing is actually new. One effect is that these floating signifiers, these themes and motifs and icons detached from their original context, lose their heft and weight, becoming imbued with an implicit irony. And this can equally apply to revolutionary symbols and ideas. A push against the outrages of the present, accompanied by admiration of great movements from the past, is often enacted through the icons and thematic statements of those movements — which can quickly become a form of camp, dressing up in old uniforms, as it were.

We really have to be part of creating something new.

Theories and expectations

A new world requires new theory. Sometimes the realization starts with the question, Why is the world turning out so differently from what I was expecting?

In the 1970s, many of us expected (I expected) revolutionary struggle, or certainly very major social upheaval, in our lifetimes, in the US and around the world – and sooner rather than later. Many of us thought that “revolution is the principal trend in the world today.” And we thought that this struggle would be guided by revolutionary Marxist theory and ideology of some variety.

In the 1980s many expected world war, or nuclear war involving the US and USSR.

In the 1990s a “movement of movements” oriented around the struggle against capitalist globalization seemed to many to be the revolutionary wave of the future.

Some wrong (or at least completely unuseful) reactions to all this would be “Wow, you guys musta not had a clue, thinking any of that was on the horizon,” or “So I guess it just goes to show you never can tell, and it’s pointless to try to figure it out.”

In fact none of this was wrong to expect – in the sense that the seeds of such developments in each case, or a dynamic pointing in that direction, were present. And of course those who expected there to be no real change from the status quo of the time, or those who projected other tendencies into the future, were equally wrong. But more than that, these expectations arose within the context of real movements for justice or of resistance; and to see, feel something developing, to throw yourself into a struggle for justice and liberation, to expect, to know that it can succeed even against long odds – that’s never foolish, or wrong. On the contrary.

But still we have to deal with failures of struggles and the turnabouts of history. And there are many ways to react to these, and to the unexpectedness of the ways in which history has actually developed. Most obvious is the need for analysis. Why did it happen, this unexpected turn of events? What was it we were not seeing? This goes further too: I would venture that any new creation will also involve a recasting of the past. Something truly new now will involve not only a new vision of the present but, inevitably, a new vision of the past as well.

We also clearly need to look at our theoretical equipment. We approach everything in life with a whole theoretical apparatus already in place, some of it explicit, much of it implicit. A crisis in our lives, a sharp turn historically, has got to make us reconsider what we thought we knew, theory as much as fact. If it doesn’t, we’re just being willfully blind, or stupid, or both.

Of course a crisis can sometimes provoke betrayals, the turning aside from a great project, going with the reactionary tide or into the enemy camp – that’s common enough, and easy enough to understand. But a blind or unthinking fidelity to “the principles laid down” during times of great changes of circumstances is not a true alternative. And neither is any sort of simple picking up and recycling of the great ideas of the past.

In many ways this is the crux of Badiou’s thinking and work, over the past 25 years: how to “keep the faith” in a creative way; how to do justice, theoretically, to a greatly changed world while remaining true to the project of a politics of emancipation.

I quoted a commentator above to the effect that Badiou had “doggedly kept faith with the concept of communism,” which is true, yes; but it’s also much more complicated than that. I don’t intend to really enter into Badiou’s philosophical concepts here. (I’ve written a bit earlier – here and here – and I intend to write more in future.) But I do want to say something pointing to why Badiou is someone who should have our attention and is worth our study.

Fidelity

Faithfulness or fidelity is a prominent concept in Badiou’s thinking. When one becomes involved in what Badiou calls a truth-process (and a revolutionary process and project would be an example), there is a matter of keeping the faith with the process to which one has committed, of fidelity to the unfolding of the truths of this process and making them real. But no process lasts forever, and at some point it may reach an impasse, the end of its fruitful development – become what Badiou terms saturated.

One might say (although Badiou would not it put it this way) that in such a case the parameters of the world have shifted, so that the project to which one has maintained fidelity, with its particular vocabulary, its projections and expectations, its hard-won truths – the whole project seems stuck, doesn’t offer new possibilities, ways of going forward creatively or effectively. (And isn’t that the way things have been for many of us, for some time now, politically?)

The question is, what do you do, what can you do, when a process becomes saturated? Badiou talks about this in an interview of about three years ago:

“I think a fidelity does not really finish, but sometimes it is saturated; that is my term for it. There is a saturation; you cannot find anything new in the field of your first fidelity. Many people, when this is the case, just say, ‘It’s finished.’ And really, a political sequence has a beginning and an end, too, an end in the form of saturation. Saturation is not a brutal rupture, but it becomes progressively more difficult to find something new in the field of the fidelity….

“When the fidelity is saturated, you have a choice. The first possibility is to say it’s finished. The second possibility is this: With the help of certain events…you find what I name a fidelity to the fidelity. Fidelity to the fidelity is not a continuation, strictly speaking, and not a pure rupture, either. We have to find something new. When I was saying yesterday that ‘from outside, you can see something you don’t see from inside’, that’s merely a rule by which to find something new.”

Fidelity to the fidelity – that’s a valuable concept: not a catch-phrase, but a concept that deserves exploration, deepening and discussion, both within the context of Badiou’s systematic thought and outside it. And there’s much more, of course, in Badiou, that’s potentially very valuable in a project of reconception and regroupment – concepts of event and subject as Badiou conceives them – all of them highly interrelated as Badiou conceives them, and deserving of real exploration and study.

This world we face is one of crisis and injustice and momentous changes – and of inspiring struggles, too, and people dealing with the same problems of theory and practice that we are, in different forms and circumstances. We need to learn from them, from all who are pushing against the fabric that binds us, and seek to be part of the creation of new forms, both theoretically and practically, seizing the courage to climb the unexplored mountain, in the words of our comrades in Nepal.

Related posts:

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

pdf version

by Christopher Day (1996, Love and Rage Archive)

In the Spring 1996 issue of Workers Solidarity (journal of Ireland’s Workers Solidarity Movement) there is a review by Conor McLoughlin of Ken Loach’s excellent film on the Spanish Revolution, Land and Freedom. The review concludes that:

“(T)he factors involved in the defeat of the revolution would take an article in themselves to explain, ranging from the military power of the fascists (and their outside aid) to the betrayals by the communists and social democrats, and this is not my purpose here. What is important is that the social revolution did not collapse due to any internal problems or flaws in human nature. It was defeated from without. Anarchism had not failed. Anarchists had proved that ideas which look good in the pages of theory books look even better on the canvas of life.”

This quote neatly sums up the lessons that most anarchists seem to have drawn from the history of the anarchist movement. It also neatly sums up what is wrong with the anarchist movement. It is nothing short of a complete abdication of one of the most basic responsibilities of revolutionaries: the responsibility to subject the defeats and failures of the movement to the most thoroughgoing critical scrutiny.

Instead it takes a historical experience that ended in a crushing defeat, makes excuses for that defeat and offers the faithful reassuring platitudes that, all evidence to the contrary, the one true path of anarchism is vindicated by the experience.

When anarchists encounter this sort of thing in other ideologies they never fail to tear it to shreds. Does Communism bear responsibility for the heaping piles of corpses produced by Communist regimes? Is Christianity to be blamed for the Crusades, the Inquisition and the Witch Hunts? Of course. We judge ideologies by their practical results in peoples lives not by their pie-in-the-sky promises. Anarchism in Spain raised the hopes of millions that a classless stateless society could be achieved in the hear and now, lead them to the barricades to make it real, and failed abysmally. The Spanish people were condemned to fourty years of fascist rule because of the failure. And yet while the anarchist movement of the past half century has produced an extensive literature extolling the momentary successes of the Spanish Revolution in the creation of peasant and workers collectives, there has been almost no serious effort to analyze how the anarchist movement contributed to its own defeat. Blaming ones political enemies (fascists, Communists, or social-democrats) for behaving exactly as one would expect them to behave only further confuses matters. Betrayal, after all, is only possible on the part of someone trusted.

The Responsibilities of Revolutionaries

This paper is not primarily about the Spanish Revolution. Rather it is an attempt to pose some serious and difficult questions that I believe anarchism has irresponsibly avoided. It is addressed to those in the anarchist movement who are serious about making an anti-authoritarian revolution. It is not addressed to those who do not believe that such a revolution is possible. It is not addressed to those whose political horizons extend no further than establishing either a “temporary autonomous zone” or a semi-permanent bohemian enclave. Neither is it addressed to those for whom being a revolutionary means affecting a more militant than thou pose. The anarchist movement is filled with people who are less interested in overthrowing the existing oppressive social order than with washing their hands of it. This concern with ensuring the passage of ones soul to anarchist heaven can range from the obsessive efforts to purify ones personal habits to the sectarian refusal to join any group or organization that shows any sign of being a product of this society.

I believe that an enormous amount of human suffering is the direct consequence of the fact that the majority of humanity does not have control over the decisions that effect their lives. I believe that people are ultimately capable of exercising that control over their own lives. Consequently the revolutionary overthrow of the authoritarian institutions and social relationships that stand in the way of realizing that control is a necessary undertaking. People who are engaged in that project are revolutionaries and as revolutionaries I believe we have certain responsibilities. It is neccesary to speak of three of those responsibilities before getting into some of the thornier questions this paper aims to address.

To Win Freedom

The strength of anarchism is its moral insistence on the primacy of human freedom over political expediency. But human freedom exists in a political context. It is not sufficient, however, to simply take the most uncompromising position in defense of freedom. It is neccesary to actually win freedom. Anti-capitalism doesn’t do the victims of capitalism any good if you don’t actually destroy capitalism. Anti-statism doesn’t do the victims of the state any good if you don’t actually smash the state. Anarchism has been very good at putting forth visions of a free society and that is for the good. But it is worthless if we don’t develop an actual strategy for realizing those visions. It is not enough to be right, we must also win.

To Learn from the Past

People have been struggling for freedom forever. The single most valuable asset of the revolutionary movement is this experience. We are not the first people to grapple with the problem of how to make revolution and create a free society. We have an obligation to subject every chapter in the fight for freedom to the most searing analysis we are capable of. This is the only way that we can hope to avoid repeating the errors of the past. The anarchist approach to history, unfortunately, consists largely of looking for the lessons we want to find. The view of the Spanish Revolution critiqued above is a fairly typical example. This feel good approach to our own history (or to some imaginary prehistoric anarchist Eden) is generally coupled with a complete disinterest in the history of struggles that can’t be neatly contained within our own ideological borders (however any individual might define them). The result is a sort of hagiology: a timeless procession of libertarian martyrs to be invoked in political debates. How many anarchists once they have read an anti-authoritarian account of some historical episode actually go and read accounts from other perspectives? If our history were an uninterrupted train of successes this certainty that there is nothing to learn from others would be a bit more defensible.

To Have a Plan

Finally revolutionaries have a responsibility to have a plausible plan for making revolution. Obviously there are not enough revolutionaries to make a revolution at this moment. We can reasonably anticipate that the future will bring upsurges in popular opposition to the existing system. Without being any more specific about where those upsurges might occur it seems clear that it is from the ranks of such upsurges that the numbers of the revolutionary movement will be increased, eventually leading to a revolutionary situation (which is distinguished from the normal crises of the current order only by the existence of a revolutionary movement ready to push things further). People who are fed up with the existing system and who are willing to commit themselves to its overthrow will look around for likeminded people who have an idea of what to do.

If we don’t have a plausible plan for making revolution we can be sure that there will be somebody else there who will. There is no guarantee that revolutionary-minded people will be spontaneously drawn to anti-authoritarian politics.

The plan doesn’t have to be an exact blueprint. It shouldn’t be treated as something sacred. It should be subject to constant revision in light of experience and debate. But at the very least it needs to be able to answer questions that have been posed concretely in the past. We know that we will never confront the exact same circumstances as previous revolutions. But we should also know that certain problems are persistent ones and that if we can’t say what we would have done in the past we should not expect people to think much of our ability to face the future.

There is a widespread tendency in the anarchist movement (and on the left in general) to say that the question of how we are going to actually make a revolution is too distant and therefore too abstract to deal with now. Instead it is asserted that we should focus on practical projects or immediate struggles. But the practical projects or immediate struggles we decide to focus on are precisely what will determine if we ever move any closer to making revolution. If we abdicate our responsibility to try to figure out what it will take to actually make revolution and to direct our current work accordingly we will be caught up in an endless succession of “practical projects and immediate struggles” and when confronted with a potentially revolutionary situation we will be pushed to the side by more politically prepared forces (who undoubtedly we will accuse of “betraying” the revolution if they don’t shoot all of us). We will be carried by the tide of history instead of attempting to steer our own course. And by allowing this to happen again it will be we who have really betrayed the revolution.

The net result of the refusal to deal with what it will actually take to make a revolution is that anarchism has become a sort of directionless but militant reformism. We are either building various “counter-institutions” that resemble nothing so much as grungier versions of the social services administered by different churches; or we are throwing ourself into some largely reactive social struggle in which our actions are frequently bold and courageous, but from which we never build any sort of ongoing social movement (let alone a revolutionary organization).

The Theoretical Poverty of Anarchism

By the standards of these three responsibilities alone anarchism has been a failure. Not only has anarchism failed to win lasting freedom for anybody on earth, many anarchists today seem only nominally committed to that basic project. Many more seem interested primarily in carving out for themselves, their friends, and their favorite bands a zone of personal freedom, “autonomous” of moral responsibility for the larger condition of humanity (but, incidentally, not of the electrical grid or the production of electronic components). Anarchism has quite simply refused to learn from its historic failures, preferring to rewrite them as successes. Finally the anarchist movement offers people who want to make revolution very little in the way of a coherent plan of action. Projects, schemes, and reasons to riot abound — but their place in a larger coherent strategy for actually overthrowing the existing order is anybody’s guess.

Anarchism is theoretically impoverished. For almost 80 years, with the exceptions of Ukraine and Spain, anarchism has played a marginal role in the revolutionary activity of oppressed humanity. Anarchism had almost nothing to do with the anti-colonial struggles that defined revolutionary politics in this century. This marginalization has become self-reproducing. Reduced by devastating defeats to critiquing the authoritarianism of Marxists, nationalists and others, anarchism has become defined by this gadfly role. Consequently anarchist thinking has not had to adapt in response to the results of serious efforts to put our ideas into practice. In the process anarchist theory has become ossified, sterile and anemic. In the place of substantive political debate the anarchist movement has raised the personal quarrel to an art form. On the rare occasions that substantive issues are broached the response is invariably concerned more with the process by which they were broached or speculation on the character-structure of anybody who would question the received anarchist wisdom than with the political content of what has been said. This is a reflection of anarchism’s effective removal from the revolutionary struggle.

Bakunin’s brilliant predictions of the consequences of Marx’s statism have not become the foundation for a developing anti-statist praxis, but rather a hollow chorus of “we told you so.” One of the consequences of Marxism’s “successes” has been that there has been greater opportunity to see its limitations. One of the consequences of anarchism’s meager and short lived victories has been that many of our ideas have not been put to the test of practice. Once we are willing to accept that good anti-authoritarian intentions do not get us off the hook for the authoritarian consequences of anarchist incompetence it becomes possible to approach the whole historical experience of the revolutionary movement in a considerably less self-righteous frame of mind.

Once we acknowledge the historical failure of anarchism (which is not to repudiate our anti-authoritarian critique of other ostensibly revolutionary currents) we can begin the work of rebuilding a revolutionary libertarian movement.

Anarchism and the Revolutionary Movement

I believe that if we want to understand the moment we are in we need to understand ourselves as one part of a much broader revolutionary project of human liberation that everywhere around the world has either been defeated or is in retreat. The revolutionary movement is not defined by the embrace of a particular ideology, but rather by the objective movement of oppressed people resisting their oppression and fighting for a world free from oppression. Over time this movement has taken many twists and turns and has, at least ideologically, branched off in a number of directions. It has found expression through a variety of ideological forms (anarchism, marxism, feminism, revolutionary nationalism, liberation theology). At every moment in its history the revolutionary movement has contained the contradictions of the authoritarian society from which it is constantly being reborn. So its every theoretical and organizational expression has always contained both revolutionary and counter-revolutionary, both liberatory and oppressive, both libertarian and authoritarian aspects and potentialities.

As anarchists we have tended to divide the left neatly into libertarian and authoritarian camps. I believe the terms of this division correctly identify the essence of the contradictions that constantly reappear in the revolutionary movement. But I also think that there has been a general tendency to make this division in a mechanical way. There is a tendency, for example, to view the split in the 1st International between Marx and Bakunin as setting the terms by which we analyze the whole intervening historical experience. As the inheritors of Bakunin’s anarchism we uphold the good works of all anarchists since him and ritualistically denounce the actions of all Marxists in the same period. The consequence of this is to blind ourselves to the counter-revolutionary elements in anarchist theory and practice and the legitimate accomplishments of many marxists (or other “authoritarian” currents).
In opposition to this mechanical or scholastic approach I believe we should look at the whole experience of the revolutionary movement dialectically. We need to identify the aspects of anarchism that effectively crippled it as a credible revolutionary alternative to marxism. We need to examine when and how liberatory currents asserted themselves within marxism. We need to look at the various questions that distinguish various currents within the revolutionary movement. We need to look at these questions not simply in the abstract but in the real historical conditions in which they arose and developed. We need to look not just at the few times anarchists have played a significant role in a revolutionary situation but at all the revolutions of the past century.

Many anarchists, of course, have been willing to embrace particular episodes (workers councils in post-WW1 Europe, Hungary ’56, the Shanghai Commune, France May-June ’68, Portugal ’74) in which explicitly anarchist forces were not major players, as part of the revolutionary libertarian tradition. Obviously this broadens the points of historical reference and is for the good. But the short-lived nature of each of these experiences means that by blaming the appropriate Stalinists or social-democrats for their betrayals, it is possible to avoid answering the harder questions sometimes posed more sharply by those episodes in which clearly defined libertarian forces did not participate.

Objective Conditions

It is practically anarchist dogma that every revolutionary situation has the potential to become an authentic libertarian revolution. On the basis of this position the failure of any situation to develop in such a direction is the consequence of the authoritarianism of the various ostensibly revolutionary organizations and parties. The suggestion that the “objective conditions” faced by various revolutionary movements account for the turns they took is routinely ridiculed by anarchists as simply making excuses for the crimes of those authoritarian forces. And certainly there is no shortage of cases in which the suppression of the workers movement, political executions, the imprisonment of dedicated revolutionaries, and so on have been dismissed with casual reference to the “objective conditions.” But this does not mean that objective conditions haven’t imposed insurmountable obstacles for the revolutionary movement.

Revolutionary situations do not present themselves to us only after we have made perfect preparations for them. They arise suddenly when the old order is unable to maintain its rule. It would be irresponsible in such situations not to try to carry out a thorough libertarian social revolution. But it isn’t neccesarilly the case that it is always actually possible to win everything we want. In this case the revolution will be confronted with choosing between different kinds of compromises or half-measures in order to “survive.”

The question that confronts revolutionaries is never simply whether the workers (or peasants) are capable of taking control of the means of production, and reorganizing production on democratic and libertarian lines (like the workers and peasants collectives in Spain). Nor is it even whether they are capable of establishing within cities and villages organs of self-government (as in the many cases of workers councils). From the Paris Commune to the Zapatista rebellion we know that these things can be done.

The question is almost always whether they can do these things over a prolonged period of time under conditions of war and general social breakdown. These are the conditions under which revolutionary opportunities are most likely to occur. It is precisely under these conditions that the limits of the revolutionary movement as a whole have revealed themselves.

Anarchists often like to pose the “social revolution” in contrast to the merely “political revolution.” For the purpose of distinguishing real social upheavals from mere coup d’etats this distinction might be useful. But almost all the “political revolutions” so criticized in fact involved significant elements of social revolution. More importantly it is impossible to imagine a “social revolution” devoid of all the features of a “political revolution.” A revolution is a struggle for power and is inevitably a messy affair. If we are not prepared for the fact that future revolutionary situations are going to present us with unpleasant choices then we are not really interested in making revolution.

Attitude Adjustment Time

I want to put forward here several connected propositions on the nature of the revolutionary project that I believe challenge some basic anarchist prejudices. The first proposition is that in a world characterized by gross disparities in the level of economic develoment as a consequence of imperialism it has simply not been possible to overthrow capitalism in most (if not all) of the imperialized countries. Revolutions in those countries have been of neccesity capitalist (and ususally state capitalist) revolutions that have swept away certain (horribly oppressive) pre-capitalist features of those societies and renegotiated the terms of capitalist exploitation.

The second proposition is that the achievment of a stateless classless society within the territorial limits of a single country (or otherwise defined territory) in a world of nation-states is impossible. Revolutions so confined to a national territory become national revolutions or are crushed. National revolutions can accomplish certain things but not others. The replacement of the old state apparatus with a new ostensibly revolutionary state is necessary to secure many of those accomplishments but we should have no illusions about such a state “withering away” on its own accord. It too will have to be smashed. One of the main things that national revolutions give people is experience in the process of making revolution and a deeper understanding of the complex dynamics of revolutions.

The third proposition (related closely to the second) is that a regular army can only be defeated by another army. Militias or other irregular forms of military organization alone, while capable of heroic resistance, will ultimately collapse before a regular army. The collapse of a national army (almost always precipitated by a military defeat) can create an opening for a revolutionary movement. But if that movement does not create its own army the old order will reconstitute its army or a foreign power will do it for them.

The fourth proposition is that only one class has the potential to overthrow capitalism — the international working class. It must act in conjunction with other classes and social movements to win and the participation of those forces is crucial to carrying out the most thoroughgoing social change, but the working class organized as a revolutionary class is the only single force without which the overthrow of capitalism is absolutely impossible. The fight against patriarchy and racial/national oppression within the working class is necessary for achieving unity within the class.

The rest of this paper will deal with these four propositions in light of the history of revolutions in the 20th century.

Unequal Development

Capitalism is a world system. If certain elements of capitalism appeared initially in the relative isolation of particular national settings, they only came together to form what we would recognize as capitalism as the result of the unparalleled global integration of trade that began in the 15th century with the European conquest of the Americas and domination of the trade routes of the Indian Ocean, and the establishment of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and plantation complex. From its inception capitalism has enriched certain countries and enabled them to revolutionize production by looting and subjugating other countries to the economic needs of the ruling classes of the imperialist mother countries. Initially this relationship took the form of extracting wealth from largely self-sufficient societies. Over time it developed into a relationship of dependency in which the the imperialized countries were not only a source of raw materials but also crucial markets for finished goods. This dependency meant the deliberate destruction of the self-sufficiency of the imperialized countries. More recently certain imperialized countries have become centers of manufacture within a global market. Dependency on the imperialist centers has been maintained so far through control of developmental capital (the IMF and the World Bank) and the specialization of different types of manufacture in different countries.

The consequences of this unequal development for the project of anti-capitalist revolution are huge. Until recently the exploitation of much of the Third World was carried out through pre-capitalist economic forms (usually and imprecisely called semi-feudal) plugged into and subordinate to the world capitalist market. This meant that the antagonism between capitalism and the producers in much of the world took the immediate form of unequal distribution of land and the resulting super-exploitive landlord-tenant relations.

China is a good example of this. In other areas forced labor was used (as in many parts of Africa under colonialism) or plantation agriculture existed side by side with the peasant economy (as in Cuba). Capitalist forms of production constituted a small fraction of the economy and involved an even smaller fraction of the population. Moreover many of the capitalists involved in this small sector understood that the semi-feudal structure of the society and the domination of their country by the imperialists was an impediment to their own interests. They were potential allies of any peasant movement to seize the land and overthrow the landlords.

The Chinese Revolution must be understood in this context. It was overwhelmingly a peasant revolution that destroyed a very rotten old system, redistributed the land, and established China’s relative economic independence from imperialist domination. Only once these fundamental tasks had been carried out did it even become possible for the Chinese Communist Party to talk about what to do with China’s puny capitalist sector. The cities had been controlled by the Kuomintang and the only significantly industrialized region, Manchuria, had been under Japanese control. The industrial proletariat, such as it was, did not have either the experience or the organization to take matters into their own hands. Any move to do so would need the active support if not of the peasantry, then of the Communist Party.

Development of industry was crucial to solving a number of China’s most pressing problems. The lack of transportation and communications meant that famine-plagued regions were difficult to reach with relief. Mass production techniques were neccesary to meet the huge demand for the most rudimentary farm implements (ploughs, carts) and to raise agricultural productivity sufficiently to break the constant cycle of famine. Superficially it might seem like this is an argument that a problem with social-structural causes (famine) required only a technological solution. But the social-structural causes (feudal land structure and dependency on foreign manufactures) expressed themselves significantly in the low technological level of agrarian China. The land could simply not sustain its then current population without a technological as well as a social revolution.

In this context the section of the capitalists who had sided with the agrarian revolution were crucial. They concentrated technical and managerial expertise without which the development of new industry would have been impossible. To simply exproporiate them would have meant to drive them into the arms of the Kuomintang. Could the workers who had worked under them take up the slack and run existing enterprises? To a certain extent. But it should be kept in mind that in the wake of a civil war many enterprises were operating sporadically and the workers with the technical expertise to run them weren’t neccesarily easily found. More importantly the Chinese proletariat was hardly a mature class with a lengthy experience of common struggle informing its self-activity.

But the question wasn’t simply one of running the existing enterprises, it was one of dramatically and immediately expanding the industrial base to forestall famine and for that the expertise of the tiny capitalist class was indispensable.

Time was of the essence. The expansion of industry was also neccesary to prevent the masses of landless peasants who had crowded the cities as a result of famine and war from returning to a countryside that wasn’t prepared to absorb them. Furthermore there was a significant threat of foreign invasion or a U.S. backed Kuomintang invasion from Taiwan. During the Korean War MacArthur openly threatened to invade China.

Furthermore we need to confront the limited political capacities of the peasantry. Could the Chinese peasantry have abolished capitalist relations (wage labor in particular) and set about a non-capitalist process of development to solve their considerable problems? The peasantry had accomplished many things. On the village level they had taken over control of the administration of village affairs from the corrupt landlord elites and had carried out the dramatic redistribution of land. Leaving aside for the moment the crucial role of the Communist Party in these accomplishments we can note that this peasant control of administration extended to greater and lesser degrees upwards to the county or even provincial level. But as one moves up the hierarchy one encounters more and more reliance on the Communist Party cadres, and more and more reliance on educated cadres from non-peasant backgrounds.

We can interpret this fact two ways. On the one hand it is an expression of the ultimate dominance of the Communist Party and its regime by a relative handfull of intellectuals from middle-class or landlord backgrounds. On the other it is a simple reflection of the fact that the overwhelming majority of the Chinese peasants were illiterate and that the literate supporters of the revolution (whether of non-peasant background or taught to read by the Party or the Peoples Liberation Army) were in the Party. These different ways of looking at the same fact are not contradictory. Together they reveal the class character the Chinese Revolution had and also why it probably couldn’t have had any other.

The Council Communist Anton Pannnekoek in his 1940 article “Why Past Revolutionary Movements Have Failed” linked the inherently capitalist nature of revolutions in the periphery to the problems of the proletarian revolution in the imperialist centers. He argued that the underdevelopment of Russia meant that the capitalist revolution there could not be carried out by the bourgeoisie but rather by a new bureaucratic capitalist class drawn mainly from the intelligentsia. This new capitalist class leveraged the prestige of the thwarted proletarian revolution in Russia to dominate the the revolutionary workers movement in the West and thereby diverting the self-organization of the proletariat in the most adavanced capitalist countries. This is one way in which the unequal devlopment of capitalism has resulted in the unequal devlopment of the revolutionary movement. Pannekoek doesn’t deal with the role of imperialist super-profits in effectively buying off at least a section of the workers movement, but that fact too must inform our understanding of why the 20th century has been characterized not by international proletarian revolution but by peasant-based national capitalist revolutions.

Only as an abstraction can freedom be absolute. In the real world freedom is always conditioned by the social context in which it exists. Freedom can not be defined simply in terms of the absence of constraint but must also refer to the power to make the decisions that affect ones life. It is impossible to rule a society if you don’t understand how it works. So, in a hunter-gatherer society that sort of power depends on different things than it does in an industrialized society. A crucial feature of class societies is that they deny the exploited classes access to the things they would need to rule. Revolutions in a certain sense are the process by which an oppressed class obtains those things. But, because class societies inevitably combine old and new methods of exploitation, different oppressed classes are better positioned to make the revolutionary leap and to take control of society.

In the 13th century the technological level of society was such that one could perhaps imagine the peasantry taking control of society as a whole and establishing some sort of agrarian communism. In the 20th century it is an impossibility (though Pol Pot gave it a shot). The peasant is enmeshed in a global system of capitalism, the deeper workings of which are obscured from the vantage point of life in a small village. In contrast the urban worker is exposed in a thousand ways to the complex operations of the world system. The problem of course is that, as a consequence of the unequal development of capitalism around the world, it has been the life conditions of the peasant and not the proletarian that have fueled the major revolutions of the century. But precisely because the peasantry as a class is so poorly prepared to administer a capitalist society (even an underdeveloped one), that those revolutions have ultimately carried new minority ruling classes to power.

Anarchism in One Country?

The Spanish Revolution and its supression demonstrated in the starkest terms one of the central problems of anarchism. The Spanish Revolution was the product not simply of the global class struggle, but of its particular features in Spain. A particular chain of events reflecting the particular character and history of Spain lead up to the moment when the Spanish peasants and workers were able to seize control of the fields, factories and workshops. Every revolution arises from the failure of a particular state in a particular moment. In Spain the Republican government crumbled in the wake of Franco’s military revolt. Power was lying in the street, and the anarchist movement, the most powerful force among the workers and peasants, took it.

I am emphasizing the particularly Spanish character of the Spanish Revolution to make clear the simple fact that while the Revolution was able to count on a certain amount of international solidarity, the conditions that had produced the revolution were not to be found elsewhere and therefore the prospects for the revolution to spread were limited. But that didn’t mean that the Revolution took place in isolation. Italian and German fascism sent trroops, arms, and planes to support Franco’s armies. The Soviet Union leveraged its support for the Republic for the creation and control of a counter-revolutionary regular army. If the Republican Government couldn’t subdue the Revolution and the fascists couldn’t drown it in blood there is no reason to expect that other foreign powers wouldn’t intervene. Their short-term interests in retrieving control over exproporiated enterprises and their long-term interests in preventing the Revolution from becoming an international example meant they would have no choice but to intervene militarily.

There are basically two reasons it is impossible to create a stateless classless society within the confines of single country. The first is economic and the second is military.

The economic reasons are important. As discussed above capitalism is a world system. This means that no country is self-sufficient. Obviously some countries have more or less potential for self-sufficiency, but certain problems are effectively universal. Some countries, as a consequence of their population, simply could not hope to meet their own food needs. This is the case for many of the smaller more densely populated industrialized countries. Some countries, as a consequence of their underdevelopment under colonialism, don’t have the means of producing manufactured goods (clothing, tractors, etc…) on which they depend. And practically all countries are dependent on at least a few strategic minerals that simply don’t exist within their borders. Chromium, for example, is neccessary for all sorts of machine parts. It is concentrated largely in Southern Africa. Similarly much of the world is dependent on foreign petroleum.

The point here isn’t that one can’t imagine the eventual creation of a self-sufficient economy within a particular country, but rather that the economies that revolutionaries inherit are not self-sufficient and the severing of international trade (by either the revolutionary forces or by foreign powers) will have very disruptive consequences. These are two-sided. First, industries that depend on foreign materials will stop functioning and people will no longer have access to goods that are only available from abroad. Second, economic sectors that produce for the international market, will either cease to produce or will produce goods for which there is no domestic demand.

The situation of Cuba is instructive here. Many of the economic problems that confronted the Cuban Revolution would have been just as present if that revolution had a libertarian character. Cuba’s economy was classically dependent. Sugar and tourism brought in the cash with which to purchase foreign goods including food, medicine, clothing, petroleum, and automobiles. In the intervening 37 years it is a scandalous consequence of the relations developed with the Soviet Union that Cuba has not converted its agricultural sector to become self-sufficient in food. The result is that Cuba now faces the same problem it would have faced then: how to make that conversion without access to foreign capital. The technology involved in growing, harvesting and processing sugar is not the same as that involved in producing rice or produce. It is not a simple matter to knock down all the sugar cane and begin growing grains and vegetables. It takes time to get a whole new kind of agriculture going. How are people going to eat in the meantime?

The practical answer inevitably is that dependence on the world market can only be reduced in steps. But so long as people are producing for the world market they can not be said to have smashed class society altogether — they continue to be exploited by an international capitalist class. To make matters worse the refusal of parts of the world market to trade (as in the case of the U.S. embargo of Cuba) drives down the price that the goods will command on the world market. The only way to recover that lost profit (for there is no point in engaging in international trade if it doesn’t generate profits that can be invested in making the country self-sufficient) is to raise the level of exploitation of the producers. Worse, the administrative apparatus of the revolutionary regime, whether it is called a “workers state” or “a federation of free collectives” is the body that must do the exploiting. Good intentions are feeble protection against the logic of the world market. How does the apparatus respond when the producers, entirely in the spirit of the revolution, say that they will not be exploited and go on strike?

This is precisely the dilemna that has confronted every revolution that has survived longer than a year. For avowed statists like Marxists it is not much of a dilemna. But for anarchists it is profound.
The second obstacle to the creation of a stateless classless society in a single country is military. Thoroughgoing social revolutions, even if contained in a single country, are a profound threat to the international capitalist order. Every such revolution that has not been crushed internally has had to face some degree of foreign military intervention. The motivations of the individual countries don’t even have to be so farsighted as the maintenance of world capitalism. Often enough the revolution threatens foreign investments that the foreign power decides it must defend. Even when this is not the case the turmoil of a revolution can seem like a golden opportunity for a foreign power to establish or widen its foothold in a country.

There is no reason to suppose that if the Russian Revolution had taken a different course (if the anarchists had gotten their shit together, or if the Soviets had been able to resist subordination to the Bolshevik Party structure), that it wouldn’t have faced invasions by 14 foreign powers in support of the Whites in the civil war.

It is impossible to repell a foreign invasion without a military force of ones own. Making war, even a war of resistance, has a certain authoritarian logic to it. War is about killing people and sending some people off to die so that others might live. It is, unfortunately, not mainly about killing the class enemy, but rather about killing the other oppressed people, often conscripts, who make up the enemies army. Even if one’s strategy depends on mutiny or mass defections within the enemies army it will still be neccessary to kill people. The reason is simple. Soldiers mutiny or defect in significant numbers only when the threat of being killed in battle is plausibly greater than the threat of being shot for insubordination. This is the smart thing to do. Therefore armies maintain their internal discipline in part by convincing their troops that being shot for insubordination is a certainty. For an army to fall apart it must face some sort of military defeat.

Anarchists sometimes claim that decentralized, non-authoritarian structures are inherently so much more efficient than centralized authoritarian ones that these principles should be applied to military operations. This is the express route to anarchist martyrdom. If anarchist principles can accomodate turning groups of human beings into efficient killing machines there is a problem. But if they can’t there is another problem. It is the second situation that we face: making war means compromising anti-authoritarian principles. In so far as a military forces has as its aim the defeat of other military forces within a given territory it is acting to create a monopoly on organized violence — a defining feature of the state. Is it possible to create a truly anti-authoritarian military structure that corresponds with the relative decentralism of a libertarian society and that is able to defend that society from external (or internal) military threats? I will try to answer that question in the next section.

The Revolutionary Army

The anarchist movement has basically two major experiences with trying to organize its military power in defense of its revolutionary gains: in Ukraine and in Spain.

The anarchist literature on the Ukrainian experience is considerably less extensive than that on the Spanish experience, but a couple points are worth making about it. While the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of the Ukraine (Makhvovists) conducted massive collectivization of land in the zones of its control, the Ukrainian peasantry was not heavily imbued with anarchist thinking. The Maknovist movement rose up as a result of the Brest-Litovsk agreement in which the Bolsheviks ceded Ukraine to Austrian and German Imperialism. But like the rest of the old Russian empire Ukraine was in the throes of a social revolution as the peasantry was seizing the land. The Ukrainian Confederation of Anarchist Organizations (Nabat) saw in this situation an opportunity to build under anarchist leadership a military force that might carry forward the revolution and expell the foreign imperialists. And that is precisely what they did before they were crushed by the Bolshevik Red Army.

The Ukrainian peasantry embraced anarchism in so far as the anarchist army could protect what they had won in the revolution. The Insurgent Army was a guerilla army. It operated within a region about 150 miles in diameter, populated by 7,000,000 people. In organization it stood midway between the sort of indigenous “bandit” formations that consistently arise from peasants in remote or unstable regions and what I will later define as a mature revolutionary army. It did not have the same worked out anti-authoritarian structure as the anarchist militias in Spain started out with.

Once the Makhnovists had defeated the White forces of Generals Deniken and Wrangel they were in turn defeated by the Red Army. The territory controlled by the Makhnovists was highly unstable. It was subject to periodic occupation by White and foreign forces. The tenacity of the Makhnovists resistance lead to the disintegration of the White forces and the withdrawal of the foreign ones. The Red Army was beating down and absorbing irregular peasant forces all over the former Russian empire. Makhno’s proved the most difficult to defeat, but ultimately they too fell.

The military reasons are straightforward. Irregular forces like Makhno’s can sustain themselves perhaps indefinitely in geographically remote hinterlands. But Ukraine was not such a region. The Brest-Litovsk agreement and the general social collapse of Russia created a momentary opening into which Makhno’s forces stepped. But the consolidation of Bolshevik rule in the rest of Russia and the decision of the imperialists to abandon Ukraine meant the closing of that window. It is important to note that in spite of allthe anarchist slogans the program of the Maknovists in practice was not much different from that of later peasant revolutions (like the Chinese), namely: redistribution of the land, more or less voluntary collectivization, and expulsion of the imperialists (national independance).

If there is any doubt that the Ukrainian Revolution was limited in what it could hope to achieve within its own borders the words of the Nabat in calling for the creation of the Insurgent Army should settle the matter:

“4. With regard to the external attack on the social revolution by Western and other imperialist powers, the anarchists have always relied and will continue to rely not on the regular Red Army, not even on an insurgent war, but on the inevitable collapse of imperialism and its armed forces through the unfolding world-wide revolution”

It shouldn’t be neccessary to note that there wasn’t anything inevitable about the collapse of imperialism on which the Ukrainian anarchists were relying.

The Spanish Revolution had a somewhat different character. Almost 70 years of anarchist education and agitation had prepared significant sections of the Spanish working class and peasantry for a libertarian revolution. When the moment came in July 1936 millions of Spaniards had in their minds what the anarchist reorganization of their society would entail. And they applied the same libertarian principles to the military formations they created: the militias.

The militias were drawn from various factories or neighborhoods or villages and each one had a distinct identity in accordance with its origins. The militias were organized into columns which in turn elected delegates that were to carry out some of the functions of officers, but without the automatic authority that officers commanded. The anarchists were not the only ones to organize militias. The socialist workers of the UGT, and the various parties like the POUM, also organized militias.
The militias, at least initially, were the picture of decentralism and non-authoritarianism. And the military consequences were disastrous. Anarchist accounts of the operations of the militias heavily overemphasize their occasional heroic victories and minimize their frequent defeats or simply blame them on the refusal of other forces to provide them with the arms they needed. But while the militias certainly fought courageously, their decentralism and lack of discipline was as much their downfall as the “treachery” of organizations that never should have been trusted in the first place.

Anarchists studying Spain should be careful about taking their own propaganda too seriously. The lack of internal discipline made for acts of tremendous stupidity from a military point of view. Militia members would regularly abandon their positions when boredom set in. The absence of any sort of unified command structure meant that every proposed coordinated military action involving different militias, let alone ones from different political tendencies, had to be discussed and modified and approved before it could be carried out. In this process crucial time was often wasted and military opportunities lost. When coordinated actions were carried out the modified plans were often greatly reduced in scale, often to the point of making them irrelevant. Militias jealously refused to share materiel with each other. Observers of all perspectives noted how militias of each organization took a certain delight in the defeats suffered by the militias of other organizations.

The simple fact of the matter is that wars can not be won in this way. Militias can play an important role in defending the gains of a revolution, in organizing irregular warfare within a circumscribed region, and in suppressing counter-revolutionary activity within the zone of a revolution. But without a regular army of its own the revolution can not hold back the advances of an invading army.

The reasons are simple and it is borne out by the whole history of military conflict. An army with a unified command going up against a “decentralized” force will set about to identify its weakest units and concentrate its first attacks accordingly. The decentralized forces lacking a unified command will be unable to quickly redeploy troops to the weak area in the way that a regular army can. Similarly when a coordinated offensive needs to be carried out certain troops will be put in considerably greater danger than others. In a decentralized structure such decisions are subject to rejection by the units most likely (or even certain) to take the heaviest losses. This means that the decentralized military structure can only deploy its most courageous or selfless units in such situations. Its not difficult to see how such a practice would result in the rapid weakening of the decentralized structure as it sacrifices its best forces or backs off from battles that can be won. Conversely the boldest units in a decentralized force are more likely to expend themselves in heroic but ultimately pointless acts of self-sacrifice.

There is a reason that the world is dominated by regular armies with unified command structures. It is not because the staes of the world simply find their authoritarian form more agreeable in spite of its comparative military inefficiencies. If that were so states would be constantly striving to obtain the benefits of decentralism in military matters (as they sometimes do in other matters in which decentralism is in fact more efficient). But the military remains the most centralized institution in any society, it authoritarianism the model by which less authoritarian institutions are judged.

One can of course conceive of a perfectly functioning decentralized military structure in which the grasp of military science is so evenly spread out that it makes no errors and goes on to win. But in the real world all such plans run into friction from the flesh and blood people who are supposed to carry them out. Wars are won not by those who concoct perfect plans, but rather by those whose plans are best able to absorb the consequences of their own imperfection. In military matters a reliable command structure enables the most rapid response to setbacks.

If we are ready to concede (as the Spanish anarchists ultimately did) that making war involves compromising anti-authoritarain principles we need to look at precisely what measures need to be taken to prevent those compromises from undoing the whole revolutionary project. It seems that there are a number of basic things here: the election of officers, the elimination of unnecesary social distinctions between officers and their troops, a commitment to developing the leadership skills of the rank and file in opposition to relying on officers from the old regime and the like. But these things can’t hide the fundamentally authoritarian nature of an army: absolute subordination to the command structure, drills that psychologically prepare soldiers to take orders, the suspension of basic democratic rights in the course of military engagements and so on.

Recognizing the neccesity of an army doesn’t mean accepting any old army. One of the central issues in te Spanish Revolution was the attempt to incorporate the militias into a new regular Republican army. Much of the impetus for this militarization came from the Communist Party, which by virtue of its connections with the Soviet Union, was prepared to dominate the command of such an army. The anarchist and POUM militias resisted this process in varying degrees. Ultimately most of the anarchist militias were either incorporated into the new army or broken up by it. One group that resisted militarization were the militias at the Gelsa front. Instead of joining the army they returned to Barcelona and constituted themselves as the Friends of Durruti. The Friends of Durruti played a pivotal role in the May 1937 events in Barcelona, calling on the anarchist forces to maintain their barricades when the CNT leadership was preaching conciliation with the Communists. After these events the Friends of Durruti issued a pamphlet “Towards a Fresh revolution” that analyzed the defeat of the Spanish Revolution and put forward proposals for its regeneration. Unlike anarchists today who see the Spanish militias as the model of anarchist military organization the Friends of Durrut had seen them in action and proposed in opposition to either the Republican army or an exclusive reliance on the militias the revolutionary army:

“With regard to the problem of the war, we back the idea of the army being under the absolute control of the working class. Officers with their origins in the capitalist regime do not deserve the slightest trust from us. Desertions have been numerous and most of the the disasters we have encountered can be laid down to obvious betrayals by officers. As to the army, we want a revolutionary one led exclusively by workers; and should any officer be retained, it must be under the strictest supervision.”

In this quote there is the usual anarchist equivocations. The defeats of the militias are the result of betrayals, but the solution is a revolutionary army. We want the workers in control but we know we will need the expertise of professional officers. This is nonetheless a considerable improvement on the naive celebration of the militias that passes for anarchist military thinking today.

The question of the character of an authentically revolutionary army is important. The Friends of Durruti correctly identify the class character of the army and its command as crucial in determining its role in the revolution. So far we have spoken of the army entirely in its role as defender of gains already made by the revolution. The obvious next question is what role can a revolutionary army play in enlarging the revolutionary zone, in effect bringing the revolution to new areas. This would certainly have been a question if a revolutionary army in Spain had been able to defeat Franco’s forces and take territory that had up to that point not been touched by the Revolution.

Historically many armies have started out with revolutionary objectives. John Ellis’s Armies in Revolution, is a valuable treatment of much of that experience from the point of view of a military historian. Ellis argues that every revolutionary army from Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army to and including the Soviet Red Army was an army in the service of a minority class. He upholds the achievements of Makhno’s Insurgent Army in the face of criticisms by the Bolsheviks. He doesn’t treat the Spanish Revolution (perhaps because it offers no example of an authentically revolutionary army). Finally he points to the Peoples Liberation Army in China as the single example of an army that carried out the revolutionary class program of the oppressed majority, namely the comprehensive redistribution of land to the poor peasantry. I have argued earlier that the Chinese Revolution was ultimately a capitalist revolution, and I would argue that the PLA carried out, at least up until 1949, a program that was consistent with the common interests of the peasantry and the aspiring new capitalist class represented by the leaders of the Communist Party. In spite of these qualifications I would argue that the Chinese experience is still an important one from the point of view of trying to develop a revolutionary libertarian military strategy.

The Revolutionary Class

The problems posed by the Chinese experience are fundamentally the product of China’s underdevelopment and the fact that the only class that can hope to overthrow capitalism, the proletariat, was almost absent from the Chinese political landscape. I have referred earlier to the problems posed by a class which developed historically under pre-capitalist conditions taking over a national economy that is already integrated into world capitalism. There is in anarchism a certain tendency in upholding peasant revolts to avoid their inherent limitations. Whatever the situation once was it should be clear now as the globalization of capitalism accelerates out of the control of any single national capital that the only class that has a hope to take on this system is the international working class. The overwhelmingly middle-class composition of the anarchist movement in the U.S., and the dogmatic invocation of the working class by the various marxist sects, make many anarchists reluctant to take an explicit stand in favor of a working class orientation. Instead the working class is seen as one of many points of reference or “identities” that taken together are going to carry out the revolutionary process. The pluralism of this position is its singular virtue. But by treating economic classes in the same ways that we treat ethnic or sexual identities we lose sight of the fact that it is capitalism that couples oppression with a profit-generating exploitation that fuels its constant and dynamic expansion into new territories and new areas of our lives (including ethnic and sexual identity).

Immigration and the transnational movements of capital are increasingly making the abstract notion of an international proletariat a lived reality for hundreds of millions of people. The rapid urbanization of the Third World increasingly means that it is the proletariat and not the peasantry in those countries that is best positioned to challenge neo-colonialism. The proletariat should not be viewed as a monolithic entity represented by a single party (a la the various currents of Marxism) but rather as a contested body whose unity is contingent on the freedom of its different parts to fight for their interests within it. The fight for womens liberation or the recognition of the rights of various ethnic groups then are not battles to be put off until after the proletariat seizes power globally, but are neccesary precursors to that seizure of power that clarify the revolutionary orientation of the proletariat.

Conclusion

I have sought in this paper to draw out some of the failures of the anarchist movement. I am not arguing here for the abandonment of a generally anti-authoritarian orientation, nor a modification of the ultimate goals of anarchism. I am arguing however that the viability of those goals is contingent on a number of factors and that anarchists have resisted facing these political realities with the result that anarchism has withered as a credible revolutionary alternative to the failed ideologies of marxism and the various nationalisms.

It is not clear to me that anarchism, as defined by its historical practice over the past century, offers an adequate framework for rebuilding the revolutionary project on libertarian foundations. It is clear to me that while the historical experience of marxism is invaluable, and while marxism offers important analytical tools for understanding the world we live in, that marxism as an overarching philosophical framework has proven to be irretrievably authoritarian.

There is a crying need for the development of a new body of revolutionary theory that breaks decisively with the dogmatism and political shallowness of anarchism as well as with the authoritarian essence of marxism.

Any new theoretical approach to the revolutionary project must confront not just the important historical experiences addressed in this paper but also the new conditions we face, in particular the new possibilities for building authentically international revolutionary organizations rooted in an increasingly mobile and international working class.

Related posts:

1. Eddy Laing: Why Historical Materialism Matters
2. Marxism or anarchism or —?

Avakian’s Assessment of Thomas Jefferson:
A Critical Reading

By Pavel Andreyev

Pavel Alexeyev is an historian and specialist on religion with a long acquaintance with the RCPand other Maoist organizations.

The Revolutionary Communist Party describes Bob Avakian’s latest essay, Communism and Jeffersonian Democracy, as an “unsparing critique of the history…of American society” and is promoting it with the same urgency it devoted to the author’s Away With All Gods!earlier this year… What follows is a contribution to a critique, addressing approximately the first quarter of the work (dealing with Jefferson, his life and thought) rather than a review of the entirety. I’ll raise some questions about how we should relate to historical facts, the issue of “progress” or “directionality” in history, and the evaluation of individuals in historical periods far removed from us. In AWAG!Avakian remarks provocatively that if Jesus were alive today we wouldn’t and shouldn’t like him very much (mainly because he accepted slavery). Similarly he would like us to dislike Thomas Jefferson, whom he depicts as a cynical, demagogic, slave-owning oppressor. But his depiction of the individual (whatever its own merits) is less the issue than the use of this depiction to broadly characterize and explain over two centuries of “Jeffersonian democracy.”

Web version: part 1, part 2,  part 3

pdf pamphelt version

Related posts:

1. Avakian on Jefferson: A Critical Reading part 1
2. Avakian on Jefferson: A Critical Reading Part 2
3. Avakian on Jefferson: A Critical Reading Part 3

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.

No related posts.

Dear Professor Badiou:
About the RCP Assault on Alain Badiou, Philosophy & (Ultimately) Communism Itself

By Bill Martin

Before we say more about this RCP polemic (“Why Alain Badiou is a Rousseauist… And Why We Should Not Be“) the first thing that needs to be said is that its guiding principle is:

“Who needs this shit? Bob Avakian has the New Synthesis, and that’s the end of the matter. Either get on board with that or you’re going down the wrong road.”

The second harsh thing that needs to be said is this polemic is an act of stupidity and irresponsibility against communism itself.

It is also an act of stupidity and irresponsibility against philosophy, theory, and critical thought. And we need to understand better how an act such as this, in being such an act against philosophy, etc., is an act against communism.

None of this, absolutely none of this, has anything to do with whether the polemic (or Bob Avakian) is right and Badiou is wrong on any particular point.

Neither should we get caught up too much in taking the polemic as setting any kind of agenda for the discussion of Badiou’s work and the ways that this work might help us in reconception and regroupment. There are plenty of good commentaries on Badiou’s work out there that do not deign to only, finally, notice the work of this outstanding philosopher and “post-Maoist” of our time when it comes time to knock him down, and with no appreciation whatsoever for the openings that he has created.

It may seem insignificant, or far less significant, to discuss this polemic, or Badiou’s philosophy, much further in light of the even more recent discussions around Nepal (basically, the Nepal material coming a couple of weeks after the polemic). But there is a sense in which this is all of a piece, the piece being not BA’s New Synthesis, and, furthermore, other things lighting up the sky, such as the Idea of Communism conference, and developments in Nepal, and, for that matter, the fact that the Bush regime was “driven out” without the central role being played by Bob Avakian (BA), the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), or World Can’t Wait (WCW), and none of these things are foregrounding the New Synthesis, either. The narrow world of the RCP is closing in upon itself even further, and there is an inability to ask why this happening; instead there is an essentially conservative, capitulatory reaction.

This polemic ought to make those of us who care about the future livid.

It’s just worse-than-worthless stuff when all you can do with contemporary philosophy is to jump out with a polemic that is motivated by no kind of actual intellectual or even political curiosity. Not all of us find Badiou’s ideas exciting, important, and even exhilarating, but some of us do (and I do). But what is more at stake is that the perspective behind this polemic is one where that would not even be a possibility, it is ruled out in advance. And that is deplorable, and it should be called out for being the complete crock of shit that it is.

As for lessons that we ought to learn from this, among those of us who are looking for the next steps in Marxism, and even the next steps in Maoism and post-Maoism, I want to take this moment to state this in a sharp and harsh form. Not everyone here is going to be convinced by my claim that we still have much to learn from Immanuel Kant. Not everyone here is going to be convinced by Badiou’s philosophy, and its sense that we still have a good deal to learn from Plato, Spinoza, and Rousseau. But for the people who simply dismiss this idea, that we still have much to learn from philosophers who came before Marx, these people in essence are dismissing the communist project.

Avakian’s Away With All Gods! is a fantastic display of contempt for intellectual work, an approach proudly defended in the recent excerpt of a talk by BA (“On the role of communist leadership …”) where he defends his “methodology” of self-referencing and talks about all of the books that he has read. This polemic on Badiou furthers this contempt.

I’ll just put things very simply: communism is good, and nothing good can come from such an approach, whether this approach is applied by the RCP or by other know-nothing, anti-intellectual “socialists.”

But I will save the larger development of these arguments for other posts. Among other things I will argue that “enough of Badiou is right” (and that we communists would be very irresponsible in not taking up these ideas), while I also have some questions for Badiou on points where I disagree with him or perhaps simply do not understand him.

One reason why I will save these arguments for other posts and other topics is that I think our main response to this polemic ought to be,

“Dear Professor Badiou, we hope that you will not think, if you even happen to see this RCP Polemic, that it represents the views of all revolutionary communists in the United States; unfortunately, however, the main trend of Maoism in the U.S. has come to this sorry state and dead end. Fortunately, there are some ideas in your philosophy that will help us understand this point of saturation and even ‘disaster,’ and we also are open to exploring your philosophy, and the theoretical work of others, in attempting to forge a path beyond this impasse. Thank you for your outstanding contributions.”

Rearguard and Ugly

One assumes that this polemic was put together by a writing group; I suppose it doesn’t really matter, though I bristle a bit at the fact that it is put out there “anonymously,” that seems a bit smarmy to me. The timing of the thing is clearly meant to be coincide with the Idea of Communism conference, where Badiou was something of the centerpiece, though of course there were other important thinkers there as well. What an ugly thing to do, and what a rearguard sort of “contribution” to this whole scene. I have not yet heard any reports of the presentation that Raymond Lotta made in London at the time of the conference, does anyone know if what was presented was some version of this polemic? Again, very rearguard and ugly.

When I had my massive argument with the person I have previously referred to as a Leading Party Member at the end of May 2008 (as described in my first Kasama post, “Going forward from here”), I continually challenged this person to just come out and say that the history of philosophy prior to Marx is basically worthless, and that philosophy outside of the narrow MLM/BA canon is worthless. I was begging this person to come to his senses in terms of basic intellectual integrity. This polemic, unfortunately, is some kind of answer on these issues.

Certainly one could say, “they know not what they do”—or, again, to put it harshly, they don’t have a bloody clue.

But BA and the remaining members of the RCP, if they weren’t just sycophants to begin with (for it is very clear that the idea that “Communists are rebels” was dropped from the program some time ago), have willfully placed themselves beyond the possibility of getting a clue. I have respect for what some of these people used to be, and I still have some (sentimental perhaps) hope and wish that some of these people will break with their present, ever-deepening impasse, but perhaps those who have remained have just decided that all they know to do at this point is to go down with the ship.

As a general point, and in the context of some of the study some of us have recently undertaken on the work of Louis Althusser, we might discuss further whether the “polemical mode” is a good way to carry forward work in philosophy or in other intellectual endeavors. Ironically, Badiou defends the role of polemic, and he cites Kant in this. I recognize that sometimes it is necessary to engage in a “war of ideas” (polemos is the Greek word for “war”), and certainly I think it can be good to present certain ideas with a certain “edge.” At the very least, however, one might think that there is something wrong with the initial engagement with a major figure taking this form, starting with a typically ridiculous title of the form, “N is an x, and we shouldn’t be that.” Again, deplorable.

This polemic, however, is not only an initial engagement with Badiou, it is the first extended engagement with any major figure in the history of philosophy or contemporary philosophy in many years. This in itself is a statement on philosophy.

The term, “engagement,” is used loosely here, especially as the whole point of the polemic is to ensure that people who probably hadn’t even heard of Badiou until quite recently are inoculated against any impulse toward actual engagement with Badiou or any other major figure in philosophy.

This is also the whole point of the labeling (“Rousseauist”) in the title of the polemic—since we especially know there is nothing to be learned from any philosopher before Marx. Furthermore, how can there be an engagement, when the whole approach is “shut it down,” rather than “open it up”? Again, it is a very conservative reaction, and indeed it is also merely a “reaction.”

While I’m laying it on, let me characterize the foregoing in two further ways:

First, if you have to jack yourself up to believe that you are really the only person or group putting forward the only really new and revolutionary synthesis, then you will get into a mindset where, frankly, you wouldn’t be able to recognize something new and valuable even if it bit you on the ass. Indeed, other new things will appear merely threatening.

Second, one place where Bob Avakian is a lot like Stalin, and less like Marx, Lenin, and Mao, but also a lot like other trends of economistic Marxism, is in viewing the whole history of philosophy as one big pile of crap. Again, this is represented very well by the fact that Badiou is now being discussed with people who only recently heard of Badiou, by people and for people who wish they never had heard of Badiou. It is simply orthodoxy and economism, and we would do well, even those of us who don’t want to spend much more time discussing Bob Avakian or the RCP, understanding how this is the case and what sorts of dynamics lead in this direction.

Asked To Engage He Who Does Not Engage

With this polemic, we are once again being asked to engage with he who does not engage. There are two related points to be raised here, as concerns how the rest of us who are attempting to reconceive and regroup should proceed.

First, I think there is a real question of “standing” that ought to be addressed. For one thing, it is clearly the point of this polemic that it doesn’t really matter what Badiou thinks, or what he has to offer, or what questions he opens up; the real deal is that BA has laid down the new science, there for the taking. Now, whoever wrote this polemic did a little more homework than BA generally does (which isn’t saying much, and there is more to this than just a long list of books one has read), but the point is the same: Badiou is wrong because Avakian is right.

But this leads to the second point:

If Badiou is wrong, he is wrong in his many systematically developed books, and in his systematic, rigorous, and expansive written work (this is a repetitive way of making the point, but I not only want to make the point, I want to rub it in).

If BA is “right,” he is right in his mostly non-systematic, non-rigorous, self-referential talks. I used to think this was acceptable (though not preferable) up to a point, when there seemed to be a context for it, a Maoist current that was opening itself up to learning from many sources.

To the extent that was ever a reality, it was shut down, and then one finds oneself going back to works such as the Democracy book and others from that period, and asking why we should spend any time with them when there are other works by figures such as Sartre, Althusser, Derrida, and Badiou (and many more) that give us more than enough to do.

So, now, it seems we need to have a discussion of the ideas of Badiou. And, for that matter, especially thanks to the ideas and provocations of Badiou and Zizek, here is the possibility for breaking through with the idea of communism! Who should get a seat at the table of these discussions? On what basis would we say anymore that BA or others from the RCP have anything to contribute? The way that they think they can just come into debates where they have made no substantive contribution and have shown no ability to learn from others (and to apply the “John Stuart Mill principle” and all of the stuff that at least looked good in those Skybreak essays) looks to everyone else to be simultaneously silly and authoritarian. Nothing good can come of this approach—and, again, communism is good.

For our part, let’s do engage with others and give them a good reason to engage with us.

Needing to Reconceive and Regroup

Simply in recognizing that revolutionary communism needs to reconceive and regroup an advance has been made.

The RCP reached a point where, in order to continue to make a contribution, it needed to make a fundamental advance, and it was not able to do this. The main reason for this is objective, in the sense that they were working from within a paradigm that was played out. But there are some subjective factors as well, which shaped the inability to break with an exhausted paradigm. In grappling with the “communist hypothesis” we need to go further in understanding these dynamics.

My point, regarding intellectual work, is that there is a model here that has to be negated—and I frankly wish that some of the people who post at Kasama would go further in negating this model. Certainly we don’t want to shut down the enthusiasm anyone, anyone whosoever, might have for contributing to the theoretical project. At the same time, we need to be able to carry forward theoretical work on a high level, informed by contemporary developments and analyses.

I still think there is something to Engels’s formula of the most advanced “socialist” experience—under which he also included syndicalism and utopian communitarianism, philosophy, and political economy, just leaving aside the French, German, and English parts; what he called “English” was for the most part actually Scots, anyway!

This is a hard nut to crack, it’s not clear that it’s ever really been done. We need to think more about why it might be significant that BA and the RCP did pretty well, and sometimes very significantly well, with at least some aspects of the “French” and “English” parts of this work (the summing up of experience and political economy), but for the most part very poorly with the “German” (philosophical) part, and indeed worse than poorly for the most part, seeing the work of historical or contemporary philosophers as mostly something against which to erect barricades. The present barricade, and its circumstances (where the polemic against Badiou is in some sense also a polemic against the Nepali Maoists), is again representative of foolishness and irresponsibility and a merely reactive mindset, but we would be remiss if we don’t take this opportunity to learn some lessons about methodology and the role of philosophy in anything that might really be a new synthesis.

Not a Deep Enough Break

By way of conclusion, we might spend a moment with at least one little part of the polemic, the part that sets out three possibilities for the next wave of revolutionary activity.

“What are the correct and incorrect lessons to be drawn from the rich experience of this first wave of socialist revolutions? What is the framework for the new stage of communism, for going forward in this project for the emancipation of humanity? Is Marxism, communism, still valid as a science? In the most fundamental sense, the question comes down to this: can you make revolution in today’s world, a genuinely emancipating communist revolution—or is that not possible, or even desirable, anymore?

“As described in Communism: The Beginning of a New Stage, A Manifesto from the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA there are three main and essential responses to this moment.

“First, there are those who religiously cling to the experience and theory of the first wave of socialist revolution of the 20th century—not summing up problems and shortcomings, not moving forward, but circling the wagons.

“Second, there are those who reject real scientific analysis of the contradictions of the socialist transition and distance themselves from the unprecedented breakthroughs in human emancipation represented by the Bolshevik and Chinese revolutions. They look for inspiration and orientation even further back into the past–to the 18th century and the proclaimed democratic and egalitarian ideals and social models of the bourgeois epoch and to theorists like Rousseau, Kant, and Jefferson. In some cases, they discard the very term communism; in other cases, they affix the label “communism” to a political project that situates itself firmly within the bounds of bourgeois-democratic principles.

“Third, there is what Bob Avakian has been doing. He is not only the leader of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, which has its sights set on the revolutionary seizure of power and the radical transformation of society, but is also a visionary theorist. Since the defeat of the Chinese revolution in 1976, he has been applying himself to the challenges of making revolution in today’s world, acting on the understanding that communist revolution is the only way out of the madness and horror that is social existence on this planet. (pp.2-3)”

Let’s take this in the order first, third, and second; in other words, first the dogmatists, then BA, then Badiou.

The problem is not really that there are a lot of people out there simply clinging tenaciously to the Soviet and Chinese experiences (or Cuban, Algerian, etc., for that matter). The way this first category should have been framed is that there are many socialists who sum up the first wave of proletarian revolutions as showing us that it is a mistake to try to break with an economist perspective, and that what we need instead is a better worked-out version of such a perspective.

I’ll deal with these questions at length in a discussion of economism, but let us say that we know this perspective well in the interventions here at the Kasama site, most eloquently developed by Carl Davidson and most systematically developed in the work that Carl repeatedly recommends, that of David Schweickart. I know Prof. Schweickart fairly well, he is not a dogmatist, in fact he is a very sophisticated thinker—and I want to add that he is, in my experience, a kind and caring person. I could see some of his economic models as playing a helpful role in a socialist society, but, again, I will take that up at length in my post on economism. But the point is that Prof. Schweickart is an avowed utilitarian, he affirms many John Stuart Mill principles.

Apart from discussing these issues more directly, the main point is that BA’s New Synthesis doesn’t really break with it.

In terms of continuity and discontinuity, the NS is more continuous with the experiences of the first wave (as is said directly in the polemic: “principally continuity”), and it doesn’t give us enough that is either new or a synthesis. Again, I would say that BA was up against an objective arc or trajectory and its exhaustion, and up against certain subjective factors, including a certain anti-intellectualism and intellectual laziness hiding behind a shallow critique of “academic niceties.”

If BA really had a new synthesis, he ought to be able to enter into fruitful conversation with others who are also attempting to forge ahead, but clearly he is not able to do this. Instead, he clings tenaciously to what he knows or thinks he knows, and after awhile it is all so swirled up in a sea of self-references that no one ought to consider what is coming out of the process a “theoretical project,” quite apart from academic niceties.

More to the point—because I do think Avakian is a smart guy, that’s not what’s at issue—is a certain habit of mind, reinforced over many years of experience in the RCP, and many decades of experience in the ICM, that prides itself on narrowness in the name of materialism. Not to get all psychoanalytic or even new-agey here, but there is a pathology to grabbing too hard, and there is a need, for the sake of both materialism and emancipatory projects, to let go a bit.

It has been pointed out to me by Kasama Project people who were closer to the RCP than I was that this mindset is also linked to failure, and that it represents a kind of capitulation:

“If we can’t do anything else, we must at least promote the work and leadership of Bob Avakian well.”

Is Our Needed Synthesis a Philosophy or a Science?

Once again let us underline two questions about science, or perhaps three.

What would Marxism be as a “science,” especially given how much science has been done since the time of Marx? (Incidentally, it is important that, among the figures mentioned in the polemic that Badiou is “going back to,” we do not find Georg Cantor; perhaps this will be found in a subsequent installment of the polemic, but surely this would complicate simply summing up Badiou as a “Rousseauist”?)

What is “science,” exactly, and does it give us everything, in every way, that we need for revolutionary communist theory and practice? For example, are there real ethical questions, and is there a science or a purely scientific mode of inquiry that gives us the answers to such questions? What about questions of art? Is art a substantive part of the human experience and possibilities for liberation and flourishing? Can questions of art and aesthetics be sorted out in a purely “scientific” way?

Lastly (among these questions), and the only point in having to say this once again is that the RCP keeps putting it forward as if they are really saying something, you don’t get to science, systematicity, rigor, or vision by declaration or fiat. There have been many insights over the years from Bob Avakian and the RCP, and some good historical analysis, some of it even pathbreaking, and some good work in political economy; I don’t see the point in minimizing these things, though they meant one thing in the context of an organization and activism that had some vibrancy to it, and they mean another thing in the context of an organization and leadership that was not able to make the necessary transition to a new level of theoretical and practical activity.

Does anyone doubt that the reason for “science and vision by declaration” is that this whole “new synthesis” hasn’t really come together?

Furthermore, and perhaps again to wax a bit psychoanalytic (superficially so, I realize), isn’t this the real motivation for tearing Badiou down, that BA doesn’t really have the new synthesis, combined with an abiding faith on the part of BA and those who remain in the RCP that only BA could have it.

Thus this dismal, grind-it-out-to-the-verdict, prooftexting and cherry-picking polemic against Badiou. This should make us angry, livid even, but it is also just sad.

However, even while we are correctly expressing anger at this stupid irresponsibility, let us underline one methodological point that needs much more discussion, and again it has to do with philosophy.

In the final analysis, is our Marxism, or better our revolutionary communism, our needed new synthesis (or even simply our new patchwork or “crazy quilt” of analyses that speaks to the way the world is today) that is going to help us radically change the world, a philosophy or a science?

We need science, we need scientific work and many avenues of scientific investigation (in other words, we need not only science, we need the many different sciences, plural)—does anyone really dispute that? But do we need art (and, again, the many different fields of artistic endeavor, and even the many fields of art theory and criticism)? Do we need love? Do we need politics, especially where the emergence of a true event in politics is something in the manner of an intervention, one that is essentially (if also in some sense not “absolutely”) underdetermined?

We could have a very fruitful debate around whether these are the only categories where events are possible, and so on, though of course we won’t have any such discussion in the case where our only interest in Badiou’s philosophy is to shut it down. Badiou’s work does a great deal more to help us with these issues than does chanting the mantra of “science” with very little (if any) real science to go with it.

The larger point is that the core of a truly new synthesis needs to be philosophy, not “science,” and, if you do it the other way around, you will not only be anti-philosophical and dismissive of the contributions of philosophy and philosophers (including, ultimately, the philosophical contributions of Marx, Lenin, and Mao — because, once you have the new science, you can kick away the old science), you will not understand the contributions of science in the proper context, either.

Bad Methodology

In the paragraph that goes more directly to Badiou, we see the usual use of the term “like.” This betokens very bad methodology. “Theorists like Rousseau, Kant, and Jefferson,” as with other non-helpful groupings such as “postmodern philosophers like Derrida” (or is it like “the Derridas”?), is just a way of not having to do some philosophical work and grapple with ideas.

Of course, it all works fine if we’ve already got the assurance that no thinkers before Marx have anything to teach us, and especially no philosophers since Marx have anything to teach us if they are outside of the narrow MLM/BA canon.

Anyone who has read Badiou knows that he hasn’t distanced himself from the Bolshevik Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, the Cultural Revolution, or Lenin or Mao.

Indeed, some of his ideas are very helpful for understanding what it might mean to say that these contributions are “saturated” and that it is time for a new synthesis, without setting aside a basic fidelity to these experiences. There is still a difference between what can be carried forward in our present efforts, and that which was not revolutionary to begin with.

As for analyzing the experience of the first wave, sure, I have some questions for Badiou’s particular claims and his broader framework, but there is a lot to be learned from it, too—just as, for instance, there is a lot to be learned from Sartre’s analysis of the Stalin period in Critique of Dialectical Reason, Vol. 2, and in the remarks on “survivals” in Althusser’s For Marx and Reading Capital. And there is a lot to be learned on this point from Mao’s Critique of Soviet Economics and Avakian’s Conquer the World?

But isn’t the point that we need all the help we can get in understanding the horrible mess that socialism became under Stalin, and that people of good will should come together on this work? We need to understand better why it is significant that this polemic contains not the least bit of good will.

The approach of this polemic instead reminds me of those so-called “Christians” who are mostly concerned with identifying the people who are going to hell, and I can’t help but recall BA’s bizarre piece on how “most of the time, even communists aren’t communists.” He didn’t mention himself in that regard, and the implication is that, all alone in this world Bob Avakian is the one communist who is a communist all the time, and he is the thread by which communism hangs in our time. It should go without saying that, if you begin with such a standard, no one else is going to measure up. But then you find yourself saying “we” shouldn’t be “Rousseauists” to people for whom the question means nothing, because it is ruled out in advance that there might be some reason to read Rousseau today. Nothing good can come from this.

It’s silly, anyway, to mainly identify Badiou with Rousseau—for the crime of thinking we might still learn a thing or two from Rousseau (and as if Marx didn’t)—when he is most often identified with Plato and the fulfillment of a certain “dream” of Plato by Cantor and the development of set theory and the idea of infinity.

How Badiou’s view that “mathematics is ontology” could be materialist or Marxist is an interesting question. It’s a question that I’m still trying to understand myself—and when I encounter some of these very smart people who are working in a concentrated way in Badiou’s philosophy, or, for that matter who have worked in set theory and mathematics more generally, I ask for their help in getting some insight into this question.

One important point is that W. V. Quine (no Marxist, for sure!) argued that sets have to be accepted into ontology because sets are necessary for doing scientific work. However, one thing that I would say is materialist about what Badiou is doing here (and Quine for that matter) is that his proposals open many questions, whereas Avakian’s half-baked, fragmentary, positivist, “truth is correspondence with reality” line not only shuts down questions, that is its aim.

We can argue with Badiou’s ideas, that’s part of what makes them materialist. There’s no arguing with BA’s crude notion of truth, with which he is “intoxicated” (as he put it), that’s what makes his theoretical enterprise “idealist,” and not in any good way. There is nowhere to go from there, and the people who are persisting in this line are indeed going nowhere.

Is Badiou a “Marxist”?

Well, members of L’Organisation Politique, of which Badiou is a leader, are referred to as “Modern Marxists.” It’s true that Badiou’s Marxism might be called one of “pure politics,” as Slavoj Zizek puts it in The Parallax View. Badiou’s rejection of economism goes so far as to reject the whole language of “interests,” a language that motivates most of what calls itself Marxism, including that of Bob Avakian. But wouldn’t we want to engage with this argument in a non-sectarian way, especially if we are interested in a non-economistic Marxism?

Is Badiou a “Maoist” or “post-Maoist”?

Bruno Bosteels makes a convincing case for the latter in his article, “Post-Maoism: Badiou and Politics.” Certainly Badiou continues to refer to various points in his philosophy that he takes to be “profoundly Maoist,” and his philosophy gives us a philosophical basis for both retaining a fidelity to Mao and the experience of Maoism and for recognizing that “it is absolutely necessary to invent a new political discipline.” This last is from the conclusion to an interview with Tzuchien Tho, conducted for the 2007 publication of The Concept of Model, in English translation, almost forty years after its original publication in French; the entire interview is very good, but of particular significance to our present concerns is this concluding section, where Badiou goes from discussing mathematics as ontology to answering the question, “Is there a Maoist theme there?” Badiou responds, “Yes, Maoist in a very deep sense.”

But again, the point is not simply whether we agree or not at every point with how Badiou develops these themes; there are many, Maoist or otherwise, who would take issue with the analysis that follows Badiou’s affirmation of a very deep Maoist theme. However, the real question is this: beyond Marxism or Leninism or Maoism, Badiou is working toward a renewal of the communist hypothesis. If we care about communism, we need to engage productively and critically with this work. Why would we not want to do this?

Related posts:

1. Stephen Mauldin: Badiou 101 for the RCP,USA

By Eddy Laing

At the core of Marxism is the methodology of historical materialism (HM), which “regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence.” ¹ As developed by Marx and Engels, the dialectical materialist conception of history is not just an interpretation of the world; it is a guide to active transformation and “in its essence critical and revolutionary.”²

Of course, it can be argued that any study of history is necessarily a study of social development. Unlike histories defined by the acts of presidents, generals, bankers or other elites, and measured against the Idea, or Moment or other ideological abstractions, historical materialism proceeds from an analysis of how society as a whole functions, “starting with the material production of life itself and comprehending the form of intercourse connected with and created by this mode of production.”³ In other words, historical materialism is a study of societies as they really are – as diverse and complex assemblies of people with various needs and aspirations. In order to do that, we need to examine society in all its stages and component reciprocal actions; how people make their lives, enact the state (laws, governance), and conduct themselves ideologically through religion, philosophy, ethics, morality, art, literature, music, etc. These activities and expressions are in fact social practices and, taken together, form the cultural matrix of the given society.

In 1848, Europe was still emerging from the centuries-long hold of feudalism and monarchism. From that vantage point, Marx and Engels had a palpable sense of the old social formations – dying but not yet dead – as well as the newly emerging ones, especially a rising class of proletarians for whom social revolution was on the immediate agenda.⁴ Thus, Marx and Engels developed their framework in active opposition to the idealism which, then as now, reinforced the dominant narratives of the day. And it was through that struggle that they were able to stand Hegel’s dialectical method ‘right side up’ and develop a science of the general laws of motion of the external world and of human thought, so that the real world was approached as the source of ideas, and not the other way around.⁵

HM proceeds from the hypothesis that our social being produces our consciousness; how we think and what we think are construed from our collaborations and communication with others. We devise our ways of life through networks of economic, political, and ideological social relationships, which we usually call ‘society.’ This sociality is a defining characteristic of humans; we could not exist, much less create culture, outside our social practices. Furthermore, the reciprocal interaction of our thinking and being is transformative; through our social practices we intentionally – and unintentionally in some cases – change our conditions of life, including how and what we think.

In this way, we produce our history, not as a recurring series of equivalent events, but as ongoing transformative experiences. Thus, human cultural history is oriented; it is a continuum of social practices that intersect in a complex matrix and which extend from and build upon collective past practices. How we live today is not how people lived two hundred or two thousand or two hundred thousand years ago. Neither are societies identical; each contains its own specificity and history. That said, how we live today is based in some part on how we have lived in the past and societies often share features that are built from similar social practices. An analogy can be drawn from biology: natural history is oriented in its evolution in that new species derive from species, body plans and organs that already exist, not according to a metaphysical system of phylogenetic progress. Furthermore, as biology, geology, astrophysics, and other sciences have subsequently shown, all life on this planet and all matter in the universe have histories too.

Orientation – the continuum of formative practices – does not preclude accident or obviate contingency. Social development is inexorable through time, but not in regard to its structure. Societies are what we make them to be, but we operate “under circumstance directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.”⁶ Societies arise according to specific conditions of material life, and as history demonstrates, they continue to undergo various subtle and dramatic changes over time: technologies are invented and become obsolete, forms of symbolization are transformed and deprecated, shared knowledge (oral or written) of the world is gained, forgotten or destroyed. As history also demonstrates emphatically, when the functional conditions of life of enough members of a society come into sharp conflict with how that society is directed or organized, resolutions are found in climactic and sudden events, often pitting one section against another, or pitting all against nature. Mass migrations, epidemics, wars and revolutions are all examples of resolving events.

Marx and Engels first presented their ‘materialist conception of history’ in polemics against the ‘idealist conception of history’ espoused by certain academic Hegelians⁷ and Ludwig Feuerbach. Starting with those polemics and specifically with The German Ideology, written in 1847, historical materialism provides a bright red thread running through their subsequent decades of collaboration, as demonstrated in their many practical applications: The Manifesto of the Communist Party; Capital; The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Boneparte; The Civil War in France; Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State; and their many other investigations of history, contemporary society and the struggle for socialism.

Since all scientific theories are developed from fact, my intent here is to illustrate the validity of HM by drawing on the empirical evidence of human social history: anthropology, psychology, archaeology, and other social sciences. Marx’s own study of the history of law and philosophy provided him with a starting point (e.g. the ideological and political superstructure of societies) for developing this theory, and his extensive study of capitalism, using England as its primary data set, is summarized in his famous critique.⁸ However, the data available today is more extensive than that obtainable in 1847 or 1867.

I do not presume to exhaust this subject, which is not possible in any event. Neither am I interested in compiling a set of rules or formulas or mechanistic ‘just so’ statements. What I do hope to accomplish is a cogent explanation of key theses within the HM methodology and an exploration of certain misconceptions, in the spirit of “revolutionizing the existing world, of practically coming to grips with and changing the things found in existence.”⁹

Humans as Social Animals

More than a simple statement of fact, we are animals and so we have a natural history. Our species, Homo sapiens, is a sub-set of the Hominidae family within the Primates order. We share a common ancestral species with and are most closely related to other hominids – chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans. Those animals (with the possible exception of Borneo orangutans) as well as the Old World monkeys and some other primates are social-banding creatures from which we can infer that earliest members of our species also lived that way. Early humans in Eastern Africa very likely lived in groups that jointly gathered food, secured shelter and biologically reproduced. It is also likely that early human bands observed some form of internal hierarchy aligned with age and sex. Based on ethnographic analogy, it is reasonable to suggest that the exploitation of female and juvenile labor emerged early as expressions of such a hierarchy, ^10,11,12 and rudimentary manifestations of exploitive practice have been observed among collateral species ^13,14,15,16 (e.g. adult males aggressively taking food that has been gathered by females or juveniles).

Successful population groups are by definition those that solve the problems of maintenance and reproduction of the group, which of course takes place in relation to the group’s environment. This is a necessary quality for biological evolution, and it is a necessary quality of social evolution.¹⁷ Functional groups are able to cooperate and are multi-generational. They have a need to communicate and they have learned behavior that can be shared among peers and with the younger generation. It is in these functions that we can begin to discriminate the capabilities of humans from those of other hominids. Very significantly, comparative observations of humans and other great apes show that the human infants display a capacity for understanding shared intentions. In other words, as part of our cognitive development we learn – before we can speak – that other humans are agents with whom we can cooperate.^18,19,20,21

It is in the course of cooperation that we learn vocabulary and other cultural information. As everyday events show us, speech acquisition is an on-going social practice. We are continually encountering – and inventing – new words and new meanings for words. While infant vocalization may begin as signaling, it rather quickly evolves into something more. We are not learning a set of signals when we acquire speech.²² Rather, our speech is comprised of a logically formed and extensible system of symbols.²³ Here again, we are the only animal known to be capable of symbolizing and symbolic recursion.²⁴ Taken together, these capabilities enable an expandable matrix of social practices, which reciprocally comprise intra-group social relationships.

“The production of life, both of one’s own labour and of the fresh life in procreation, now appears as a twofold relation: on the one hand as a natural, on the other as a social relation – social in the sense that it denotes the co-operation of several individuals, no matter under what conditions, in what manner and to what end. It follows from this that a certain mode of production, or industrial stage is always combined with a certain mode of co-operation, or social stage, and this mode of co-operation is itself a ‘productive force’.”²⁵

Modern society has developed – over several thousand generations – from those beginnings. As our social history illustrates, those specific capacities do not prescribe one type or direction for our cultural evolution. Our capacity for shared intentionality, for example, has not obviated social conflict; our ability to create tools produced Zyklon B and the H-bomb. Social contradictions do not result simply because we are not as ‘wise’ as our taxon sapiens suggests, but they do demonstrate the innovative variability inherent in our transformative actions.

Thought and Social Practice

The phenomenon of consciousness has been the object of speculation – what is it, how does it happen – throughout written history. A well-known Zen koan frames the subject-object question by asking whether the dreamer is a man or a butterfly, but an entomologist might point out that the Lepidoptera nervous system is too primitive to support memory. Historical materialism, developed in opposition to philosophical idealism, answers this question directly: it is not human consciousness that produces our being; it is our social being which produces our consciousness.

This statement should not be interpreted to mean only that the brain is an organ for thought or memory, or that thoughts are simply biochemical signals transmitted through a central nervous system. Although it is required for and enables thinking and memory, the physiology of the brain is not thinking. Brains do not produce symbols or memories from within. Thinking proceeds from interactions with others. The dialectical materialist psychologist Lev Vygotsky and his colleagues conducted path-breaking investigations of cognition during the revolutionary 1920s in Russia, demonstrating that cognitive ability develops through social interaction.²⁶ Human infants learn how to learn through dialogic exchange with others. Thus, we are not born ‘human’; we are made so through our interactions. We continue to acquire knowledge throughout our lives by internalizing direct and indirect shared experience, through social practices, including those of semiotic mediation – the forms through which we communicate with each other. ^27,28,29 In this process, we create our thoughts: as memories of dialogic experiences, as physical perceptions, and through a process of comparison and association that we sometimes experience as an ‘inner monologue.’³⁰

This assumes still greater significance when we consider the full history of our species. Humans migrated out from Africa in perhaps several waves, reaching across Asia as well as into Europe, out onto the Pacific, across the Bering Sea, and the length of the Western Hemisphere. This in itself demonstrates a range of transformative and transmitted behaviors that enabled ‘success’ in a tremendously wide range of habitats – from the African savannah to the Arctic tundra, from the Tibetan plateau to the Amazonian basin. While human presence has created habitat opportunities for fellow travelers (rodents and domestic cats are two examples), no other animal has demonstrated such a capacity for adapting to widely different climates and habitat.

Humans have not only responded to the environment, we have learned to remake it. The earliest details of how we learned are lost to the oral histories of the thousands of generations who came before the advent of written language about 5,000 years ago. Relying on their oral folklore our distant ancestors learned to predict climate and seasons, learned to control fire, learned to cultivate plants, learned to domesticate certain mammals, learned to create their own shelter, and with various other assembled skills and affinities eventually stepped into a more settled world; produced by their own hands and minds in dialogue with each other.

An ongoing argument within anthropology for most of the last century has been whether the breadth of human culture has been mainly a process of diffusion – the communication of practices from one group to another – or independent invention responding to specific similar or distinct conditions of life. Writing, for example, is thought to have developed independently in at least two cultures (Mayan and Sumerian) and possibly others (Indus), based on distinct glyphic systems and proto-grammars. Other examples can be inferred from the invention of crop cultivation, for while varieties of the same grains might be transplanted to different locales with similar climate (for example from east to west or vice versa), the same transfer would not be successful when moving longitudinally (south-north) or across elevations (into or out of significantly different climate zones).³¹ It would appear that both the social, interactive practices of innovation and of interchange are foundational to human cultural history, and have been employed by various – distinct and related – population groups at different times and in different places.³²

The Core of Culture is the Mode of Production

Every human society, regardless of its simplicity or complexity, coheres around modes of activity that solve the prerequisites of food, shelter, clothing and other basic physical and ideological needs. Generally, modes of production are comprised of the activities through which the group provides for this subsistence and reproduction, including the rules, customs, techniques, beliefs, and other ideas that have arisen from and in turn enable those basic activities, such as how those activities are communicated across generations and geography.

Marx described the capitalist mode of production as distinguished by two characteristics. First, the social product takes the form of commodities (a useful product of human labor created for exchange), and second, the aim of production is the creation of surplus-value (the value created by labor beyond its cost as labor-power), which is appropriated as interest, ground rent and profit by capitalists.³³ In this mode of production, the capitalists direct the kinds of social production and how the social surplus (the surplus-labor of the society as a whole) will be used as they compete to exchange commodities in various markets. Within this type of economy, human labor is one of the commodities produced and traded. The proletarian sells her labor-power for wages with which she feeds, clothes and shelters herself and her dependants, and thereby lives to work another day (and create more surplus-value for the capitalists).

This does not mean that only one mode of production is possible in any society. Social practices are dynamic and human culture is constantly in process. For example, during the 12th and 13th centuries and continuing into the 18th, mercantile and small-scale productive capitalism co-existed with feudal agrarianism in much of Europe. Likewise, in some aboriginal North American societies observed during the 18th and 19th centuries, as well as among some Amazonian groups in the 20th, hunting/gathering co-exist with crop cultivation. In addition, from the 15th until the late 19th centuries, slave labor was essential to large-scale Euro-American capitalist farming and natural resource extraction in the Western Hemisphere. Nonetheless, within a given society at a specific period in time, one mode is dominant “whose relations thus assign rank and influence to the others. It is a general illumination which bathes all the other colours and modifies their particularity.”³⁴

The transformative quality of human culture both requires and enables the ensemble of ideological activities that explain, reproduce and challenge the underlying social practices of the society. We are not only capable of symbolizing; we require language, other sound and visual expression to enable our consciousness and our sociality. Our cultures are matrices of social practices. In order to operationalize a mode of life (hunting, cultivating, manufacturing, singing, painting, storytelling, writing) we cooperatively invent tools and techniques, which further transform our shared existence. All of this requires semiotic mediation – the expression and internalization of ideas – and that social interactivity in turn promotes new knowledge and expressions (words, meanings, etc.).

Early human advances in cognition were most likely confronted with many practical obstacles, not the least of which was recognizing cognition as the rationalization and internalization of social practice.³⁵ Consequently, in the course of thinking about themselves and the world, people developed belief systems and ‘world views’, some of which were partially accurate or largely inaccurate. For example, long ago humans observed various manifestations of seasonality and learned to track the passing of time in order to predict their requirements for migratory hunting, agriculture, ceremonies, and other activity planning. Thus were created lunar and solar calendars. In various ancient societies, supernatural forces were assumed responsible for many of the phenomena being observed; the sun, the moon, major rivers, certain marine mammals, were ascribed with motive force. Coincidence was confused with causality, and successful predictions in one circumstance (seasonality as applied to cultivation) were sometimes generalized into ideological systems (the sun as an omnipotent god) in order to explain other phenomenon. We can recognize similar gaps between being and understanding in contemporary capitalist society, for example, ascribing the processes of economic exchange to supra-social ‘market forces,’ or the fetishism of commodities in which “a definite social relation between men assumes … the fantastic form of a relation between things.” ³⁶

Our awareness is created through our interactions with the rest of the world, but it can never be fully aligned to it: first, because material reality is expansive and continually changing and second, because our thinking is a symbolic interpretation, an abstraction formed from that reality. A hallmark of human cognition is ‘predictive thinking’ and being able to form hypotheses that describe probable events or outcomes. We can’t actually ‘see into the future’; we anticipate based on prior experience.

Division of Labor and Social Stratification

As far as is known, within nearly every society to date, regardless of the mode, production has been engaged according to a division of labor. The regular production of a surplus enables such a division – more is collected or produced than is consumed by those collecting or producing it – and reciprocally, a division of labor may enable producing a surplus by concentrating specific skills on specific social functions. Alternately, if the band, ethno-unit or society is unable to maintain a productive surplus, it typically collapses (rather than contract to a less complex productive mode) and its members die out, migrate, or merge as bands with other groups.³⁷ In just the last few decades, we have seen societies and state forms that have ‘failed,’ dissolved, been annexed or partitioned, and of course, throughout recorded history many states have been formed or dissolved because of social revolution or inter-state warfare.

Turning again to ethnography in search of historically analogous examples, at least some recent societies that have been primarily engaged in a combination of cultivation and hunting have done so through a division of labor between hunters and cultivators, reinforced with customs, rules, and other specialized behaviors that were developed and transmitted according to that division.³⁸ In addition to expressly productive tasks, a division of labor also developed between manual activities and ideological tasks, such as conducted by shamans, priests or medicine societies. These specializations were required to ensure the life and growth of the group; to develop specific practices, such as birthing, dying, hunting, cultivating and symbolizing; to innovate new practices, such as plant or animal domestication; and to communicate specific practices as knowledge, especially across generations.

The first division of labor within human ethno-units was likely between women and men and may have arisen from one of the qualities of human biological dimorphism; within a given breeding population group of our species, males are typically larger than females. This hypothesis contradicts some well-known earlier assertions following L. H. Morgan³⁹ who hypothesized that early human societies practiced a ‘primitive communalism’ in which labor was equally shared. Arguments contra Morgan have been proposed by various anthropologists who cite the behaviors of closely related hominids (as mentioned earlier). Others refer to analogous social relations as recorded by ethnographers over the past Å 200 years, such as J. H. Moore’s 1978 survey of Human Relations Area Files⁴⁰ for evidence of exploitation of women by men in hunting and gathering societies. The only examples Moore found of ‘agalitarian’ societies – where there was no indication of such exploitation – were four groups who live or lived in marginal ecological zones that did not support a regular productive surplus (such as the Arctic coast and the North American Great Basin). However, those marginal zones were inhabited only after exploitative societies had fully occupied the more productive areas. Moore further argued that the subjugation of women provided a cultural model for the subjugation of men.⁴¹

Regardless of the moment and practice of origin, the differentiation of labor very early in human social history suggests the production of some amount of surplus. On that basis, societies cleaved according to provision and task. Those divisions would have promoted or reinforced in-group and cross-generational knowledge and technology transfer apropos to cultivation, hunting, healing, tool making, etc. As noted earlier, recorded oral histories of many hunter-gatherer societies describe divisions between hunters and cultivators and between mental and manual activities. Those ethnographies (as well as other data, such as archaeological evidence) also suggest that those two divisions are linked, and that within the resulting strata further hierarchy, primary leaders, and inter-strata conflicts emerged shortly thereafter. These earliest divisions provide the starting points for later and more complex stratification. Out of this process, sections of society come to be ‘fixed’ in their social relationships as classes that are comprised of specific relationship types, distinct from other classes. In many societies, these class definitions are transferred across generations, as heredity. Stratification also promotes – and increasingly requires in order to reproduce those relationships – the further development of an ideological and political superstructure, which soon comes to direct every aspect of the society’s activities.

“The division of labor implies from the outset the division of the conditions of labor, of tools and materials, and thus the fragmentation of accumulated capital among different owners, and thus, also, the fragmentation between capital and labor, and the different forms of property itself.”⁴² It is in this division of labor (including the division between town and countryside) that private property and class distinctions are based. Marx and Engels considered this essential to understanding the dynamics of class society as well as to understanding how to create a new kind of society, free of class distinctions, exploitation and oppression.

Stratification Produces Class Struggle

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” With this statement in the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels introduced their analysis that through all of human history “oppressor and oppressed stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on a now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.” ⁴³

The division of societies into distinct classes is enabled by the economic exploitation of subaltern classes by the dominant class: slave by master, serf by landlord, proletarian by capitalist. These classes exist as social contradictions. There is dialectical unity between the opposing classes in such a society; one requires the other, but this is not a static relationship. The dominant class exists at the economic, political and ideological expense of the subaltern class. The economic disadvantage is generally evident in the respective life-ways of the opposed classes. The political disadvantage is evident in the nature of the laws and customs that promote those disadvantages. Ideologically, the ruling classes have free rein (by law as well as by economic control) to dominate the intellectual life of the society through philosophies, aesthetics, traditions and other sentiments that champion their position as elites and justify the subjugation of the other class. Beyond that fact, the ruling class also expropriates the symbolic innovations of the subaltern groups; the visual art, music, dance, poetry, prose and song created by the oppressed often become property of the dominant class in the intellectual market.⁴⁴

This socio-political contention between strata and classes is grounded in the division of society according to labor that, as proposed earlier, emerged first between men and women and between mental and manual labor. Here, the reciprocity between different forms of social practice is critically important. The division of labor as it has evolved is not incidental much less inconsequential to the society; it is a requisite component of the social order and its continued existence.

Without devising solutions to shared necessities – such as how to hunt most effectively, what plants to cultivate and when or how to attend to the sick and dying – the band cannot survive and thrive. Over time, these shared practices are explained and encoded as ideology. Knowledge is not acquired in the abstract or equally by all members of the group concurrently; as a process, it proceeds unevenly among individuals and is intentionally withheld or shared. Those discrepancies, transferred across generations, eventually come to comprise distinct ideological systems shared within specific sub-groups, strata or classes.

Given the burden of knowledge acquisition and transfer, especially for the many tens of thousands of years before the advent of writing, specialization of activity was both vitally important and subject to tremendous pressures. Nature (climate, weather, geology, biology) appeared as mysterious and dominating forces. Predation by other animals was always present. An unsuccessful collection or hunt could produce internal strife over causes and results, under the constant specter of starvation. The spontaneous emergence of division morphed into codifications deemed necessary for survival and which came to be perceived as complementary to the conditions of life, as ‘natural’ as nature itself. From this process emerge concepts of medicine, taboo, morality, ethics, etc.

These ideological practices are tethered to how the society is structured and functions. The anthropologist Leslie White pithily noted that “religion is, at bottom, an affair of the emotions,”⁴⁵ but emotions – affective responses – are an interpretation of the real world. Marriage traditions and incest taboos promote exogamy⁴⁶ which can foster productivity by the group (by expanding its size) and reinforce peaceful coexistence with neighboring groups in their mutual use of resources (for hunting, cultivation, etc.). Origin stories explain in-group distinctions and traditions and thus promote social cohesion.

These interactions work in reverse as well. Shocks to the lifeways of the society call into question the ideologies that support and promote those lifeways. The 19th century encroachment of the US Army and European settlers onto the North American Plains undermined the status and role of the traditional Cheyenne clan system of Council Chiefs, prompting its replacement by the Soldier Chiefs.⁴⁷ The economic dislocations and prolonged slaughter of the First World War, combined with subaltern demands for peace and bread and land, prompted the overthrow of the 300 year-old Romanov dynasty and its replacement by a revolutionary socialist government. ⁴⁸ In both cases, long-standing ideological support for the traditional order was overturned in favor of new worldviews.

The struggle within societies between strata and classes, and which appears to erupt more or less ‘spontaneously,’ takes as its starting point any of a wide variety of practices in politics, ideologies and/or economics. In times of acute social crisis, any aspect of how society operates is liable to be interrogated, and at such times, “(new) beginnings are to be seen literally on all sides.”⁴⁹

Economic Base, Political-Ideological Superstructure and the Need for Revolution

In their historical analysis, Marx and Engels specifically noted and partly described several types of societies that have existed over the past two thousand years, primarily citing the Mediterranean and Europe. Tribal societies, slave societies, feudal societies, and capitalist societies have each been characterized by distinctive but generalizable economic relationships and technologies (e.g. estate agriculture using slave labor together with small-scale handicraft production) and ideo-political superstructures (Roman or common law, literature and music, religions and customs, etc.) In every stratified society, the dominant class exerts hegemonic control over the rest of society, including over intellectual life, aspirations, and the ability of subaltern strata to express ideas independent of that dominant, ruling class narrative. The proletariat (and every other non-dominant class) is not only expropriated economically; they are expropriated in every aspect of culture including their intellectual life. Consider, for example, how the ruling class narrative defines popular discussions of ‘democracy’, ‘dictatorship’, ‘violence’, ‘peace’, ‘terrorism’, ‘economic crisis’, and so on.

The oppressed classes’ struggle – as individuals and in groups – not just against the surface phenomenon of economic conditions, they push up against all of these other types of subjugation too, although often without awareness of the real nature of the contradiction or of potential outcomes. Within the system of class divisions, the boundaries of oppression – just like the actual composition of the classes – shift over time, depending upon the resistance of the oppressed, the rate of success/failure of the social economy, the relative political/military strength of the classes facing each other, and environmental conditions. Bourgeois revolutions often set out to overturn the hereditary rights that characterized earlier class societies, and replace those with the so-called ‘inalienable rights of man.’ Yet, as the history of the last 350 years shows, social status remains inheritably constrained (but not completely fixed) within capitalism; through inheritable property; through the bourgeois family; through literacy and a stratified education system; through acculturation in literature and arts; through national/ethnic oppression and racism, and so on.⁵⁰ As Marx and Engels observed, “class in its turn assumes an independent existence against the individuals, so that the latter find their conditions of life predetermined, and have their position in life and hence their personal development assigned to them by their class, thus becoming subsumed under it.” This “subjection of the separate individuals to the division of labor … can only be removed by the abolition of private property and of labor [i.e. the sale of labor-power] itself.”⁵¹ In other words, class societies reproduce themselves by reproducing the classes of social practices on which that mode of life is based.

Based on their analysis of historical succession, Marx and Engels theorized that class society was itself historical; that the blind necessity that had driven all prior class societies was being eclipsed by the current capabilities of social reproduction; and that therefore exploitative capitalist society could and should be brought to an end by the revolutionary class struggle of the proletariat. This struggle, aimed immediately at the capitalist state, must account for all the other components of the social superstructure and not only production relationships.

“The alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution; the revolution is necessary therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.”⁵²

As 20th C. history shows, while an essential and great leap, the revolutionary transformation of the superstructure requires much more than ‘smashing the state’ and establishing a new regime of workers or their representatives. It is increasingly evident that the revolutionary transformation of all social relationships (economic, political and ideological) must be the program for the entire period of socialist transition. Short of that type of movement, the economic relationships at the outset of socialist reconstruction not only bear “the birth marks of the old society,”⁵³ they stand in active opposition to moving forward: an extensive division of labor; wage scales and the exchange of labor-power; various forms of small-scale production and commerce; the administration of public property, etc.

In order to create a society that has rid itself of the ‘muck of ages’ we need to refashion all of the ways in which we interact with each other; transform all of the social relationships upon which society is based. This is not just a matter of enacting laws or restructuring the economy, although those are enabling actions from which we must start. This again speaks to the relationship between being and thinking; between the ways society is organized and functions and the ways we conceptualize each other. We cannot re-conceptualize ourselves without changing the ways in which we live; we cannot change those social relationships without re-conceptualizing our peers and ourselves.

Is Human History Directionally Orientated?

Marx wrote to Joseph Weydermeyer that “no credit is due to me for discovering the existence of classes or the struggle between them … what I did new was to prove: 1) that the existence of classes is only bound up with particular historical phases of the development of production, 2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat, 3) that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.”⁵⁴

This has led some to view socialist revolution and the demise of capitalism as inevitable and bound to occur, under the pressure of its own internal contradictions. There are indeed fundamental contradictions inherent in capitalist societies, not the least of which are those internal contradictions between exploitation and accumulation, between the proletarian and capitalist classes. However, patterns and trends in social history do not necessarily indicate all potential or future actions; human societies are inherently dynamic and variable, even – perhaps especially – when large numbers of its members attempt to act in concert, such as classes struggling to become conscious of their collective and strategic interests.

Engels spoke to social contingency in his notes on Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, and is worth citing at length here. “In spite of the consciously desired aims of all individuals, accident apparently reigns on the surface. That which is willed happens but rarely; in the majority of instances the numerous desired ends cross and conflict with one another, or these ends themselves are from the outset incapable of realization, or the means of attaining them are insufficient. … The ends of the actions are intended, but the results which actually follow from these actions are not intended; or when they do seem to correspond to the end intended, they ultimately have consequences quite other than those intended. … Men make their own history, whatever its outcome may be, in that each person follows his own consciously desired end, and it is precisely the resultant of these many wills operating in different directions, and of their manifold effects upon the outer world, that constitutes history.”⁵⁵

The struggle for communist society is a struggle to overcome and do away with all of the inequalities that arise from the historic divisions of society and the division of labor. As the struggle between classes is fought out through every social relationship, it creates further potential for revolutionary transformation of all social relationships. The object of the socialist revolution is not simply an equal (or even generally-increased) distribution of the social product – such an equity between sellers and buyers can only reproduce the old social relations of capitalist exchange⁵⁶ – rather, the object must be the creation of new and non-exploitative social relationships in every field of activity. Most importantly, this applies to the proletariat itself, which must “rid itself of everything that still clings to it from its previous position in society.”⁵⁷

Instead of life’s work as compulsory and alienated (so many units of labor-power within a capital process), communism envisions emancipatory ‘life’s work’ unfettered of narrow economic relationships. To arrive at that mode of life, we need to reorganize society beyond the narrow confines of the “bourgeois right,”⁵⁸ beyond an ‘equality’ grounded in commodity exchange and which masks the relationships among people with relationships between things. As Marx and Engels envisioned it, classless society enables the full realization of individuals through the full realization of society as a whole. In capitalist society, the prime objective for the worker is the sale of her labor-power for purposes directed by capital. Even one’s ‘free (unpaid) time’ and compensatory (in lieu of truly self-directed) activities are narrowly defined by capitalist relations, such as the periodic ‘freedom’ to purchase – or more often, borrow against – ‘non-essential’ consumer goods, make a holiday excursion, etc. As Marx and Engels envisioned it, communist society is one where “each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, [since] society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow.”⁵⁹ This vision of the future suggests but cannot propose specific solutions to every form of social contradiction, and it certainly strains an imagination subsumed in the present-day ideologies of late capitalism and the age-old traditions of class society. (e.g., how can everyone be competent or enabled to engage in every type of activity?) However, the scope and sociality of this vision stands exactly opposed to all of the brutality, muck and ennui of imperialist society, with its ruling class of loathsome parasites.

The oppressed can make their own history only through overcoming the ‘dead hand of the past’ – ideologies and practices that perpetuate exploitation and oppression. Historical materialism is an essential tool for decrypting those social practices. Especially important to the theory is the observation that “it is not a question so much of the motives of single individuals, however eminent, as of those motives which set in motion great masses, whole peoples, and again whole classes of people in each people. … Everything which sets men in motion must go through their minds; but what form it will take in the mind will depend very much on the circumstances.”⁶⁰ We are who we are through our social practices and our socially transformative capabilities arise from that sociality, especially as class struggle.

Up through the mid-19th century, materialist philosophy had largely been constrained by mechanistic and reductionist interpretations: the world as an aggregate of things, each with a cause and effect. Marx and Engels liberated materialism from this conundrum by applying dialectical analysis; instead of a series of isolates, the physical world and human society were revealed as complex webs of interactive processes. Within the web of human culture is the communist project, based on the premise that overthrowing capitalism and building a new form of society is historically possible; the proletariat can act in that direction because of its position as a class within the matrices of contemporary social relationships. Our actions are generally deliberate, but not ‘inevitable’ or automatic, and often produce unanticipated consequences. For all of that, by acting we are transformative of society, the world and ourselves.

Of course, the advent of dialectical HM has not meant the demise of idealist and subjectivist modes of thought. It did however expand the proletarian class struggle – already taking place over economic and political relationships – into the realm of philosophy and within the ideological superstructure more broadly. In that way, by providing a framework for interpreting the world, HM dialectically enables the communist hypothesis to change it. The manifestations of this ideological struggle (such as against idealism and subjectivism) are of critical importance for those struggling to revolutionize society.

For example, in their examination and analysis of society, Marx and Engels adopted the approach of isolating and dissecting various social relationships in their phenomenal forms – such as labor-power, surplus-value, constant capital, economic base, political and ideological superstructure – in order to describe internal features and specific categories of interaction. These specific features were examined by Marx in order to understand society as a whole process, as a ‘rich totality of many relations.’

“It seems to be correct to begin with the real and the concrete, with the real precondition, thus to begin, in economics, with e.g. the population, which is the foundation and the subject of the entire social act of production. However, on closer examination this proves false. The population is an abstraction if I leave out, for example, the classes of which it is composed. These classes in turn are an empty phrase if I am not familiar with the elements on which they rest. e.g. wage labour, capital, etc. These latter in turn presuppose exchange, division of labour, prices, etc. For example, capital is nothing without wage labour, without value, money, price etc. Thus, if I were to begin with the population, this would be a chaotic conception [Vorstellung] of the whole, and I would then, by means of further determination, move analytically towards ever more simple concepts [Begriff], from the imagined concrete towards ever thinner abstractions until I had arrived at the simplest determinations. From there the journey would have to be retraced until I had finally arrived at the population again, but this time not as the chaotic conception of a whole, but as a rich totality of many determinations and relations.”⁶¹

This approach remains vulnerable to one-sided and reductionist interpretations and, indeed, some activists have made those types of mistakes; adopting mechanical and atomized perspectives – over that of capitalism as a matrix of international process – fragmenting the relationships between economics, politics and ideology in the near-term revolutionary class struggle and as they affect the longer struggle for communism. Those misinterpretations have had harmful and often disastrous effects. For example, various conceptualizations of socialism have been advanced over the past century which give priority to productive capacity, types of technology, or amounts of output as the ‘key link’ for creating socialism and for revolutionizing society, substituting these for the truly key objectives of socialist revolution: the radical transformations of all economic, political and ideological social relationships. Similarly, various visions of anti-capitalist social change center on organizing incremental economic oppositions to individual capital formations, policies or capitalists in place of advancing the struggle to challenge all of the oppressive and exploitative social relationships inherent in capitalist society, including and especially the character of the state. Within the ranks of the proletarian movement, the failure to recognize and accurately advance the struggle over key matters of ideology, of materialist dialectics, as well as of the analysis of specific socio-political moments, contributed to the reversals of socialism in the USSR and China, and to the misdirection of many revolutionary movements in other countries worldwide.⁶² Our practical and theoretical work today is very much grounded in those past practices – successes and failures – and on the struggle to accurately assess them.

As current events continually remind us, the social world is not frozen, waiting for the oppressed and exploited to seize the day. The outrages and atrocities of capitalism are an ongoing assault on the great majority of the people of the world and on the planet itself. The clock is always ticking. For us, the project for the future will only advance if we assume among our component tasks the critical opposition to such mechanistic and ‘metaphysical’ conceptualizations and the further critical development of dialectical, revolutionizing, historical materialist practice and theory.

Notes:

[Abbreviations for multi-volume book sets: MECW = Marx and Engels Collected Works; MESW = Marx and Engels Selected Works; LCW = V.I. Lenin Collected Works]

1. Marx, K. 1967/1867. Capital. Vol. 1. New York. p 29.
2. Capital. Vol. 1. p 29.
3. Marx, K. and F. Engels. 1976/1848. The German Ideology. MECW 5. New York. p 53.
4. Describing 1848, Engels wrote “the Paris uprising found its echo in the victorious insurrections in Vienna, Milan and Berlin; when the whole of Europe right up to the Russian frontier was swept into the movement.” see Marx, K. 1969/1850. The Class Struggles in France. MESW Vol. 1. Moscow. p. 189.
5. Capital. Vol. 1. p. 29. See also: Engels, F. 1969/1886. Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy. MESW Vol. 3. Moscow. esp. Part IV on Marx.
6. Marx, K. 1969/1869. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Boneparte. MESW Vol. 1. Moscow. p. 398.
7. German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel was a very strong influence for Marx and other radical thinkers of the day.
8. Capital, Vol. 1. p. 19.
9. The German Ideology. p 38.
10. Moore, J. H. 1977. The Evolution of Exploitation. Critique of Anthropology 2(8): 33-48.
11. Moore, J. H. 1978. The Exploitation of Women in Evolutionary Perspective. Critique of Anthropology 3(9-10): 83-100.
12. Terray, E. and J. S. Kahn. 1979. On Exploitation: Elements of an Autocritique. Critique of Anthropology 4(13-14): 29-39.
13. Brennan, J. and J. Anderson. 1988. Varying responses to feeding competition in a group of rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta). Primates 29(3): 353-360.
14. Starin, E. D. 2006. Patterns of food transfer in temminck’s red colobus. Aggressive Behavior 32(3): 181-186.
15. Whiten, A. and C. P. van Schaik. 2007. The evolution of animal ‘cultures’ and social intelligence. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 362(1480): 603-620.
16. Cheney, D., R. Seyfarth, B. Smuts. 1986. Social relationships and social cognition in nonhuman primates. Science 234(4782): 1361-1366.
17. By evolution, I mean simply ‘the change in properties of populations of organisms over time’ as per Ernst Mayr.
18. Tomasello, M. 2001. Cultural Transmission: A View from Chimpanzees and Human Infants. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 32(2): 135-146.
19. Tomasello, M., M. Carpenter, J. Call, T. Behne, and H. Moll. 2005. Understanding and sharing intentions: The origins of cultural cognition. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28(05): 675-691.
20. Herrmann, E., J. Call, M. V. Hernandez-Lloreda, B. Hare, M. Tomasello. 2007. Humans Have Evolved Specialized Skills of Social Cognition: The Cultural Intelligence Hypothesis. Science 317(5843): 1360-1366.
21. Tomasello, M. and H. Rakoczy. 2003. What Makes Human Cognition Unique? From Individual to Shared to Collective Intentionality. Mind & Language 18(2): 121-147.
22. Wertsch, J. V. 1985. Vygotsky and the Social Formation of Mind. Cambridge and London, Harvard University Press.
23. Vygotsky, L. 1986. Thought and Language. Cambridge, MIT Press. p. 68-95.
24. Hauser, M. D., N. Chomsky, et al. 2002. The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve? Science 298(5598): 1569-1579.
25. The German Ideology. p 43.
26. Vygotsky. Thought and Language. p. 68-95.
27. Moll, H. and M. Tomasello. 2007. Cooperation and human cognition: the Vygotskian intelligence hypothesis. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 362(1480): 639-648.
28. Fernyhough, C. 1996. The dialogic mind: A dialogic approach to the higher mental functions. New Ideas in Psychology 14(1): 47-62.
29. Wertsch, J. V. and P. Tulviste. 1992. L. S. Vygotsky and Contemporary Developmental Psychology. Developmental Psychology 28(4): 548-557.
30. Vygotsky. Thought and Language. p. 210-256.
31. Several examples are discussed in Diamond, J. 1997. Guns, Germs, and Steel. New York, W.W. Norton.
32. For tens of thousands of years this may also have involved interchange between Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis, another, somewhat earlier species of humans who also populated areas of Africa and Eurasia. c.f. Mellars, P. 1988. The Origins and Dispersal of Modern Humans. Current Anthropology 29(1): 186-188.
33. Marx, K. 1967. Capital. Vol. 3. New York. p. 879-880.
34. Marx, K. 1973. Grundrisse. New York. p. 107-108.
35. A related illustration might be the schizophrenic perceiving their own thoughts to be external voices. c.f. Fernyhough, C. 2004. Alien voices and inner dialogue: towards a developmental account of auditory verbal hallucinations. New Ideas in Psychology 22(1): 49-68.
36. Capital, Vol. 1. p. 77. < http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm#S4>
37. c.f. Diamond, J. 2005. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York. Viking.
38. Ethnography is rich on this topic, but an illustrative sample would be: Sharrock, S. R. 1974. Crees, Cree-Assiniboines, and Assiniboines: Interethnic Social Organization on the Far Northern Plains. Ethnohistory 21(2): 95-122. Moore, J. H. 1974. Cheyenne Political History, 1820-1894. Ethnohistory 21(4): 329-359. Southall, A. 1976. Nuer and Dinka Are People: Ecology, Ethnicity and Logical Possibility. Man 11(4): 463-491. Moore, J. H. 1994. Putting Anthropology Back Together Again. American Anthropolgist 96(4): 925-948. Masco, J. 1995. “It is a Strict Law That Bids Us Dance”: Cosmologies, Colonialism, Death, and Ritual Authority in the Kwakwaka’wakw Potlatch, 1849 to 1922. Comparative Studies in Society and History 37(1): 41-75.
39. Morgan’s survey Ancient Society (1877) is cited by Engels throughout The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.
40. HRAF is a collaborative archive at Yale University that catalogues worldwide ethnographic data.
41. Moore. ‘Exploitation of Women’.
42. The German Ideology. p. 86.
43. Marx, K. and F. Engels. 1969/1848. Manifesto of the Communist Party. MESW Vol. 1. Moscow. p. 109.
44. This is obviously the case in many fields of intellectual activity, where patents, copyright and other contracts assign ‘intellectual property’ rights to the employer, not the intellectual employee.
45. White, L. A. 1926. An Anthropological Approach to the Emotional Factors in Religion. The Journal of Philosophy 23(20): 546-554.
46. White, L. A. 1948. The Definition and Prohibition of Incest. American Anthropologist 50(3): 416-435.
47. Moore. ‘Cheyenne Political History’.
48. c.f. Lenin, V.I. 1964/1917. Lessons of the Revolution. LCW Vol. 25. Moscow.
49. Lenin, V.I. 1964/1920. ‘Left-wing’ Communism - An infantile disorder. LCW Vol. 31. Moscow. p. 101.
50. Studies of education practices in the US have shown that a large majority of low-income and ethnic-minority students are regularly placed in ‘low-skilled’ educational tracks. c.f. Condron, D. J. 2007. Stratification and Educational Sorting: Explaining Ascriptive Inequalities in Early Childhood Reading Group Placement. Social Problems 54(1): 139-160.
51. The German Ideology. p. 77.
52. The German Ideology. p. 53.
53. Marx, K. 1969/1875. Critique of the Gotha Programme. MESW Vol. 3. Moscow. p. 17.
54. Marx, K. 1969. Letter to J. Weydermeyer in New York. 5 March 1852. MESW Vol. 1. Moscow. p. 528.
55. Engels, F. 1969/1888. Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy. MESW Vol. 3. p. 366.
56. Where “he, who before was the money-owner, now strides in front as capitalist; the possessor of labour-power follows as his labourer.” Capital Vol. 1 p. 172.
57. The German Ideology. p. 88.
58. Critique of the Gotha Programme. p. 18.
59. The German Ideology. p. 47.
60. Ludwig Feuerbach. p. 367.
61. Grundrisse. p. 107-108.
62. c.f. Ely, M. 1980. Slipping into Darkness, ‘Left’ economism, the CPUSA, and the Trade Union Unity League (1929 – 1935). Revolution 5(2-3).

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