John Steele: Is Badiou a Maoist?

This is the paper I presented at the Rethinking Marxism conference last weekend (a little more filled out here). I hope we can get some response and some dialogue going here on the issues raised in the paper.

To anticipate my conclusion:  Is Badiou’s work Maoist? – the answer, I believe, is certainly, yes.

Badiou and Maoist “voluntarism”

by John Steele

As we know, Alain Badiou was, during the decade and more following 1968, an important figure, and theorist, in the milieu of French Maoism. Although Badiou would certainly no longer call himself a Maoist, I believe there are aspects of Mao’s thinking which continue to be characteristic of Badiou’s theories. Specifically, I will talk about Badiou in the context of a characteristic often attributed to Maoism under the rubric of “voluntarism.” Although I believe that this is a misnomer – the theories and politics of Mao Zedong are not overall correctly characterized as voluntaristic – I think that there is an important characteristic of Maoism to which this term is an attempted reference. And I believe that this characteristic continues to play an important part in Badiou’s thinking.

I will try to isolate and characterize this strain in Maoism, and seek to show how this characteristic continues to find a place in Badiou’s more recent thinking (Being and Event and since).

“Voluntarism” in Mao

One of the favorite critical (and dismissive) epithets leveled against Mao Zedong by Marxist opponents (and others) was that of voluntarism.  A few illustrations -

“[Maoism] has rejected the materialist understanding of history in favour of voluntarism….[Whereas] materialism is inseparably linked with the recognition that economic relations are the factor determining the entire system of social relations,….[they have] adopted the stand of petty-bourgeois ideologists and rejected the fundamental principles of materialism in favour of voluntarism and subjectivism.” (P. Fedoseyev, “Marxism and Maoism,” Kommunist, No. 5, 1967, reprinted in Maoism Unmasked (Moscow, 1973), 19, 20.)

Raya Dunayesvkaya calls Mao’s thought “the modern version of the intuitionist and voluntarist alternative to dialectics” (Philosophy and Revolution, 162) on much the same grounds. So does also Martin Glaberman in his 1971 article on “Mao as a Dialectician”: Mao’s thought and theory is “…completely divorced divorced from any material base, in fact or in thought, and is completely empty of the element of necessity, that is, of inherent inner development, so critical to dialectical materialism.”

On a more substantive basis (for the above characterizations seem based on little more than selective use of quotations, coupled with assertion), Maurice Meisner, a China scholar who has not been unsympathetic to the political aspirations of the Maoist period in China, nonetheless reaches similar conclusions. He speaks of the “extreme voluntarism that characterized the Maoist world view,” and says that “Maoism replaces the Marxist belief in objective laws of history with a voluntaristic faith in the consciousness and the moral potentialities of men as the decisive factor in sociohistorical development.” (Marxism, Maoism, and Utopianism, 201, 61)

The contrast these authors draw seems fairly clear, and there is a consistency among them with regard to the basis of their indictment (and we’ll get to its spelling-out in a moment). But before proceeding further, what is voluntarism? Philosophically, voluntarism indicates a view or theory which accords primacy to the human (or divine) will over the intellect. Clearly the critics quoted above are pointing to a characteristic of Mao’s thinking and practice which they understand in something like these terms. In each case the critique is essentially that Mao abrogates necessity, that he does not recognize the determining character of the economic relations, the material base, or of the objective laws of history. Marxism is seen as a theory or even science of firm laws of human historical development, laws which it is possible to formulate because of the (presumably linear) determination of human thinking and political/legal relations by something seen as more basic and material (usually economic relations).

Now one could debate whether this is truly what Marxism is, and of course there have been many such debates. But I don’t propose to take this direction of discussion, which I don’t see as the most fruitful. Marxism, historically, has been comprised of several strands or tendencies, all of which have some basis in the writings of Marx. (There is no such animal as “the true and only Marxism.”) And it’s obvious that deterministic, necessitarian Marxism is one, often dominant, strand.

(I want to mention, though, the work of Nick Knight – see especially his recent Rethinking Mao: Explorations in Mao Zedong’s Thought [2007] – who carefully and convincingly defends Mao against the charge of Marxist heresy.)

And it is equally obvious that an important aspect Mao’s thinking, an aspect which marks it perhaps most distinctively, is precisely the reality and the advocacy, both theoretically and practically, of “eruptions,” so to speak, of episodes and periods in which the political takes (and needs to take) priority over (and causal efficacy with respect to) the economic, the “superstructure” over the “base,” and generally, human consciousness over matter and brute facts – and, yes, conscious and motivated volition (“will”) over the limits imposed by what can be ascertained, known, proved (“intellect”).

“The so-called theory of ‘weapons decide everything’…is a mechanistic theory of war,” Mao wrote in 1938 for example in On Protracted War. “Our view is contrary to this; we see not only weapons but also the power of man. Weapons are an important factor in war but not the decisive one; it is man and not material that is decisive.”

“But suppose the United States uses the atom bomb?” Anna Louise Strong asks in a famous 1946 interview. “The atom bomb is a paper tiger with which the U.S. reactionaries try to terrify the people,” Mao replies. “Of course, the atom bomb is a weapon of mass destruction, but the outcome of a war is decided by the people, not by one or two weapons.”

There are many other passages from Mao along the same lines – that is, to the effect that the balance of material forces is not decisive in war or struggle generally, but that what is decisive for the outcome of the struggle is the mobilization, just cause, and spirit of the people. (E.g. – “A weak nation can defeat a strong, a small nation can defeat a big. The people of a small country can certainly defeat aggression by a big country, if only dare to rise in struggle, dare to take up arms and grasp in their own hands the destiny of their country. This is a law of history.” (From “People of the World, Unite and Defeat the U.S. Aggressors and All their Running Dogs,” May 1970, with the Vietnamese struggle still ongoing.)

Or, in short, the famous admonition, “Dare to struggle, dare to win!”

It is only a short step from this to another wellknown epigram, dating from 1938: “Marxism consists of thousands of truths, but they all boil down to one: It is right to rebel.” Clearly, a leading theme in Mao is the primacy of human initiative, consciousness, spirit, and mass cohesiveness over material circumstances and the necessities which they generate in themselves.

As well, and congruently, there is the Maoist line of thinking which can be summed up by the slogan, “Politics in command” – politics must guide economics, not vice versa. As Mao said in critique of the principal Soviet political economy textbook in the late 1950s, it “only talks about economic relations, not about politics.” (Secret Speeches of Chairman Mao, ed. MacFarquhar, Cheek, Wu, 464.)

A corollary is an absence of necessity with regard to outcome, and an element of uncertainty as to the future course of history – an aspect which became much stronger in the last 15 years or so of Mao’s life. Although the Cultural Revolution is often represented as orchestrated and controlled by Mao, in fact it’s clear that even its eruption and its dimensions took him by surprise. “I myself had not foreseen,” he said at a Central Work Conference in the fall of 1966, “that as soon as the Beijing University poster was broadcast, the whole country would be thrown into turmoil.” (Quoted Knight, 249-50) As it developed, it became clearer to Mao that any success it gained would not be permanent, and that the future promised continued struggle, whose outcome was by no means certain.

“The victory or defeat of the revolution can be determined only over a long period,” Mao declared in 1967. “If it is badly handled there is always danger of capitalist restoration. All the members of the party and all the people of the country must not think that after one, two, three, or four great cultural revolutions there will be peace and quiet. They must always be on the alert and never relax their vigilance.”

Some parallels in Badiou

The event – one of Badiou’s most notable and distinctive concepts, is something which, as he construes it, erupts “out of nowhere.” It is not even theoretically predictable (in fact the reverse) because the evental site is “the void,” invisible to “the state of things,” the reigning categorization and knowledge regime. A truth-process is possible, stemming from the evanescent event, if (and only if) the event is named – initiative is required, a leap into the unknown (and unknowable) – and a subject comes into formation, a subject whose whole being will orient around the carrying forward of the truth-process. It is only through such a process that anything truly new, anything revolutionary, can come into being.

For Badiou too, the charge of voluntarism has not been absent. Oliver Feltham, for example, notes in his recent book on Badiou (Alain Badiou: Live Theory, 2008) that “One of the more frequent critiques aimed at Badiou’s theory of change…is voluntarism. One variation of this begins by asking whether a truth procedure is subject to any constraints…[and concludes that] Badiou’s conception amounts to thinking political practice as the sheer expression of a subjective will.” (113)

Feltham responds with a list of a number of “constraints that are actually built into [Badiou’s] theory of change.” There is Badiou’s distinction between true events and pseudo-events, for example, which allows him to disqualify Naziism as and event/truth-process. There are similar constraints on truth-process and fidelity to an event. (Feltham distinguishes five such constraints – 113-15.)

As Todd May sums it up in a review of Feltham’s book, “Feltham’s defense against this objection is that what the militants of an event do is not rightly characterized as an ex nihilo break from a situation. It is instead a wager that there is something lying beneath the situation that has yet to find expression. In Badiou’s thought, an evental site — the site from which an event can emerge — covers a void in the situation. But the void is only for the situation; it is not an ontological void. In set theoretical terms, the evental site is ‘an entirely abnormal multiple: that is, a multiple such that none of its elements are presented in the situation.’ (Being and Event, p. 174) What the militants of an event seek is the expression of those elements in the name of the event rather than a pure break that would come entirely from outside the situation.”

All this is true. And it’s also true that the initiation of a truth process is not some sort of pure decisionism or an arbitrary action of subjective will. It is, rather, a wager on what cannot strictly speaking be known. I want to emphasize this, for I think it’s the crucial point in this regard. The human actions at issue here (the naming of the event, the making oneself part of a subject) are on the one hand “a shot in the dark” – no certainties, no guarantees, no predictability, no prior laws or rulebook. But it is not a purely arbitrary act, not an example l’acte gratuit. It is based on a sort of grasping, a seeing of something, and then the engagement of a momentous commitment, a very risky bet, on the basis of that “vision.”

But on what basis can such a “seeing” (my word, not Badiou’s) take place, given that the event springs from “the void” and the evental site is invisible?

The precise meaning of these words, in Badiou’s set-up, has to be realized. The event is not, in an absolute sense, “nothing,” nor does it spring out of absolute nothingness; its birth is to be sought (for Badiou) in the void, but such a void (as emphasized above) is always relative to a situation, or what Badiou will come to call, in the Logic of Worlds, a world. And it is void simply in the sense that it is necessarily invisible (in Badiou’s set-up), given the structuration and knowledge-regime of that situation. It is a void, “nothing,” relative to the official “count-as-one,” and the event itself is likewise invisible from that standpoint just in the sense that it cannot be accounted for; it is an accidental blip, noise or static as opposed to signal.

But the continuity of Badiou with Mao lies not so much (if at all) in the “occurrence” of the event, but rather in the co-implicating phenomena of nomination, truth-process, and subject-formation. What has been called “voluntarism” in Mao’s thinking has to do with the relation of revolutionary agency and the circumstances of action or practice. What is distinctively Maoist, in contrast in particular with the orthodox Marxism (“Marxism-Leninism” or official Communism) of his time, is the emphasis on the necessary priority (at particular times) of agency over circumstance, so that the location of determination is revolutionary agency, in contrast to seeing circumstances as determinative. (It is man and not material that is decisive.  Politics in command!)

But there is a question here of how this is conceptually configured. In other words, what is the location of human freedom, which Marxism has always upheld?

Take Engels’ wellknown characterization, usually glossed as “freedom is the recognition of necessity”:  “Freedom does not consist in any dreamt-of independence from natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws, and in the possibility this gives of systematically making them work towards definite ends.”

In this formulation, then, it is a matter of a human freedom which is directly related to necessity, and is born of a reflexive relation of necessity and knowledge: that is, knowledge of necessity (the laws of nature and of material circumstances generally) generates freedom from necessity (the ability to change circumstances on the basis of these laws).

The freedom and agency which Badiou points to is very different from this. (And my argument is that the most distinctive aspect of Mao’s thinking points in a direction far more similar to that of Badiou than to that of Engels.)

For Badiou Marxism as “science of society” or “science of history” is of no political interest. “At bottom,” he says in Theory of the Subject, “it is always in the interest of the powerful that history is mistaken for politics….Science of history? Marxism is the discourse with which the proletariat sustains itself as subject. We must never let go of this idea.” (44) Or, as he says a bit later in the same book, “Marxism is the practical discourse for sustaining the subjective advent of a politics,” whereas a “Marxism, seized from any point that is not its effective operation which is entirely of the order of politics within the masses, does not deserve one hour of our troubles.” (129, 128)

It might be objected that this is from a 1981 work (written chiefly in the late ‘70s) which precedes Being and Event (1988) by some years, and still falls within Badiou’s Maoist, as opposed to his present “post-Maoist,” period. Now I believe that there is less discontinuity between these two phases of Badiou’s thinking than is often attributed to them; but be that as it may, it’s easily shown that Badiou still maintains the same divide between politics and science of any sort. For on the one hand, in his new systematic, politics and science, as areas in which truth-procedures may take place, are entirely discreet, nonoverlapping and distinct from each other. And on the other, science in the sense of a body of constituted knowledge is simply part of what there is, the state of things, through which any event/truth-procedure will punch a hole.

In his most recent large work of systematic philosophy, Logics of Worlds (subtitled Being and Event 2) Badiou reiterates his own distance from historical materialism as a basis for an emancipatory politics, and forcefully distinguishes it from the materialist dialectic which he now espouses: “Contrary to what transpires in the Stalinist version of Marxism…it is crucial to disjoin the materialist dialectic…from historical materialism.” (LW, 509) (In the previous paragraph he had, indeed, even identified historical materialism with the viewpoint of what he calls democratic materialism, which is the object of his scorn:  “Democratic materialism has a passion for history; it is truly the only authentic historical materialism.”

The relation here, though, between a truth-process — and remember that the unfolding of a revolutionary political sequence is a truth-process: let us think of that here – the relation between truth-process and the circumstances in which it unfolds, from the point of view of the actor, the agent, is fairly subtle, and is not liable to capture through gross general categories. In particular, it can rather obviously not be regimented within a necessitarian calculus – nor, equally, through concepts of a voluntaristic “triumph of the will.” It will not get us very far, in the case of either Mao or Badiou, to pose the question simply as whether freedom is to be founded upon necessity or necessity upon freedom.

Let us take, for example, a brief, almost aphoristic, commentary by Badiou on Mao’s statement that the truths of Marxism all boil down to one: “…the Marxist axiom: ‘It is right to revolt’ is ambiguous. Is it meant to indicate that the revolt has its reason, its concept? I don’t think so. The revolt is what founds rationality, and it concentrates a thousand reasons to revolt. As popular subjectivization, however, neither can it be reduced to its reasons (which belong to the structure or to the event) nor does it wholly abolish itself in its political future.” (Theory of the Subject, 106. Terms such as ‘subject’ and ‘event’ in this work should not be taken in the technical senses which they are later given in Being and Event.)

Let us look at several points in turn.

‘It is right to revolt’ is ambiguous. Is it meant to indicate that the revolt has its reason, its concept? I don’t think so. “It is right to revolt” – or “It is right to rebel,” as we more commonly say it – is ambiguous; it does not say what the rightness consists in. Does it mean simply that there is a cause, a reason for the rebellion, such that the revolt is reasonable and justified in light of that cause? Badiou says no.

The revolt is what founds rationality: The revolt itself, the act of rebellion, is (or can be) the foundation of a particular train of actions which have their own immanent rationality. …and it concentrates a thousand reasons to revolt. At the same time, the act of rebellion brings to a head a thousand reasons, any one of which might form a sufficient basis for revolt; a rebellion is overdetermined.

As popular subjectivization, however, neither can it be reduced to its reasons (which belong to the structure or to the event): Although there are reasons for the revolt, arising from the underlying structure of the situation, or from the occasion which sparked it, the popular consciousness, understanding and aims of the rebellion cannot be reduced to these reasons. …nor does it wholly abolish itself in its political future. Just as the rationality and reason of the revolt cannot be reduced to its surrounding and antecedent causes, neither can it be reduced or swallowed up in its aim or its outcome; its meaning is not exhausted in what it accomplishes, nor in a teleology linking it to some larger historical purpose.

The revolt, in sum, cannot be reduced to what surrounds it – neither to its structural context nor its antecedent circumstances nor its actual outcome nor its status as a means to some larger aim – but maintains its own autonomy, its integrity and its immanent self-founded rationality.

In the Preface to Logics of Worlds, Badiou, seeking the lineaments of “transtemporal political truth” which he attributes to Mao (but not only to Mao) speaks of “a singular correlation between will and confidence, rupture and consent.” (24)

Will: breaking the chains of determinism; assertion of freedom. Confidence: the basis for the bet on what cannot be known.

Confidence in what? “We can see here the outline of that truth for the sake of whose deployment Mao and his partisans waged, between 1965 and 1975, their last battle. This truth is the following: political decision is not fettered by the economy. It must, as a subjective and future-oriented principle, subordinate to itself the laws of the present. This principle is called ‘confidence in the masses’.” (LW, 23.)

What is at stake here can be seen through a brief look at the critique with which Peter Hallward ends his review of Logics of Worlds:

“Badiou’s conception of political truth has the great merit of distinguishing specific sequences from the ordinary play of social domination, and of routing them through those occasional moments that are structured in terms of the ultimate simplicity of a ‘yes or no’….The task remains to ensure that these decisive moments are not weakened by excessive simplification or abstraction. This will require…us to privilege history rather than logic as the most fundamental dimension of a world….It is [hard] to see how [Badiou's] account could be characterized as either materialist or dialectical…. Badiou’s chief concern is less material constraint than exceptional excess, less determinate negation than abrupt revaluation, less dialectical mediation than immediate subtraction.”

It is clear, I think, that Hallward both feels uncomfortable with the basis that Badiou provides for a politics, and that he does not see Badiou’s account as congruent with either materialism or dialectics. These are fair questions, obviously. Is Badiou’s theoretical structure a materialist one? Is it dialectical? I believe those terms could be defended with application to Badiou’s work, but these aren’t topics I’ve approached here. Certainly Badiou’s theories are in contradiction with many understandings of both materialism and dialectics.

It’s also clear that Badiou’s theses do not cohere with everything Mao wrote. But, as I hope to have shown, Badiou’s thinking is, with respect to this crucial, so-called “voluntarist,” aspect, very close to Mao.

To the question, Is Badiou’s work Maoist? – the answer, I believe, is certainly, yes.

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: Revolutionary Faithfulness and the Radically New
4. John Steele: Our relation to revolutionary tradition
5. Badiou’s Logics of Worlds: notes & reflections, 1