Thanks a lot for engaging with me on these questions and for your contributions to khukuri, as I look forward to reading more of your pieces and engaging in further discussions on these sorts of issues, which I also believe are important issues in the revolutionary communist movement.

So the question is, has the truth-process which was initiated by Marx’s giving the name “proletariat” to the void of the situation obtaining in Europe in the mid-19th century (which is more or less how Badiou describes it) — has that truth-process become “saturated” (to use B’s term)? You believe it clearly has not.

The way it works out in Badiou’s thinking is a bit more complicated. On the one hand, there are a lot of indications in his writing that he believes that Marxism, as a deep theory of capitalism, is still completely valid. So in this sense he would agree that Marxism is an ongoing truth-process, and I think it would be right to place Badiou within it — in this sense he is a Marxist.

But, in terms of Badiou’s four areas, Marxism in this sense would fall under science. But the questions you’re referring to politics, and here Badiou believes there have been several sequences, each with its own truth-process, corresponding to different revolutionary periods — that of which Marx was a part in the 19th century, that associated with the name Lenin and the 1917 revolution in Russia, and that of Mao and the Cultural Revolution in China.

These three are obviously related, but Badiou sees them as distinct. Here is where the identity/boundary-question comes in. Badiou poses them as distinct, and emphasizes this, in line with his emphasis on the ab ovo “new beginning” and complete reorientation posed by an event — and I think there’s a lot to this. On the other hand, there is also the relatedness which seems to be so obviously present among these sequences — it would seem that they are a linked series of sequences. (In fact Badiou recognizes this sequential relation, of course, and analyzes how each set out to solve the chief problem thrown up by the previous.)

Is this a sort of scholastic dispute about the fine points of Badiou’s theoeries, or are these questions of relative relatedness and distinctness important? I think they are important, and I will go more into why it is so, in the discussion on my post on “Our relation to revolutionary tradition.”

While various subjective truth-processes that can be universalized have been brought into being by ‘events’ since that time, I believe that the above is the one broader truth process that all who see themselves as Marxists are still working through. While some Stalinists obviously like state socialism and don’t want to deal with this problem, I would simply argue that they are no longer contributing to this ongoing Marxist truth process.

I also definitely don’t think Mao came close to solving the above problem through the Cultural Revolution, though see this event as an important part of our history as Marxists and as something we have to soberly consider in the continuation of the Marxist truth-process.

Welcome to khukuri, and good to have your comments.

I agree that Badiou’s theorization of the event is not problematic in the way it is taken to be by Nicholas Brown and others. The event does not spring from an absolute void, but from one which is relative to the “state of the situation,” that is, from a place which cannot be recognized within the reigning structure of knowledge. The place from which the event is born is already there within the situation.

Further, the problem for a revolutionary politics is not really the event in itself. In Logics of Worlds, Badiou makes clear that events are not uncommon; the problem is not so much the occurrence of an event, as it is our response (or lack of response) when it does occur. “Incessantly,” Badiou says in the rather moving conclusion to Logics of Worlds, something happens. Several times in its brief existence, every human animal is granted the chance to incorporate itself into the living presence of a truth.” Events happen incessantly! Of course he is speaking of events in all of the four areas he marks off: not only politics, but science, art, and love as well. But still – The problem (to paraphrase Hamlet), lies not in the event but in ourselves.

The point is that the occurrence of an event in itself does nothing, solves nothing. The event is not “the revolution” — even though “revolution” may be a name retrospectively given to an event. Retrospectively because for an event to receive a name, or to be talked about or referred to, requires first that it be recognized, and a beginning truth-process initiated. This is a very active process.

An event, in a manner of speaking, is like a little flash made by that which would otherwise be invisible. But if we heed that flash (which everything in the world-as-it-is pushes us to ignore or dismiss), if we grab hold of it and then start to look at the world and reconfigure it “from the point of view” of that event — that’s when a truth-process can possibly begin. In Badiou’s words, then (again from the Conclusion to Logics of Worlds), “Interrogate the flashes”!

I look forward to seeing your paper, Michael, and to further discussion on these important questions.

However, I don’t see the same problems with Badiou’s theorization of the event as you do, as his Theory of the Subject cleared up a lot for me in terms of where he comes from politically as a Maoist and how he developed the new theories and conclusions we see today in Being and Event and Logics of Worlds.

I actually started a paper that attempts to explain the usefulness of Badiou’s work for revolutionaries (not just Maoists) today that is based largely on his work in Theory of the Subject and explores his work in Being and Event and Logics of Worlds in the context of this earlier work when he was still a consistent Marxist and Maoist.

One interesting thing about Badiou’s theory of the truth processes (in art, science, politics and love) and his formulation of the communist hypothesis is that they seem to be based on a reading of Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (which I am currently reading) or possibly Engels’ Anti-Duhring (which I have not read), as Lenin explained that the degree of success of our material practices show the extent to which our ideas and theories about the nature of the world correspond to material reality and truth, which is the material reality (for Lenin, truth is not some abstract concept that we come up with in a way that is separate from material reality but is instead that material reality itself) and which we should attempt to move closer to through a dialectical materialist process of theory and practice.

I believe that this helps to explain Badiou’s communist hypothesis as a thoroughly materialist and not an idealist formulation. However, I and many others have a lot of disagreements with Badiou about what can be learned from the 20th century ‘experiments’ with this hypothesis. For instance, Badiou seems to believe that the party necessarily leads to the party-state, and has thus disavowed party-based political action, believing that we now need to experiment with the communist hypothesis in a way that isn’t materially rooted in the party. While this is definitely a valid analysis based on the actual history of the 20th century communist movement, I do not believe it is necessarily true and think we still need to investigate the role of the party in the transition to socialism and the potential role of different parties under socialism, which Bhattarai and the UCPN(M) seem to be doing. I actually fully believe that different parties are entirely necessary under socialism due to the fact that different classes and particular interest groups still exist, and that the only people we should really be oppressing politically through our ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ are the bourgeoisie and the political forces and parties that represent their interests, including parties representing the interests of the elite or ‘big’ peasants (eg. the kulaks) in those countries where this is still a fairly large class.

I would like to see an analysis of the mistakes made by Lenin and Mao in the building of socialism in Russia and China and what we could do differently so that the party does not lead to the authoritarian party-state. I think these are very complex questions that need to be addressed by communists if we are going to be successful in building a mass communist movement in the 21st century, as many people see the ‘communist hypothesis’ as being totally discredited due to their negative assessment of the 20th century experiments that were based on it. While it is very easy to counter Badiou’s theory of the communist hypothesis by saying that communism is a movement and not an idea, this misses the whole point that Badiou is trying to make through this formulation and fails to grasp the fact that Badiou is still a militant materialist regardless of what some critics may claim. Of course communism is a movement, but the purpose of this movement is to experiment with the communist hypothesis in a political truth-process.

When I am finished the paper I am currently working on, I hope to post it here so that people can get a look at it.

Also, while I am not a Maoist, and am simply a Marxist and a communist who believes we need to learn from the ‘experiments’ of Trotskyist, Maoist and Stalinist parties in testing out the communist hypothesis, I am grateful that these forums for ideas (both Kasama and Khukuri) exist and hope that they can be used to go beyond developing a post-Maoism to develop a total re-invention of communist theory based on the successes and failures of all communist tendencies the world over.