{"id":1144,"date":"2011-03-19T00:00:49","date_gmt":"2011-03-19T05:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/?p=1144"},"modified":"2021-11-18T13:58:35","modified_gmt":"2021-11-18T18:58:35","slug":"left-forum-nyc-2011-badious-communism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/?p=1144","title":{"rendered":"Left Forum NYC 2011: Badiou’s Communism"},"content":{"rendered":"

Badiou\u2019s \u201ccommunism\u201d \u2014 a gerontic disorder<\/h2>\n

Chris Cutrone<\/h2>\n

Presented on a panel with Nayi Duniya (<\/em>Demarcations<\/a> journal), co-author of <\/em>Alain Badiou’s “Politics of Emancipation:” A Communism Locked Within the Confines of the Bourgeois World<\/a>, and Bruno Bosteels (Cornell University) at the <\/em>Left Forum 2011<\/strong>, <\/em>Pace<\/em> <\/em>University<\/em>, <\/em>New York<\/em>, <\/em>March 19, 2011<\/em>; and on the panel “Badiou and post-Maoism: Marxism and communism today,” with Mike Ely<\/a>, Joseph Ramsey<\/a> and John Steele<\/a> at the third annual Platypus Affiliated Society international convention<\/a>, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, April 30, 2011 (audio recording<\/a>). (An audio recording<\/a> of the related April 12, 2011 lecture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, on “The Idea of Communism: Badiou, Althusser and Lacan,” is available<\/a>.)<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Perhaps the most condemnatory thing that could be said of Badiou\u2019s \u201ccommunism\u201d was something Badiou himself wrote, when he defined \u201ccommunism\u201d as a \u201cKantian regulatory idea,\u201d a norm to be aspired to, rather than a concrete reality to be achieved. This not only besmirched the historical Marxist idea of \u201ccommunism,\u201d but also Kant! For Kant addressed freedom as something that could and should be, not as a utopia. And Marx remained deeply engaged in practical politics. Leon Trotsky wrote, more than a hundred years ago, after the 1905 Russian Revolution (in the 1906 pamphlet Results and Prospects<\/em>), that \u201cMarxism converted socialism into a science, but this does not prevent some \u2018Marxists\u2019 from converting Marxism into a Utopia.\u201d Trotsky also wrote that, \u201c[I]n academies .\u00a0.\u00a0. it might be possible artificially to detain the proletariat for fifty, a hundred or five hundred years, but in the course of all-round life in capitalist society, on the basis of unceasing class struggle[,] .\u00a0.\u00a0. [t]he growth of the consciousness of the proletariat transforms this class struggle, gives it a deeper and more purposeful character.\u201d Trotsky was not a utopian any more than Kant or Marx were.<\/p>\n

However, as we know, such \u201cunceasing class struggle\u201d that Trotsky had in mind, which could \u201ctransform\u201d the \u201cconsciousness of the proletariat\u201d and potentially \u201cgive it a deeper and more purposeful character,\u201d is precisely what the world has been missing, for at least a generation. The Marxist vision for proletarian socialism has passed, almost completely into oblivion. Badiou\u2019s late redefinition of \u201ccommunism\u201d is a response \u2014 an adaptation \u2014 to this historical reality. Indeed, Trotsky was writing at the crest of 2nd International Marxism, which developed in the period from 1871 to 1917, whose history Badiou deliberately seeks to bury. Badiou characterizes this period, like our own, as an \u201cinterval,\u201d in which \u201cthe communist hypothesis was declared to be untenable,\u201d \u201cwith the adversary in the ascendant.\u201d What is the basis of Badiou\u2019s judgment of this period, 1871 to 1917, in which, not only did bourgeois society go through its last great flowering, in the Belle \u00c9poque<\/em>, but Marxism flourished as an international workers\u2019 movement, commanding a dedication to socialist revolution by millions in the core capitalist countries? The period between the Paris Commune and the October Revolution was not<\/em> in any way like ours; it was not cynical, but optimistic in the sense of historical mission and the real potential of human progress. Badiou shares the skepticism that has developed regarding such historical potential. Indeed, we can say that Badiou is typical of the 1960s-era New Left in this regard. Badiou cannot recognize 2nd Intl. Marxism as an advance. Moreover, Badiou is, in Trotsky\u2019s sense, \u201cacademic,\u201d despite his avowed intentions. The last thing Badiou imagines is that he has conceded. Badiou\u2019s entire philosophy was developed out of concern for \u201cfidelity,\u201d resisting the apostasies of the 1968 generation in the decades that followed. \u2014 The question is, to what does Badiou claim fidelity? Certainly not Marxism.<\/p>\n

What has sanctioned Badiou to bury the admittedly obscure history of the first wave of Marxism in the 2nd Intl., today? And why does Badiou find an affinity in our moment with that of the pre-WWI world, which otherwise seems so unlikely? In certain respects, Badiou is rather optimistic in finding such an affinity, hoping that today we are in a period of preparation for the realization of more radical social transformation \u2014 \u201crevolution\u201d \u2014 down the road. Badiou thus tries to keep fidelity to \u201cthe revolution\u201d in his estimation of the present. But which \u201crevolution?\u201d Badiou is clear that his model for revolution is May 1968 in France and the contemporaneous Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China. Presumably, in the latter case, this means a commitment to Mao and \u201cMarxism-Leninism.\u201d But, beneath this, there is a certain unmistakable pessimism to the characterization of the formative era of Lenin\u2019s Marxism in the 2nd Intl., as being, like ours, one of conservative reaction. \u2014 Was the growth of Marxism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries really a retreat, after the defeat of the Paris Commune? Or, has Badiou mistaken one revolution for another? Badiou has maintained fidelity, not to \u201ccommunism,\u201d in Marx\u2019s sense, but rather to \u201cdemocracy,\u201d that is, the eternal bourgeois<\/em> revolution. It is thus significant that Badiou dates modern communism, not to Marx in 1848, but to the Jacobins in 1792. This obscures the history that came between.<\/p>\n

The truth is that Badiou\u2019s \u201ccommunism\u201d is deeply anti-Marxist. Not merely non-Marxist, in the sense of what it tends to leave out, but actually hostile to historical Marxism. Perhaps this is unremarkable. Perhaps it is not a problem in itself. But it may bear some inquiry into the potential consequences that might flow from this. Perhaps Badiou is quietly acknowledging that Marxism may have become an obstacle to the kind of social change that, in his estimation, is possible and desirable \u2014 and necessary. That is a real question. Does Marxism speak to the needs of the present? But to consider this \u2014 to consider what Badiou may have to offer as an alternative to Marxism \u2014 we must address what Badiou means by \u201ccommunism.\u201d<\/p>\n

Badiou defines communism as \u201cradical democratic equality.\u201d The \u201chypothesis\u201d that motivates communism, according to Badiou, is that,<\/p>\n

the logic of class \u2014 the fundamental subordination of labour to a dominant class, the arrangement that has persisted since Antiquity \u2014 is not inevitable; it can be overcome. .\u00a0.\u00a0. [A] different collective organization is practicable, one that will eliminate the inequality of wealth and even the division of labour. .\u00a0.\u00a0. The existence of a coercive state, separate from civil society, will no longer appear a necessity: a long process of reorganization based on a free association of producers will see it withering away.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Furthermore,<\/p>\n

As a pure Idea of equality, the communist hypothesis has no doubt existed since the beginnings of the state. As soon as mass action opposes state coercion in the name of egalitarian justice, rudiments or fragments of the hypothesis start to appear. Popular revolts \u2014 the slaves led by Spartacus, the peasants led by M\u00fcntzer \u2014 might be identified as practical examples of this \u201ccommunist invariant.\u201d With the French Revolution, the communist hypothesis then inaugurates the epoch of political modernity.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

However, the potential for emancipated humanity expressed in communism that Marx recognized in the modern history of capital is not assimilable without remainder to pre- or non-Marxian socialism. Marx\u2019s thought and politics are not continuous with the Spartacus slave revolt against Rome or the teachings of the Apostles \u2014 or with the radical egalitarianism of the Protestants or the Jacobins. So what was Marx\u2019s distinct contribution? As Marx put it, \u201cCommunism <\/em>is the necessary form and the dynamic principle of the immediate future, but communism as such is not the goal of human development, the form of human society.\u201d This was because, according to Marx, \u201cCommunism is a dogmatic abstraction and .\u00a0.\u00a0. only a particular manifestation of the humanistic principle and is infected by its opposite, private property.\u201d Marx was not the preeminent communist of his time but rather its critic, seeking to push it further. The best Marxists who followed, such as Lenin, Luxemburg and Trotsky, similarly sought to push their respective political movement of \u201crevolutionary social democracy\u201d in the 2nd Intl. further. In so doing, they revealed and grappled with the form of capital of their moment in history, what they called \u201cimperialism,\u201d seeking to make it into capital\u2019s \u201chighest\u201d and last stage, the eve of revolution. Badiou, by contrast, addresses inequality as a timeless, perennial problem. He thus departs fundamentally from Marx and Marxism, and liquidates the revolution of capital.<\/p>\n

Badiou conceives of the relation between freedom and equality as an ontological one, in the mathematical terms of set theory, transhistoricizing it. Badiou\u2019s background is in Lacanian and Althusserian \u201cpost-structuralist\u201d French thought, in common with other prominent New Left-era thinkers \u2014 and former students of Louis Althusser \u2014 such as \u00c9tienne Balibar and Jacques Ranci\u00e8re. Althusser found, in the Russian and Chinese Revolutions, a salutary challenge to the notion of the Hegelian \u201clogic of history,\u201d that revolutionary change could and indeed did happen as a matter of contingency. Althusser took great inspiration from Mao in China and Lenin in Russia for advancing the possibility of emancipation against a passive expectancy of automatic evolution in the historical process of capital. For Badiou, this means that emancipation must be conceived of as an \u201cevent,\u201d which involves a fundamental reconsideration of ontology. Badiou does not conceive of the transformation of the capitalist mode of production that would allow for overcoming the socially pernicious aspects of specifically capitalist forms of inequality. By contrast, Marx looked forward to the potential for overcoming the conditions of possibility for the reproduction of capitalist class dynamics in the mode of production itself: capital\u2019s overcoming of the need to accumulate the value of surplus labor-time. Marx saw the historical potential to overcome this socially mediating aspect of labor, expressed, for instance, in automated machine production. However, Marx also foresaw that, short of socialism, the drive to accumulate surplus-value results in producing a surplus population, an \u201cindustrial reserve army\u201d of potential \u201cworkers\u201d who thus remain vulnerable to exploitation. A politics based only in their \u201cdemocratic\u201d discontents can result, not in the overcoming of the social need for labor, but in the (capitalist) demand for more labor, the demand to be put to work. Or, as Max Horkheimer, director of the Marxist Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, put it, machines \u201chave made not work but the workers superfluous.\u201d Marx anticipated this when he warned that realization of the socialist demand to abolish \u201cprivate property\u201d would (merely) make society as a whole into one giant capitalist dominating its members. Marx even went so far as to analogize this with socialist calls to abolish marriage as a \u201cbourgeois\u201d institution, which he said would result only in universal prostitution \u2014 indeed, that capitalism was already bringing this about.<\/p>\n

For Marx, elimination of a separate capitalist class would not in itself be emancipatory unless a transformation in the \u201cmode of production\u201d and its social relations came about. Marx did not think that the capitalists were the cause, but the effect of capital, calling them its \u201ccharacter masks.\u201d Nonetheless, Marx endorsed, however critically, the traditional socialist demand to abolish private property and \u201cexpropriate the expropriators,\u201d regarding this as a necessary first step<\/em>: necessary, but not sufficient, to realize a society beyond the mode of production and social relations of capital. As Lenin underscored this, in The State and Revolution<\/em>, <\/em>on the eve of the October 1917 Revolution in Russia, such social relations of bourgeois society, namely, the mutual exchange of labor as the form of social solidarity in capital, could only be transformed gradually and thus \u201cwither away,\u201d and not be abolished and replaced at a stroke. The proletarian socialist revolution was supposed to open the door to this transformation. But, since then, the history of the Russian and Chinese Revolutions showed another potential, that is, the reconstitution of capital, under the guise of \u201csocialism.\u201d Marx had already foreseen such a possibility in the limited consciousness of his socialist and communist contemporaries of the 19th century, and he criticized them \u201cruthlessly\u201d for this. Marx and Lenin recognized a problem in \u201csocialism\u201d itself that their supposed followers have neglected or avoided.<\/p>\n

All this remains hidden to Badiou. But it was precisely this Marxist approach to capital as a \u201cmode of production,\u201d or form of society, that distinguishes Marx from other socialists or communists, and motivated revolutionaries who followed Marx, such as Lenin, maintaining that Marxism pursued the possibility of overcoming capital \u201con the basis of capitalism\u201d itself. Badiou situates emancipatory possibilities rather atavistically, in a pre-historical ontology, to which the philosophy of mathematics \u2014 for instance, the question of \u201cnumber and numbers\u201d (the title of one of his books) \u2014 can be an adequate guide. For Badiou, in a procedure that recalls a self-criticism session or assembly at a \u201creeducation\u201d camp, matter itself, in its open-ended recombinations, poses the solution to what Marx called \u201ccommunism,\u201d the \u201criddle of history.\u201d Each element must be broken down to its radical potentiality for permutation \u2014 for instance, in the Maoist \u201crevolutionary people,\u201d for emancipatory change to take place. It is not for nothing that Badiou conceives of revolution not as a process but an event, or, that his conception of \u201cprocess\u201d is founded on a conception of the \u201cevent.\u201d On the other hand, Badiou finds Marxists such as Lenin (and Marx himself) conceding to the existing social hierarchies and thus betraying the \u201cidea of communism,\u201d for instance in the party-state, which Badiou regards in retrospect as a \u201cfailed experiment.\u201d Thus, Badiou.<\/p>\n

What of Marx and Marxism? Marx distinguished capitalist inequality from that of the traditional caste system that had characterized civilization for millennia before the emergence of bourgeois society in the post-Renaissance world. As Adorno pointed out, to call all of history the \u201chistory of class struggles\u201d was to indict all of (\u201crecorded\u201d) history, and to thus consign it to the mere \u201cpre-history\u201d of authentic humanity. But this humanity was itself historically specific, and emergent \u2014 to the era of capital. Just as traditional inequality was not the cause<\/em> of the form of community that the ancients regarded as being divine in origin, capitalist inequality was not the cause but the effect<\/em>, the product of the cosmos of capital. Marx\u2019s magnum opus, Capital<\/em>, explored how the post-Industrial Revolution society of capital produced a new form of inequality, between capitalist and worker, but one liable to be cast and responded to in the form of the original Revolt of the Third Estate that had ushered in modern bourgeois society in the 17th and 18th centuries. Marx found an important disparity \u2014 a self-contradiction \u2014 to have developed between the political aspirations of the subjects of capital, for \u201csocial democracy,\u201d and the potential of capital to go beyond bourgeois society and its forms of politics \u2014 liberalism and democracy. This did not make Marx and those who followed him illiberal or anti-democratic, but they did regard liberalism and democracy \u2014 the combined libertarian and social-egalitarian impulses in modern politics \u2014 as means<\/em> and not ends<\/em> in and of themselves. This is because they regarded capitalism itself as a process and not merely a state of being. Marx and his best followers, such as Lenin, looked forward not merely to more liberalism and more democracy, but to the potential transcendence of the need<\/em> for both liberalism and democracy, an \u201cend\u201d to politics as presently practiced. But not all at once, and not by denying them in the present. Capital is not an eternal event of inequality that needs to be met with the event of revolution. Badiou does not deny liberalism and democracy, but rather unconsciously reaffirms their present, bourgeois forms, at a deeper and more obscure level. Badiou\u2019s ontology of \u201cradical egalitarian democracy,\u201d provides not a critical recognition, but a philosophical affirmation of the way bourgeois society already proceeds, however contradictorily. Badiou mystifies.<\/p>\n

The challenge is to recognize the symptomatic character of liberalism and democracy in the crisis of capital, as it had developed in the 19th century, setting the stage for the history that came later. But such symptomology was not to be \u201ccured\u201d in the sense of elimination, but rather undergone and worked through \u2014 as Nietzsche put it, modernity is an \u201cillness, but the way pregnancy is an illness,\u201d bringing forth new life. The problem, as Marx recognized it, was that, by the mid-19th century, when bourgeois society entered into crisis, after the Industrial Revolution, and became \u201cproletarianized,\u201d humanity faced a situation in which, as Engels later described it, the capitalists were no longer and the workers not yet able to master the society of capital. Marx regarded this as the source of the authoritarianism of the modern, capitalist (nation-)state, despite the promises of classical bourgeois liberalism for a minimal state and a free, cosmopolitan civil society that would, for instance, reduce legislatures to, at most, sites of public debate and political recognition of social facts already accomplished on the ground \u2014 what Kant, for one, expected. But the bourgeoisie could no longer and the proletariat not yet rule modern society. The genie of capital had been let loose. The historical task of emancipating humanity had thus fallen from the bourgeois to the proletarian members of society. Marxists have recognized that this is the situation in which the world has remained stuck ever since then \u2014 ever since the failed \u201csocial democratic\u201d Revolutions of 1848, on the eve of which Marx and Engels had published their inaugural Manifesto<\/em>. For Marx, the demand for \u201csocial democracy\u201d was part of the history of capital, to be worked through \u201cimmanently\u201d and transcended. But none of this registers for Badiou. Marx marked a potential turning point for humanity; he was not merely one in a chain of prophets reaching back for thousands of years. He was thinker and political actor for our, modern time.<\/p>\n

The cost of liquidating the specific history of capital \u2014 its peculiar constraint on society and its potential beyond itself \u2014 is Badiou\u2019s reduction of \u201ccommunism\u201d to the perennial complaint of the subaltern, the millennial dream of social equality, as a specter haunting the world that has more in common with eschatological \u201cjustice,\u201d posed by religion at the end of time, than with the pathology of the modern, bourgeois world of capital, in which humanity actually suffers today. We must awaken from this nightmare \u2014 the vain wish that things be otherwise \u2014 of the oppressed. For we are not only oppressed, but tasked <\/em>by capital.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, the failure of historical Marxism has made Badiou an evidently adequate symptomatic expression of our time \u2014 its confusion and diminished expectations, well shy of the epochal transformation that had motivated Marx and the best Marxists, historically. We must remember Marxism, so we can forget Badiou: forget the time that made such ideology \u2014 such naturalization, indeed ontologization \u2014 of defeat so appealing, and finally consign it, where it belongs, to pre-history. | \u00a7<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Badiou\u2019s \u201ccommunism\u201d \u2014 a gerontic disorder Chris Cutrone Presented on a panel with Nayi Duniya (Demarcations journal), co-author of Alain Badiou’s “Politics of Emancipation:” A Communism Locked Within the Confines of the Bourgeois World, and Bruno Bosteels (Cornell University) at the Left Forum 2011, Pace University, New York, March 19, 2011; and on the panel […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[29,30,8,4,16,21],"class_list":["post-1144","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-presentations","tag-29","tag-badiou","tag-conferences","tag-left-forum","tag-marxism","tag-postmodernism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1144","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1144"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1144\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3219,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1144\/revisions\/3219"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1144"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1144"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1144"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}