To contextualize this study we should make clear that the 'leftist hypothesis' in question is in reference to Lenin's text 'Left-Wing Communism: An infantile Disorder', from 1920. A text whose stance is all the more pertinent to me given that formally it serves as the orthodox counter-foil to Mao's invocation in 66 to attack the party-state. I had previously attempted to situate the impact of this Cultural Revolution via an appraisal of Alessandro Russo's paper 'Did the Cultural Revolution End Communism'. A paper which takes up the impact of the events in China that are spoken of in that name, were to have in May 68' in France, Italy in the early '70s, but as I would point out, also in resistance to the Vietnam war in the U.S. I would guide any readers or onlookers to that presentation were they to wish to familiarise themselves with the issue or would like a re-cap. (https://mutteringsofthealley.blogspot.com/2022/06/appraisal-of-did-cultural-revolution.html )
The threat which is apprehended by the author also presents itself as a discourse perhaps symptomatic of the situation. In 1968 Daniel and Gabriel Cohn-Benditt published 'Obsolete Communism: The left Wing Alternative' where they jocularly suggest that instead of the specter of communism, it is the specter of leftism that is roaming the streets of Europe - challenging the 'senile disorder' of communism. A sentiment that may have been popular at the time. A professor of mine, whose name I shall not disclose given that I can find no evidence for this event once told me that when Sartre went to address the rioting students of May 68', they held up placards with the words 'Sartre be brief' - an imminently imaginable scenario. Indeed Sartre was no Foucault, and this was the same professor who told me that I should read 'Empire' by Negri and Hardt instead of that 'charlatan Badiou'.
But I stray, even if such deviations allow us to more clearly return to the point.
It is not easy to be a communist today, not least because of the antagonism immanent in its own history, a history which cannot be distilled to some puritanical essence devoid of the force of a desire, however, situated the antagonisms it comes up against - that expresses itself with the force of a proper name. We today, read Badiou because of his reconstruction of a dialectics which attempts to situate a subject's divisions as they come up against commitments in life that would alienate them. In this sense, his work is metaphysical inasmuch as it would seek to provide a rubric for how a subject encounters their own disaggregation, yet he does this without trying to envision a disaggregation of commitments or failed subjection or resistance to them, something which Judith Butler, for instance, may pursue. Both clearly influenced by Althusser's early hermeneutical explorations of interpellation. The author also notices the homology, if I may, between this schema and the Maoist maxim of one dividing into two, yet emphasis as per the theme of the conference, remains an attempt to think how it may be possible to strengthen that which is common in communism rather than take away from it, indeed this is the effort made in this paper which asks after the possibility of separating the communist hypothesis from 'the history and theory of leftism'?
A fascinating, even if seemingly paradoxical proposition as some may say that it was this history that produced it. The question which is really being raised is simply whether there can be a conceptualization of the communist hypothesis which is not determined by its history; a reinvention as it were as Badiou may have put it.
The author endeavours to question, given the acknowledgment of a death of communism, upon the collapse of the Berlin Wall - the possibility to once again speak as 'we'. This 'we' however, crucially would require not to be a prisoner of likes and dislikes or to any militarized ideal of 'us' and 'them'.
There has been a tendency, particularly since the advent of the movement arising out of France, recognized by American academia as post-structuralism, to mourn something akin to a 'death of the subject'. The prime anxiety, nay the existential dread which is symptomatic of this condition is the inquiry 'what is a we that is not subject to the ideal of an I, a we that does not pretend to be a subject? This would be a situation that communism has to come to terms with.
This position is one that faces up to not merely a philosophical dread but is usually targeted in the mainstream press as 'ultraleftism', or is caricatured as fodder for journalists to pitch against its mirror image - the extreme right; to be rejected all the same. This is of course complemented by usually violent repression at the hands of the police and military state apparatus, also cited by the author, to say nothing of the obligation of the duties often explicitly flouted by those in office.
I would also commend professor Bruno Bosteels, for identifying and stating as early as 2010 a destructive rhetoric of whose example we have presented; an allegation against 'leftism' as it were that produces a chain effect similar to the 'lingering' accusation of logocentrism in the project explicitly identifying itself with the destruction of metaphysics, from Nietzsche to Heidegger to Derrida.
In a remarkable comparison, the author quotes from 'The Century' by Badiou, which echoes this sentiment of antagonism 85 years after the original text by Lenin raising the issue of a crisis of organization, even as it took a position in favor of the party. A position that was not sustainable through the Cultural Revolution.
The use of rhetoric - that is the deployment of a debate in which one does not have a stake, to illicit a charge from the other merely to pitch it against a competing position is the ploy. An example of this essentializing rhetoric is the one presented in Badiou's book, "this is what allows these destroyers to destroy each other reciprocally - for example, Heidegger regarding Nietzsche, with as much lucidity and rigor as bad faith and misconstruction, as the last metaphysician, the last Platonist." An abnegation of the crucial difference in the latter, in rather famed attacks on Plato and of course Christianity. This is what I would like to read as an act of interpretative subsumption and accusations of this nature are widespread among leftist philosophers too.
To return to our subject, however, left-wing communism presented by the author, at least according to Lenin would be characterized by the following features 1. A stance against participation in electoral or parliamentary politics 2. Against participation in unions 3. And perhaps especially against party discipline.
Of course, there is another way in which this foil of mutually negating charges without negation, that is without determinacy, hence producing no sublation gets played out across party line, when a pressing force does choose to abide by the discipline a party may impose. These are the twin deviations of left-wing 'adventurism' and right-wing 'opportunism'. A feature, we are informed, that characterized the Cultural Revolution in China while influencing or rather 'defining the stakes' as the author puts it, in movements influenced by Maoism worldwide.
It would be heedful however for a historically informed critic here, to remind the reader that even in Marx's own lifetime, Max Stirner was already accused of 'adventurism', and even parliamentary parties today, of the bourgeoise kind can be sublimely opportunistic in how they conduct their affairs.
In quoting Mao 'On Practice' we are introduced to however the expression of an antagonism, yes - between those who regard their fantasies as truth, against those who 'strain to realize in the present, as an ideal which can only be realized in the future.' However, added to this we find - 'they alienate themselves from the current activities of the majority of the people,' and at such a historical moment may be unalienated, further they themselves do not harbor fantasies or 'seek to realize in the present, an ideal which can only be realized in the future.' In deviating from the subject of the essay to Mao 'On Practice' - I may have to state that such an outlook would not be particularly revolutionary. Further, if an independent organization is not to function as per the prescription of the party, then the kind of 'adventurism', denigrated by him in 1937 seems to be the only alternative. A position which the chairman himself would rather vociferously assert come 1966.
As a consequence however of the rhetoric presented, even chairman Mao was led to point out the mutually nullifying tendencies on the fringe and invoked the need for a communist to be a centrist. An invitation as it were for liberals, social democrats, and other non-commital positions to present themselves as the rescuers of a genuine leftism.
This charts rather nicely how the apparent position of a sympathizer which is often the garb that leftism offers serves as a cover for the muddying of Marxism- Leninism-Maoism. To quote Lenin from Left-Wing Communism - 'the surest way of discrediting and damaging a new political (and not only political) idea is to reduce it to absurdity on the plea of defending it.'
Here I would present that it makes tactical sense to present a critique of leftism, which in a faux Maoist bravado and in seeming independence from the party would pit the masses unmediated by any representative organization against the State. And, one can hear here perhaps an acknowledgment of the role of the party. What this disavowed representation does however is flatten out any genuine dialectical analysis by leveling everything into 'the same old story' of masses against the State. It also willfully ignores how splits in the ideological struggle are what ultimately engenders the new. Or, as the author puts it, 'that which in them divides itself from the old.'
In an emulative maneuver, the author purports that this unmediated relation between the masses and the state is the definition of totalitarianism; a charge often levelled against state-socialists of course.
The resulting discourse which often emerges out of this is one that imagines that it has purified contradiction. Of there being an oppressive state, or let us call it the other figures of the master, however adequate or inadequate (philosophers, kings, Jacobins, Marxists...etc. ) but seemingly working in accord with the state. And on the other side the class of innocent plebians, of non-power, practicing pure generosity. This is recognized for what it is, a caricatured ideological staging designed to invisibleize class relations, perhaps small collectivities, rules, in other words, those set of associations and practices which constitute the stance of democracy. And also, as we are reminded - their own forms of 'exclusion and oppression.' A thinker such as Ranciere for instance may choose to focus on instances in a discourse where the articulation of power and non-power are knotted in some manner, perhaps forming recognisable symptoms.
The leftist however whose portrait we have been presenting thus far may be inclined to envision a virtually existing communism that may be nascent within the current state of affairs. A historically informed argument as it were even if it is historicist in its premise that conditions of the communist movement 'result from the now existing regime.' To be fair, however, Marx himself seems to have been of this view when in his 'Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy in 1859, which was to form the first three chapters of 'Capital'; he asserts that 'new higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions for their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself.
This, in my view, would problematize any conception of 'pure immanence' given that any transition in the mode of production would have a periodizing effect on the narrative in question. Were the immanence in question to be persited with however we are guided by professor Bosteels to a truly metaphysical Maoist principle, namely where there is oppression, there is rebellion. And yes, this rebellion is to be ontologically prior to the oppression, though the author is less clear about how this may be, for which we are directed to the work of Foucault, Deleuze, and Negri. The primacy of resistance here is emphasized, in its creative capacity even - and here it would be instructive for us to perhaps attempt a reading of Foucault by Deleuze.
In the foreword to 'Anti-Oedipus' written by Foucault, a sentence serves to demonstrate the unique complicity of their alliance - ' Do not be enamored by power.' An invitation as it were to enjoy oneself, amorously and a prohibition against the fascination of its use.
Yet here, at this stage, I would have to intervene to remind any possible interlocutors who may still be with us that there is a reason why Marx begins his analysis of the mode of production with a commodity. It is well and good to conclude as Negri does with 'Communism is already alive within the capitalist and/or socialist societies of today, in the form of a secret order dedicated to co-operate in production.' The question we must present here however is how did 'co-operation in production ever become a 'secret order'? Indeed, how can an order that is a secret ever facilitate cooperation in production; much less change the mode of its organization? If communism is 'born' out of class antagonism then perhaps only at the expense of espionage can we meet and acknowledge the forms of non-cooperation prevalent between classes. An absurd proposition.
Also, less clear to me are quotations from Empire by Hardt and Negri, of the 'multitude', like some agential entity 'pushing through empire to come out the other side', instead of simply being assimilated into it - which I think is far more likely. Perhaps more familiar to some of us would be mentions of a counter-Empire, as an alternative to Empire sustained by the 'creative forces' of the multitude. Indeed, was this not the project of Habermas's students Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge in their attempt at mapping a proletarian public sphere as opposed to the bourgeois one? Drawing of course upon the model of Habermas's inquiries on salon culture in France prior to the revolution?
I do see for instance a Leninist organizational logic in the thinking cited by Hardt and Negri, that the more capitalism there is, the better the chances for communism to emerge. To explain, a vegetable market may have discrete stalls each selling their wares, and competition between the traders would ensure that they never unionize or coordinate prices between them. This changes dramatically in a supermarket that purchases in bulk and often does sell fruits cheaper, often with better refrigeration. More importantly and in coming to our point - it forces the employment of a larger number of workers under one roof, creating the possibility of cooperation and unionization, and I do state this while acknowledging the contemporary weakness of unions in many sectors. Historically, the case of the transition to factories from workshops still does provide the best example of this - and there have been some calls to recognize universities as a factory; and here while I may have reservations about the word I would say that it is vital that we actually foreground the conditions of our disciplinary inquiries or knowledge production if you prefer.
The melodramatic, or should I say performative (?) act in politics was emphasized earlier. Yet in the ritualization of the performance, we do not have the cut of an originary schism, but rather the recantation or remembrance of what may once have been such a moment. Raised as it were in an act of renegacy.
Regarding the point of view expressed in the paper itself, however, the supposed Negrist notion of a communism already operating within capitalism, and the consequent opening of such a world without having to rely upon 'an idealist or utopian Hintenwelt - seems as Zizek rather succinctly put it, itself utopian. Utopian, however, not from the point of view of providing an ideological alternative to the present state of affairs, and hardly in a position to abolish them as communism was once envisioned as. The best that I may say about this worldview is that it may be a form of revolutionary but non-dialectical idealism. In the sense of it imagining an embryonic or virtual communism already operative within the mode of production; it negates bellitlingly the possibility of a formal confrontation with the antagonisms that presently face us. In a fatalistic moment, it seems to proclaim that there is no other world, only another way to live. Having said this I would like to make clear that this should not keep us from discovering new sites of already existing communism as it were, especially from the point of view of conceptual production, in the politics of narrativization, and of course in the ideological coordinates or visualizations that inform our readings, even if they be of affects.
Bosteels does seem to identify the theoretical danger we are entertaining of taking Marxism, stripping it of class struggle, the dictatorship of the proletariat - and revolution in a bid to raise communism itself to the status of some Platonic or Kantian idea. Indeed would Alain Badiou himself not be partly guilty of this charge when he calls for the separation of the communist hypothesis from 'both, the party form of politics and from the figure of the state?'
The question regarding the relation of communism to the state is an important one, and here there seems to be an informed and strong logic presented by Badiou when he writes that 'we declare that, socialist or not and though invariably needed for the intelligibility of action, the state guarantees nothing with regard to the subjective effectuation of communism.'
The de-linking of the communist hypothesis from the state would mean that we now would not recognize socialism as an intermediary step lest this act of transition ossified into a state form itself. Socialism would then be 'a name for an obscure arsenal of new conditions in which the capitalism/communism contradiction becomes somewhat clarified.' - Badiou.
In a rather important quote, we are pointed to the fact that in order for this not to be the case we would have to believe that the socialist state is an exception, and as an exception is capable of an algorithm of its own withering away. It would hence correspond in a communist topology to the category of structure and obstacle.
This does seem to leave us in a predicament where we are repeating in some measure the outcome of May 68' - being the separation of communism from the state. What is peculiar about it however is that the author appeared to be sympathetic to the Leninist critique of left-wing communism earlier in the essay.
The question of the exteriority of the organization remains a pertinent theme which we return to. Alvaro Garcia Linera, former vice president of Bolivia, in his writing seeks to use the category of the plebian to bypass the figure of the proletariat modeled on workers in a factory. Perhaps a conceptual maneuver not unlike Mao's assimilation of the peasantry as the revolutionary class as opposed to the industrial proletariat. Bosteels does well to spot however that the term 'plebian' actually appears in the Spanish translation of Lenin's pamphlet on Left-Wing Communism.
In essence, however, what we gather from these examples is that the plebians, the lumpenproletariat, the 'independent organizations' - whatever you may wish to call this, consistently sidestep the question of the principle of representation. This relation, between the plebian if you please and the philosopher is one which is weighed in words, those which are kept - and by that, I do mean honored, hence potentially redeemable, not unlike a coupon that you may exchange for a snack, yet crucially - unlike a coupon; that whose exchange value is not yet fixed - punched or tied as it were to the value of the commodity. This is what the transmissibility of human experience still resists.
Funnily enough, Bosteels does choose to bring our notice to this, citing the example of Garcia Linera himself - whose 2005 electoral campaign had monickers such as 'he who knows' or 'he who clarifies things'. An intellectual who senses the uneasiness of this bond or gap as it were between himself and the plebs, and pokes fun at his image. Uneasy too, for in representing them, he seeks acceptance into 'the hydra-headed apparatus of the state.'
The alternative to this dilemma of representation is, of course, that sublimely philosophical invocation of immanence. 'Potencia' (Linera), 'potenza' (Negri), or simply the English word 'potency', though 'potential' is more polite. Bruno Bosteels does, however, acquaint us with another sense in this word in its verb form 'potenciar' to empower or potentialize - yet this is not a blind gaze into an anticipated future; or rather not merely this. Any sight is informed by that which is latent perhaps unfinished in an existing state of affairs. The other side of 'potenciar' however is that the plebians in their movement as labor will never oppose capital from some site of pure exteriority; their potential - particularly their organizational potential already lies within capital; which is perhaps why Althusser once described philosophy as class struggle in the realm of theory. A matrix as it were which is open, indeed live among the class conflicts or counterfinalities inherent in capitalism - and in relations subservient to it.
Indeed, regarding the relation of communism - as the potential which remains hidden, latent in capital:- and the leftists - we seem to be assessing whether this non-relation as it were corresponds to the figure of 'rabble' or 'intimate enemy.'
The communist invariant however is not an invariant. This platitude is what we realize in the expression in which the aforementioned act of mediation results in. Rather it is a movement or mobilization whose history is being written and expressed whenever we confront the privileges of property, hierarchy, and authority. In other words, this is a legacy of unsolved problems handed from one sequence to another. In this sense, it is the assessment of a failure in its historicity; and of what is called a failure.
The issue of embodiment, as in any responsible and liberatory discourse is re-iterated here. A question that will be answered for, seemingly with or without the mediation of a party. This is perhaps why the way this embodiment is to take place is important, an issue which is never reducible to mere contingency when it can be addressed fairly we will find among those assembled their doubts and disagreements. This is also why the form of its presentation is vital, and here I must acknowledge along with the author the effort and organizational know-how that put together the conference which produced these papers. Among the collectivities we have been referring to; the party, independent organizations, associations of workers and students, and yes even plebeians among whom we may never entirely exclude philosophers it seems.
We witness efforts at enunciating the mediation necessary between the state, in whatever form, and moment of proletarian resistance which seek to alter that which is given.
In appraising the form of the party in its adequacy for this task what the author emphasizes following Badiou is not the vanguardist aspect as much as the anticipatory aspect of an unbound multiplicity of consciousness. A delimitation of class in the face of historical necessities; in this sense open to formal re-inventions, new practices - and I would add, indeed their complementarities.
Narratives, I shall maintain - remain instructive, vitally so, as do the tendencies embodied by those they are about. Linera for instance in jail sings the cry of the abolition of the state and its parliamentary apparatus, casts aside his Negrism and autonomia in favor of a Hegelian apologetics once vice president.
While such steps on behalf of an individual may be called or proclaimed 'opportunistic', we would do well to remember that the ideal of the cultural revolution may indeed be an invariant which even a modest social democrat as seen today in Jean Jaques Rousseau would attest to. "Whoever dares (as it were... *) undertake to establish a people's institution must feel himself capable of changing human nature."
Is capitalism a humanism? This is the question that plagued Louis Althusser. What is apparent to us today however is that every defence of capitalism will present itself in the guise of a humanism. If there is an enduring lesson we may take from the cultural revolution it is that the development of new practices will correspond to social conditions in actually existing capitalism. The construction of any common horizon would be poorer without such a perspective. This, concludes the author, is how we reach beyond leftism while still in dialogue with its lessons.
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