Kasama

We are starting a new series by Bill (his third on Kasama). Rubber and Glue will appear in five parts over the next few days.

Elements of Exhaustion, or, Rubber and Glue (Kasama Post #3)

Part I: Recoiling Into a Dead End

by Bill Martin

“It may even be that there are pathways that certain currents of Maoism have taken that are effectively precluded from getting “there” (that is, revolution). It may even be that we simply have to accept a fundamental disconnect between ‘here’ and ‘there,’ that seems to be one upshot of Badiou’s theory of truth-events…”

“….it is difficult for many of us who came in one way or another through Maoism to now engage in regroupment and reconception with people who came through other Marxist or otherwise radical trends (even other trends of Maoism, but obviously I especially have in mind the various Trotskyist trends). I do think there is something to the fact that, for a long time, among trends within Marxism, only the RCP and Bob Avakian were really willing to put the possibility and necessity of revolution out there and to try in various ways to pursue revolution. That has to count for something, but what exactly in our attempt to forge a new paradigm? It might not be a matter of Trotskyism itself having something to contribute (on the other hand, why rule this out per se?…), but why not some people who came through that experience and who themselves were looking for ways to radically change the world?”

” There is one thing I do know, however, and I don’t hesitate to say it is a basic article of faith: no form of economism is revolutionary, no matter how militant its expression.”

* * * * * *

Hello again, Kasama friends and lurkers. After my last, very long piece, I set myself the task of writing shorter posts—but of course I failed, and I imagine that I will continue to fail in this. So please bear with me, and, as I said before, if this kind of discussion is not your thing, then don’t feel any obligation to read on.

One other thing that may appeal to some, and not to others: the main orientation of many of my posts will be to continue what I’m going to call “a debriefment of Maoism,” with the aim of generating some terms for the next phase. Here and there I hope to show how Alain Badiou helps us move beyond a revolutionary sequence that has become “saturated,” to use his terminology. Ultimately I hope to combine all the posts into a little book, something that would constitute a kind of “workbook” of “post-Maoism.”

As I’ve said before, the fact that I am working on this should not be taken as representing a perspective on my part that either 1) there aren’t other people making valuable contributions to this specific project; or 2) there aren’t other projects that are just as important, if not more important.

I am interested in “getting there from here,” where “here” is the Maoist current in communism. But this is not only a complicated question (as I hope to demonstrate in these posts, including the present one), it may even be that there are pathways that certain currents of Maoism have taken that are effectively precluded from getting “there” (that is, revolution). It may even be that we simply have to accept a fundamental disconnect between “here” and “there,” that seems to be one upshot of Badiou’s theory of truth-events, for example as applied directly to the field of politics in the essay, “Politics Unbound”:

“In this chapter I shall place philosophy under condition of politics. Not exactly the most contemporary of politics, but the one that can be called the ‘first cycle’ of modern emancipatory politics, the revolutionary and proletarian cycle, the one to which the names of Marx, Lenin, and Mao remain attached. Bear in mind that . . . each one of these names designates a singular sequence of politics, a historical mode of its rare existence, even if philosophy occasionally seeks to bridge this essential discontinuity for its own ends.” (Metapolitics, p.68) [link]

In other places, for example in the essay on the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution that has been published as part of the book, Polemics, Badiou seems to assimilate Mao to a larger sequence of “Leninism” (where Stalin represents the “lower stage” and Mao the “higher”), so there are some things that need sorting here.

As I said in the “Conception and Collectivity” post, there are many questions in Badiou’s philosophy that I am still trying to understand, but there are some things that don’t seem to fit together quite as coherently as Badiou might think they do. But this is a matter for further investigation, and I hope to write a post about how Badiou is certainly helpful on at least some key points that will help us move forward with the revolutionary project.

However, let us not close down the idea that some of what we need for the revolutionary project may at least appear to be fundamentally disconnected from what we have previously understood.

Thanks very much for the comments and criticisms on “Conception and Collectivity,” I hope to respond to some of them more directly in a subsequent post.

The Recoil Thesis

With fondness I remember Bob Avakian’s insight in Conquer the World? that sometimes Marxists are the last ones to see some things that are glaringly obvious to everyone else.

One of the most important contributions of that work was to put the understanding and criticism of the Stalin period on a new, radical basis, and certainly Stalin was the exemplar of what can be called extreme “cul-de-sac” thinking. On a lesser scale, but still vying for attention in this regard, we can recall a line from Enver Hoxha’s With Stalin, to the effect that “not a single major mistake in either theory or practice was ever made by this brilliant leader”–that is, Stalin. One almost has to admire this level of doggedness.

Undoubtedly it is difficult to take in a friendly spirit the idea that an organization has persisted in an endeavor to the point when it has become exhausted. Perhaps this is especially difficult when it comes after a time when it seems that new life was being breathed into the project.

It is incumbent upon the Revolutionary Communist party (RCP) to look more deeply into this time, roughly from 2000 to 2006, and to be clear on why it wanted to break with the openings of that period. I would again offer the “recoil” thesis, and also even the sense that, when it comes down to it, the wild and woolly vicissitudes of real life are simply too much for Bob Avakian (BA) and the RCP to work with.

I seem to recall a discussion from long ago (in the Revolutionary Worker) concerning two kinds of coach in basketball, the one who sees the players as simply an extension of the coach on the court, and the other who seeks to guide the players in such a way as to unleash their initiative on the court. The best of BA and the RCP was when it tried to be like the latter coach, but the consolidation of the line around the Culture of Appreciation, Promotion and Promotion (AP&P) of the Chair seems to also be a consolidation of the notion of others, whether in the party or not, as simply extensions.

The Exhaustion of a Paradigm

The argument is that the consolidation of this line betokens the exhaustion of a paradigm, or its “saturation.” The paradigm is filled up, it has gone as far as it can go. It has come to the end of its road and is in a cul-de-sac.

This happens both for the fact that the elements of any given paradigm can become played out and the fact that objective conditions in the world do not sit still either. The paradigm has given what it has to give (and this is hastened if the paradigm has closed in on itself), and it might be said that the world has drawn out of the paradigm all that it can as well.

It is very hard, however, from the inside, to recognize that this point has been reached. There are a number of reasons for this, including even simply an emotional attachment and sense of “investment” in a cause. One of the harder reasons to deal with is the fact that, even under the exhausted paradigm, some powerful and true criticisms and exposures of the existing social system can be raised.

However, this is also true for previous paradigms in the physical sciences, for instance. The Newtonian paradigm in physics is completely filled out, but, on the other hand, we apply Newton’s laws of motion every day, even in just walking down the sidewalk. Some elements of cellular biology are being replaced with models in molecular biology, but the cellular model still works fine for many purposes. Still, no one working in physics today pursues the theoretical study of Newton’s laws.

Arguably things are different in the arts, and it is important that philosophy is in some respects more like endeavors in the arts, in that its paradigms and central creative figures may not simply be surpassed. At least for my part, I think that even figures such as Plato and Aristotle or Descartes and Spinoza still have much to give us, though I realize there are many who claim an historical materialist perspective who believe otherwise.

Still, surely it is good Marxism to realize there comes a point when something is played out. After all, BA put forward a provocative thesis about “the end of a stage and the beginning of a new stage,” and he also declared at a certain point that it was time for a new synthesis, and then, at a later point, that the new synthesis had been completed.

How did he know when the moment was ripe for the new synthesis, and how did he know that others had not already gone some distance toward creating it?

After all, the “End of a Stage,” essentially the time when there were socialist countries in the world, came in 1976. For a party that now claims that its main contribution is the theoretical work of the chair (at least that is how I am reading some of the recent statements from the RCP, especially the Constitution and the Manifesto), this has been a long time in coming, and though, as I have said repeatedly, it contains some good elements, it is pretty clear that this is not the new synthesis that we need to enter into a new period of struggle to change the world.

There are some (hi, Carl!)  who claim that we do not need a “new synthesis” at all, associating the very idea with what Richard Rorty used to call “grand, German-style social theorizing,” or with the idea that the problem with a philosopher such as Sartre was that his “Frenchness” gets in the way. I hope to address this question in a subsequent post.

For a party that now says, in the Manifesto , that it was mostly revisionist most of the time anyway, why should others who want to make a contribution to the revolutionary project of communism be disparaged for seeking new channels for work, including theoretical work? And why should there be disparagement for seeking out some ideas that were foolishly dismissed along the way? That some of this work includes the critique of the “stage” that was the attempt to keep on with Maoism after Mao, with some qualitative developments, but perhaps without a real qualitative leap into something that is really a new stage of Marxism is, I’m sure, irksome to those who want to stay within this paradigm, but so what?

If you can’t present good theoretical arguments to defend continued work within your paradigm, but instead can only rely on the circularity of a special historical role for the Chair that somehow guarantees or underwrites the presumably non-communicable aspects of the new synthesis, can you really blame others for not being ready to swallow the whole package? Can you really blame others for raising criticisms of this path, or for trying to formulate an alternative?

Continuity and Discontinuity

 

As I understand it, the RCP is claiming that the new synthesis is more on the side of continuity with Maoism than discontinuity. (At the same time, there has been no developed statement on the relationship with “Maoism” or with “Marxism-Leninism-Maoism,” though it appears that the MLM formulation has now been removed along with the “Three Ours” at the Revolution newspaper site.)

 

This might be understood as a separate question, at least analytically, from the assessment of the various elements that have been put out there as making up the new synthesis. Certainly there is one “element” that ties the whole package together, the “caliber” question (that we now have in the world a leader of the “caliber” of “a Lenin or a Mao”), and this can be put on the table as a qualitative discontinuity.

Clearly there is a good deal of frustration on the side of the RCP with the failure to make this claim in any convincing way.

I realize that there is more than simply “theoretical debate” at stake here, but imagine (or pretend) for a moment that theoretical debate is the core of it. Some of us are trying to develop a better theory, and one of the reasons we have to do this is that Avakian’s New Synthesis is seriously deficient in a number of respects. This in itself wouldn’t be as big a problem if the opening of 2000-2006 had kept going, and if the new synthesis had been understood as a still-developing, collective, and engaged project—and not as essentially finished and tied together by the “caliber” claim. At least that is how I look at it—I realize that not everyone posting at Kasama does think this, and some of this has to do with whether Maoism is even in everyone’s “encyclopedia,” to use Badiou’s term; it is definitely in mine.

Truly being in a new stage, however, might mean not making this a cardinal question—I really don’t know the answer to this, I think it needs more debate.

Coming Through Maoism Or Through Other Trends

On this point, let us digress for a moment on two issues:

First, I know that it is difficult for many of us who came in one way or another through Maoism to now engage in regroupment and reconception with people who came through other Marxist or otherwise radical trends (even other trends of Maoism, but obviously I especially have in mind the various Trotskyist trends). I do think there is something to the fact that, for a long time, among trends within Marxism, only the RCP and Bob Avakian were really willing to put the possibility and necessity of revolution out there and to try in various ways to pursue revolution. That has to count for something, but what exactly in our attempt to forge a new paradigm? It might not be a matter of Trotskyism itself having something to contribute (on the other hand, why rule this out per se?—again, I ask this not because I know the answer, I’m just trying to understand), but why not some people who came through that experience and who themselves were looking for ways to radically change the world?

There is one thing I do know, however, and I don’t hesitate to say it is a basic article of faith: no form of economism is revolutionary, no matter how militant its expression. Obviously we can put a group such as the Spartacist League on a special pedestal as a brilliant example of militant economism—and we can ask what it would mean to not be anything like what they are exemplifying. This is where once again I would want to pursue the question of what might be called “Kant for communists,” and the key to it (as I explore at abundant length in Ethical Marxism) is to ask what it would mean, from an historical materialist perspective, to take ethical questions to be fundamentally real. I would say that the alternative to this is economism and instrumentalism, but this argument has to somehow work with the reality that a revolution against imperialism and toward communism is the most ethical thing we can imagine. But I will pursue this further in an additional posting.

As a bridging comment from this affirmation of faith to my second point, I might mention something from my experience in England. As many readers will know, the Marxist scene in England (and the U.K. generally) is dominated by economism and Trotskyism (which, to me, is basically a redundant way of putting it).

When I spent two terms at the University of Sheffield, in 1998 and 2003, the main internationalist currents I found were either anarchist or progressive or radical Christian. A couple of years ago I spoke at a conference on Maoism at Goldsmiths College (part of the University of London), and as a provocation, in attempting to address the question of why there has not been much Maoism in the U.K., I said that Rowan Williams is generally a better internationalist than most of the groups in the U.K. calling themselves “Marxist.” (Rowan Williams is the Archbishop of Canterbury and hence the leader of the Church of England and the Worldwide Anglican Communion.) For what it is worth, no one took issue with this, though I don’t mean to erect a “theory” on this anecdotal experience.

Keeping with the U.K. for the moment, and this question of Trotskyism, the work of Alex Callinicos is very much worth considering. Callinicos is the author of many books, most of them working with figures in social theory and philosophy, from Lukacs and Benjamin to Sartre, Althusser, Derrida, and Badiou (much of the terrain in which I also have a deep interest), and he is also a leading member of the Socialist Workers Party (UK).

Most readers here will know that this is a neo-Trotskyist group that supports the thesis that Stalin led the restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union, and that the Chinese Revolution, being fundamentally “Stalinist,” was never more than a nationalist revolution. The SWP reached its moment of greatest influence during the 1980s, in the period of Thatcherism and the protracted miners’ strike. More recently, some in the U.S. left movements may know of the SWP as the group that played the leading role in having the International Socialist Organization ejected from their international grouping of organizations, supposedly for the failure of the ISO to make much of an appearance in the “Battle of Seattle,” and for the ISO’s being overly “campus-based.”

On the whole I have deep disagreements with Callinicos, especially the way that he always finds a solution to intellectual questions in a return to “classical Marxism” (which is the program of the SWP in general, also expressed as connecting with the “genuine Marxist tradition”). Of course I disagree quite a bit with Callinicos’s critique of “postmodernism,” and especially of Derrida, and I agree with the idea that, even here, line is decisive. However, there is much to learn from Callinicos’s work, and there has to be something to be said for the fact that he actually puts in the time and follows out the arguments of whomever he is discussing (for example in his recent book, Resources of Critique, where he works through some ideas from Negri, Zizek, and Badiou, among others).

Callinicos’s intellectual work is to a high standard. I suppose what I am saying is that it is not clear to me what the decisiveness of line means if instead there seems to be no standard beyond what essentially comes down to “whateverism.”

It doesn’t help to say, Sartre’s “Frenchness” gets in the way or “I’m an American pragmatist,” any more than it helps for Avakian to ponder what if “the Derridas” were communists, especially if this is not really a question. Perhaps the point is to deepen our conception of line—and to recognize that the line cannot be so narrow, linear, or univocal.

Another way to come at this question is in terms of the old “red-expert” debate since the Cultural Revolution. 

The Sixties Are Over, But Still Valuable

My second point, finally, is that I once raised to the person I call a “Leading Party Member” (LPM), back around the time when the Conversations book was coming together, the idea that there ought to be a “homecoming” of sorts for “sixties people,” a gathering of what remains of the radical and revolutionary spirit from the time before people broke up into different groups and trends. I called this a kind of political “allee-allee-in-free,” as they say in the game of hide-and-seek. The LPM seemed open to the idea, or perhaps he was just humoring me (or both—this was a time when these two lines were contending in the party, so to speak, the broad and the narrow).

My intention with this is not that we ought to get back to the sixties, which isn’t even remotely possible, but that there is still some energy to be gathered from that experience., and that we ought to be interested in why people wanted to be radical and revolutionary in the first place.

Clearly this is a subject for a more extended engagement, but my point here is that the exhaustion of a paradigm does not mean that all of the energy (or even “energies”) that went into the paradigm is itself exhausted. And so one way to combine these two points is that there is a sense in which those of us who are looking for the “post-Maoist” synthesis will certainly want to both “debrief” from Maoism and to see what energies can be carried forward into the new synthesis. On the other hand, there are those who never believed in the Maoist project in the first place, and didn’t take part in it, and sometimes took part in other projects that we might call economist, and yet we need to look at this both in terms of their striving to find ways to fight capitalism and in terms of the new day that is in front of us.

Richard Rorty liked to say that we need to have open minds, but not so open that our brains fall out.

In Part 2: Drawing the Line on Economism