John Steele: Revolutionary Faithfulness and the Radically New
Posted by John Steele on April 3, 2009
Over the next week, we will be publishing a new series of Kasama essays by five writers — touching on interrelated themes: The London Conference on Communism, the theories of Alain Badiou, the reclaiming of communism, the revolution in Nepal, and the polemical engagement with exhausted forms of dogmatic Marxism. We urge our readers to set aside the time for them.
“In many ways this is the crux of Badiou’s thinking and work, over the past 25 years: how to ‘keep the faith’ in a creative way; how to do justice, theoretically, to a greatly changed world while remaining true to the project of a politics of emancipation.”
by John Steele
Over the past week and more there have been daily posts on this site – news, commentaries, interviews, videos – about and from the recent London conference On the Idea of Communism. The conference, as I understand it, was organized by Slovoj Zizek, who holds a visiting post at the college in London which sponsored the conference, but it was French philosopher Alain Badiou whose advocacy of “the communist hypothesis” provided the governing theme of the conference.
Why was (is) the conference important? And why are Zizek and Badiou important – both as the thinkers and philosophers they are, and as figures within the larger political-intellectual landscape today? And by important I mean important for the purposes around which Kasama is organized: the going-forward of communism, important for reconceiving and regrouping. Those are the questions I want to address in this post, paying particular attention to the thinking of Badiou. Address these questions – not answer them in any final way but open them up for engagement.
A recent report from the Idea of Communism conference posted here[Frieze], noted that
“Badiou doggedly kept faith with the concept of communism at a time, after 1989, when it was both pronounced dead and criminalized, identified with the totalitarianism that a triumphalist liberal capitalism defined itself against.”
Well, one might respond, weren’t there others who did too – many readers of this site, for example, or some left groups and parties around the world? Certainly that’s true, and taking up this question can begin to get at what’s at issue and at stake here. The issue (or one of them) is this: how to respond to a crisis, to a change in the world, to a new situation. We’re all familiar with some wellworn reflexes: the nothing’s-really-changed, or the go-with-the-tide response.
Or you can respond by saying, yes, a new synthesis is called for in a changed world, and then produce something which is not very new and not really a synthesis. And we’re familiar with that response as well.
A Quick Look at Where We Are
The last 30 years have seen the brutal ascendency of capital worldwide – practically, politically, ideologically. For 20 years “the death of communism” has been proclaimed.
Now, in the midst of a capitalist crisis which is just beginning its work of laying waste to people’s lives around the world, a conference is held, organized by Zizek around some of the ideas of Badiou, proclaiming that the participants in the conference “share the thesis that one should remain faithful to the name ‘Communism’: this name is potent to serve as the Idea which guides our activity, as well as the instrument which enables us to expose the catastrophes of the XXth century politics.”
And the theme was expressed in a quote Kasama posted earlier:
“Zizek opened the conference by saying that the time for guilt was over, that in the 21st century we needed to reclaim the name of “communism” from the ill repute into which it has sunk.”
A thousand people, at least, flock to London to the conference, while thousands more – who knows how many? – heard about it, talked about it, read about it, and thought about these questions.
In a word – Wow!
How could this not be something to celebrate, to look at, to pay attention to, to discuss? Doesn’t this provide wonderful openings for talking about communism – not preaching, but really getting into these topics and concepts, including the ways in which the people who spoke at this conference unfold their thinking? How could this not be an important event in the political-intellectual realm?
But I know there are those – and I keep being surprised by how many – who don’t see it this way. So let me try to explain why I do.
A Changed World
I have myself been very excited, over the past several years, to discover and begin studying Badiou and Zizek. These are genuinely innovative and radical thinkers: radical intellectually and radical politically. They’re exciting in both those dimensions and particularly in the combination. It’s not just that their work is interesting and exciting (as it is); it’s necessary work – or at least work of this sort, and this sort of depth, is profoundly necessary today.
Maybe I can begin to make clear why I believe that’s so, by playing it off against two viewpoints which take up positions to the contrary, which I’m going to enunciate in a fairly crude way just for the sake of argument and contrast:
The first is that we don’t need this sort of purely theoretical or philosophical exploration; we need actual struggle (and real communists should be engaged in, or organizing, such struggle). And we’ve seen this expressed a few times on this site.
The second might be put as, we need theory, but not what people like Badiou and Zizek are doing – we have Marx (Lenin, Mao – or Bakunin – or Trotsky – or Avakian) – that’s what communism is all about: those principles, those theories, which we already have. So what’s Badiou’s problem with that?
The crux of the matter is this: Although seemingly viewing the question from opposite ends, these positions are two sides of the same coin. This coin could be characterized in various ways. But rather than throw labels around, I’ll just say that mostly what this is about is not seeing that the world has changed, and how much it has changed, and what that requires of us.
How has the world changed? A huge question, of course, and I’ll only point to a few features and indications.
Economically, the world is still is still capitalist (duh), and in fact more widely and deeply than it was 30 or 50 years ago. But the structure of our capitalist world is very different than it was 15, or 30, or 50 years ago. The structures and circuits of capital have changed, as has the structure of imperialism.
The world has seen huge demographic shifts in recent decades: massive urbanization (more than half the world’s population now dwells in urban areas – an historic shift) and great flows of human migration both within and between countries. The roles that different populations and age groups play has shifted, as well as the roles and social positions of women. Look at the demographic shifts in this country: by 2050 whites will no longer be the majority in the US – a dramatic marker of some of these rather rapid changes of recent decades.
The structures and dynamics of communication and social interaction have altered and shifted.
And intellectually too. Take any field of study or investigation, from physics to anthropology to history to philosophy: the prominent theories, the terms of reference, the axis of discussion and dispute – all these things have changed, often fairly radically, over the past, say, 40 years.
The question is not whether these changes have been for good or ill (or to what extent it divides into two); the point is that the intellectual landscape has changed.
Nothing is timeless, nothing is changeless (a cliché, to be sure, but worth keeping in mind) – not in the physical world, not in the human social world – and not in the intellectual world of concepts and theories.
If one is to navigate and do work in a changing world, your tools, including theoretical tools, have to undergo change as well. Or let’s approach it from the other side. Of course, if we hope to change the world we have to be very aware of what’s happening around us, and we have to understand it, not just perceptually, but conceptually as well. But in that case our concepts cannot be hidebound or remain static. This seems obvious and unexceptional enough.
But there’s more to it than that.
It’s not just that a changing world requires changing concepts; it’s that the concepts will change in any case. The intellectual world, and each individual’s conceptual apparatus, is not separate from the larger world, but part of it, and changes unavoidably. Even those who “stay the same” are changing in fact. First because the context changes: my beliefs in context y are no longer the same as they were in context x simply because what they mean in the new context is not the same as what it was in the old. An obvious example – the meaning of a “golden oldie” played on the radio today versus its meaning in the context of the time in which it originated.
As the world changes, the social landscape of human thinking changes too. This is part of the materiality of human thinking, that it is essentially social and that like the larger world of which it is a part, it changes, and its changes have a relationship (complex and far from one-to-one, but a relationship) to the changes in the larger world.
There’s much more to say and develop around this topic. But for the moment, just one more thought. In adapting what we have to new circumstances, there’s obviously no ready-made process to arrive at a needed “new synthesis.” But one thing that’s certainly necessary is ruthless criticism of previous automatic assumptions. Or the seeking out of critiques from others, and taking them seriously.
Hanging on to what we believe we know — doesn’t this sort of defensive hugging-tight pretty obviously betoken a lack of confidence in those very assumptions? Of course even worse is the “back to the basics” old-time religion response – not just because it’s mistaken, but because it’s a self-deceptive illusion. An old idea in new circumstances is not the same idea as it was originally.
There’s a further twist to this, though, in the contemporary situation. For it sometimes seems that nothing has so perversely marked our era for some time now as the endless recycling of themes, songs, tropes, styles, forms, genres, what-have-you — a proliferation of endless variety in which “everything old is new again” but nothing is actually new. One effect is that these floating signifiers, these themes and motifs and icons detached from their original context, lose their heft and weight, becoming imbued with an implicit irony. And this can equally apply to revolutionary symbols and ideas. A push against the outrages of the present, accompanied by admiration of great movements from the past, is often enacted through the icons and thematic statements of those movements — which can quickly become a form of camp, dressing up in old uniforms, as it were.
We really have to be part of creating something new.
Theories and expectations
A new world requires new theory. Sometimes the realization starts with the question, Why is the world turning out so differently from what I was expecting?
In the 1970s, many of us expected (I expected) revolutionary struggle, or certainly very major social upheaval, in our lifetimes, in the US and around the world – and sooner rather than later. Many of us thought that “revolution is the principal trend in the world today.” And we thought that this struggle would be guided by revolutionary Marxist theory and ideology of some variety.
In the 1980s many expected world war, or nuclear war involving the US and USSR.
In the 1990s a “movement of movements” oriented around the struggle against capitalist globalization seemed to many to be the revolutionary wave of the future.
Some wrong (or at least completely unuseful) reactions to all this would be “Wow, you guys musta not had a clue, thinking any of that was on the horizon,” or “So I guess it just goes to show you never can tell, and it’s pointless to try to figure it out.”
In fact none of this was wrong to expect – in the sense that the seeds of such developments in each case, or a dynamic pointing in that direction, were present. And of course those who expected there to be no real change from the status quo of the time, or those who projected other tendencies into the future, were equally wrong. But more than that, these expectations arose within the context of real movements for justice or of resistance; and to see, feel something developing, to throw yourself into a struggle for justice and liberation, to expect, to know that it can succeed even against long odds – that’s never foolish, or wrong. On the contrary.
But still we have to deal with failures of struggles and the turnabouts of history. And there are many ways to react to these, and to the unexpectedness of the ways in which history has actually developed. Most obvious is the need for analysis. Why did it happen, this unexpected turn of events? What was it we were not seeing? This goes further too: I would venture that any new creation will also involve a recasting of the past. Something truly new now will involve not only a new vision of the present but, inevitably, a new vision of the past as well.
We also clearly need to look at our theoretical equipment. We approach everything in life with a whole theoretical apparatus already in place, some of it explicit, much of it implicit. A crisis in our lives, a sharp turn historically, has got to make us reconsider what we thought we knew, theory as much as fact. If it doesn’t, we’re just being willfully blind, or stupid, or both.
Of course a crisis can sometimes provoke betrayals, the turning aside from a great project, going with the reactionary tide or into the enemy camp – that’s common enough, and easy enough to understand. But a blind or unthinking fidelity to “the principles laid down” during times of great changes of circumstances is not a true alternative. And neither is any sort of simple picking up and recycling of the great ideas of the past.
In many ways this is the crux of Badiou’s thinking and work, over the past 25 years: how to “keep the faith” in a creative way; how to do justice, theoretically, to a greatly changed world while remaining true to the project of a politics of emancipation.
I quoted a commentator above to the effect that Badiou had “doggedly kept faith with the concept of communism,” which is true, yes; but it’s also much more complicated than that. I don’t intend to really enter into Badiou’s philosophical concepts here. (I’ve written a bit earlier – here and here – and I intend to write more in future.) But I do want to say something pointing to why Badiou is someone who should have our attention and is worth our study.
Fidelity
Faithfulness or fidelity is a prominent concept in Badiou’s thinking. When one becomes involved in what Badiou calls a truth-process (and a revolutionary process and project would be an example), there is a matter of keeping the faith with the process to which one has committed, of fidelity to the unfolding of the truths of this process and making them real. But no process lasts forever, and at some point it may reach an impasse, the end of its fruitful development – become what Badiou terms saturated.
One might say (although Badiou would not it put it this way) that in such a case the parameters of the world have shifted, so that the project to which one has maintained fidelity, with its particular vocabulary, its projections and expectations, its hard-won truths – the whole project seems stuck, doesn’t offer new possibilities, ways of going forward creatively or effectively. (And isn’t that the way things have been for many of us, for some time now, politically?)
The question is, what do you do, what can you do, when a process becomes saturated? Badiou talks about this in an interview of about three years ago:
“I think a fidelity does not really finish, but sometimes it is saturated; that is my term for it. There is a saturation; you cannot find anything new in the field of your first fidelity. Many people, when this is the case, just say, ‘It’s finished.’ And really, a political sequence has a beginning and an end, too, an end in the form of saturation. Saturation is not a brutal rupture, but it becomes progressively more difficult to find something new in the field of the fidelity….
“When the fidelity is saturated, you have a choice. The first possibility is to say it’s finished. The second possibility is this: With the help of certain events…you find what I name a fidelity to the fidelity. Fidelity to the fidelity is not a continuation, strictly speaking, and not a pure rupture, either. We have to find something new. When I was saying yesterday that ‘from outside, you can see something you don’t see from inside’, that’s merely a rule by which to find something new.”
Fidelity to the fidelity – that’s a valuable concept: not a catch-phrase, but a concept that deserves exploration, deepening and discussion, both within the context of Badiou’s systematic thought and outside it. And there’s much more, of course, in Badiou, that’s potentially very valuable in a project of reconception and regroupment – concepts of event and subject as Badiou conceives them – all of them highly interrelated as Badiou conceives them, and deserving of real exploration and study.
This world we face is one of crisis and injustice and momentous changes – and of inspiring struggles, too, and people dealing with the same problems of theory and practice that we are, in different forms and circumstances. We need to learn from them, from all who are pushing against the fabric that binds us, and seek to be part of the creation of new forms, both theoretically and practically, seizing the courage to climb the unexplored mountain, in the words of our comrades in Nepal.
Stephen David Mauldin said
Dear John.. very nice job of setting the stage for what should be an elevating dialog. I am quite inspired.. not the least because this could lead to wider engagement of Badiou thought and Zizek’s inimitable confrontation. Since I anticipate I and others will be looking to express new insights we find and share – and we will want to relate this to the words of Badiou and Zizek – I offer to the community a system of bookmarks established at the Delicious social bookmarking site:
http://delicious.com/stefandav
So what is there is linked articles with an annotation on the article created by selecting text from the article.. snips on the key issues contained. The selection is managed by tags and organized tagging system:
http://delicious.com/stefandav/zizek is 158 items
http://delicious.com/stefandav/badiou is 108
http://delicious.com/stefandav/badiou+zizek is 32
And for the collection on Maobadi of Nepal, the best is
http://delicious.com/stefandav/maoism+nepal about 100
emil said
nice sentiments, but apart from big pseudo radical words, not much. slavoj zizek strikes me as a bullshitter, and all this about ‘faith’ strikes me as quite misleading and not well thought out. Chomsky is better than this. but more importantly, why does anyone think that a communist radicalism can come from elite western universities??
Green Red said
Hi Emil,
beside disregarding your judgmental language please refresh our memory about where and in what grounds your Chomsky’s radicalim was born? was it harvested in some non elite, highly massive anarchist universities?
Without endorsing all said and Trotskist angle of sayings, still, contact Socialist Action and check out their pamphlet regarding shortcomings and vague and obscure panorama of Chomsky and other anarchists.
Without optimism and faith in our path, without nice sentiments, leading masses of people to a better – even relatively – world is undoable.
On the other hand what is an Anarchist tendency except a polished left appearance of Libertarian Party’s love for anarcho capitalism and me first and then perhaps others too, as appose to I matter along serving and being served by the rest so we all may blossom our lives without greed and egotism?
The time of guilt and confusion is over pal, let’s get serious.
With best wishes for reviewing matters since without one another we, and the confused masses of people, will sink into disoriented massive upheavals,
G R
Arthur said
I haven’t read Badiou or Zizek and scanning previous related threads has not inclined me towards taking the trouble.
This review does convince me to at least take a look, though its still not a high priority for me and will take some time.
Meanwhile some notes/questions based purely on John Steele’s comments. Responses (or lack of) could be helpful in assessing priority for me or others.
1. Style comment. Preliminaries didn’t add anything to actual content which started at subhead “Changed World”. Succinct articles are harder to write but will be more widely read. This may just be a personal preference but perhaps worth mentioning in view of suspicions that the appeal of Badiou and Zizek is to people who like spinning a lot of words unecessarily. If the density really is due to difficult content (as in Marx and Hegel) thats ok. But if they have important ideas but just happen to not be skilled at exposition, crisp summaries by others could be helpful.
2. The whole section “A Changed World” expresses something that ought to be, but is not, taken for granted among everyyone in a tradition that owes anything to Marx, Lenin and Mao (or even Hegel). Its certainly worth restating, especially among people who seem to have got stuck in dogmatic sects, and I broadly agree with the restatement. But I’m unclear what’s being claimed for Badiou and Zizek here. The changes during recent decades strike me as dramatically confirming the vision of capitalist development and globalization expressed in the 1848 Manifesto, yet Marxism virtually disappeared during this period. Is it being suggested that this basic world outlook is something new?
What does it add to Lenin’s defence of orthodoxy?
3. Subhead “Theories and Expectations”. Ok that description of the 1970s would be common to the 60s generation of Maoists. Problem is a) why we thought that, despite being aware of how small a minority we were in the sixties (alive and making a difference, but surely not under the illusion we had actually solved the problem in the West going back to collapse of the second international and established mass based communist workers parties) b) why we didn’t recover when it turned out we were wrong about the 1970s, and haven’t got anywhere since.
4. My perspective on the 1980s is different. Agreed with both previous Maoist leadership and initial revisionist leadership of China that US had been in decline since defeat in Vietnam, that Soviet Union was a rising aggressive threat more dangerous now than US and focus should be to countering that threat of war with unity against Soviet aggression (including US and NATO to some extent) rather than previous period unity against US imperialism. That is NOT the same as “expecting world war”. “Either revolution will prevent war or war will give rise to revolution” expressed the basic optimism of Mao’s politics, not the apocalyptic visions of Avakians.
5. This view had negligible support among “Maoists” after Mao’s death. My view was then and is now that the Chinese analysis was correct but hardly anyone understood and agreed with it but merely paid lip service to it (or distorted as just a matter of Chinese diplomacy) while Mao was alive and then quickly abandoned it after Mao died, with the excuse that the obviously revisionist new leadership was going in the same direction. Seeing everyone who wasn’t openly anti-Mao in the pro-Teng and pro-Hoxha camps spouting the RCPs stuff directly opposing Mao’s international line when they had recently been claiming to support it, convinced me that there just wasn’t any serious analytical capability around. I don’t expect agreement here, but believe its part of the background to subsequent developments. Also there might be agreement that there wasn’t as much analytical capability around as others thought there was at the time.
6. So by early 1980s I and others in Australia were already convinced there was currently no International Communist Movement and recognized that we didn’t have the foggiest clue what to do about revolutionary politics in Australia. So we avoided remaining organized as a sect, which seemed to be the inevitable fate of going along with what other “Maoists” were proposing. That seems to be just an Australian oddity. But actually I think it was a worldwide phenomena. The overwhelming majority of people who had become active in the 1960s had in fact dropped out by the early 1980s. Most did not have any clear analysis of the situation and became apolitical or joined various reformist or other currents. But it wasn’t just a handful that saw something basic was wrong and refused to remain organized on sectarian principles. It was the overwhelming majority – leaving behind very small sectarian organizations indeed.
7. Flowing from above I have a completely different perspective on the 1990s. Although Maoists were a small minority on “the left” throughout, rejection of the Soviet Union had been pretty universal from the late 1960s. Only diehard “tankies” were enthusiastic about it after the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 – and they were isolated. Many people called the Soviets “Stalinist” instead of “revisionist” or “social fascist” but nobody much thought it was progressive.
8. Weirdly this seemed to mutate when the Soviet Union collapsed and the capitalist media went on about the death of communism. The rot must have set in earlier but I didn’t notice it at the time. For me it was just instinctively obvious that anyone mildly progressive would cheer the East European police states collapsing. Perhaps this was made easier by having identified the Soviet Union rather than the US as the main enemy. But I was honestly unprepared for the concept of a “left” that felt gloomy about the “defeat of socialism” in the early 1990s. It was bizarre finding that some people who had been Maoists felt that way. Where had they been during the Cultural Revolution and its defeat? How did they become Maoists?
9. The anti-globalization wave was less puzzling. It seemed to be a combination of continuing the focus on US imperialism that belonged to the 1960s with the less Marxist aspect of the 1960s. Lots of young radical minded people who would have been led into Marxist-Leninist politics if they had been around in the 1960s seemed to be trying to express some of the spirit of that era while actually opposing globalization. The 1960s WAS globalization and Marxism is the philosophy of globalization par excellence. So it was clear Marxism had gone into decline along with US imperialism.
10.
I think we did have a clue in the sixties (with all the inevitable errors of youth). Did not have much of a clue in the 1970s and had basically disappeared by the 1980s (leaving behind some sects) with most previous activists at least knowing that they did not know what to do. This mass exodus from left politics left behind the various trot groups and other sects whose existence is basically unaffected by the rise and fall of mass movements. So by the 1990s the field was clear for memory of revolutionary left politics to be largely lost and replaced by quite reactionary pseudoleft politics of the sort that was rejected as revisionist or hippy bullshit in the 1960s.
11.
Very true. There are a lot more important aspects (going back to the failure to recover from collapse of the second international). But I’ve focussed on the above because it points towards something deeply and perhaps inevitably embedded especially in the USA that will be especially hard for you to revisit and reconceive. US imperialism had been in decline since the early seventies and has not been the “number one enemy of the people of the world” since the mid-seventies. Mao and Chiang Ching inviting Nixon over wasn’t some embarassing aberration. Getting that wrong for 3 decades lands you in a spot where its difficult to even discuss very live current political issues like Iraq and Afghanistan or understand what’s happening in Nepal. Its a bit like some of the tankies who became communist when Stalin was leading the war against fascism. They just could not see the Soviets as anything but central to progress. Likewise its difficult for both individuals and political tendencies that grew out of the Vietnam period to think clearly about the USA – especially if they actually live “in the belly of the beast”.
11. I hasten to add that those of us who did escape that syndrome haven’t got anywhere either so it certainly isn’t the most important problem. It just may be one of the hardest for Kasama to face up to.
12. Subhead on “Fidelity”. Ok, but what does the language in the paragraphs from Badiou capture that is not better expressed by Kasama’s concept of “reconceiving” or the Nepalese concept that the revolution does not revive but develops? Or above from Lenin on orthodoxy?
nando said
(side point: Arthur’s determination to turn every conversation towards his embrace of U.S. imperialism makes me support his banning. Do we really need this crap in every thread? And if that really is his reason for being here, lets just throw him out now and let him go rhumba with Christopher Hitchens.)
* * * * * *
So to take just one relevant point:
Arthur writes:
First: The question asked is a description of a discussion that needs to unfold. Exactly, we need to dig into what the work of Badiou means for the current work of communists — (including the evaluations of the methods of Nepal’s maoists)
From many different sides, a number of different forces in the world are grappling with “fidelity” — how to push forward the communist project under these conditions. And there needs to be a sorting out of what to uphold and what to create anew in the somewhat worn tapestry of existing Marxism. And we need to BOTH create for ourselves a theoretical framework for such a sorting and then do the sorting. And in that process, forge what the 9 Letters calls a “new communist coherency.”
Badiou suggests a version of a theoretical framework. And he makes his own initial forays into discussions of what is exhausted and what is relevant.
I think that the way things are being posed is an important initial leap beyond how many communists are thinking: For example it is a rupture with the idea of going “back to basics.” The problems we face are not (mainly) the result of “deviations” or “revisions” from a series of supposedly “classic” Marxist conceptions — to be cured by reembracing those basics.
For example, Bill Martin makes the point in an earlier post that each “stage” of Marxism so far has involved a reconception of communist organization. (I.e. the approach of Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto is quite different from the approach adopted by Lenin. And the view developed during the Cultural Revolution by Mao of the relationship of party to the people, and on the question of struggle within the party is a major departure from conceptions assumed by the communist movement of Stalin. Bill’s thought is that it would be no surprise if this moment and this process of reconception produced new approaches to communist organization. Badiou has his view (including a view that the communist party and a subsequent party-state are outmoded). And while I tend to disagree with Badiou on important elements of that — i think we really do need to look at these questions afresh — in terms of how contraditions and class struggle and our past experience lead us to conceive of our next and emerging communist reorganization.
So how are Badiou’s conception of fidelity different from Kasama’s call for reconception — I think we are learning from Badiou (with a critical read), even while we are revisiting how early marxists reconceived the ideology they inherited.
* * * * *
As for Lenin and orthodoxy: There were historical reasons why Lenin paraded his break with previous Marxism as “orthodoxy.” Similarly, there is a paradox that Mao (who did so much to break with Stalin) found himself casting his break with the USSR as a defense of Stalin. And you can see in Lenin’s twisted logic (in the quote Arthur gives above) how hard it is to claim BOTH embrace of “orthodoxy” AND a creative approach to reality.
We should not cast our work in the guise of “orthodoxy.” It would be possible to critique dogmatic Marxists (like the RCP) from the point of view of orthodoxy — for example, to imagine some “better,” “earlier” more orthodox Maoism (circa 1980). But that would be an illusion and a disservice. The problem with Bob Avakian (to take one example) is not that he made breaks with “orthodox” Maoism — but that he has pursued a wrong and idealist course in his own creative process.
The 9 Letters speaks to this, saying:
In other words, to retreat back to the assumed coherence and correctness of an earlier Maoism would just be to embrace a different and earlier set of contradictions.
In some ways, the Nepalis present themselves as orthodox, even as they assert the necessity to be creative (as Arthur says they assert that you can’t imitate and recreate an earlier revolution.) They say (in their letter to the RCP) that everyone can agree on strategy and the “ABCs of Marxism” — and that the difficulty (and controversy) comes in applying that to tactics (i.e. to the specific conditions of each country).
But in fact that is not particularly dialectical: there are no simple “ABCs of Marxism” — there is no kernal that is fixed, and closed, and final. And the creative process is not simply in the “application” of pre-existing and well known truths. The whole gets transformed in a dynamic process. (and the Nepalis recognizes that, in part, with their conception that specific applications of marxism can give rise to new “universalities.”)
final note: I would urge people to abandon a cranky approach to new ideas that says impatiently: Well, I listened to you, and maybe there is something different there, but how really is it better than what lenin said here or here or here.
that kind of mental conservatism is stopped up. You can’t even take the time to understand what others are working through — but compare each piece to your own dogmas in a partial and fragmented way.
And it leaves out John’s whole point that ideas are not being presented in the context of YOUR existing framework — but in the context of a new and changing world. There are NEW generations encountering revolution and communism through the process of what Zizek and Badiou are presenting.
I read remarks like Arthur’s opening: “This review does convince me to at least take a look, though its still not a high priority for me and will take some time.” And, it is hard to be generous. Such begrudging willingness to open a closed mind a crack. I just kinda think: well, welcome to our century. And will it “take some time”? Yes, exactly, and that is one small reason why the RCP’s critique of badiou is so shallow, and why the answers to many questions will not arrive overnight.
When Zizek packages 1917 lenin in “Revolution at the Gates” — he is not merely presenting “some old stuff” — he is presenting Lenin as some NEW stuff, as new eyes get to see Lenin anew.
And more: real work has to be done in order to understand how to appreciate previous revolutions WITHOUT reducing their experience to a dogma. Because transforming the previous into dogma makes it irrelevent and even repugnant — and deprives a new generation of the lessons, insights and methods to be salvaged (“aufgehoben“) for whatever now approaches.
And we don’t merely need to repackages and represent previous marxism for new times — but actually reconceive. “The theoretical knife has to go deeper than that.”
Just one example: I understand the claim of Engels to a ‘scientific socialism’ — especially in contrast to the dreamy, non-materialist, schematic, and utopian forms of socialism that previously existed. However, we also have to sum up the experience of “Marxism as a Science” — its pretenses of prediction and analysis — because that record has been spotty at best. For example: I have been jotting notes on the experience of almost forty years around the RCP — and the waves of “scientific” assertions and expectations. The expectation of revolutionary possibilities emerging around each corner (first assuming the spread of unrest to industrial workers, then assuming world war as an engine of conjunctural crisis, and so on right down to the present — where in an almost cartoonish way supporters of the RCP were led to say that a revolutionryh moment could jump off of a Katrina-like event.) It was necessary to make the best estimates of where revolutionary openings are. It is fair to make your best guesses and allign your forces appropriately. It is important to scour every event and world situation to extract where there may be revolutionary possibilities (i.e. “looking for loopholes.”) But why would we want to continue the “tradition” of claiming these estimates are “scientific” — especially when they have been wrong over and over (and have gotten more wrong with time). Those applying Marxism to events have not proven particularly more prescient than those applying other ideologies and analytical methods. (And certainly there is no reason to restrict this to the RCP — look at all the Marxist trends who insisted that after World War 2 that the depression would inevitably return? or the pronouncements of the Chinese 9th Party congress that imperialism was in its decline…..look at the theory of “general crisis” which was given quasi-religious status as orthodoxy, and was as wrong as the flat earth theory.)
Perhaps we should restrict “scientific” to a few core understandings — like the insights around labor theory of value, or the framework of “Preface of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy” — and not try to put the word “science” on every prediction, campaign or tentative analysis (as if it were a costume). And in some ways, that would be to approximate the real operations of science and of real scientists — where people don’t constantly announce their hypotheses as “world historic” and allow them to be vetted and questioned, proven or disproven. And who recognize that their field will always have competing theories, and that the final decisions over which ones are correct will take a long time, and will probably not leave any of the leading hypotheses standing fully intact.
celticfire84 said
This an exciting discussion. I was raised during the fall of communism, and seeing people my age discuss these ideas openly and curiously is like someone opened the door to a spring day after a long winter. From my day to day interactions and discussions, people have dropped the knee-jerk pretenses (not uniformly) that communism has failed and was a murderous disaster.
My first experience with an explicitly Marxist group one of my first questions was: so when is this shit gonna happen? And personally I think its appropriate to always be asking this, but also learning from the RCP’s crystal ball methodology.
I am intrigued by the idea of adulterous ideology, and John’s points about old tools under new circumstances.
Right now I am working with a coalition for a Bus Riders Union that has me talking to new people on a bus or light rail everyday. A good number ask about the books I’m carrying (Samir Amin right now) and it’s easily detectable in their voices that new ideas are the order of the day.
Badiou’s point about intellectual saturation as a process of sapping our ability to explore and as Lenin said, creatively develop and apply Marxism in our conditions is clearly manifested around the two line struggle over Nepal.
I think of the problems of revolutionary movements generally was an over reliance on foreign models. We still see this – how many numbers of Trot groups cling to the Bolshevik model, and imagine a kind of storming the winter palace in this context? Or the Chinese model in Latin America, or Africa..
I think communism – as project – is wide enough to encompass both the Nepalese revolution and thinkers like Badiou, while retaining it’s ability to not toss those tools that still work. I am not calling for some unprincipled support for everything that identifies as Marxist/communist like say the WWP, but rather, allowing constellations of projects under and umbrella of revolutionary thinking.
Stephen David Mauldin said
So Arthur has to Tango with Nando before the Rhumba!
What a long strange trip it has been. Its something to listen to the years stories behind these comments, such wealth and also burden perhaps. I also came out of the Vietnam era (Tay Ninh 67-68 in fact). But I went “spiritual” rather “political”. I feel the one led to the other, the “political” gradually over only the last 10 of these 40 years. My point is that I am quite sure I gravitated to Badiou because “fidelity to the fidelity” is an atheistic spirituality which is where I found myself. Now it occurs perhaps those travelers who started on the “political” road open to the “spiritual” just as I opened to the “political”. And so we converge in peace and love.
Now I was interested in the situation in Nepal originating exactly in that experience of war in my own life and also because I knew a lot about the spiritual culture there – its philosophical roots. The leaders of the Maobadi are largely male Brahmins. This is a tradition of deep analytical thinking as well as spiritual philosophy.
Maybe its hard to follow exactly what I mean. I am saying that it is not surprising that the nature of Badiou’s philosophy and communism would find synchronicity with a revolutionary evolution of the communist hypothesis in Nepal where an atheistic faith would find fertile ground for novelty.
I think Nando is pointing out that Badiou thought is not dismissible given his experience and knowledge of the story of communism. Zizek and Badiou are both influenced by Lacan and are close in many other ways as well as different – but Zizek is rather irresistible as opposed to “not dismissible”. Badiou is saying that the fixed elements of situations (in art, love, politics and science) are subject to transformation, to revolutionary rupture which leads through a process to a completely novel situation. Zizek has the same faith, but his emphasis is on how this is connected with the “defense of lost causes”, in recovering and sustaining valuable elements as in “new eyes seeing Lenin anew”. So if Arthur wants a “quickie” that’s it.
Of course, Arthur, in the case of both Zizek and Badiou there is a requirement of considerable learning curve. Zizek goes to the end of Hegel and beyond then brings it all out in Frankenstein, classical music, Hitchcock and god knows what next while cross referencing at every point with Plato to Marx and anybody since. A lot of words are spinning, but a hell of a lot of people don’t find it meaningless. If you want the “crisp summary”, well that is mathematics isn’t it? So Badiou says “{}”. Now go figure.
Anyway, it is worth a gander.. and I think you will find these guys are pretty thoroughgoing commies too.. I suspect, don’t know that much about it myself – as I have said I have kinda got here from another side.
Arthur said
SDM
Thanks. I’ve now spent a few hours on Badiou and Zizek (mainly Zizek because less boring). Not convinced the quickie does extract an essence. Equally unconvinced there’s much of an essence to extract at all.
Seems to be a product of similar phenomena to those Camille Paglia described in Vamps & Tramps.
emil said
greenred;
you are right about chomsky, but at least he is saying something, and the information he gives is useful, which is why people read him all around the world including non leftists.
this ‘fidelity’ is very christian way of seeing the world, and this whole thing seems extremely confused to me. i feel uncomfortable with the use of religious terms for politics, which is always a dirty business.
i simply do not think badiou and zizek are great philosophers, unlike Marx, or for that matter Nietzsche or bertrand russell. it seems to me promoted by western academia for the benefit of some people who want to do research and make careers with radical sounding words. but good luck if you guys get something out of it. basically, i think zizek and badiou are sophists and zizek in particular bullshits a lot.
btw has anyone read Alan Sokal’s ‘intellectual impostures’, where there is a section on badiou. sounds right to me. Sokal is a leftist by the way.
emil said
what do people think about the use of things like ‘fidelity’ faith’ etc. sounds very religious to me. further, there have always beens some quasi religious sentiments in marxism, and MLM in particular. the ‘cult of personality’. i think the way forward for communism is not to bring back more religious terminology, ( and badious thing with st paul is too much for me, altho it is a good book)while at the same time claiming we are doing a ‘science’.
Bruce noman said
Emil,
I think that you are confusing the terms ‘fidelity’ and ‘faith’ in badiou’s work. Here he is not simply speaking of something conceived of in religious terms. He has chosen ‘fidelity’ for good reason. Just as one can be faithful to a spouse, to a principle, to a meaning even, one can also be faithful to the event which badiou talks about. The root of fidelity and faith is the Latin word fidelitas: faith, or fidere: to trust. This does not imply anything religious. What badiou is explaining is the loyalty to the supplemental event which ‘happens’ in a situation (the structure of public knowledges and opinions which are the norm). To create a truth, a new sphere of thought (which is the need in our present time) there must be a ‘fidelity’ to the event, a struggle with the idea for a new determined point of thought.
Mike E said
People respect when revolutionaries remain “true” to the cause and the revolution. It is demoralizing when activists (especially leading figures) give up, or “sell out.” And it is important when core forces stay on the revolutionary road.
That kind of fidelity is important, for many reasons.
At the same time, it is worth struggling over HOW we have “fidelity to fidelity” — what does it mean to remain “true” to the revolution — as time passes, as conditions change, as our initial ideas and methods age and become exhausted.
It is possible to grimly clutch old verdicts and forms in a dogged but uncreative way. It is common to see things “through the prism” of how questions were posed twenty or thirty years ago. (Black nationalism? Technology? Security? Forms of mass organization? Assumptions about roads to revolution?)
In fact, dogged, exhausted politics (however nominally “revolutionary” in self-conception and rhetoric) can enable our common enemies so say to a new generation “see how isolated, tired, out-of-date, and rigid revolutionary politics have become…. and see how we are able to tolerate it because of its utter marginality.”
How can one appeal to a new generation in a new world with exhausted old icons, old verdicts, old forms whose pungency and relevance have simply faded. You can repackage this as a “new” synthesis — but who is fooled by that? A new generation knows they are shut out of a creative process. They can see the huge voids, backward-looking dogma and glaringly unanswered questions in that synthesis.
Just one example: Communists internationally are thinking through the legacy of the “one-party state.” Think about how THAT needs to be engaged and reworked… and think of the damage done by simply clutching that concept close — even while vaguely and unconvincingly promising to allow “elasticity” in future socialist societies.
So (imho) Badiou’s discussion of militancy and fidelity is very important. It raises the question of continuing on the revolutionary road, while creatively and flexibly being open to new “events” (and new “truth processes”)…
Our responsibility is more than just gritting our teeth, “not backing down from our stand” or “keeping the red flag flying” etc. Much more.
Much more.