Much-Needed Revolutionary Strategy: How Does It Get on the Menu
Posted by Mike E on October 26, 2010
by Nando Sims
Communist philosophers Badiou and Zizek appeared at New York’s Jack Tilton Gallery on October 15. Readers of this site attended, and Radical Eyes wrote a report on the event.
In reply, Rafael made a simple comment:
“With so many crisis, it’s bewildering how, based on the summation, they couldn’t speak to any concrete strategy/line.”
Why?
Are you assuming that it is always possible and always necessary to lay out a “concrete strategy/line”?
Why would we assume that it is the job of communist philosophers to develop communist political strategy? Perhaps it is wise for them to stay on the terrain of their life’s work and is perhaps someone else’s responsibility to develop “concrete strategy/line.”
I went to lectures by Stephen Jay Gould on evolution, including a discussion of dialectics in biology — but it didn’t occur to me to blurt out “That’s all very good Stephen, but what precisely should we communists now do concretely based on your insights?” Why would we approach radical philosophers differently from radical biologists? Or (another example) Bob Dylan writes (in his autobiography) that people kept coming up to him wanting his suggestions for political action (as if the radical poet was, at the same time, the radical leadership they needed). It was (to put it mildly) frustrating for him.
Or after a discussion by J. Arch Getty, should we respond, “That’s all very interesting about the 1930s and all…. but we live in the twenty-first century, and you didn’t say anything (not a THING!) about what strategic line we communists should adopt now?” Is that any way to respond to a radical historian laying out massive amounts of important work?
A Perhaps Justified Reluctance
Badiou (i’m less familiar with Zizek) clearly does not WANT to answer your question “What is to be done?”
I think that (on some levels) he believes it can (a) best be answered by others, and (b) can only be elaborated at some specific points in the arrival of radical new events (after some significant progress in the summation of previous radical events).
In many ways, such caution is in sharp contrasts to many communists around us who are a mixture of know-nothing and know-it-all — who pontificate on power, strategy, and world affairs with remarkably little serious experience or investigation. Some even imagine they can foresee (or even actively pre-figure) future forms of socialist state in the absence of experience or a specific allignment.
Perhaps we should welcome it when serious communist thinkers show a caution against babbling nonsense out of school.
Badiou is very careful in using political examples in the course of making his philosophical work. But despite his intentions, there is a constant preoccupation (among others) to sift through his philosophical writings (as if we were panning for gold)– to systematically cast aside the explicitly philosophical and to pick out little nuggety pieces that seem purely political… i.e. to treat the philsophy as dross, and his occasional political comments as the real deal. And so attemptto artificially construct a non-existent “What is to be done” from a writer who carefully thinks it would be unwise to make an integrated proposal on political matters.
Why do that?
Why not ask instead about the reasons Badiou puts limits on his own political pontification, and whether or not those limits are worthy of respect. And then what responsibility that puts on the rest of us!
Do We Privilege Concreteness over Abstraction?
I sometimes feel like people respond to this work as if they were in a restaurant looking over a complex and highly developed menu and complaining loudly that some other particular dish is not on the list. Perhaps you are in the wrong restaurant. Perhaps you should just cook at home.
Where does this come from?
Is this an impatience with any theoretical discussion that doesn’t (quickly, directly) move on to making “concrete” proposals for “what is to be done?”
Should we really think there is only one question on the table, and that this sole question is the strategic-political one? Do you think that if someone doesn’t have an answer to that political strategic problem they should just shut up about all the other problems they are investigating (and perhaps helping to solve)?
And let’s not hide it: There also seems like there is a lingering anti-theoretical view that says “abstract = bad” while “concrete = good.” If someone really wants to argue this, why don’t you just come out and say it explicitly.
In my view (by contrast), there are many crucial matters that can only be discussed at a high level of abstraction and that can’t simply be immediately transposed into some realm of the concrete. And not every investigation can or should provide an immediate answer to the question “Ok, how precisely is this inquiry of value to us here and now?”
Much hostility to abstraction (and certainly to philosophy as such) is simply instrumentalism — i.e. that the value of an investigation is measured by its most short-term applicability. (“How exactly is this idea useful to us?”) And it also ultimately doesn’t understand the relative independence of theory or the often protracted process by which theoretical inquiries plow up insights that can serve emancipation. Or that they often serve emancipation by means other than simply helping to propel “concrete” actions.
We don’t just want to interpret the world, we do want to change it. And we want to make sure our practice is guided by advanced theory. But if we have some narrowly impatient view of these relationships, we might actually bypass the hard work of interpreting the world altogether (a process with its own laws and problems), and reduce thinking to some quick generation of superficial tips for “doing it.”
Where Does New Strategy Come From? And Who Creates it?
I share impatience with the current absence of strategy. It is agonizing to all of us for many reasons. But my view is that its absence is not a result of dawdling around abstract points — but precisely because it is difficult to move to strategic matters (and concrete proposals) in the absence of major work of various kinds.
But I sometimes wonder how deeply we have thought about the problems of developing a “concrete strategy/line” — how is that done? What are the prerequisites? What did the development of previous “concrete strategy/lines” look like?
For example, Mao spent decades inventing (and then reinventing) a “concrete strategy/line” for making (and then continuing) revolution in China. It was not something he just pulled out of his ass one day — after ruminating for a while on philosophy. It was not something you could sit in Jack Tilton Art Gallery and demand of two communist philosophers (who are providing you mountains of other valuable work!)
I don’t assume that philosophers should extract political/strategic or concrete proposals from their work. Or that, if they were compelled to, the results would be particularly good.
(If the poet Bob Dylan or biologist Gould had unwisely started proclaiming “concrete strategic lines” based on their work it would have been valuable? I suspect that Dylan’s political proposals would have been less mind-blowing than his songs.
The Strange Posture of Unsatisfied Customer
Further, I don’t assume that it is possible to simply “spit it out” at any given point — or that the only reason someone would refrain from making strategic pronouncements is some subjective indifference to the urgency of action.
Why wouldn’t Badiou shout at you (in his audience) “Here is my philosophical work, now in exchange why don’t you elaborate back the concrete strategic line we all need?”
Who says he is the do-it-all workhorse, and you get to play unsatisfied customer or the passive consumer of other people’s effort? Shouldn’t we instead say thank you for what they do provide (at great effort)?
Rather than blaming philosophers for not becoming political leaders, perhaps we should urge ourselves to pick up our work — and sketch out how a new strategic set of plans will emerge (and do so in the midst of a critical mass of activists who might make those plans a material force).
Carl Davidson said
Fair enough. Let Badiou, et. al., do philosophy. I love doing philosophy, having taken my degree in it, and I’m also an advocate of the instrumental theory of truth, although I’d venture that my ‘instrumentalism’ is used in the strict sense, not in the special meaning you give to it.
The challenge, then, is to those who think that by engaging these debates, they are THEREBY solving the problems of strategy. Perhaps they are, but they still have to lay out their strategic working hypotheses.
I’d agree that it takes time. It took my small group 10-15 years of study and mass work combined to come up with our proposal, and it still needs further work. But it’s on the table, put up in previous threads here.
Lenin returned to a study of Hegel at critical points, then came back and wrote more strategic and tactical polemics and plans. That’s worth noting. But we should also note that many others delved into Hegel, and remained stuck there, or came out as preachers of the Christian Gospel, or all sorts of things.
So let Badiou and Zizek carry on, as did Dylan and Gould (both of those two are among my heros!). But as for strategy and tactics, the ball is right back in our court.
Nando said
Raphael writes:
I’m not sure I understand your metaphor — regarding Maggies Farm. Dylan wrote a song saying “I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more.” I.e. i’m tired of being a drone. OK.
And? What is your point?
You ask:
Perhaps. It seems both concrete and abstract to me. (A unity of opposites…) But even so, I still don’t get your point.
We are not just talking here about developing the desire to be free. We are talking about developing a vast strategic plan to remake society in order to be free. (The song “Maggies Farm” doesn’t deal with the question “What is to be done?” — does it?)
Developing the desire to be free happens on a very different level of abstraction and scientific investigation from the strategic plan for solving the problem. Just as developing the desire to cross a river is a different thought process from developing the engineering plan for the bridge that ultimately crosses.
Can you elaborate what you are getting at?
You write:
That is because some people are looking to have this “blueprint” handed to them — as if it is there (already) behind one of the hidden doors onstage. (As if it is “there for the taking” and we just need to figure out who, exactly, has it in their pocket.)
In fact we aren’t just “seeking” it — we are responsible for inventing it. And complaining that someone else hasn’t already done so seems to miss that point.
And if you (i.e. we) are planing to invent a strategic plan — and are trying to gather the prerequitie insights and summations for such a creation, then the creative and exploratory work of all kinds of radical thinkers looks more helpful and less “bewildering” (to repeat your earlier word).
On a separate point, you describe “closing that mental/manual divide… as a barometer of theory is important .”
Is this true? Do we judge our theory by whether it has closed the mental/manual divide? Are you saying that the value of theory can be judged by whether it can be successfully popularized and adopted? Isn’t the theory actually measured by other standards (like truth and the guiding of revolutionary practice), and not by whether we have somehow broken down the barriers between that mental domain and the domain of manual work? We can judge our revolutionary project (over the long haul), in part, by whether it breaks down the mental-manual divide within human society (over the long haul) — but surely it is not a “barometer” for judging specific theories or theorists?
Rafael said
Yes. I appreciate the analysis. There’s a spontaneous premium on pragmatic individualist results that I didn’t know weighs so heavily, as well as workerism.
Radical Eyes said
Nando writes:
It’s an interesting scenario. I only wish that such a dialogic mode of discourse was characteristic of even our most professedly radical and communist philosophers these days.
Eddy Laing said
XI
The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.
MODERN1ST said
thank you nando for making these points, and very clearly. particularly the point about unhappy consumers – I think that basically sums up the instrumentalist critique of theory quite well.
Radical Eyes said
Another point, though Badiou and Zizek are clearly philosophers–and thus ought to be engaged on that level–, they certainly do also present themselves again and again as critics of and/ort endorsers of particularly lines and forms of political struggles.
So it does not seem to me to be quite so out of line to attend their talks or to read their works with the hopes of gleaning some sort of practical “take away” (insights, suggestions, lessons, or principles for guiding action of one sort or another) as it would be to approach, say, a Stephen Jay Gould or Bob Dylan event in this manner.