Kasama

The following is expanded from remarks delivered to the Platypus Society, April 2011.

By J. Ramsey

I would like to begin by thanking the Platypus Affiliated Society, the organizers of the conference, as well as Chris Cutrone for organizing this panel, and inviting me—inviting us—to speak with you today.  I do not at all take it for granted that there are groups of people who come together to share views and engage in thoughtful discussion about capitalism, Marxism, communism, and the path to human emancipation.

While the ravages of this capitalist system inevitably provoke resistance, opposition, and fight-backs against this or that latest attack, crime, abuse, or injustice, (“Where there is oppression, there is resistance!” as Mao put it)—and these demand our attention, study, and our support—the collaborative cultivation of communist ideas and the space for those ideas, is something else.

It is something that requires deliberate and conscious effort, planning and care in its own right.  It is something that needs to occur in light of and in conversation with those unfolding struggles in the world, but which is not reducible to them.

As Badiou points out, and it is a point that informs his work broadly, unlike the  1840s of Marx’s day, and certainly unlike the greater part of the 20^th century, we cannot today take it for granted that communism, either as an idea or as a movement—a movement aiming at the radical abolition, overthrow, and transformation, rather than the amelioration or reform of the existing capitalist system—exists at all.  Nor do I believe that we can leave this process of negation to the dialectical dynamics of capital itself, as if the system inevitably calls forth its own grave-digggers, though it digs and fills plenty of graves, that’s for sure.  It is a system that does not only alienate and proletarianize, but zombifies human beings, that demands, as Badiou puts it, that people “Live without Ideas,” that they give up what is potentially “eternal” and “true” in them, and become reduced to the sheer “animality” of particular individuals or groups pursuing their immediate and selfish” interests.”

Ours is an age—and in particular, the US, is a society—where the very existence of what Badiou calls the Communist Hypothesis is in no way guaranteed.  In this context, the very idea of Communism –indeed the very idea of Big Ideas!—needs to be defended, nurtured, and deliberately developed.  And so it is important that we not take forums like this conference, or each other, our fellow-travellers on this revolutionary road, for granted.

The Platypus panel description we were given asks several questions.  They are certainly not exhaustive of the topic of Badiou, (post) Maoism, or Communism.  But they do seem to me to be a reasonable, if not the only, place to start.

As a participant in the Kasama Project, I have developed an appreciation for processes that deepen and that unpack complex questions, rather than coming to quick “verdicts” that often fail to engage the multiple layers of logic, assumption, evidence, and interpretation that are involved in whatever is the subject matter at hand.

The problem with reaching and issuing quick verdicts—whether about the nature of the Soviet Union in the 1930s, China in the 60s, about the historical legacy of Maoism, Trotskyism, or anarchism, or about the philosophy of someone like Slavoj Zizek or Alain Badiou for that matter—is not only (objective) that such verdicts fail to do justice to the multiple aspects of the matter at hand, but also (subjective), that unless we delve more deeply into the layers of our subject, rendering explicit—and then problematizing and engaging—the underlying assumptions coming from what appear to be various “sides” on a particular issue, we fail to create the possibilities for true understanding, for principled and productive struggle, mutual transformation, and collective reconception.  We talk past each other—and either fall into sectarian squabbles, or paper unity that lacks a solid foundation.

Bringing together radically inclined thinking and struggling people within the United States both through common practical work, and protracted theoretical wrangling is, I believe, one precondition for the reconception of contemporary communism, which is then a prerequisite for honest-to-god regroupment of the revolutionary forces in this country.

Kasama, at its best, strives to make a material contribution to this communist reconception and regroupment by developing a space that encourages a better mode of discourse amongst radicals and revolutionaries, of various stripes.  It is in this spirit that we have engaged the work of Alain Badiou (and many others, with whom we do not all necessarily “agree” or “disagree.”)

I want to use my time, in part, to deepen and unpack, just the first of the really quite loaded questions that were put to us by Chris Cutrone and the Platypus Society for this panel.

First, we are asked by the blurb, “How does the prominence of Alain Badiou’s approach to communism speak to the present historical moment and its emancipatory possibilities?”

This question like many questions has embedded within it a number of aspects.  1. The prominence of Badiou’s thought.  2.  Badiou’s approach to communism. And how each of those relates to: 3.  The present historical moment. 4.  And its emancipatory possibilities.  1.2.3.4. + aspects.  Each of these aspects brings forth another question, complex in and of itself—questions that deserve full treatment in themselves—among them:  1.  What is the prominence of Badiou’s thought today? 2.  What is the nature of Badiou’s approach to communism?  3.  What is the best way to understand the present historical moment?  4.  And what are the emancipatory possibilities within in this moment? Finally, 5.  How does Badiou’s thought relate to #3 and #4 , to the contemporary moment and its emancipatory possibilities?

In this paper I would like to take a stab at just the first couple of these, beginning with:

1. 1.     How prominent is Alain Badiou’s thought today, and what is the nature of this prominence?

That is, who is reading Badiou—and who is not—and where are they located, geographically, socially, politically, etc?  How many readers of what demographic does Badiou have and how does that compare relatively with other philosophers or communists, contemporary and not.  With Zizek?  With Noam Chomsky?  With Marx?  With Lenin? With Mao?  What have been the determinants of this rise to “prominence”?  And what are the contending lines of interpretation in Badiou’s reception?  I will admit that I am not at present in a position to speak to this question very concretely, let alone with authority.  Events where Badiou speaks—at least in places like New York City—seem to be well attended.  Apparently the “Idea of Communism” conference in London a year or two ago at which Badiou (as well as Zizek and others) was a featured participant, drew well over a thousand attendees—five or ten times the expected turnout, which is suggestive.  And certainly Verso has been pumping out his books in translation.  A Google search for “Alain Badiou” as of May 14 returns about 550,000 hits.  (“Badiou” alone gets about 1.1 million.  “Slavoj Zizek” around 740,000—“Zizek” 1.8 million. “Noam Chomsky,” on the other hand, returns almost 8 million. )

Further, many of Badiou’s students and “adherents” (for lack of a better term), such as Peter Hallward, have produced work (such as Hallward’s Damming the Flood, about the 2004 US coup vs. Aristide in Haiti) which have had a significant impact.  The work of Hallward at the very least shows that an affinity for Badiou’s thought is in no way incompatible with a close and concrete analysis of contemporary economic and political issues, even a rigorous class analysis.  Furthermore, it is worth noting that Hallward and other Badiou students and scholars, such as Bruno Bosteels, maintain a critical relationship, not a dogmatic adherence to his views.

Among many of my self-identified socialist-activist comrades, I don’t sense that Badiou has to date had much impact at all, if they have even heard of him.  The exception here would be those like the RCP –and perhaps Chris Cutrone –who have taken a great deal of notice of Badiou, but who represent him as a mystifying pseudo-marxist antagonist who threatens to block the path to a genuine communist movement.  Mapping the influence and prominence of Badiou is a worthwhile project.

At a minimum, Badiou’s rise to prominence would seem to signal a growing open-ness—at least in academic circles—to the issue of communism, or at least to the radical opposition to capitalism, which is to say, a waning of certain cold war era prohibitions, a fading of the “end of history” Fukuyama-ist haze that has blanketed academia for so long.  Badiou’s prominence, at least within humanities, English, and philosophy departments would likewise appear to signal a certain moving beyond the limits of what is often called “postmodernist” discourse, with its fetishization of plurality, irony and uncertainty, its privileging of difference, and its ethics of respecting the Other at a distance, even at the expense of meaningful intervention…His “prominence” suggests a re-emerging interest in questions of unity, universality, truth (with a  capital T), and politics (with a capital P), as well as thinking in terms of transforming inherited situations in fundamental ways, rather than ‘subversively’ playing on their hybrid margins.  It’s also worth considering the radical difference between Badiou and say the empirical approach of Noam Chomsky, an invaluable thinker whose critical work of exposing the system’s crimes is still haunted, nonetheless, by a prohibition on thinking “Big Ideas.”  AS already noted, Badiou identifies this prohibition as one of the symptoms of our time, as well as one of the major obstacles to breaking out of the present capitalist system.  In my view, these developments are largely positive!

Of course Badiou’s prominence is not the only sign of this moment’s open-ness to Big Ideas, or to communism in particular.  A recent Rasmussen poll for instance found that 11% of “likely voters” in the US found Communism “more moral” than the current US political and economic system.  Breaking down these numbers (for their “Platinum members only”) the pollsters found that 26-7% of 18-29 year olds interviewed reported that communism was both moral and that it worked better than the current US system.   (And keep in mind here of course that “likely voters” tend to be wealthier and, by definition, more committed to the political existing system than, say, non-voters, let alone say, non-citizens, or the un-documented.)  To me these are exciting and encouraging numbers. To what extent are Badiou and the discourse around him and other emerging philosophers of communism have contributed to this support vs. merely benefited from it in increased attention and readership?… It is difficult to say.

But what does seem likely to me is that aside from matters of direct influence, many of these people who are now reporting themselves as in favor of communism, are likely coming at communism, like Badiou, in new and what may appear to us as “strange” ways, not primarily through a reading of Marx’s Capital, but through other vectors of discourse, experience, reflection, and influence.  (Though undoubtedly in many cases Marx or Marxism continue to play an important role, as well they should.) We should not treat such emerging and undoubtedly sometimes uneven or eclectic tendencies with hostility or dismissal.  Rather we should be open and welcoming towards those new and “strange” communisms, and towards other radical or anti-capitalist tendencies.  We should not elevate secondary disagreements to the level of antagonistic contradictions.  We should investigate, in a critical materialist and dialectical spirit what these new things are, where they are coming from, and what are their competing tendencies in terms of where they can or will go in the future.  Always with an eye to how we can intervene in that process, as well as be transformed by it for the better.  Our method should be one that seeks to learn from such “unorthodox” communisms—even when they don’t call themselves “communists”—not simply to “set them straight,”  a method that seeks a deepening engagement with those ideas and those who bring them forward.  Ours should be an approach that, where possible, seeks to identify unity amidst varied parties, not in a static or pluralistic way, but in order to establish common ground, key problems, and important sites for future work and struggle.  Keeping in mind, always, a point that is central to Kasama at present, that though it is clear that the conditions on this planet call for revolution, that capitalism must be overthrown, and some sort of communism achieved, it is not at all clear how we are to get from here to there, given our present circumstances.

This brings us to the second question within the given question:

2.  What is Alain Badiou’s approach to communism?

I would start by noting an assumption that is built into this question.  Namely, that there is only one singular Badiou-ist approach to communism.  While I haven’t yet read let alone made a close study of Badiou’s complete oeuvre, I have read enough to learn that there is, in fact, more than one Badiou—as there is more than one Marx for that matter!  There are tensions, competing trajectories, and changes that move through Badiou’s work, regarding many elements of his philosophy, including several that are quite directly linked to communism and to politics.

I do not mean to throw open the door to a kind of textual indeterminacy, as if we can “never generalize about Badiou because he is not even identical with himself.”  Rather I aim to suggest that in dealing with Badiou—or other complex thinkers such as Hegel, Marx, Lenin, Adorno, or Mao—we would do better to imagine Badiou’s work as a kind of layered terrain, a textual topology with which we best familiarize ourselves before pronouncing a totalizing judgment, that is, if we want to stand a chance of entering that terrain, to grapple with Badiou seriously, and/or to engage students of Badiou in a meaningful way.

For example, in reading Bruno Bosteels recent essay (“The Leftist Hypothesis” from the Idea of Communism book, based on talks from the Birkbeck conference), it becomes clear that there are differences between Badiou of the early 1980s and the Badiou of today, as regards, for starters, such “fundamental concepts of Marxism” as class struggle, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and revolution.   Similarly in his 1969 essay “Outline of a Beginning,” curiously reprinted in the middle of Badiou’s most recent book, The Communist Hypothesis, (in a section entitled “We Are Still Contemporaries of May 1968,”) Badiou appears very much open to the notion of something like a maoist party of “a new type,” one that puts into practice the mass line, (“from the masses to the masses”) with cadre dialectically engaging mass movements, in a process of movement party mutual transformation.  A Party that continually struggles against bureaucratization, ossification, as well as fragmentation and anarchic isolation—a party that would incorporate the very mass friction it encounters as the means of its radical renewal and transformation, as well as the masses’ (self)transformation.  For this Badiou of 1969 or even of 1982, “the party-state” is not simply “exhausted,” as it appears in much later work (though even here there are variations and competing tendencies).

For instance consider Badiou’s rather sympathetic description of the notion of the Party as it was grasped by Marx and for that matter, Lenin (from his book Metapolitics): “It is crucial to emphasize,” Badiou states, “that for Marx of Lenin, who are both in agreement on this point, the real characteristic of the party is not its firmness, but rather its porosity to the event, its dispersive flexibility in the face of unforeseeable circumstances.”  To quote a long passage that Bosteels finds in Badiou on this point:

Rather than referring to a dense, bound faction of the working class…the party refers to an unfixable omnipresence, whose proper function is less to represent class than to de-limit it by ensuring it is equal to everything that history presents as improbably and excessive in respect to the rigidity of interests, whether material or national.  Thus, the communists embody the unbound multiplicity of consciousness, its anticipatory aspect, and therefore the precariousness of the bond, rather than its firmness.” (Metapolitics, 71).

Tracing the development of Badiou’s thought into his later writings, in relationship and in contrast to these writings of the 1980s and 1990s, Bosteels (in “The Leftist Hypothesis” essay) asks, skeptically, but not dismissively: “What happens when of these four fundamental concepts [class struggle, the dictatorship of the proletariat, revolution, and communism] only communism is retained?…Moreover…what are we to make of Badiou’s recent calls for the complete separation of the communist hypothesis both from the party form of politics and from the figure of the State”? (Bosteels, 50).  We too should raise and pursue such critical questions.  Note: they are not simply rhetorical questions aimed as disqualifying Badiou’s project as anathema to Marxism or “true communism,” but, rather, real questions that demand investigation and clarification.  That is: If we cannot rely solely on the concept of class struggle producing a revolutionary communist subject, (the party being the official, and even historically destined leader of that struggle) then where might—where will, where must—such communist subjectivity come from?  Similarly if the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat—as embodied in a socialist state—has proven historically to not in itself adequate to guaranteeing the progress of the revolutionary transformation of capitalism, through socialism to communism, then what new concepts and new forms are necessary and available to us to prepare the way for this radical transition?  Considering a history of socialist states that have had difficulty “withering away,” how ought communists to relate to the notion of “socialism” today?

Moreover, we might ask, (in ways that challenge Badiou): Does reckoning with the limitation of these “fundamental” concepts of Marxism to date necessitate their retirement (as “exhausted”), or merely their revision, reconception, or perhaps their being supplemented by other additional concepts and organizational forms? And if so, what are these concepts and forms?  What in these concepts is still worth fighting for and reclaiming, albeit “against the current” of the times? Moreover we should ask to what extent has Badiou carried out the investigation of past communist events and sequences necessary to justify these rather bold theoretical generalizations?  To what extent does our understanding of these previous sequences support, confirm, complicate, or contradict Badiou’s conclusions?

Personally, I should note, that while my thinking has been provoked on Badiou this point, I have yet to be convinced by Badiou’s more recent conclusion (which derives from Sylvian Lazarus, as I understand it) that the “Party-State” form of emancipatory politics is totally “exhausted.”  In my estimation the quite informative and thought-provoking historical examination that Badiou gives the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China—Badiou’s prime example for the exhaustion of the party-state organization as a communist form of politics—does not provide a conclusive evidentiary basis that could justify the rather universalizing conclusions he then draws about politics in general.  At the same time, I unite with Badiou when he writes (in the Communist Hypothesis) that Mao remains the name of a problem we still face; that is the contradiction between maintaining power for a revolutionary order on the one hand, and unleashing further emancipatory currents that threaten to destabilize even the main institutions of that new order, on the other.  I can at least unite with Badiou in that it is clear to me that the problem of the communist party must be thought again, whether or not we retain this name “party” in the end at all.

These days Badiou continues to reconsider and reframe his position with respect to the state.  For instance, as Bosteels has pointed out, Badiou’s essay “The Idea of Communism,” in its published book form, differs subtly but importantly from the talk version of the essay he delivered at the Birkbeck conference some months prior.   At the conference Badiou put forth his frequently quoted point about the “party-state” being “exhausted.”  Yet, in the published version Badiou argues that it may still be possible for the Idea of Communism to include a projected figure of ‘another state’ so long as this post-capitalist state to come is on the one hand, subtracted from the present State and secondly is figured so that it’s essence is to “wither away” (CH 248).

I don’t mean to wade too deeply into this particular—and important– thicket  of the Party-State.  The main point here is that both historically, and even in our present moment, Badiou’s thinking is an active and developing project, one that—as Bosteels has sugggseted, is still subject to the pressure and effect of ideological struggle.  Indeed, as Badiou himself argues, we are in a time of political experimentation, the experience and summation of which then ought—indeed must—be figured back into theoretical constructions. To do otherwise would be to fall into dogmatism.

But to get back to the issue of what communism means for Badiou.

Badiou offers several different Communist concepts, each of which have a distinct meaning and position within his thought, the main being:

What he calls “generic communism”

What he calls The Communist Hypothesis

And also what he calls The Idea of Communism

To get at the meaning of the first two concepts, we might do well to quote the following passage, from The Meaning of Sarkozy, one of Badiou’s most recent books.

“In its generic sense, ‘communist’ means first of all, in a negative sense—as we can read in its canonical text The Communist Manifesto—that the logic of classes, of the fundamental subordination of people who actually work for a dominant class, can be overcome.  This arrangement, which has been that of history ever since antiquity, is not inevitable.  Consequently, the oligarchic powers of those who possess wealth and organize its circulation, crystallized in the might of states, is not inescapable” (98).

As Badiou continues, moving to the second concept:

“The communist hypothesis is that a different collective organization is practicable, one that will eliminate the inequality of wealth and even the division of labor; every individual will be a ‘multi-purpose worker,’ and in particular people will circulate between manual and intellectual work, as well as between town and country.  The private appropriation of monstrous fortunes and their transmission by inheritance will disappear.  The existence of a coercive state separate from civil society, with its military and police, will no longer seem a self-evident necessity.  There will be, Marx tells us—and he saw this point as his major contribution—after a brief sequence of ‘proletarian dictatorship’ charged with destroying the remains of the old world, a long sequence of reorganization on the basis of a ‘free association’ of producers and creators, which will make possible a ‘withering away’ of the state.” (98-99).

Generic communism here appears as an actuality of resistance.  The actuality of this resistance and rebellion then makes possible the self-consciousness of that historical movement: the communist hypothesis.  From this point on, for Badiou it becomes possible—at least in partial and fragmentary ways—to raise the issue of communism as a question and a problem to be solved, in its own right.

To offer a few further reflections on this passage: It is statement about possibility; and about the non-necessity of the current order of things.  It is not to be confused with the hopefully hopelessly vague World Social Forum slogan that “Another World is Possible” in some clear and positive sense, as if the “alternative” is simply there for the taking (without a major revolutionary reckoning that involves the negation and overcoming of many aspects of the present situation).  It is a statement aiming to deprive the ruling capitalist order of classes and states of its aura as ‘natural’ and ‘inevitable.’   That aims to clear the ideological fog that obscures the path(s) forward: Things do not have to be this way.  We can make the world on new foundations.

There is more that we might say about even this short passage, namely its emphasis on the transformation of society not simply in terms of overcoming wealth inequality but also the division of labor, and in particular the division between mental and manual labor, and between town and country.  (The debt to Marx and to Mao here are unmistakable.)  Badiou, contrary to his critics is not simply calling for some radical egalitarian democracy of a “pre-marxian” sort.

The communist hypothesis for Badiou is a projected negation of the present conditions, and a posited horizon, not only to be strived towards but to be used as a critical—what he calls a “heuristic”—a Kantian “regulatory idea”; a means of “produce lines of demarcation between different forms of politics” that contend in the actuality of the present.  It is not itself a path to be followed but a kind of lens, a perspective through which to evaluate and to decide between paths that present themselves.  As he writes, “By and large, a particular political sequence is either compatible with these principles or opposed to them, in which case it is reactionary.  Communism in this sense is a heuristic hypothesis that is very frequently used in political argument, even if the word itself does not appear.”

As Badiou elaborates on this point, with rhetorical flair:

“If it is still true, as Sartre said, that ‘every anti-communist is a swine’, it is because any political sequence that, in its principles or lack of them, stands in formal contradiction with the communist hypothesis in its generic sense, has to be judged as opposed to the emancipation of the whole of humanity, and thus to the properly human destiny of humanity.  Whoever does not illuminate the coming-to-be of humanity with the communist hypothesis—whatever words they use, as such words matter little—reduces humanity, as far as its collective becoming is concerned, to animality.  As we know, the contemporary—that is, the capitalist name of this animality—is ‘competition’.  The war dictated by self-interest, and nothing more.” (Meaning of Sarkozy, 99-100).

Indeed, for Badiou, capitalism strives to make ‘animals’ of us all.

Badiou’s framing of the communism in terms of the Communist Hypothesis, of course, draws an analogy between the historical struggle to achieve communism and the proof of a mathematical theorem.  I see at least three implications of this framing: 1) It suggests an approach of testing and experimenting, of persistent inquiry rather than doctrinal certitude; 2)  In contrast with, say the language of Manifestation, to frame communism as a hypothesis emphasizes the importance of thought and learning in communism’s emergence; communism is not something whose emergence is simply immanent to the dynamics of capitalism and the class struggle, though its possibility is suggested—and its hypothesis established—for Badiou even by pre-modern slave uprisings like Spartacus, etc.  The working out of communism is something that requires abstraction and reflection, as well as conscious testing in theory and practice.  3)  By speaking of Communism as a hypothesis, Badiou reframes previous (unsuccessful) attempts at achieving communism as merely the “prehistory of the proof of the hypothesis.”  Failure, and the summing up and learning from failure, through close and situated analysis of those sequences, is absolutely crucial, to any scientific endeavor.  Certainly for an experiment to fail, or rather to produce negative results, does not impugn the project as a whole.  Past failures are nothing to be ashamed of, so long as you learn from them and persist in the proof! Indeed, they are often necessary to bring about the rare and precious positive breakthroughs.  Likewise with the history of the communist movement.

I will at this point bring in a fourth aspect which seems to me more of a danger implicit in this hypothesis framing.  Namely 4) that the mathematical rhetoric here may lead some to read Badiou as suggesting that the problems and questions of communism can be resolved solely within the context of controlled laboratory experiments, or through theoretical abstractions shared at conferences like these (or via websites even).  Certainly, in academic contexts many a thinker—Marx himself for one—has been domesticated in this way, divorced from practice that engages the world beyond the seminar table.  But is this tendency one that Badiou seeks to encourage?  I would say no. For alongside the imperative to learn from the failures of the communist movements and socialist states of the past, and to draw abstract and universal leassons from these studies, Badiou also calls us to examine the partial successes and failures of contemporary political movements whose actual politics and ideology are far from communist.

As he writes, for instance, “Today we need to investigate the real nature of the link to the people from the standpoint of the universal lessons to be drawn, of organizations limited by their religious allegiance: Hezbollah in Lebaon and Hamas in Palestine.   We should also pay attention to the countless worker uprisings in China, and the actions of the ‘Maoists’ in India and Nepal.  The list is by no means closed” (Sarkozy, 111).  The point here I want to underscore is that alongside Badiou’s mobilization of the communist hypothesis (and the communist Idea, t be discussed further below) and his emphasis on abstractions and subjective dynamics, is a perhaps less pronounced, but equally important imperative to investigate political situations past and present, with an eye to how the new communist sequence can be helped forth.

The Idea of Communism

Badiou’s Idea of Communism, which he describes as more of an operation—I might suggest projection or even project—than a fixed “utopian ideal,” has a distinct meaning, related but different from The Communist Hypothesis.   Basically, it is the operation through which an individual becomes Subject to a communist Truth-process, symbolically bridging the gap between the singularity of particular political practices and the great historic collective project of human emancipation.  If the Communist Hypothesis aims to open our eyes and help us see the possibilities and lessons of the past and present more clearly, than the Communist Idea, is an essentially subjective operation, one that makes the individual communist subject a part of something bigger than him/herself.  To quote Badiou, at several key points:

“An Idea is the possibility for an individual to understand that his or her participation in a singular political process…is also , in a certain way, a historical decision.  Thanks to the Idea, the individual, realizes his or her belonging as an element of a new Subject, realizes his or her belonging to the movement of History” (Communist Hypothesis, 235).

“In other words, the communist Idea is the imaginary operation whereby an individual subjectivation projects a fragment of the political real into the symbolic narrative of History.” (CH, 239).

“The Idea is a historical anchoring of everything elusive, slippery and evanescent in the becoming of a truth.  But it can only be so if it admits as its own real this aleatory, elusive, slippery, evanescent, dimension” (CH, 247).

“The role of this Idea is to support that individual’s incorporation into the discipline of a truth procedure, to authorize the individual, in his or her own eyes, to go beyond the Statist constraints of mere survival by becoming a part of the body-of-truth, or subjectivizable body” (CH, 252).

In short, Badiou asks us to anchor communist subjectivity in the imagination, not in the necessities of history.  The state of being a communist subject is not, for Badiou, something that can be reduced to, or read off of objective determinants, whether of class position, or party affiliation—certainly not just by adding the adjective “communist” to some pre-existing or half-thought practice or organization.  It is not something organic or stable or something guaranteed but something that is sustained only so long as the communist Idea is operative.  It is not guaranteed by History, which remains an imagined projected narrative, albeit a necessary one, if we are collectively to think, and through our thoughts, and actions supported by those thoughts, to actualize global human emancipation.

We may hear in Badiou’s language here a certain secularized communist recasting of Christian communion.  Through the operation of the Idea we become aware of our potential to join our individual self as part of a larger greater body of truth, and a movement of History.  Contrary to a certain vulgar secularism, within our age of cynicism, I find, this notion of the Communist Idea, of interest as a way to simultaneously (on the one hand) en-courage and sustain the fidelity of lonely and depression-visited radical anti-capitalists in a moment of Sarkozys and Obamas.  At the same time it is a notion that encourages rather than squelches local experiments in political practice.  For no practice can be deemed in itself in advance to be “communist” or “non-communist” based on simply its location or its immediate import; it is the way that practice is bound up with and mediated by, and becomes a site of the idea operation of communism that they will have become communist. The Idea remains an Idea not a certainty.  Just a hypothesis demands proof in practice.

Which then brings us to the final two questions in the assigned blurb:

3+4) What is the nature of the “present historical moment”?  And what are its “emancipatory possibilities?”

I might reverse this question and instead ask :  What are some of the things that stand in the way of the emergence of a movement capable of cultivating, organizing, and mobilizing these emancipatory possibilities?

A quick list comes to mind:

Fragmentation, pessimism, isolation

The TINA notion that “there is no alternative” to the capitalist system

Cynicism and nihilism (both on and beyond the left)

Dogmatism and Sectarianism (including a fetishization of or premature dismissals of tactics and forms)

Facile anti-communist dismissals of actually existing communists movements, past and present

I would argue that Badiou offers us perspectives and approaches, and a spirit of enthusiastic engagement , that can play a role in helping us in addressing all of the above weaknesses.  No magic bullet.  But an element of the mix!

**

In closing, a few notes on an additional question put to us by Platypus and by Chris Cutrone:

“How does Badiou’s conception of communism relate to the history of Marxism in the 20^th century, with its roots in the 19^th century?

As is well known, Badiou places particular emphasis and pays close attention to the moments of the Paris Commune, and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, as well as May 1968.

He places great emphasis on learning from failure.  Failure not as it was “doomed from the start” but as it was worked through in actual historical experience, theory and practice.

He places a particular focus on Mao as a name that still embodies a the practical-theoretical knot of the communist movement, even today, namely: How to build an organization that is massive and powerful enough to overthrow the present order, to sustain state power (in a capitalist-imperialist world), and yet is able to stave off ossification, bureaucratization, capitalist roaders—to remain a revolutionary agent encouraging, not suppressing the initiative of ‘spontaneous’ mass organization and social transformation.

Obviously, we are not in the position of picking up where Mao left off….The practical question for us is not “what could or should have Mao or the revolutionary cadre in China have done to transform their possibilities in the 60s or 70s?”  But how to organize NOW in light of the limits and the tangles that communist revolutionaries come up against in the past.

To briefly and provocatively conclude: what I take from Badiou in this vein is the necessity for us today to conceive of communist revolution as from the start—not simply after supplanting the present state power—a cultural revolution.   We need not just a revolutionary party, but a revolutionary people.   For which we need revolutionary intellectuals and activists who sink deep roots in the people not simply to build a core of cadre oriented towards exposing and eventually overthrowing of the current state power as well as the construction of a new and different one, but whose aim is to stir up and support emancipatory ideas and practices so as  to cultivate new cultural and social spaces that can now prepare the field, so that we have a shot of avoiding those pitfalls that have constrained and even toppled those who have come before us.