The Idea of Communism. Ipotesi sul comunismo. Fabio Raimondi - - Scienza and Politica. Per Una Storia Delle Dottrine 24 Matthew Charles - - Radical Philosophy Gavin Keeney - manuscript. Alain Badiou - - Filozofski Vestnik 30 3 Act or Revolution? Yes, Please! Santiago M. The Neo-Communist Manifesto. Filip Spagnoli - - Algora. Thought Experiments in Science and Philosophy. Massey eds. First as Tragedy, Then as Farce.
JJible the anti-totaLitarian coJldeldud around the notion tl1at there u a neceddary Link between that Dea and Terr The key moment in this temporary deadlock of the communist Idea was the failure of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which had attempted to revive the communist Idea outside the confines of the part and the state through a general mobiliza tion of the students and working-class youth.
The restoration of state order under Deng Xiaoping sounded the death knell of a whole sequence of existence of the Idea - what can be called the part-state sequence.
Rather, the task is to examine, and possibly to i nterrogate or destroy, the consensus theory that pl aces ful l responsibilit for Terror on the communist Idea. As a matter of fact, I propose the following method of thought: replac ing the debate between theor 1 and theory 2 with a debate between theories 3 and 4.
In other words: after a frst historical sequence i n which the communist Idea, on the side of bourgeois reaction, was sai d to be a criminal one, and the existence of any Terror whatsoever was, on the communist side, denied; after a second historical sequence i n which anti totalitarianism asserted that there was an organic link between the communist Idea, utopic and lethal , and state terror, a third sequence should now begin i n which four things will be asserted simultaneously: 1.
The absolute necessit for the communist Idea i n opposition to the unbounded barbarism of capitalism; 2. The undeniably terroristic nature of the first effort to embody this Idea in a state; 3. The circumstantial origins of this Terror; and 4.
The possibilit of a political deployment of the communist Idea geared precisely towards a radical limitation of terrorist antagonism. The heart of the whole matter, i n my opinion, is that, although the revo lutionar event does in fact lie, in a wide variet of forms, at the oriin of any political i ncarnation of the communist Idea, it is nevertheless not its rule or its model.
I regard Terror a in fact the continuation ofiurrection or war by Jtate meand. But even if i t has had to go through their vicissitudes, the politics of the communist Idea is not and must never be reducible to insur rection or war. For its true essence, the root of the new political time it constructs, has as its guiding principle not the destruction of an enemy, but the positive resolution of contradictions among the people -the politi cal construction of a new collective confguration.
To establish this point more firmly, we must natural ly start over again from the l ast two hypotheses concerning Terror. Even if the figures cited by the now consensual anti-communist propaganda are often absurd, we must ful ly recognize the violence and scope of Stalinist Terror. We must regard it as linked to the circumstances under which the historically unprecedented implementation of a regime inspired by the communist Idea, the regime of the socialist states, was undertaken.
They were the circumstances of an ongoing shortage of experienced, stoical political cadres, the best of whom were carried off early on i n the whirlwind. All of this created a political subjec tivit composed of a superego imperative and chronic anxiet. Uncertaint, ignorance, and fear of treason were decisive factors in what we now know about the climate in which the leaders made their decisions.
This subjec tivit in turn led to the main principle of action being to treat any contradiction as if i t were antagonistic, as if it represented a mortal danger. The habit that developed in the civil war of killing anyone who was not with you became entrenched i n a socialist state that was constantly amazed at having successfully prevail ed. All of this concerns not the communist Idea in itself, but rather the particular process of the first experiment with it in history. We must now start again from scratch, armed as we are with the knowledge of the potential outcome of that experiment.
We must maintain that there is no relationship i n principle between the communist Idea and state terror. I would even venture to make an analog about this for which I will be criticized: Was the Christian Idea linked in principle to the Inquisition? Or was it instead li nked i n principle to Saint Francis of Assisi's vision? This issue can only be decided from within a real subjectivization of the Idea. Nevertheless, the only way we can break free from the circumstan tial destiny of the communist Idea i n its guise as the terrorism of the part-state, an organization whose vision was shaped by the metaphor of war, is by deploying this Idea again i n today's circumstances.
There is nonetheless historical support for this undertaking that I would like to mention - that of the striking differences between the Soviet and Chinese experiments within the same model: the part-state. The common features of these two experiments are obvious. In both cases, the victory of the revolution took pl ace in an enormous countr that was still l argely rural, in which industrializawion was only just begin ning. It occurred under the conditions of a world war that had greatly weakened the reactionar state.
In both cases, the responsibilit for lead ing the process was assumed by a disciplined communist part that was linked to l arge military forces.
In both cases the leadership of the part, and therefore of the entire process, was composed of intellectuals trained in dialectical materialism and the Marxist tradition.
The differences between them, however, are great. The Chinese Part's popular base certainly included workers, but i t was dominated largely by peasants, especially in the mil itary - the Red Army of which Mao strikingly remarked it was responsible for 'carring out the political tasks of the revolution'. Secondly, the victor of the revolution i n Russia took the form of a short insurrection focused on the capital and the cities, and was followed by a terrible, anarchic civil war i n the provinces, with the intervention of foreign mil itary forces.
In China, on the other hand, there was first a bloody defeat of the urban insurrections based on the Soviet model, and later, under the conditions of the Japanese invasion, a very long sequence of peopl e's war supported by remote provincial bastions i n which new forms of power and organization were being tried out.
It was only at the end that a short classical war, with huge battles in the open countrside, destroyed the reactionary part's military and governmental apparatus. What I am particularly struck by is that the antagonistic confrontation with power and the political experimentation are not at all the same, and that the fundamental criterion of this difference is duration. Basically, the Soviet revolution was characterized by the conviction that all the prob lems were urgent, and that this urgency made violent, radical decisions necessar i n ever domain.
The insurrection and the atrocities of the civil war controlled political time, even when the revolutionar state was no longer under any immediate threat. The Chinese revolution, on the contrary, was bound up with the concept of 'protracted war'.
It was all about process, not sudden armed takeover. The most important thing to discern was long-range trends. And above all, the antagonism had to be. In the people's war, the preservation of one's forces would be preferred to glorious but useless attacks. And this preservation of forces also had to be able to be mobile if enemy pressure was too great. Here, in my opinion, we have a strategic vision: the event creates a new possibilit, not a model for the real becoming of that possi bilit.
There may well have been urgency and violence at the beginning, but the forces that resulted from this shock may have been dictated, on the contrary, by a sort of mobile patience - a long-term progress that could force a change of terrain without, however, reinstating the absolute rule of i nsurrectional urgency or relentless violence.
But what form, political ly, does the preservation of forces opposed to domination take? Terror can certainly not resolve the problem. Of course, i t imposes a certain tpe of unit, but a w. To preserve one's forces, and therefore the unit of those forces, is always i n the final analysis to resolve internal problems within the political camp concerned. And wl1at experience. These problems have to do with the methods linked to what Mao called 'the correct handling of contradic tions among the peopl e'.
And throughout his life he insisted on the fact that these methods were absolutely different from those that concern antagonistic contradictions. It is essential to maintain that communist-tpe politics seeks solutions to political problems. Communist-tpe politics is an immanent activit, an activit under the sign of a shared Idea, not an activit determined by external constraints such as the economy or the legal formalism of the state. Ultimately, every political problem boils down to a problem of the unit of orientation on an issue that is collectively defned as being the main issue of the moment or of the situation.
Even a victor over the enemy depends on the subjective unit that was the victors'. Over the long run, the key to a victorious treatment of antagonisms lies i n the correct handling of contradictions among the people -which also happens to be the real defition of democracy. Terror asserts that only state coercion is equal to the threats to the people's unit i n a revolutionar period.
This idea naturally wins the subjective support of many people whenever the danger is enormous and treason widespread. But it should be understood that Terror is never the solution to a problem, because i t is the problem's suppression. Terror is always far removed from the Idea, inasmuch as it replaces the discussion of a political problem, located at the border between the I dea and the situ ation, with a brutal forcing of the situation that swallows up the collective rel ation to the Idea along with the problem.
Terror considers that, by its ostensibly shifting what it calls the 'balance of ptwer', the parameters of the problem will also be shifted, making a solution possible.
Ultimately, however, every problem suppressed by force, even the problem of trai tors, is bound to return. Accustomed to solutions that are solutions i n name only, the state officials themselves wil reproduce internally the betrayal of the Idea that they have banished externally. This is because when the Idea, instead of lying i n the problems posed by the situation, serves to justif the terrorist abolition of these problems, it is in a sense even more weakened than it would be by frontal attacks on the Idea itself.
I 0 AlAINDIOU It is easy to see, then, that everthing hinges on the abilit to give the formulation and resolution of problems the time required in order to avoid terrorist short-circuiting as much as possible.
The main lesson learned from the last century's revolutions can be expressed as follows: the political time of the communist Idea must never compete with the established time of domination and its urgencies. Competing with the adversar always leads to the mere semblance, not the real, of force.
For the communist Idea is not i n competition with capitalism; it is i n an abso lutely asymmetric relationship with it.
As the dramatic conditions that accompanied their implementation clearly showed, the Soviet five-year plans and Mao's 'Great Leap Forward' were forced constructs. Slogans like 'catch up with England i n fifteen years' implied a forcing, a perver sion of the Idea, and ultimately the obligation of implementing Terror.
There is a necessary slowness, both democratic and popular in nature, which is particular to the time of the correct handling of contradictions among the people. That is why the fact that people worked slowly, and sometimes not ver much, in socialist factories, just as people work slowly and often not ver much in Cuba still today, is not in itself such a terrible thing. It was only - i t is only - a form of protest i n the eyes of the world of Capital.
Work time cannot be measured in the same way when it is related to the production of surplus value - namely, the profits of the oligarchy - as when it seeks to accord with a new vision of what people's lives should be.
Nothing is more important for communists than to declare that their time is not Capital 's time. In conclusion we can say: far from being a consequence of the commu nist Idea, Terror actually results from a fascination with the enemy, a.
And this effect is twofold. First, i t confuses the conditions of the militar confrontation with the enemy - insurrection or war - which are the conditions of the event of liberation, with the conditions of the affirmative construction of a new collective order under the sign of the power of the Idea. We can say that Terror is the effect of an equation of the event with the event's conse quences, consequences which are the whole real of the process of a truth, a real oriented by a subjective body.
In short, we will say that Terror is a fusion between event and subject in the state. What such violence especially destroys is the time of emancipation, which is on the scale of the life of humanit, not on that of the market's profit cycl e.
I n the end, we wind up with people like Gorbachev or the current Chinese leaders, whose only aim is to be admitted into the little group that repre sents the international capitalist oligarchy.
People who want more than anything to be recognized by their supposed adversaries. People for whom the Idea has no meaning anymore. People for whom the aim of all differ ence will have been to conquer power i n identit. We can then see that Terror has only ended up being renunciation, precisely because it has not allowed for the preservation of forces and their shifting; because i t has not devoted most of its time, as any political thought must, to that preserva tion; because it has not constantly poLiticizd the people in the exercise of wide-ranging local and central powers, of efficient deliberation.
Only the 'seize power' movement, or the 'occupations' movement in May '68 - as today i n Egpt or on Wall Street - represent a ftrst approximation of such politicization, which creates both its own pl aces and its own time. The renewal of the communist Idea, which is the task of the century now beginning, will be one in which revolutionar urgency will be replaced by what can be called its aesthetics, i n the Kantian sense.
It is not so much a change, even a violent one, which we will want to create in the status quo; rather, we will want everthing existing to be somehow curved in a new space, with new dimensions. We wil l find for the Idea what i t l acked - a l ack for which the furious impatience of Terror was both the cause and the price: we will find the absolute independence of both its pl aces and its time.
And i n particular I want to express my deep gratitude to Alain Badiou: not only because he could not join us in person in this conference that he had entirely planned i n close spiritual communit with Sl avoj Z izek, and is now experiencing hardship, but because it is entirely due to his repeated and personal insistence that I fmd myself tonight i n your company.
Alain and I are very ol d friends, going back almost to when I met him for the first time, although in those early years I was too impressed by his precocious phi losophical mastery, and the age difference formed an unbreakable barrier, however small it may appear fift years later. Soon after that he decided on a completely spontaneous and gener ous move to j oi n the small group of young philosophers gathered around Althusser, and immediately brought to us a new impulse while displ aying absolute egalitarianism.
None of us could ever forget that. Alain and I over the years have had strong disagreements, both philosophical and political, leading sometimes to quite harsh exchanges it was again the case recently when, after I had declined in somewhat aggressive terms his proposal to j oi n the conference on the Idea of Communism held in Berlin in 0, he wrote to me that I had managed never to, fi nd myself where 'things are really happening', after which each of us felt obliged to explain to the other why what he thought was not worth much.
But we have succeeded i n remaining faithful to one another; I have the fondest memor of his signals of solidarit and gestures of esteem, and I have found mysel f intellectually rewarded each ti me I have had to engage with his ideas or hi s arguments.
I am sad that he is not here tonight, but I wi l l try to act as if he were, and address him as if he could react or even respond. The title that I had proposed with only a vague idea of how I would treat it in detail - 'Communism as Commitment, Imagination, and Politics' - has led me to build an argument i n which I confront my own reflections 1 4 ETIENNE BALIBAR with propositions from some of our contemporaries, i ndeed protagonists of the debate on the ' new communism', including Badiou and Z izek, which - as you could perhaps expect from a professional phi losopher - fol lows a classical model.
This is the Kantian model of the three transcendental or perhaps only quasi-transcendental questions, albeit in a non-classical order. The first question, corresponding to the issue of commitment, can be phrased like this: Who are the commum". As you notice, I use a floating designator for the subject of the proposition, this ambiguit being part of the problem which needs to be discussed. And I make use of formul ae belonging to a well-known Marxian tradition, partial ly coinciding with our ' idea of communism', albeit somewhat modified.
These two formal characteristics will reappear in the next questions. And now, without further ado, let us examine the first question, the question of communist commitment. But I want also to explain why I believe that some of the consequences of this indisputable fact are, to say the least, problematic. However, to say that they are problematic is not to rej ect the premise, it is only to ask for a philosophical disquisition of the consequences.
They were all idealists, both in the ordinary and in the technical sense of the term: dreaming of another world and ready to sacrifice much of their lives, sometimes all of it, for their conviction, as Max Weber would say. This was indeed true of Marx, one of the clearest cases of practical ideal ism in the histor of philosophy and politics.
After decades of attempts on the part of some communists not all of them, but among them some of the most authentic to present the pursuit of communism as a process 'without a subject', it is high time to say that a rose is a rose, and not a bicycle, and that ' communism without a subject' involves a performative contradiction. But what makes the communist a subject different from others is primarily his or her commitment to a certain idea, which is also an ideal of course.
But one can add an additional argument, more specu lative: by defi nition, the ideal object or objective of the communist desire is not something that is part of the existing state of affairs. To quote here thefamous definition from Marx's German Deofgy to whi ch I will return - ' communism is the real movement overcoming the existing state of affairs' - changes nothing about the situation, because subjects can either resist the movement or contribute to it, and they contribute to i t only i f they desire it, whatever the conditions, material or spiritual, which can facilitate or even produce this subjective orientation.
So idealism is the condition for the commu nist commitment, or, better, i t is the philosophical name of that commitment. So far, so good; but now we have to careful ly examine the implications of that ideological fact, one by one and step by step, and 1 6 ETIENNE BALIBAR here perhaps we may find that the rigor of Badiou's insight, breaking with what I called the 'performative contradiction', is also accompanied by a certain blindness, or a certain refusal to envisage all the conse quences.
This will concern, I suggest, the pl ace of communism i n a 'world of ideas', the subjective consequences of idealistic convictions oefitiu, or fait ufneJd, in his termi nolog , or identification with the requisites and injunctions of an idea, and above all the modalities of the ' being in common' under the interpellation of that idea, which acquire a special importance in the case of the communist idea, because that idea happens to be precisely tl1e ioea of tl1e 6eing in common i n its purest form.
But let us be very careful about all this. A quick word, to begin with, concerning the pl ace of communism i n the world of ideas. And not even i n the even stronger sense of an idea which possesses the ontological and epistemological character of the absolute - namely the coincidence of the mark of truth and the mark of goodness and probably also, for that reason, the mark of beaut.
I am not suggesting that there are infi nitely many ideas of that kind in our intellectual world, but at least there are several, which we can tr to enumerate: Justice, Libert, Rght, Love, Mankind, Nature, the Universal, Truth itself, Beaut, but also Democracy, Peace but also War, i n the form of the eternal pofenwd ' father ing everthing' , the Market as an ideal form of a universally beneficial and self-regul ated system of exchanges, never realized in practice, but which can always be hoped for, and for which one can sacrifice certain interests , even the Nation or rather the People.
Even Propert. It is important to notice that we receive all these ideas through signifers, indeed master-signifiers: they pl ace the desiring subject i n a relationship of dependency with respect to this signifi er, however freely chosen. There is nothing special about communism from this point of view, and this is an element that we will try to reflect on the condtitutinn ofda6jectillih; relative to ideas, inasmuch as they bear names, or pass through signifiers.
What to do with this multiplicit? It might be tempting to explain this is a certain form of simplifed Platonism, with theological connotations that all the ideas which are absolute, or eternal, as Badiou would say, are in fact iden tical, or form oif erent named for the same absolute. The idea of communism becomes meaningless if it means the same as the idea of Propert, or the idea of the Pure Market, which are nevertheless ' ideas' i n the same ontological and epistemological sense.
Badiou certainly has a tendency to suggest that communism Ld tl? And as a consequence all the other ideas are either other names, perhaps partial names, for commu nism such as Equalit, or Justice, or the Universal or dimu!
This could be a form of philosophical naivety, an expression of his personal commitment to communism, the passion that inhabits his own desire, and so on. But I believe there is a stronger reason, which is that Badiou does not want to expose the characteristics of communism from outside, i n a distanciated or even rel ativistic manner, but from the inside, as a phenomenological elucidation of its intrinsic manifestation, or revelation.
The idea reveals its true character only to the subject who desires its realization, and it is in this character that the 'communist subject' is interested. However, the problem will now become that i t is impossible to analyze and to compare what differentiates a communist commitment from other commitments, which also can be rational or mystic, civilized or fanatic, and so on. Let us suspend for a minute this comparison, and return to the dpecicilj of the communist idea.
I believe that we can express it by saying that what we the communists desire is to change the wor! But, more precisely, they want to change the world - meaning, at least in a first approximation, the social and historical world, the 'ensemble of social relations' - radicaLLy, whereby I keep following certain Marxian formul ations l? Or the L4' e of the hwnand, i. It is important to underline this teLod, implied in the combination of the two ' changes', because from the communist point of view, to change the world is uninteresting if it does not lead ultimately to a new form of life in which 1 8 ETI ENNE BALIBAR the human qua reltionaL eddence ' becomes different, reversing the charac teristics of life under capitalism particularly unli mited competition, therefore permanent ranking of i ndividuals according to their power or their value, and i n the limit cases elimi nation of useless or 'valueless' indi viduals ; but changing the human involves changing the world, again if by this term we understand the social world.
Now there is a causal dissym metr in this articulation, which confers undoubtedly upon the communist idea an uchatowgiaL character, but there is also a retroactive, or reflexive effect, which allows it to mark the difference with a reLiiou.
I will present this retroactive effect, or reflexive dimension of the idea of communism, which is a practical dimension and here, again, the idealistic determination i s obvious , in the following form: although the emergence of the 'new men' or the new human l i fe is possi ble onl i f the world is changed, the world can be changed only if the subjects are extracting themselves, emancipating themselves from the determinations of the existing world, or at least already engaged i n a process of self-emancipati on.
Otherwise, a redeemer of whatever ki nd would be needed. Accordi ngly the practical, albeit subjective and reflex ive, dimension we are talking about is also a 'secular' one, i n a fairly simple sense of the term. It corresponds to a Verwirkficl7ltng which is also a Verweftfichung. Remember again Marx in Statuted ofthe InternationaL Workingmen' AMocintion, 1 : 'the emancipation of the working classes will be the work of the workers themselves'.
He speaks of workers, but clearly confers a uni versalistic dimension upon this name. Now this could seem enigmatic, or perhaps tautological, but we can give i t another formulation, whi ch is far from i nnocent in particular because it partially explains a contrario the failure of many 'communist attempts' : the commitment to the iea of com! Communist 'subjects' commit themselves negatiPefy, to begin with, i n the form of the elimination, the critique of their 'individualistic' self, their desire for power, domination, i nequalit i n order to become the agent.
We are perhaps now, in spite of the brevit of this description, which rema ins partly allegoric, i n a position to understand better what produces at the same time the strength and the problematic character of Badiou's understanding of the consequences of the idealism that he has rightly reaffirmed.
There is something strange in the fact that Badiou frequently refers to a Lacanian heritage that he would preserve, whereas i n fact he almost entirely reverses the articulation of subject-position and the action of the signifier as 'cause' of the subject that is so important for Lacan and of course, a fortiori, behi nd Lacan, there remains, like i t or not, a Freudian legacy of the analysis of the 'communit effect' of the identification of subjects to a common ideal, or 'model ' [ Vor6iLJ] from which they derive their shared ego-ideal.
The heteroge neit of the symbolic and the real becomes a pure possibilit of liberation. Writes Badiou: 'it i s i n the operation of the Idea that the i ndividual finds the capacit to consist "as a Subject"? This might provide a justification for the hypothesis that the communist idea is different from any other and therefore a commitment, an identification with the communist ideal, works on its own subjects in a manner absolutely different from any other - for example the idea of the Republic, or the idea of the Law, or the idea of the Market , albeit that there is a great probabilit that the justifi cation is tautological: all the other commitments would be heteronomous - they would involve a subjection to the master-signifiers on which they depend and after which they name themselves, whereas the communist commit ment would be autonomous, or, if you prefer a less Kantian terminology, i t would consist i n a kind of de -interpeLLation of the i ndividual as subject.
But then we need to take i nto account what has emerged as the singular determination of the communist idea - namely the fact that its ' impera tive' is a realization of 'being in common' in order to prepare for the world l To enter into that, we should discuss more precisely the di fferences between an ioea and an ioeal, and their differential relationship to the 'object' of desire. And the difficult becomes redoubled - on the subjective plane as on the historical plane.
I t is ver striking here to see that Badiou has a marked preference for an adjective that is far from i nnocent to characterize the kind of ' commu nit effect' that belongs to communism as a militant activit, as well as an ideal to become realized i n the world: the adjective intenJe, leading to the notion of interuih;.
One that will have everyone own everything but controlled by the government. This society would be based on the common ownership of the means of production and would not rely on social classes, or money. List of communist ideologies Wikipedia Council communism is a far left movement originating from Germany and the Netherlands in the s. Council communism continues today as a theoretical and activist position within both Marxism and libertarian socialism.
Do not be afraid, join us, come back! Communism is designed to allow the poor to rise up and attain financial and social status equal to that of the middle class BTW, I provided Mr. Buchar the idea for the name of his documentary film. Download Free. Newer Post Older Post Home.
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