Badiou is a disaster
July 27th, 2010The Leninists in the U.K. can’t get enough of Badiou. They wish they were Badiou. He is their new Lenin. Anyone who mentions the Chinese cultural revolution in the same breath as the Paris Commune and the events of May 1968 needs quarantining. This is the blurb the SWP are using to sell his latest turd:
“Badiou insists that his book is not a work of politics, but one that deals with the issues it raises at a fundamentally philosophical level: rather than taking for granted the “failure” of communism, he is intent on defining failure as such, crediting with sagacity only those “who are not blinded by the propagandist notion of failure.” With this in mind, Badiou takes us from May 1968 to the Cultural Revolution to the Paris Commune. Rather than flinching from the historical precedent set by these events, Badiou invites the possibility that these so-called failures may be thought of as a sequence that is far from complete. He argues, in other words, “that the apparent, and sometimes bloody, failures of events closely bound up with the communist hypothesis were and are stages in its history.”
July 27th, 2010 at 12:17 am
Verso celebrates the maoist Badiou , this in 2010!
The escapee from the Vincennes Zoo, that is how Debord called Badiou is being celebrated by the ortho-marxists from Meard street, the none and only Verso and their miserable mag called the OLD LEFT REVIEW. Badiou is a strange character, he still has not criticized his maoist ghastly positions. He must be one of the last maoists in France. Incredible..He has been going on for 40 years, spreading confusion, ideological misery, creepy analyses, he is the best ally those in power have. He will never be sacked from the Ecole Anormale Inferieure. He is part of the bricks , just like Althusser was. What a pair! Verso must be really in the dolldrums if they have to wheel in Alain Badiou. Perry Anderson is in good company, Tariq Ali also, and Robin Blackburn.. What a Medusa raft, driftin’ on the high theoretical seas, they are all lost. They have made a fetish of the working class, they can’t get out of their leninist straightjacket..They are part of the old world.
Goodbye Badiou..
July 27th, 2010 at 12:33 am
of course verso love love loves badiou, they shut down AAAARG afterall, the bastards.
July 30th, 2010 at 10:25 pm
Badiou, with his focus on “communism” as “radical egalitarian democracy,” conceives of the relation between freedom and equality as an ontological one, in the mathematical terms of set theory, transhistoricizing it. Badiou does not recognize the historically specific nature of capitalist class struggle, but rather thinks of the “communist hypothesis” as follows:
“What is the communist hypothesis? In its generic sense, given in its canonic Manifesto, ‘communist’ means, first, that the logic of class—the fundamental subordination of labour to a dominant class, the arrangement that has persisted since Antiquity—is not inevitable; it can be overcome. The communist hypothesis is that a different collective organization is practicable, one that will eliminate the inequality of wealth and even the division of labour. The private appropriation of massive fortunes and their transmission by inheritance will disappear. The existence of a coercive state, separate from civil society, will no longer appear a necessity: a long process of reorganization based on a free association of producers will see it withering away.
“‘Communism’ as such denotes only this very general set of intellectual representations. It is what Kant called an Idea, with a regulatory function, rather than a programme. It is foolish to call such communist principles utopian; in the sense that I have defined them here they are intellectual patterns, always actualized in a different fashion. As a pure Idea of equality, the communist hypothesis has no doubt existed since the beginnings of the state. As soon as mass action opposes state coercion in the name of egalitarian justice, rudiments or fragments of the hypothesis start to appear. Popular revolts—the slaves led by Spartacus, the peasants led by Müntzer—might be identified as practical examples of this ‘communist invariant’. With the French Revolution, the communist hypothesis then inaugurates the epoch of political modernity.” (Alain Badiou, “The Communist Hypothesis,” New Left Review 49, January-February 2008)
But Badiou explicitly prefers the appellation “communist” to “Marxist.” This is because he finds that Marx falls short of the full breadth of “radical, anarchic equality.” At the same time, Badiou fails to heed Marx on what has radically changed about society since the Industrial Revolution, what was not yet the case in the French Revolution of 1789 or in Kant’s time, let alone in the time of the Spartacus Roman slave revolt!
Badiou does not conceive of the transformation of the capitalist mode of production that would allow for overcoming the socially pernicious aspects of specifically capitalist forms of inequality, the dangers of which are understood by Badiou, following Mao in the Chinese Cultural Revolution, rather atavistically. Mao conceived of the role of the revolutionary proletarian (or “communist”) party as the political means for suppressing tendencies towards social inequality.
Marx, by contrast, looked forward to the potential for overcoming the conditions of possibility for the reproduction of capitalist class dynamics in the mode of production itself: capital’s overcoming of the need to accumulate the value of surplus labor-time. Marx saw the historical potential to overcome this socially mediating aspect of labor in automated machine production. However, Marx also foresaw that, short of socialism, the drive to accumulate surplus-value results in producing a surplus population, an “industrial reserve army” of potential “workers” who thus remain vulnerable to exploitation. A politics based only in their “democratic” discontents can result, not in the overcoming of the social need for labor, but in the (capitalist) demand for more labor. Or, as Max Horkheimer, director of the Marxist Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, put it, in “The Authoritarian State” (1940), machines “have made not work but the workers superfluous.”
July 31st, 2010 at 5:59 pm
Very succinct analysis Chris, and excuse me for raising a slightly off topic point, but perhaps you can give us an idea of what is it you think is worth saving in those two other ‘communist’ mass murderers’ curriculum vitaes - Mr Lenin and Mr Trotsky? It doesn’t fail to amaze me, that you, as a student and scholar of Moishe Postone, refuses to comprehend that a proper understanding of his Time, Labor and Social Domination, means a wholescale rejection of everything the Bolshevik mince machine stood for.
Sean
August 1st, 2010 at 5:51 am
Postone does a disservice to his own work in defining it through anti-Bolshevism (i.e., anti-Lenin and Trotsky), which is hardly necessary. Furthermore, Postone’s anti-Bolshevism is not original to his work, nor is it what distinguishes his interpretation of Marx, despite what he himself may think. If that’s what you get essentially out of Postone, you’re missing the real point of his work. I disagree with Postone that world revolution was impossible in 1917-19. Adorno, for one, thought otherwise, pointing out in the 1960s that if the revolution in Germany had succeeded, Stalinism in the USSR could have been prevented. Bolshevism was not about being a “mince [meat] machine,” and Lenin and Trotsky were not “mass murderers.” — Of course not! The later course of the USSR’s history through Stalinism was not Bolshevism. It needs to be pointed out that Bolshevism was endorsed wholeheartedly (but not entirely uncritically) by Rosa Luxemburg, among literally millions of others at the time fighting against the barbarism of the capitalist world, and with reason. Living in 2010, it may be easy to forget that history. There’s a world of difference between civil war and the gulag. (Or was Abraham Lincoln a “mass murderer,” too?) But in the end the Right won: the (world) revolution was brutalized and strangled. One doesn’t need to idealize to recognize the worth of historical figures. — And before Kronstadt gets invoked, the anarchist historian, very sympathetic to the Kronstadt mutineers, Paul Avrich, concluded through well researched history of the event nevertheless that the tragedy of it was that Lenin and Trotsky were justified in their actions. Avrich discovered that (like other White anti-Bolsheviks), the Kronstadters were virulently anti-Semitic in their anti-Bolshevism, and not accidentally. Kronstadt was a Right-wing rebellion. Further research later only further bore out Avrich’s conclusions:
home.comcast.net/~platypus1919/avrichpaul_kronstadt1921ex.pdf
August 3rd, 2010 at 1:20 am
How you can conclude that Kronstadt was a right wing rebellion is beyond me - even Avrich denies this.
More documents have come to light since Avrich was writing his pro-Bolshevik partisan account. Some of us here were very impressed with your recent document on Freud and psychoanalysis - but the rose tinted spectacles you put on when analysing the Bolshevik terror completely closes down anything worth saving in the Platypus project. It is your achilles heel, Chris! The best we could possibly say is that the whole Bolshevik dictatorship was a tragedy from beginning to end. Applying the insights you made regarding the revolution in psychoanalysis, the dismemberment of the individual during the Bolshevik dictatorship only goes to illuminate the usefulness of Postone’s emphasis upon a vitally original rediscovery of Marx’s Capital, which has to be explained and propogated as far and wide as possible, and which in turn means we have to be more honest about the tragedy of 1917. Lenin himself admitted that he only just ‘got’ Marx’s Capital as late as 1914! By which time the whole misreading of Marx was part and parcel of Bolshevik orthodoxy, and so the framework of the future secret police state was already set in motion. We can speak about the tragedy of the revolution not spreading into Germany and beyond, but that is dealing in ‘what-ifs’ - there was no exit plan! As such it should really mean that we are even more critical of a Leninist tradition that makes sentimental excuses relying upon some kind of mystical ‘peoples will’ - unsurprisingly, such naive romanticism still holds a fatally hegemonic position that permeates the majority of radical critique. In the UK and US that may not be so dangerous, but in India the result is trains full of people get blown up in the name of Marx. The Leninist project is completely redundant for the world we inhabit in 2010, and until the Platypi collective do a wholescale root and branch inventory of the errors, crimes, misdeeds and lunatic behaviour of that period in our history, you only succeed in holding back the renaissance in radical ideas.
SD
August 4th, 2010 at 5:07 am
It’s a bad and entirely pseudo-Postonism to ascribe the problems of the Bolshevik Revolution to their not “getting” Marx, as if politics is a matter of theoretical “correctness!” The point is, was there a possibility for transcending the problems of Bolshevism as a function of Bolshevism’s success — this was Luxemburg’s take on things, and it should inform any historical judgment of what can and cannot be learned from this history. Neither rose-tinted glasses nor a jaundiced view is called for, but a critical approach, with critical awareness of the intervening regression that impairs our grasp of this history. We ought not to idealize nor vilify or demonize. The latter betrays one’s essentially conservative attitude. The Bolsheviks don’t need to be warded off, but understood.
August 4th, 2010 at 5:56 am
P.S. Adorno never said a bad thing and indeed said many good things about Lenin. I’m not a collectivist, and neither was Lenin or Trotsky. Luxemburg retains a romantic halo for some (bad) reason, as of she stood for individual dissent more than Lenin and Trotsky, even though she herself said that “he who wants to eat, must work!” in her Spartacus program of 1918. Furthermore, she never lost her fondness for Lenin (although she despised Trotsky). If Lenin was good enough for Luxemburg and Adorno, then he’s at least worthy of my consideration. Luxemburg said of the Bolshevik Revolution, which she support wholeheartedly, in one of her last published articles:
“The Bolsheviks have certainly made a number of mistakes in their policies and are perhaps still making them — but where is the revolution in which no mistakes have been made! The notion of a revolutionary policy without mistakes, and moreover, in a totally unprecedented situation, is so absurd that it is worthy only of a German schoolmaster. If the so-called leaders of German socialism lose their so-called heads in such an unusual situation as a vote in the Reichstag, and if their hearts sink into their boots and they forget all the socialism they ever learned in situation in which the simple abc of socialism clearly pointed the way — could one expect a party caught up in a truly thorny situation, in which it would show the world new wonders, not to make mistakes?
“The awkward position that the Bolsheviks are in today, however, is, together with most of their mistakes, a consequence of basic insolubility of the problem posed to them by he international, above all the German, proletariat. To carry out the dictatorship of the proletariat and a socialist revolution in a single country surrounded by reactionary imperialist rule and in the fury of the bloodiest world war in human history — that is squaring the circle. Any socialist party would have to fail in this task and perish — whether or not it made self-renunciation the guiding star of its policies.
“We would like to see the spineless jelly-fish, the moaners, the Axelrods, Dans . . . or whatever their names are, who, mouths frothing, sing their plaintive song against the Bolsheviks in foreign lands. And — just look! — they have found a sympathetic ear in such heroes as . . . Bernstein and Kautsky; we would like to see these Germans in the Bolsheviks’ place! All their superior understanding would rapidly exhaust itself in an alliance with the Milyukovs in domestic policy and with the Entente in foreign policy; to this would be added a conscious renunciation of all socialist reforms, or even of any move in this direction, in domestic policy — all this due to the conscious eunuch wisdom that says Russia is an agricultural country and Russian capitalism is not adequately cooked. . . .
“There is only one solution to the tragedy in which Russia in caught up: an uprising at the rear of German imperialism, the German mass rising, which can signal the international revolution to put an end to this genocide. At this fateful moment, preserving the honour of the Russian Revolution is identical with vindicating that of the German proletariat and of international socialists.”
www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1918/09/11.htm
Even though the practical fight is long gone (it ended back in the 1920s), the memory of it still requires vindication. As Horkheimer put it back then,
“The moral character of a person can be infallibly inferred from his response to certain questions. . . . In 1930 the attitude toward Russia casts light on people’s thinking. . . . I do not claim to know where the country is going; there is undoubtedly much misery. . . . [But] [a]nyone who has the eyes to see will view events in Russia as the continuing painful attempt to overcome [the] terrible social injustice [of the imperialist world].”
This was no uncritical siding with the oppressed on Horkheimer’s part. — Adorno and Horkheimer were not like the people around the SWP/U.K. today! There was a history before Stalinoid opportunism, if anyone cares to remember!