Towards the beginning of his paper at last weekend’s ‘On the Idea of Communism’ conference at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, self-described ‘anomalous sociologist’ Alberto Toscano cited the Observer’s recent review of The Meaning Of Sarkozy (2009) by Alain Badiou: ‘[W]hen he quotes Mao approvingly, and equivocates over the rights and wrongs of the Cultural Revolution,’ the review went, ‘it is hard not to feel a certain pride in workaday Anglo-Saxon empiricism, which inoculates us against the tyranny of pure political abstraction.’ Perhaps the inoculation isn’t as powerful as the reviewer hoped; the article goes on to admit that Badiou’s book is ‘strangely compelling’. In any case, it is an odd time to take a pride in ‘Anglo-Saxon empiricism’, since it is the unreflective, plain-speaking commonsense on which the British commentariat pride themselves that has led to the UK falling prey to the tyranny of another kind of abstraction, that of finance capital.
Slavoj Zizek
As you would expect, the current financial crisis was a subject that kept recurring at the three-day conference, and indeed may have partly accounted for the immense popularity of the event, which had to be changed to a larger venue because the level of interest was so high. But more than one speaker warned that it will take more than the crisis to undermine capitalism. As Slavoj Zizek rightly insisted, the dominant narrative of the crisis – whereby the excesses of particular capitalists are blamed, rather than the capitalist system itself – will only enable people to continue to sleep in the guise of waking up. Is it time for a return to communism? And, if so, to which idea of communism must we turn?
‘On the Idea of Communism’ was about Alain Badiou’s idea of communism. Badiou doggedly kept faith with the concept of communism at a time, after 1989, when it was both pronounced dead and criminalized , identified with the totalitarianism that a triumphalist liberal capitalism defined itself against. The key reference points for Badiou’s anti-statist version of communism are Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Jacobins and the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The most obvious absence from this list is Karl Marx, and Badiou’s interjection in the closing discussion (see clip below) confirmed that he rejects the idea – fundamental to Marx – that the economic and the political are indivisible. For Badiou, the political must always hold itself at a principled distance from the economic. But is ‘communism’ the best name for Badiou’s egalitarian and emancipatory philosophy? And does the word ‘communism’ have any further political viability?
Alain Badiou
The two speakers who most emphatically answered ‘no’ to this second question were sociology professor Alessandro Russo and writer Judith Balso. Russo argued that the collapse of the Soviet bloc at the end of the ‘80s had its roots in the Cultural Revolution of the ‘60s – a revolution that had might have had its epicentre in China, but which actually was manifested worldwide. The problem is that the co-ordinates of this discussion – party-state versus political organization – were set long ago and seem to have little relevance to the current situation. Balso’s model of the ‘state’ was so exorbitant – it included ‘opinion’ – as to encompass anything of which she disapproves. Certainly, Balso is right to highlight the way in which, far from retreating in late capitalism, the state is becoming increasingly authoritarian, with repressive measures against immigrants a particularly nasty expression of this tendency; after the bank bail-outs, though, it is surely clearer than ever that the state is at the whims of global capital.
Jacques Rancière
Terry Eagleton was the only British-born speaker at the conference, and he prefaced his embarrassingly lightweight musings with a sarcastic reference to the fact that, as ‘a mere Anglo-Saxon’, he was honoured to be among such company. Hopelessly out of his depth on a panel with Badiou and Jacques Rancière, Eagleton’s smug presentation, which used familiar Shakespeare references to make the hackneyed point that true communism would be about aristrocratic languor rather than worker-toil, suggested that the UK’s university system is as decadent as its broadsheet media. Shamelessly playing to the middlebrow gallery, offering theory-sceptics an emollient antidote to theoretical abstraction, the implicit message of Eagleton’s presentation was clear: no need to think, no need to bother your heads with all this difficult French stuff.
The difference between Eagleton and the likes of Badiou, Rancière and Antonio Negri was evident in body language and mode of delivery as much as in the content of what they said. In their different ways, Negri and Zizek had the gestural animation of the militant intellectual rather than the complacent posturings of the career academic.
Zizek’s closing remarks
Zizek’s presentation at the conference eclipsed that of Badiou, his ostensible master. It was necessary to begin again, Žižek said – echoing Badiou’s call to rediscover ‘the communist hypothesis’ as if for the first time. Badiou remains a scalding and bracing critic of the present managerialist restoration of power and privilege, but it is difficult to be confident that he is orientated towards thinking the future. By contrast, Žižek’s focus, like that of Negri and Michael Hardt, was very much on how current (apocalyptic) conditions – ecological catastrophe, the crisis of private property brought about by digitization, the impact on human identity of neuroscience and genetic engineering – may lead to new possibilities. Zizek is ready to affirm the emancipatory potentials brought by science-fictional capital’s liquidation of territories and identities. If what most of the conference speakers still wanted to call ‘communism’ is to be achieved, it will require nothing less than the construction of a new type of human being. (Something that this conference, with its punitively long sessions, also seemed to demand: maintaining concentration through three 45-minute papers in a row exceeds the tolerances of the human organism.) As Toscano and Hardt made clear, concepts such as equality and the abolition of property only appear to be self-evident; in fact they are at the moment only dimly thinkable. Theory, in its destruction of the very ‘workaday Anglo Saxon empiricism’ which treats private property and commodities as natural and transparent concepts, must play a role in the construction of this new collective subject.
Mark Fisher
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Does anyone have the full conference on video and would share it on the internet?
On the Idea of Communism – conference report
Organised by Birkbeck College, University of London, March 13th-15th 2009
By Nathan Coombs
An ambiguous spectre hangs over new formulations of Communist theory: a spectre called Marxism. In new Communist theory it cannot be fully discerned whether Marx has finally been put to rest, whether some organ without body of his theory persists; or rather, if his ghost is laughing, distraught, at the inscription of R.I.P. on his headstone, as the gears of global political economy grind on.
Still, there are good reasons for this ambiguity. Unlike Marx’s prophetic vision, the gravedigging of history turned out not to be capitalism digging its own hole, but rather capitalism, and a generation or two of disillusioned post-Marxists, digging the grave for Marxism itself. After all, the Marx of historical materialism appeared to die when capitalism emerged triumphant from the Cold War; the Marx of class struggle as the dialectical-historical motor of change appeared to die with the defeat of working class; and the Marx of revolutionary philosophy appeared to die with the turn to the anti-dialectical forms of ‘resistance’ propounded by Foucault, Deleuze, Laclau et al. Consequentially, when in recent years the term Communism has been resuscitated by theorists such as Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri and Alain Badiou, it has been at the expense of a presumed caesura between Marxism and Communism. The conjugated term ‘Marxist-Communism’ is meant to emphasise this separation between Communism – as signifying universalist collective action – and Marxism – as the Communist theory of a distinct, surpassed epoch.
In Badiou’s ‘Communist hypothesis’ this is implicit: the name Communism is subtracted from the epistemology of Marxism and meant to capture the generic Idea of Communism passed down through the ages: ‘from Plato onwards.’ Communism is thus not so much an organ without body, but a name without a body. Or more precisely, a name with many bodies; a constant process of reincarnation, of which Marxism was but the last in a long line of bodies to incarnate the Idea. But according to Badiou, Marxism is a body that has now outlived its purpose and needs to be vacated for its new, as yet undecided, form.
The greatest surprise, then, of the recent conference, which gathered a collection of Europe’s most prominent intellectuals to discuss Badiou’s ‘Communist hypothesis’, was the recurrence of Marxist references and thought in the most unlikely of places. Even Michael Hardt sought to frame his theory of immaterial production and ‘the common’ in terms of a homology to the dialectic between mobile and immobile capital in Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts. But in the rapidly shifting conditions of our political horizon perhaps this shift should not be so surprising.
On the first day of the conference, Birkbeck Law professor Costas Douzinas set the scene by noting that between the conference’s scheduling in summer 2008 and March 2009, the global economic crisis had made the subject matter more pertinent than ever, which helped explain why what should have been a small academic gathering, in the end managed to fill up the entire 900+ capacity of the Institute of Education’s Logan Hall. At the same time, Douzinas also reminded the audience to temper their expectations in the knowledge that this was just a philosophy conference and not, by implication, a workshop on economic analysis or political organisation. This observation pointed to what turned out to be a key set of antagonisms in the conference: the concrete analysis of political economy versus the crystalline beauty of abstract theory, and the examples of Communist movements within the State – in Bolivia and Nepal etc. – versus the imperative by Badiou and Judith Balso to act ‘at a distance’ from the State. In sum, what Douzinas’ disclaimer revealed was that what was meant as a pure philosophy conference was imbued with political expectations that it could inevitably not live up to and would let down some of the activist community who flocked to the conference expecting some leadership or practical signposts from the old guard.
Without wishing to reduce the numerous simmering debates and approaches in the conference to a rigid set of categories, it could be said that in general the more philosophical presentations were from Peter Hallward, Jacques Ranciere and Alain Badiou; the more whimsical reflections from Terry Eagleton and Gianni Vattimo; and the more directly related to political economy and questions of Communist organisation by Slavoj Zizek, Bruno Bosteels and Judith Balso.
To take the more overtly philosophical contributions first: Peter Hallward discussed the formation of Rousseau’s ‘general will’ as a model of voluntarist collective action; Jacques Ranciere argued that the historical distrust between Communists and workers is indicative of the separation of the classes in Plato’s Republic (he instead called for some variant of Laclauian populism in the form of the ‘general intellect’); and Alain Badiou grounded the Idea of Communism in the conditions of the empirical, historical and subjective elements of a ‘truth procedure’: to negate any confusion that his Communist hypothesis referred to a transcendental conception of the Idea.
The second category of contributions from Terry Eagleton and Gianni Vattimo were somewhat loose reflections. Vattimo stressed the difficulties of instigating Communism in the contemporary global economy and state of U.S. imperialism, and he also made some unconvincing points about the demonisation of Josef Stalin in the West. Eagleton’s presentation seemed to be particularly misunderstood by the majority in the audience. He presented Oscar Wilde’s life as a dandy as a model of Communism, which one audience member unsurprisingly interpreted as ‘aristocratic’ in the following question and answer session. Yet, even though Eagleton admitted that he was not ‘altogether serious’ in the analogy, the kernel of truth to his analogy was in fact profoundly Marxist: i.e. Communist society must be based on abundance and the elimination of scarcity; not by way of contrast, in the image of workers sweating in the fields or engaged in repetitive drudgery in the factory. This was an important point to make, especially within the context of the constant exhortations of the ‘post-materialist’ world by many anti-capitalists, who seem not to understand the link between emancipation and material abundance.
It wasn’t only his supporters that gave Marx a bad name. His theories were very exact in analysing the structure and modalities of capitalism but less precise or productive in suggesting where we go from here.
Marx and Freud still have a lot of harm to do one another, and it goes without saying that both their theories must be reflexive and dynamic, not dogmatic or fixed. They were partially determined by the context of their times and need rethinking on ours…
PS
See my just published May Day Manifesto on 21st Century Socialism website.
I am tempted to liken this to the Zimmerwald Conference held during the 1st world war by the internationalists. Though the one in Switzerland might be considered rather political than theoretical unlike this one; nevertheless, their similarity stems from the fact that they both aim finding “new ways” without losing authenticity. And so I believe it is a very exciting step on the right track.
Wouldn’t it be great if this conference could be organized annually?