The Communist Hypothesis

Alain Badiou

Description

A new program for the Left by the inimitable Marxist theorist
"We know that communism is the right hypothesis. All those who abandon this hypothesis immediately resign themselves to the market economy, to parliamentary democracy - the form of state suited to capitalism - and to the inevitable and "natural" character of the most monstrous inequalities." Alain Badiou
Alain Badiou's 'communist hypothesis', first stated in 2008, cut through the cant and compromises of the past twenty years to reconceptualize the Left. The hypothesis is a fresh demand for universal emancipation and a galvanizing call to arms. Anyone concerned with the future of the planet needs to reckon with the ideas outlined within this book.

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Philosophie politique
• Political Ideologies
• Individual Philosophers
• Political
• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophie et théologie
• Communism
• Social theory
• Politics
• Communisme

Informations

• Publié par: Verso
• Date de parution: 12 mai 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781781689431
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Communist Hypothesis
The Communist Hypothesis
ALAIN BADIOU
Translated by David Macey and Steve Corcoran
First published in English by Verso 2010
© Verso 2010
Translation David Macey and Steve Corcoran © 2010
‘A Brief Chronolgy of the Cultural Revolution’ translated by Bruno Bosted 2010
First published as L’hypothése communiste
Appendix first published as Presentation de Mao, De la pratique et de la contradiction, avec une lettre d’Alain Badiou et la réponse de Slavoj Žižek
© La Fabrique 2008
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author and translator have been asserted
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Verso
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Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-600-2
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Typeset by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh
Printed in the USA by Maple Vail
Contents
Preamble: What Is Called Failure?
I We Are Still the Contemporaries of May ’68
1. May ’68 Revisited, 40 Years On
2. Outline of a Beginning
3. This Crisis Is the Spectacle: Where Is the Real?
II The Cultural Revolution: The Last Revolution?
III The Paris Commune: A Political Declaration on Politics
IV The Idea of Communism
Appendix. Letter from Alain Badiou to Slavoj Žižek: On the Work of Mao Zedong
Preamble: What Is Called Failure?
1
T he mid-1970s saw the beginnings of the ebb the ‘red decade’ ushered in by the fourfold circumstances of national liberation struggles (in Vietnam and Palestine in particular), the worldwide student and youth movement (Germany, Japan, the USA, Mexico …), factory revolts (France and Italy) and the Cultural Revolution in China. It finds its subjective form in a resigned surrender, in a return to customs – including electoral customs – deference towards the capitalo-parliamentarian or ‘Western’ order, and the conviction that to want something better is to want something worse. It finds its intellectual form in what, in France, acquired the very strange name of ‘the new philosophy’. Despite the change of name, we have here, almost unchanged, all the arguments of the American anti-communism of the 1950s: socialist regimes are loathsome despotisms and bloody dictatorships. At the level of the state, this socialist ‘totalitarianism’ must be contrasted with representative democracy which, while it is of course imperfect, is by far the least bad form of government. At the moral level, which is the most important in philosophical terms, we must preach the values of the ‘free world’ centred on and protected by the United States. Because it has ended in failure all over the world, the communist hypothesis is a criminal utopia that must give way to a culture of ‘human rights’, which combines the cult of freedom (including, of course, freedom of enterprise, the freedom to own property and to grow rich that is the material guarantee of all other freedoms) and a representation in which Good is a victim. Good is never anything more than the struggle against Evil, which is tantamount to saying that we must care only for those who present themselves, or who are exhibited, as the victims of Evil. As for Evil, it is everything that the free West designates as such, what Reagan called ‘the Evil Empire’. Which brings us back to our starting point: the communist Idea, and so on.
For various reasons, this propaganda machine is now obsolete, mainly because there is no longer a single powerful state claiming to be communist, or even socialist. Many rhetorical devices have of course been recycled in the ‘war against terror’ which, in France, has taken on the guise of an anti-Islamist crusade. And yet no one can seriously believe that a particularist religious ideology that is backward-looking in terms of its social vision, and fascistic in both its conception of action and its outcome, can replace a promise of universal emancipation supported by three centuries of critical, international and secular philosophy that exploited the resources of science and mobilized, at the very heart of the industrial metropolises, the enthusiasm of both workers and intellectuals. Lumping together Stalin and Hitler was already a sign of extreme intellectual poverty: the norm by which any collective undertaking has to be judged is, it was argued, the number of deaths it causes. If that were really the case, the huge colonial genocides and massacres, the millions of deaths in the civil and world wars through which our West forged its might, should be enough to discredit, even in the eyes of ‘philosophers’ who extol their morality, the parliamentary regimes of Europe and America. What would be left for those who scribble about Rights? How could they go on singing the praises of bourgeois democracy as the only form of relative Good and making pompous predictions about totalitarianism when they are standing on top of heaps of victims? Lumping together Hitler, Stalin and Bin Laden now looks like a black farce. It indicates that our democratic West is none too fussy about the nature of the historic fuel it uses to keep its propaganda machine running. It is true that, these days, it has other fish to fry. After two short decades of cynically unequal prosperity, it is in the grip of a truly historical crisis and has to fall back on its ‘democratic’ pretensions, as it appears to have been doing for some time, with the help of walls and barbed-wire fences to keep out foreigners, a corrupt and servile media, overcrowded prisons and iniquitous legislation. The problem is that it is less and less capable of corrupting its local clientele and buying off the ferocious foreign regimes of the Mubaraks and Musharrafs who are responsible for keeping watch on the flocks of the poor.
What remains of the labours of the ‘new philosophers’ who have been enlightening us – or, in other words, deadening our minds – for 30 years now? What really remains of the great ideological machinery of freedom, human rights, the West and its values? It all comes down to a simple negative statement that is as bald as it is flat and as naked as the day it was born: socialisms, which were the communist Idea’s only concrete forms, failed completely in the twentieth century. Even they have had to revert to capitalism and non-egalitarian dogma. That failure of the Idea leaves us with no choice, given the complex of the capitalist organization of production and the state parliamentary system. Like it or not, we have to consent to it for lack of choice. And that is why we now have to save the banks rather than confiscate them, hand out billions to the rich and give nothing to the poor, set nationals against workers of foreign origin whenever possible, and, in a word, keep tight controls on all forms of poverty in order to ensure the survival of the powerful. No choice, I tell you! As our ideologues admit, it is not as though relying on the greed of a few crooks and unbridled private property to run the state and the economy was the absolute Good. But it is the only possible way forward. In his anarchist vision, Stirner described man, or the personal agent of History, as ‘the Ego and his own’. Nowadays, it is ‘Property as ego’.
Which means that we have to think about the notion of failure. What exactly do we mean by ‘failure’ when we refer to a historical sequence that experimented with one or another form of the communist hypothesis? What exactly do we mean when we say that all the socialist experiments that took place under the sign of that hypothesis ended in ‘failure’? Was it a complete failure? By which I mean: does it require us to abandon the hypothesis itself, and to renounce the whole problem of emancipation? Or was it merely a relative failure? Was it a failure because of the form it took or the path it explored? Was it a failure that simply proves that it was not the right way to resolve the initial problem?
A comparison will shed light on my conviction. Take a scientific problem, which may well take the form of a hypothesis until such time as it is resolved. It could be, for example, that ‘Fermat’s theorem’ is a hypothesis if we formulate it as: ‘For >n, I assume that the equation x n + y n = z n has no whole solutions (solutions in which x, y and z are whole numbers).’ Countless attempts were made to prove this, from Fermat, who formulated the hypothesis (and claimed to have proved it, but that need not concern us here), to Wiles, the English mathematician, who really did prove it a few years ago. Many of those attempts became the starting point for mathematical developments of great import, even though they did not succeed in solving the problem itself. It was therefore vital not to abandon the hypothesis for the three hundred years during which it was impossible to prove it. The lessons of all the failures, and the process of examining them and their implications, were the lifeblood of mathematics. In that sense, failure is nothing more than the history of the proof of the hypothesis, provided that the hypothesis is not abandoned. As Mao puts it, the logic of imperialists and all reactionaries the world over is ‘make trouble, fail, make trouble again’, but the logic of the people is ‘fight, fail, fail again, fight again … till their victory’. 1
It will be argued here, via a detailed discussion of three examples (May ’68, the Cultural Revolution and the Paris Commune), that the apparent, and sometimes bloody, failures of events closely bound up with the communist hypothesis were and are stages in its history. At least for all those who are not blinded by the propagandist use of the notion of failure. Meaning all those who are still inspired by the communist hypotheses in so far as they are political subjects, and irres