Everything new
Is better than everything old.
—Bertolt Brecht
It’s 2014, and communism is back. Alan Johnson, writing in World Affairs, warns that ‘we can’t afford to just shake our heads at the new communism and pass on by.’ Johnson is referring to the contemporary explosion in philosophy and theory that amounts to a growing intellectual risorgimento of radical politics taking place across academia. It's inspired by the attempt of the French philosopher Alain Badiou to recast what he calls the ‘communist hypothesis’ as a kind of Platonic ‘Idea' or Kantian 'regulative Idea'—something that has continually fought to assert itself in reality. To think of communism as an 'Idea' in this sense, which Badiou is quick to clarify exists only as a 'very general set of intellectual representations' within a broader hypothesis (that is, cleared of its associations with nineteenth and twentieth century ideologies), means to see in it something like its a priori validity—an 'eternal' truth that has been historically muddled by empirical attempts to establish it outside of its 'ideational' existence (Badiou identifies 'two great sequences in its development' in 1792-1871 and 1917-1976), since, for Kant, an Idea is regulative when it provides a motivation for action but is itself not 'constitutive' of reality.
Johnson thinks that this amounts to a 'bleaching' of the totalitarian violence of the twentieth century. To think of communism as a 'pure Idea of equality', for Johnson, ignores the serious work of addressing the tragedies of 'really existing socialism'. He finds Badiou's project to be wholly unapologetic, even contemptuous of those liberals that stress the practical inevitability and attendant horrors of an empirical 'contamination' of the communist Idea by ideologies like Stalinism and fascism. Still, many contemporary philosophers and theorists have taken up Badiou's position, weighing in on its prospects. The suspects include Slavoj Zizek, Toni Negri, Michael Hardt, Gianni Vattimo, Alessandro Russo, Judith Balso, Alberto Tuscano, Terry Eagleton, Bruno Bosteels, and Costas Douzinas.
Johnson is especially bothered by what appears to him to be an ambivalence toward revolutionary violence and dogmatism in the writings of these intellectuals. He is concerned that this ‘new communism’ has the potential to spill into the streets, and not just stay confined to elite European and North American universities as an academic annoyance. The reason being that intellectual celebrities like Slavoj Zizek appear to have a lot of pull among ‘the young, the angry, and the idealistic who are confronted by a profound economic crisis in the context of an exhausted social democracy and a self-loathing intellectual culture.’ A conference held in 2009, entitled ‘The Idea of Communism,’ drew almost a thousand participants and resulted in a book published by Verso—a publisher Johnson sees as facilitating the growing respectability of the views of the ‘new communists’—by the same name. A certain kind of communism, at least in theory, is enjoying a resurgence. And Johnson, along with the readers of the Washington-based journal he writes for, have reason to be wary.
It’s 2014, and communism is back. Alan Johnson, writing in World Affairs, warns that ‘we can’t afford to just shake our heads at the new communism and pass on by.’ Johnson is referring to the contemporary explosion in philosophy and theory that amounts to a growing intellectual risorgimento of radical politics taking place across academia. It's inspired by the attempt of the French philosopher Alain Badiou to recast what he calls the ‘communist hypothesis’ as a kind of Platonic ‘Idea' or Kantian 'regulative Idea'—something that has continually fought to assert itself in reality. To think of communism as an 'Idea' in this sense, which Badiou is quick to clarify exists only as a 'very general set of intellectual representations' within a broader hypothesis (that is, cleared of its associations with nineteenth and twentieth century ideologies), means to see in it something like its a priori validity—an 'eternal' truth that has been historically muddled by empirical attempts to establish it outside of its 'ideational' existence (Badiou identifies 'two great sequences in its development' in 1792-1871 and 1917-1976), since, for Kant, an Idea is regulative when it provides a motivation for action but is itself not 'constitutive' of reality.
Johnson thinks that this amounts to a 'bleaching' of the totalitarian violence of the twentieth century. To think of communism as a 'pure Idea of equality', for Johnson, ignores the serious work of addressing the tragedies of 'really existing socialism'. He finds Badiou's project to be wholly unapologetic, even contemptuous of those liberals that stress the practical inevitability and attendant horrors of an empirical 'contamination' of the communist Idea by ideologies like Stalinism and fascism. Still, many contemporary philosophers and theorists have taken up Badiou's position, weighing in on its prospects. The suspects include Slavoj Zizek, Toni Negri, Michael Hardt, Gianni Vattimo, Alessandro Russo, Judith Balso, Alberto Tuscano, Terry Eagleton, Bruno Bosteels, and Costas Douzinas.
Johnson is especially bothered by what appears to him to be an ambivalence toward revolutionary violence and dogmatism in the writings of these intellectuals. He is concerned that this ‘new communism’ has the potential to spill into the streets, and not just stay confined to elite European and North American universities as an academic annoyance. The reason being that intellectual celebrities like Slavoj Zizek appear to have a lot of pull among ‘the young, the angry, and the idealistic who are confronted by a profound economic crisis in the context of an exhausted social democracy and a self-loathing intellectual culture.’ A conference held in 2009, entitled ‘The Idea of Communism,’ drew almost a thousand participants and resulted in a book published by Verso—a publisher Johnson sees as facilitating the growing respectability of the views of the ‘new communists’—by the same name. A certain kind of communism, at least in theory, is enjoying a resurgence. And Johnson, along with the readers of the Washington-based journal he writes for, have reason to be wary.
That's because it's easy to find concrete examples of a renewal of the 'regulative' function of the communist Idea in the growing protest movements against austerity—and increasingly toward capitalism itself—and the left-wing electoral victories that have been sweeping the globe. Zizek was well received when he spoke at Occupy Wall Street. In Greece, SYRIZA—an acronym for the Coalition of the Radical Left—continues to fend off Golden Dawn, with a recent electoral victory. In 2012, France elected their first Socialist president, Francois Hollande, since Mitterrand in 1981. Students in Quebec, though it didn't receive much press here in the United States,managed to sustain the largest protest movement of its kind in Canadian history for over three months. The protests in Chile against the privatization of education saw the rise of influential communists like the 25-year-old student leader, Camila Vallejo, now a member of parliament. For their first anniversary in 2012, los indignados of the M15 movement reoccupied public squares across Spain in order to show that 'another world is possible', vowing to continue their protest against the efforts of their conservative government to impose one of the harshest austerity programs in Europe. Groups like Occupy Our Homes were successful in reclaiming foreclosed upon homes for their
owners and against the banks. Everywhere vacant buildings are being seized in order to set up community centers and spaces in which these new movements can organize and grow. The original occupations set up after Oct. 6th of 2011 were a testament to an increasing awareness of the radical potential of the commons for any anti-capitalist struggle. The list could go on.
What's to be admired in these new social movements is their embrace of an 'Ideal' that prefigures the kind of society they wish to see in their actions: direct democracy, the goal of consensus, 'horizontal' organization and decision making (e.g., 'spokes councils') that go beyond the sometimes cumbersome nature of general assemblies, non-violent civil disobedience while sustaining an openness to a 'diversity of tactics,' like direct action and sabotage; and experiments in living (not 'dropping out' to the countryside but 'dropping in' to public squares and vacant buildings left useless). These are notions associated more with anarchism and autonomism than the puritanical Communism of the twentieth century.
And these movements aren't simply protests against austerity or Wall Street. Their appeal isn't the product of a general malaise, but is also something of a resurgence of hope, a recaptured solidarity. People are reassessing what's imaginable. Inspired by the so-called 'Arab Spring', a generation is refusing to give any weight to the argument that radicalism leads inevitably to the Gulag. May Day is back on people's calendars. The current economic crisis has revived interest in alternatives to capitalism. The tragedies of the twentieth century don't 'hang like a nightmare on the brain of the living,' as Marx put it elsewhere, and can be objectively assessed and criticized. Because, really, when was the last time liberals had to account for Robespierre and the guillotine? The recent history of human rights—what the French called the 'Rights of Man'—and liberal-democratic capitalism has its own horrors associated with any advocacy of its broader goals of a 'free' global society. The irony is that discussion of this history is confined to intellectuals and isn't some kind of moral penance that all liberals must take on in order to speak.
The discussions of revolutionary violence by the 'new communists', as with Johnson, are hardly ambivalent. For example, Zizek's attempt to 'repeat Lenin' is about returning to a revolutionary moment, and taking an entirely different route—to, in the borrowed words of Samuel Beckett: 'Try again. Fail Again. Fail better.' The more radical elements within these new movements, and the intellectuals that surround them, are not out to repeat 'capital C' communism so much as reinvent radical politics as an attempt to establish the 'communist hypothesis' as its guiding Idea, reminiscent of Plato's 'Form of the Good' in the Republic, inspired by new models of organization and resistance that are 'horizontal' , autonomous, and in opposition to any form of the State. Badiou himself admits, writing in New Left Review, that 'Marxism, the workers’ movement, mass democracy, Leninism, the party of the proletariat, the socialist state—all the inventions of the 20th century—are not really useful to us any more. At the theoretical level they certainly deserve further study and consideration; but at the level of practical politics they have become unworkable.' Johnson's contention that the 'new communism' is just an effusion of the old delusions and potential horrors of the left doesn't seem to hold up.
The organizational and philosophical core of these movements comes out of a deep recognition of the mistakes and possible calamity contained in any adherence to the radicalism of the past. Almost all of the above mentioned movements reject hierarchy, ideological purity, enmeshment within established political parties, or the idea of ever being beholden to monied interests. What is occurring is not a naive attempt to awaken from the dead 1848 or the Russian Revolution, or even May '68. When not engaging in theorizing themselves, protesters look toward autonomist Marxists like Toni Negri; radical anthropologists like David Graeber, an early organizer of the original Occupy Wall Street protests and a living example of the movement's 'anarchist roots'; Václav Havel, author of 'The Power of the Powerless'; philosophers like John Holloway, who advocate for the dissolution of power over its capture, inspired by the Zapatista movement in Mexico—to name a few—more than they do Lenin, Trotsky, or Mao.
And these movements aren't simply protests against austerity or Wall Street. Their appeal isn't the product of a general malaise, but is also something of a resurgence of hope, a recaptured solidarity. People are reassessing what's imaginable. Inspired by the so-called 'Arab Spring', a generation is refusing to give any weight to the argument that radicalism leads inevitably to the Gulag. May Day is back on people's calendars. The current economic crisis has revived interest in alternatives to capitalism. The tragedies of the twentieth century don't 'hang like a nightmare on the brain of the living,' as Marx put it elsewhere, and can be objectively assessed and criticized. Because, really, when was the last time liberals had to account for Robespierre and the guillotine? The recent history of human rights—what the French called the 'Rights of Man'—and liberal-democratic capitalism has its own horrors associated with any advocacy of its broader goals of a 'free' global society. The irony is that discussion of this history is confined to intellectuals and isn't some kind of moral penance that all liberals must take on in order to speak.
The discussions of revolutionary violence by the 'new communists', as with Johnson, are hardly ambivalent. For example, Zizek's attempt to 'repeat Lenin' is about returning to a revolutionary moment, and taking an entirely different route—to, in the borrowed words of Samuel Beckett: 'Try again. Fail Again. Fail better.' The more radical elements within these new movements, and the intellectuals that surround them, are not out to repeat 'capital C' communism so much as reinvent radical politics as an attempt to establish the 'communist hypothesis' as its guiding Idea, reminiscent of Plato's 'Form of the Good' in the Republic, inspired by new models of organization and resistance that are 'horizontal' , autonomous, and in opposition to any form of the State. Badiou himself admits, writing in New Left Review, that 'Marxism, the workers’ movement, mass democracy, Leninism, the party of the proletariat, the socialist state—all the inventions of the 20th century—are not really useful to us any more. At the theoretical level they certainly deserve further study and consideration; but at the level of practical politics they have become unworkable.' Johnson's contention that the 'new communism' is just an effusion of the old delusions and potential horrors of the left doesn't seem to hold up.
The organizational and philosophical core of these movements comes out of a deep recognition of the mistakes and possible calamity contained in any adherence to the radicalism of the past. Almost all of the above mentioned movements reject hierarchy, ideological purity, enmeshment within established political parties, or the idea of ever being beholden to monied interests. What is occurring is not a naive attempt to awaken from the dead 1848 or the Russian Revolution, or even May '68. When not engaging in theorizing themselves, protesters look toward autonomist Marxists like Toni Negri; radical anthropologists like David Graeber, an early organizer of the original Occupy Wall Street protests and a living example of the movement's 'anarchist roots'; Václav Havel, author of 'The Power of the Powerless'; philosophers like John Holloway, who advocate for the dissolution of power over its capture, inspired by the Zapatista movement in Mexico—to name a few—more than they do Lenin, Trotsky, or Mao.
