Calling All Communists! Review of The Idea of Communism, Edited by Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Zizek

It seems that we missed a hell of a conference.

In March 2009, in response to an invitation issued by Costas Douzinas, director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London, and Slavoj Zizek, among other things, the Institute’s International Director, twelve hundred people turned up to hear a small galaxy of leftist philosophers address the question “whether ‘communism’ is still the name to be used to designate radical emancipatory projects” (viii). Depending upon how history goes, the conference, whose papers are reproduced in this volume, may turn out to have been a historic event. At least the organizers, who expected only a small audience to attend, dare to think so. We can reach our own conclusions about this after reviewing what the major contributors said and how they said it.

The editors’ Introduction opens dramatically, as if to echo the first sentence of the Communist Manifesto: “The long night of the left is drawing to a close” (vii). That dark period, most of these writers would agree, encompasses not only “the defeat, denunciations, and despair of the 1980s and 1990s,” but also the earlier degeneration of “actually existing socialism” under Stalin and his Russian heirs and China’s leaders after the Cultural Revolution, as well as the failure of Europe’s social democratic parties to challenge the monopoly capitalist system. In the wake of recent global financial and economic crises, however, as well as U.S. military reversals and a global upsurge in popular protests and organizational activities, the contributors to this book see a new day dawning. According to them, new historical developments are opening up possibilities of large-scale emancipatory movements that would merit the name “communist.”

In a sense, this conference and book are about the rehabilitation of a name; or, to put the matter somewhat differently, they proffer a kind of therapy to those for whom the name has been tainted by scandal and regret. “The twenty-first century left can finally leave behind the introspection, contrition and penance that followed the fall of the Soviet Union,” say the editors (viii) – a problematic formulation that recalls the demand by some Germans to leave behind the “introspection, contrition and penance” associated with the Holocaust. What the authors mean to say, perhaps, is that such introspection need not paralyze the will of a new generation to redeem the betrayed and unfulfilled promises of communism. This perception , in turn, rests on the notion that the idea of communism is not innately or fatally flawed. Two propositions follow:

(1) There are reasons other and more important than philosophical or political errors for the “long night” referred to earlier

(2) The body of the communist Idea contains healthy tissue that offers a realistic promise of beneficial, even remarkable, growth.

I want to argue here that certain contributions to this book make a strong case for the second proposition, but that the case is compromised (at least so far as this collection of essays is concerned) by the philosophers’ failure adequately to address the first issue: the sources of historical Communism’s failures and achievements. It is one thing to leave behind introspection and regret, but quite another to abandon social analysis in a quest for good and bad ideas.

What is the idea of communism?

The contributors to this volume do not speak with one voice on this issue, but Alain Badiou’s lead essay offers a definition that many others refer (or defer) to: communism is a political truth, inscribed in history, that moves individuals to become part of a new collective Subject and to struggle for their emancipation. Empirically speaking, a political truth is “a concrete, time-specific sequence in which a new thought and practice of collective emancipation arise, exist, and eventually disappear” (2). Badiou explains that the idea of communism (a capital I-Idea, in Hegelian terms) is neither an ideological construct, a political movement, nor a socio-historical manifestation, but a “synthesis of politics, history and ideology.” It contains a surplus, as it were, over previous philosophical explications, social manifestations, and political practices. As such an Idea, communism is “better understood as an operation than as a concept.” (4).

So far, so good. But, as Jacques Ranciere points out in his important essay, everything hinges on how one defines “emanicipation.” Ranciere returns to the original meaning of the term – the individual’s advance from the status of juvenile to that of adult – and argues that communist emancipation depends upon two basic principles of egalitarianism: “Equality is not a goal; it is a starting point,” and “ Intelligence is not divided, it is one.” Emancipation therefore means “the communism of intelligence, enacted in the demonstration of the capacity of the ‘incapable’: the capacity of the ignorant to learn by himself . . . “ (168). As the essayist says later, this key principle, embodied historically in movements in which the “incapable” proved (at least temporarily) their capacity to resist authority and to manage schools, factories, and other complex institutions themselves, historically comes into conflict with anti-egalitarian assumptions springing originally from “the logic of Enlightenment, in which the cultivated elites have to guide the ignorant and superstitious lower classes on the path of progress” (167). Ranciere does not resolve this conflict, but ends by insisting fervently that “The only communist legacy that is worth examining is the multiplicity of forms of experimentation of the capacity of anybody, yesterday and today” (176).

For Ranciere, as for other of these contributors, the healthy tissue promising future breakthroughs to emancipation is communism’s radical egalitarianism and the capacity of “simple workers and ordinary men and women” to enact its promise. One immediately notices both the generality of this sort of statement, which represents a leftist take on “human nature,” and the absence of discussion of the concrete historical and socio-psychological obstacles to realizing popular autonomy. In Ranciere’s essay, the enemy of one principle (radical equality) is another (social hierarchy) – rather a ghostly conflict, it might seem, smacking of old-fashioned Idealism. Although other essayists rely on different manifestations of the capacity of “the multitude” for resistance and self-organization, this Idealist bent, in most cases, seems ubiquitous. Thus, Susan Buck-Morss describes a “radical redemption of tradition” embodied in the work of Sayyid Qutb and certain of his followers (76 et seq.), while Peter Hallward’s essay focuses on a “communism of the will” exemplified in “collective action and direct participation” (123 et seq.). To many neo-Hegelians, the principle of collective will, especially as represented by what Badiou terms the “glorious Pantheon of revolutionary heroes” (10), is the necessary corrective to the principle of hierarchical subordination.

In one of the book’s few socio-economic analyses – and one of its most interesting chapters – Michael Hardt argues that “immaterial or biopolitical production” creates a new form of property in “ideas, information, images, knowledges, codes, languages, social relationships, affects, and the like.” The new property, in turn, generates an increasingly autonomous “common” that intensifies the contradictions of capitalism and “provides the tools or weapons that could be wielded in a project of liberation” (134 et seq.). This brief “descent” to social analysis is refreshing, although Hardt’s tendency to overstate the novelty of developments foreseen by earlier Marxists (e.g., the domination of finance capital and rent) and to overestimate the subjective revolutionary consequences of technological change is off-putting. Hardt’s revolutionary optimism is raised to a fervid height by his frequent collaborator, Antonio Negri, who argues that spontaneous “indignation, refusal, resistance and struggle” can produce a “constituent power that wants to realize itself.” According to Negri, this transformative power moves forward inexorably, using force:

"From strikes, industrial sabotage, the breaking and piracy of systems of domination, migrant flight, and mobility to riots, insurrections, and the concrete configurations of an alternative power; these are the first recognizable figures of a collective revolutionary will" (161).

By now, those familiar with the history of Marxist disputation will have recognized that the tone and content of such remarks are those traditionally associated with the anarcho-syndicalist or left-communist traditions – modes of thinking and acting that more mainstream social democrats and communists long considered “ultra-left,” and that Lenin condemned as an “infantile disorder.” (More of this in a moment.) This ultra-leftism is not so clear if one simply focuses on the capacity of workers and other oppressed groups to act spontaneously outside normally accepted system-constraints, to absorb new knowledge, create new forms of property, organize autonomously, engage in new types of resistance, and so forth. A pronounced optimism about the capacity of workers and farmers for self-rule is as characteristic of Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky as of Bakunin and Kropotkin. But Lenin believed in the power of workers’ energy and creativity not only to overthrow the capitalist state, but also, properly organized and led, to reconstruct the state in a form designed to facilitate the transition to a classless society and a new birth of mass freedom. By contrast, for almost all this volume’s contributors, to affirm any positive role for the state or the revolutionary party is to repeat the Original Sin of inegalitarian Communism.

This renunciation of political impurity begins with Alain Badiou, who gives the following empirical examples of “political truth”: the French Revolution from 1792-1794, the Chinese Revolution from 1927-1949, Russian Bolshevism from 1902-1917, and Chinese Cultural Revolution from 1965-1968 (2). Isn’t this odd? One can understand (I suppose) why Badiou does not consider the Napoleonic period in France emancipatory, but he implicitly denies that Mao’s revolution deserves this description after the CCP took power, except for the period of the Cultural Revolution, when Mao and the “Gang of Four” directed workers’ and students’ energies against the party and the state. Lenin’s revolution ceased to be emancipatory, it seems, from the moment that the Bolsheviks took power in 1917! The logic of this becomes clear when one recognizes that, to Badiou and his comrades, the State is the System. “I call a ‘State’ or ‘state of the situation’ the system of constraints that limit the possibility of possibilities . . . .It follows from this that an event [defined as ‘the creation of new possibilities’] is something that can occur only to the extent that it is subtracted from the power of the State.” (7). Meaningful politics must therefore take place “at a distance from the State”; and, as for revolutionary parties, “The party-form, like that of the socialist State, is no longer suitable for providing real support for the Idea [of communism]” (13).

Other contributors express this hostility to any sort of state somewhat differently. For example, from the principle, “Being communist means being against the State,” Antonio Negri derives the corollary, “Communism is the enemy of socialism. . . .“ (158-59). Negri refers here not to Europe’s social democratic parties, which no longer pretend to be socialist, but to Soviet-style Communism and Maoism, which “despite initiating massive processes of collectivization, never questioned the disciplines of command . . . “ (159). Oddly, then, despite the editors’ confident declaration that communists can now leave behind the “introspection, contrition and penance” that followed the fall of the USSR, the shadows of Stalin and Mao continue to fall upon their work. Rehabilitating the idea of communism means freeing it from the “perversions” (to use Negri’s term) that disempowered workers, ploughed farmers under, created the gulag, and deified the State.

One sympathizes with this effort, of course. But the stripping away of alleged excrescences creates two problems. The first is to imagine a communism that is more than an unrealizable idea. Can a praxis which takes place “at a distance from the State” and eschews all organized political parties disrupt and overthrow the global capitalist System? Can it produce a new state of affairs in which “the multitude,” liberated from domination by plutocrats and technocrats, is finally permitted to manage its own affairs, i.e., a state of affairs in which the State “withers away”? The philosophers’ refusal to address these issues directly – a vague indeterminacy raised to the status of a heuristic principle by such writers as Badiou, with his emphasis on the need for “surprise” (12) – troubles one or two of the contributors. Bruno Bosteels recognizes that the brand of “left communism” advocated here is very close to that excoriated by Lenin in “’Left-Wing’ Communism: An Infantile Disorder.” Following Lenin’s example, at least to some extent, Bosteels asks tellingly whether “the ethereal Idea of communism, cleansed of every compromising trace of Marxism, Leninism, Trotskyism, Stalinism, or Maoism” can be anything other than the “the left-wing communism of pure immanence” rightfully criticized by Lenin as utopian and anti-revolutionary (34 et seq., 47). His conclusion is worth pondering:

"In a worldwide situation of rampant conservatism and blunt reactionary policies, when new forms of political organization are either lacking or insufficiently articulated, the most tempting posture is indeed one of radical left-wing idealism. Leftism in other words, appears today as the beautiful soul of communism" (53).

“Beautiful soul,” indeed. The modus disputandi of many of these writers, admirers of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and of the student-led uprisings of 1968, is to assume that the “revolutionary Subject” of classical Marxism-Leninism – the working class – does not exist as such. They must therefore to pin their hopes on the possibility that discontented groups of various sorts (“the multitude”) will develop new (non-party) forms of resistance and new (non-state) methods of exercising power. One imagines Lenin objecting furiously that this is to confuse means with ends, since workers (and, a fortiori, non-workers) cannot possibly overthrow the capitalist state without a revolutionary party to lead them, and since the conditions for communist transformation cannot come into existence until that state has been replaced by a transitional workers’ state that eliminates the great corporations and unleashes society’s productive potential. In this volume, there is little analysis either of “late capitalism’s” sources of longevity or the system’s tendency to generate self-destructive global crises. In place of socio-economic analysis, the left-communists substitute paeans to “revolutionary will” (see, e.g., Peter Hallward, 122-30) or, in Zizek’s case, adaptations of Lacanian psychology.

This is, mutatis mutandis, the doctrine criticized with such acerbity by Lenin. But it is also true that uncritical acceptance of Lenin’s praxis and that of his Soviet and Chinese epigones may lead one to duplicate certain fatal errors of “really existing socialism,” in particular, the substitution of the Party for the working class and the creation of a bureaucratic, disempowering, violent Party-State. What, then, is the source of these “perversions”? Here, the second problem implicit in this volume raises its head. Assuming that the method of historical materialism is part of the problem rather than of the solution, these contributors make virtually no effort to discover a Marxist explanation for either the horrors or the accomplishments of historical Communism. The one essay that speaks about the promise of the communist future in an authentically materialist tongue is that contributed by the literary theorist and critic, Terry Eagleton, who argues engagingly that “at a certain point of superabundance, the material transcends itself,” concluding that “Only through communism can we come to experience our bodies once again” (102, 108).

The implication (although not spelled out) is that Communism failed, in so far as it did, not primarily because of bad ideas or the tendency of power to corrupt its holders, but because the USSR and China were unable for various reasons to realize the superabundance that alone permits the state to wither away and genuine workers’ democracy to emerge. This is the essential point of the critique made most strongly by Trotsky – an Invisible Man in this book – in his Permanent Revolution and The Revolution Betrayed. For most contributors to this volume, however, the weightiest explanations for the failures of historic Communism come down to bad ideology and bad practice: the dictatorial State and the elitist Party. As a result, their implicit critiques of Stalinism and Maoism oddly resemble those of the conservative “anti-totalitarian” liberals and social democrats they despise. I am tempted to observe that this is what happens when one attempts to “do” Marxism without a revolutionary working class or an adequate analysis of late capitalism.

In any case, there is a conflict here between the “left communist” theories of Badiou and company and the perspectives of Marx and Lenin that calls for further dialogue, and, perhaps, for resolution. Albert Toscano summarizes the clash as follows:

"We need to overcome the apparent antimony between communism as the name for a form of political organization with social transformation as its name, and communism as a form of economic association with social equality as its practice" (202).

Like the other contributors (and this reviewer), Toscano does not believe that the errors of “really existing socialism” are the result of some fatal flaw that disables the idea of communism from playing an emancipatory role. He believes, for example (contrary to Zizek, at 218), that power exercised by autonomous workers’ organizations (“soviets”) can reconcile the conflict between asymmetric types of power (203). Similarly, Bruno Bosteels refuses to follow Badiou’s and Zizek’s blanket condemnation of all forms of socialism, and recommends the thinking of the Bolivian theorist/activist, Alvaro Garcia Linera, as a way to reconcile Marxism-Leninism with a left-communist sensibility (54-58).

These brief and rather sketchy efforts at reconciliation are welcome, but scarcely adequate to resolve this clash of ideas. Indeed, without an analysis rooted in social history, it seems impossible to diagnose the ills of Stalinism and Maoism adequately, and thus to put the need for “introspection and penance” behind us. But one can certainly agree on the usefulness of dialogue between historical materialists and left-communists, since each school offers insights that the other badly needs to ponder. There is no doubt that more traditional Marxist-Leninists have often ignored the contradiction between bureaucratic methods and egalitarian goals. Nor can one deny that many left-communists have eschewed state-based politics in a manner more evocative of religious separtists than of advocates for excluded social classes. Despite its limitations, this volume could serve the important purpose of initiating this much-needed exchange of views. Let us hope that those who interpret the idea of communism somewhat differently will respond in a comradely as well as a critical spirit.