Did Somebody Say Communism?

Alain Badiou is always worth reading. Some Badiou is more worth reading, though. Less interesting are the borderline fascist tendencies. But for a part-time fascist, I like the guy. His piece in the first New Left Review for 2008 is certainly worth reading.

What interests me here is the way "communism" is used as a term. It seems a deliberate provocation -- something like Zizek's circulation of Mao and Lenin tracts, not to say his ironic invocation of himself as an "orthodox Lacanian Stalinist." (With Zizek, I wonder too if it's not becoming manifest, though -- like an owner and his pet morphing into similar visages.) With Badiou, "communism" is a willfully ambivalent and ambiguous term. The lack of capitalisation (!) by Badiou is telling, for this is no proper noun. It names something but not the Soviet Union, per se. Perhaps it just describes something; it's either a noun or an adjective -- not always one or the other.

Badiou ventriloquises Sarkozy: "It is not enough that empirical communism
has disappeared. We want all possible forms of it banished. Even the hypothesis of communism—generic name of our defeat—must become unmentionable." Generic name of our defeat. This reveals something of Badiou's tactic. Why this word? He sees the provocation of the term, its very banishment, as its most useful property. Its use for him, then, is the ability of the term to corral a set of banished ideas. Badiou goes on to say, Sarkozy dummy put aside and now back in his straight-man role, that: "'Communism' as such denotes only [a] very general set of intellectual representations." These are Ideas, in the Kantian sense, of (in)equality, collectivity, class analysis. Shards of this vision are notable in every truly mass action opposing state coercion, Badiou writes. His final call is one for the communist hypothesis triumphant.

This is our task, during the reactionary interlude that now prevails: through the combination of thought processes—always global, or universal, in character—and political experience, always local or singular, yet transmissible, to renew the existence of the communist hypothesis, in our consciousness and on the ground.

Local action, international thought processes. Does this amount to anything other than the old slogan: think global, act local? It is different because Badiou recognises the seriousness of turning this ship around, so to speak. The conditions are, in one sense, unfavourable (Communism is largely dismissed, if not laughed at) and yet in others the problems are clear (market troubles, recessions etc). They are unfavourable because of the absolute marginality of alternatives.

This seems to reflect the dynamic of legitimation, as Weber has it. I have been working through Dictatorship Over Needs: An Analysis of Soviet Societies by Hungarian émigrés Ferenc Fehér, Agnes Heller and György Márkus. In there, Heller writes of the legitimation of Soviet societies.

According to one formulation of Max Weber, a social order is legitimated if at least one part of the population acknowledges it as exemplary and binding and the other part does not confront the existing social order with the image of an alternative one as equally exemplary. Thus the relative number of those legitimating a system may be irrelevant if the non-legitimating masses are merely dissatisfied. (p137)

She goes on to note that while the Russian centre was more or less legitimate -- albeit differently legitimised at its various points of existence -- the Eastern European satellites were never far from, or were actually otherwise embroiled in, an ongoing legitimation crisis. (A legitimation crisis does not inevitably lead to collapse or downfall of a given social order.) This was particularly the case in Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. An important point follows from this.

That is as true of Hungary as it is of Poland or Czechoslovakia despite the popular support lent to the present government in Hungary. Legitimation means not so much the legitimation of government as of a form of domination, and relative popular support is given to the Hungarian government precisely because it practises the otherwise rejected form of domination in a more tolerable fashion than is the case in other countries. (p138, emphasis mine)

For Badiou, then, the question is one of bringing about a legitimation crisis. It's the task of making a compelling alternative vision of a social order, one that doesn't just circulate in the same-old cliques but tips over, escaping the circuits of Brown's/Benjamin's leftist melancholy. No doubt Badiou would speak of an Act or an Event to do this. But I prefer Heller's and Weber's terms. They carry less of the metaphysical romanticism loaded on to the capitalised Badiouian terms. In essence Badiou, Heller and Weber draw towards the same realisation -- the political necessity for a vision of something outside present conditions, for a rupture from current orthodoxies. This, then, is precisely what "communism" is for Badiou -- a set of co-ordinates for an ethic and a politics outside of our current conjuncture. A provocation, a (re-)activation of the defeated, the disappeared.

And before I let you go... Dictatorship Over Needs points to some problems with Badiou's historical analysis. He writes that "police coercion could not save the 'socialist' state from internal bureaucratic inertia....The last great convulsions[--]the Cultural revolution and May 68, in its broadest sense--can be understood as attempts to deal with the inadequacy of the party." Our dear Hungarians suggest otherwise. "Bureaucratic inertia" is precisely what the moguls wanted, as Heller tells us in a masterly sequence of argument (p177-8): "[Bureaucracy's] function is primarily to practise dictatorship over needs, and this is being done thoroughly. The system of directives (orders) is a corrective one (or at least is meant as such): it clears the way for the break-through of ideological, doctrinal priorities." So food shortages are purposely inefficiently handled, while housing applicants in an accommodation shortage are systematically disheartened. Regarding the party -- Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland attest to numerous early attempts to reform the Muscovite party from the outside. Its inadequacy was fundamental, arguably apparent from the time of the first rash of Terror. May 68 is perhaps one of the last great convulsions, but is a peculiarly Western way of accessing this history. (And precisely the type of thing addressed by Márkus in the first section of Dictatorship Over Needs -- the chapter titled "Eastern European Societies and the Western Left")

But, y'know, I like the guy...