The Communist Hypothesis
Alain Badiou
Verso - New York
2010
(1º edição francesa de 2008)
279 p.
Conferência de Alain Badiou em Out 2010 de apresentação da obra em
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSPzkzogbDY
Revisão da obra por
David Morgan
David Morgan is a freelance writer. He completed a PhD on Post-Sixties Maoism
at Newcastle University in 2010, and his book Shooting the Arrow/Stroking
the Arrow, will be available on Amazon later this year (david@davidword.com).
Review
Nietzsche’s adage that philosophy is disguised biography is not a neat fit
with Badiou, only because there is very little of disguise in Badiou’s
philosophy. The core of his philosophical project (and of his political
activism) has been an attempt to understand what it means to be faithful to the
great revolutionary events of the previous two centuries, particularly May ’68
in Paris and the Cultural Revolution in China, which was, in his view, both the
high point of the revolutionary sequence and the site of its final failure.
At least since the demise of Louis Althusser, defense of the Cultural
Revolution in any form has generally been a one-way ticket to academic
obscurity, but Badiou’s Being and Event (1988) – a creative and
rigorous use of set theory as discourse about being, cataclysmic change and the
nature of truth – catapulted him into a leading position in continental
philosophy. Logics of Worlds (Being and Event Part 2), which used
algebra to examine the link between being and appearance, further consolidated
that position. Badiou’s unique mixture of Platonic Idealism and materialist
dialectics has appealed particularly to a growing reaction against the
relativist and defeatist aspects of postmodernism.
The Communist Hypothesis is a collection of articles that have
appeared elsewhere. They are sandwiched between a Preamble and an Appendix
addressed to Slavoj Žižek. In the Preamble, Badiou states that the book argues,
‘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’ (7-8). However, Badiou insists that the book ‘does not deal directly
with either politics … or political philosophy’ (37). Rather, it is ‘an attempt
to define the generic form taken by all truth processes when they come up
against obstacles that are inherent in the world in which they operate’
(38).
Badiou defines failure in terms of his theory of points as ‘a moment within a
truth procedure (such as a sequence of emancipatory politics) when a binary
choice (do this or that) decides the future of the entire process’
(38). Emancipatory politics can fail in a number of ways. First the struggle can
be defeated, often with great violence and bloodshed as in the Paris Commune.
Even here, the failure is not all negative, because the lessons learned can ‘be
incorporated into the positive universality of the construction of a truth’
(38). But failure can also come with victory, when revolutionaries succumb to
the seductions of state power. This can take either a rightist form or an
‘ultra-left’ form, ‘where every contradiction … is handled with brutality and
death’ (18). Badiou refers to a fictional exploration of this dilemma in his
play, L’Incident d’Antioche, which ‘describes a victorious and terribly
destructive revolution whose leaders finally … take the unheard-of decision to
renounce the power they have won’ (20).
The chapter on May ’68 is made up of three essays, one, a pamphlet written at
the time, and two more recent. Badiou argues that there were in fact four
different May ’68s. The first three were comprised of 1) a youth and student
revolt, 2) a general strike driven largely by young workers operating, at first,
outside the big union organizations, and 3) a libertarian May that brought
forward issues of morality, women’s rights, gay rights and culture. The fourth
May ’68 was the process of reappraisal and exploration that began then and that
functioned as a diagonal cutting across the other three May ’68s.
The essence of this fourth May ’68 was a halting attempt to break away from
‘the dominant idea (shared by activists of all kinds and in that sense
universally accepted inside the “revolutionary” camp) that there is such a thing
as a historical agent offering a possibility of emancipation’ (52). According to
this dominant idea, ‘There is an “objective” agent inscribed in social reality’,
and this objective agent must be ‘transformed into a subjective power…. For that
to happen, it had to be represented by a specific organization and that is
precisely what we called a party, a working-class or people’s party’ (53).
Badiou here puts his finger on the essential element of the Marxist concept of
revolutionary agency. His rejection of this concept achieved its first full and
systematic development in Being and Event.
In the pamphlet written back at the time, Badiou describes the ‘revolutionary
storm’ of May ’68 as ‘a cyclone that violently swirled around the empty Point,
the central void where communist organization was lacking’ (89), but in the
later essays he comes to the conclusion that the concept of the Leninist Party
itself was fundamentally flawed, or as he puts it following the terminology of
Sylvain Lazarus, that the form has become saturated, that its creativity and
usefulness in solving new problems has been exhausted. The concept of the Party
was grounded in an attempt to build on the lessons of the Paris Commune – the
first truly proletarian revolution – and the ‘unprecedented massacre’ that ended
it. The problem was not just to seize power, but also to preserve and extend it.
Lenin’s solution, according to Badiou, was to create ‘a military machine … that
could replace the bourgeois State with a new kind of State exercising a popular
despotism without historical precedent: the State of the dictatorship of the
proletariat, which is in fact a State that merges with the insurrectional Party
and which, to a large extent, militarizes the whole of society’ (274). Badiou
argues that although the party/state form was historically justified, now that
it has failed, it is time to return ‘to what was alive but defeated in the
[Paris] Commune’ prior to the Leninist synthesis (228).
Badiou defends the Cultural Revolution as ‘the last significant political
sequence that is still internal to the party-state’ (103). It represented a
rejection of Stalinism and an attempt to mobilize the masses to defend the
revolution in China against the capitalist bureaucracy that was growing up
inside the Party itself. The Cultural Revolution unleashed a revolutionary storm
whose creativity inspired revolutionary struggle around the world. But the
‘capitalist roaders’ inside the Party fought back and did not hesitate to use
those elements of state power that they controlled to crush the insurgent masses
– while at the same time organizing their own bands of Red Guards to oppose the
revolutionary Red Guards. At this point, according to Badiou, Mao backed off
from the threat of civil war. He was unwilling to accept the destruction of the
Communist Party that was the logical next step after the Shanghai Commune. The
revolution stalled, and when Mao died in 1976, Deng Xiaoping, who had been one
of the main targets of the Cultural Revolution, was able to gain control of the
Party and restore capitalism.
I’ve given a summation of Badiou’s political arguments in this book with
little reference (so far) to his mathematical formalism, because it seems to me
that despite his insistence, The Communist Hypothesis is mainly a
political analysis of the last two centuries of revolution, and that the
formalism runs in parallel to the argument rather than being either a necessary
tool of analysis or a necessary conclusion. However, it is not possible to take
Badiou’s mathematical formalization of ‘the truth process’ separately from his
(critical) loyalty to the experience of the Cultural Revolution. The fundamental
principal of Badiou’s ontology – that ‘the one is not’ – is profoundly
influenced by what was summed up in the Cultural Revolution as the main struggle
on the philosophical front: the struggle between the revolutionary line that
‘one divides into two’ vs the reactionary line of ‘two combines into one’.
Set theory, as a presentation of presence, is a powerful metaphor for
thinking the reconciliation of materialist monism with the dialectical principle
that one divides into two. It states in a formal way that there is nothing that
cannot be ‘digested’ into a collection with anything else. Therefore, all things
are one. But a set of all sets cannot be conceived without contradiction
(Russell’s paradox). Therefore, the one is not.
However, for Badiou set theory is not used as a metaphor or an analytical
tool, but as an exact analogue of the real. Deductions in set theory apply
equally and necessarily to the real. Consequently, for example, Russell’s
paradox does more than prove that it is not possible to think ‘the set of all
sets’ without logical contradiction; for Badiou it proves that there is and can
be no set of all sets that encompasses the real; it is Anselm’s ontological
proof for the existence of God reversed.
When Badiou applies set theory to the question of political change, he
conflates at least three different meanings of the word ‘state’. The first
meaning is the state of a set, i.e. the set of all subsets, that which is
included in a set, not just presented but represented. The second meaning (the
traditional Marxist definition) is the state as an instrument of class rule,
whereby one class dominates all the others in a class society. The third meaning
refers not just to the instrument of class rule, but to class society as a
whole, including the capitalist economy (243). All political and economic forms
of social organization are incorporated into Badiou’s ‘state of the situation’
as simply the status quo, ‘the system of constraints that limit the possibility
of possibilities’ (243).
This flattening out of different types and levels of social organization
makes it impossible to account for radical change other than as an aleatory
event. A new political truth that, in Marxist terms, may have been driven into
existence by the contradiction between the forces of production and the
relations of production can only appear to the political subject in flatland as
springing up out of the void. Political agency, in this conceptualization, is
reduced to organizing the consequences of an aleatory event (224). There is no
concept of agency as both caused by and causing events.
Without this causative conception of agency, the dictatorship of the
proletariat makes no sense, because it is based on the idea that a political
subject can and must transform society through understanding and manipulating
causality. In Marxist theory, the withering away of the state is a product of
this type of agency. The state does not spontaneously disappear; it withers away
because its basis in class society disappears. But class society doesn’t wither
away; it must be systematically dismantled – hence Mao’s statement in On
Contradiction that the dictatorship of the proletariat must be strengthened
in order to lay the conditions for its abolition. The real ideological roots of
the Cultural Revolution lie in Lenin’s critique of spontaneity in What Is To
Be Done.
Given these two fundamentally different conceptions of agency, conflicting
summations of the goal of the Cultural Revolution – whether to replace the Party
with a mass movement as Badiou argues, or to strengthen it by a test of fire as
stated by Mao – were inevitable. The great truth of the Cultural Revolution – in
the Maoist account – was that the elimination of class divisions in society
would be long and tortuous, and would be characterized by many ruptures
requiring both mass mobilization and Party leadership. And further, the
point of most intense class struggle and greatest danger of reversal would be
where power was concentrated: inside the Party itself. In this account, the
Party must lead the revolution against itself - a paradox, but one that Badiou
himself subscribes to, if only on the level of the individual: ‘They [the
Chinese] taught that in political practice, we must be both “the arrow and the
bull’s eye”, because the old worldview is also present within us’ (102).
Although it may be debatable whether Badiou’s ‘Communist Hypothesis’ is a
step forward into a new form of communism or a step backward into the old form
of anarchism (despite his protest to the contrary), the great strength of this
book, and of Badiou’s work in general, is in its commitment to defending and
carrying forward the achievements and lessons of the last two centuries of
revolution – and in his stubborn and controversial insistence on including the
Cultural Revolution as an essential part of that heritage:
The Cultural Revolution is the Commune of the age
of Communist Parties and Socialist States: a terrible failure that teaches us
some essential lessons. (278)
30 January 2011
Sobre o autor
Alain Badiou (Rabat, Marrocos, 17 de janeiro de 1937) é um filósofo, dramaturgo e novelista francês. É conhecido por sua militância maoísta e sua
defesa do comunismo.
O seu pai, Raymond Badiou (1905-1996), foi membro da SFIO (Section française de l'Internationale
ouvrière), fazendo parte da Resistência francesa durante a
ocupação nazi, e sendo eleito presidente da câmara de Toulouse entre 1944 e 1958.
Realizou estudos de filosofia
na École Normale Supérieure de
Paris entre 1956 e 1961. Deu lições na Universidade de Paris VIII e na ENS desde
1969 até 1999, data na que foi nomeado director do departamento de
filosofia desta. Também dá cursos no Collège international de
philosophie. Foi discípulo de Louis Althusser, influenciado pelos seus
primeiros trabalhos epistemológicos, bem como de Jean-Paul Sartre e do
psicanalista Jacques
Lacan.
Foi membro fundador do PSU (Parti
Socialiste Unifié) em 1960. Implicado
nos movimentos políticos em torno do Maio de 68, e simpatizante com a esquerda maoísta, ingressou na
Union dês communistes de France Marxiste-Léniniste em 1969. Actualmente participa no grupo ultra-esquerdista
L'Organisation Politique, juntamente com Sylvain Lazarus e Natacha
Michel.
Alain Badiou adota uma posição única no cenário internacional de
discussão filosófica. Ao mesmo tempo em que questiona a metafísica clássica,
escapa ao jargão contemporâneo que busca aniquilar a verdade enquanto categoria
prática e teórica. É conhecido também por sua crítica violenta às democracia
liberais e aos direitos humanos, que fariam parte do festim ideológico
sustentador do capitalismo em suas configurações atuais. A sua obra principal é
O ser e o evento, em que defende que as matemáticas constituem a verdadeira ontologia, ou "ciência do ser
enquanto ser". Em 2006 publicou a sua
segunda parte, Logiques des mondes. L'être et l'événement, 2, onde passa
a tratar das lógicas do aparecimento do ser em mundos (ou "situações").
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