gemini://beyondneolithic.life/badiou_archive/in_praise_of_politics/the_communist

> Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and actually even since the late 1970s, only one alternative seems to be accepted in the West when it comes to politics: managerial polities, run by the people Marx called "the agents of capital" and from which communist politics would seem to be totally shut out, even excluded from the real discussion. The governmental lefts no longer even "try" — in Europe as a whole — to make people believe they represent a different alternative. All the so-called socialist parties have by now embraced the neoliberal order, and even the so-called radical-left parties are more like splinter groups of that pseudo-socialism and don't correspond to the communist idea as you'd like to revive it. So, I would simply ask you this question, even if it's fraught with difficulties: how can we reopen that particular possibility, given that the word itself has been banished from politics?

When a key word like "communism" has been banished from politics, there's nothing to do, to begin with, but try to bring it back. That in itself is a crucial struggle. We've got to overcome, everywhere, the fear that the word triggers, people's ignorance about what it means, and never consent, for the sake of expediency, to its being eliminated. Many people have advised me to stop using the word, to replace it with a different one. But it's perfectly clear today that the elimination of the word is nothing less than the elimination of the alternative it used to refer to, and therefore the shameful acceptance of the total hegemony of the other alternative, the capitalist way.

We should first ask where the fatal sabotage of everything the word "communism" once meant, and still means, comes from. Why did the communist hypothesis, which had been extremely strong right from its inception in the 1840s, disappear so suddenly? This alternative had been conceived of, in Marx's "Communist Manifesto," as a new way of looking at human history as a whole. All worker uprisings and peasant insurrections since then have been based on it. All victorious revolutions have derived their meaning from it. It has achieved considerable successes, which changed the course of history in the twentieth century in countries as important as Russia and China and as determined and courageous as Yugoslavia and Cuba. And, given all this, they want us to dump the word "communism"?

You see, I think that an important task, a task of thought, is first and foremost to *make an independent assessment of this*, that is, not to go along with the dominant assessment of the communist experiments, an assessment that's obviously deeply flawed and self-serving and is a key element in the ostensible "triumph" of contemporary liberalism.

Basically, that's not just an attempt to defeat an orientation in the ideological—political field but an attempt to do away with it altogether. And it all dates from the 1980s; it's fairly recent. I think the great victory of the capitalist reaction in the latter part of the twentieth century, right after the big upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, consisted in eliminating the alternative hypothesis, in making it seem as though it no longer existed.

Right, by using every means necessary to ensure that public opinion was completely clueless when it came to this issue. So, to begin with, there's a very important task, which is to make our own assessment of the failure of historical communism, of the failure of the "socialist states," *based on retaining the hypothesis, not on eliminating it*. On the basis of this hypothesis, on the basis of the communist alternative to which we're committed, we need to explain why the various "socialist states" collapsed, and why, to revive politics, we've got to get past that failure. This is a very fine but important distinction. We shouldn't repeat the explanations that have been given by the dominant criminalization but rather ask the question this way: How is it that, even though the explicit objective of this emancipatory political alternative was to gradually undermine the independence and authority of the state, it instead resulted in extremely brutal, concentrated, authoritarian states? And we also need to ask why, even though the communist agenda has always been about combatting what it called the "great differences," that is, the difference between intellectual and manual labor, between city and countryside, and between management tasks and implementation tasks, nothing like that happened, except for the exciting proposals of the final phase (1971-5) of the Cultural Revolution in China. One of the basic objectives of communism in all its forms was to propose an idea of labor that Marx called the idea of the polymorphous worker: society would no longer be divided into specialized and, of course, always hierarchized, categories, the most menial jobs being the lowest paid ones and management tasks being highly compensated. How did it happen that, instead, such specialization, particularly in the Soviet Union, became set in stone?

Incidentally, I'd like to highlight the efforts undertaken in that direction in China, despite the ultimate failure that Deng Xiaoping's 1976 coup d'état represented. We can, and should, read the admirable texts, particularly the ones produced by workers from the Shanghai Machine-Tool Factory, who explained how they'd tried to ensure that factory management would be completely different from factory management in the West, where the capitalist law of productivity is imposed on the workers, who are renamed "the workforce"; how you could collect the workers' suggestions for improving the organization of work and do something with them; how there should be discussions between management and the workers about the initiatives, even the technical initiatives. There was a tremendous ferment of ideas, and that's the sort of thing we should draw on to uphold the principles of communism. Because, in actual fact, it's not because they were communist that the "socialist states" failed but because they weren't communist *enough* and didn't maintain the political tension, the constant discussion — in a word, the struggle between the two alternatives — in the collective life of the people, with regard to all the critical practical issues involving the principles of communism.

There are four main principles of communism. They can be listed very simply. The first principle is to wrest control of the means of production from private ownership. The capitalist oligarchy currently dominating the whole world must be done away with. One statistic that I constantly repeat, because it's important to be aware of it, is that, today, 260 people possess as much, in terms of income and wealth, as three billion other people, which is a *phenomenal* concentration of wealth, without precedent in human history. That has got to stop. That's the first principle.

The third principle is to try to put an end to the obsession with identities and in particular with national identity. Let's not forget that, among other things, Marx said, with a certain vehemence, that "the workers have no country." So, let's stop imprisoning politics in a straitjacket of identities, be they racial, national, religious, sexual, or other. That is also a basic objective.

And the last main principle, which in a way underpins all the others, is to do all this not by constantly strengthening the authoritarian mechanisms of the state but, on the contrary, by gradually diluting the state in collective deliberations, something Marx called "the withering away of the state," to make way, he said, for "free association."

So, to answer your question, the failure of what can be called the state communisms of the previous period, or the period of "socialist states," should be examined in relation to these four principles. To what extent did they really try to implement them? To what extent, on the contrary, did they try to bypass them for the sake of economic development and power? The idea being to locate the roots of this historical communism's failure in an *unfaithfulness* to itself rather than, as is commonly claimed, in a stubborn faithfulness to itself. It was by being unfaithful to itself, that is, by dividing, by creating a conservative oligarchy within itself, that this communism eventually failed. An obvious example of this is the fact that China, which has become a major imperial and capitalist power today, didn't even need to change the name of its dominant party, the Chinese Communist Party, which clearly has absolutely nothing communist about it, isn't communist in the least. But if the party has been able to continue calling itself that, it proves that there was a gradual abandonment of the objectives of the original politics of emancipation within the dominant political party itself. An abandonment of communism, under the name of "communism."

> But how do you respond to the people — and there are an awful lot of them — who think that the failure of communism was inscribed in the very nature of its project and that, as it went so determinedly against the way of the world, communism could only operate by using the utmost violence? How do you counter the idea that "to change man" is in itself a promise fraught with danger?

That man, the human animal, corresponds to the description given of him by dominant capitalism is a completely erroneous anthropological hypothesis. The basic idea behind all this, which in fact underpins the subservience of politics to dominant economic interests, is that man is a nasty animal, reducible to a caricature of the "struggle for life" borrowed — mistakenly — from Darwin. People are allegedly necessarily self-interested, individuals are driven only by the principles of their own power and survival, competition is the driving force behind innovation, and so on.

The truth is, there are countless examples to the contrary. Of course, selfless action often appears as a struggle or a conflict with the powers that have made self-interest and money their sole criterion. Under the conditions of dominant capitalism, this conflict may even occur within the same person, in the guise of an inner split or an inability to decide. But even under these conditions, the idea that self-interest is the absolute center of human existence, whether individual or collective, is quite simply wrong, in my opinion. I'm not saying, of course, that there's no such thing as self-interest, but there are countless examples of people passionately doing things that are dictated not by their own self-interest but by the interest of others, of the community, of the people they know, by the interest of the group they belong to, and who thus naturally go beyond their private interests in their long-term and day-to-day activities.

In a way, capitalism requires people to sacrifice themselves for an "ethics" of private interest, which is a most terrible paradox. People are told: "We are well aware that what you like is being rich; so, to make sure you get rich, start by becoming a little poorer: work hard." This is a vision of humanity that there's no reason to accept.

In fact, opposing positions on the subject had developed as early as the eighteenth century. It is ultimately the Hobbes versus Rousseau debate, which we're still having. For Hobbes, man is a wild animal who must be tamed by external forces, while for Rousseau, man is good, naturally good. "Naturally good": what does that mean? It simply means that the human animal has resources and capabilities that enable it to act for motives that go beyond the immediate conception of its own self-interest. In other words, it's not exactly an animal. And / think that the capitalist vision of humanity is that humanity, as I said, is a nasty animal species and it must therefore be subjected to … what? To a system of organized interests that will ultimately lead to the luckiest people, the people with the most advantages, the people with inherited wealth, winning, and everyone else being losers.

> I don't think you can completely reduce every vision that's different from communism to the most narrow-minded capitalism, in which man is only driven by an extremely limited sense of his own self-interest. Communism doesn't conflict with just that one vision of man. In fact, for Rousseau himself, man is by no means a selfless being, strictly speaking. On the contrary, he is completely driven by "self-love" [l'amour de soi], and the interest he may take in other people is an extension of this self-love, which depends on the feeling that might be aroused in him by another sensitive being in whom he recognizes himself, For Hume, too, man is neither wholly dominated by self-interest nor is he selfless. He is simply described as someone who is "partial," that is, not everything he does is driven by self-interest in the narrowest sense of the term; it can sometimes be driven by the interest he takes in certain people around him or by concern for a certain number of things that matter to him. So, is the debate about the communist idea really between narrow self-interest, on the one hand, and all-round altruism, on the other?

I think that, as far as actual politics is concerned, that *is* in fact the case. We shouldn't forget that capitalism's only rule is profit. The dictatorship of profit in capitalism is thus involved even in the organization of production and society itself. And it greatly increases the need for this dictatorship to have an overall vision of humanity that's directly related to profit and task specialization and that eliminates all protest based on the idea of justice or equality. That's the problem.

At the time of the debate among Rousseau, Hobbes, and Hume, a tiny oligarchy did not yet own half of humanity's wealth; the planetary hegemony of big capital did not yet exist. Where these thinkers were concerned, the most powerful owner was the landowner, the local aristocrat, and it was in that historical context that they discussed the subjective position of profit-sharing. They were tempted, of course, to promote "the mean value," i.e., the small landowner, who naturally cared about the profitability of his property but was reasonably generous. He was, moreover, the main ideological hero of the French Revolution. But in contemporary capitalism that "hero" has become a loser. In no way are sharing and moderation the basic law of capitalism. Its cult of self-interest is rampant because the (scientific) law of capitalist development is capital concentration. And we see spectacular examples of this every day. You yourself, by being summarily fired, paid the price for the fact that your conception of journalism didn't concur with that of the triumvirate of big capitalists who bought your magazine, "L'Obs", which can now be called "L'Obscène". The only thing your former bosses care about is their own self-interest. They're proud of the fact, moreover, and are pleased as punch with their view of things. Most of the press and media in France have been bought up by the giants of the CAC 40 [the French equivalent of the Dow Jones Industrial Average]. And the same trend is going on in every sector.

The concentration of capital is so intense today that its ability to provide all of humanity with means of survival is questionable. This, by the way, was also one of Marx's predictions. The accumulation of capital may occur in such a way that, at some point, it would become impossible to make a profit if everyone were put to work. Today, there are probably three billion people who are neither wage earners nor owners of capital nor farmers with a plot of land, and they roam the world in search of a livelihood. In such a world, how can there be room for anything other than a clear-cut opposition between two alternative ways of life? How can the fundamental debate between capitalism and communism be avoided?

I of course fully agree with you that it's important to be nuanced, that any figure of subjectivity is dialectical. It is also the purpose of political discussions to recognize that there are disagreements over all the issues having to do with the common good, since the definition of the common good is always complicated. But today's world, particularly now that the masters of capital believe they're free from any other alternative and think the communist way is dead and buried, is a world of utter ferocity.

And let me add that, since it is still characterized by deep-seated rivalries, especially between the former dominant powers of the European and American West and the new capitalisms that have emerged from communism, namely the Russian and Chinese ones, it's a world that, if left to its own devices, will lead us into war, as it has already done twice during the past century. That's for sure.

> OK, but the collectivization of the means of production wasn't exactly a resounding success in economic and human terms, and let's not even get started on the abolition of private property wherever it was implemented in the world at the time of the "actually existing" socialist states. How should one answer, let me ask once again, those who think that this idea, the communist idea, whatever its intrinsic value, can only be translated into reality through violence?

Again, that's really the criticism waged by liberal ideology, which views inequality and competition as the only real driving forces behind human action. I think we need to respond to it with arguments at different levels. We should begin by reminding people that, up to the 1970s, the USSR was clearly the second-largest world power. That socialist state, with its centralized economy, amazed the world, first by defeating the Nazi war machine, even in victorious, highly technical tank battles, then by being the first country to launch the space adventure. Next, it should be pointed out that there were spectacularly successful achievements made by certain types of non-competitive, monopolistic organizations in the immediate post-war period. For example, the electrification of the whole of France after 1945 was achieved under a state monopoly. At the time, nobody objected that there were fundamental flaws in the system. Not in the least! And it was a tremendous success. Renault, which was a non-competitive state-owned company back then, was an undeniable success, especially with its introduction of affordable "people's" vehicles — to such an extent that the Renault 4CV became the symbol of the "people's car." So, I think that, even on the level of economic production, the superiority of the competitive system has by no means been proven. It's an ideological myth.

Of course! But what I'm saying with this example is simply that the currently dominant view that production only works under the competitive conditions imposed by the global market is a misconception. It's quite simply wrong, and it's intended to force all types of production to fit the dominant mold of the globalized capitalist economy. I just wanted to clarify that first point. Now for my second point, which I alluded to a moment ago but need to come back to: if the problem has to do with human nature, I would argue that there is no evidence that human nature is geared toward the privatization of everything rather than toward a conception of the public management of everything.

First, let's be clear: if by "private property" we mean possessing things needed for survival and personal development, it would be absurd to call for its abolition! What we're talking about here is private ownership of the means of production and exchange. Marx had already made it clear that he was not talking about private property in general but about *bourgeois* property. I have absolutely no doubt that such property could be abolished. It is quite clear that, after the expropriation and subsequent collectivization of their workplace, the dedication and even the excitement of workers, employees, all involved in both the management and the material process of production, can be relied on. There are myriad examples of dedication, generosity, and selflessness in the history of the human species, and I can't see why anyone would declare that these aspects of generosity and selflessness can't be encouraged so that they become dominant and contribute to the strength of a collectivized economy. I can't see why we should instead accept, encourage, and organize things in such a way that brute competition is dominant. In other words, competition is dominant only because the ideology of competition is dominant. If the ideology were no longer that one, if it were reversed, if the values of solidarity, dedication, and equality were cultivated a little more systematically, we'd realize that they constitute a human resource that is largely as effective as the focus on private interest.

Naturally, there will always be a conflict between the two alternative ways of life. There will always be circumstances where selfishness, the desire for domination, and the cult of private interest will prevail, I'm not elaborating some warm and fuzzy vision of human beings here. Every subjectivity is divided and self contradictory, but the properly political question is which term of that contradiction we support. The systematic encouragement given to competition, to the desire to be a winner, to contempt for losers? That's the liberal ideology; there's no getting around it! And that liberal ideology must be fought with political means.

The truth is, countless human actions, including those praised today by the very people who advocate competition and selfishness, testify to the fact that the subjective resources on which the new communist politics is to be based do in fact exist to a large degree. For example, everyone has to acknowledge that the people who embodied reason and valor during the last war were the Resistance fighters, who were exposed to tremendous risks, and not the collaborators. Yet it was the opportunists, the collaborators, who were on the side of instant success and victorious competition! The idea of the subjective primacy of selfishness is not only wrong but extremely dangerous because its impact depends on the circumstances: in certain circumstances it may become a criminal idea, pure and simple. If the absolute law is really the law of competition and dominance over others, in a fascist-type political regime it will naturally also be tempting to get in good with the people in power! And indeed, most of the French CEOs of capitalist companies were in good with the people in power, with Pétain. That's why their companies could be nationalized at the Liberation.

> Again, let me be clear, I really don't think that the communist idea only conflicts with a liberal, competitive view of human nature. Take the Christian idea, which was the first to assert the oneness of humanity, to consider the existing hierarchies null and void, to aim to morally rearm the weak against the injustice of the powerful: well, that idea, which was unacceptable to the political regimes of the time, didn't conflict with the liberal world view. The forces with which that profoundly anti-natural Christian ideology conflicted were the established forces of domination, which significantly predated the capitalist world view. The profoundly inegalitarian nature of human relations predates the liberal or neo-liberal period by quite some time —we can agree on that, can't we?

Of course we can! I'm in no way underestimating the enormous obstacles the new communism has to face, but I think it's always important to understand that the problem of human nature, as such, cannot be analyzed apart from what fosters one belief or another in a given social world. Even the Church failed in its attempt, as is well known. Why? Because where its official institutions were concerned, it accepted inequality. True, it had some amazing preachers; it had mendicant friars; it had Saint Francis of Assisi; it had all of that. In fact, if the Church is still remembered it's because of those things. It's surely not because of the Inquisition. But the fact is, from the time of the Emperor Constantine, thus very early on, it had agreed to become an official religion, an ideological machine within the state. We're talking about politics here: the main path taken by the churches, without exception, was to make a pact with the states and hence with the ruling classes who "held" these states. That's why nothing corresponding to a "communist" orientation, even in a very vague sense, could come out of the Church, apart from a few special cases, from Saint Francis of Assisi to the worker priests of the 1950s.

However, let's get back to your question. I also think that the established order has thus far always been inegalitarian, and that that's what's called the Neolithic Age. We don't know much about what came before it. There were little groups of hunters. But the so-called "Neolithic Revolution," for the first time, formed societies based on inequality, based entirely on the organization and conservation, by force when necessary, of significant inequalities. In all societies, for the past four thousand years, a ruling group, ruling unequally, on the basis on how much private property it owned, ran society, protected itself with a proper state apparatus, competed with other groups of the same type, and so on. We're still completely stuck in this situation. Capitalism is part of Neolithic culture. That's why Marx thought it was still prehistoric in nature. And so, of course, it can always be argued that that's the way things have been for thousands of years. Ir's true! That's the way things have been for thousands of years, and that's why communism is not a simple matter of storming the Winter Palace. Naturally, the Winter Palace has to be stormed, but even if you do storm it you'll still be in the Neolithic Age because the very concept of "palace" is a Neolithic concept.

That's why I was simply asking you: is there a human resource that can work constructively toward becoming dominant beyond the unequal framework that has been in place for thousands of years? A resource for a post-Neolithic political subjectivity? Well, I think there's no reason for the answer to be negative, because when you accept the negative answer, you're just accepting the fact that all known societies, ever since private property and the state that protects it have been in existence, have been inegalitarian and have fostered an inegalitarian view of human relations. And so, over the long run, this fostering of inequality has shaped our subjectivities. When you've been raised with the idea that it's better to be first in class rather than last, to be very rich rather than poor, and so on — and we've all been raised that way — well, it leaves its mark. But in exceptional circumstances you realize that the opposite tendency also exists and that when it manifests itself, it mobilizes considerable affect in you, as well as a new way of thinking. And it is this affect, this new way of thinking, that must be organized, structured, and sustained by the communist hypothesis. I absolutely believe that most people know such a thing exists within them, as a positive potentiality. I myself know from experience that when this potentiality is realized, it surpasses in zest and joy anything the old self-centered subjective organization has to offer.

So, I agree with you: it's a lengthy business because it involves nothing less than getting out of the Neolithic Age! But we shouldn't counter this with the idea of a sort of bare human nature that's doomed to unfair competition, because, in a way, that would be to view the human species as an animal species. Yet, in spite of everything, as long as the human species is capable of something that is its own unique achievement, something that no other living creature can do — in any field, for that matter — that capacity cannot be reduced to that of an animal.

It is wrong to claim that every society must be hierarchical, disciplined, militarized, and so on. That's one possible form of association, but it's an unnatural one. Let's be Marxist about this: we shouldn't underestimate the fact that it is existing circumstances that shape our consciousness rather than our consciousness that shapes existing circumstances. Our minds have been shaped by the idea of inequality and competition ever since the time of the pharaohs and the Chinese emperors. The communist idea was the first one to rebel against that model, after what was actually a very short and largely misguided preparatory phase of Christianity. In a certain way, Stalinism was a repetition of something similar to Catholicism: the statization of the communist idea, conceived of as the only path to its victory, was carried out in an authoritarian and violent way. But we have to put an end to that.

2 — The Communist Hypothesis