Praise of Anti-Politics

I was recently thrilled to find the new gemini capsule/gemlog

=>gemini://beyondneolithic.life Beyond Neolithic Life.

It's fantasically put-together capsule, filled with some communist-adjacent resources and unique articles that appear to follow the Alain Badiou/French Maoist milieu. (If the admin of that capsule ends up reading this at all, hello! I would love to work together! Maybe we can even start a gemini orbit for like-minded capsules to link to each other!) In any event, I came across the capsule through a reading of their posting of an excerpt from Badiou's "IN PRAISE OF POLITICS" a dialogue with french journalist Aude Lancelin. Badiou is certainly interesting for being the last living representative of that particular moment of the french communist movement that existed in opposition to the Situationist International and all the communinization theorists that followed in varying degrees from that moment. A tendency with names like Sartre, Jean-Luc Godard, and so many others. With total disclosure, I probably have a deeper (if not complete) affinity with their intellectual rivals in Debord and Dauve. Yet, I really respect that movement for sticking true to the aim of abolishing the social relations which make up Capitalism, and having the intellectual honesty not to sacrifice a coherent understanding of "what capitalism is" in order to justify the actions of some particualr pet movement or state.

That being said, however, I found myself extremely disappointed in the chapter posted entitled, "THE COMMUNIST HYPOTHESIS". Considering the title, my main issue with the text is a bit ironic. Essentially, I do not believe that Badiou sufficiently puts forward a complete, positive hypothesis for the what and why of communism. In my view, Badiou, and perhaps this is simply a limitation of the format of responding to another's questions, remains too much on the defensive, conceding self-evidence to the ridiculousness of the communist horizon. This means that he is unable to make a correct case of why communism is a desireable thing! While I can't claim any real knowledge of the rest of the book, and in fact it's entirely possible my qualms are dealt with later in the complete text, this chapter is presented on its own on BNL, and so I want to evaluate it totally on its own terms, fair or not.

Before I get to a more detailed explication of my issues with the text so far, I want to briefly comment on what is totally right about it. Badiou says,

> 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.

I have no issues with this statement whatsoever. Badiou's bravery in unequivocally declaring "historical" communism - and by extension the "socialist state" form is admirable for someone who maintains a fundamentally leninist reading of the relevant literature. Of course, Badiou's placement of the failure of so-called historical communism as the Deng Xiaoping "coup" is something I would certainly challenge from a variety of angles, but the basic imperative to divorce the term, communism, from the states which have waved its banner historically is vitally necessary if we wish to retain orientation towards its goals. This is the basis of what Badiou is attempting in the following chapter, that is, he constructs a series of defenses of the ideals of communism against various, and common, criticism from liberal positions, which Aude Lancelin inhabits for the sake of this book. However, in doing so, he creates what, from my perspective, is a contrived understanding of what the communist hypothesis he is trying to rescue really is at its core.

Now, here's the rub. Badiou lists out four "principles" of communism on which to evaluate the level of communization, of a particular project. These being:

"...to wrest control of the means of production from private ownership."

"...to do away with the specialized division of labor, in particular the hierarchical divisions between management tasks and implementation tasks and, more generally, between intellectual and manual labor."

"...to put an end to the obsession with identities and in particular with national identity."

"...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."

These principles are a fascinating perspective into the mind of Badiou, what he holds in tension and what he holds as immanently important. They are also completely useless as a definition of communism. Strictly speaking, none of them are entirely wrong in isolation, but what is wrong with them is that they offer no real insight into what, precisely, the communist movement fights against, what is is fighting for, and offers an incomplete and contradictory view of how it fights for it. As far as the first three go, yes, those are parts of what communism seeks to accomplish, and especially the third point, the relaxation of identitarian modes of being and of the abolition of such constructs of organization as nationality, is vital. The fourth point I would especially like to tangle with. Like all the others, it is not, strictly speaking, wrong. Communism is, in fact, oriented toward a stateless society, and yet Badiou's emphasis of a gradual dilution of the state, and the conflation of the concepts of "withering away" and "free association" imply that Badiou sees communism as a wholly political project. This is not entirely surpising given the title of his book, but I'd like to interrogate this more. If communism is a poltical project, why weren't the communist polities of the 20th Century unable to achieve it? Were they simply insincere? With a few notable exceptions, Stalin being the principal one, I reject this. No, there is a deeper reason. To understand that, we need to have a deeper understanding of what communism is than a checklist of programmatic items to achieve. Plenty of people have done this better than me, a personal favorite is Gilles Dauve's "THE ECLIPSE AND RE-EMERGENCE OF THE COMMUNIST MOVEMENT" but I will do a little summary here.

In order to understand what communism is, you have to first understand the problem it is attempting to solve, namely capitalism. But why is capitalism a problem at all? Many will assume here a moralistic critique, that it is cruel, or that is is based on a mode of stealing. These moralistic critiques exist on varying levels of veracity, but all of them fall into the same trap, which is that they don't posit a problem which is unsolvable through reformist measures, or perhaps even more benevolent capitalists. No, Communism, at least in its marxian conception (I am consciously avoiding the term "marxist" here for its dominant use by people with views fundamentally irreconcilable with Marx) makes a different, normative rather than moral, critique, that Capitalism restricts freedom through a system of impersonal domination fundamental to the basic principles of the Capitalist mode of production, i.e. Value, Money, etc. Marx expounds on this system quite a lot in Capital (funny, that). Specifically, he builds this idea of the fetish character of the commodity, that shows how these social abstractions are able to mediate and determine our interactions with each other, preventing our "free association". This is in part why I have an issue with Badiou's fourth principle, "free association" would not come into being only by removing state deliberations, rather it requires a complete re-organization of society. Thus, we see the basis of what communism actually is, a complete ablation of the present state of things. An abolition of Value, of Profit, of Work. The attractiveness, the beauty, of communism is not some becoming of a complete man, or whatever. It is to be free. Not only free as an individual but free as a society.

To return to Badiou's work with this understanding of communism leaves us unfulfilled. His responses to Lancelin are not effective as a rhetorical tactic, as they flatten the aims of communism, they are wrong insofar as they would not necessarily be an undoing of the problem of Capitalism, and principally, they do not offer an effective understanding of what, exactly, we are meant to do as communists to achieve our goals. You might say that it is a temporary deception in order to make Badiou's replies more palatable to a skeptic like Lancelin, that they are merely what you tell an interested beginner before they are prepared to understand the more fundamental critique of capitalism that communism consists in. However, I do not think it is right or helpful to do some kind of Marxist Taquiyya for any reason, as it only dilutes our position, and actually makes it less appealing and "different" to those same people.

What Should We Do Instead?

I think Badiou should let go of poltics. While it is certainly necessary to critique the failed projects of the past for the sake of making our own revolution, granting them any level of "success" is frankly impossible, and returning to a political communism of the third international would be a disaster. It's projects from the Popular Front to the primacy of National Liberation all stem from this thinking of communism as primarily a political project. However, communism is not a political project, at least primarily. No, the political form which currently exists is intertwined with the economic form, and it is just as historically specific to the age Capitalism we are seeking to surpass. Communism's banishment from the popular political sphere should be celebrated by communists. We are not leftists, we are not natural allies of liberals and social democrats, we are seeking a total abolition of that entire ideological, and ultimately theological, frame. Rather than fighting for the return of a political communism, we should embrace the anti-politics that we have been forced into anyway. Communism is anti-economic and anti-politcal. Communism is pro-freedom and pro-love.

I'll be around in the meantime, waiting.

For more reading on the anti-political, Robert Kurz (at the time writing for Krisis, one of the most vital communist journals of the post-soviet age) has a fantastic article entitled "THE END OF POLITICS" which can be found:

on Libcom.org

In Praise of Anti-Politics was published on 2022-02-07