The Communist Hypothesis

286 Pages·2010·2.08 MB·English

by  Alain Badiou

THE
C O M M U N I S T
H Y P O T H E S I S
A L A I N B A D I O U
★

The Communist
Hypothesis
ALAIN BADIOU
Translated by
David Macey and Steve Corcoran
VERSO
London • New York
First published in English by Verso 2010
©Verso2010
Translation David Macey and Steve Corcoran © 2010
‘A Brief Chronolgy of the Cultural Revolution’
translated by Bruno Bosted 2010
First published as L’hypotMse communiste
Appendix first published as Presentation, de Mao, De la pratique et de la
contraction, avec ¡une lettne d'Alain Badiou et la réponse de Slavoj ZiZek
© La Fabrique 2008
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author and translator have been asserted
13579 108642
Verso
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Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-600-2
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Catalog.ing-iii-Publieation Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Typeset by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh
Printed in the USA by Maple Vail
Contents
Preamble: What Is Called Failure? 1
I We Are Still the Contemporaries of May ’68 41
1. May ’68 Revisited, 40 Years On 43
2. Outline of a Beginning 68
3. This Crisis Is the Spectacle:
Where Is the Real? 91
II The Cultural Revolution: The Last Revolution? 101
III The Paris Commune:
A Political Declaration on Politics 168
IV The Idea of Communism 229
Appendix. Letter from Alain Badiou to
Slavoj ZiZek: On the Work ofMao Zedong 261

Preamble: ^%at Is Called Failure?
I
The mid-1970s saw the beginnings of the ebb
the ‘red decade’ ushered in by the fourfold
circumstances of national liberation struggles (in
Vietnam and Palestine in particular), the worldwide
student and youth movement (Germany, Japan, the
USA, Mexico . . .), factory revolts (France and Italy)
and the Cultural Revolution in China. It finds its
subjective form in a resigned surrender, in a return
to customs — including electoral customs — deference
towards the capitalo-parliamentarian or ‘Western’
order, and the conviction that to want something better
is to want something worse. It finds its intellectual
form in what, in France, acquired the very strange
name of ‘the new philosophy’. Despite the change
of name, we have here, almost unchanged, all the
arguments of the American anti-communism of the
2 THE COMMUNIST HYPOTHESIS
1950s: socialist regimes are loathsome despotisms
and bloody dictatorships. At the level of the state,
this socialist ‘totalitarianism' must be contrasted with
representative democracy which, while it is of course
imperfect, is by far the least bad form of government.
At the moral level, which is the most important in
philosophical terms, we must preach the values of the
‘free world’ centred on and protected by the United
States. Because it has ended in failure all over the
world, the communist hypothesis is a criminal utopia
that must give way to a culture of ‘human rights’, which
combines the cult of freedom (including, of course,
freedom of enterprise, the freedom to own property
and to grow rich that is the material guarantee of
all other freedoms) and a representation in which
Good is a victim. Good is never anything more than
the struggle against Evil, which is tantamount to
saying that we must care only for those who present
themselves, or who are exhibited, as the victims of
Evil. As for Evil, it is everything that the free West
designates as such, what Reagan called ‘the Evil
Empire’. Which brings us back to our starting point:
the communist Idea, and so on.
For various reasons, this propaganda machine
PREAMBLE: WHAT IS CALLED FAILURE? 3
is now obsolete, mainly because there is no longer a
single powerful state claiming to be communist, or even
socialist. Many rhetorical devices have of eourse been
recycled in the ‘war against terror’ which, in France, has
taken on the guise of an anti-Islamist crusade. And yet
no one can seriously believe that a particularist religious
ideology that is backward-looking in terms of its social
vision, and fascistic in both its conception of action
and its outcome, can replace a promise of universal
emancipation supported by three centuries of critical,
international and secular philosophy that exploited the
resources of science and mobilized, at the very heart
of the industrial metropolises, the enthusiasm of both
workers and intellectuals. Lumping together Stalin
and Hitler was already a sign of extreme intellectual
poverty: the norm by which any collective undertaking
has to be judged is, it was argued, the number of deaths
it causes. If that were really the ca.se, the huge colonial
genocides and massacres, the millions of deaths in the
civil and world wars through which our West forged its
might, should be enough to discredit, even in the eyes of
‘philosophers’ who extol their morality, the parliamentary
regimes of Europe and America. What would be left for
those who scribble about Rights? How could they go on
4 THE COMMUNIST HYPOTHESIS
singing the praises of bourgeois democracy as the only
form of relative Good and making pompous predictions
about totalitarianism when they are standing on top of
heaps of victims? Lumping together Hitler, Stalin and
Bin Laden now looks like a black farce. It indicates
that our democratic West is none too fussy about the
nature of the historic fuel it uses to keep its propaganda
machine running. It is true that, these days, it has other
fish to fry. After two short decades of cynically unequal
prosperity, it is in the grip ofa truly historical crisis and
has to fall back on its ‘democratic’ pretensions, as it
appears to have been doing for some time, with the help
of walls and barbed-wire fences to keep out foreigners,
a corrupt and servile media, overcrowded prisons and
iniquitous legislation. The problem is that it is less and
less capable of corrupting its local clientele and buying
off the ferocious foreign regimes of the Mubaraks and
Musharrafs who are responsible for keeping watch on
the flocks of the poor.
What remains of the labours of the ‘new
philosophers’ who have been enlightening us — or, in
other words, deadening our minds — for 30 years now?
Whatreallyremains of the great ideological machinery
of freedom, human rights, the West and its values?