Badiou's The Communist Hypothesis: A Review, Part II

Badiou feels that our material and political existence have been completely colonized by the State: 

Through all these systems, all these apparatuses  . . . we can see how the state organizes and maintains, often by force, the distinction between what is possible and what isn't.

In view of a reality where "'democratic' politics means nothing more than an eager willingness to service the needs of the banks," Badiou is dedicated to vindicate the need to have one's life guided by some great and powerful idea. For him, this idea is, of course, communism. In The Communist Hypothesis, Badiou offers a very interesting (albeit an excessively broad, in my view) definition of communism:

An egalitarian society which, acting under its own impetus, rings down walls and barriers; a polyvalent society, with variable trajectories, both at work and in our lives.

This idea sounds very attractive but is so vague as to be capable of being applied to pretty much anything.

Badiou's struggle to redeem communism is valiant but, ultimately, weak and unconvincing. He fails to address any of the real criticisms that are addressed to communist-inspired regimes with anything other than cantankerous grumbling. I agree with Badiou wholeheartedly that we cannot and should not expect capitalism to resolve its internal contradictions. He is undoubtedly right when he points out that capitalism has come a full circle and reached its predatory roots:

The world of global and arrogant capitalism in which we live is taking us back to the 1840s and the birth of capitalism. Its imperative, as formulated by Guizot, was: "Get rich!" We can translate that as "Live without an idea!" We have to say that we cannot live without an idea. . . Living without an idea is intolerable.

 I agree with every word Badiou says here. What makes no sense, however, is his suggestion that we follow capitalism back into the vicious circle of the struggle between capitalism and communism. We all know how that struggle ends. We also know that it claims too many victims on its way. What we need is not to replay this old and fruitless battle. We need a NEW great idea. Both capitalism and communism have systemic flaws that cannot be repaired. I wish that the great minds of our times stopped trying to fix either of these two inherently non-viable systems and started looking for something completely new.

I don't think that either Badiou or Zizek will be able to do that. Both philosophers are too mired in their Cold War era experiences and the attendant mentality. They are - and I'm afraid will always remain - prisoners of the communism vs capitalism binary. They fail to see that no political or economic system can be as oppressive as a binary mentality. There is, in fact, no system of oppression known to the world that has not based itself on some sort of a binary (or a collection of binaries.)

Badiou's The Communist Hypothesis: A Review, Part I

There is this group of over-entitled and unbelievably spoiled papa's boys who deal with the boredom of grad school by pretending to be oh, so dedicated revolutionaries. While Daddies are paying the bills and guarding that trust fund for when darling boys finally graduate, the sons walk around feeling important and showering everybody with badly digested quotes from Zizek, Badiou, Lacan, Deleuze, etc. I know that they will descend on my blog with a vengeance to berate me for a critical analysis of the work of one of their idols. This has happened before and will keep happening. Their fake Marxism makes it intolerable for them that a woman from a background that is a lot less privileged than theirs would dare have an opinion. Well, you've just got to suck it up, boys. Cheers!

For the most part, Badiou's  The Communist Hypothesis consists of some old essays that have been published elsewhere a while ago and are now repackaged and accompanied by Badiou's explanation of why it makes sense to re-publish these essays as one book. So if you are thinking about buying the book, you need to be forewarned: you can find most of what it contains elsewhere and for free. What's genuinely new in the book is about 20 pages at the beginning and 20 pages at the end.

This isn't a book of philosophy, as much as an autobiographically tinged discussion of three historic events that Badiou finds important: May of 1968, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and the Paris Commune of 1871. The most valuable thing about the part that discusses May '68 was for me Badiou's discussion of his personal response to those events. His detailed explanation of what May 1968 entailed and how events unfolded seemed a bit superfluous because this is a story most people who would be interested in Badiou enough to buy his books know well already.

The part dedicated to the Chinese Cultural Revolution and Badiou's defense of his Maoism was the one I found to be the most uninspiring intellectually. Badiou attempts to defend Mao's personality cult by saying that it is no different from the admiration we render to artists. This argument sounds extremely feeble since nobody has seen huge demonstrations of people holding Modigliani's portrait and nobody has claimed that Dostoyevsky's wisdom is helpful even in the art of planting tomatoes (as according to Badiou has been said about Mao's wisdom.) The rest of the chapter dedicated to Maoism (which is actually a conference Badiou delivered in 2002) lists in minute and often excruciatingly boring detail the events of the Cultural Revolution.

The last revolutionary event that Badiou discusses is the Paris Commune. This is the most interesting part of the book. Badiou explains that the Maoist attempt to appropriate the legacy of the Commune failed because of Mao's incapacity to escape, in this case,  from the constraints of the party-state framework. In view of this failure to appropriate the political legacy of the Commune for the contemporary revolutionary purposes, Badiou offers an important analysis of the events of 1871. The Commune was the only revolutionary event that did not allow the corrupt and power-seeking Left to pretend that it represents the interests of the revolutionaries, thereby robbing them of the fruits of their struggle and perverting their original goals.

The book ends with a letter that Badiou addresses to Zizek. The letter disappointed me because it contains some decidedly unintelligent statements. To give an example, Stalin and Mao "fail to understand [that] any immanent negation is, in its essence, a negation of the negation that it is." Those of us who know anything at all about Stalin can imagine well enough what Stalin would do to an intellectual (Stalin's most hated kind of person) presenting him with this type of sentence. This makes me think that Badiou has a very limited understanding of both Stalin's goals and his failures*. Badiou insists the horrors committed by Stalin and others like him (which he light-heartedly refers to as "hair-raising anecdotes") can and should be ignored by today's Marxists. Ignoring unpleasant facts that you have no idea how to explain is, for me, a sign of intellectual impotence. As I said before, I would love to read an honest and detailed communist analysis of why every communism-inspired regime has been such a total and irredeemable disaster. Instead, modern day Marxists only offer the disappointing and childish response that "capitalism and colonialism also killed many people." In The Communist Hypothesis, Badiou goes as far as to berate his friend Slavoj Zizek for "projecting" his knowledge of Stalin's atrocities onto Mao Zedong. It is as if Badiou were bothered by the idea that anybody might revive the knowledge of Stalinist horrors.

* If you plan to argue about this, please, at the very least familiarize yourself with the most basic facts of Stalin's life. It annoys me a lot when people who know nothing about the history of my country start lecturing me on it.

[To be continued . . .]

Žižek, Badiou, and Communist Profit Margins

In one of the comments to my review of Žižek's Living in the End Times, a reader called Leo made the following comment:

he [Žižek]  says he is so anti-capitalist but for some reason he doesn't place his new book online where everybody could have free access to his ideas. No, he prefers to sell it for a pretty steep price (I for one can't afford it) and make a profit. Seems like he only want those rich individuals who can fork out 30 bucks for a hardcover to be reached by his ideas.

 I keep thinking about these observations while reading Badiou's The Communist Hypothesis. Badiou and Žižek are close friends and passionate Marxists. They also participate very successfully in the capitalist "profit-is-king" economy. While bemoaning the ills of capitalism and defending communism, both philosophers don't make their ideas accessible for free on-line. Neither do they publish with more modest publishing houses that would put out a cheaper version of a book. Both Living in the End Times and The Communist Hypothesis are edited beautifully, on high quality white paper, in hardcover. Neither philosopher made efforts to have the publishing house put out a digital version of the book, which would make it at least somewhat less expensive and help people save on shipment costs.


As a result, the intended audience of these books is reduced to those who have some pretty ample means at their disposal and can spend that money freely on pricey books. With the economic crisis we are going through, Žižek and Badiou consciously limit their audience to the kind of individuals who are not extremely likely to engage in a revolution. 


I'm trying to give The Communist Hypothesis my undivided attention (a review is forthcoming as soon as I finish reading the book) without being distracted by the thoughts of how profitable it has become to be a communist. With all its demonstrable faults, capitalism not only allows vocal communists to make huge profits, it even succeeds in making those very communists care about profits a lot more than they do about the revolution.