Communism As a Religion

"Religion is the opium of the people," Marx said in his Contribution to Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right published in 1843. (I looked this up on Wikipedia and I'm not ashamed of confessing it.) The Communist leaders of the Soviet Union took this statement to heart and invested the Soviet brand of Communism with very obvious religious overtones.* This made it a lot easier to convert a very backwards, ultra-religious country to a new Communist religion.

Just consider the following facts:

Just look at this picture that in the
USSR we saw on a regular basis. Does
it remind you of anything?

1. Communist ideologues were always presented as a kind of a Holy Trinity where, instead of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, you had Marx, Engels and Lenin. 

2. Holy remains of saints were always central to religious practices of the most backwards denominations. When Lenin died in 1924, his body was embalmed and preserved in a mausoleum so that people could visit his remains and pay their homage. It was considered a duty and a privilege of every Soviet citizen to walk by Lenin's remains at least once. I've done it and I don't know any other person who grew up in the Soviet Union who hasn't. The Russian government still spends a significant amount on preserving Lenin's remains because there are too many people who oppose interring the poor guy's body (or whatever is left of it). Lenin's remains still have pride of place on the Red Square. When Stalin died, his remains were also embalmed and added to Lenin's in the Mausoleum.**

3. In a Russian Orthodox home, there was always a corner called "beautiful" (which carries the same meaning as the word "red") where religious images were located. After the October Revolution, religious images were removed from these right-hand corners and substituted with images of the Communist Holy Trinity. Just like with the holy images, people would light candles in front of the triple image of Marx, Engels and Lenin (or Marx, Lenin and Stalin.)  The number of "inspirational stories" we have read about young Pioneers (you do know what it means in the context of the Soviet Union, right?) removing an old grandma's religious images from the right-hand corner and placing Lenin's portraits there was overwhelming. And, come to think of it, very Derridian****, too.

4. In a profoundly Pagan culture that was forcibly converted to Christianity (as all Slavic cultures that still preserve their Pagan customs and allegiances were), it was important to offer people Communist equivalents of their Pagan deities and traditions. This was done very successfully in the Soviet Union. As we all know, Pagan  sexuality is very happy and exuberant***, while Christianity was always very repressive sexually. The official Communist ideology would snag people with their "a sexual act should come as easily as having a glass of water" propaganda of the 20ies, only to collapse into an extremely Puritanical culture of the 60ies and the 70ies.

The main reason that the Communist ideology was so successful with the backwards and ultra-religious people of the Russian Empire is that it managed to inscribe itself so neatly into the all-important belief system  promoted by the Russian Orthodox Church. It isn't for nothing that Stalin was so eager to turn the Church leaders into happy collaborators of the regime. For decades, the Russian Orthodox priests collaborated with the KGB and informed the authorities of whatever it was that people revealed in the confessional. Today, the Russian president and prime-minister flaunt their fake religiousness which is made easy for them because of their KGB credentials that they share with the top officials of the Russian Orthodox Church.

*If I somebody reminds me, I will one day blog about why this project failed so spectacularly in Cuba.

** I also want to write a separate post on how Stalin's death was perceived as an enormous tragedy even by the most intellectual and refined Soviet people. It is especially curious to examine the case of Jews who weeped over the death of a guy who was in the process of exiling them all into Siberia. There are so many topics to blog about that one feels overwhelmed.

*** I'm also dying to blog about Slavic Paganism in the hopes that a Western Pagan (Pagan Topologist, maybe?) will point out similarities and differences.

**** If I need to write a separate post about it, just say so.

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.

Why the October Revolution Failed

Here is the long-promised post on the reasons why, in my opinion, the October Revolution (the one that resulted in the creation of the Soviet Union) failed.

One of the things that today's Marxists have been particularly hard pressed to explain away is the utter failure of the Communist revolution that transformed the Russian Empire into the Soviet Union. The easiest explanation always insisted that the conditions for the revolution in the predominantly agrarian Russian Empire simply weren't right. Since the capitalism in that country had not reached the needed level of internal contradictions, the revolution was not supported by the needed level of class consciousness among the paltry numbers of proletarians. Today we know that this explanation is, at best, very limited and misguided. We have seen that in countries where industrialization occurred early and ran its course successfully capitalism has evolved in a way that allowed to reconcile the most glaring of the system's inadequacies without any popular need for a massive uprising.

In my opinion, the October Revolution of 1917 was destined to degenerate into massive terror, genocide, and totalitarianism because of the very nature of the social experiment that its leaders attempted to conduct. Simply put, communism relies way too heavily on things that are contrary to human nature. Social animals that we might be, we are still not collective animals. I believe that the history of the country where I was born proved this point once and for all. And, by God, have we paid a huge price to demonstarte to the world one of the central weaknesses of the Marxist project.

What the example of the Soviet Union has shown to the planet is that people simply will not work for something defined as "the common good." At least, not for any significant period of time. I know that nobody want to hear this but the simple reality of the matter is that when there is no private ownership of businesses, when there is no difference in monetary compensation for the quality of your job performance, what happens is that people simply stop working. They just do. No amount of propaganda (and the Soviet propaganda was absolutely amazing) is going to change this simple reality. When people stop working, then the only way to make them go back to producing anything is terror. This is why Stalin's industrialization required millions of people toiling away in concentration camps. This is why after the breakup of the Soviet Union, working for a regular salary was considered shameful and unprestigious in the former-SU countries. Many people preferred to live in complete and utter poverty to accepting well-paid employment that was offered to them. Of course, actually looking for a job was considered so shameful that it made people massively deppressed.

When I discuss this issue, the main objection that I hear to my view of things is that the Soviet people were somehow not evolved enough and that's why they didn't manage to understand the supreme value of working for the benefit of their colelctive (whatever that collective might be) instead of just for their individual profit. I insist, however, that the absolute majority of people - myself included - are still not evolved enought for that, and in all probability will never be. Take, for example, my attitude to research. If I were told that from now on my publications will appear under the collective name of my department and the rewards for publishing a lot will be given to the entire department, I have to confess that I would start publishng a lot less. I love research, adore my colleagues, and feel very attached to my academic institution. Nevertheless, unless it's mine, I simply don't need it. I remember feeling like that since I was a little child. When I was given a toy and told that it would belong to both me and my sister, I would always say that I prefer it to be hers. I notice the same attitude in my students. When they have to create a group project, unless I specify (many, many times) that the project will be graded based on individual performance, the quality of the project becomes extremely poor. As human beings, we need to know with a lot of certainty where "I" end and "they" begin. This is why children who do not have enough personal space in their childhood develop all kinds of neuroses as adults.

I would love hearing what my readers think about this topic.

Left and Right

We are used to thinking about political convictions in terms of left and right. In our minds, we see a straight line that accommodates political and ideological stances from the most progressive to the most conservative. However, I often feel that the range of political beliefs is best represented not by a straight line but by a circle. The further you go to the right, the likelier you are to arrive at the extreme left. Sounds paradoxical, doesn't it?

I was reading Scheibeler's The Merchants of Deception when I noticed a striking similarity between the ideological position of the extremely conservative, fiercely Republican group of people that he describes (Amway employees) and Marxist ideology. Just consider the following quotes from the book:

"There were several examples that were frequently used to reinforce the group’s
paradigm that employers were oppressive" (42).

In their opinion, people who worked "were relegated to a lifetime of servitude to an employer who would forever control both their time and their income" (68).

"Many distributors actually began to detest their employers for taking advantage of
them and reaping the harvest of their employees’ labor. People often spoke of how hard
they worked for years with little or no respect only to have the owner and his wife go to
Hawaii, while they stayed back to watch his business" (79).

As we can see, these hardcore Republicans arrive at Marx's questioning of why the employer should be entitled to the fruits of the employees' labor. Move a little further in this direction and you will undoubtedly arrive at the necessity for a social revolution.

Now let's take an example of a radical feminist and a die-hard male chauvinist. As different as their political agendas undoubtedly are, it is entirely possible for both of them to proceed from the same ideological assumption: women are different. See how we have come a full circle by going in opposing directions?

Another example: an atheist (not to be confused with an agnostic) and a profoundly religious person. You'd think they have nothing in common. Not so. They actually share an extremely important conviction: they both KNOW for sure. A full circle yet again.

Fascism is supposed to be located at the right end of the spectrum and communism on the left. However, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union had a lot in common. Stalin admired Hitler, while Hitler learned a lot from Stalin. A circle, not a straight line.