Poetry and Communism

Alain Badiou

translated by Bruno Bosteels, Lana Turner

[from the forthcoming book by Alain Badiou, The Age of the Poets and Other Writings on Twentieth-Century Poetry and Prose, edited and translated by Bruno Bosteels with an introduction by Emily Apter and Bruno Bosteels (London-New York: Verso, 2014).]

In the last century, some truly great poets, in almost all languages on earth, have been communists. In an explicit or formal way, for example, the following poets were committed to communism: in Turkey, Nâzim Hikmet; in Chile, Pablo Neruda; in Spain, Rafael Alberti; in Italy, Eduardo Sanguinetti; in Greece, Yannis Ritsos; in China, Ai Qing; in Palestine, Mahmoud Darwish; in Peru, César Vallejo; and in Germany, the shining example is above all Bertolt Brecht. But we could cite a very large number of other names in other languages, throughout the world.

The two names of communism

The Two Names of Communism by TigersEye99

‘Another World is Possible’

Alain Badiou’s resolute commitment to communism and revolution placed him in the wilderness in the 1980s and ’90s.  Since the economic crisis, however, his ideas have become more germane as part of broader resurgence of interest in the concept of communism.  Samuel Grove interviewed Colin Wright, author of Badiou in Jamaica: The Politics of Conflict and Lecturer in Critical Theory at Nottingham University, about Badiou’s ideas. This is the first part of their discussion, the second will follow soon. New Left Project

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You describe Alain Badiou’s philosophy as revolving around three key questions: i) How does genuine novelty enter the world? ii) How is it distinct from mundane change? iii) And how can it be made to endure? And yet capitalism has become so hegemonic in recent years that it has become pretty difficult to even imagine an alternative to it. 

I think the problem you describe, of the commodification of the political imaginary by capitalism, is a very serious one, especially given that this extends to images of resistance to capitalism as well (I refer to this in Badiou in Jamaica a few times as 'rebel chic').  Zizek's reading of the epidemic of apocalyptic Hollywood disaster movies is relevant here.  He suggests that capitalism's hold on the collective imaginary is such that it is now far easier, particularly in the face of mounting evidence of environmental catastrophe, to picture the whole planet going up in flames, than it is to conceive of the end of capitalism.  So it's a serious problem.  I also think that part of addressing this problem does indeed have to take place on the level of the political imaginary itself.  For all its many problems, at least the motto of the World Social Forum that 'Another World is Possible' acknowledges the need for an imaginative space in which alternatives to capitalism can be elaborated.  But it certainly can't be addressed only at that level, since enormous amounts of energy can be wasted on building utopian visions, when significant change, at least from a Marxist perspective, never comes only from ideas.  

The Idea of Communism

The Idea of Communism by Katechon Merkado

Philosophy for Militants

by Alain Badiou

Translated by Bruno Bosteels

A philosophical guidebook for the struggles to come

An urgent and provocative account of the modern ‘militant’, a transformative figure at the front line of emancipatory politics. Around the world, recent events have seen the creation of a radical phalanx comprising students, the young, workers and immigrants. It is Badiou’s contention that the politics of such militants should condition the tasks of philosophy, even as philosophy clarifies the truth of our political condition.

To resolve the conflicts between politics, philosophy and democracy, Badiou argues for a resurgent communism – returning to the original call for universal emancipation and organizing for militant struggle.

Is the idea of communism potentially emancipatory?

by Makasa Chinyata

1. Introduction

This essay will argue that the idea of communism is potentially emancipatory. It will therefore attempt to build on Alain Badiou’s claim that “the communist hypothesis is the hypothesis of emancipation” (Badiou as cited in Ranciere, 2010:167). Communism has quite generally been thought of as an oppressive mode of politics. This particular misconception is largely due to the fact that communism generally tends to be conflated with the Soviet Union. As a result of this, the failure of the Soviet Union (apparent long before its eventual ‘defeat’ in the Cold War) is generally thought to signify the failure of communism – hence its relegation as a form of politics that is largely spurious. This essay will therefore attempt to portray illegitimacy of claims that view the Soviet Union as representative of communism and argue that the Soviet Union was in fact contradictory to the idea of communism. Secondly this essay will argue that communism is potentially emancipatory. In order to argue the latter, this essay will be based on Sylvain Lazarus claim that “there is no politics in general, only specific political sequences [and that] politics is not a permanent instance of society” (Neocosmos, 2009:13). This claim renders possible the argument that communism as a political idea, can be traced in particular political sequences that have occurred over the course of history with varying success. Alain Badiou’s concept of communism being above all else the exemplification of an “egalitarian society which, acting under its own impetus, brings down walls and barriers” (Badiou, 2010:60) will therefore be applied to specific political sequences (or ‘events’ - in the philosophical sense of the word): the Haitian revolution and the Paris Commune. In doing so, this essay will attempt to postulate the validity of conceiving of the idea of communism as potentially emancipatory.

Jasper Bernes and Joshua Clover on The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings

History and the Sphinx: Of Riots and Uprisings

The Los Angeles Review of Books, September 24th, 2012 

1.

Riots are the Sphinx of the left. Every soi disant radical intellectual feels compelled, it seems, to answer the riddle they hear posed by the riots of the present, in Bahrain or Asturias, Chile or Britain: Why now? Why here? Why riot? These answers generally come in a few simple varieties. First, if the riot seems to lack focus or present clears demands – that is, if it is illegible as “protest,” as in the case of the London riots of summer 2011 – the intellectual will paint them as a “meaningless outburst” (Slavoj Žižek), undertaken by “mindless rioters” (David Harvey). Invariably, attributions of unmeaning must find support in patronizing sociology, rendering the rioters mere side-effects of an unequal society, symptoms of neoliberalism, capitalist crisis and the ensuing austerity.

After Capitalism: 'In the anti-worlds of daily struggles the world beyond capitalism is to be found'

Communists without communism?

by Jacques Rancière, 2010

Firstly communism is not an ideal. It is an actual form of life. While democracy means freedom and equality only represented in the separate form of law and state, communism is their sensory reality, embedded in the forms of an existing common world.

"We Need a Popular Discipline": Contemporary Politics and the Crisis of the Negative

Alain Badiou, Interviewed by Filippo Del Lucchese and Jason Smith, 2008

I see my philosophy as an inheritor of the great contestatory movements of the sixties. In fact, my philosophy emerged out of these movements. It is a philosophy of commitment, of engagement, with a certain fidelity to Sartre, if you like, or to Marxism. What counts is that the intellectual is engaged in politics and commits to or takes the side of the people and the workers. I move in that tradition. Myphilosophy tries to keep alive, as best it can (it is not always easy), the idea that theris a real alternative to the dominant politics and that we are not obliged to rally around the consensus that ultimately consists in the unity of global capitalism and the representative, democratic state. I would say, then, that I work under the condition of the situation of political actuality, with the goal of keeping alive, philosophically, the idea of the possibility or opening of a politics I would call a politics of emancipation—but that could also be called a radical or revolutionary politics, terms that today are debatable but that represent all the same a possibility other than the dominant one.

The Speculative Left

by Bruno Bosteels, 2005

For Badiou, there emerges a speculative type of leftism whenever communismis disjoined, and nowadays supposedly set free, from the historicity intrinsic to the various stages of Marxism. The critique of speculative leftism in this sense is actually a constant throughout Badiou’s work. At the same time, though, a common objection among readers of this work holds that Badiou himself, by sovereignly divorcing the theoretical fidelity to an event fromany concrete genealogical inscription of the event, over the years increasingly would have painted himself into a similar corner as a dogmatic, absolutist, or even downright mystical thinker. According to this objection, Badiou himself would be yet another example of ‘‘left-wing communism’’ as the ‘‘infantile disorder’’ of Marxism, to use Lenin’s well-known words, even if we might have to turn these words around today, following the example set not so long ago by Gabriel and Daniel Cohn-Bendit, in terms of Marxism as the ‘‘senile disorder’’ of an eternally youthful and invariant ‘‘leftism.’’ Once we grasp the logic behind Badiou’s critique of speculative leftism, however, we will also be better equipped to address this objection, according to which he himself, if not earlier then evermore clearly so in recent years, falls prey to precisely such a leftist temptation of wanting to be a communist without also being a Marxist.

Of an Obscure Disaster: On the End of the Truth of State."

Alain Badiou. "Of an Obscure Disaster: On the End of the Truth of State."in: lacanian ink. Vol. 22, Fall 2003. (English).

THE "TRIUMPH OF DEMOCRACY"?

Democracy triumphs on the ruins of communism, say our prose writers. Or it is going to triumph. The greatest triumphalists evoke the triumph of a "model of civilization." Ours. Nothing less. Those who say "civilization," especially in the form of a triumph, also proclaim the right of the civilized to their gunboats — for those who might not have understood in time on what side the trumpets of triumph sound. The rights of man are no longer a tired intellectual demand. It is the time for rights with muscle, for the right of intervention. Triumphal movements of democratic troops. The need for war, that obligatory correlate of triumphant civilizations. Iraqi deaths, accommodated in silence by millions, even exclusive of any count (and we know to what extent the civilization of which we speak is a counting one...), are only the anonymous remainder of triumphal operations. Shifty Muslims, after all, non-civilized recalcitrants. Because, take note, there is religion, and there is religion. The Christian and his Pope are part of civilization, rabbis are a considerable part, but Mullahs and Ayatollahs would do well to convert.

Thoughts on Kevin Anderson’s Marx at the Margins

Unity & Struggle

Marx at the Margins is an important summary of Marx’s thought concerning the relationship between the capitalist and non-capitalist world, colonialism and social development, as well as nationalism and internationalism. The book provides a general overview of Marx’s thinking about these issues, especially as Anderson draws together and gives some narrative form to an extremely wide-ranging number of Marx’s writings. However, Anderson doesn’t always step back to consider this material from a more conceptual standpoint. Therefore these notes try and synthesize Anderson’s reading in order to lay the groundwork for a more schematic understanding of the issues raised in the book.

Idea of Communism—Resources and commentary

By Rowan Wilson, Verso, 22 September 2011

Following on from our announcement of Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek's New York conference, Communism, A New Beginning?, we have brought together the numerous reports, responses, commentary and resources relating to the first Idea of Communism conference in London.

The Actuality of Communism

The Actuality of Communism

by Bruno Bosteels

One of the rising stars of contemporary critical theory, Bruno Bosteels discusses the new currents of thought generated by figures such as Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière and Slavoj Žižek, who are spearheading the revival of interest in communism. Bosteels examines this resurgence of communist thought through the prism of “speculative leftism”—an incapacity to move beyond lofty abstractions and thoroughly rethink the categories of masses, classes and state. Debating those questions with writers including Roberto Esposito and Alberto Moreiras, Bosteels also provides a vital account of the work of the Bolivian Vice President and thinker Alvaro García Linera.

"We Need a Popular Discipline: Contemporary Politics and the Crisis of the Negative."

An interview with Alain Badiou, Critical Inquiry, 645, 2008

 Q We would like to begin by asking you to clarify the relation between philosophy and politics. What do you mean when you speak, for example, of a "militant philosophy"?

AB Since its beginnings, philosophy's relationship to the political has been fundamental. It's not something invented by modernity. Plato's central work is called The Republic, and it is entirely devoted to the questions of the "city" or polis. This link has remained fundamental throughout the history of philosophy. But I think there are two basic ways of structuring this relationship.

The Communist Hypothesis

Alain Badiou’s formulation of the “communist hypothesis” has traveled around the world since it was first aired in early 2008, in his book The Meaning of Sarkozy. The hypothesis is partly a demand to reconceptualize communism after the twin deaths of the Soviet Union and neoliberalism, but also a fresh demand for universal emancipation. As “third way” reforms prove as empty in practice as in theory, Badiou’s manifesto is a galvanizing call to arms that needs to be reckoned with by anyone concerned with the future of our planet.

DOWNLOAD: Mediafire

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

We rely, in this world, on the visual aspects of humanity as a means of learning who we are. This, Ralph Ellison argues convincingly, is a dangerous habit. A classic from the moment it first appeared in 1952, Invisible Man chronicles the travels of its narrator, a young, nameless black man, as he moves through the hellish levels of American intolerance and cultural blindness. Searching for a context in which to know himself, he exists in a very peculiar state. "I am an invisible man," he says in his prologue. "When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination--indeed, everything and anything except me." But this is hard-won self-knowledge, earned over the course of many years. As the book gets started, the narrator is expelled from his Southern Negro college for inadvertently showing a white trustee the reality of black life in the south, including an incestuous farmer and a rural whorehouse. The college director chastises him: "Why, the dumbest black bastard in the cotton patch knows that the only way to please a white man is to tell him a lie! What kind of an education are you getting around here?" Mystified, the narrator moves north to New York City, where the truth, at least as he perceives it, is dealt another blow when he learns that his former headmaster's recommendation letters are, in fact, letters of condemnation.

To Resist All Degradations & Divisions

S’bu Zikode interviewed by Richard Pithouse, Abahlali baseMjondolo, 28 April 2009

Click here to read an annotated version of this interview in pdf and here to read a summary.

Tell me something about where you were born and who your family were.

I was born in a village called Loskop which is near the town called Estcourt. It is in the Natal Midlands. I was born in 1975. I have a twin sister, her name is Thoko. We are now the last born. I have two other sisters. I also had a brother who passed away so I am the only son.

Is the SACP still relevant?

by Mazikbuko K. Jara, The Sunday Times

The South African Communist Party can be faulted on many fronts, but its sterling contribution to defeating apartheid and challenging capitalist exploitation was personified in the principled socialist morality and selflessness of Chris Hani, Joe Slovo and others.