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.
