Awakening the Giant: Is the long night of the left drawing to a close?
Is communism not the name for an enormous crime, for the Gulag Archipelago and for totalitarian states? Did it not fail, both economically and politically? Didn't people risk their lives to escape communism? Is "communist" not, moreover, the name for the party that still rules over the world's most populous country – a country that is both markedly authoritarian and profoundly subject to the dictates of neoliberal capitalism? Such has been the hegemonic view for the past three decades.
What Badiou terms the period of "restoration" began in the mid-1970s with the decline of national liberation struggles, youth movements and factory revolts. The ebbing of these struggles, he argues, ushered in a "bitter period of betrayal" in which former activists rallied to parliamentary politics and submitted to global capitalism. It was an era characterized by critiques of totalitarianism, praise for human rights and apparently humanitarian (but in reality, imperialist) "interventions" and capitulations to the power of the United States.
For three decades, Badiou wrote, the word "communism" was either forgotten or taken to signify a criminal enterprise. In contrast, he describes his own trajectory as a refusal to yield to this counterrevolutionary betrayal. For Badiou, who constantly affirms his own fidelity to the events of May '68 and the revolutionary Marxist heritage, the very impetus for philosophy comes from the attempt to understand "how and why many of his generational peers could betray their revolutionary convictions."
In his short book The Communist Hypothesis, Badiou argues that today all that remains of the ideological machinery of freedom, human rights and Western values is a simple, negative statement: communism failed. The labors of the capitalist philosophers, he says, amount to little more than the assertion that there is no choice but to consent to the capitalist, parliamentary present. But what "exactly do we mean by 'failure' when we refer to a historical sequence that experimented with one or another form of the communist hypothesis?" he asks. When we say that the socialist experiments failed – and Badiou does not dispute this proposition – do we mean that the communist hypothesis and the horizon of emancipation to which it gestured should be abandoned? Or do we mean that they failed because they took a wrong path, because they failed to respond to the initial problem in the right way?
The failures of previous attempts to realize communism, Badiou suggests, must be treated as stages in the realization of the idea. For him, as for the other philosophers at the communism conferences, the problems that gave rise to this idea have, if anything, become more acute. Here Badiou compares the history of attempts to realize the idea of communism with the history of efforts to resolve a mathematical problem. Fermat's theorem, for instance, was solved only recently after 300 years of failed attempts. Referring to those New Philosophers who authorise their condemnations of communism through reference to the brief and loose communist affiliations of their youth, he notes that no one would take very seriously a mathematician who failed to solve a problem in his early twenties and used that as evidence that the problem itself no longer exists...
In The Communist Hypothesis, which was published in 2010, Badiou argued that a key source of the crisis of Western democracy is that "it is less and less capable of corrupting its local clientele and buying off the ferocious regimes of the Mubaraks and Musharrafs who are responsible for keeping watch on the flocks of the poor." Within a year, Mubarak was gone and uprisings across the Middle East and North Africa had profoundly transformed the face of global political possibility. For Badiou, echoing Marx's much-cited definition of communism as the "real movement that abolishes the present state of things," these movements reveal, in its purest form since the Paris Commune, "a communism of movement." But in what sense is it meaningful to speak of the Arab Spring as communist?
Badiou's point is not that the participants in these uprisings are subjectively communists – indeed, after decades of successful annihilation of the left across the Middle East, this would hardly be expected. Rather the point is that a successful popular uprising points toward the horizon designated by Marx as the withering of the state, opening up a realm of non-state political action in which that elusive figure "the people" comes into being.
"Communism", Badiou writes, "here means: a common creation of a collective destiny." Such a common, he argues, is generic, representing humanity as a whole, and capable of overcoming statist contradictions between substantive identities. When female doctors from the provinces sleep peacefully in the middle of a circle of young men, when a row of Christians keeps watch over Muslims at prayer, when a group of engineers entreats young suburbanites to hold firm, these situations and inventions, he suggests, constitute the communism of movement.
The events in the Middle East, for Badiou, have created not a new reality, but myriad possibilities for the world as a whole, and refuted the belief that all that is possible in politics is to choose between parliamentary representatives. Rather than lecturing the movements about democracy, he argues, we should be their students, heeding their lesson that a genuine politics of emancipation is possible. The uprisings, he argues, give life to the principles the dominant powers have tried to convince us are obsolete – in particular, "the principle that Marat never stopped recalling: when it is a matter of liberty, equality, emancipation, we all have to join the popular upheavals."
