Minimal Communism

4. Politics can be thought the idea of communism

‘I am for the withering away of states, for Marx’s slogan: “the workers have no country"’ (Badiou, 2018).

In In Praise of Love (IPL), Badiou remarks that it is entirely probable that under communism love will be experienced differently. Being subtracted from the dominance of property, from the structures and impostures of exploitation and inequality, lovers will confront a different world.

Our dialectic takes another turn; what a true politics might do to love.

What is politics for Badiou is pretty straightforward: it is communism – here and now. Communism is the work of true politics, the making manifest of the axiom of equality, whose philosophical name is justice. He often quotes Beckett: ‘in any case, we have our being in justice, I’ve never heard anything to the contrary’ (B HII 135/OB 64). ‘... a justice totally unrelated to any kind of norm or finality. It concerns the ontological equality of the figures taken by the generic human subject’ (OB 64). Justice is how philosophy thinks politics.

If we think for a minute, we realise that communism is the only politics today that cannot be tolerated, recognised, reconciled, adapted – which is to say, included. Why? Because it belongs to all as what the all is generically capable of.

Let’s recall that the Red Years, culminating in 1976, finding, in Badiou’s work, their balance sheet in Theory of the Subject, itself written during what he calls the bitter period of betrayal, were in large part an effort to renew Marxism as the truth of communism. It is the truth that Marxism bears and, as a truth, a matter for philosophy, which for Badiou at the time, was an integral part of the struggle – Mao being the only philosopher, philosophy as such framed as in war: ‘revolution and counter-revolution; this division, anterior of any philosophy’ (AFP 2). Friends and enemies – which is to say: the masses think or the masses are incapable of thought.

So Marxism as the truth of communism: Subjectively rather than objectively. However, and perhaps this is part of the impasse of TS – it is not Marxism, finally, but communism that Badiou remains convinced of – a communism not incompatible with Marx to be sure but not ‘in its dominating image’, to speak like Genesis (bible not band). In CCBT (61) he says: ‘We must be the subject of the destruction of Marxism in order to propose its concept’. Communism must be, for us, reinvented. And moreover not one achieved in terms of what it must first destroy, as remained integral to TS but in terms of its subtraction from what it will cause to wither away.

‘Marxism is the consistency of a political subject, of a heterogeneous political capacity. It is the life of a hypothesis’ (CPBT 61). The communist hypothesis.

I was at the 2008 Communism conference in London and I heard Antonio Negri say to Badiou – ‘you are a communist without being a Marxist’; and I heard Badiou reply, ‘you are a Marxist without being a communist.’

Which one do you want to be?

I don’t know much about the antagonism with Negri – there has been hints of something personal in it – but it appears here and there in Badiou’s work. Two places standout for what concerns us. LW and M.

In the Preface of LW Badiou is setting out, broadly, the conception he has of the contemporary scene, the scene derived from what we think today; ‘what we think, at least, when we are not being ‘monitored’. What is our natural belief: ‘Natural’, he goes on, ‘in keeping with the rule of an inculcated nature. A belief is all the more natural to the extent that its imposition or inculcation is freely sought out—and serves our immediate designs’ (LW 1).

Note the element of agency ascribed to this most natural desire.

‘Today’, he says, ‘natural belief is condensed in a single statement: There are only bodies and languages. Democratic materialism. The individual as fashioned by the contemporary world recognises the objective existence of bodies alone’ (LW 1).

He continues a little further on with his typical polemical flare that languages supplement bodies as the juridical guarantee of the body, reduced to a function of rights – a species of suffering animal, worthy of pity, available for domestication; ‘…the contemporary consensus,’ he says ‘in recognising the plurality of languages, presupposes their juridical equality. Hence, the assimilation of humanity to animality culminates in the identification of the human animal with the diversity of its sub-species and the democratic rights that inhere in this diversity. This time, the progressive reverse borrows its name from Deleuze: ‘minoritarianism’. Communities and cultures, colours and pigments, religions and clergies, uses and customs, disparate sexualities, public intimacies and the publicity of the intimate: everything and everyone deserves to be recognised and protected by the law’ (LW 1-3). He treats this ‘suffering animal’ more fully in his Ethics... from 1998, written for high school students.

He notes, in LW, there is a democratic thus ideological limit to this materialist progressiveness, and that is of course those who do not, somehow, submit themselves to this ethic of tolerance – that which protects the human animal from itself, from its anti-democratic tendency to prescribe what, if you like, in truth, a body and a language can do. ‘A language that aims to regulate all other languages and to govern all bodies will be called dictatorial and totalitarian’ (LW 2).

And we know that ‘totalitarian’ ‘pace’ Arendt and her pathetic fanboys of Les Nouveaux Philosophe, covers the multitude of sins going back to the French Revolution at least, so beloved of the good liberal; and totalitarian especially denotes the ‘black book of communism’; communism, whose language of class struggle and the withering away of democratic materialism itself is truly the paradigm of the intolerable.

Most other failures to submit are merely rivalry, exhibiting merely the desire of the west, as Badiou calls it. Hence the fascist versions of Islam that have arisen don’t aim at the communist idea, let’s say, that a new truth of the collective is possible, but at the assumption of the power of the state as such – which is no idea at all. These fascisms have risen ostensibly on the back of western imperialist adventures over the past century, specifically the de-politicisation intrinsic to its technique, which is precisely how you turn, via a discipline of reaction or occlusion, a thinking being into an Other ‘for me’, and away from any possible thought of the collective, which a people always is. Communism, lets declare, is when a collective – the abstract name of what is for all – asserts itself as itself into a situation wherein it has been ruled impossible. Communism is, each time, the ongoing invention of a politics unbound from its state.

It’s no coincidence that today in the democratic age of bodies and languages, the return of that other pillar of totalitarianism, in its non-islamic sense, anyway, is not only tolerated, but encouraged, funded, armed, exalted and so on, and all the more so because it is so often electorally legitimated – but this is always so, no? Moreover, in the case of the Zionist entity as, for example, Ilan Pappe has closely documented, the entities capacity to inhabit, singularly, the place of victim, and from there to instrumentalise the singular virtue our democratic materialism authorises is truly an Ethics of our time.

In turn, as the eternal figure of the suffering animal that is humanities highest virtue, the entity can do whatever it wants – no-one, after all, can out suffer those who suffer historically, which is to say, eternally. The suffering of others can never be true suffering and at the same time the prevention of that true suffering justifies every bombing, humanitarian or otherwise. It is no surprise that Trump, who has no allegiance to the niceties, no matter how transparently phoney, of diplomacy, has reduced Palestine to the bare bones of bourgeoise property rights.

Badiou’s argument in Ethics, which is partly reproduced here in LW, is basically that the ethical disposition that animates the west under the guise of human rights requires the suffering animal as its exalted figure; that can both be saved by the west, providing the west a halo; or alternately, and more often than not coincidently, be that body, paraded across our screens, which legitimates humanitarian intervention, as the west exalts in naming its gutless massacres from the sky.