http://www.khukuritheory.net/what-is-badious-communism/#more-1384 What is Badious communism? May 18th, 2011 by John Steele. The following essay by J.

Ramsey is expanded from remarks delivered at the Platypus Society Convention in April, as part of a panel on Badiou and Post-Maoism: Marxism and Communism Today. Other speakers were Chris Cutrone of Platypus (whose paper can be found here), Mike Ely of Kasama (whose remarks can be found on Kasama), and John Steele of this site (paper reproduced here). (Ramseys paper appears in a slightly shorter version here; the full essay can be found here.) Creating Space for Communist Re-Emergence: Approaching Badiou By J. Ramsey I would like to begin by thanking the Platypus Affiliated Society, the organizers of the conference, as well as Chris Cutrone for organizing this panel, and inviting meinviting usto speak with you today. I do not at all take it for granted that there are groups of people who come together to share views and engage in thoughtful discussion about capitalism, marxism, communism, and the path to human emancipation. Ours is an ageand in particular, the US, is a societywhere the very existence of what Badiou calls the Communist Hypothesis is in no way guaranteed. In this context, the very idea of Communism indeed the very idea of Big Ideas!needs to be defended, nurtured, and deliberately developed. And so it is important that we not take forums like this conference, or each other, our fellow-travellers on this revolutionary road, for granted. The Platypus panel description we were given asks several questions. They are certainly not exhaustive of the topic of Badiou, (post) Maoism, or Communism. But they do seem to me to be a reasonable, if not the only, place to start. I want to use my time, in part, to deepen and unpack, just the first of the really quite loaded questions that were put to us. First, we are asked by the blurb, How does the prominence of Alain Badious approach to communism speak to the present historical moment and its emancipatory possibilities? This question like many questions has embedded within it a number of aspects. 1. The prominence of Badious thought. 2. Badious approach to communism. And how each of those relates to: 3. The present historical moment. 4. And its emancipatory possibilities. 1.2.3.4. + aspects. Each of these aspects brings forth another question, complex in and of itselfquestions that deserve full treatment in themselvesamong them: 1. What is the prominence of Badious thought today? 2. What is the nature of Badious approach to communism? 3. What is the best way to understand the present historical moment? 4. And what are the emancipatory possibilities within in this moment? Finally, 5. How does Badious thought relate to #3 and #4 , to the contemporary moment and its emancipatory possibilities? In this paper I would like to take a stab at just the first couple of these, beginning with: 1. How prominent is Alain Badious thought today, and what is the nature of this prominence? At a minimum, Badious rise to prominence would seem to signal a growing open-ness at least in academic circlesto the issue of communism, or at least to the radical opposition to capitalism, which is to say, a waning of certain cold war era prohibitions, a fading of the end of history Fukuyama-ist haze that has blanketed academia for so long. Badious prominence, at least within humanities, English, and philosophy

departments would likewise appear to signal a certain moving beyond the limits of what is often called postmodernist discourse, with its fetishization of plurality, irony and uncertainty, its privileging of difference, and its ethics of respecting the Other at a distance, even at the expense of meaningful interventionHis prominence suggests a re-emerging interest in questions of unity, universality, truth (with a capital T), and politics (with a capital P), as well as thinking in terms of transforming inherited situations in fundamental ways, rather than subversively playing on their hybrid margins. Its also worth considering the radical difference between Badiou and say the empirical approach of Noam Chomsky, an invaluable thinker whose critical work of exposing the systems crimes is still haunted, nonetheless, by a prohibition on thinking Big Ideas. As already noted, Badiou identifies this prohibition as one of the symptoms of our time, as well as one of the major obstacles to breaking out of the present capitalist system. In my view, these developments are largely positive! Of course Badious prominence is not the only sign of this moments open-ness to Big Ideas, or to communism in particular. A recent Rasmussen poll for instance found that 11% of likely voters in the US found Communism more moral than the current US political and economic system. Breaking down these numbers (for their Platinum members only) the pollsters found that 26-7% of 18-29 year olds interviewed reported that communism was both moral and that it worked better than the current US system. (And keep in mind here of course that likely voters tend to be wealthier and, by definition, more committed to the political existing system than, say, non-voters, let alone say, non-citizens, or the un-documented.) To me these are exciting and encouraging numbers. To what extent are Badiou and the discourse around him and other emerging philosophers of communism have contributed to this support vs. merely benefited from it in increased attention and readership? It is difficult to say. But what does seem likely to me is that aside from matters of direct influence, many of these people who are now reporting themselves as in favor of communism, are likely coming at communism, like Badiou, in new and what may appear to us as strange ways, not primarily through a reading of Marxs Capital, but through other vectors of discourse, experience, reflection, and influence. (Though undoubtedly in many cases Marx or Marxism continue to play an important role, as well they should.). This brings us to the second question within the given question: 2. What is Alain Badious approach to communism? I would start by noting an assumption that is built into this question. Namely, that there is only one singular Badiou-ist approach to communism. While I havent yet read let alone made a close study of Badious complete oeuvre, I have read enough to learn that there is, in fact, more than one Badiouas there is more than one Marx for that matter! There are tensions, competing trajectories, and changes that move through Badious work, regarding many elements of his philosophy, including several that are quite directly linked to communism and to politics. I do not mean to throw open the door to a kind of textual indeterminacy, as if we can never generalize about Badiou because he is not even identical with himself. Rather I aim to suggest that in dealing with Badiouor other complex thinkers such as Hegel, Marx, Lenin, Adorno, or Maowe would do better to imagine Badious work as a kind of layered terrain, a textual topology with which we best familiarize ourselves before pronouncing a totalizing judgment, that is, if we want to stand a chance of entering that terrain, to grapple with Badiou seriously, and/or to engage students of Badiou in a meaningful way. For example, in reading Bruno Bosteels recent essay (The Leftist Hypothesis from theIdea of Communism book, based on talks from the Birkbeck conference), it becomes clear that there are differences between Badiou of the early 1980s and the Badiou of

today, as regards, for starters, such fundamental concepts of Marxism as class struggle, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and revolution. Similarly in his 1969 essay Outline of a Beginning, curiously reprinted in the middle of Badious most recent book, The Communist Hypothesis, (in a section entitled We Are Still Contemporaries of May 1968,) Badiou appears very much open to the notion of something like a maoist party of a new type, one that puts into practice the mass line, (from the masses to the masses) with cadre dialectically engaging mass movements, in a process of movement party mutual transformation. A Party that continually struggles against bureaucratization, ossification, as well as fragmentation and anarchic isolationa party that would incorporate the very mass friction it encounters as the means of its radical renewal and transformation, as well as the masses (self)transformation. For this Badiou of 1969 or even of 1982, the party-state is not simply exhausted, as it appears in much later work (though even here there are variations and competing tendencies). For instance consider Badious rather sympathetic description of the notion of the Party as it was grasped by Marx and for that matter, Lenin (from his bookMetapolitics): It is crucial to emphasize, Badiou states, that for Marx of Lenin, who are both in agreement on this point, the real characteristic of the party is not its firmness, but rather its porosity to the event, its dispersive flexibility in the face of unforeseeable circumstances. To quote a long passage that Bosteels finds in Badiou on this point: Rather than referring to a dense, bound faction of the working classthe party refers to an unfixable omnipresence, whose proper function is less to represent class than to delimit it by ensuring it is equal to everything that history presents as improbably and excessive in respect to the rigidity of interests, whether material or national. Thus, the communists embody the unbound multiplicity of consciousness, its anticipatory aspect, and therefore the precariousness of the bond, rather than its firmness. (Metapolitics, 71). Tracing the development of Badious thought into his later writings, in relationship and in contrast to these writings of the 1980s and 1990s, Bosteels (in The Leftist Hypothesis essay) asks, skeptically, but not dismissively: What happens when of these four fundamental concepts [class struggle, the dictatorship of the proletariat, revolution, and communism] only communism is retained?Moreoverwhat are we to make of Badious recent calls for the complete separation of the communist hypothesis both from the party form of politics and from the figure of the State? (Bosteels, 50). We too should raise and pursue such critical questions. Note: they are not simply rhetorical questions aimed as disqualifying Badious project as anathema to Marxism or true communism, but, rather, real questions that demand investigation and clarification. That is: If we cannot rely solely on the concept of class struggle producing a revolutionary communist subject, (the party being the official, and even historically destined leader of that struggle) then where mightwhere will, where mustsuch communist subjectivity come from? Similarly if the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariatas embodied in a socialist statehas proven historically to not in itself adequate to guaranteeing the progress of the revolutionary transformation of capitalism, through socialism to communism, then what new concepts and new forms are necessary and available to us to prepare the way for this radical transition? Considering a history of socialist states that have had difficulty withering away, how ought communists to relate to the notion of socialism today? Moreover, we might ask (in ways that challenge Badiou): Does reckoning with the limitation of these fundamental concepts of Marxism to date necessitate their retirement (as exhausted), or merely their revision, reconception, or perhaps their being supplemented by other additional concepts and organizational forms? And if so, what are these concepts and forms? What in these concepts is still worth fighting for and

reclaiming, albeit against the current of the times? Moreover we should ask to what extent has Badiou carried out the investigation of past communist events and sequences necessary to justify these rather bold theoretical generalizations? To what extent does our understanding of these previous sequences support, confirm, complicate, or contradict Badious conclusions? Personally, I should note, that while my thinking has been provoked on Badiou this point, I have yet to be convinced by Badious more recent conclusion (which derives from Sylvian Lazarus, as I understand it) that the Party-State form of emancipatory politics is totally exhausted. In my estimation the quite informative and thought-provoking historical examination that Badiou gives the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in ChinaBadious prime example for the exhaustion of the party-state organization as a communist form of politicsdoes not provide a conclusive evidentiary basis that could justify the rather universalizing conclusions he then draws about politics in general. At the same time, I unite with Badiou when he writes (in the Communist Hypothesis) that Mao remains the name of a problem we still face; that is the contradiction between maintaining power for a revolutionary order on the one hand, and unleashing further emancipatory currents that threaten to destabilize even the main institutions of that new order, on the other. I can at least unite with Badiou in that it is clear to me that the problem of the communist party must be thought again, whether or not we retain this name party in the end at all. These days Badiou continues to reconsider and reframe his position with respect to the state. For instance, as Bosteels has pointed out, Badious essay The Idea of Communism, in its published book form, differs subtly but importantly from the talk version of the essay he delivered at the Birkbeck conference some months prior. At the conference Badiou put forth his frequently quoted point about the party-state being exhausted. Yet, in the published version Badiou argues that it may still be possible for the Idea of Communism to include a projected figure of another state so long as this post-capitalist state to come is on the one hand, subtracted from the present State and secondly is figured so that its essence is to wither away (CH 248). I dont mean to wade too deeply into this particularand important thicket of the Party-State. The main point here is that both historically, and even in our present moment, Badious thinking is an active and developing project, one thatas Bosteels has sugggseted, is still subject to the pressure and effect of ideological struggle. Indeed, as Badiou himself argues, we are in a time of political experimentation, the experience and summation of which then oughtindeed mustbe figured back into theoretical constructions. To do otherwise would be to fall into dogmatism. But to get back to the issue of what communism means for Badiou. Badiou offers several different Communist concepts, each of which have a distinct meaning and position within his thought, the main being: What he calls generic communism What he calls The Communist Hypothesis And also what he calls The Idea of Communism To get at the meaning of the first two concepts, we might do well to quote the following passage, from The Meaning of Sarkozy, one of Badious most recent books. In its generic sense, communist means first of all, in a negative senseas we can read in its canonical text The Communist Manifestothat the logic of classes, of the fundamental subordination of people who actually work for a dominant class, can be overcome. This arrangement, which has been that of history ever since antiquity, is not inevitable. Consequently, the oligarchic powers of those who possess wealth and organize its circulation, crystallized in the might of states, is not inescapable (98). As Badiou continues, moving to the second concept:

The communist hypothesis is that a different collective organization is practicable, one that will eliminate the inequality of wealth and even the division of labor; every individual will be a multi-purpose worker, and in particular people will circulate between manual and intellectual work, as well as between town and country. The private appropriation of monstrous fortunes and their transmission by inheritance will disappear. The existence of a coercive state separate from civil society, with its military and police, will no longer seem a self-evident necessity. There will be, Marx tells usand he saw this point as his major contributionafter a brief sequence of proletarian dictatorship charged with destroying the remains of the old world, a long sequence of reorganization on the basis of a free association of producers and creators, which will make possible a withering away of the state. (98-99). Generic communism here appears as an actuality of resistance. The actuality of this resistance and rebellion then makes possible the self-consciousness of that historical movement: the communist hypothesis. From this point on, for Badiou it becomes possibleat least in partial and fragmentary waysto raise the issue of communism as a question and a problem to be solved, in its own right. To offer a few further reflections on this passage: It is statement about possibility; and about the non-necessity of the current order of things. It is not to be confused with the hopefully hopelessly vague World Social Forum slogan that Another World is Possible in some clear and positive sense, as if the alternative is simply there for the taking (without a major revolutionary reckoning that involves the negation and overcoming of many aspects of the present situation). It is a statement aiming to deprive the ruling capitalist order of classes and states of its aura as natural and inevitable. That aims to clear the ideological fog that obscures the path(s) forward:Things do not have to be this way. We can make the world on new foundations. There is more that we might say about even this short passage, namely its emphasis on the transformation of society not simply in terms of overcoming wealth inequality but also the division of labor, and in particular the division between mental and manual labor, and between town and country. (The debt to Marx and to Mao here are unmistakable.) Badiou, contrary to his critics is not simply calling for some radical egalitarian democracy of a pre-marxian sort. The communist hypothesis for Badiou is a projected negation of the present conditions, and a posited horizon, not only to be strived towards but to be used as a criticalwhat he calls a heuristica Kantian regulatory idea; a means of produce lines of demarcation between different forms of politics that contend in the actuality of the present. It is not itself a path to be followed but a kind of lens, a perspective through which to evaluate and to decide between paths that present themselves. As he writes, By and large, a particular political sequence is either compatible with these principles or opposed to them, in which case it is reactionary. Communism in this sense is a heuristic hypothesis that is very frequently used in political argument, even if the word itself does not appear. As Badiou elaborates on this point, with rhetorical flair: If it is still true, as Sartre said, that every anti-communist is a swine, it is because any political sequence that, in its principles or lack of them, stands in formal contradiction with the communist hypothesis in its generic sense, has to be judged as opposed to the emancipation of the whole of humanity, and thus to the properly human destiny of humanity. Whoever does not illuminate the coming-to-be of humanity with the communist hypothesiswhatever words they use, as such words matter littlereduces humanity, as far as its collective becoming is concerned, to animality. As we know, the contemporarythat is, the capitalist name of this animalityis competition. The war dictated by self-interest, and nothing more. (Meaning of Sarkozy, 99-100).

Indeed, for Badiou, capitalism strives to make animals of us all. Badious framing of the communism in terms of the Communist Hypothesis, of course, draws an analogy between the historical struggle to achieve communism and the proof of a mathematical theorem. I see at least three implications of this framing: 1) It suggests an approach of testing and experimenting, of persistent inquiry rather than doctrinal certitude; 2) In contrast with, say the language of Manifestation, to frame communism as a hypothesis emphasizes the importance of thought and learning in communisms emergence; communism is not something whose emergence is simply immanent to the dynamics of capitalism and the class struggle, though its possibility is suggestedand its hypothesis establishedfor Badiou even by pre-modern slave uprisings like Spartacus, etc. The working out of communism is something that requires abstraction and reflection, as well as conscious testing in theory and practice. 3) By speaking of Communism as a hypothesis, Badiou reframes previous (unsuccessful) attempts at achieving communism as merely the prehistory of the proof of the hypothesis. Failure, and the summing up and learning from failure, through close and situated analysis of those sequences, is absolutely crucial, to any scientific endeavor. Certainly for an experiment to fail, or rather to produce negative results, does not impugn the project as a whole. Past failures are nothing to be ashamed of, so long as you learn from them and persist in the proof! Indeed, they are often necessary to bring about the rare and precious positive breakthroughs. Likewise with the history of the communist movement. I will at this point bring in a fourth aspect which seems to me more of a danger implicit in this hypothesis framing. Namely 4) that the mathematical rhetoric here may lead some to read Badiou as suggesting that the problems and questions of communism can be resolved solely within the context of controlled laboratory experiments, or through theoretical abstractions shared at conferences like these (or via websites even). Certainly, in academic contexts many a thinkerMarx himself for onehas been domesticated in this way, divorced from practice that engages the world beyond the seminar table. But is this tendency one that Badiou seeks to encourage? I would say no. For alongside the imperative to learn from the failures of the communist movements and socialist states of the past, and to draw abstract and universal lessons from these studies, Badiou also calls us to examine the partial successes and failures of contemporary political movements whose actual politics and ideology are far from communist. As he writes, for instance, Today we need to investigate the real nature of the link to the people from the standpoint of the universal lessons to be drawn, of organizations limited by their religious allegiance: Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine. We should also pay attention to the countless worker uprisings in China, and the actions of the Maoists in India and Nepal. The list is by no means closed (Sarkozy, 111). The point here I want to underscore is that alongside Badious mobilization of the communist hypothesis (and the communist Idea, to be discussed further below) and his emphasis on abstractions and subjective dynamics, is a perhaps less pronounced, but equally important imperative to investigate political situations past and present, with an eye to how the new communist sequence can be helped forth. The Idea of Communism Badious Idea of Communism, which he describes as more of an operationI might suggest projection or even projectthan a fixed utopian ideal, has a distinct meaning, related but different from The Communist Hypothesis. Basically, it is the operation through which an individual becomes Subject to a communist Truth-process, symbolically bridging the gap between the singularity of particular political practices and the great historic collective project of human emancipation. If the Communist Hypothesis aims to open our eyes and help us see the possibilities and lessons of the past and present more clearly, than the Communist Idea, is an essentially subjective

operation, one that makes the individual communist subject a part of something bigger than him/herself. To quote Badiou, at several key points: An Idea is the possibility for an individual to understand that his or her participation in a singular political processis also , in a certain way, a historical decision. Thanks to the Idea, the individual, realizes his or her belonging as an element of a new Subject, realizes his or her belonging to the movement of History (Communist Hypothesis, 235). In other words, the communist Idea is the imaginary operation whereby an individual subjectivation projects a fragment of the political real into the symbolic narrative of History. (CH, 239). The Idea is a historical anchoring of everything elusive, slippery and evanescent in the becoming of a truth. But it can only be so if it admits as its own real this aleatory, elusive, slippery, evanescent, dimension (CH, 247). The role of this Idea is to support that individuals incorporation into the discipline of a truth procedure, to authorize the individual, in his or her own eyes, to go beyond the Statist constraints of mere survival by becoming a part of the body-of-truth, or subjectivizable body (CH, 252). In short, Badiou asks us to anchor communist subjectivity in the imagination, not in the necessities of history. The state of being a communist subject is not, for Badiou, something that can be reduced to, or read off of objective determinants, whether of class position, or party affiliationcertainly not just by adding the adjective communist to some pre-existing or half-thought practice or organization. It is not something organic or stable or something guaranteed but something that is sustained only so long as the communist Idea is operative. It is not guaranteed by History, which remains an imagined projected narrative, albeit a necessary one, if we are collectively to think, and through our thoughts, and actions supported by those thoughts, to actualize global human emancipation. We may hear in Badious language here a certain secularized communist recasting of Christian communion. Through the operation of the Idea we become aware of our potential to join our individual self as part of a larger greater body of truth, and a movement of History. Contrary to a certain vulgar secularism, within our age of cynicism, I find, this notion of the Communist Idea of interest as a way to simultaneously (on the one hand) en-courage and sustain the fidelity of lonely and depression-visited radical anti-capitalists in a moment of Sarkozys and Obamas. At the same time it is a notion that encourages rather than squelches local experiments in political practice. For no practice can be deemed in itself in advance to be communist or non-communist based on simply its location or its immediate import; it is the way that practice is bound up with and mediated by, and becomes a site of the idea operation of communism that they will have become communist. The Idea remains an Idea not a certainty. Just as a hypothesis demands proof in practice. Which then brings us to the final two questions in the assigned blurb: 3+4) What is the nature of the present historical moment? And what are its emancipatory possibilities? I might reverse this question and instead ask : What are some of the things that stand in the way of the emergence of a movement capable of cultivating, organizing, and mobilizing these emancipatory possibilities? A quick list comes to mind: Fragmentation, pessimism, isolation The TINA notion that there is no alternative to the capitalist system Cynicism and nihilism (both on and beyond the left) Dogmatism and Sectarianism (including a fetishization of or premature dismissals of tactics and forms)

Facile anti-communist dismissals of actually existing communists movements, past and present I would argue that Badiou offers us perspectives and approaches, and a spirit of enthusiastic engagement , that can play a role in helping us in addressing all of the above weaknesses. No magic bullet. But an element of the mix! ** In closing, a few notes on an additional question put to us by Platypus and by Chris Cutrone: How does Badious conception of communism relate to the history of Marxism in the 20th century, with its roots in the 19th century? As is well known, Badiou places particular emphasis and pays close attention to the moments of the Paris Commune, and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, as well as May 1968. He places great emphasis on learning from failure. Failure not as it was doomed from the start but as it was worked through in actual historical experience, theory and practice. He places a particular focus on Mao as a name that still embodies a the practicaltheoretical knot of the communist movement, even today, namely: How to build an organization that is massive and powerful enough to overthrow the present order, to sustain state power (in a capitalist-imperialist world), and yet is able to stave off ossification, bureaucratization, capitalist roadersto remain a revolutionary agent encouraging, not suppressing the initiative of spontaneous mass organization and social transformation. Obviously, we are not in the position of picking up where Mao left off.The practical question for us is not what could or should have Mao or the revolutionary cadre in China have done to transform their possibilities in the 60s or 70s? But how to organize NOW in light of the limits and the tangles that communist revolutionaries come up against in the past. To briefly and provocatively conclude: what I take from Badiou in this vein is the necessity for us today to conceive of communist revolution as from the startnot simply after supplanting the present state powera cultural revolution. We need not just a revolutionary party, but a revolutionary people. For which we need revolutionary intellectuals and activists who sink deep roots in the people not simply to build a core of cadre oriented towards exposing and eventually overthrowing of the current state power as well as the construction of a new and different one, but whose aim is to stir up and support emancipatory ideas and practices so as to cultivate new cultural and social spaces that can now prepare the field, so that we have a shot of avoiding those pitfalls that have constrained and even toppled those who have come before us. http://www.khukuritheory.net/why-is-badiou-of-political-value/ Following is the paper I gave yesterday at the Platypus convention in Chicago, as part of a panel titled Badiou and Post-Maoism: Marxism and Communism Today. Other panelists were Chris Cutrone of Platypus, Mike Ely of Kasama, and Joe Ramsey. Cutrones paper strongly attacked Badiou, whom he characterized as a typical 60s new leftist, deeply anti-Marxist, who would reduce communism to the perennial complaint of the subaltern. The others of us on the panel looked far more favorably on Badiou. Parenthetically, what became far more clear to me at the conference is that, despite the groups stated orientation of self-criticism and self-education, Platypus represents a

very defined political position. In a nutshell: Marxism as the self-consciousness of the bourgeois revolution,and proletarian revolution as the fulfillment and culmination of the bourgeois revolution. I dont raise this in order to discuss it, but simply as an observation. The following is not really a discussion of Badious thought certainly not a deep one and does not attempt to assess his central philosophical positions. Im simply, rather, attempting to address a question on a somewhat more crude level: Is Badiou, as a thinker and actor in todays intellectual/cultural/social milieu, playing a valuable role, politically? Why is Badiou of political value? John Steele I assume we all start out from Marxism (certainly I do) but what does this mean? There have been, and will be, many Marxisms, and the way to deal with this fact is not to believe that we have somehow to excavate the true and only Marx or Marxism, but to recognize that the fact of many Marxisms is based not just in history but in the writings of Marx himself (as well, of course, as those of his close associate Engels). Marx did not create a completely integrated and self-consistent theoretical structure let alone an integrated theoretical/strategic/practical edifice. It is obvious that there are several (or many) strands and interpretations within the Marxist tradition. Most of these accept the unitary Marx thesis. In actuality, though, several strands of thinking co-exist in Marx and his writings, which do not necessarily form (in fact do not form) a self-consistent, integrated whole. Even within the critique of political economy, the most fully developed part of Marx work, there is (notoriously) more than one crisis theory. But leaving all that aside, lets preface the question of Badious value by asking: Why is Marx of political value? First a point of clarification on the sort of politics I mean: the politics to say it very broadly and for the moment without further elaboration of human emancipation. Given that this is our politics, or our broad political aim, then what is of political value can be characterized, equally broadly, as what conduces to, or what is helpful in working toward this aim. (Obviously this will be relative to historical situation.) So Marx is of political value if his works conduce toward this, and for quite a bit of the last hundred and fifty years hes been thought, on a very broad scale, to be valuable in precisely this way. Now of course a lot of the finding-Marx-of-political-value during this period was built upon an understanding of Marx as the creator of a science of society and a metaphysic of history which limned a sure course of development and eventual victory a thesis, and an understanding of Marx, which I reject, as Im sure do most here. That was aMarx, and its a Marx which has lost the political value it may once have had, but this is not the only Marx. Turning to my subject, my thesis is that for us, at this historical moment, Badiou, in his writings and his public stance, is of political value. Or perhaps, less sweepingly: He speaks to the situation and dilemmas of this historical moment in a way that I think can help us move forward politically. Marxism Part of the reason for his value is the fact that he does not pose his work as a development of Marxism. Although I would claim Badiou for Marxism (and for Maoism, as Ive written elsewhere), its salutary to find a thinker who defines himself politically in terms of communism, who traces a complex identity with all that communism has meant in the 20th century, including the Russian and Chinese revolutions and their

ramifications, but who does not seek to derive, deduce or define a contemporary emancipatory politics simply in those terms, nor in the language (for the most part) of this tradition. This is a good thing, part of why Badiou is of political value, because this trajectory of revolutionary politics, along with much of its language and terminology, is dead dead in the sense of being a living force in the world socially and politically. Let me make make sure what Im saying is clear here, and guard against misunderstandings. Marx is an intellectual and political resource and Lenin, to cite just one other name, but along with many, many others and it would be unthinkable for any contemporary emancipatory politics to attempt to do without this resource of past thinkers and actors. So I dont mean at all that the works and example of Marx (& etc.) are dead, useless, outmoded. As I said, we always need to beware of imposing a false unity and integration on this past, and to be alive to its contradictions, unevennesses, gaps, anomalies. But to say that Marx (etc.) is a necessary resource for rebuilding is clearly not to say that Marxism (or Marxism-Leninism, or ) is a living political/social force: it was and there were many problematic aspects, but there was a living movement with a broad commonality of thinking and acting in the political realm: a subject pursuing a truthprocess, in Badious terms. This no longer exists as a real and living social/political force thats obvious. Whats often not so obvious to leftists is that the point is not to resuscitate or resurrect what has died. Badiou: some terms Before moving on into Badiou, let me just mention some of Badious key concepts as they apply politically: Event (this term has a specialized meaning in Badiou). A Badiouian event is a momentary break in the ruling or hegemonic structure of things, an opening out of which a new truth process may be born. To quote Badiou from his recent Communist Hypothesis, it is a rupture in the normal order of bodies and languages as it exists for any particular situation.What is important to note here is that an event is not the realization of a possibility that resides within the situation or that is dependent on the transcendental laws of the world. An event is the creation of new possibilities. It is located not merely at the level of objective possibilities but at the level of the possibility of possibilities. (242-3.) Not the realization of an already existing possibility but the creation of new possibilities. Truth process. Politics that is, a particular political sequence is conceived as a truth-process. Politics is an autonomous realm, which forges its own truths through truth processes. Thus political truth processes and their truths are not derivative from those of another realm (such as philosophy, ethics, economics, etc.). Emancipatory politics as truth-process: both terms are notable and important. After a certain point a particular truth process becomes saturated (Badious term) in effect it reaches an impasse. The truth-process beginning from the Russian Revolution has (long since now) become saturated. To sum up what Ill call the beneficially destructive aspect of Badiou: I think this emphasis on the autonomy of politics is important and valuable. Is he correct in saying this? Im not completely sure. But what is valuable is this emphasis because it helps to pry us loose from a century or 150 years of making, or trying to make, politics an appendage of something else of economics, often, or of philosophy. This illustrates a prominent way in which Badiou can be, and is valuable politically: not because he outlines a new, grand theory to which all should give assent (and this is not at all the way it is, btw, in Badious stance or in the attitudes of his fans and students), but in marking a new possible approach, which will at the very least have the virtue of challenging

wellworn and habitual left platitudes, which have shown themselves by this point (in fact by long ago) to be thoroughly unfruitful. Truth Politics as truth why truth? Why is that valuable? Actually of course, what Badiou says is not that politics is truth, or that a real emancipatory politics represents truth, but that any real politics is constituted by a truth process. Both words should be taken in full weight. Lets take the second word first: politics is process not achieved or hoped-for result, and also not a proceedure based on recipe or body of knowledge (at least not knowledge taken as knowledge, so to speak on which see more below). Rather, it is a process beginning not from what exists or from knowledge of what is (including its contradictions or tendencies), but from an axiom (or axioms). Now this insistence on an axiomatic beginning might seem to introduce a strong element of decisionism as if the starting point is something arbitrarily decided upon, or some wished-for thesis taken as beginning point: a sort of utopianism. But this is not Badious thinking. Rather, this axiomatic beginning is taken up as a starting point in view of an event, another key term (as we all know) in Badious thinking. An event, in Badious rather technical sense, is not a grand happening. It is not even a noteworthy thing that occurred. It is, rather, more like a little flicker, which might easily pass unnoticed, and which will pass unnoted in the historical annals unless it becomes the beginning of a truth process. An event gives a momentary glimpse, not of possibilities inherent in what exists, or in history, but (to repeat) a glimpse of the possibility of possibilities. And the axiomatic beginning of a truth-process is the taking of a stance: it is to assume that these possibilities are real. Or even more: to explore the world, to act, as if these possibilities will have already become true. Thus politics actual, emancipatory politics is a leap in the dark. It is not action based on what we know, or what can be known. It is action based on a gamble, on the making of a very serious bet, not even on a possibility (to say it again), but on what would be the case if the implications of that initial glimpse of the possibility of what might be are followed out and made true. To take up political truth-process is to assume that axiomatic beginning in practice, to take it up fully and follow out its implications that is, to act on the supposition of what will have become true, given the axioms truth. This is not a toe-in-the-water attitude, or a testing-it-out-to-see-whether stance. Its a leap which can only be made with courage and confidence a confidence which cannot be founded in the world which surrounds the one who leaps. So we can clearly see the process part; and we can also start to see whats meant by truth here. Badiou makes a strong distinction between knowledge and truth. Knowledge is achieved and relates solely to an existing state of affairs a situation or a world, in Badious terminology. Truth, on the other hand, is always processual: always in process, never achieved (else it changes to knowledge, and relates to a new and achieved world or situation). The reference of truths is in the future perfect: what will have been the case should the political practice which is the truth process come to fruition and succeed in changing the world (making a new world). Truth can only reach a state of achievment (when it then becomes knowledge) retrospectively. If we want to say that what is true must correspond to a state of affairs, then we have to say that truths, for Badiou, correspond to a state of affairs to be brought about only through the agency of a subject and its associated truth process. Now I just mentioned the subject associated with a truth process. Badious theory of the subject is a big topic, which I will gloss over here. But lets at least note that the subject here is not an individual person or consciousness, but something trans-individual.

Badiou describes the subject as a new body, constituted by the trace of an event, and oriented around a truth process. Political value But leaving that thorny topic aside, lets return to the question of political value. The concept of event is whats most often taken from Badiou. This is important, yes, but theres much more to Badiou than simply the admonition to be on the lookout for what is new, or for upsurges of rebellion. There is this admonition, if its understood with sufficient openness: what were on the lookout for is the possible beginning of a new truth process, not something were calling on to conform to an already-existing political template. (A good place to see how this works for Badiou is in his recent remarks on the uprisings on Tunisia and Egypt, one of which have been reprinted here, the other on Kasama.) Communism as process and axiom not goal Marxism as it has existed, and to a lesser and more ambiguous extent in the writings of Marx, has built politics upon a theory of history, a progressive historical schema (obviously very much part of enlightenment thinking) which projects a sequence from pre-capitalist society through capitalism to socialism and thence to communism, within which socialism becomes the proximate revolutionary goal, and communism is over the horizon, but a state of things to be achieved in the end. In this context politics becomes an activity which is both teleological (guided by a particular goal to be achieved), and instrumental (a process serving as an instrument for the achievement of this goal). Badious conception is a challenge precisely to this: Communism is immanent within the process of emancipatory politics: an axiom, not an objective, a process, not a program. (I owe this formulation to Don Hamerquist.) The communist hypothesis informs the political truth process, not as a plan or program, nor as a goal, but as the general and over-riding defining axiom. (In fact, Badiou holds, nothing will count as a political truthprocess which is not defined by this axiom: he says that it is the only real political Idea another term used in a technical way by Badiou, which I will dodge for now.) Communism (note: not socialism another question to discuss another time) communism as axiom and process restores real contingency to politics, and at the same time cuts against a pragmatic orientation. Politics is a process of agency, a subjective process that is, proceeding through a subject. This process is not a strategically mapped-out march toward a pre-established goal, but an aleatory process, following a necessarily chance-ridden path. And in fact isnt this how revolutionary politics has actually proceeded, even though it is not how it has conceived of itself as proceeding? The 2nd and 3rd Internationals (as well as Trotskyist variants of the latter) understood politics to be a matter of proceeding from scientific and historical analysis and yet whatever real politics took place (and I do think it did, in particular places and times during this long period), was much more along the lines of what Badiou outlines, than the mythical self-understanding which was its ideology: real politics here too was, in practice, a leap in the dark, guided by a basic postulate, without assurance of success or where exactly what the end result would be. Look at any of whatever you may choose as great instances of revolutionary politics in the 20th century, or in your own experience, and I think this will hold true, if examined with full honesty. It certainly holds true in my own experience. That aside, though, and whether you grant that this has been the case, I think it would be hard to deny that any emancipatory politics of the present historical moment would or must if its going to take place fit Badious open but anchored process.