Communism (2)

[Antid Oto]

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20 March 2009

alberto toscano: communist knowledge/communist power
[Here is Alberto's paper from day two of the Birkbeck Communism
conference. Pictures chosen by me, of course]

For the purposes of this talk, I want to take Zizek’s opening remarks
yesterday about the ‘patience of the concept’ as a license to zero in
on the question of communism’s relationship to philosophy. I want do
so in particular through the prism of what I’d like to call the
politics of abstraction, a notion which I hope will be clarified as I
proceed. As a cautionary note, this means that this paper will not
address the immediate prospects of a communist politics, but simply
consider what it might mean to be a communist in philosophy, and
whether the idea of communism is indeed a philosophical idea. It also
means that I will be engaging at various points in the quotation and
discussion of Marx. This is not a matter of allegiance or authority –
Marx is not a timeless standard of correctness – but stems from the
need to define how philosophy was caught up in the very emergence of
the idea of communism, and in what manner communism developed both
from and against philosophy. This is a precondition, I think, for
revisiting and possibly recasting the idea of communism today.

A philosophical consideration of communism is immediately confronted
with two apparently opposed retorts. From the standpoint of its most
inveterate detractors, communism is a political pathology of
abstraction, a violent denial of worldly differences and customs, of
the density of history and the inertia of nature. It is the doomed
attempt to philosophize the world into something other than what it
is. To employ Hegel’s vocabulary, communism is a manifestation of
fanaticism. That is, to quote The Philosophy of History, ‘an
enthusiasm for something abstract – for an abstract thought which
sustains a negative position towards the established order of things.
It is the essence of fanaticism to bear only a desolating destructive
relation to the concrete’. In a world of differences, hierarchies and
stratifications, how could an intransigent politics of egalitarianism
be anything other than fanatical? Such views, which first gained
momentum in reaction to the French Revolution, have continued to
accompany the various instantiations of what Badiou calls ‘generic
communism’. This was (...and remains) the case in the literature of
Cold War anti-totalitarianism, for which the desolations and
destructions of Stalinism are to be referred, in the last instance,
not to the logic of political and class struggles, or to the bellicose
encirclement of the Soviet Union, or indeed to the baleful mechanics
of bureaucratisation, but to the fundamentally ‘ideocratic’ character
of political rule in historical communism. Abstract thought is to
blame – as the very notion of ‘ideocracy’ suggests. As a very minor
contemporary example take these lines from the review of The Meaning
of Sarkozy in The Observer: ‘So when he quotes Mao approvingly and
equivocates over the rights and wrongs of the Cultural Revolution, it
is hard not to feel a certain pride in workaday Anglo-Saxon
empiricism, which inoculates us against the tyranny of pure political
abstraction’.

But this reproach of abstraction is also – and this is my second point
– internal to communist thinking itself, especially and above all in
its Marxian variant. As early as his 1843 correspondence with Ruge in
the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbucher Marx was casting doubts on the
emancipatory powers of a communism – the kind associated with the
likes of Weitling or Cabet – which operated as a ‘dogmatic
abstraction’. As he remarks: ‘it is precisely the advantage of the new
trend that we do not dogmatically anticipate the world, but only want
to find the new world through criticism of the old one. Hitherto
philosophers have had the solution of all riddles lying in their
writing-desks, and the stupid, exoteric world had only to open its
mouth for the roast pigeons of absolute knowledge to fly into it’.
This is why, as he declaims, ‘we do not confront the world in a
doctrinaire way with a new principle: Here is the truth, kneel down
before it! We develop new principles for the world out of the world’s
own principles’. Is this profession of critical and political
immanence a mere abdication of philosophy? Far from it. The problem
for Marx, the problem of communist politics and communist theory will
remain throughout that of a non-dogmatic anticipation. And this
anticipation will mutate in accordance with the conjuncture.

To explore and take stock of the relationship between communism and
(philosophical) abstraction, I want to begin by exploring this
question of anticipation. Taking Marx’s ‘Introduction to a Critique of
Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’ as emblematic in this respect, it is
possible to suggest that the anticipatory function of philosophy is
inversely proportional to the revolutionary maturity of the situation
in which it intervenes. Famously, Marx’s plea for radicalisation is
insistently contextualised in terms of German backwardness. What is
perhaps most arresting about this text is precisely how the most
generic of programmes, universal social emancipation, is meticulously
and strategically situated in a very singular political predicament.
Having lyrically encapsulated the results of the critique of religion,
which he regards as having been ‘essentially completed’ for Germany,
Marx is confronted with the obstacles preventing the prolongation of
the unmasking of religious abstraction into the vanquishing of social
and political abstraction, of ‘the critique of heaven ... into the
critique of earth, the critique of religion into the critique of law,
the critique of theology into the critique of politics’. But the
retrograde character of the German situation impairs the role of
critique as a productive, immanent negativity. In Marx’s acerbic
words: ‘For even the negation of our political present is already a
dusty fact in the historical junkroom of modern nations. If I negate
powdered wigs, I still have unpowdered wigs’. Or, as we may echo
today: ‘If I negate subprime mortgages, I still have mortgages’.

What is the critical philosopher to do when faced with an
anachronistic regime that, as he puts it, ‘only imagines that it
believes in itself’? The German anachronism is double: on the one
hand, the farce of restoration without revolution in practice; on the
other, the anticipation of the future in theory. It is the latter
which alone is worthy of the kind of immanent critique that would be
capable of extracting, from the productive negation of the purely
speculative image of ‘future history’, the weapons for a genuine
overturning of the status quo. In other words, the radicalism of
philosophy – that is of philosophy’s existence as the self-criticism
of philosophy – is dictated by the paradoxical coexistence of
practical backwardness and theoretical advance. In order to be
properly radicalised, the situation surveyed by Marx is thus compelled
to pass through philosophy. Neither a practical repudiation of
philosophy nor a philosophical overcoming of practice are possible:
‘you cannot transcend philosophy without actualising it’, nor can you
‘actualise philosophy without transcending it’. Again, it is important
to stress that though these may appear as universally-binding
statements, they are specified by Germany’s anomalous retardation, its
odd admixture of political anachronism (its powdered wigs) and
philosophical anticipation (Hegel’s Philosophy of Right as the most
advanced articulation of the modern state, a state which of course
does not actually exist in Germany). This anomaly even permits Marx to
hint at Germany’s comparative revolutionary advantage, when he asks:
‘can Germany attain a praxis à la hauteur des principes, that is to
say, a revolution that will raise it not only to the official level of
the modern nations, but to the human level which will be the immediate
future of these nations?’

But, notwithstanding Marx’s faith in theoretical emancipation and his
conviction that theory is not a mere collection of ideas but ‘an
active principle, a set of practices’, philosophy’s practical
conversion appears thwarted by the absence of the ‘passive element’ or
‘material basis’ for revolutionary praxis. This basis would ordinarily
be found in the domain of civil society, in the sphere of needs: ‘A
radical revolution can only be a revolution of radical needs, whose
preconditions and birthplaces appear to be lacking’. In other words,
the ‘theoretical needs’ that emerge from the immanent critique of
philosophy do not translate into ‘practical needs’. The sheer
immaturity and disaggregation of the German polity means that the
‘classical’ model of partial and political revolution is inoperative.
But Marx could not countenance a praxis simply determined at the level
of essence or of philosophy. As he unequivocally put it: ‘It is not
enough that thought strive to actualise itself; actuality must itself
strive toward thought’. This embryonic version of Marx’s later ‘method
of the tendency’ dictates that radical emancipation find its objective
or ‘positive possibility’ in ‘the formation of a class with radical
chains’, the proletariat, that the impossible become real. The point
of this brief excursus is to stress that, even as critical attention
shifts from the limits of the political state to the mode of
production and its laws of motion, the demand of a non-dogmatic
anticipation will continue to define Marx’s work, as will the need to
reassert the difference between this approach and that of dogmatic
anticipation, especially when the latter takes the form of
‘philosophical fantasies’ of a truth which would serve as the standard
against which to judge social change – Marx and Engels’s main
accusation, in The Communist Manifesto, against utopian socialism.

This figure of philosophical anticipation, initially framed in terms
of actuality striving toward thought, and later enveloped and
surpassed in the knowledge of capitalism’s tendencies, has important
consequences, I want to argue, for our very idea of communism. The
specificity of communism stems from its intrinsic and specific
temporality, from the fact that, while never simply non- or
anti-philosophical, it is an idea that contains within it,
inextricably, a tension towards realisation, transition, revolution. I
now want to briefly draw the consequences of this argument in terms of
four interlinked dimensions of the notion of communism which challenge
the philosophical sufficiency or autonomy of the concept: equality,
revolution, power, and knowledge. You will note that in some manner
these are dimensions which philosophy sometimes defines by contrast
with the vicissitudes of communist politics and its associated
critique of political economy. Thus, economic equality is sometimes
treated as the counterpart to equality as a philosophical principle or
axiom; power, especially state power, is regarded as a dimension
external to philosophical questioning about communism; knowledge is
juxtaposed to truth and revolution is regarded as an at best enigmatic
and at worst obsolete model of emancipatory change.

Let’s begin with equality. The affirmation of equality, both as a
political maxim and as a social objective, lies of course behind the
age-old view of communism as a dangerous levelling force, a violent
abstraction unleashed on a world of embedded customs and refractory
differences. But communism – in its own words, so to speak – has also,
at different times, articulated its own criticism of equality as
abstraction. Consider the Critique of the Gotha Programme, and the
commentary on that document in Lenin’s State and Revolution. Faced
with a truly ‘economistic’ theory of justice (the social-democratic
ideal, pushed by the likes of Lassalle, that equality signifies ‘fair
distribution’, ‘the equal right of all to an equal product of
labour’), Marx retorts – in passages whose significance for the
concept of equality have yet, one might argue, to be fully assumed –
that the notion of equality implied by this distributionist vision of
communism is still steeped in the very abstractions that dominate
bourgeois society. Speculating about a communist society that emerges
from capitalist society – and is thus, not just its negation but its
determinate negation – Marx notes that the abrogation of exploitation
and the capitalist appropriation of surplus-value would not yet end
the forms of injustice that inhere in the domination over social
relations by the abstraction of value. In a nascent communist society,
distribution is still ‘governed by the same principle as the exchange
of commodity equivalents: a given amount of labour in one form is
exchanged for the same amount in another’.

Equality in such an embryonic, transitional communism is still
beholden to the domination of a standard, labour, which is itself the
bearer of inequalities – of capacity, productivity, intensity, and so
on. The equal right so blithely invoked by the social-democrat is thus
‘in its content one of inequality, just like any other right’, since
‘a right can by its nature only consist in the application of an equal
standard’ to unequal individuals. In other words, a political and
philosophical notion of equality as a right, founded on the idea of an
abstract and universal measure or standard, still bears the birthmarks
of a form of social measurement based on the value of labour. In
Lenin’s gloss, ‘the mere conversion of the means of production into
the common property of the whole of society ... does not remove the
defects of distribution and inequality of “bourgeois right” which
continues to dominate in so far as products are divided “according to
work”’. What philosophical lessons are to be drawn from this for our
idea of communism? First of all that, to the extent that communism is
the determinate and not the simple negation of capitalism – i.e. to
the extent that it is not a ‘dogmatic abstraction’ – the problem of
its realisation is inherent to its concept. The communist problem of
equality is the problem of an equality, to quote Lenin, without any
standard of right – which is to say an equality that does not
perpetuate the inequalities generated by the domination of social
relations by the measures of value, by the labour-standard in
particular, which pertain to capitalism. Such a ‘non-standard’
equality can only be thought as an outcome of revolution and transition.

>From a philosophical standpoint, we could ask whether the very notion
of equality is still in effect. Rather than either affirming the
principled equality of human beings or promising their eventual
levelling, communist ‘equality’, involves creating social relations in
which inequalities would be rendered inoperative, no longer subsumed
as unequal under an equal standard or measure of right. This idea of
equality beyond right and value is of course in its own way profoundly
abstract – but it demonstrates, first, how the philosophical
contribution of communism involves a struggle against a certain type
of abstraction (the kind which is derivative of the capitalist form of
value and the standards the latter imposes), and second, how the
question of realisation is intrinsic to the idea of communism. In
effect, I think it would be more appropriate, when it comes to notions
such as Marx’s view of equality to speak of a problem rather than an
idea of communism, in line with Deleuze’s definition of a problem, in
his Bergsonism, and with reference to Marx, as something that ‘always
has the solution it deserves, in terms of the way in which it is
stated (i.e., the conditions under which it is determined as a
problem), and of the means and terms at our disposal for stating it.
In this sense, the history of man, from the theoretical as much as the
practical point of view is that of the construction of problems’.

In the case of the concept of equality, we can thus see how a
communist philosophy or theory might ‘anticipate’ a communist
politics, not in the sense of producing its own futurological standard
against which to measure instances of communism, but by delineating
the problems and lines of solution that communism calls for. As I hope
to have suggested with reference to the concept of equality, while
communism should not be envisaged in terms of ossified programmatic
principles or anachronistic refrains, it can be usefully conceived in
terms of problems that orient their own resolution. Communism, to
quote a useful, rather minimal definition from Engels’s Principles of
Communism, is ‘the doctrine of the conditions for the liberation of
the proletariat’. Precisely because doctrine and conditions are not
immobile, communism is never exempt from the need to formulate its
protocols of realisation. This has important consequences, to my mind,
for the philosophical debate about communism, which cannot but also be
a debate about communist power. By power I mean the collective
capacity both to prefigure and to enact the principles of communism.
Too often, in recent discussions, reacting both to the grim
vicissitudes of communist politics in the short twentieth century and
to meanings given to the idea of power in the social and political
sciences (from Weber’s domination to Foucault’s governmentality),
there has been a tendency to think that the philosophy and politics of
communism need to separate themselves from power, to think a dimension
of politics removed from questions of force, control and authority.
But precisely because communism cannot be separated from the problem –
rather than the programme – of its realisation, it can also not be
separated from the question of power.

This is a vast debate, to which I cannot do much justice here, but I
think a couple of points can be made. First of all, for the problem of
communism and power to be even posed without falling into the usual
traps, we need to overcome the apparent antinomy between communism as
the name for a form of political organisation with social
transformation as its aim and communism as a form of social and
economic association with social equality as its practice. It is the
least that one can say that in the twentieth-century the relations
between crafting the means for the conquest of power and enacting the
transformation of everyday life have been immensely problematic, and
that the very notion of a ‘politics of producers’, to use the Marxian
formulation, has been overwhelmed by historical conflicts that have
left the legacies of commune, council and soviet, with some rare
exceptions, in a state of abeyance. But the problem – of thinking
together these two aspects of communist practice, organisation and
association – remains. To reify them in the separation between
politics and the economy is deeply unsatisfactory, precisely because,
as I indicated vis-à-vis equality, the problem of moving beyond right
and beyond value is inextricably a political and an economic problem;
indeed it directly upsets the very distinction between these. In
trying to overcome the antinomy between organisation and association,
between the instruments and the everyday practice of communism, we
cannot but address the question of power. But we cannot merely reduce
this question to the dimension of the state. The rather sterile
doctrinal disputations over the evils and virtues of the seizure of
state power tend to obscure the far greater challenge posed by
thinking revolutionary politics in terms of the splitting of power –
not just in the guise of a face-off between two (or more) social
forces in a situation of non-monopoly over violence and political
authority, but in the sense of a fundamental asymmetry in the types of
power. This is why the problems posed by the classic notion of ‘dual
power’ remain, as various political conjunctures around the world
suggest, of such political, and indeed philosophical significance –
despite the fact that they cannot be conceived in ways congruent to
their Leninist formulation in the interim between the February and
October revolutions.

The challenge of the notion of dual power lies in the asymmetry that
it introduces into the concept. Power is not a homogeneous element to
be accumulated, but a name for heterogeneous and conflicting forms of
practice. Thus, the power wielded by the soviets is incommensurable
with that of their bourgeois counterparts, however ‘democratic’ they
may be, because its source lies in popular initiative and not in
parliamentary decree; because it is enforced by an armed people and
not a standing army; and because it has transmuted political authority
from a plaything of the bureaucracy to a situation where all officials
are at the mercy of the popular will, and its power of recall. With
its paragon in the Commune, this power is both organisational, in the
sense that it incorporates strategic objectives, and associative, in
the sense that it is inseparable from the transformation of everyday
life, but more to the point, because it is in and through the practice
of association that the political capacity to organise is built up.
The notion of a ‘prefigurative communism’ has its place here. This is
especially significant today because finding the means of making the
communist hypothesis exist, in Badiou’s formulation, means finding
efficacious ways of fostering such a political capacity.

Perhaps the most difficult problem for a philosophy concerned, to
repeat a term introduced at the outset, with the non-dogmatic
anticipation of communism, involves linking this subjective demand to
build power qua political capacity, with the question of the knowledge
of the tendencies that traverse the conjuncture of contemporary
capitalism. If – and these I think are preconditions for the
intelligibility of communism as a concept distinct from those of
equality or emancipation – communism is to be understood as a
determinate negation of capitalism and its concrete forms of abstract
domination, and as concerned with the ‘conditions of liberation’ that
Engels spoke of, what role for knowledge? After all, the communist
notion of revolution – regardless of the particular form it takes –
lies at the intersection between, on the one hand, the idea of a
political capacity and force, and, on the other, the idea that, from
the partisan perspective of that organised capacity, it is possible to
know and to practically anticipate the real tendencies in the world
that communism seeks, determinately and determinedly, to negate.
Without some such articulation of power and knowledge, the notion of
communist revolution is unintelligible.

But what does it mean to demand that communist politics find or create
its concrete foothold in real dynamics without, as the young Marx
seemed to do, postulating an ‘inner logic’ whereby ‘actuality strives
toward thought’? If a communist philosophy is preoccupied with the
preparation and anticipation of politics, what relation does it bear
to those forms of anticipatory knowledge – the kind of partisan
knowledge that the later Marx sought to produce – which seek to
delineate the contemporary field of realisation for the problems of
communism? Is it the case that, as Mario Tronti has noted about Marx’s
partisan epistemology, ‘science as struggle is an ephemeral
knowledge’? If the idea, or the problem of communism is inseparable,
as I believe, from the problem of its realisation – with the important
consequences that this has for philosophy’s relationship to communism
– then the question of how to connect the prospects of communism to a
partisan knowledge of the real and its tendencies, without mistaking
these tendencies for a logic or a philosophy of history, becomes
crucial. This task is especially urgent in a world such as ours which,
to recall Marx, ‘only imagines that it believes in itself’. In 1842,
in the Rheinische Zeitung, Marx wrote: ‘The fate which a question of
the time has in common with every question justified by its content,
and therefore rational, is that the question and not the answer
constitutes the main difficulty. True criticism, therefore, analyses
the questions and not the answers. just as the solution of an
algebraic equation is given once the problem has been put in its
simplest and sharpest form, so every question is answered as soon as
it has become a real question’. This is our task today, to turn the
question of communism into a real question. We will then get the
answers we deserve.

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