[D66] Badiou on totalitarianism

[A.O.]

https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4133-alain-badiou-we-are-at-a-new-beginning-of-marxist-thought

Alain Badiou, interviewed by Mathieu Dejean, in Les Inrockuptibles, 28
August 2018

In his new book ‘Petrograd, Shanghaï’ (La Fabrique, 2018), Alain Badiou
reflects on the failures of the Russian Revolution of October 1917 and
the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Always against the current, this
philosopher controversial for his defence of the Maoist legacy discloses
his thinking in a long interview.

***

You seem unconvinced by the many publications, documents and debates
that marked the centenary of the Russian revolution of October 1917.
According to you, this is even the object of a ‘concerted forgetting’.

AB: Yes, because the reality of this revolution, its impact, and what it
still bears within it that is properly contemporary, have in no way been
brought into the discussion. The overwhelming majority of references in
the media are in terms of the ‘origins of totalitarianism’, or less they
relegate this revolution to a remote and different age.

The historian Stéphane Courtois, author of The Black Book of Communism,
published an essay against Lenin for this occasion, calling him the
‘inventor of totalitarianism’. Do you see this current as dominant in
French historiography today?

AB: Stéphane Courtois’s counter-revolutionary passion no longer needs
any demonstration. It is his brand, and also how he makes his living. To
cast revolutionaries into the ever open dustbin of ‘totalitarianism’ is
a well-rewarded trade in the ideology market, and also in the media,
which have almost everywhere become a sector in the great planetary
oligarchy. Suddenly, yes, a negative vision of Lenin is quite
widespread. But there is nonetheless a counter-current, intellectual and
international, which shows on the basis of facts that Lenin was
undoubtedly one of the five or six greatest thinkers and militants of
revolutionary and communist politics that modern times have known –
let’s say, from Saint-Just and Robespierre to today.

In the debate on totalitarianism, you have taken an unambiguous
position, writing: ‘This Russian revolution of 1917 was anything except
totalitarian.’ According to you, it has been wrongly equated with its
degeneration into a totalitarian party-state under Stalin.

AB: The identification of Lenin in 1917 with Stalin of, say, 1937 is a
still more striking absurdity than that propagated by the monarchists in
the early twentieth century, when they put Robespierre and Napoleon in
the same sack. We should say that amalgams, fake figures and apocalyptic
visions of the horror show type have always been instruments of the
counter-revolutionaries. The Russian revolution is the appropriate name
for the historical sequence running from 1917 to, at the maximum, 1929.

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