New Communism on the Trail

The Comeback Kid

Communism is making a comeback.  The windshift has fired up the radicals of yesteryear and got them out on the barricades again "occupying" things.

Where is the new wind coming from?  A cluster of intellectuals who have "had it" with capitalism.  Strangely they are being listened to.  Apparently desperate times call for desperate measures.  Irony lurks here because the European Union of Socialist Republics has told itself for generations that if the states of Europe did not agree to subsidize and fund everyone using other people's money the resulting social dislocation would lead to a recrudescence of National Socialism.  Apparently the diagnosis and prognosis was right yet quite wrong.  The hardships of fiscal austerity are causing a resurgence of interest in Communism amongst the intellectual elites, not Nazism (which so far remains the preserve of the uneducated disaffected).

Alan Johnson, writing in World Affairs, documents the new Communism.  Funnily enough it looks woolly, vacuous, and wishfully utopian--remarkably like the Occupy Wall Street people.
 

The New Communism: Resurrecting the Utopian Delusion 

Alan Johnson

A specter is haunting the academy—the specter of “new communism.” A worldview recently the source of immense suffering and misery, and responsible for more deaths than fascism and Nazism, is mounting a comeback; a new form of left-wing totalitarianism that enjoys intellectual celebrity but aspires to political power.

The Slovenian cultural theorist Slavoj Zizek and the French philosopher and ex-Maoist Alain Badiou have become the leading proponents of this new school. Others associated with the project are the authors of the influential trilogy Empire, Multitude, Commonwealth, the American Michael Hardt of Duke University and the Italian Marxist Toni Negri; the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo (who recently declared that he has positively “reevaluated” The Protocols of the Elders of Zion); Bologna University professor and ex-Maoist Alessandro Russo; and the professor of poetry at the European Graduate School (and another ex-Maoist) Judith Balso. Other leading voices include Alberto Toscano, translator of Alain Badiou, a sociology lecturer at Goldsmiths in London, and a member of the editorial board of Historical Materialism; the literary critic and essayist Terry Eagleton; and Bruno Bosteels from Cornell University.

Most spoke at “The Idea of Communism,” a three-day conference held in London in 2009 that, to the astonishment of the organizers, attracted nearly a thousand people willing to pay more than one hundred pounds each. After that event, a companion publishing industry, powered by Verso Books, has grown up to accompany the movement, making it respectable on campuses. . . . 

So, that's a brief on who is involved in the revival and some of the evidence of its attraction amongst the Chattering Classes on the campuses.   What are the core precepts?  At the heart is the age old attraction of the necessity of revolution.  Unfortunately the perceptive words of Barbara Tuchmen, that "revolutions produce other men, not new men" appear lost on those with dizzying intellects in the academy.

So, why this new interest in communism, of all things? After all, the leading new communists have refused to plumb the gist of the historic failures of the past and freely admit that they have almost no idea how to proceed in the future. And in the present they are politically irrelevant. The appeal rests on one fact above all: only the new communists argue that the crises of contemporary liberal capitalist societies—ecological degradation, financial turmoil, the loss of trust in the political class, exploding inequality—are systemic; interlinked, not amenable to legislative reform, and requiring “revolutionary” solutions.

The new communists would have us think that there is no necessary relation between communist idealism and the tyrannical bloody communist regimes of actual, real history.  The blood letting tyrannies of Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, and the Kim clique in North Korea are irrelevant because they are not intrinsic to communism per se.  In other words the New Communists are taking refuge in the world of idealist utopian dreams.  As Marx and Lenin did before them.  Utopian dreams such as the "withering away of the state".  The new communists have deliberately shut their eyes to historical reality. 

The new communists seek to rehabilitate communism by treating it not as a historical movement with a record of labor camps and enormity but as a beautiful Platonic “Idea.” The catastrophe of actually existing communism is acknowledged, but only as the first failed approximation to an obvious good. As Zizek puts it, “Try again, Fail again, Fail better.”

As a capitalized “Idea” or an eternal “hypothesis,” the new communism turns out to be a simple repetition of the old. The goal is the old dream of a leap into the kingdom of freedom—a society wholly beyond the market and representative democracy; a perfectly equal stateless society. For Badiou, class divisions, along with “capitalo-parliamentarism” will be “overcome,” the division of labor “eliminated,” the private appropriation of great wealth and its transmittance by inheritance will “disappear,” and a coercive state, separate from civil society, will “wither away.” 

At this point, the new communism descends into stupid self-willed irrationality.   It cannot be tested or refuted by historical or empirical reality.  It just is.  It is a "just so" story. 

Under scrutiny, it becomes clear that we are not dealing with a communist “hypothesis” at all—that would involve testing and the possibility of falsification—but rather a communist dogma, and the relation of the new communists to that dogma is fundamentally religious, marked by piety and faith, and not at all critical.

When confronted with such flights of free fancy needing to be gain intellectual respectability, the first refuge of the charlatan is to big airy words that obfuscate. Such expressions of the faith can neither be understood, nor, thereby, tested and refuted.  Vagueness is the characteristic mode.   

The duty of the new communist is to “help a new modality of existence of the [communist] hypothesis to come into being,” says Badiou. Likewise, uninterested in the purely theoretical, Alberto Toscano’s desire is to “connect the prospects of communism to a partisan knowledge of the real and its tendencies.” But they do not deliver. In fact they rarely rise above the merely gestural. For example, Jacques Rancière defines communism as “the autonomous growth of the space of the common created by the free association of men and women implementing the egalitarian principle.”

Good luck with making sense of that mess of verbiage.  

Others do not even reach the level of vagueness. Instead they resolve the strategic impasse by mere rhetoric. Gianni Vattimo sees a communist future in “an undisciplined social practice which shares with anarchism the refusal to formulate a system, a constitution, [or] a positive ‘realistic’ model according to traditional political methods.” Instead, Vattimo thinks that “communism must have the courage to be a ‘ghost’” . . . whatever that means. And what sense can we make of these effusions of Jean-Luc Nancy?: “The common means space, spacing, distance and proximity, separation and encounter. But this ‘meaning’ is not a meaning. It opens precisely beyond any meaning. To that extent, it is allowed to say that ‘communism’ has no meaning, goes beyond meaning: here, where we are.”

 No.  No.  They are serious.  It's impolite to mock.  There is a sinister side to all this nonsense, of course.  It is the determination to ignore the record of bloodshed etched on the historical annals of the twentieth century.  The "culture of memory" is to be rejected: it is a right-wing plot! 

[T]here is a brazen promotion of evasion as a virtue. The “culture of memory” is right-wing, according to Bruno Bosteels, so it must be combated by “active forgetfulness”; Badiou declares that “the period of guilt is over”—as if it ever started. About criticism of Stalin and other communist leaders, he warns that it is “vital not to give any ground in the context of criminalization and hair-raising anecdotes in which the forces of reaction have tried to wall them up and invalidate them.” 

In a nutshell, the new communists don't want to talk about the actual bloody annals of communism.  Rather, they recognize they need to re-institute it, to "fail better"--by which they apparently mean, enslave and kill more people than old communism.  New revolutionary violence will transform people, creating the New Man.

When it tries to make the turn from ethereal philosophy to practical politics, the new communism is mostly a cult of force committed to magical thinking about the transformational power of revolutionary violence and expropriation. . . . Thus Zizek: “Revolutionary politics is not a matter of opinions but of the truth on behalf of which one often is compelled to disregard the ‘opinion of the majority’ and to impose the revolutionary will against it.”

The democratic socialist Eduard Bernstein issued a warning at the turn of the nineteenth century to his fellow Marxists. The danger of a “truly miraculous belief in the creative power of force,” he prophesied, is that you begin by doing violence to reality in theory, and end by doing violence to people in practice. What distinguishes the new communism is that its leading partisans are fully aware of that potential . . . and embrace it as a strategy. As Zizek puts it:

The only “realistic” prospect is to ground a new political universality by opting for the impossible, fully assuming the place of the exception, with no taboos, no a priori norms (“human rights,” “democracy”), respect for which would prevent us from “resignifying” terror, the ruthless exercise of power, the spirit of sacrifice . . . if this radical choice is decried by some bleeding-heart liberals as Linksfaschismus [left-wing fascism], so be it!

The rapine violence of the Occupy Wall Streeters becomes illustrative of the new communist movement.  The ethereal philosophy is irrational bunkum.  The real way forward is revolutionary violence.  Its handprints can be seen all over the present May "uprising". 

Communism itself, of course, is dead. But when Zizek recommends the “insight” of the 1970s Baader-Meinhof gang that “in an epoch in which the masses are totally immersed in capitalist ideological torpor . . . only a resort to the raw Real of direct violence . . . can awaken them,” we should be concerned.

Recent history tells us that authoritarian philosophical and political ideas can still find their way to the streets in advanced capitalist societies. The new communist ideas might yet connect with the young, the angry, and the idealistic who are confronted by a profound economic crisis in the context of an exhausted social democracy and a self-loathing intellectual culture. Tempting as it is, we can’t afford to just shake our heads at the new communism and pass on by.

And let's not forget "the young, the angry, and the idealistic" are the generation which has swallowed the propaganda of the Progressives and the Left that gummint can and will create for them the perfectly cocooned society which will swaddle them from the cradle to the grave.  As the promises have failed the "little dears" have become petulantly angry.  The post-Christian West has created its own bitter spawn. 

Alan Johnson is an editorial board member of Dissent magazine and a senior research associate at the Foreign Policy Centre. He blogs weekly for World Affairs.