19.02.2009

Communist theory and the sophisticated anarchist

Yassamine Mather was at the recent Glasgow conference where Alain Badiou spoke

On Friday February 13, 280 students and staff filled a Glasgow University lecture theatre to listen to Alain Badiou, described on the university website as a “renowned French philosopher and author”. Some of us had read his first books 30 years ago, long before he became “renowned” - when he was a member of the French Maoist group UCFML - and wondered how much of his radicalism had survived the period he calls the “dark years”.

The Glasgow conference was timed to coincide with the publication of the English translation of Badiou’s Incident at Antioch (25 years after it was first published in French). Although this play is based on the ‘turn’ of an ancient apostle, Paul (in the play Paula), it has little to do with Christianity - Badiou makes it clear throughout that he is an atheist. Instead it deals with contemporary questions about revolutionary creativity and political violence, and calls into question the relationship between the revolution, the party and the state. It follows closely an earlier play by Paul Claudel (La ville, 1890), but Badiou’s version deals with a different kind of revolution. The discussions at the barricades - acted out in the first session of the conference by theatre students - have a familiar ring for anyone who has experienced conflict and war in a revolutionary period.

In Badiou’s words Incident at Antioch marks a “more complicated period”, compared to the time of an earlier play, L’écharpe rouge, written in the 1970s. While L’écharpe rouge is a narrative about revolution written at a time of social upsurge and depicting warfare in the countryside, strikes, the role of party dissidents, etc, L’incident d’Antioche relates to a new situation: a period the author refers to as the “dark years, the beginning of a dark period”. It is more melancholic, reflecting some of the political defeats of the radical left in the last century.

L’écharpe rouge follows an optimistic revolutionary scenario centred around the party, whereas in L’incident d’Antioche the party has become an obstacle to revolution. A pessimistic, anarchist view prevails: the revolution must be saved from the party and its state, in line with a period when presumably the author has become disillusioned by both the Communist Party of China and the defeat of the 68 movement.

For Badiou ‘events’ lead to ‘truth’, which can only emerge from one of four “generic procedures”: science, art, politics and love. Truth and subjectivity are described in terms of the relationship between the revolution (truth) and the revolutionary (subjectivity). An individual’s fidelity to the ‘revolution’ (an ‘event’) and its truth is demonstrated by the subject’s “militant proclamation” of the event. The play tries to explain some of these concepts.

For Badiou communism is feminine - which explains why Paul becomes Paula. Although the author quotes Engels to defend the idea, the mathematician in him is looking for more conclusive evidence of communism’s femininity. He states: “Of course, I have no proof for this and there are many examples of women seeking power (for the sake of power).”

Maybe that doubt explains his reply to the question about the revolutionary forces of our time. It is a predictable answer, but his classification of ‘event’ and ‘revolution’ are interesting nonetheless.

According to Badiou, there are four components of the revolutionary forces capable of playing a role for real change: 1. students; 2. the popular youth of the poor suburbs (les jeunes du banlieu); 3. indigenous workers; 4. workers from other countries, including and especially the illegal immigrants, the sans papiers.

Badiou refers to student protests, demonstrations by workers, riots in the banlieu, etc usually one at a time. However, he thinks revolution - an ‘event’ - will come only when all four components are united. The state strives above all to ensure that such unity and coincidence of protest cannot arise: “With the union of the four groups we will have revolution and the state will do what it can to stop this.” However, Badiou does not believe such a situation will happen soon and he points out that key factors - not least war - have prefaced all such ‘events’, including the French, Russian and Chinese revolutions.

For him, “… the solution will be neither the formless, or multi-form, popular movement inspired by the intelligence of the multitude - as Negri and the alter-globalists believe - nor the renewed and democratised mass Communist Party, as some of the Trotskyists and Maoists hope” (New Left Review January-February 2008).

Of course, one can see contradictions in Badiou’s categorisation of ‘revolutionary forces’ and his opposition to the party and the state. For example, the success of a revolutionary movement surely does not depend on the unity of all four of his categories (it could be two or three of them, or elements of all four, or indeed forces beyond them). Furthermore, the eradication of undemocratic/Stalinist practices does not mean the role of the party must be denied: the absence of a party, far from guaranteeing mass participation in the democratic process, paves the way for individual bureaucrats claiming to speak for the masses and making decisions on their behalf. Then there is the question of how one achieves communism, to which Badiou clearly remains committed. Yet he seems to deny any role for a post-revolutionary transitional state.

During the two-day conference there were inevitable references to some of his more philosophical works, including Event and being, which relies on a mathematical understanding of the axiomatic treatment of infinity. Referring to that work, he said: “We can reduce the issue of ontology to science. It is not philosophy. There are no other forms of truth not defined mathematically - to create a new concept of truth and then try and prove it is incompatible with maths. Although truth is not maths.” Apart from its mathematical strength, Events and being (only translated into English in 2005, 20 years after its publication) was a response to what the author calls “fashionable moral philosophy disguised as political philosophy” - a critique of postmodernism and cultural relativism.

When Badiou was asked about the relationship between philosophy and the theatre, he reminded us that he follows a French tradition and that as a disciple of Sartre (“as a young man I was a Sartrian”) he sees writing plays as an extension of his philosophical work.

His most popular book, De quoi Sarkozy est-il le nom? - loosely (and inaccurately) translated into English as What is the meaning of Sarkozy? - is a bestseller in France and a number of speakers made reference to it. Published in 2008, the book uses Sarkozy’s ascent to power to make a critique of “capitalo-parliamentarianism” - referred to as an episode of black reaction in response to May 68. While Badiou calls Sarkozy “a servant of the stock-exchange index”, “a man obsessed by policing”, “visibly uneducated”, “a Pétain of the 21st century”, his presidential opponent, Ségolène Royal, does not come out of the book much better. She is “a clouded bourgeois whose thoughts, if she has any, are rather secret”.

According to Badiou, “Sarkozy is the name of a society which is afraid and asks to be protected. I sense in this society a demand for a master-protector capable of using violence against those who are the origin of that fear.”

In many ways the book presents a brutal critique of the worship of bourgeois politics and its electoral, parliamentary system. Instead it proposes a “communist hypothesis” that can lay the basis for emancipatory politics in the 21st century: “The communist hypothesis is that a different collective organisation is practicable - one that will eliminate the inequality of wealth and even the division of labour; 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” (p98).

“Sartre said in an interview, which I paraphrase: if the communist hypothesis is not right, if it is not practicable, well, that means that humanity is not a thing in itself, not very different from ants or termites. What did he mean by that? If competition, the ‘free market’, the sum of little pleasures and the walls that protect you from the desires of the weak are the alpha and omega of all collective and private existence, then the human animal is not worth a cent” (p101).

A long time ago, in very difficult circumstances in Iranian Kurdistan, I had relied on Badiou’s book, Théorie de la contradiction, to understand and come to terms with the many “linear”, “circular”, “antagonistic” and “non-antagonistic” contradictions we faced as guerrillas in a war with the military forces of the Islamic regime - in a period when we were consumed by internal conflicts that at times took very violent forms. Whatever one thinks of Alain Badiou’s political analysis, he challenges activists of the left to think about theory, practice, motives and methods.

Books such as Event and being are not easy reading, even for those of us familiar with mathematical sets and axioms, and I do not claim to have understood all of Badiou’s philosophical arguments. However, there can be no doubt that the man a comrade once called a “sophisticated anarchist” remains as committed to revolution and communism as he was in May 1968.