[Marxism] Communism or Socialism?

[Jeff Rubard <jeffrubard@xxxxxxxxx>]

Cross-posted from my blog, in full since I at least read Marxmail
offline and you might not feel like reading most of my Thinkings
online.

Recently, a conference was held at Birkbeck College, London on “The
Idea of Communism”. The doyen of the movement to reclaim a sense for
the word “communist”, Alain Badiou, gave a contemporaneous interview
to the BBC in which he graciously admitted that the ‘communist’
experiments of the 20th century had been failures, but explained that
the political configuration of the present required
reconceptualization involving communist premises. Although the strains
of the economic present have resulted in an unusual degree of
enthusiasm in the US for what might be called ’social-democratic’
ideas and institutions, this is not the pairing which I wish to make
in connection with our new communists; social democracy in the style
of a Helmut Schmidt prides itself on a lack of dialogue with
communism, yet since there are worse alternatives perhaps we ought to
let it.

Instead, I want to rhetorically ask our new communists, who are also
newly philosophical, questions about their core principles in
connection with the ‘other’ anti-capitalist left, the socialists who
have taken power in various places around the world during the last
ten or fifteen years. Though all of these latter make some concessions
to the globalized economy, I think there is some point — including in
terms of clarity about ’state socialism’ in the 20th century — to such
a rhetorical dialogue, especially for the US left. Barack Obama’s
victory has opened a crack in the neoliberal gentlemen’s agreement
that brought us both the Clinton and Bush administrations and the
encroachment of aggressively capitalist methods on the remaining
standards and practices of the New Deal era; it is of the utmost
importance that a red wedge be shoved in immediately if we want a
leftist alternative to be conceivable in US civil society. Of what
kind this implement should be is what I aim to provisionally
determine.

Although Badiou makes the fewest concessions of former 68ers to
liberal ideology, let us begin with a concept dearer to Antonio Negri
and Michael Hardt: “constituent power”. Constituent power, a concept
deriving from Spinoza, situates the hidden wellspring of sovereignty
in the masses and their activity: without a more or less disorganized
yet noncapitalist stratum of activity on the level of the “Multitude”
our state sepulchres would lack all sense and effectivity. According
to them, the communist task is to embrace and amplify the effects of
constituent power on society and minimize the effects of state power.
Shades of Lenin, actually, not only in the sense of the “withering
away of the state” but also “being as radical as reality itself”: so
perhaps we should pose the problem of constituent power as the problem
of liberation’s connection to facticity, not normativity.

I think that we should indeed do this, not least because the terms
“facticity” and “normativity” indicate we are operating in a
‘theoreticist’ register (I am also gesturing at the German title of
the “social-liberal” Habermas’ chief work on political and legal
philosophy, Between Facts and Norms, aka Faktizität und Geltung). All
of our contemporary communists operate within the ambit of a
‘Continental’ philosophy saturated with concepts drawn from the famous
noncommunist Heidegger, and one of the ways to span Heidegger’s entire
body of work is by describing it as concerned with “the Question of
Being” in the form of the human being’s interaction with core reality,
the human being’s having a ’sense of being’ and commerce with material
reality that cannot be explained as the drawing of correct inferences
from normatively proper premises. Communism, as opposed to an
“ethical” socialism, is rooted in the power of what is: bodies, minds,
labor, transhumance involving flows of language and culture, but not
‘hearts’ or ‘beauty’ or any other transcendent ideals we must check
the real against.

The sentimentally antifascist among us may desire to stay several
paces from the Rector of Nazi Heidelberg, and why not? A similar
dialectic of matter can be developed working more closely with Marx
and the concepts of ‘bourgeois’ economic sociology. Max Weber’s
‘cultural materialist’ innovations as against Marx, accepted by
thinkers as diverse and politically powerful as the Frankfurters and
Bourdieu, consist largely in accepting the premises of “marginal
utility” economics. Since attention to marginal utility, developed by
academic Junkers, is usually trotted out in canard form as a reason
for ‘junking’ the labor metaphysic, the conceptual core of the method
is rarely remarked upon. Marginal utility is built upon a Bayesian or
’subjective’ analysis of probability, one that figures appropriate
‘degrees of belief and desire’ for economic states based on the
evidence subjectively available to the agent, not the cumulative
frequency available to people in general. Basically, the Bayesian
forms his views based on a series of ‘impressions’, not the collective
imprint of human history; it forms the basis of Weber’s ‘ideal type’
constructions because it is a type of idealism.

In a formalized version, Bayesianism is critically implicated in the
game theory of modern economics; yet heterodox thinkers can easily
find a literature devoted to its problems and the reasons for
accepting a “frequentist” analysis of probability. (One of Keynes’
major works was a treatise on probability halfway between the
Bayesianism of his friend Frank Ramsey and the objectivist chance of
Kolmogorov.) Undoing the Humean skepticism of marginal utility and its
descendants in our thought about economic reality is a
‘non-Theoretical theoretical’ level on which “the power and reality of
the common” can be realized as a genuine force which should be obeyed,
not commanded. In this way the communist insistence on the power of
collective action (Badiou’s “Events”, the globalized protest movement)
to provide a genuine interface to the Real is inspiring. Furthermore,
the questions it raises about how seriously we must take the
generalized productive power of human groups (as opposed to, say, an
ultraleftist fetish for putschism idealistically justified by
super-republican systems of representation such as workers’ councils,
or its more contemporary congener, an unchecked enthusiasm for the
‘liveliness’ of an often seamy and pecunious counterculture). This
could certainly also provide a window into unremarked-upon experiences
of the “deformed worker’s states”: the street culture, the prisoners’
amnesties, even perhaps the minimal comforts of the gulag.

Yet this true teacher, practice, reveals that more than minimally
comfortable residents of rich countries discovering the joys of
‘communism’ is not the politically powerful answer to the problems of
the present. The lessons learned since Chavez took power in 1997 and
the tide — we Northerners are perhaps not invited to care whether it
is red or pink — spread across Latin America are many and signal; the
resistance of Islamic populists to the unreasonable demands of the US
and Israel and the more-than-reasonable demands of their mass support
are an echo worth considering, though perhaps not at the length
encouraged by Europe’s “Arab problem”. The appearance of a “democratic
socialism” worthy of the name, with its ‘genuine liberalism’ (Adorno)
when it comes to considering the religious and other ideological views
of its people, is a more powerful model for revamping the world order
than going ‘back to the future’ with neocommunism. Perhaps if we are
invited to consider the question “’facticity’ or ‘validity’?” we can
say validity becomes a material force when it grips the masses.

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