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The Actuality of Communism
One of the rising stars of contemporary critical theory, Bruno Bosteels discusses the new currents of thought generated by figures such as Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière and Slavoj Žižek, who are spearheading the revival of interest in communism. Bosteels examines this resurgence of communist thought through the prism of “speculative leftism” – an incapacity to move beyond lofty abstractions and thoroughly rethink the categories of masses, classes and state. Debating those questions with writers including Roberto Esposito and Alberto Moreiras, Bosteels also provides a vital account of the work of the Bolivian Vice President and thinker Álvaro García Linera.
- GenresPoliticsPhilosophyTheory
232 pages, Kindle Edition
First published June 1, 2011
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249 people want to read
About the author
Bruno Bosteels
43 books19 followersBruno Bosteels is a philologist, a translator, an Associate Professor of Spanish Literature at Cornell University, and the current editor of Diacritics. Bosteels is best known to the English-speaking world for his translations of the work of Alain Badiou. Bosteels has research interests spanning contemporary philosophy and critical theory, and has published over 30 articles in French, Spanish and English.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
June 23, 2014
Since Alain Badiou’s argument in 2008 that the left should return to a politics of struggle based in a communist hypothesis (see his The Meaning of Sarkozy and The Communist Hypothesis) there has been a revitalisation of sharp and insightful writing, thinking and critical exploration of the options and ways of struggle. For Badiou the communist hypothesis, an essentially optimistic outlook, centres on two propositions, which he phrases in The Meaning of Sarkozy (see p 98) as first “that the logic of classes, of the fundamental subordination of people who actually work for a dominant class, can be overcome” and second that “the oligarchic power of those who possess wealth and organize its circulation, crystallized in the might of states, is not inescapable”.
The dominant strands of this line of analysis have been two-fold. One draws on critical engagements with Badiou’s (not very) lapsed Maoist outlook and turns particularly on his privileged role of ‘the event’ in struggle; the principal critical engagement here is with writers such as Jacques Rancière. The second is linked to the radical Hegelianism of Žižek, woven through as it is with Lacanian psychoanalytic thinking; the other key 'communist hypothesis' writer in this field is Jodi Dean. Running alongside this set of debates is the largely non- or post-Marxist work linked to the Italian autonomists (Hardt & Negri or Marazzi, for instance), with other strands seen in the anarchist approaches wrapped up in work by Kalle Lasn and other linked to the adbusters network (see www.adbusters.org) and the Occupy activists, while more conventional Marxist approaches remain in work by, for instance, David Harvey or Ellen Meiksins Wood. The point here is that there is a rich, dynamic and exciting set of theoretical and praxis-related debates running through global left politics.
Bosteels steps into this debate to mount two essential and productive challenges. The first is to the ‘speculative leftism’ of much of the left – term derived from Rancière’s critique of Althusser – which means that it is/we are stuck in a world of lofty abstractionism and isolated from the material struggles of life. This aspect of is argument is located deep in a set of texts in European Marxism – work by Althusser, Rancière, Žižek, Badiou, Roberto Esposito, Alberto Moreiras and others including Laclau and Mouffe, Derrida and Giorgio Agamben. This speculative leftism has led, in his view, to an ontological turn in leftist analysis, and leads to a closely argued critique of Badiou’s and Žižek’s emphasis on the ‘event’, the ‘act', as betraying their continued attachment to forms of Maoist praxis (what were the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution if not ‘acts’, shock developments in communist development). All in all, this is dense and demanding stuff that demands time and slow deep engagement for comprehension.
Happily, it all comes together in his second challenge, to the presumption that our leftist debates have been global, when in fact they have been premised on the intellectual activity of a small group of mainly western European writers. In this final section of the book Bosteels returns to his contribution to The Idea of Commnuism (edited by Žižek and Costas Douzinas, based on a conference of the same name in London in 2009) where he explores the work of the Bolivian writer Álvaro García Linera, a one-time armed struggle revolutionary who became vice president in the government of Evo Morales. Bosteels' case is that García Linera’s theoretical and praxis related work as a fighter and political prisoner is being translated into practice in government, even as García Linera recognises the limits of that translation.
This is not an argument for reformism or for ‘entryism’ but a case that communism is not the same as the sort of leftism that speculative leftism is part of. This critique leads him to propose two general tasks in struggle. The first is the active historicisation of the communist hypothesis in settings beyond western Europe and the former Soviet Union. This leads him to reject the orthodox view of stages and transitions derived from the existence of actually existing communism and therefore a different assessment of the forms and types of failures of the project thus far (Badiou and Žižek place great emphasis on assessing failure – see, for instance, Žižek’s First as Tragedy). This then leads him to the second task where in addition to this rehistoricisation, the communist movement must be a real movement that not only sets out to abolish the present state of things, but that does so. I read this, then, as a challenge to activist praxis and to demand a focus the ways in which we embody and organise ourselves in struggle.
I’d have to confess that the specificity and detail of the philosophical engagement with speculative leftism made this a more difficult read than I usually find these things. As a result I finished up taking time to stop, to think, to revisit sections and go back once I’d read what came next really helped. On top of that, the García Linera chapter drew much of the case together in concrete politics. Demanding but well worth it.
The dominant strands of this line of analysis have been two-fold. One draws on critical engagements with Badiou’s (not very) lapsed Maoist outlook and turns particularly on his privileged role of ‘the event’ in struggle; the principal critical engagement here is with writers such as Jacques Rancière. The second is linked to the radical Hegelianism of Žižek, woven through as it is with Lacanian psychoanalytic thinking; the other key 'communist hypothesis' writer in this field is Jodi Dean. Running alongside this set of debates is the largely non- or post-Marxist work linked to the Italian autonomists (Hardt & Negri or Marazzi, for instance), with other strands seen in the anarchist approaches wrapped up in work by Kalle Lasn and other linked to the adbusters network (see www.adbusters.org) and the Occupy activists, while more conventional Marxist approaches remain in work by, for instance, David Harvey or Ellen Meiksins Wood. The point here is that there is a rich, dynamic and exciting set of theoretical and praxis-related debates running through global left politics.
Bosteels steps into this debate to mount two essential and productive challenges. The first is to the ‘speculative leftism’ of much of the left – term derived from Rancière’s critique of Althusser – which means that it is/we are stuck in a world of lofty abstractionism and isolated from the material struggles of life. This aspect of is argument is located deep in a set of texts in European Marxism – work by Althusser, Rancière, Žižek, Badiou, Roberto Esposito, Alberto Moreiras and others including Laclau and Mouffe, Derrida and Giorgio Agamben. This speculative leftism has led, in his view, to an ontological turn in leftist analysis, and leads to a closely argued critique of Badiou’s and Žižek’s emphasis on the ‘event’, the ‘act', as betraying their continued attachment to forms of Maoist praxis (what were the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution if not ‘acts’, shock developments in communist development). All in all, this is dense and demanding stuff that demands time and slow deep engagement for comprehension.
Happily, it all comes together in his second challenge, to the presumption that our leftist debates have been global, when in fact they have been premised on the intellectual activity of a small group of mainly western European writers. In this final section of the book Bosteels returns to his contribution to The Idea of Commnuism (edited by Žižek and Costas Douzinas, based on a conference of the same name in London in 2009) where he explores the work of the Bolivian writer Álvaro García Linera, a one-time armed struggle revolutionary who became vice president in the government of Evo Morales. Bosteels' case is that García Linera’s theoretical and praxis related work as a fighter and political prisoner is being translated into practice in government, even as García Linera recognises the limits of that translation.
This is not an argument for reformism or for ‘entryism’ but a case that communism is not the same as the sort of leftism that speculative leftism is part of. This critique leads him to propose two general tasks in struggle. The first is the active historicisation of the communist hypothesis in settings beyond western Europe and the former Soviet Union. This leads him to reject the orthodox view of stages and transitions derived from the existence of actually existing communism and therefore a different assessment of the forms and types of failures of the project thus far (Badiou and Žižek place great emphasis on assessing failure – see, for instance, Žižek’s First as Tragedy). This then leads him to the second task where in addition to this rehistoricisation, the communist movement must be a real movement that not only sets out to abolish the present state of things, but that does so. I read this, then, as a challenge to activist praxis and to demand a focus the ways in which we embody and organise ourselves in struggle.
I’d have to confess that the specificity and detail of the philosophical engagement with speculative leftism made this a more difficult read than I usually find these things. As a result I finished up taking time to stop, to think, to revisit sections and go back once I’d read what came next really helped. On top of that, the García Linera chapter drew much of the case together in concrete politics. Demanding but well worth it.
November 9, 2012
Bruno Bosteels provides close and incisive readings of several contemporary radical philosophers. He approaches the political theories of each thinker by asking the question: “what aspects of this thought might support a theory for staging a revolutionary intervention in the actual world?” Bosteels criticizes what he terms speculative leftism: the preoccupation with radical definitions and reformulations of philosophical questions that renders the development of revolutionary theory and practice impossible. The more radical the ontology or theory of the subject, the more praxis becomes paralyzed in a web of warnings and cautions. Some of his insightful critiques: in the work of Badiou, Bosteels diagnoses a tendency towards the reducing of communism to the status of a Kantian regulative idea. In leftist ontology he criticizes the tendency to denigrate actual revolutionary practice as blind, unaware, and uncritical of its own conditions for existence; and he argues that the post-Heiddegerian/Deleuzian ontology of virtuality and flux is essentially the reflection in philosophy of the neoliberal laws of capital. In Ranciere's work, Bosteels identifies a political dualism of rebellion vs consensus that is unable to think the foundation of a new affirmative and constitutive revolutionary politics. The chapter on the political writings of Alvaro Garcia Linera, Evo Morales’ vice president, contains an interesting discussion of the relationship between pre-capitalist forms of community and the development of socialism, however Bosteels remains uncritical of how Linera’s ideas regarding ‘non-statist’ forms of socialism actually mean supporting and relying on the bourgeois state and its dictatorship.
May 15, 2017
Pretty engaging!
January 9, 2022
I liked his analysis of Alvaro Linera’s work and Zizek’s work, but overall I didn’t get drawn into his language the way I do with other philosophers. If I’m gonna read your work, you better be giving me a vocabulary to use on my own or you will overall bore me.
January 4, 2020
Unreadable.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews