The Communist Hypothesis and the Question of Organization Peter D. Thomas

The Communist Hypothesis and the Question of Organization Peter D. Thomas

Abstract

The international discussion of the communist hypothesis has quickly developed into a debate regarding the adequate party-form for radical politics today. This article argues that the stakes of this development become clearer when it is related to the central debates of the earlier alternative globalization movement. The article then explores some significant models of organization that emerged in previous periods in which the renewal of communist politics was closely linked to attempts to rethink the party-form: the notion of the ‘compositional party’ of Italian operaismo, Lukács’s concepts of a ‘political subject’, and Gramsci’s ‘modern Prince.’ The modern Prince is argued to represent the type of ‘expansive’ party-form that might be able to respond productively to the challenges of contemporary political movements.

The Communist Hypothesis

The debate on the ‘Idea of Communism’ that emerged in 2008 following Alain Badiou’s analysis of the electoral victory of Sarkozy, drawing upon a longer history of vindications of communism over the last 30 years, was quickly greeted with enthusiasm by prominent theorists from a wide range of leftist political traditions.

This discussion also seems to have stimulated a renewal of the energy and engagement that had marked the most creative dimensions of the alternative globalization and anti-war movements straddling the millennium. After the impasses those movements confronted in what was sometimes seen as an ‘interregnum’ at the beginning of the global economic crisis,

the affirmation of the ‘Idea of Communism’ – or perhaps even more so, the more precise notion of a ‘Communist Hypothesis’ – offered the possibility of a renewed collective research project into the viable forms of contemporary political struggle.

Unexpectedly and audaciously, the positive programme of communism, and not simply negative resistance to capitalist crisis, became the horizon within which we could comprehend and meet the challenges of the present.

As an ideological intervention, the merits of this discussion are remarkable: it has given rise to a wide ranging international discussion of the notion of communism that did not occur even at the height of the alternative globalization and anti-war movements, still struggling against the overdeteminations of the new world order rhetoric of the 1990s.

What still remains more difficult to ascertain, however, is the nature of these discussions’ relationship to the organizational debates that have emerged in the wake of Occupy, international anti-austerity protests and the

‘actually existing’ revolutionary movements of our times. Some important contemporary theorists have argued that the discussion of the idea of communism should keep a distance from immediate organizational questions.

In particular, Badiou has strongly resisted the notion that the affirmation of communism should necessarily be accompanied by a renewed consideration of the role of the political party, as decisive agent of that idea’s realization, which he instead regards as an historically superseded instantiation of ‘communist invariants’ that are today searching for a new mode of historical existence.

By far the most widespread response, however, has been the proposal that a coherent investigation of the meaning of communism today necessarily requires a reconsideration of the nature of political power, of political organization, and, above all, of the party-form.

Žižek, for instance, has long argued that a politics without the party is nothing more than a form of ‘politics without politics.’ More recently, Jodi Dean has emphasized that the reproposition of the party-form is the horizon within which the debate on communism can become intelligible to itself. Far from the caricature of homogenous or ‘totalitarian’ unity, Dean argues that the party – and the Leninist party in particular – should be understood as constituting a ‘vehicle for maintaining a specific gap of desire, the collective desire for collectivity’ (Dean 2012, 207). She further argues that such a dynamic has already been evident in the achievements of Occupy, whatever the ‘anti-verticalist’ claims sometimes made on its behalf. In a related vein, Jan Rehmann (2013) has argued that the nascent counter-hegemonic dimensions of Occupy, alongside regroupment processes on the European left, have prepared the ground for a serious reproposal of the question of the mass political party. In particular, Rehmann argues that a renewal of the party will involve experimentation in new party forms, including notions such as those of a ‘mosaic left’ (Urban 2009) or a

‘connective party’ (Porcaro 2012).

These are positions close to those advocated by one of the original proponents of the debate on communism, the

sadly departed Daniel Bensaïd, who repeatedly argued over many years that the concept of the party remains

central to any coherent reflection on the nature and form of politics in the contemporary world, whether or not

the word ‘party’ itself is used to describe those processes of unification, coordination and decision. For Bensaïd,

it is the specificity of the overdetermined field of political relations and its irreducibility to the social that

continually reproposes the question of the party-form – not as a solution, but as a problem that each upsurge of social and political struggle involving diverging and sometimes conflicting component elements inevitably confronts. This constitutive tension generates the need for continuous interpretative and analytical labor, in the attempt to discover the party-form adequate to the specificity of the social movements to which it gives expression, at the same time as it transforms them by translating their demands into the distinctive register of politics (Bensaïd 2002, 112 et sq).

Above all, however, it has been practical experience of the contradictory processes of left regroupment on an international scale – from reconfigurations over the last decade on the Latin American left, to the varying success of coalition parties in Europe such as Die Linke in Germany, Izquierda Unida in Spain, Syriza in Greece and the Front de Gauche in France, to the tentative emergence of new political formations across North Africa and the Arab world – that has firmly placed the question of the party back on the contemporary agenda. The communist horizon thus now confronts its own horizon of intelligibility not simply in a discussion of the party- form, but in the dialectical relation between such theoretical debates and the organizational innovations of the real movements of today, to paraphrase the now oft-quoted words of the German Ideology, that aim to abolish the present state of affairs (MECW 5, 49).

The Horizon of the Party-Form

In this text, I want to explore some of the consequences of the notion of a communist hypothesis in relation to these organizational debates, and in particular, to the emerging debate regarding the adequate party-form for radical politics today. First, I will argue that the sometimes obscure organizational implications of the generic affirmation of communism become clearer when we situate this discussion historically, as a transposition and continuation ‘by philosophical means’ of some of the central debates of the alternative globalization movement.

For despite the exaggerated claims to novelty of both friend and foe alike, the debate on communism did not emerge from nowhere. Rather, I argue that it should be understood as representing the displacement into a theoretical register of central themes of the previous sequences of struggles against the ‘new world order’ in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In the same way, the new movements that have fortuitously coincided with the debate on communism – student movements across North America and Europe from 2009 onwards, the global wave of Occupy, the ongoing Arab revolutions and growing anti-austerity movements around the world throughout 2012 – represent not a return or rebirth of history, but its revenge.

They should be understood as expressions of the accumulation, displacement and transformation of tendencies from the previous cycle of mass struggles that that have been surreptitiously burrowing away, like Marx’s old mole, under the surface of what we can now see was only an apparent and decidedly temporary pacification of the ‘interregnum’ of the middle years of the last decade. The ‘spontaneous rediscovery’ by the moment of Occupy of the aporiai that plagued the alternative globalization and anti-war movements, however, indicate a substantial continuity of unresolved problems across the different conjunctures of the ebbs and floods of the social and political movements of the last 15 years. As a formalized response and proposed resolution to some of these themes, the discussion of communism can help to clarify both the strengths and limits of these debates, particularly those that are still strongly operative in the post-Occupy conjuncture.

Second, I then aim to explore some significant models of organization that emerged in previous periods in

which the renewal of communist politics was closely linked to attempts to rethink the party-form. For from the

Manifesto of the Communist Party onwards, communism, as word, idea and hypothesis, has always been

inseparably tied to the forms of political organization necessary for its realization: in the terms of the classical

Marxist debates, the ‘question of organization’ [die Organisationsfrage]. The models that I will consider are,

first, the notion of the ‘compositional party’ derived from the experience of Italian operaismo, recently – and

perhaps surprisingly – reproposed in Hardt and Negri’s Commonwealth; second, the conceptualization of the

party as a ‘laboratory’ in which a unitary ‘political subject’ could be forged, theorized most coherently in the

work of the early Lukács; and third, Gramsci’s call for the formation of a ‘modern Prince’ as a harnessing of the

inherent conflictuality of political modernity in a constituent party-form. Each of these models can be regarded

as a mirror in which we can see reflected some of the challenges of the organizational questions that have

marked both the alternative globalization movement and the rebellions and revolts of today. Hardt and Negri’s

notion of a compositional party composed of ‘insurrectional intersections’ of irreducible singularities responds

to the problem of thinking the party-form in a period of the proliferation of demands and movements grounded

in diverse experiences of capitalist exploitation and oppression. Lukács’s proposal of the party as a laboratory

for the forging of a totalizing political subject poses the question of the party-form as one of the unification and

coordination of political initiatives. Both of these models, I will argue, ultimately confront the limitations of a

political formalism, which runs the risk of invoking a political party-form as the resolution of the contradictions

of the social practices that are thereby interpellated as its subaltern content. Gramsci’s modern Prince, on the

other hand, integrates both compositional and totalizing dimensions, while avoiding the temptation of a formalistic resolution of the contradictions that are the necessary preconditions – and enduring challenge – of political organization. Rather than the elimination of difference, the assertion of identity or the dominance of political form over social content, the modern Prince represents the outlines of a party-form that would be capable of valorizing contradiction and conflict, harnessing them as the motor of its totalizing development. In these sense, the modern Prince can be understood as a proposal for a type of ‘expansive’ party-form that might be able to respond productively to the challenges of contemporary movements.

Die Organisationsfrage at the Millennium

While the recent revival of philosophical discussions of the ‘Idea of Communism’ has been able to draw upon the legacy of theoretical debates over the last 40 years for some of its central propositions and vocabulary, these discussions should be properly understood as responding to primarily political determinants. Although the connections have not always been immediately apparent, I would suggest that the vindication of the idea of communism of the last years emerged as a response to impasses in the organizational debates that had characterized the alternative globalization, social fora and anti-war movements. Albeit sometimes falling into overly dichotomized positions that were themselves reflected in the practices of what was sometimes known as the ‘movement of movements’ – overly abstract oppositions between movements-parties, antipower- counterpower, and micropolitics-macropolitics, as faint echoes of the classic couplet of spontaneity-organization – debates between figures such as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, John Holloway, Daniel Bensaïd nevertheless had the redeeming merit of providing a new generation of activists with a ‘re-actualization’ of some of the classic organizational debates of the workers’ movement (Hardt and Negri 2000; Holloway 2002;

Bensaïd 2005). Theories of the nature of state power, of the relationship between social movements and political forms, and different traditions of organization of mass politics, from the mass strike to the United Front, were central themes.

These debates configured the question of organization in at least three distinct registers, which corresponded not simply to theoretical or political traditions, but more broadly to some of the most significant ‘structures of feeling’, in Raymond Williams’s sense, that informed the participants who were active in these movements.

First, the question of organization was debated as a question of political form, or the type of political organization that was best able to express and strengthen the demands and goals of the movements, ranging from supposedly horizontalist networks to an ostensibly ‘verticalist’ and ‘traditional’ party-form. Second, the alternative globalization movement in particular formulated the question of organization as a question of utopian prefiguration within current political struggles; the anti-Thatcherite slogan that ‘another world is possible’ posed the challenge of thinking the valorization of existing organizational practices as the potential beginning of such an alternative, already in the midst of these struggles. Finally, as in any period of the revival of social movements, the question of organization appeared urgently as a question of concrete forms of active remembrance, or the construction of the institutions in which traditions of struggle could be bequeathed, inherited and ‘re-actualized.’

Traces of each of these themes have been operative in the debate on communism, though often transposed in theoretical formulations rather than posed as immediate organizational tasks. The question of political from has perhaps been the most immediately obvious, particularly if we follow the seductive Platonic models suggested by some of the debate’s most prominent advocates, from Badiou to Groys (cf. Groys 2009). In some of Badiou’s more stridently ‘philosophical’ formulations in particular, the ‘Idea’ of Communism seems to represent a type of

‘neoplatonic war of position’; blocked on the terrain of history itself, ‘Communism’ retreats to the stronghold of the Idea, awaiting the moment of its renewed ‘emanation’ or even ‘incarnation’ in a ‘Programme’, before its final realization in a mimetic chain as ‘Organization’, according to a tripartite schema of ‘grades’ of political reality.

In other contexts, particularly in response to criticisms, Badiou effectively argues that the Idea of Communism functions as a ‘place holder’ for a type of Platonic ‘courage’, a central notion in his concept of subjectivation since at least The Theory of the Subject.

Formulated in these terms, fidelity to the Idea of Communism against all odds and historical disappointments thus constitutes not simply the only worthy foundation of emancipatory political engagement today, but also its formal condition of possibility in any conjuncture.

As inspiring and necessary as such figures of optimistically stubborn resistance may be after 40 years of

neoliberal hegemony and the death of supposedly ‘actually existing’ ‘communist’ regimes,

it nevertheless

remains hard to see how such a strongly programmatic proposal, on its own, represents an advance upon the

alternative globalization movement’s emphasis in the late 1990s on the need for new forms of radical politics

(whether conceived as a new party, or forms of ‘post-party’ organization). In particular, it is not clear what

specific organizational consequences can or should be drawn from the generic affirmation of the Idea of Communism, in a new conjuncture of proliferating zones of social and political contestation. Arguably, participants in these movements today require less an assertion of subjective conviction, as the precondition for organization, than the articulation and strengthening of practices of collective organization that are already clearly operative.

Bruno Bosteels’s enticing description of the current conjuncture’s ‘speculative leftism’ suggests an alternative, modern philosophical tradition by means of which we might try to grasp other dimensions of the communist hypothesis’s import for organizational debates:

namely, the long trajectory of German idealism, with its foundation in the status of spectatorship in Kant’s reflections on the world historical significance of the French revolution, and its end in the status of the speculative for Hegel. Remobilizing a concept from the early Rancière, via Badiou, Bosteels regards ‘speculative leftism’ as ‘a name for the philosophical appropriation of radical emancipatory politics’ (Bosteels 2011, 33). It is a theoretico-political strategy powerfully operative particularly in contemporary post-Althusserian thought, which, in the ‘post-68’ conjuncture, seems set upon repeating German idealism’s foundational philosophical appropriation of the politics of its own time. Yet an alternative ‘appropriation’ is equally conceivable: at stake here would be the possibility, if not of ‘leftist speculation’, then at least of the political appropriation of philosophical motifs, for the purposes of theoretical clarification. To the extent that theoretical reflection can operate by way of metaphors, as Althusser once not unproblematically suggested (cf. Althusser 1976, 107, 140), we might thus wish to think the extent to which some of the fundamental strategies and conceptual motifs of the long arch of German Idealism might be

‘deformed’ in order to provide alternative metaphors for considering the communist hypothesis in terms of its organizational implications.

One such non-Platonic comparison has already been essayed and immediately disavowed by Žižek, while rhetorically rehearsing the charge that the Idea of Communism risks falling into the indeterminateness of a Kantian ‘regulative idea.’

For Kant, of course, a regulative idea constitutively lacks empirical referent; it is deployed in a heuristic sense merely in order to regulate enquiry, but explicitly does not figure as a telos that such an enquiry could attain. As Kant says, it directs ‘the understanding towards a certain goal upon which the routes marked out by all its rules converge, as upon their point of intersection’ (CPR, B 672). Were the Idea of Communism to be understood as such a regulative idea – that is, not as a presently deferred goal towards which programme and organization strive, or as a hypothesis open to revision in the course of research, but as constitutively unattainable heuristic guide – we would be left, as Žižek rightly observes, with the revival of ‘an

“ethical socialism” taking equality as its a priori norm-axiom’ (Žižek 2009a, 87).

In other words, maximalist programme would here quietly transmogrify into social democratic minimum common sense, returning us to a theory of historical stages as prelude to an unattainable non-historical goal. In this sense, the Idea of Communism could be understood as continuing the focus upon utopian prefiguration of the ‘moment of Seattle’

in 1999, with its militant assertion, in the face of appeals to neoliberal realism, of the possibility of another world. It would not necessarily, however, provide any clearer indications regarding the means by which such an alternative could be realized. In an inversion of Bernstein’s famous maxim, the goal would be everything; the movement, much less, if not simply a continuous re-assertion of the goal itself.

Another conceptualization inspired by German Idealism of the organizational import of the discussion of communism might be found in the figure of a ‘reconstructive transcendental style.’ I have elsewhere argued that much contemporary radical thought seeks to find the ‘conditions of possibility’ for future political engagement by ‘reconstructing’ them on the basis of a (more or less implicit) comparison to previous political formations (cf. Thomas 2009b). Rather than in the present indicative of classical transcendentalism, this transcendental

‘style’ proceeds retrospectively, departing from conditions of possibility formulated as a memory, in order then to repropose them in the conditional future. Thus, this ‘transcendental’ question would not be ‘radical political engagement exists: how is it possible?’, but rather, ‘we remember that radical political engagement once existed;

how was it/could it become possible again, beyond the limits of the possibility of the current situation?’ This is

not a question of melancholic brooding over past defeats, but a type of ‘militant nostalgia’ that seeks in the past

traces of potential futures, constructing a type of ‘selective tradition’ of genuinely emancipatory politics running

from ancient slave revolts through to the present day. It aims at re-actualization of the strengths of the past,

rather than a pursuit of lost time as panacea for the paucity of the present. The conceptual structure of the

classical transcendental argument à la Kant is thus in a certain sense ‘historicized’; rather than aspiring to

identify the conditions of any possible political action ex-ante, it is reconfigured as instead a strategic decision

and intervention into a specific conjuncture, whose conditions are not given but must be actively constructed, in

part, by the imaginative terms of such an intervention itself.

This configuration of the idea of communism as a

communist hypothesis, as a criterion of historico-political experimentation and research, could thus be

understood as a transformative continuation of the alternative globalization movement’s emphasis upon the

question of organization as one of active inheritance, whatever skepticism some currently prominent figures, such as Badiou, may have expressed regarding the earlier movement.

Both conjunctures represent, in different practical and theoretical registers, the conscious renewal of traditions of resistance after the long retreat in the face of the neoliberal offensive from the late 1970s onwards. In this perspective, contemporary movements could be viewed as signaling a new phase of ‘incorporation’ of a communist hypothesis, which both precedes and exceeds them.

Political form, prefiguration, and inheritance and renewal: these were some of the central themes and energies that I would suggest have flowed in subterranean channels from the alternative globalization and anti-war movements into the formulation of communism as both idea and as hypothesis. Just as significantly, as I have argued, these themes can also be detected both in the organizational implications that would seem to follow from the terms in which the discussion of communism has been conducted thus far, as well as, in related forms, in the debates that have accompanied recent movements. The transition from the affirmation of communism to a consideration of the viable forms of its instantiation in contemporary struggles, however, requires different figures and metaphors, drawn from other political and theoretical vocabularies. Rather than the generic affirmation of an ‘untimely’ communism, what is needed today are specific proposals of organizational forms that respond to the demands of the present. I therefore now propose to turn to examining some of the significant models of organization that emerged in previous periods in which the renewal of communist politics was closely linked to attempts to rethink and to renew the party-form.

The Compositional Party and the Multitude

The renewal of the party-form as a ‘compositional party’ was one of the fundamental concerns of the experience of early Italian operaismo. At first sight, this claim may seem paradoxical, particularly given the widespread perception that this tradition of ‘heretical Marxism’ was defined by a rejection of ‘classical’ Marxist organizational positions. Yet despite a selective international and particularly Anglophone reception focused upon (a particular interpretation of) a particular moment of Autonomia in the second half of the 1970s, Italian workerism, in its historical context, was not opposed to the political party as such.

On the contrary, as Mario Tronti has recently recalled, a fundamental dimension of the Italian workerist tradition was the attempt to reinvigorate the political party as an organization of political struggle, rather than administrative apparatus (cf.

Tronti 2012).

This focus was already present in the pioneering works of Raniero Panzieri and Romano Alquati, in which the key methods of workerist research – particularly those of co-research [conricerca] and workers’

enquiry [inchiesta operaia] – were first and arguably most coherently elaborated. For Panzieri, it was necessary to study the contemporary levels and forms of ‘technical composition’ of the working classes in the relations of production in the broadest sense, in order to be able to determine the possible forms of their ‘political composition’ in institutions and formations of political struggle. The divisions among workerists that emerged already in the 1960s and intensified in the 1970s into an opposition between perspectives emphasizing the possibility of a conjuncturally-determined ‘autonomy of the political’, and an other current insisting upon the (transformative) continuation of so-called ‘first [primo]’ or ‘classical’ workerist themes, primarily regarded disputes over the type of political party that would be adequate for the growth of anti-systemic politics during Italy’s ‘long 1968.’

Tronti, Cacciari and others argued for the need for the workers’ political formation to exert control over an increasingly bureaucratized state apparatus and rationalized course of capitalist development, a task that the bourgeoisie was held to be no longer capable of fulfilling. In so doing, they arguably ended up proposing a model of political organization that, in practice, could only be distinguished with difficulty from the Togliattian conception of the Italian Communist Party as privileged bearer of a progressive democracy – precisely the conception and form of politics with which the early workerist experiment had attempted to break.

On the other hand, the experience of Potere operaio in the late 1960s and early 1970s, involving Negri and others, attempted to continue the attempt to think and practice the possibility of a party ‘of a new type.’ The critique of the party-form that gained wider currency in the 1970s should be seen in the political context of the broader critique of the Italian far left of the PCI’s notorious Compromesso storico, and as a critique of the particular party-form that, in those years, was clearly functioning as a form of the state.

Hardt and Negri’s Commonwealth renews this tradition of research when they call for the necessity of the

‘becoming prince’ of the ‘multitude’, in a process they describe as ‘governing the revolution’ (Hardt and Negri

2009, vii, 361 et sq.). Commonwealth (and its ‘mini-sequel’, Declaration) has not enjoyed anywhere near the

success of Empire. This seems to me unfortunate, because in many respects this book represents a much more

politically focused intervention than their preceding collaborative works.

One of the significant advances of

Commonwealth is that it immanently breaks with the spontaneist and arguably even ‘economistic’ exaggerations

of Empire and Multitude, according a much more prominent position to the question of organization. In Commonwealth, explicitly political organization figures not as a superfluous supplement to an already ontologically fulfilled ‘political subject’, as seemed to be the case in the previous books. Rather, political organization is here configured as the necessary solution to the multitude’s constitutive lack; the multitude is not given, but must be actively made, through a strategy of developing the ‘revolutionary parallelism’ of a manifold of identities into ‘insurrectional intersections.’ ‘Making the multitude’, however, ‘is not a process of fusion or unification … but rather sets in motion a proliferation of singularities that are composed by the lasting encounters in the common’ (Hardt and Negri 2009, 350). The organization of such lasting encounters, of making them endure, in a Machiavellian sense, constitutes something akin to a cathartic process of purification of the ‘juridical corruptions’ that have hitherto prevented the multitude from becoming itself. The aim of this process is to enable the multitude to make the transition from a subaltern technical composition within the

‘Republic of Property’ to self-determining political composition within ‘the common.’ Political organization thus figures for Hardt and Negri in Commonwealth no longer as something external or additional to the multitude. Rather, organization is now posited as the practice potentially internal to the multitude by means of which it could finally throw off the constraints imposed upon it by the terrains of the public and the private alike. It is from this process of achieved political liberation, and not as an already given ‘plane of immanence’

(as Hardt and Negri sometimes still seem to suggest, in continuation with the Deleuzian vocabulary deployed in Empire and Multitude), that ‘the common’ emerges, as an artificial construction defined by its negation of the determinations of the ‘Republic of Property.’ Rather than a political ontology, or an attempt to ground political action in the already given, the notion of the common should thus be understood as a political imaginary, in the fullest sense of the term; that is, as a forcing of the new, or as the elaboration of a project of intervention into existing relations of force, in order to transform them.

Perhaps paradoxically, or at least for those readings of Negri that continue to depict him as an arch-anti- constitutionalist, this notion of the common represents a theory of (active) institutionality as an ineluctable moment in the formation of an emancipatory political project.

In other words, Commonwealth ultimately proposes, albeit implicitly (and sometimes while explicitly repudiating certain historical formulations of the party-form), a theory of the necessity of the political party, conceived as a dynamic process of political class composition.

It should thus be understood as an effective return to the project of thinking the contours of a

‘neo-organization’ outside the paradigm of (sovereign) representation, after the long detour of the conjuncture of debates on the obsolescence of the party-form that occupied the energy of so many on the European far left in the 1970s and 1980s, and which continues to cast its shadow on the question of organization even today (as was notable in the alternative globalization movement and as has continued to mark debates in Occupy and some, though not all, anti-austerity movements – the rise of Syriza in Greece constitutes a clear exception that disproves the longevity of the rule).

Yet if Commonwealth can be understood as making a contribution to the renewal of the discussion of an adequate party-form today, its specific proposal nevertheless remains ambiguous. This is highlighted by Hardt and Negri’s continuing uncertainty regarding the formal nature and agent of this party composition, and in particular, the terms in which they attempt to think the question of organization as one of an organic transition between technical composition in the social relations of production, and political composition at the level of organization. In his contribution to the volume Lenin Reloaded, deriving from a conference at the height of the alternative globalization movement (2001), Negri had clearly outlined the alternatives. Would the multitude prove capable, he asked, of being the ‘demiurge’ of its own body, almost like Baron Munchausen lifting itself up by its own bootstraps? In other words – those of Commonwealth – would the ‘becoming prince’ of the multitude be possible by means of an act of formalization of spontaneity? This would correspond to a political ontologist model of tautological immanence – spontaneity is spontaneity is spontaneity, in an indeterminate repetition, suddenly becoming organization through an excess of its own spontaneity reflecting upon itself.

Or would it instead require, in what Negri presented as supposedly classically ‘Leninist’ terms, a need for

‘consciousness’ to be brought ‘from the outside’?

In a certain sense, Commonwealth marks a shift in preferences. While Empire and Multitude expressed the hope that the multitude might organizationally determine itself in a unitary and expressivist fashion, Commonwealth seems to recognize that the constitutive divisions within the multiple-singularity of the multitude – or in an older vocabulary, the contradictory development of socialization within the various levels of the working classes – means that its composition always occurs in uneven forms, both temporally and spatially, an unevenness expressed also at the organizational level. The solution offered in Commonwealth thus attempts to resolve the Kautskian aporia by means of a decision, which arrives from ‘outside’ to transform the ‘flesh’ of the amorphous multitude into the

‘body of the general intellect’: a postmodern Prince, conceived as a type of proletarian kairos.

Hardt and Negri’s answer to this antinomy is not adequate, not least because Lars Lih’s recent path breaking

work has more than problematized the ‘traditional’ reading of Lenin’s adoption of Kautsky’s formulation regarding the ‘exteriority’ of socialist consciousness to the working classes (cf. Lih 2006). Hardt and Negri also fail to indicate what this ‘outside’ from which an organizational form might be imposed could be. They thus ultimately fall back into a concept of the party as a formalistic instance that effects the almost miraculous transubstantiation of constituent power into constitutional form on the basis of an excess of itself.

Commonwealth’s advocacy of organization can thus only finish with an abstract invocation of a party ‘of a new type’, rather than a demonstration of its feasibility and possible concrete forms in the present. Despite significant advances, the analysis of Commonwealth therefore remains firmly wedded in the last instance to a dichotomized external opposition between spontaneity and organization, movement and political form.

Overcoming such a schematism is one of our central political tasks today.

The Laboratory Party and the Political Subject

Is it possible to think the dynamic dimensions of political organization not from above or outside, in what is ultimately a governmental paradigm, but as a processual political form that condenses – in Poulantzas’s sense – and therefore also intensifies and coordinates, existing social and political relations? The question here is that of thinking the process of constitution of political form not as exterior formalization of a content that fortunately or regrettably escapes it, but precisely as a dynamic process, as the constituent rather than constitutional practices that make up the warp and weft of any durable political organization from within. In other words, it is a question of thinking a constituent process that is not exhausted in an instance of formalization (constitution), but which renews itself continuously, in a dialectical relation between spontaneity and organization grounded in institutions of self-governance. This is not simply or primarily a case of affirming the necessity of the political party; rather, much more, it is a question of thinking a potential contemporary political party-form in terms that would be immanent to the ‘content’ of contemporary movements. Such a potential immanent party-form should not be regarded as a simple expression, or ‘appearance’, of a primordial spontaneity that would play the role of its Hegelian ‘essence.’ Rather, it is a question of attempting to discover the precise concrete forms that, today, could be mobilized against the recurrent temptation of the descent into political formalism, as a guarantee of and against the vagaries of history. In other words, our contemporary task is to attempt to determine the process of the material (rather than formal) constitution of the political party as a laboratory for new practices of socialization (cf. Sotiris 2013).

The Lukács of the final phases of the theoretico-political journey charted in History and Class Consciousness provides one powerful model of such a process. The concluding essay of that astounding collection of interventions, ‘Towards a Methodology of the Problem of Organization’, was written in late 1922, in the midst of the broader debate in the international Communist movement on the United Front, and before the imposition of the limited party-form associated with the Comintern-directed process of ‘Bolshevization’ (a monstrosity, in the classical sense of the term, that continues to deform communist political practice even today). Lukács argues that ‘organization is the form of mediation between theory and practice’ (Lukács, 1971, 299). It is a mediation that operates not in a merely linear fashion, in a teleological sense (the word-become-flesh, or a movement from Idea to Programme to Organization). Rather, this mediation reacts back upon that which it instantiates. As Lukács argues, ‘only an analysis oriented towards organization can make possible a genuine criticism of theory from the point of view of practice’ (300). The question of organization for Lukács involved a dialectical integration of spontaneous action of the class and conscious regulation by the party (317). Sometimes, he argued, this process could even involve a temporary ‘detachment’ of the party from the broad mass of the class.

Yet as he immediately emphasized, this notion of provisional separation does not imply a Blanquist strategy of substitutionism; rather, such a ‘distance taken’ is determined by the uneven nature of the social formation, which Lukács conceives in subjectivist terms as so many different layers and levels of an uneven but potentially unitary consciousness. The momentary distinction between party and class is representative of the processes of distinction that constitute the class as a class; it ‘is itself a function of the stratification of consciousness within the class, but at the same time the party exists in order to hasten the process by which these distinctions are smoothed out – at the highest level of consciousness attainable’ (326). Thus, the party relates to the class as a laboratory in which the future of the class is essayed, an ‘autonomous form of proletarian class consciousness’ that prefigures, in a particularist form, the disciplined communist ‘freedom’ that it is the task of the revolution to make universally attainable (330). Lucio Magri provides a precise characterization of this conception of the party, which ‘does not represent a mere “instrument of action” in the hands of a pre- existent historical subject with its own precise character and goals, but instead represents the mediation through which this subject constitutes itself, defining its own aims and historic goal’ (Magri 1970, 100-101).

One of the most common critiques of supposedly ‘Leninist’ conceptions of organization such as that advocated

by Lukács is that it implies an elitism of a party that remains ‘above’ and ‘outside’ the movement, in a

hierarchical relationship. The limits of Lukács’s conception, however, seem to me not to reside in its ostensible

‘vanguardism’, which is an inevitable dimension of any political process, just as it is an enabling feature of the pedagogical relationship. As Terry Eagleton judiciously reminds us, a vanguard is precisely not an external or permanent elite, but merely a temporally distinct element within a broader movement, to which it must remain integrally linked in order to be defined as a vanguard at all (cf. Eagleton 2007). Rather, the limits of the organizational figure proposed both in the conclusion of History and Class Consciousness and in Lukács’s slightly later study of Lenin (cf. Lukács 1970) seem to me to consist in its reliance upon a figure that can be legitimately regarded as Lukács’s own invention: namely, the figure of a ‘political subject.’ Today, following the exhaustion of the theoretical anti-humanist moment of the 1960s and the widespread ‘return of the subject’

in broader philosophical discussions, a ‘renovated’ concept of the subject (albeit one distinct from the subject- as-essence valorized by philosophies of consciousness) is regularly deployed by theorists from a wide variety of otherwise antagonistic political traditions, in order to describe the distinctive revolutionary potentials of a particular political actor or agent. Working class, proletariat, multitude, cognitariat, precariat, rabble; all can and have been nominated as the privileged ‘political subject’ of past or future revolutionary politics. We have become so (re-)accustomed to this vocabulary that one rarely pauses to problematize its presuppositions. Yet the concept of a ‘political subject’, taken literally, represents something of an historical anomaly, if not a philosophical monster. It is arguably either a tautology – insofar as for one tradition of modern thought descending from Hegel to Althusser, the subject is always-already political, as a function of the ethical life [Sittlichkeit] of the state – or a contradiction in terms – insofar as, according to the anthropological presuppositions of modern bourgeois philosophy, the subject is precisely that which is pre-eminently pre- political, constituting the Träger of a political process that can only begin on the basis of the subject’s prior constitution.

Despite its widespread current usage, one searches in vain for either the word or the concept itself of the

‘political subject’ in the so-called ‘classical’ Marxist tradition, prior to Lukács’s seminal intervention. Literally, the notion of a ‘political subject’ is not to be found in the political texts of Marx and Engels. They instead most often use a vocabulary in which notions of political actors, interests and above all ‘relations of force’ are central.

Indeed, it is notable that, after discussions of the subject in his philosophical critiques in the 1840s, Marx rarely uses the concept in his later political texts; when the word ‘subject’ does appear in the successive drafts of the critique of political economy, culminating in Capital, it is used in relation not to the proletariat, as a ‘political subject’ of revolutionary praxis, but in relation to capital itself, as an ‘automatic’ and ‘dominant’ subject whose expansion is driven by its mode of positing all relations as merely its relation to itself (Marx 1990, 255).

Similarly, Lenin does not theorize the party as a ‘political subject’, whether collective or singular, but rather, as the site of the construction and intensification of knowledge; such a ‘learning process’ is embodied for Lenin in the concrete form of the agitational slogan, an ‘objective correlative’ capable not of comprehending or reproducing its time in thought, in Hegelian fashion, but of intensifying the contradictions of socio-economic relations via their articulation with and expression of determinant interests.

Nor is the notion of a ‘political subject’ prominent in the works of Korsch and Gramsci, supposedly Lukács’s ‘co-founders’ of the tradition of Western Marxism in the 1920s and 1930s.

It was thus arguably not ‘Western Marxism’ in its totality that embarked upon a search for a missing

‘revolutionary subject’ (Žižek 2009b, 51). Rather, this concept represents the young Lukács’s own distinctive

‘addition’ to the Leninist programme: namely, its translation into the conceptual vocabulary of what is arguably more neo-Kantian than post-Hegelian philosophical thought.

For Lukács in the early 1920s, the class is forged into a subject in the laboratory of the party; but this can occur only on the basis of the prior implicit ‘formalist’

redefinition of the term ‘class’ itself. Rather than corresponding to common but non-identical practices and interests, a nominalist description of real multiplicity, the term class becomes the indicator of an existing or potential unity. The class, that is, is thought as a potentially unified and tendentially homogenous subject capable of coordinated and purposive action. In this perspective, it is the party-form that enables the full realization of the political subject, in a paradigm of political formalism. Organization thus ultimately arrives from without; if not as a ‘demiurge’, to use Negri’s surprisingly Platonic term, crafting the missing body of the political subject, it is at least a process that is additional to the class, the supplement that can both complement and complete it.

Hardt and Negri’s notion of the ‘becoming political subject’ of the multitude inherits this position, just as do so

many other currents of contemporary radical thought, in different forms, from Badiou’s call for a non-

essentialist ‘subjectivity without a subject’ to Mario Tronti’s call for the formation of a new mass party that

might save us (cf. Badiou 2005; Tronti 2008). Perhaps unsurprisingly, Lukács should be regarded as the theorist

of the current politico-philosophical conjuncture, defining in advance positions that we are merely rediscovering

again today.

Precisely insofar as his response to the question of organization ultimately falls back into the

assertion of privileged political form that can ‘comprehend’ social movements, rather than the immanent development of the political forms within them, it starkly presents us with an image of one of the most significant limits that confronts attempts to rethink the party-form.

The Modern Prince and the Expansive Party-Form

An alternative model of the political party as both compositional process and totalizing laboratory can be found in Gramsci’s very different formulations in the Prison Notebooks regarding the complex process of formation of a ‘Modern Prince’. It has often seemed to commentators that Gramsci is also, like Lukács, a theorist of a unitary party-form, conceived as a political subject. As Gramsci famously argued, ‘The modern Prince, the myth-Prince, cannot be a real person, a concrete individual. It can be only an organism, a social element in which the becoming concrete of a collective will, partially recognized and affirmed in action, has already begun. This organism is already given by historical development; it is the political party, the modern form in which the partial, collective wills that tend to become universal and total are gathered together’ (Q 8, §21, 951-3; written in January-February 1932).

This formulation, however, only appeared in the Prison Notebooks after Gramsci had undertaken a long period of reflection on the differential forms of bourgeois and proletarian political organization, and needs to be placed in its historical and political context if we are to understand its full significance.

An old and widely influential interpretative tradition notwithstanding, the notion of the ‘modern Prince’ was not intended by Gramsci to be a code word for a supposedly ‘classical’ and already known party-form (of the

‘Leninist party’), which he merely sought to hide from the prison censors (a fear much exaggerated in many commentaries on the admittedly difficult, often culturally specific but always precise vocabulary of the Prison Notebooks). Indeed, the emergence of this concept in the Prison Notebooks can be regarded as, in part, an act of undeclared self-critique regarding Gramsci’s own earlier role in the process of ‘Bolshevization’ of the Italian Party. With the metaphor of the modern Prince, Gramsci aimed to outline an alternative party-form to the bureaucratic monolith affirmed in the Stalinization of the international Communist movement. The notion of the

‘modern Prince’ is not in fact present in Gramsci’s carceral reflections from the beginning of his imprisonment in the late 1920s. Rather, Gramsci’s first notebooks, from 1929-1932, are dominated by the elaboration of the concept of ‘passive revolution’, in its relation to the emergence of the specific organizational forms of the bourgeois ‘integral state’.

In an increasingly intense way from 1932 onwards, Gramsci then turns his attention to analyzing the specificity of a proletarian ‘hegemonic apparatus’, while the deepening of his encounter with Machiavelli provides him with a political vocabulary to formulate its novelty and distinction.

The formulation of the notion of a ‘modern Prince’ was Gramsci’s attempt to think the coordinates of communist political organization in its almost complete absence, in a period in which the Italian working class had been politically

‘decomposed’ by the Fascist regime, and in the face of the Stalinist catastrophism of the ‘Third Period,’ against which Gramsci continuously polemicized throughout the 1930s. It should be understood as the theoretical expression and distillation of Gramsci’s consistent practical call in his final years for the formation of a constituent assembly, or renewed united front, of anti-fascist forces already within and against the Fascist regime.

The notion of the modern Prince is one of the means by which Gramsci attempted to elaborate this project of a new conception and practice of the party as an ‘organization of struggle.’ There are at least four decisive elements of this dense Machiavellian metaphor that seem to me to be directly relevant to the tasks of exploring the communist hypothesis as an organizational question, and of rethinking the party-form in relation to contemporary movements.

First, Gramsci’s modern Prince signifies no pre-existing form of the political party, but rather, just as in the not

yet existing example of Machiavelli, a proposal for a new form of political organization. The modern Prince is

not a ‘concrete individual’, and still less a political subject. Rather, it is a dynamic process, which aims at

nothing less than a totalizing expansion across the entire social formation, as a new organization of social and

political relations. The modern Prince thus ultimately represents the simultaneous point of departure and

summation of the process of the ‘immense concentration of hegemony’ that Gramsci had indicated as the goal of

an offensive war of position against the logic of the passive revolution, and of a properly proletarian type of

hegemony, or social and political leadership. For this reason, the modern Prince cannot be limited to its

articulation as a new party-form, as decisive as this institutional dimension is to its process of historical

becoming and efficacy. Rather, the modern Prince’s distinctive nature as a party-form consists in the fact that

this institutional level represents only the tip of the iceberg of a broader process of collective political activation

of the popular classes, in all of the instances of deliberation and decision-making throughout the society. It is

precisely for this reason that modern Prince as party-form is not an instance of political formalism, for it is a

form that constitutively and continuously exceeds its own limits. It thus cannot be conceived in terms of

‘constitutional law, of a traditional type’, but only in the non-statal terms of an expansive constituent power (Q 5, § 127, 662).

Second, the Modern Prince, unlike at least one other reading of its Machiavellian ancestor, does not emerge from a ‘void’ in order to impose unity upon it in a process of transcendental ordering, either in an act of self- validating charisma or miraculous decision.

Rather, it is an historical and even ‘civilizational’ process of the emergence of increasingly articulated forms of self-governance throughout the society.

It gathers up the partial collective wills already in motion, not in order to fuse them into identity or submit them to a sovereign instance, but in order to further the process of their ‘becoming concrete’, that is, their becoming effective as instances of socio-political leadership. This is to say that the modern Prince is not a Hobbesian figure of a communist Leviathan that seeks institutional stabilization in the form of an irrevocable sovereign constitution. It thus does not signify an organizational form that can be reduced to one of the common figures of modern state theory. For the tradition that runs from Hobbes, via Rousseau, Hegel, Weber and Rawls, the state is that type of social organization in which unity and stability dominate over difference and conflict, which can then only appear as

‘un-‘ or ‘pre-‘ political, as the social chaos that (state) politics must organize. Gramsci’s proposal for a new party-form is not developed as the mirror image of the existing bourgeois state. On the contrary, it seeks to develop the notion of the party as a social relation that goes beyond the neutralizations of the modern state. No unity closed within itself, the modern Prince is conceived instead as a ‘terrain’, or even as a ‘categorical imperative’, the ‘organiser [of a popular-national collective will] and simultaneously active and effective expression’ of the same (Q 13, §1, 1561).

Third, the ‘Modern Prince’ includes within it processes of disaggregation and conflictuality as constitutive moments. As both political party formation and broader civilizational dynamic, the modern Prince functions not simply as a organization of a political struggle external to itself, but institutionalizes political struggle within itself as the very form of its historical existence; a fully and properly political organization that valorizes the conflictuality inherent to political modernity as one of its immanent expansive dynamics. Gramsci thus does not think unity in terms of identity and homogeneity, but rather, in terms of constitutive difference as the precondition of processes of unification that necessarily always remain ‘incomplete.’ There can be no unification of the identical, which is always already present to itself; unification in fact presupposes and requires irreducible differentiation, in an expansive dialectic without definitive synthesis. It is only on the basis of the differences and conflicts that constitute the modern Prince that it can continue to grow, with the productive harnessing of conflict as motor of totalizing expansion, rather than its expulsion or exclusion by the delimitation of distinct subjects ranged one against the other, in a vision of politics that effectively reduces the party-form to a vehicle of militarized parliamentarianism.

Fourth, the modern Prince’s institutional articulation as party-form functions as an active organizational synthesis of all the levels and instances of the struggles of ‘subaltern social groups’, in Gramsci’s creative formulation, or the working classes in the broadest sense.

The modern Prince was a proposal for the political recomposition of the decimated Italian working classes within and by means of an expansive party-form, which integrates the strengths of both the ‘compositional’ and ‘laboratory’ party models. On the one hand, Gramsci’s modern Prince represents a proposal for a mass party capable of effecting the political recomposition of the class, representing, expressing and thereby transforming its myriad interests and forms. In this sense, it can be interpreted as including important dimensions of a ‘compositional’ party. On the other hand, the modern Prince is also conceived as a laboratory for processes of unification of these differences, recognizing that a vanguardist emphasis upon dynamic leadership is a necessary consequence of and potential solution to the unevenness and contradictoriness of the capitalist stratification of the subaltern social groups.

This party-form thus represents no ‘political formalist outside’ in relation to the ‘social’ instances its aims to organize, but instead, their valorization and mobilization within an ongoing constituent process of politically overdetermined recomposition of the subaltern classes. Both prefiguration and process, the modern Prince should thus be understood as an enduring constituent process: the ‘Revolution in Permanence’ invoked by Marx after 1848 as the foundation for an autonomous working class politics, and continually recalled by Gramsci as the original formulation of hegemonic politics,

or the expansive party-form finally discovered, to echo Marx’s reflections on the Paris Commune, in which to work out the emancipation of the subaltern social groups.

From the alternative globalization movement to the Communist Hypothesis to the renewed discussion of

political organization: the struggle against the new world order over the last 20 years has been characterized by

ebbs and floods, as concrete struggles and mobilizations have alternated with moments of theoretical reflection

and consolidation in a progressively expanding dialectic. The emerging discussion of the renewal of the party-

form today occurs in a context of radical experiments in organizational forms around the world, from networks

to coalitions to old and new conceptions of the United Front. The real Organisationsfrage today is not the affirmation or negation of the party, conceived in the abstract, but rather, the question regarding the particular type of party-form that could help these movements to continue to grow. Gramsci’s notion of the modern Prince as an expansive political form, integrating compositional and laboratory dimensions in a renewal of the political party as a formation and practice of partisanship, provides a name for this process of collective experimentation.

Notes

1

For a survey of the debate thus far, cf. Roberts 2013.

2

For a representative example of this claim, cf. Balakrishnan 2009. Both Žižek and Badiou argued in different ways that end of the last decade represented a ‘zero point’ for a new beginning of radical politics, encapsulated in the notion that this ‘pre-political’ conjuncture bore decisive similarities to the Vormärz of the 1840s. Cf. Žižek 2009a, 87 and Badiou 2010, 258-60.

3

Although it has become widely identified as a debate on the ‘Idea’ of communism, with ‘Idea’ frequently understood in a (caricatured) ‘Platonic’ sense, Badiou’s formulation in The Meaning of Sarkozy had emphasized the notion of a communist ‘hypothesis’, as a proposition in need of demonstration and historical actualization (a similar formulation can be found in the much earlier Peut-on penser la politique of 1985; cf. Walker 2013). The exploratory sense of a collective research project was also emphasized by Bensaïd’s preference for the notion of communism as a ‘strategic hypothesis’ (Bensaïd 2009). Arguably, such an experimental metaphor is better positioned to capture the key political stakes of the discussion, whilst the formulation of an ‘Idea’ risks allowing the debate to be too easily sidetracked by accusations of idealism, abstraction and so forth – as has indeed sometimes occurred.

4

The notion of a ‘Communist horizon’, conceived not as limitation but as potential, is strongly emphasized by Jodi Dean and Bruno Bosteels, both of whom draw upon the concept in García Linera’s work. Cf. Bosteels 2011 and Dean 2012.

5

The interventions of Badiou and Žižek have been followed by a wide range of contributions and special journal issues, on an international scale. Among many others, these include the proceedings of the 2009 London and 2011 New York conferences (collected in Douzinas and Slavoj Žižek 2010, and Žižek 2013), alongside a similar event in Berlin; an issue of the journal ContreTemps under the editorship of Daniel Bensaïd in 2009, and subsequent conference in Paris in January 2010 (‘Puissance du communisme’); the conference ‘Quale comunismo oggi?’ held at the University of Urbino in December 2010; and the special issue of Utopia (Athens, 2012), in which a previous version of this text was published.

6

For analyses of the emergence in Badiou’s thought in the 1980s of the notion of ‘politics without a party’, cf. Toscano 2008 and Bosteels 2011, 105-6 and 118-28.

7

As Alberto Toscano emphasised at the London conference on the Idea of Communism, ‘communism as the name for a form of political organization’ is the necessary complement of, rather than alternative to, a philosophical comprehension of the tasks of a communist politics today. Cf. Toscano 2010, 202.

8

As both Spinoza (cf. Theological-Political Treatise, Chapter 6) and Lenin continuously emphasized, the miraculous is only another name for ignorance of the mundane. As Lenin argued in early 1917, ‘There are no miracles in nature or history, but every abrupt turn in history, and this applies to every revolution, presents such a wealth of content, unfolds such unexpected and specific combinations of forms of struggle and alignment of forces of the contestants, that to the lay mind there is much that must appear miraculous’ (Lenin CW 23, 297). I am grateful to Warren Montag for pointing out to me Lenin’s profound Spinozism on this point.

9

Badiou speaks in a distinctive and precise fashion of the ‘incorporation’ of the Idea of Communism in processes of

‘subjectivation’ (Badiou 2010, 234). Cf. the development of this distinctive vocabulary Logics of Worlds and Second Manifesto for Philosophy, and most recently, in Badiou’s ‘hypertranslation’ of Plato’s Republic. Žižek employs a similar vocabulary when he argues that what is missing today is a ‘privileged link of the Idea to a singular historical moment’; surviving the ‘failure of its realization as a specter’, the communist idea thereafter subsists as an ‘endless persistence’ (Žižek 2009a, 125-6).

10

Badiou’s recourse to Platonic terms in order to think this dimension of political subjectivation (albeit with his own significant, post-Lacanian modifications) arguably tends to obscure as much as it clarifies. In particular, it prevents him from providing a full account of the relation between such generic ‘courage’, as a foundation of political engagement, and the distinctive model of political power that distinguishes a dominant current of twentieth century political thought from all previous traditions, whether ancient or modern: namely, the notion of the self-foundational capacity of charismatic power, as formulated by Weber and pursued to its logical conclusion in Schmitt’s transcendental formalism (cf. Farris 2013). The potential decisionism of such a configuration is also a risk run by Peter Hallward’s calls for a

‘dialectical voluntarism’, as an immediate instantiation without delay of a ‘communism of the will’. Cf. Hallward 2010, 112. For a more extended version of this argument, cf. Hallward 2009.

11

‘The main political virtue we need to fight […] now is courage’ (Badiou 2010, 66). ‘It will always be a question of communism, even if the word, soiled, is replaced by some other designation of the concept that it covers, the philosophical and thus eternal concept of rebellious subjectivity’ (Badiou 2003, 131).

12

As a number of critics have now noted, a significant and regrettable limitation of both Badiou’s and Žižek’s interventions has been the lack of a rigorous analysis of the non-communist nature of the historically existing regimes that appropriated its name for an entire historical period; in the absence of such an account, the re-assertion of the idea of communism today will continue to be haunted by its misappropriation in the past.

13

The concept of ‘speculative leftism’ is an organising thesis in Bosteels 2011. For an earlier version of this argument, cf. Bosteels 2005.

14

It was Badiou himself who originally suggest the Kantian comparison, which he just as quickly retracted, though

without elaborating a detailed rationale or suggesting a more convincing alternative metaphor (cf. Badiou 2010, 246).