Marxisms, The Communist Hypotheses and its Relevance to South Africa today.

There can be little doubt that the writings of Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels have engaged, politicians, academics, economists, feminists, working class people and organisations for over 150 years, and has in many instances shaped the worlds political outcomes if not its economic outcomes in various ways. South Africa is no exception.
Many have pronounced the death of Marx and his ideas over the 150 years of its unstinting analyses and critique of the Capitalist mode of production. Talcott Parsons(Parsons, 1967), at the same time as Marxism was experiencing a revival of Marxist thought across the globe, dismissed it as a theory whose significance was entirely confined to the nineteenth century. Though, according to Michael Burawoy(Burawoy, 2013) the revival did not last long, suffering setbacks through repression, dictatorship and then by market fundamentalism. It was the collapse of the Soviet Union and the turn to the market in China, that really brought the gravediggers out in their numbers, proclaiming the death of Marxism and Communism.

The gravediggers have, in their haste to toll the bell for this enduring critique, failed to understand that much like the society it is based upon, Marxism is a not a set of dogmatic and doctrinaire religious prescriptions by an infallible, Christ- like deity, even though many have sought to portray Marx as such, but instead it is a living methodology that “enjoys renewal and construction as the world it describes and seeks to transform undergoes change. After all, at the heart of Marxism is the idea that beliefs –science or ideology – necessarily change with society.”(Burawoy, 2013)

By changing with society, one does not mean to impute that Marxism is like a mirror that simply reflects society in a constantly changing analyses, rather its stated aim is not only to interpret the world, but to change it.

One of the lasting legacies of Marxism is the many branches and evolving traditions of Marxism which has developed over the years.
Burawoy suggests that if we “think of Marxist tradition as an ever growing tree, we can ask: what are its roots? What defines its trunk? What are its branches?” I find this analogy most useful in making sense of the sometimes convoluted, yet important distinctions required to understand Marxists thought and methodologies.

The roots, he argues, grow in shifting entanglements of four foundational claims, Historical Materialism as laid out in the preface to the Critique of Political Economy, The premises of History as found in the German Ideology, notion of human nature as found in the Economics and Philosophical Manuscripts, and the relation of theory and practise as found in the Theses on Feurbach. The trunk of the Marxist tree is the theory of capitalism, presented in the three volumes of Capital and the branches are successive interpretations such as – German Marxism, Russian-Soviet Marxism, Western Marxism, Third World Marxism and then of course Feminist Marxism and Eco Marxism should be added as well. Some of these branches are dead, others dying and yet others are flourishing. Any critique of Marxism has to take these multi dimensional manifestations of the tradition of Marxist thought into account if it hopes to produce a theory which, Ahmed Veriava(Veriava, 2013) describes as “grounding a critical work in the perspective of the real movement for the destruction of the present order (More about the Present order and its destruction later). Our critique should not hesitate to be Relentless in our Criticism. Marx outlines an intellectual practise that marks out a relationship to the existing state of things, his present, as one of `relentless criticism`:

Even greater than the external obstacles seem to be the internal ones. Even though there is no doubt about the `whence`, there does prevail all the more confusion about the `whither`. It is not only the fact that a general anarchy has broken out among the reformers; each one will have to admit to 'himself' that he has no exact idea of what is to happen. But this is exactly the advantage of the new direction, namely, that we do not anticipate the world dogmatically, but rather wish to find the new world through criticism of the old. Until now philosophers had the solutions to all riddles in their desks , and the stupid outside world simply had to open its mouth so that the roasted pigeons of absolute science might fly into it. Philosophy has become secularized, and the most striking proof for this is the fact that the philosophical consciousness itself is drawn into the torment of struggle, not only outwardly but inwardly as well. Even though the construction of the future and its completion for all time is not our task, what we have to accomplish at this time is all the more clear: RELENTLESS CRITICISM OF ALL EXISTING CONDITIONS, relentless in the sense that the criticism is not afraid of its findings and just as little afraid of the conflict with the powers that be.(Marx K. , 1967)

Criticism should not necessarily be an imposed limit, or the object of a particular struggle, but a critical attitude, or as Hardt once suggested , materialism cannot be a body of thought, but is instead `a constant questioning of the priority thought gives to itself`(Read, 1999).

One of the most important developments to emerge from the premature celebrations of the passing of Marxism was its own internal reflections on Democracy.

For some critics, Marxism is antithetical to democracy, for others vanguard democracy represents the pinnacle of democracy. Michelle Williams argues that Marxism has gone through different phases, each with its own unique social base and foundational ideas. (Williams M. , 2013) Williams argues that the bifurcation of democracy into representative democracy versus vanguard democracy has limited the debate on democracy and by focusing on what Bertrand Russell described as the western understanding of democracy as consisting of the rule of the majority and the Russian view that it consists in the interests of the majority. Neither version she argues, emphasised government by the people. “(I)n the twenty-first century political movements are attempting to transcend this dichotomous view of democracy and placed direct and participatory democracy at the cente of the alternative.”(Williams M. , 2013)

Williams points out that Marxists have historically not given enough attention to direct democracy and that this neglect, leading to a totalitarian and an undemocratic nature. Various scholars have delved into this aspect(see Gabriel A.Almond, Hannah Arendt, Fernando Claudin, Joseph Shumpeter, Philip Selznick and Jacob Talmon) and which influenced the larger discourse of cold war politics and continues to influence critics as is evident in Francis Fukuyama`s The End of History and the Last Man.(Fukuyama, 1992)
While there was a case to be made about the link between vanguard democracy and authoritarianism (Femia, 1993), the liberal tradition was underpinned by a critique of the dangers inherent in popular participation in politics. Paterman suggests that with the rise of fascism and the post world war 1 establishment of totalitarian regimes (ostensibly based on mass participation), there was a tendency to link `participation` with the concept of totalitarianism.(Paterman, (1978)1999) Thus the liberal tradition conflated totalitarianism with communism, participatory democracy and authoritarianism. This was also true for South Africa and Williams argues that “what the ascendance of the liberal tradition represented was a shift from a democratic theory centred on participation of the people, to a democratic theory based on participation of an elite minority.”

In looking at what is beyond the bifurcation of the democratic discourse, Williams points out that one of the legacies of the liberal traditions (mis)appropriation of representative democracy is that direct democracy (Participatory), is often placed in opposition to it. She argues that “direct democracy is not a replacement for or a competitor of representative democracy, but rather, the tow forms of democracy are vital institutional spaces for deepening and extending democracy in society.”

In a prescient foresight, Rick Turner, who was assassinated by the Aparthied Regime in 1978, wrote in 1972 in The Eye of The Needle, that the liberation movements had to adopt radical forms of democracy and argued that the importance of imagination, human agency, values and consciousness, which lie at the centre of social and human transformation, only made sense in dialogue with each other as the one could not be attained without the other. He argued for placing worker control and democratic planning at the centre of human freedom and he argued strongly that vanguard democracy led by the Party impoverishes human freedom and social transformation.(Turner, 1972)

Of the most famous examples of direct democracy are Porto Alegre where the Brazilian Workers Party (PT), upon winning the mayoral position in 1986, opened up the city`s budgets for popular participation (Bruce, 2004)and the Communist Party of India (Marxists) created spaces of mass participation in state governance in Kerala and became famous for its achievements in human development.(Williams M. , 2008)
The notion of a vanguardist Party, albeit that it still survives in certain branches of Marxism, has lost its currency in a twenty first century democratic space, in which Marxist have in true Marxist fashion, renewed and reconstructed their praxis in line with the changing realities of the world even though this praxis has not found a universal acceptance and Marxists continue to grabble with the challenges of a compromised history and an unrelenting assault by the forces of capital on the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. (this question is also dealt with later)

What then about the question of Communism? Has it been debunked and left on the trash heap of History?
The most recent crises of Capitalism have spurred a renewed interest in the idea of communism. But the idea of communism has been so closely associated with the Stalinist regimes (where generally parties that call themselves communist held power), that generally Marxists have preferred to use the term socialism. The re-emergence of the communist idea, on the international stage, can however be traced back to Michael Hardt and Toni Negri`s book Empire.(Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, 2000) Released in 2000 in the wake of the Seattle protests, Empire introduced a new Marxist language into the new movement against neoliberalism and war. But it was in their third book in the series they produced together, called Commonwealth, in which the terms of the concept of the common was developed. The concept of the common not only included natural resources, but also other goods that are collectively created but expropriated by capital, that should be held in common.(Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, 2009)

For Hardt and Negri, communism is the process of re-appropriation of the common, which is already underway in a capitalism that is increasingly parasitic on different forms of social creativity.
While the concept may not be classical Marx, in that it ignores Marx`s comment that “Capital is productive of value only as a relation, in so far as it is a coercive force on wage-labour, compelling it to perform surplus – labour, or spurring on the productive power of labour to produce relative surplus value.”(Marx K. , 1988), it nonetheless produced a renewed interest in Marx and the idea of communism.

It was however Alain Badiou, who, if Negri and Hardt had rekindled the fire, really stoked the imagination of the left and its analyses of communism.
Badiou, writing a series of short polemical essays responding to the shifts in the current politico-ideological juncture, called Circonstances, devoted a chapter to the “The Communist Hypotheses”.(Badiou, 2008)
The text attracted substantial attention and led to a conference devoted to the “idea of Communism” orchestrated chiefly by Slavoj Zizek in London 2009. Another development that stemmed from the idea of communist hypotheses was the special issue of the journal Contretemps, and a conference, edited and organised by Daniel Bensaid around the theme “of What is communism the name?”(Besaid, 2009) The answer according to Alex Callinicos is quite simply- “that it is a name of a systemic alternative to capitalism- not a reformed better regulated version of capitalism, but a different kind of social order altogether”(Callinicos, 2013)

Callinicos argues that in its generic sense, given its canonical Manifesto, “communist” means, first, that the logic of class – the fundamental subordination of labour to a dominant class, the arrangements that has persisted since antiquity – is not inevitable; it can be overcome. He argues that a different collective organisation is practicable, one that will eliminate the inequality of wealth and even the division of labour. The private appropriation of massive fortunes and their transmission by inheritance will disappear. The existence of a coercive state, separate from civil society will no longer appear a necessity: a long process of reorganisation based on free association of producers will see it withering away”(Callinicos, 2013)
Badiou however describes communism as what Kant called an Idea, with a regulatory function, rather than a programme, “a pure idea of equality”. For Kant a regulative idea is an Idea that is never
completely fulfilled in reality but that incites constant efforts to organise experience according to its requirements. Badiou accordingly associates the idea of communism with “two great sequences in its development” – First the era of the Great French Revolution to the Paris Commune (1789 – 1871) and the second, the era from the October Revolution to the end of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1917 – 1976)(Badiou, 2008)

But Badiou`s criticism of historical Communism, is itself criticised for not being discriminatory enough in that he lumps all the projects associated with historical Communism into one basket, when he announces “The eventual opening of a new sequence of the communist hypothesis:

But it is clear that this will not be- cannot be – the continuation of the second one. Marxism, the workers movement, mass democracy, Leninism, the party of the proletariat, the socialist state – all inventions of the 20th century – are not really useful to us anymore. At the theoretical level they certainly deserve further study and consideration; but at the level of practical politics they have become unworkable. The second sequence is over and it is pointless to try to restore it.”(Badiou, 2008)

Callinicos suggests that Badious failure to apply an analyses of Marx`s critique of political economy and points out that Badiou himself argues that Marx`s critique shows how communism as a transhistorical ideal could be transformed into a historically situated project that offered a resolution of the contradictions of the capitalist mode of production.

From Marx`s perspective, capitalism is the terrain on which the question of communism is posed. As Marx and Engels put it in the German Ideology: “(c)ommunism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality (will) have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things”(Karl Marx and Friederich Engels, 1976)

This is all the more pertinent, because as Bensaid warns: “The temptation to subtract oneself from a critical historical inventory leads to reducing the communist idea to `invariants`, to turn it into a synonym for indeterminate ideas of justice or emancipation, and not the specific form of emancipation in the era of capitalist domination”

In Badiou`s defence of his Marxist credentials he replies:
I am also Marxist, innocently, completely, in a manner so natural that there is no need to repeat it. Would a contemporary mathematician try to prove that he is faithful to Euclid or to Euler? Real Marxism, which consists in the rational political struggle for an equalitarian social organisation, began no doubt around 1848, with Marx and Engels, but it has travelled further since, with Lenin, with Mao, with some others. I have been nourished by these historical and theoretical lessons. I believe I know well the problems that have been resolved , whose instruction it is useless to repeat, the problems that await resolution, that demand reflection and experience, and the problems that were badly addressed, which require of us radical rectifications and difficult interventions. All living knowledge is made of problems, which have been or must be constructed and reconstructed, and not of repetitive descriptions. Marxism is no exception. It is not a branch of economics (theory of the relations of production), or a branch of sociology (objective description of “social
reality”), or a philosophy (dialectical thought of contradictions). It is, let us repeat, the organised knowledge of the political means needed to undo existing society and deploy a figure of collective organisation that is at once equalitarian and rational, whose name is communism”(Badiou, 2008)

Badiou goes on to reject theories of postmodern capitalism advanced by Hardt and Negri and denies that capitalism is on the verge of its metamorphosis into communism, stating that “my position is exactly the contrary: contemporary capitalism has all the traits of classical capitalism. It conforms strictly to what one could expect of it, as long as its logic isn’t countered by resolute and locally victorious classes. Take, in what concerns the becoming of Capital, all Marx`s predictive categories and we will see that it is now that their validity (evidence) is fully demonstrated”

In explaining why he talks about a “Communist Hypothesis”, Badiou invokes the analogy of “a scientific problem, which may well take the form of a hypothesis until such time as it is resolved” He gives the example of Fermats last theorem, which resisted numerous attempts to prove it for centuries, until it finally succumbed in 1995:

Many of these attempts became the starting point for mathematical developments of great import, even though they did not succeed in solving the problem itself. It was vital not to abandon the hypothesis for the three hundred years during which it was impossible to prove it. The lessons of all the failures, and the process of examining them and their implications, were the lifeblood of mathematics. In that sense, failure is nothing more than the history of the proof of the hypothesis, provided the hypothesis was not abandoned. As Mao put it, the logic of imperialists and all reactionaries the world over is “make trouble. Fail, make trouble again”, but the logic of the people is “fight, fail, fail again, fight again...till their victory”

In dealing with historical communism and the first two sequences, specifically those of the Paris Commune, May 1968 in France and the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Badiou argues that the significance of the Commune lies above all in the break it represented with the “left” – the professional politicians who from 1840 onwards sought to use popular struggles as a means to strengthen their position within the prevailing “capital –parliamentarian” order. “For the Commune is what, for the first time and to this day only time, broke with the parliamentary destiny of popular and workers political movements” It must be said at this point that the break described by Badiou has striking similarities with the workers committees of Marikana, who went outside of the bureaucratic union system to fight for a living wage, even though they were eventually forced by the prevailing conditions after the massacre, to return to a bureaucratised and cleansed notion of working class struggle.

Callinicos notes that the `lefts’ complicity with capital-parliamentarianism, is merely one form of entanglement with the state from which even the most resolute communists have found it impossible to escape from. Thus it is the disabling effect of an orientation on state power and the adoption of the party form as the means of attaining it that preoccupies Badiou.

Badiou most tellingly also runs Mao through the wringer of a critical analyses of the disabling effect of the preoccupation with the state when he contends that in dealing with the rebellion at Peking University in 1968, Mao sends in the workers to replace the Red Guards because “ Mao is also a man
of the party-state. He wants its renovation, even a violent one, but not its destruction. In the end he knows full well that by subjugating the last outpost of young rebellious “leftists”. He eliminates the last margin left to anything that is not in line with the recognised leadership of the Cultural Revolution: the line of party construction. He knows it, but he is resigned. Because he holds no alternative hypothesis – nobody does- as to the existence of the state.”

The similarities between the Marikana massacre is again apparent here. The connection between the state and control of the citizenry is a crucial nexus and turns revolutionaries into murderers and Badiou sees the state as an institution disposing of means to impose on an entire population norms that prescribe what derives from this state, the duties that it imposes and the rights it confers. Within the framework of this definition, the state fictions an identiary object (for example South Africans or Pro ANC) to which individuals and groups are obliged to be similar as possible in order to preserve the positive attention of the state. Whoever is declared to be markedly different to the identiary object is equally entitled to the states attention, but in a negative sense (suspicion, control, internment, expulsion, murder....)(Callinicos, 2013)(my emphasis and connection to Marikana)

Callinicos, in tempering Badiou`s analyses, points out that the state remains a large scale redistributor of income and providerof services, as well as the locus of macroeconomic management, and contends that all these functions are at stake in contemporary struggles over austerity. He is however quick to point out that taking these into account does not necessarily lead to a social democratic conclusion, but unfortunately does not explain what it leads to and how a social democratic outcome is to be avoided.

So the State is at once the death of emancipatory struggles and an ontological necessity. In answering his own question: “ If the party form is obsolete , what is there for an organised process that nourishes itself with a sort of rectitude and true fidelity to the struggle of the political generic – which has as its norm equality – against statist identity, which separates and suppresses? , Badiou suggests a “new discipline, a practical discipline of thought....Today’s task, being undertaken notably by the Organisation Politique, is to support the creation of such a discipline subtracted from the state”

Much of the criticism directed at Badiou has got to do with the abstract nature of his analyses as well as the lack of class content to his critique and what Callinicos calls his “rare and heroic subjectivity”, accusing Badiou of a highly impoverished conception of politics which conceives the state as the enforced imposition of identity which corresponds to one of a political organisation as a pure vanguard shunning compromise. Callinicos Points out that Marx had in the Poverty of Philosophy, identified a general movement of the working class that puts demands on the state as a political movement. He maintains that his, and others` criticism of Badiou`s hypothesis, that while it has merit as a political discussion, but “failing to historically locate the communist project among the contradictions and struggles generated by capitalism as it exists today transforms it into a subjectivist abstraction.”(Callinicos, 2013)

It is Bensaid that best articulates the theoretical and practical challenges presented by the “Communist Hypothesis”:
Communism is not a pure idea, or doctrinaire model of society. It is not the name of a state regime, or that of a new mode of production. It is that of a movement that,in permanence, surpasses/suppresses the established order. But it is also the aim that, rising from this movement, orients it and allows it, unlike politics without principles, actions with consequences, day to day improvisations, to determine what draws closer to the aim and what makes a greater distance from it. In this respect it is not a scientific knowledge of the aim and of the road, but a regulative strategic hypothesis. It names, indissociably, the irreducible dream of another world of justice, equality and solidarity; the permanent movement that tends to overthrow the existing order and the era of capitalism; and the strategic hypothesis, that orients this movement towards a radical change in the relations of property and power, unlike those accommodations with a lesser evil that will be the shortest path to the worst.(Besaid, 2009)




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