By Matthew Charles
‘On the Idea of Communism’, Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, London, 13–15 March 2009
This conference’s political conditions had been staked out in advance, on behalf of all the speakers, by Alain Badiou’s essay ‘The Communist Hypothesis’. These were the collapse of the Old Left of the Communist Party and state, and the demise of the social-democratic project. The financial crisis that has since intervened featured as an additional element and a frequent point of reference for speakers and audience. But if, as a result of the apparent ideological capitulation of free-market capitalism, ‘we are [supposedly] all socialists now’, then the imperative for communism to further distance itself from the Party, the generalities of the Left, and even from socialism itself as a continuation of the capitalist project, marks the latest high-water mark of a pessimistic position.
In this respect, the current situation is resolutely modern and represents not the stalling of capitalism but the obverse face of a triumphant capitalist Third Way over an already outdated model of free-market economics. Those participants of the conference who urged the speakers to find something optimistic in re-nationalization or government-backed co-operative schemes were offered little other than sympathetic platitudes. At one point Slavoj Žižek invoked Naomi Klein’s shock doctrine thesis with reference to the Cultural Revolution, but the current crisis has already proved to be an opportunity for further consolidations of the newest forms of capitalist organization and power. Read more...>
Posts
