Horner's Corner

Just when you thought Charlie Marx was thoroughly dead, stake through his red heart etc., here  comes the bushy bearded dialectician for his second – or is it the third? or fourth? coming. And who is the grey  leveller behind him? could it be the Spectre of Communism? it is. Communism is back.

Not that it went  away, of course. But it did experience a drastic lack of fashionability after the fall of ‘actually existing socialism’ in the ‘eastern bloc’ This was a phenomenon that always puzzled me a bit: surely it was the one party regimes of Roumania, Bulgaria and the USSR that did a lot to damage marxism’s claim to be an emancipatory phenomenon, heir to the enlightenment etc.  Getting shot of them after 1989 was  like a late – a very late – winding up of  Stalin’s legacy. Then there was the mass exodus from Marxist related theory in the universities – farewell dialectics and the study of ideology, hello to bio power and the power of differance. Trahison des clercs, indeed, while we’re (trying) to speak French..

What hadn’t gone away, of course was the old stuff, until recently  rendered unattractive when set against the glitter of PoMo, Theory and ID. politics: class, exploitation, alienation, not forgetting crises of capitalism, which some had thought they could naturalise as ‘the business cycle’. Ask any banker, or failing that, a classical economist.

Zizek:

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So it seems a good time to reflect on the idea of communism, and a good time to hear what the luminaries of the philosophical left have to say. This is what we did at Birkbeck on the 13-15 March. I have also to admit to a certain vulgar curiosity: I wanted to see these people actually look and sound like.  Apart from Terry Eagleton and Slavoj Zizek they have been just (big) names in books to me: Badiou, Ranciere, Vattimo, Negri…

I won’t attempt a review as my energy fails me. I would say that the Zizek contributions (from the floor and on the platform) were as usual pretty stimulating and amusing, and I was gratifed that Ranciere discussed issues in the (excellent) book of his The Ignorant Schoolmaster – about equality as a premise rather than a goal.

Random thoughts: all but one of the contributors were male, which seemed odd; most were Italian or French which was more predictable, and judging by the number of mentions, stocks in Gramsci are at an all time low, while those of Lenin are going up. I wonder if this is a sustainable rise, or if we should anticipate a crunch?

As so often in events like this, the real debate only began to emerge towards the end, on the last day. Broadly, these were areound the stance the left should take to the state: is it something radicals should work around and away from, setting up other ways of acting collectively (Negri), -  or should the left view state power as something to seize and use? (Zizek). I’m with Zizek.

Or perhaps we should try both? Before that, though, we have to build a political presence. At the moment of one of the greatest capitalist economic crises, what used to be called the left is conspicuous by its absence. We can’t leave it all to Chavez and Zizek. There has to be a challenge to the prevailing liberal hegemony, now that neoliberalism is so clearly a busted flush – something Gramsci might be a guide to, as well as Lenin.

Below are  three extracts: Badiou, Ranciere, Zizek and Balsa et al.

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