[Here are the remainder of my notes. All typographical/hearing errors mine, all conceptual errors belong to the speakers, ho ho. Some of the notes are shorter than others and I'm afraid there are no notes for the final two papers - Vattimo and Balso - as by that point I was so tired I couldn't concentrate any more. I may write something more reflective and less note-like on the conference, but probably not for a bit, as there are two weeks left of teaching, and it's getting crazy. While there are some video clips from the conference, I haven't yet been able to locate any mp3/ogg vorbis files of the event online, which is weird cos there were at least 15-20 recorders on the stage at any given time. What are you doing with them all?!]

Here are some more links to reflections on the conference:

The Commune
Kafila
Total Assault on Culture

There are no doubt others, tell me if I've missed you.

DAY TWO

Alessandro Russo: Did the Cultural Revolution End Communism?

Sociology is affected by a kind of paralysis. Are we witnessing a migration of the name of communism from politics to philosophy? Ethics of Philosophy concerning its political condition. Politics articulates a singular mass political desire. Cannot rely on perennial adversaries. Discontinuous mode of subjectivity. Lazarus – exists only in given sequences. Politics is singular mode of rationality. Each sequence has its own politics. How is it possible to think of the relation between two different sequences? All political sequences are short, but reactionary sequences tend to be longer, how to rethink epoch and epochal change whilst avoiding historicism?



By 1990, a certain epoch was over, but what was the nature of that change? what driving force? The nineties should be investigated by looking two decades earlier. The death of the figure of the party requires reconsideration of the 60s. There was a delayed effect of the 60s on the 90s – nature of the cultural revolution. Not exclusive to Chinese, was political sequences from mid-60s to late 70s – worldwide political event.

Antonio Negri (translator Arianna Bove): Communisme: reflexions sur le concept et la pratique [no idea why the title was in French]

At the basis of historical materialism is that history which is the history of class struggle. The history of class struggle is communism. The political meaning of critique should not be mistaken for historical telos. Communists assume that history is always the history of class struggle. But the world today is dominated by capital. No longer any semblance of use-value, we are completed immersed in world of exchange value. Exchange value is common social reality – its surplus value is turned into profit. Money is itself the community and can tolerate no other standing above it as Marx says in the Grundrisse. Finance has become the common land. Historical materialism proposes to grasp the anthropology of the worker – as the worker changes herself in struggle she proposes a real metamorphosis in capital. Multitudes are shaped by these dynamics.



Philosophical imagination can give ‘colour’ to the real but cannot replace action. Being communists means being against the state. Vs private property and private exploitation of labour power. Against the public – state and national configurations. Public is a form of exploitation. Public is enemy of private property (Rousseau) but this is a sophism – it doesn’t belong to the state, it belongs to everyone as common. We are against management, communism is the enemy of socialism.

New definitions – Historical materialism as immanenetism of subjectivity. Multitude is a class concept, Singular obeys as a resistance, constituent power is key to realizing revolutionary will against the state. Communist democracy against the state, not possible mediation between anarchy and tyranny – overcoming of this opposition. There can also be a revolution against Das Kapital, as Gramsci taught us.



How do we move forward to realization of communism? Determinism can be overcome by building a superior force. Political rupture seems necessary. What is a communist ethics? – against the state, refusal of exploitation. Militants against exclusion and poverty.

questions:

The nationalising of the banks, the role of state - what about oppositions in the world if it’s all the same one?

TN: The question is not nationalisation or non-nationalisation, but the dualistic function of breaking governance. Renationalisation is a response by capitalism to constant pressure that comes from class and social antagonism. We need to separate socialism and communism. ‘No outside’ means not outside of capital. There is total subsumption.

SZ: We should not be afraid of the state, we shall have to force state to behave in non-state way. Abolish Christmas! [I can’t now remember why Zizek said that]

Terry Eagleton – Communism: Lear or Gonzalo?

As a mere Anglo-Saxon (actually a Celt) I feel weird being invited. Hitching onto a European philosopher is like marrying to get a green card. In The Tempest, there is a kind of communist vision. Gonzalo says:

In the commonwealth I would by contraries
Execute all things; for no kind of traffic
Would I admit; no name of magistrate;
Letters should not be known; riches, poverty,
And use of service, none; contract, succession,
Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none;
No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil;
No occupation; all men idle, all;
And women too, but innocent and pure;
No sovereignty;
All things in common nature should produce
Without sweat or endeavour: treason, felony,
Sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engine,
Would I not have; but nature should bring forth,
Of its own kind, all foison, all abundance,
To feed my innocent people.



We have an idea of inexhaustible riches. Of infinity as plenitude. Using abundance of capacities to generate scarcity. Material base needs to evolve to avoid its own appearance – like a disappearing valet. Only materiality will release you from the material. Socialism is a self-abolishing project, nothing like being a Jew or a Muslim. Communism itself fruit of productivity and its enemy. How can productivity be turned against itself? Productivity transferred on the side of nature, not on side of humanity. Look at Marvell’s ‘The Garden’.

Creative idleness – the harbinger might be patrician (Oscar Wilde), or the dandy. There is a profoundly creative uselessness in work.



Capitalism is a shoddy work of art – too abstract and too particular. It combines anarchic desire and the reign of supremely bodily reason. It’s the worst of all worlds. Marx has a notion of the sublime, the poetry of the future. True wealth can’t be measured by pre-existing yardstick. Communism is sublime – excess, iconoclastic. This is not true of socialism. St Augustine’s confession, and what shall we say, oh my communism...what can anyone say? The good sublimity of communism can be contrasted with that of capitalism – money garbles all identities, share a common form. Both are sublime, communism has a form this form is no more than the activity of its various members. St Paul - socialism still tied to law, communism as grace – the acquired habit of virtue, not acts of will. Lear reminds us that communism was always about ethical finitude and the creative constraint of the development of all.

Jacques Ranciere: Communists without Communism?

A simple point: communism is not only name of exception and failed states, but a perilous task. Communist is about emancipation according to AB, JR agrees. What does emancipation mean? What kind of communism does it imply? Look at Jacotot. It is often assumed that there is a gap between two intelligences. But the egalitarian principle, on the other hand, is a starting point: there is only one sort of intelligence, and it belongs to anybody. This is a way out of he social logic of positions (e.g. Plato’s rhetoric – artisans do their jobs, work doesn’t wait, they have specific aptitude). But work can wait and there is no specific aptitude. How can this coincide with the organization of society? Jacotot is opposed to social bodies. Society as such can never be emancipated.



How can the anarchical principle become the social distribution of tasks? Communist communities fails because the communist capacity could not be privatized. The temporality of emancipation could not correspond to organized timetable. Can communist society be made of communist workers? Marx and Engels disbanded early form of communist society and waited. Communists and community – when we say communist hypothesis is possible on basis of egalitarian presupposition, communism has been permeated by its opposite, namely inegalitarian tendencies. Plato’s notion of gold/iron souls reemerges in communism. The communism of capitalists is not the communism of communism. How far can we call this communism at all? There is a crisis at end of capitalist utopia. Communist intelligence is a collective intelligence.

Alain Badiou: ‘Communism: a Generic Name’

We need a construction of the concept of communism. Definition of communism: this concept the idea of communism is a composition of four elements. Political, historical, subjective and ideal elements. Political element is condition of the three others – political truth: empirically, it’s a concrete sequence of emancipatory politics, French rev 1792-94 or Cult Rev 1965-68, formally philosophical, it’s a truth procedure that is a construction of a new truth in the political field, it is impossible to speak of communism without speaking of the real of specific and particular political truth. Historical – a sequence is inscribed in the general becoming of humanity as such – historical definitions of a truth, interplay between different truths. Third element: subjective individual to decide, will for an individual to decide to become part of a truth procedure. To become a militant of this truth, an individual goes beyond him or herself and becomes part of a new subject. We can name this will, decision, becoming of being able to do something new as subjectivisation. Abstract totalisation of the three others – ideal – not separate from the concrete world, is synthesis of the other elements.



An idea is a sort of operation by which the singularity of the concrete sequence is connected to the global movement of history. An idea is the possibility for an individual to understand that his or her participation to a political process is also in some sense an historical decision – the individual realizes that he or she belongs to global movement of history. Communism is the most important name in the framework of revolutionary politics. To be a militant of a communist part was also to be an agent of the historical becoming of humanity as such. Not purely a political idea, ‘communist’ cannot be a purely political name. It is not purely a historical word, not purely subjective/ideological word. Communism is a idea that is inside a political subjectivisation the synthesis of politics, history and ideology. We could translate into Lacanian language of the real, symbolic and the imaginary. Communism is the real of politics but in the structure of a historical fiction. Its most important element is the concrete existence of political possibility, that is the point of the real. Abstract definitions: an event is a rupture in normal dispositions of bodies and language in a particular world/situation. An event is not the realization of possibility that lies inside the situation, an event is indiscernible.



The state of situation is a system of constraints which limits possibilities. Capitalist economy, law, labour, etc all that comprises the state of the situation. The state defines what is possible and what is not. An event is always something that happens outside of the state. Truth is not purely composed of facts – truth is also becoming of a new subject, of a new collective subject in politics.

Inside the idea of communism we have the presentation of the truth as if the truth was a historical fact, but it’s not, it’s a fiction. An idea is between event and fact. Communism exposes particular truths in the form of a fact. The idea is dangerous – historical facts are always in relation to the state of the situation by definition. Why do proper names attach themselves to communism? Why this list of ‘glorious’ proper names? The function of ideas is the exposition of truths – formalism of the truths must be in relation to empirical concrete existence. Why the reduction of collective action and something without name to the singularity of a proper name? It is the attempt to try to save truth from its invisibility. There is something in all forms of truth like a possibility of invisibility – its exposition in the form of a state. How can we be prepared for a historical event? How can we accept the event? There is the possibility of other possibilities, the possibility of something else.



Communism is something like the fact that an event is possible. In the present we have to separate communism and the state. We are as if in the mid 19th century when capitalism takes hold in the 1840s. There is an ideological question on the basis of a militant question. We can so we must.

DAY THREE

Slavoj Zizek: To Begin from the Beginning Over and Over Again

What to do today? In 1922 the Bolsheviks retreated into the NEP. On ascending a high mountain – Lenin retreated back into the valley. There is a necessity of admitting mistakes. To begin from the beginning – he writes ‘in all probability we will not perish’. Lenin at his Beckettian best. Descending back to the starting point. We must be vigilant against enemy propaganda. Enemy propaganda is by definition cynical – that this is the ‘least bad’ world. If liberal democracy is the least bad, why should we not be reconciled to it?. Communism as narcissism of the lost cause? Main task of ruling ideology is to put blame on secondary institutions – there is a danger that the predominate narrative of the crisis will enable us to carry on dreaming. Global warming, pharmaceutical demands, starving children they can wait, but ‘save the banks’ must be addressed immediately! Brodsky ‘money is the fifth element’. Do we endorse the naturalization of capitalism, or are there strong enough antagonisms? There are global, private property, technoscientific, apartheids. Commons – external and internal natures. All these struggles share the awareness of destructive capacity of capitalism.

The progressive enclosure of the commons is an increasing proletarianisation. We need to radicalize Marx’s notion of the proletarian. We live in apocalyptic times – ecological breakdown, manipulable machines, total digital control of our lives. Not even your thoughts are your own. Proletarisation is not enough, though. These things could be ‘fixed’ by totalitarianism, communitarianism. Communism should be opposed to socialism. Nazism was National Socialism, not National Communism. There cannot be communist anti-Semitism. Capitalism with Asian values and/or populism, are temptations. Communism involves all rejection of substantial unity. We are modern subjects – we should reject both mother earth and father heaven. No going back. we should remain resolutely modern. It is not at all that communism and capitalism are metaphysically the same as Heidegger thought.



If there is a state of emergency in Italy, it is all around the globe, vs. immigrants, terrorists. For the most part, this is simply accepted. The underlying logic is very dangerous – the formula of ‘reasonable anti-Semitism’ was proposed: we allow ourselves to applaud Chaplin, Proust, Hertz. We don’t want to kill anybody, they say, but the best way to stop radical anti-Semitism is by accepting reasonable anti-Semitism. Our governments do the same thing with immigration – they propose ‘reasonable anti-immigration’ to supposedly counter worse anti-immigration.

Unlike socialism, communism must refer to singular universality. National identities are simply not a category of truth. This is Kant’s point about the enlightenment – enthusiasm is a conflict of the faculties, but enthusiastic solidarity not enough. The French Revolution generated enthusiasm in places like Haiti – a practical enthusiasm. It is only through its repetition in Haiti that the French Revolution truly became a world-historical event. This is what is missing in Kant – but it is in Hegel. Susan Buck-Morss argues that Hegel and Haiti belong together.



Ex-slaves of Haiti took the French Revolution more seriously than the French. French soldiers were sent by Napoleon to put down black army of ex-slaves. They heard murmuring and assumed it was a war chant but they were singing the Marseillaise and thought, what if we are fighting on the wrong side? The French lost against the ex-slaves. We should assert the significance of Haiti – we need Haiti to understand Europe, not the other way round. The part of no part stands for universality – properly communism reason. It is not that we are all together, but we are with the part of no part as singular universality. If Haiti failed it is because it was ahead of its time.

After the abolition of slavery, ex-slaves were obliged to serve as capitalist subjects. This is slavery in equality. The fate of the Haitian Revolution is one of the series of reversals that characterize modern revolutions. There is a profound structural homology between struggle against ossification and the inherent destruction of capital. The tragedy of great leap forward is repeating itself as capitalist comedy – a skyscraper in every street. What if the Cultural Revolution worked as a kind of Naomi Klein shock therapy? What if China has to be added to her list? The slate cleared for new capitalist explosion.



Today more than ever, one should instead insist on communist invariants, the privileged link of the idea to a singular historical moment – we are at such a moment. There is something unique in today’s situation. Massumi says that losing reality is capital’s own form of power. Capitalism’s power to produce variety is the exceptional ontological nature of capitalism. Capitalism is worldless. What if the Chinese Cultural Revolution was not only exhaustion of state-party epoch but of all emancipatory projects? The enemy took over revolutionary dynamics, order already is its on subversion. Neither within nor outside the state form, rather a gesture of distance from the state, of subtracting. How is this to be operationalised? Is the state simply a fact? Or is it that we should aim at the subtraction from the hegemonic fields which lays bare its true coordinates? How are we to revolutionize an order whose very principle is self-revolutionizing/dynamic? It can’t be a purely formal reversal.

Sloterdijk said if there is a statue to capitalism in 100 years it will be of the ex-president of Singapore, to capitalism with Asian values, to authoritarian capitalism. We are seeing the end of the link between capitalism and democracy. We have to confront this – The critique of political economy clearly perceives limitation of Marx on the question of the general intellect (Hardt and Negri). Bill Gates is the richest man in the world because he appropriated rent, he privatized the general intellect. The price of oil has nothing to do with surplus exploitation, it’s all about rent. working class: intellectual class with their own identity politics, the old working class – communitarian, and outcasts – are constantly pitted against one another.



The future will be Hegelian much more radically than Fukyama thinks. There are two Hegels, one with a conservative vision and the other with the telos of Haiti. There is no higher historical necessity, the train of history runs into a precipice. If anything light at end of tunnel is another train approaching us at high speed. The big other is against us – history leads towards catastrophe, we need radical voluntarism. Many old anti-communist leftists are returning to Marx like sinners like reconciling to Christianity. Do not be afraid! Come back, you had your fun. Now is the time to get serious and come back!