* * * * * *

Badiou says:

“There were three essential points of Maoist provenance that we practised:

The first was that you always had to link up with the people, that politics for intellectuals was a journey into society and not a discussion in a closed room. Political work was defined as work in factories, housing estates, hostels. It was always a matter of setting up political organizations in the midst of people’s actual life.
The second was that you should not take part in the institutions of the bourgeois state: we were against the traditional trade unions and the electoral mechanism. No infiltration of the so-called workers’ bureaucracies, no participation in elections; that distinguished us radically from the Trotskyists.
The third point was that we should be in no hurry to call ourselves a party, to take up old forms of organization; we had to remain very close to actual political processes.”
* * * * *

An Interview with Alain Badiou, conducted by Eric Hazan

Eric Hazan: One of the most striking aspects of Sarkozy’s rise to power was the support he attracted from Left renegades—from turncoats such as André Glucksmann. As someone who still wears his coat very much the same way round, how would you explain this strange phenomenon?

Alain Badiou: I think you have to put this in perspective, or rather look at it more closely. First of all, it would be better to ask: why so many Maoists from the Gauche Prolétarienne? (GP was one of the ain Maoist groups, whose name meant Proletarian Left in French) Because it is among them that you find those who ‘went wrong’ in this way. Secondly, as far as I am aware, only a few rank-and-file activists in the GP made this about-turn. So, to give your question a slightly more technical character, I would say: why did so many people in the GP leadership take such a bad turn?

There were other Maoist organizations—for example the UCFML, which I was involved in establishing, along with Sylvain Lazarus, Natacha Michel and others, in 1970. In fact, Lazarus and Michel came from the GP, in the wake of a split of sorts, whereas my own background was completely different: I came from the PSU, the social democrats. I’m not aware of a single leader or activist in our organization who took a wrong turn, in the sense we are speaking of here. People from other organizations, such as the GOP and VLR, often went back to the PCF, and there was a sprinkling of other groups, in particular the PCMLF, whose idea was more to rebuild the good old Communist Party, which was already in pretty poor shape. On the whole, these people are still somewhere or other ‘on the left’ today.

But those who ‘went wrong’ in public and spectacular fashion—some of them, like Glucksmann, becoming official supporters of Sarkozy—did come from the GP, which was broadly hegemonic in this milieu, particularly among intellectuals. We could mention Serge July, founder of Libération, Benny Lévy, who was the GP’s leading figure, Jacques-Alain Miller, Jean-Claude Milner, Olivier Rolin, head of the military wing, or indeed Glucksmann himself, who joined rather late in the day, but joined all the same. There were also less well-known intellectuals such as Jean-Marc Salmon, who played a major role at Vincennes and later became a die-hard pro-American.

There are a number of ways to understand this turncoat phenomenon. The first is that many of these people had a mistaken analysis of the situation at that time, in the years 1966–73; they thought that it was actually revolutionary, in an immediate sense. The Miller brothers gave me the tersest formulations on this point. A few years later, around 1978, I asked them: ‘Why did you just quit like that?’ Because they dropped out very suddenly—even today there are elderly workers, Malians in the hostels, Moroccans in the factories, who ask us: ‘How is it that, overnight, we never saw those guys again?’ Jacques-Alain Miller said to me: ‘Because I realized one day that the country was quiet.’ And Gérard: ‘Because we understood we were not going to take power.’ It was a very revealing response, that of people who saw their undertaking not as the start of a long journey with a great deal of ebb and flow, but as an avenue towards power. Gérard said as much in all innocence, and he later joined the Socialist party, which is something else again.

So, a mistaken understanding of the conjuncture, leading either to a blocked ambition, or to the realization that it was going to take a great deal of trouble and hard work in a situation that was not all that promising. You could see them in Balzacian terms as ambitious young men who imagined they were going to take Paris by dint of revolutionary enthusiasm, but then came to understand that things were a bit more complicated. The proof of this is that a large number of these people have found positions of power elsewhere, in psychoanalysis, in the media, as philosophical commentators, and so on. Their renunciation did not take place along the lines of: ‘I’ll go back to being anonymous’, but rather: ‘That wasn’t the right card, so I’ll play a different one.’

There was a second principle involved in this reversal, less Balzacian and more ideological. This was embodied by the ‘nouveaux philosophes’—themselves part of a long history—and by those who followed them, often with a certain honesty and not necessarily for personal ends. What happened at that point was a transition from the alternatives of ‘bourgeois world or revolutionary world’ to those of ‘totalitarianism or democracy’. The shift can be given a precise date: it was articulated starting from 1976, and a certain number of former GP activists were involved in presenting it. Not just them, but them along with others. This was particularly the case with Christian Jambet and Guy Lardreau, when they wrote their book L’Ange, a kind of philosophical balance sheet of their involvement with the GP.

Here you can see the reversal at work. It revolves around the idea that, at a certain point, absolute commitment becomes indistinguishable from absolute slavery, and the figure of emancipation indistinguishable from that of barbarism. Grafted onto this was the question of the Soviet camps as depicted by Solzhenitsyn. Above all there was the matter of Cambodia and Pol Pot, which played a very major role for those who had been actively involved in supporting the Khmer Rouge cause, and then learned what an appalling story that was. All this gave rise to a kind of standard discourse of repentance: ‘I learned how absolute radicalism can have terrifying consequences. As a result, I know that above all else we must ensure the preservation of humanist democracy as a barrier against revolutionary enthusiasm.’

I can certainly accept that many people sincerely believed this, and not just because they wanted a place in the media spotlight. A number of them remained honest people—like Rony Brauman, like Jambet and Lardreau, who went quite far in this direction but then stopped: they saw that this was no reason to become pro-American and cosy up to the likes of Sarkozy. By and large, these people, whom you can call honest renegades, resigned themselves to the politics of the lesser evil, which in one form or another always leads to the Socialist party. But others, like Glucksmann, instrumentalized this fear of totalitarianism and rode the wave it created.

They saw that the figure of the renegade from the Communist project, who steps onto the media stage to stigmatize its horror and is able to say that he experienced it in the flesh, and tell how he made a narrow escape, how he almost became a Polpotist, could fill a gap in the market. They weren’t wrong—they were orchestrated, all doors were opened to them, you hardly saw anyone else on television; they built up a whole intellectual media empire on the basis of this business.

Eric Hazan: What about Bernard-Henri Lévy?

Alain Badiou: Bernard-Henri Lévy, as you can imagine, was never a very convinced Maoist, more of a sympathizer. But there was Olivier Rolin, who went on to make quite a name in the literary world. And others, who were activists or sympathizers of the GP, such as Jean-Claude Milner—who, in the 1980s, starting with his book Les Noms indistincts, declared that formal freedoms were not something to be trifled with, and that the Cambodian business should be called ‘genocide’. But Milner is a transition to a third point of entry.

This involves the long history of Palestine–Israel, the question of the name ‘Jew’, etc. This aspect was all the more important, in the case of the GP, in that its central character was Benny Lévy, alias Pierre Victor. He was the GP’s charismatic leader, and on top of that had been anointed by Sartre. He had a great capacity for intellectual seduction, as well as being very forceful, and the combination captivated a number of activists before seducing Sartre. This third aspect cannot be seen like the others, as a visible political U-turn, a renegacy; it was rather the idea that there was something higher than politics. Benny Lévy could maintain, in substance, that in the end he had only ever been interested in one thing, the absolute, and that his involvement in the GP was a misguided approach to this absolute. In the event, he converted in a very precise sense: from progressive politics to Jewish studies. To his convert’s eyes, revolutionary political commitment seemed not just secondary and limited, but a wrong turning. All of this adds up to a sophisticated kind of renegacy.

Many people who came out of the GP took this route. Not to the extent that Benny Lévy pushed it, making religion and Jewish identity the organizing centre of their existence. But they did—whether they were Jewish or not, that is not the significant factor—turn the extermination of the European Jews and the name ‘Jew’ into the emblems around which all should rally, against any political radicalism that was bound to end up totalitarian. All those who had long been bothered by the question of Israel, and those who at a certain moment, often for personal reasons (being anti-Islamic today is always very close to a ‘fear of the masses’, a fear of the banlieues and the poor), became anti-Arab—they all plunged into this symbolism. A far from negligible role in this sorry affair was played by a certain professorial republicanism, made up of a secularism that was as pugnacious as it was corrupted, and a low-grade feminism. All ingredients from which first Le Pen and then Sarkozy were the only ones to benefit politically.

In conclusion, I would say that the GP was marked by three characteristics: first, a kind of impatient megalomania with regard to the course of history, a conviction that the Maoists were in a position to take power or at least to overturn the situation very rapidly. Second, they were extremely ideologized: what they took from the Cultural Revolution was that ideology and personal re-education were in command—which led them to launch a series of absurd campaigns, completely detached from reality, out of pure ideologism, with a radicalism that was vehement and imaginary in equal measure. I remember how, out of this over-estimation of ideology, they created ‘apolitical’ committees of struggle at Renault Billancourt. That already anticipated Milner’s hatred for the ‘political view of the world’. They went to the brink of armed struggle, and at the moment when they pulled back in fear there were also a number of U-turns, always couched in a rhetoric of compassion and repentance: ‘Look how far I almost went.’ Thirdly, they were always communitarians. One of our many run-ins with them—our relations were always dreadful—was when they decided to establish a ‘movement of Arab workers’ in the factories. We opposed this communitarian separatism with the idea of the ‘international proletariat of France’. It was a decisive struggle with long-term implications: those who set up a movement of Arab workers can one day make a U-turn and become apologists for any other communitarian signifier. A good number of those who today are hitmen for the Israeli army were rabidly pro-Palestinian at the time of the GP—in an adventurist and very precarious fashion, far too unreal relative to the actual situation.

Once again—and I’m not speaking just for my own crowd—the combination of these three characteristics is only applicable, as far as Maoism is concerned, to the GP, and still more precisely to the GP after 1969. You might say that this GP was the heir, in France, of all that was worst in the Chinese Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. Certain Red Guard groups, in the years 1967–69, developed the idea that you can overturn a situation by means of all-powerful ideology and spectacular violent actions. I always thought that Kuai Dafu, the leading figure of the Beijing Red Guards, was a lot like the GP leadership; they adored Lin Biao, their favourite Chinese leader, who said that you had to ‘change man at the deepest level’. They liked that activist metaphysics.

Eric Hazan: It’s strange. As I recall, the organization you were with was known for being highly sectarian, whereas the GP attracted the decent types. I wasn’t alone in thinking this. The UCFML used to march carrying banners with Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao, chanting their names in that order.

Alain Badiou: No, that’s not how it was at all, what a muddle! The people you’re talking about were the PCMLF—a closed bunch, Stalinists in fact. They were attached to the Chinese state from the time of the Sino-Soviet conflict. You could say that, seen from today, the difference between the PCMLF and the UCFML. . . But in revolutionary politics, as you well know, such ‘nuances’ are of major importance. The PCMLF and the UCFML were like night and day.

I believe there have been three different interpretations of Maoism in France. The first, and the oldest, was that, contrary to the USSR under Khrushchev, China held on to an original hardline Stalinism—and that the abandonment of Stalinism would lead sooner or later to a general dissolution (in which regard they weren’t mistaken). These people started the PCMLF believing they would rebuild a genuine Communist party of class struggle, against the revisionism of the official PCF and the USSR. It was both a dogmatic and a nostalgic interpretation. But it was also the only place where you found old working-class activists—there were young people in all the Maoist groups, but not older ones, nostalgic for the great era of Thorez, the 1950s, when the Party ruled in the factories and housing estates. It was really a conservative interpretation. At the other extreme there was the ultra-left interpretation of the GP, which was almost anarchist: you launched bold attacks, set up stunts, made ‘revolution in the head’, ‘melted into the masses’, always with a very keen eye to the media. The organization was highly centralized—in secret; in public it dissolved itself every five minutes in order to ‘liberate’ the energy of the masses.

As for us, the UCFML, I would say that we were a centre-left organization, in the sense always advocated by Mao, who described himself as a ‘centrist’.

There were three essential points of Maoist provenance that we practised: the first was that you always had to link up with the people, that politics for intellectuals was a journey into society and not a discussion in a closed room. Political work was defined as work in factories, housing estates, hostels. It was always a matter of setting up political organizations in the midst of people’s actual life. The second was that you should not take part in the institutions of the bourgeois state: we were against the traditional trade unions and the electoral mechanism. No infiltration of the so-called workers’ bureaucracies, no participation in elections; that distinguished us radically from the Trotskyists. The third point was that we should be in no hurry to call ourselves a party, to take up old forms of organization; we had to remain very close to actual political processes. As a result of all this, we found ourselves sharply opposed to the two other main currents. Our founding pamphlet attacked both the PCMLF on the right and the GP ‘on the left’. A struggle on two fronts . . .

Eric Hazan: And Tel Quel?

Alain Badiou: They were latter-day Maoists. The first lesson that the Tel Quel people drew from May 68 was that they should join the PCF—an entryism which rather repeated the Surrealists’ stance in the 1920s and 30s, with the idea of revolutionizing the Communists from within, by the innovatory power of the word. They went on to adopt a more Maoist posture, which in my view remained a superficial crust. But they did, it must be said, pass through Maoism, and Philippe Sollers was one of several who had a strange itinerary between the 70s and today—from Waldeck Rochet to Balladur and Royal, via the Great Helmsman.

It is important to note that Maoism of the GP type was very marked by having been fashionable among intellectuals for five years or so, say from 1969 to 1974, and many people gravitated to it for that reason—as well as Sollers and Sartre, there was Jean-Luc Godard, for example. What attracted these intellectuals and artists was an aura of activism and radicalism, and they didn’t look too closely at the actual politics the GP was conducting, which often involved trickery and throwing dust in people’s eyes. Almost everything put out by GP propaganda was half untrue—where there was a kitten, they described a Bengal tiger.

Eric Hazan: in terms of milieu, was there a difference in social origins?

Alain Badiou: I haven’t studied this point in any detail, but in my personal perception of things, it is clear that there were a lot of young grands bourgeois in the GP, which made it reminiscent of the Russian anarchist movement. There were also many young women from the same milieu, who had broken with their families. It is well known that the GP would hold meetings in enormous apartments—I sometimes attended these and took part. When the GP sent a big contingent out to the Renault works at Flins in June 1968—we should remember that one of them, Gilles Tautin, was killed by the riot police—they organized an emergency network to bring back the guys who had scattered into the surrounding countryside; and a large part of the Paris intellectual bourgeoisie, including myself, went out in their cars to rescue these activists.

Godard’s film Tout va bien gives a good picture of this kind of sympathy—simultaneously bourgeois, activist, distant and fashionable. The fascination of Yves Montand’s character with events in the factory is totally characteristic of the attraction the GP exercised on the intellectuals of the time. But remember that the GP, like the UCFML, also contained workers, young people, Algerians, all kinds of people.

Eric Hazan: I think that if my experience with the Communists hadn’t made me rather wary, I might have gone in that direction myself.

Alain Badiou: Yes, and me too, if I hadn’t been put off early on by the element of flagrant posturing—boasting of things that didn’t really exist—and a kind of hystericization of activism, which I sensed very quickly would not stay the course. For my part, I made a permanent commitment, it wasn’t a youthful prank. Theirs was an adventurist and fallacious style of action, but one that was exciting at the same time, a politics that was also a fashion, its personal roots in actual fact not very deep—all this, in the GP, made possible those spectacular reversals that we have now seen. Politics as excitement is not a good thing. The canonical example in France was Jacques Doriot, the great hope of the 1930s when he was Communist mayor of Saint-Denis. He was the Dionysian leader who set off for battle at the head of his proletarian troops. That kind of visionary can make a total about-turn, because the moment comes when, to remain in the spotlight, to maintain your own excited self-image, you have to be able to pull off a complete change of course. Doriot became a notorious fascist, an extremist collaborator with the Nazis.

The phenomenon of Doriotism was aggravated by a French characteristic: the link between intellectuals and politics—an excellent thing in many respects, but which has its specific pathologies. This was how, around 1969, a kind of hegemony of the most superficial form of ‘Maoism’ established itself in the trendy intellectual milieu, and how we are now seeing an equally bizarre phenomenon, that of ex-Maoist intellectuals who made a complete about-turn and whom you hear on television railing against any kind of progressive politics. When Doriot was killed in his car by machine-gun fire, he was wearing an SS uniform. As far as our ‘Maoist’ renegades are concerned, we should really speak of Doriotism as farce.

Translated by David Fernbach. This interview originally appeared in Eric Hazan, Changement de propriétaire, Paris 2007.

http://kasamaproject.org/2008/11/03/badiou-on-different-streams-within-french-maoism/

discipline posted:

I see this sort of mindset in my friends as we age. some of them turned very obviously towards participating in a system that they used to despise because the revolution isn't around the corner and they must "be practical". of course, this means they move on to the lesser evil sort of mentality pretty fast. I think at the heart of it badiou is correct: these are people who were in it for power and excitement. true politics takes decades and many failures/setbacks along the way. especially in this weird ADHD world we live in I don't think so many of my generation are willing to sit down and put in the hard work. lured into the left in their 20s, they leave it pretty quickly when they see it won't get them where they want to go tomorrow. when they encounter it in a serious form in the future or by former comrades they confront it as one embarrassed of their past, speaking loudly that they've already figured it out and it was all bunk to begin with

Well, yeah, the boomers have made this abundantly clear already

discipline posted:

I see this sort of mindset in my friends as we age. some of them turned very obviously towards participating in a system that they used to despise because the revolution isn't around the corner and they must "be practical". of course, this means they move on to the lesser evil sort of mentality pretty fast. I think at the heart of it badiou is correct

i think you're right but badiou would consider supporting chavez as lesser-evilism, for example. badiou opposes left front campaigns like melenchon's (or mitterrand's). obviously the french maoists denounced the soviet union and its allies. most communists are "lesser evilists", which isn't necessarily a bad thing i guess.

discipline posted:

I think it's important to view things over the course of our lifetimes. will things be prime in 5 years for some serious change? probably not. even if things slipped and fell there would be no one ready to step in. see what happened in egypt for example. but might things be ready in 30, 40 years? well that's something you've got to commit your life to.

if this is indeed true what if you just quit and be""""" practical """""" for the next 30 years and then come back when """serious change""" is indeed serious? or are you saying if you're not a 24/7 revolutionary for the next 40 years then you are doomed to become a boomer? doom to boom

tentativelurkeraccount posted:

well isnt the point of the commitment to facilitate that serious change, to ensure its readiness--to lay the groundwork for it. like that its not as simple as stowing away your personal opinions on class struggle while you sit on the couch watching netflix until the day comes to take to the streets and smash the state in an afternoon

my man, i've been active in an Active Org doing exactly that for the past year and a half (and on my own self for longer), and trust me, there are tens if not hundreds of thousands of Really Smart Active people working for that as well and all fighting each other all the time at the same time

feeling kinda demoralized at the moment honeslty because even if you're active as fuck in these stupid semi-effective structures (which i am only half-so compared to others) all it takes is some other Really Smart Active People doing the same thing (outside of or within your org) to come by and undercut all your org's shit and reverse it without even the Capitalist doing it and it's impossible to tell if The Groundwork is Being Laid at All or if it's just the conditions getting fucking worse because we're so ineffectual arguing endlessly about a trillion different theoretical and organizational differences that its the worsening is what's radiccalizing more people (who drop by and are Demoralized by the state of things as well but are On Our Side ultimately)

we have some significant legions out there imo, they just don't want to participate in Constant Insanity-Inducing Bullshit to lay """ Groundwork """ that may or may not matter within the structures (as opposed to posting on a fuckeing internet forum that radicalized people or just talking to petit bourgeois about becoming apathetic rather than hostile to socialism)

i'm optimistic about eventual outcomes but can't help but be pessimistic about the Real of Now especially in the first world and my inner liberal is hesitant about going to fucking Nepal to have commitment mean a god damn thing aside from helping an org continue existing day to day and not annihilate itslef

Edited by prikryl (Jan. 14, 2013 05:57:15)

getfiscal posted:

discipline posted:

I see this sort of mindset in my friends as we age. some of them turned very obviously towards participating in a system that they used to despise because the revolution isn't around the corner and they must "be practical". of course, this means they move on to the lesser evil sort of mentality pretty fast. I think at the heart of it badiou is correct

i think you're right but badiou would consider supporting chavez as lesser-evilism, for example. badiou opposes left front campaigns like melenchon's (or mitterrand's). obviously the french maoists denounced the soviet union and its allies. most communists are "lesser evilists", which isn't necessarily a bad thing i guess.

this is the complete opposite of what badiou is talking about, and no communists are "lesser-evilists" in any sense of the word.

babyhueypnewton posted:

this is the complete opposite of what badiou is talking about, and no communists are "lesser-evilists" in any sense of the word.

what do you mean. i meant a few things:

1. badiou opposes lesser-evil politics, including electoral left fronts.

2. the average person that self-identifies as communist tends to support basically what exists. like they support castro even though most maoists don't consider castro socialist.

getfiscal posted:

babyhueypnewton posted:

this is the complete opposite of what badiou is talking about, and no communists are "lesser-evilists" in any sense of the word.

what do you mean. i meant a few things:

1. badiou opposes lesser-evil politics, including electoral left fronts.

2. the average person that self-identifies as communist tends to support basically what exists. like they support castro even though most maoists don't consider castro socialist.

communism is a goal. communists support anything that gets us closer to that goal. people who are like "you support Iran even though they have communists killed LOL" are missing the point because communism is not a goal to them but a religion. Or rather, it is something pure that is separate from the real, dirty politics of the everyday struggle. We support Iran only in the specific context (one might even call it the historical-materialist conditions) of the current balance of power among world capitalism and a serious evaluation of tactics, potential points of crisis, and political-economic trends.

lesser-evilism is supporting something because it is better than the alternative. it is a fundamentally reactionary ideology. anti-imperialism and communism often overlap with lesser-evil liberalism in whom they support (Chavez, Cuba, various historical groups) but they support them for completely opposite reasons. lesser-evilism is a moral ideology, the morality of the less bad. communism is tactical, supporting whichever side destabilizes capitalism more and which side creates space for revolutionary politics.

Ironicwarcriminal posted:

babyhueypnewton posted:

I think what Badiou is saying is really interesting, though I don't think the idea of "fashionable" revolutionary politics is necessarily a bad thing. Sure all these egomaniacs and impatient fools turned against the left in the 80s, but this was not the cause of the defeat of the left but rather a consequence of its defeat.

I've always been interested in the ideas behind blac bloc tactics. Though anarchists would never admit it, it functions as a kind of extreme vanguard, which radicalizes mass protests and turns the acceptable, impotent liberal protests into violent, radical affairs. The Blac bloc disrupts the hegemony of capitalism, which is so all-pervasive that it even allows protest against it in the spirit of freedom. Sure most liberals blame the blac bloc rather than the police who are beating them on the head, but who cares? The blac bloc doesn't exist, there is no one to blame.

Maybe I'm committing the same mistake at the GP of valuing propaganda and the image over hard work, but how cool would it be to see a famous liberal, like Sean Penn or something, getting pepper sprayed by police at an anti-war protest. How important was it to see rich white college students getting abused by the police and hearing reports of sexual assault by the police against female occupy protesters in our age of unprecedented "peace"?

I know this is a different context to the American one but the end of Occupy Melbourne definitely changed my views. Check this out:



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U82bDjIpCmM

They had just been camping in a square downtown for a couple of weeks, just chilling around their tents with signs. Very inoccuous, very white. The mayor decided to evict them for 'blocking thoroughfares' and shut down the busiest intersection in the area to brings cops on horses in and forcibly evict them as seen above.

No, it's not the most brutal of police behaviour that we see but i was still pretty shaken by the fact that even some white, bougie hippies chilling in tents for a little while can't even be tolerated without a big show of state violence. The general reaction of the public from what i could tell from the blogs and news and talking to a few people was "good" and the justification was "they were blocking people from shopping". Quite a lot of people sort of seemed to vicariously relish in it and Occupy's legacy ended up being "the left in this country is so hopeless and short of things to whine about that they have to import their greivances from America"

i see very little in the way of even some residual form of sympathetic solidarity and the general consensus was that cities are for shopping and working, not democracy or ideas, and if you try and 'make a fuss' you have to expect to take a club on the head because you're an elitist trying to stop honest hard working australians from blah blah blah blah

a profoundly dispiriting episode

this is an interesting point. to paraphrase David Harvey, there's nothing unique about neo-liberalism economically, pretty typical IMF free market capitalism applied to the first world instead of the third. we can characterize it as a political movement to empower the bourgeoisie and crush the working class. this means a couple of contradictory things.

one, any political movement for workers power, no matter how small or pathetic, has to be completely crushed. if we're going to ride this train all the way to the bottom and do nothing to address the contradictions in capitalism, the bourgeoisie will only become more paranoid and the state more militarized. occupy, by all accounts, was pathetic compared to the massive response of the state and corporations, which we are only learning now was highly coordinated and hyper-militaristic. COINTELPRO looks like a joke compared to some of the things coming out of leaked documents and heavily redacted FBI files were seeing now.

two, traditional methods of organization are being crushed. obviously unions are being destroyed, but traditional white, male supremacy is being destroyed as well as the pure logic of capitalism (which doesnt care about race, religion, sex, etc) is being brought onto the first world labor aristocracy. the response you mention is closer to white guilt than white supremacy, which may be all that remains of "whiteness". occupy may have been white as hell, but there will never be another Hanoi Jane to stir up sympathy as a rich white woman being abused by the state.

i dunno what this means. I'm sure some people on here would talk about nomadic sites of resistance and turning every rupture in the surface of capitalism into a full crisis, i never liked D&G that much. regardless, that every person is isolated in capitalism, both from progressive politics (union, political party) and regressive politics (family, race, religion) makes mass movements much harder, however that every movement has the potential to become a serious crisis makes neo-liberal control much harder is something worth thinking about. i thought half of Empire by N&H was great and the other half was nonsense, but the part where they basically say what im saying was the most interesting stuff. anyway this post goes all over the place and doesnt make much sense but hopefully theres some ideas here.

babyhueypnewton posted:

a lot of this is a specific trend in maoism, which like badiou says is what separates them from the marxist-leninists and the trotskyists. i cant speak for badiou, im probably a lot closer to a "stalinist" as he would say than he is, but theres nothing inherently wrong with participating in the electoral process. like everything else, it is a question of tactics, it just so happens bourgeois elections in almost every case serve to undermine revolution and stabilize capitalism for a short time until the revolutionary wave passes or is crushed. for example, I have no problem with someone in Haiti supporting Aristide, precisely because it is unacceptable to United states capital and creates crisis. whether that's still the case today is unclear, Daniel Ortega for example has been moderated by history (though I still support him with some reservation). Once again, it is not a question of morals or principles, but tactics. the only principle is the advance of socialism, and even then I wouldn't call that a principle but a historical necessity.

Chavez is a borderline case, I think if he wasn't creating people's militias communists would have more trouble supporting him. not sure why you get on everyone's case for supporting chavez, it's not like we have much to do about it in the west anyway except revolutionary defeatism.

okay but up north here you said "this is the complete opposite of what badiou is talking about, and no communists are "lesser-evilists" in any sense of the word." just want to make sure that you were being snarky and totally ignoring what i had to say.

discipline posted:

prikryl posted:

feeling kinda demoralized at the moment

I dunno man. sometimes on a personal level I feel towards my activism like I do towards my writing. I don't really have a choice. I'd do it no matter what, if it worked or not. I do it because it's the right thing to do.

yes
yes
yes

if your not active your not a communist your just a drip of red paint on the edges of whatever social net you happen to exist in


in all honesty my experience in anti imperialist marxist left here in the uk basically taught me that attempts to mirror historical party structures are mired in contradiction upon contradiction no matter what your ideological position not only re the movement by re comrades and even the entire struggle itself but they are still essential in their own way (organisational red structures with democratic centralism are wonderful and genuinely miss it) we just need to have a bit of pride of our place in history (and its an ace placed capitalism in crisis in all that) and get a bit angry so were willing to recreate properly

Edited by SovietFriends (Jan. 14, 2013 22:17:57)

prikryl posted:

I think you may have only been tangentially directing this at me if at all, but I guess the point of bringing up Nepal as example of "meaningful" work was not the fetishistic ideal of violence but simply the ability to indeed do "hard and patient work" for an organization in a sector of the global system that is actually a meaningful "weak link"

i was directing it more at like some maoist blogs that seem to have, to put it one way, huge boners for militaristic shit.