SOVIET COMMUNISM AND THE PARADOX OF ALIENATION
In departing from its initial revolutionary impulses, Soviet “communism” made its state and economy ultra-alienated. By the 1970s, its system brought on the atomization of society and the victory of an ideology of individualism and consumerism, comparable to the situation in bourgeois societies. But the Soviet experience also had another side: the “common” or the “collective” was really not appropriated; in the bureaucratic system of collective irresponsibility, it turned out to be unneeded, belonging to no-one.
The Soviet landscape, a landscape that is only slowly disappearing and still very much surviving in provincial Russia, is a landscape of abandoned construction sites, empty lots, or the open street-doors, where one could easily urinate or drink a little bottle of vodka … In many senses, the common remained vacant and free. In spite of itself, through a “trick of history”, the Soviet regime achieved a free common where it was not looking for it … Of course, all of this was uncomfortable and ineffective, and the new bourgeois prophets of the Perestroika began by pointing at this scandalous trait of Soviet “communism”, suggesting to privatize it in order to tie humanity more closely to the material “base” of its surroundings. But for now, none of this has worked: the new private owners have little respect for the world of things, which is why they have subjected this world to predatory exploitation (based on the same disrespect), while disrespect for the public sphere is so much of a part of our very existences that we still hardly worry about the environment in our everyday lives; we never fix up our hallways and are rarely capable of uniting for any action in protest.
The common, however, belongs to no one. In their total worldliness, empty lots play the role of sacral spaces, segregated “zones.” The sacrality of the profane is perhaps an alternative formula of democracy or, more precisely, communism in its true unrevealed meaning. The real common, the common aside from exchange, the common without the universal, lies beneath our feet at the exact place where it is nobody’s. The question is actually, on the one hand, how to preclude the usurping of this common (through bureaucracy or capitalism), and on the other hand, how to preserve a relationship to it: once one is deeply involved in their private lives, s/he hardly notices the common void that chases their particular little worlds. And the unconscious communism turns into its opposite, the realm of universal privateness/deprivation.
Therefore today: does this mean a regime of the grand collective appropriation of everything by humanity, or on the contrary a project of a sacral denial of property (compare the same dilemma in the definition of democracy: a representation of people by government, or, as in Claude Lefort, a taboo on the embodiment of people). To achieve in alienation, this prevented them from exploring the concrete content of communism at all. Today, to reconsider this, we may need to get back to Marx’ definition of alienation and recall that the early Soviet aestheticians, and later Brecht, used a synonym of alienation as a positive category describing new revolutionary art. If alienation looked suspect to Marx from the economical point of view, it turned to be essential for new communist state in the aesthetic sphere. If, following Schiller, we perceive “an aesthetic state” in the no man’s land between the public and the private, we may say that the Soviet communism built such an aesthetic state of alienation in the midst of its repressive ideological state.
Communism as idea
“Communism” is a concept that, from the very emergence of its present meaning during the period of the French revolution was meant to be a radical and down-to-earth alternative to the idealistic slogans of the Jacobins (liberty, equality, fraternity, etc.).1 Unlike the former, “communism” includes a reference to economy and, more precisely, to a society without private property. This materialist content was later reaffirmed by Marx who, after first having rejected the concept altogether,2 expressed allegiance to a “communism” that is for him and Engels “not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself” but “the real movement which abolished the present state of things.”3 Communists, with their “criticism of the Earth,”4 belong to the revolutionary branch of the Romantic movement that aspired to reverse the usual spiritualist orientation of humanity away from the Earth to Heaven, to redirect it into the depths of Earth, and towards the depth of matter and the prose of life.
In France, this tradition was followed for example by Jules Michelet, the romantic left-wing historian. He writes in his History of the French Revolution that “One has to dig deeper than Dante and to uncover, inside the Earth, the deep foundation of people on which the colossus [of monarchy] is built.”5
The same tendency was continued a hundred years later during the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. One of its early supporters, the poet Alexey Gastev, wrote: “We will not aspire to these heights that are called ‘heaven.’ Heaven is a creation of the idle, lazy, and timid people. Let us rush down! Together with fire, metal, and gas, and steam, let us dig mines, let us drill the largest tunnels in the world, let us empty in the bowels of the earth the untouched old layers.”6
All of this is important to argue against the dominant liberal-conservative perception of Soviet communism as yet another ideocratic dictatorship.7 If it was an Enlightenment educational regime, it was such only for the reason that it emerged out of a materialist struggle against idealism – the only properly idealistic philosophical state is, of course, a liberal state.
Nevertheless, the ambiguity of the concept of communism, the one between a vision and an ontological statement, remained even for Marx himself who certainly had a vision, although vague, of a future communist society, “where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me … to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner,”8 and where “the free development of each” would be “the condition for the free development of all.”9 Communism would be a society of abundant free (“available”) time used by the subjects for self-education. From here we may see that in his positive program of communism, Marx remains an aesthetic Romantic thinker. And this suggests that communism is somehow possible as a way of life beyond labor or remaining in its shadow.
Therefore, by the time that the Soviet and pro-Soviet Marxism died “in itself”, serious attempts have emerged to conceive “communism” at the level of contemporary philosophy and of the existing political–economic condition. Indeed, after the victory of the liberal vision of society, communism sounded once again as the only viable alternative to the idealistic models of human togetherness, whether understood as the representative state, the rule of law, or a social contract combining individuals into a whole. This idealistic liberal unity remains relative; it hypostasizes an individual who originally exists by itself and only then enters a society. Excesses of this model are the melancholic and moralistic individualism of the bourgeois subject, the crushing of the “general will” in the Rousseauist republic, and especially nationalism as a collective egoism which unites individualism and collectivism.
There should be a way to conceive a stronger totality, which would not involve a transcendent principle of unity (like God), but would nevertheless allow for an infinite relationship of a member to the whole, which it would “run through.” When Marx described the effects of the bourgeois revolution, he noted that this “political revolution dissolves civil society into its elements without revolutionizing these elements themselves.”10 The goal of a new revolution would thus be a chemical or even nuclear dissolution of the social fabric which would allow it setting off from the fixed opposition of egoism and idealism, and which would strive for a new kind of unity.
In such a totality, elements would interweave and interpenetrate, and would be free in the aesthetic sense of a “virtuosity” (Virno),11 and free play, instead of the liberal freedom within pre-set boundaries. Hegel had already expressed something like this with his concept of “absolute” (i.e., “the bacchanalian revel, where not a member is sober; and … [at the same time] the revel is just as much a state of transparent unbroken calm”). However, Hegel thought that the revolution had been superseded by the organic state and was rightly accused of conservative tendencies. His followers, the young Hegelians and primarily Marx, looked for such an absolute from the side of the substance (underestimated by Hegel, in their view), and emphasized its negative, dissolving force which they reoriented against Hegel’s own philosophy.
It is important to note that, unlike the recurrent bourgeois apologies of solidarity (communitarianism in USA, “civil society” in the recent sociological and political discourse), communism, even if aimed against private property, is not a univocal “collectivism”. Both Marx and recent theorists of communism actually emphasize its negative predicates, oriented at least at the dissolution of already existing social units. Communism is a vision of society, which justifies the forces of social dissolution acting in every society, while liberalism uses these same forces as an argument for its dualism of individual and state.12 But, in the context of communism, these forces are seen as revolutionary, to wit, as social forces of auto-dissolution that bear energies of collective liberation. The totality/commonality that “communism” promises proceeds not only from the positively defined goal of an activity (here, a unitary collective subject would suffice) but rather as a negative unity of the suspended, dissolved multitude who are co-ordinating among themselves, so to speak, “by default.”
However, Negri and Virno both explicitly deny that exodus is important because of its negativity;13 they follow Deleuze in insisting on the inherent positivity of any event, which leads them to think that the task of a revolution consists in giving full freedom to the already-existing creative force of the multitude. Against this claim, we should perhaps look for the revolutionary resources in the social negativity itself, as in the unconscious collective form of dissolution. Communism is revolutionary not as a supposedly positive form of society that must be affirmed against all others, but as a condition intimately tied up with the destruction of the status quo.
These ideas revive the old Marxian dilemmas of communism. If Soviet communism was wrong, if communism is a “hypothesis,”14 as Badiou suggests, or a theorem yet to be proven (realized in practice), then it risks to be viewed as one more ideal. If communism is an ontological condition of humanity (even an “ecstatic” one), then it escapes historical determination and does not inspire much insurrectional activity. Finally, if there is a progressive tendency within capitalism, then how can it destroy its own presuppositions (namely, that of capitalism)? To escape this dilemma, we have to find a political definition of communism, and then to find something in actual reality that would “destroy the present condition” – precisely something that we do not see in the current philosophical discussions of communism.
“Communism” of the past and communism of the future
This leads us straight to the more specific historical condition of Central/Eastern European communism. If this was not communism, then (so liberals say), communism remains a utopian fantasy. If this was actually “historical communism,” then it is predominantly presented, if not as “totalitarianism,” then as an unpleasant, outdated sociopolitical regime in a poor and authoritarian country with an excessive push for collectiveness, which “goes against human nature.” The latter opinion is more widespread, and one normally speaks of the state of contemporary East and Central European societies as “postcommunism,” assuming that communism had already taken place. Ironically, for citizens of the Soviet Union and other socialist countries, communism had always remained a utopia or a project to realize in the future. Thus, strangely, communism, at least in Soviet Union, was first in the future, then in the past, but never making it into the present.
Thus, there are two common-sense perspectives; the first, that communism was an unrealistic utopia never achieved, and second, that the only possible realization of communism was a Soviet-style socialism, that is to say, “totalitarianism.”
However, there is a third perspective, and it is shared by several authors who have written on communism in the recent years. From this perspective, communism did really exist (and perhaps still exists), but it did not equal the Soviet-style state socialism at all. On the one hand, there is an argument of Paolo Virno that there is a “communism” that is inherent in the capitalism but is subdued by its logic. On the other hand, some analysts of “really existing socialism” also believed that communism existed under this regime, although it did not coincide with the official ideology or the accepted form of property. In Russia, it was Alexander Zinoviev, a Soviet dissident philosopher and émigré, and an author of an important treatise on Marx’s dialectics who then turned to formal logic and, at the same time, to the violent critique of the Soviet regime expressed in semi-fictional satiric essays, who held this view.
In his essay “Communism as a Reality” (1980),15 Zinoviev stated that communism really existed in Soviet Union, although it was not a politico-economic regime alternative to capitalism but a more profound societal regime of what he called “communality” – an excessively collective life of man which, he claimed, had been normally reduced in the West by “civilization.” The rest was a violent critique of the “communism” which vividly reminded the reader of the Western conservative theory of “masses” in the spirit of Le Bon, Tarde, and McDougal. Zinoviev, logically enough, was skeptical about the perspectives of positively transforming Soviet communism, and this may explain his spectacular ideological U-turn in the 1990s, when he sided with the reactionary and chauvinist “Communist Party of the Russian Federation” in its critique of perestroika and of the liberal-democratic reforms. Then, he became an apologist of the Soviet society, emphasizing that “it made the historical being of the people meaningful”, and that in it, “citizens are guaranteed jobs, free medicine, retirement and other social goods”, along with “powerful police forces and the military power to protect the country from a foreign attack.” At that time, Zinoviev tentatively called the new Russian regime “communist capitalism.”16
A view partly similar to that of early Zinoviev was held by yet another soviet dissident philosopher and émigré, Boris Groys. From his works of the Soviet period up to the recent Communist Post-Script,17 Groys has emphasized the substantively peculiar character of the Soviet regime, which did not coincide with socialism per se, but consisted, according to him, in the ideocratic and mythopoetic power of this state, which was thus different from the more down-to-earth materialist western societies. For Groys, the communist regime was “dialectical,” by which he (idiosyncratically) understands the ability to incorporate any reality into one’s ideological outlook and to behave in an entirely unprincipled way.
The earlier work of Groys, as it is known, takes a more critical stance vis-à-vis communism and speaks of Stalin’s USSR as a sui generis aesthetical project that inherits in the footsteps of Soviet avant-garde.
In a similar line of argument but with a more positive attitude, Oleg Aronson claims that Soviet cinema (as well as western mass cinema) created a certain “sensible” communism, which consisted in the making-common of image, not of material things. Aronson thinks that a poetic of “cliché,” which is characteristic of mass culture, is paradoxically more “communist” than the authorial techniques of many art house films. Thus, “perception of cinema becomes immanent to the type of commonality where it remains not word and not silence but a communication (relationship to the other that proceeds from the insufficiency of Ego)” (Aronson, 1993: 86–7).
I think that both Groys and Aronson are up to something when they emphasize the aesthetic (sensuous, autonomous, unproductive) nature of Soviet communism. It was indeed a sort of Schillerian Aesthetische Staat. But why? It is the argument of this paper that the aesthetic communism did not coincide with the conscious ideological project of the state but formed an autonomous sphere within the regime, and this sphere was characterized by negativity. The civil society in Soviet Union was negated by the state and party, and thus sublated -- relegated to the aesthetic (neutralized) level. Therefore, as we will see below, the negativity did not just consist in the Benjaminian mass imagery, but also in the constant process of subjectivization and in a vacuous intersubjectivity.
While all of the described theories of communism are certainly more interesting than Soviet official philosophy or the Western theory of “totalitarianism,” they may and must be criticized from the Left. However, all of these theories dismiss the emancipatory sociopolitical nature of the regime that achieved what it did, not by setting free some age-old chaotic energies of the masses, but through a wide-range destruction of the institutions of private property, and through a democratic revolutionary mobilization of the society. Many of the phenomena that are deemed to be “communist” in the aforementioned “real communism” tradition are in fact the results of the large-scale destruction of the social link, which allowed a communistic questioning of traditional forms. Some admire this situation as a purely aesthetical massified sensuality, but in fact aesthetics is here inseparable from a political revolutionary project, from the negativity which is a virus of a negative, and therefore politically active, communism.
Desert communism
To understand the “communism” of Soviet society, we need to be attentive to its peculiar melancholic character and, moreover, to the negative condition of the ecstatic “communality” which ultimately led to the regime’s destruction. Moreover, at the background of a motion, be it a collective purposeful activity, an expectation, or mourning, humans become apparent as ground and not figures.
Paradoxically, any talk of the “communality” or “communism” of Soviet society should start from the consideration of the most noncommunist phenomena possible. The Russian people today are among the most atomized and egoist in their values and attitudes. They value individual happiness above all, they do not care about charity, they are apolitical, and the majority abstains from collective action.18 Everyday communication among strangers is extremely alienated: a contemporary Russian will rarely excuse oneself if s/he kicked you in the crowd, would not say “hi” if s/he leaves next door in your stairwell, etc. If one is in the way of another person, s/he would silently push you or your body part away without saying a word. As a recent American visitor, the writer Jack Milestone, shrewdly remarked: “It appears that Russians made a secret agreement to treat each other like a piece of shit … How did these people manage to get together and to shoot the Tzar with his whole family, while they never even say ‘good morning’ if they are not introduced to each other, I will never learn this.”19 Russians live in cozy apartments, but usually their stairwells are rotten and in a state of disrepair. Against an obvious objection that this situation is a product of the rogue capitalism of the 1990s, one must immediately rejoin that these traits have existed throughout the conscious life of the generation born in 1970s and appear as rigid behavioral patterns that the new western-oriented culture politic tries in vain to revert. However, in the late Soviet society, these traits coexisted with some intensely communal elements (living in communal apartments, relying on friends for services, career advances, and unofficial entrepreneurship) which were subsequently denigrated and now, while still existent, are regarded as an obstacle and residue of the past, while in fact, ultra-individualist values are a residue of the past to an even larger degree.
Realistically, the anti-communality of today’s Russians may be explained by the extreme zeal with which the Soviet state, starting in the 1930s, placed families into packed “communal apartments” without permission of the existing tenants, and by the fact that it subsequently moved many of these families into private apartments in the 1960s and 1970s, creating conditions for a modest but zealous embourgeoisement. Communism seen as a unilateral collectivism reinforced, with time, its suppressed side of atomistic competitiveness. Thus, the postcommunist Russian middle class is a mirror-image of the Western educated class; the latter are atomized by law but strive for some idealistic solidarity, while the former, more united and interdependent physically, consciously defend and institute the newly-acquired individualism.
Is the ubiquity of social alienation a proof that Soviet socialism was “totalitarian,” but not truly communist? Perhaps this excessive alienation points to something else, and hides a “positive,” more attractive side. Indeed, in the Soviet Union, the existing public space was a space of anarchic freedom, and complete alienation was a guarantee of nonappropriation. The attractively deserted character of Soviet space is well shown in Soviet art, most famously in Andrey Tarkovsky’s film The Stalker, with its estranged but mystically utopian industrial ruins as a space where a deep communication becomes possible. However, long before Tarkovsky, the same poetic was elaborated by Andrey Platonov (1899–1951), the greatest Soviet prose writer of the revolutionary generation. There were other theorists and writers before Tarkovsky, such as Lev Vygotsky and Mikhail Bakhtin who, under the Soviet regime, produced apologies of communism as an ecstatic utopian force that destroyed identities and deliberately created chaos. We can even speak of a communist anti-communist canon of people who in their thought and imagination preserved the constituent (or more precisely, destituent) power of communist revolution.
In many of Platonov’s allegories of communism (including the builders of a foundation pit, a premature attempt to build “communism” in a small town called Tchevengur, or the emancipation of a small Turk tribe called the “Dzhan” wandering in a Central Asian desert), people are shown in alien deserted spaces, in extreme poverty, fatigue, and solitude. In opposition to Marx, communism for Platonov is the regime of poverty and negativity. At the same time, as is clear biographically and textually, he was a staunch supporter and participant of the Soviet project.
Tchevengur, in accordance with Badiou’s doctrine, is a town where communism is organized by the “prochie”, or the unaccounted “rest” of society. The wandering of the Dzhan people ends in their dissolution, when they depart one by one in all directions. Platonov sees communism as both solitude and community,20 but these two are presented not as an organic development from one to another (as conceived by Virno in the concept of individuation), but as a dialectical tension. For instance, a very characteristic diary note from 1931 reads: “The mystery of prostitution: union of bodies implies a unity of souls, but in prostitution the unity of souls is so absent, and it is so apparent and terrible, that there is no love, that from surprise, from the fall, from fear – ‘unity of souls’ starts to emerge.”21 At the same time, Platonov presents human sociability on the basis of a literary trope which Olga Meerson called the “re-familiarization” (opposite to Shklovsky’s “estrangement” or “de-familiarization”):22 the presentation (and perception by characters) of weird and surprising events (such as a bear working as a blacksmith) as normal occurrences not accentuated or marked within the otherwise realistically looking narrative. It is a special kind of sociability which grows from universal alienation (strangeness) and social dissolution and which takes others for granted.
Platonov’s universe of a collective solitude where humans relate to each other nonthematically, as to ground rather than to figure, appears as a utopian communism of senses. However, it is clear that for Platonov, such communism is not just aesthetic sensuality (as Aronson attributes to him in the aforementioned reading), but that it exists in the framework of radical subjectivization, which implies the questioning of traditional, fixed subjectivity. Platonov’s characters are obsessed with finding out who is doing what they are doing. One of them says, in a latent polemic reminiscent of Descartes, “I don’t exist here … I only think here.”23 Another says, “In spite of my self-consciousness as a right-winger, left-winger, and a reconciliatory quietist, I am still sad, and consider this statement of mine to be insufficient, to be a typical démarche of a class enemy.”24 This latter phrase is a parody of the “self-criticism” which was required at that time for Soviet citizens. But for Platonov, it is a genuine movement of subjectivization; a performative self-refutation manifesting the existence of the revolutionary subject. It is nevertheless clear that this subject, in its suspended and unstable nature, belongs to the aesthetical and educational rather than purely political or scientific spheres.
All of this is indicative of the meaning of sadness and solitude in Platonov; they are affects of self-destruction, which is needed in order to retroactively create a subjectivity for the ongoing Soviet project. A revolution conceived by intelligentsia for the sake of the “proletariat” then had to build this proletariat and to grow its own roots, requiring a regressive, destructive approach. This is the meaning of the metaphor of the “foundation pit”; the joyful optimistic construction of the future means nothing without all the mourning, which it redeems, and which needs to be constantly reconstructed.
The inattention and aggression in late Soviet/new Russian streets and apartment buildings may simply mean that Russian citizens take other people for granted, as a ground not as a figure. It is completely opposite from the behavior vis-à-vis strangers typical of contemporary US and Western Europe, where an encounter produces a shock of almost disbelief, and the exaggerated rituals of politeness are meant to hide the embarrassment of the encounter itself. Russia and the “West” thus display the same value components of social attraction and repulsion, but they are structured differently, even inversely to one another, which makes one be cautious against any nondialectical “pluralism” of “alternative modernities.”
Paolo Virno suggests that communism is a way from the assumed collectivity to “individuation”.25 This is an organic version of the coexistence and passage between these two opposites. Alas, a gloomier scenario exists in Russia with the move from an assumed commonality to egoism and cynicism. It still serves as a manifest proof of the preexisting being-in-common. But, as elsewhere, the newly formed “subjects” do everything to suppress and destroy the ground sociability, the premise of their existence.
Thus, the presumably «totalitarian» Soviet party-state in fact did produce a common space by virtue of its very alienating force: the state property was informally considered “ownerless.” This did not help economic development, but did maintain a paradoxical sense of belonging and commonality via the relationship to this ruined state property. This, in a strict sense, is associated with what “common” really means; “res communis omnium” in Roman law was distinct from the “res publica” or “res nullius,” because it was a good, which belonged to no one (including the Roman people, etc.), and could not be appropriated (as res nullius could be).26 One may say that res communis is a mediator between res nullius and res publica; in a sense, it also belongs to no one, and this very nonbelonging is protected by the public.
In the Middle Ages,27 common land could belong to a feudal lord, but he did not have complete sovereignty over it; property, in such cases, did not exclude the right of usage by others. This is also the case with public property in today’s western countries. But, the fact that this is property of the people makes it necessary to police it: prohibit starting fires drinking, or smoking, install cameras, etc. In contrast, in the case of the res communis omnium, the legal rule was rather closer to the Schmittean right of exception; law excluded a territory from the regime of property.
Now, how do we understand this communist anti-communism in the Soviet Union? There are at least two obvious explanations.
The first explanation is that Soviet socialism was a weird way to block the modernization of social relations in the spirit of bourgeois Enlightenment and, being unable to suggest anything new, managed to freeze a certain pre-Modern sociability of a mutually suspicious crowd and family-like networks of kinship and friendship, using clientelist networks for economic activity and living in a perpetual communion of feast and alcohol. This version is close to Zinoviev’s “communality,” except that the features in question are not collectivist. In fact, the late Soviet society on an everyday basis was less “communal” (in the sense of communitarian) than the contemporary western society (where, for instance, the regular co-habitation of “roommates” or other previously not acquainted individuals exists as a normal institution for young people and does not cause a large social problem or generate a dissident discourse, as in the case of Soviet communal apartments).
The second explanation, paradoxical in nature, is that the cunning of history made the quasi-theocratic Soviet party-state a placeholder for the profane sacrality of a terra and res nullius, which was strangely at the same time a res communis. This version would be close to Groys’s theological parallels, except that it is the negative, apophatic elements of religion that are emphasized.
In both cases, there is a danger of taking these situations for granted, ignoring their eventful, catastrophic coordinates, or dismissing them as archaic.
In fact, communism is not necessarily anything “nice,” and even not necessarily anything “collectivist.” Both its utopian force and its force of a real movement build on the potential of immediate solidarity and on the power of disrupting and dissolving the social body, exposing humans to each other in their extreme solitude. It is this power that makes communism a threat and a hope for the status quo. It is a potential of revolution and subversion, and at the same time, is an idea of a society, which would not correspond to any model or idealist definition. In fact, communism would actively destroy any such model, building instead both the structures of social dissolution and the structures of aleatoric sociability. The current nonbeing of solidarity in postcommunist countries may well correspond to a temporal mode of communist existence which remains a “specter”, having passed away without having ever been there. This is quite natural for the phenomenon of negativity as such, which is always unstable and fleeting but which, at the same time, returns in its very repression.28 The culture of the collective solitude formed in the authoritarian environment may also be used, in an inverted way, to invent an alternative to bourgeois sociability.
Negativity in communism
It is important to treat communism politically and subjectively, and to maintain it as an alternative and a liberating abolition of the existing state of affairs. We can admit that in some sense we are all already communists. But without political subjectivization, communism remains an ethically neutral and ambivalent process, which can lead, politically, not only to self-management, but sometimes to the authoritarian destruction of the social link, or even to the fascist-like hyper-identification of a collective. The political institutions of communism should somehow be themselves “negative” and foster the destruction of identities and the invention of new unclassifiable entities.
As mentioned in the beginning, a parallel may be drawn between the concept of communism and the concept of “democracy.” Claude Lefort famously argued that democracy is a regime where the place of supreme power is temporarily left empty, and special care is taken to regularly empty it out (Lefort). It is analogous with communism, at least in some crucial spheres; private property should not just be forbidden, but should be actively resisted as an informal social institution. The partiality and ideality of the concept of democracy, which subordinates life to law, covers up for authoritarianism in a corporation or in dealing with noncitizens, as well as serves to demobilize people and consider them only as passive bearers of interest, may be criticized. However, we see that in today’s world there are democratic states (like France or Italy) with numerous mass illegal or informal protests led by a nonsystemic opposition and directed against the existing regime. These states certainly do not encourage their citizens to do so, but there is something about these states’ liberal “democracy” that provokes some individuals to go against it in a “democratic” way.
Jacques Rancière, an influential apologist for Western democracy, uses the argument that democracy starts where there are new unrecognized subjects (the “sans-parts”) emerging to contest the status quo. In this sense, what we mean by communism is a more radical and less formal version of the same thing that the left-wing understanding of democracy entails, that is, a regime which is constantly capable of self-overcoming.
There must be ways to preserve the subversive, ecstatic character of communist constituent power, even at the price of its potential destructiveness. The current sociopolitical situation shows, furthermore, that there is a Schillerian need for constantly educating and reuniting its citizens into subjects. The negative dissolving force of communism itself risks producing apathetic “last men” at the moment when the ideology vanishes. Thus, an effort must be made to make the communist background of the current atomization and apathy evident. But, any educational posture could produce a countereffect of overturning of the educators. So, perhaps a communist government should be truly dialectical (as opposed to the pseudo-dialectical liberal state, as well as to the ideocratic dogmatism of the Soviet state to which Groys attributes a dialectic for false reasons). Such a government should be dialectical in its rationality and aesthetical in its virtuosity: harsh, but plastic at the same time, constantly preparing its own downfall and rescuing itself from it.
Notes
1By Restif de la Bretonne, then by German Jacobins: see Jacques Grandjonc, “Quelques dates a propos des termes communiste et communisme,” in Mots, October 1983, no. 7. “Cadrage des sujets et dérive des mots dans l’enchainement de l’énoncé,” pp. 143–8.
2Karl Marx, Communism and the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung, in: Marx and Engels, Collected Works Volume 1, pp. 215–21.
3Marx and Engels, “German Ideology,” in Collected Works Volume 5, p. 37.
4Marx and Engels, “Contribution to the critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” in Collected Works Volume 3, p. 177.
5Jules Michelet, Histoire de la Révolution française. P.: Robert Laffont, 1979. T. 1, P. 67.
6Alexey Gastev, Poezia rabochego udara. M.: Khudozhestvennaya literatura, 1971, p. 138.
7Such as represent, in (post-)Soviet studies, B. Groys, M. Ryklin, E. Dobrenko, and others.
8“German Ideology,” p. 37.
9Marx and Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in Collected Works, Vol. 6, p. 506.
10“On the Jewish Question,” Collected Works, vol. 3, p. 160.
11P. Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, New York: Semiotext, 2004.
12See Kant’s notion of “asocial sociability” in: “Idea For A Universal History With A Cosmopolitan Purpose,” in Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (2nd edn) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 41–53.
13See for instance Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Empire (New York and London: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 131–2. See also an important critical article by Ernesto Laclau criticizing Negri and Hardt for inattention to the negativity of history: E. Laclau, “Can immanence explain social struggles,” in P. Passavant and J. Dean, eds., Empire’s New Clothes: Reading Hardt and Negri, New York and London: Routledge, 2004, pp. 21–30.
14A. Badiou, L’hypothèse communiste, Paris: Lignes, 2009.
15Alexandr Zinoviev, Communism kak realnost’ (1980). Translated into French as Communisme comme réalité, Paris: Juillard/Age d’Homme, 1981), pp. 56–9].
16Alexander Zinoviev, Perestroika in Partygrad, New York: Peter Owen, 1992.
17See reference above.
18Atomization and extreme individualism of the Russian citizens, on the level of conscious values, are demonstrated in quantitative sociological data; see for instance Vladimir Magun and Maxim Rudnev, “The Life Values of the Russian Population,” in: Sociological Research (2010), Vol. 49, No. 4, pp. 3–57. (There is a difference of Russia against other European countries, in the higher value of individual achievement and self-affirmation, as opposed to the values that “transcend the individual self.”)
19http://fishki.net/1697319-vpechatlenija-amerikanca-vpervye-pobyvavshego-v-rossii.html Last visit 11.02.2016
20See Jonathan Flatley, Affective Mapping, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008.
21Andrey Platonov, Zapisnye knizhki, Moscow: IMLI RAN, 2006, p. 185.
22Olga Meerson, Svobodnaya Vesch: Poetika neostraneniya u Andreya Platonova, Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Slavic Specialties, 1997.
23Andrey Platonov, Kotlovan Moscow: Gudyal Press, 1999, p. 7. The Foundation Pit, trans. M. Ginzburg, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1994, p. 13.
24“Zabluzhdenie na rodine kompota.” Arkhiv Platonova. Moscow: IMLI, 2009, p. 254.
25P. Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, New York: Semiotext, 2004, pp. 64–9.
26Inst. 2.1, 2.1.1, Dig. 1.8.2 pr.-1 (Marcianus), in: Corpus Iuris Civilis, http://web.upmf-grenoble.fr/Haiti/Cours/Ak/. Last visit 5.10.2010.
27Cf. Yann Moulier Boutang, “Les nouvelles clôtures: technologies de l’information et de la communication ou la révolution rampante des droits de propriété,” www.ulb.ac.be, Last visit 5.10.2010.
28On these and other features of negativity in politics, see my Negative Revolution, London: Bloomsbury 2013.