South Atlantic Quarterly

Gavin Walker
The Reinvention of Communism:
Politics, History, Globality

The communists today are alone and potent.

Antonio Negri, Goodbye Mr. Socialism
Changing the world is more difficult, certainly,
than Marx and our own earlier selves believed.
But it is no less necessary than it ever was. From
the international demonstrations of the World Social
Forums, the impatient need for something new has
once again begun to move. A shiver, still fragile and
timid, like an uncertain convalescence, insufficient
to reverse the regressive spiral of retreats and defeats.
But just proclaiming that another world is needed
already means shaking the yoke of the fait accompli.
So that this other world becomes possible, another
Left is needed. Not a Left in denial or shame, not
a lite or dehydrated Left, but a Left of struggle,
up to the mark of the challenges of the age.
Daniel Bensad, An Impatient Life

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, the

term communism has returned to the theoretical and historical agenda with a striking force and
a surprising novelty.1 In a wide range of fields of
knowledge, the questions of the actuality and the
history of the world communist movement, the
theoretical tendencies of communist thought,
and the current political possibilities of new developments of communism have been revisited and
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addressed anew. In the social movements that have sprung up in nations

around the worldfrom Spain to Greece to Quebec, throughout Latin America, Asia, Africa, and beyondthe word communism has again acquired a
critical force, not a force of nostalgia or simple retrospection, but a new and
creative force. We can only be struck by the degree to which it now seems
that communism, far from the dead end of the twentieth century it was long
assumed to be, may be something profoundly of the twenty-first century, an
idea and field of concepts whose time has come.
When Antonio Negri emphasizes that the communists today are
alone and potent, he alerts us to a crucial point that I want to highlight,
from two divergent directions, in the following essay. Rather than see the
contemporary communist moment simply as a return, implying a transposition of the same forces, forms, and contents, this moment indicates instead
an open field for the reinvention of communism. The earlier modality of
twentieth-century communism, linked above all to the existence and continuity established by the Soviet Union, no longer exists. No longer is there a
national form or federated space that would serve as a bulwark of the communist project. In this sense, the communists today are alone. Yet Negri
insists that the communists are alone and potent. This potency is derived,
not as in the previous arrangement, from a site of institutional force that
could be treated as a model of explanation, but from this fact of being alone,
untethered, unguaranteed, not beholden to a specific historical telos. In this
sense, the communists today are potent because they are alone. What does
this new political solitude mean for the concepts and contents of communism in our contemporary moment?
Two distinct trends emerge in this development of communism in our
global present. One is the great historic movement that has transferred the
center of gravity of a reinvented communist politics to the exterior of the
West, taken in the broadest sense. This globality of communism is in essence
a fulfillment of a promise rather than a historical accident, the fulfillment
of a politics that from the outset sought a new theoretical and political destiny beyond the horizon of the national and local. The second is the striking
link between this returnand reinventionof communism and its site of
return, one of which is without doubt the field of critical theory. What
makes this site peculiar is that it too, like the political potential of communism itself, has been in a long retreat since the 1980s in the fields of knowledge production around the world. Theorys originary impulse toward the
politicization of knowledge, the immanent critique of the university, and its
globality, the fact that theory has long provided a common language beyond
the regime of national language, has been the target of an intense revanchist

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attack by institutional neoliberalism, conservative politics, and positivist

knowledge work. But new experiences have emerged in recent years to produce a situation in which these two developmentsone linked to the practical social movements and reinventions of political organization and the
other linked to the crystallization of a new trend in theoryare experiencing complex and volatile articulations and points of contact. What we are
seeing today is perhaps the first emergence of a new direction and politicization of theory itself, the first stirrings of a communist critical theory.
Politics: Persistence and Scission
One distinguishing feature of the current discussions of the communist
hypothesis (Badiou), the actuality of communism (Bosteels), and the
communist horizon (Dean) is a renewal of an insistence on the primacy of
politics over the mere presupposition of a politics derived from the structural
analysis of global capitalisms current tendencies, level of technical composition, and scale of development of the productive forces. These thinkers maintain a conception of politics that upholds its rarity, its intermittent or hazardous quality. Rather than accept the given character of politics, in which it
would become a figure of ubiquity or immanence (the banal argument that
everything is political), the rethinking of the question of communism has
also insisted on a divergent genealogy of what is and what is not political.
Rather than a constantly presupposed undercurrent, this figure of politics
would instead be, for instance, in Alain Badiou (2001), the rare event that
grounds a political sequence and convokes a subject through a fidelity, or in
Jacques Rancires (1999) terms, the egalitarian proposal that suspends the
representations possible in the dominant order (the police).2 This concept
of politics is, above all, linked to new attempts to think the place of the subject
of politics, and it is this point that provides an entry into the critical dimensions of this communist hypothesis within the theoretical field.
The rethinking of communism today has distinguished itself as a
trend in insisting on antagonism, contradiction, the subject, politics, and
organization; it refuses gestures of diffusion, multiplicity as such, focusing
on the dialectical conditions of the possible rather than the immanent conditions of the impossible. There is here a reaction to the monopoly held by a
very specific registerthe Derridean register of defeat and withdrawal, the
Deleuzian register of immanence and multiplicitywithin the broadly left
trends of thought and knowledge production. Metapolitically speaking, we
can observe within the works associated with this communist hypothesis
a rebirth of simple, seemingly obvious concepts: truth, justice, fidelity,

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struggle, honor, courage, and so forth, concepts largely derided in the postdeconstruction trends of thought and relegated to the realm of the popular,
avoided as vulgarities too earnest for the field of so-called theory. Instead,
detachment, irony, withdrawal, defeat, finitude, the impossibility of presence, the impossibility of naming, the impossibility of an affirmative creation, and the impossibility of an interventionist politics proper often constitute the typical terms of theoretical work. There is thus in the recent
communist current a refusal to accept this by-now rigid division of labor, one
that has decisive consequences for both politics and critical theory itself.
What lies behind this new vocabulary and new set of gestures? Above
all, it is the insistence on a link between the internal dynamics of theory and
the external situation, in particular, on the question of organization. Let us
consider a few short texts that might be taken as a pre-history of this
notion, a polemical period of Badious work that expresses the essence of the
overall problem: how to develop and conceptualize a theory of politics that is
not simply a reflection or proof of a structural or given feature of the situation in which we find ourselves, a theory of politics that is not beholden to
concepts of historical necessity. Behind this thesis lies a resistance to the
notion that politics is involved in a flattening of phenomena, a fear of antagonism, the preference for holism over division, the emphasis on consensus,
on friendship, against contestation.
In 1977 Badiou launched a frontal attack against Gilles Deleuze and
Flix Guattaris work for its implied political pitfalls. This attack on their
fascism of the potato is excessive, dogmatic, beyond the demands of the
political conjuncture (going so far as to identify them as prefascist ideologues). But it also contains an extremely important point for the paradox of
organization within politics, perhaps the key kernel of the new trend inaugurated in theoretical work by the hypothesis of communism. In this text,
Badiou (2012: 199200) reacts against Deleuze and Guattaris celebration of
multiplicity, appeals to escape, to flight, to becoming-multiple, becomingschizophrenic, becoming-minor, and so forth,3 by intersecting this theoretical work with the concrete terms of the political situation:
We have seen this in May 68: If you have the mass revolt, but not the proletarian antagonism, you obtain the victory of the bourgeois antagonism (of bourgeois politics). If you have ideas that are just, but not Marxism, you obtain the
return to power of the bourgeois reformists of the Parti Socialiste. If you have
the objective forces, but neither the programme nor the party, you obtain the
revenge of Pompidous parliamentarianism, you obtain the return to the
scene of the PCF and the unions.

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Badiou argues that Deleuze and Guattari fail to carry through the very ideas
that found their major theoretical concepts. They support the mass revolt,
but lack the antagonism between friends and enemies of the people;
they have just ideasfreedom, the overturning of injustice, the defense of
the workers, the poor, the targets of a vicious imperialism in and out of the
metropolebut no structural features link the situation of domination with
an affirmative politics of inversion; they include the objective forces of the
masses in social motion, but lack direction, a concrete framework within
which the mass movement can orient itself. Badiou argues that these elements finally invert into their opposites: the victory of bourgeois politics,
reformism, parliamentarism, and so forth. But what is behind this charge,
this accusation? Two elements subtend this polemic whose compositional
elements are returning today to the theoretical scene through the return to
the communist hypothesis, namely, persistence and scission.
Badiou charges Deleuze and Guattari with the production of a theoretical system that is itself in a constant process of diverting, redirecting, and
moving sideways to avoid capture. Such a politics cannot sustain the forces
it unleashes; it can initiate moments of dissensus within the dominant order,
but it cannot persist in a full overturning of their foundations or proceed
from this moment of dissensus to a new hegemony over the situation. Such
a mode of thought poses questions, identifies structural injustices, and marks
points of rupture, but it nevertheless chooses, at the final moment, to refuse
to uphold a strong division, a strong break, an insistence on one side over
another, one line over another.
Badiou (2012: 199200) puts this point in a dense and powerful formulation: To think the multiple outside the two, outside scission, amounts
to practicing in exteriority the dictatorship of the One. If you think the multiple, you can expose the One to its internal disunity, the false impression of
substantiality. But merely pointing to the multiple character of a social and
political situation is not in itself a bridge to a politics. Remarking on the multivocal character of what appears as a unity is in no way a critique, much less
an intervention, within this situation. Instead, the multivocal reality of the
unitary image can always be recuperated precisely in the service of the One. In a
circumstance of social struggle, it is never enough to point to the heterogeneous composition of all positionsthe police are also drawn from the lower
stratum of society, their pensions are also being cut back by the state,
within the ranks of the workers are some with terrible ideas, the activists
are not as upstanding as they say they are, and so onand thereby to end in
the original abstentionist position: Its all so complicated, its not just one
thing and another. This type of analysis, which always underscores the

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hybridity and mutual complicity of political scenarios, itself participates in

the naive fantasy of imagining that exposing this multiplicity allows one out
of the practice of partisanship. In such an optic, you can go on multiplying
the options, always finding yet another option, always finding a third way,
always insisting on escape from the binary, escape from the pressure of limited choices, always demanding an evacuation of responsibility, of having to
uphold the consequences of a choice.
To force a cut in the situation is to assert that the One is forever split,
that there is a two-line struggle in every social and political scenario, that
politics proper consists in this scission itself: the formation of an antagonism
where previously there was only a semblance of unity. This is why Badiou
emphasizes the Twowhen you choose to say, I dont want either side,
theyre all bad, we dont have to make a choice, we dont have to have just one
thing, what is installed in theory and in practice is not a splitting or splintering of the One into its infinitely heterogeneous elements (the thesis of multiplicity) but a withdrawal that allows the One to remain intact. This is precisely what Badiou calls, in the above formulation, practicing in exteriority
the dictatorship of the One. By choosing flight or escape, the status quo (i.e.,
the One) reasserts itself, this time stronger than before, bolstered by the
experience of finding in its own image of multiplicity a renewed unity. What
remains a true politics is the courage to choose, to insist on the Two, to not
fear division, separation, scission. To accept the responsibility of the choice,
to accept that there is no way to opt outthat the act of a supposed withdrawal is in fact a refusal to countenance real movement, real overturning of
the situation, a break that has to be sustainedis to accept the responsibility
to uphold the choice despite the fact that there is no going back.
What does this argument contain for the current rethinking of communism? Above all, it holds that politics is contained not in overturning the
system of social binaries, or in finding a third way, or in escapism, defeatism, or abstention. A common thread today, in all the thinkers reinventing
the term communism, is a long and arduous struggle for hegemony in the
world of thought, a world devoted to concepts of the death of the subject,
the refusal of binaries, the emphasis on incessant multiplicity, and so forth.
This struggle for a new politics recognizes the dead end of these philosophies of defeat, in Bruno Bosteelss terms. It recognizes that a new communist development will come, not from the endless work of withdrawal and
negation as such, but from the affirmative and interventionist declaration
that politics is possible and the status quo can be permanently fractured.
And this fracture produces the need for a persistence, the ability to carry
through the full consequences of the initial break.

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Hence the dominance of the organizational question in the contemporary rethinking of communism: organization in the field of political practices corresponds to this dialectic of persistence and scission on the theoretical front. Here is the first point of opening for the development of this new
rethinking of communism: an articulation between these two directions,
joined around the question of the actuality, a term inserted into this discussion by Bosteels, the immediacy and presence, but also the timeliness and
reality of communism today. We might add to this analysis of actuality
(Wirklichkeit) the additional concept of actualization (Verwirklichung) in
G. W. F. Hegel, a concept that allows us to expand on Bosteelss definition of
actuality: The notion of actuality as used in connection with communism
presupposes the immanence of thought and existence, going so far as to
accept the much maligned identity of the rational and the real, not as a dogmatic given guaranteed by the objective course of history, but as an ongoing
and open-ended task for politics (Bosteels 2011: 39). Let us consider the processes by which this potential identity of rational and real, linked here
to the concept of communism as a rational figure of struggle (in Badiou),
comes to be a possible production through politics. We can refer to Hegels
(1970: 29) understanding of actualization: The shape [Gestaltung] which the
concept assumes in its actualization [Verwirklichung], and which is essential
for cognition of the concept itself, is different from its form of being purely
as concept, and is the other essential moment of the Idea.
In Hegels point is something crucial for a consideration of the communist ideathe concept of communism is insufficient and requires for
our cognition of its features the different form it takes within its process of
actualization, its stuttering attempts at realization, wherein rational and real
are volatilely articulated and disarticulated. This is precisely why we must
situate this new communist development within the history of communism,
not only at the level of thought but also at the level of lived actuality.
History: Actualization and Reinvention
Figures from Badiou, tienne Balibar, and Jean-Luc Nancy to Boris Groys,
Slavoj iek, Bosteels, and Jodi Dean, among others, have revisited this conception of communism, giving us new and potentially crucial ways to consider what this term means, and what it could mean, what new meanings we
can give to it. I would like also to insist on a link between these new analyses
of communism, mostly emerging within the orbit of what is often called critical theory (in the broad sense, rather than the narrow sense limited to the
innovations of the Frankfurt School), and the rethinking of the experience of

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communism from within the party-oriented, or specifically movementoriented, Left. Lucio Magris final work, The Tailor of Ulm: Communism in the
Twentieth Century, provides us with a type of missing link that has gone
relatively unremarked in the existing discourses on the return to communism. What distinguishes this text is not solely its hypotheses for the future
of an idea but rather its exceptional capacity to place into question the historicity of communism, the capacity to locate in history and attempt an internal balance sheet transversal to the history of the workers movement and
the political-theoretical trajectories of Marxist thought.
Bosteels argues, in more of an aside than a central component of his
intervention, that all authors linked to this return of communism argue for
a firm demarcation of communism from socialism, a concept perhaps exemplified in Negris (2008: 26) Goodbye Mr. Socialism:
While socialism is dialectical and now a bad memory, communism is the optimism of reason, as well as true dystopia. If utopia is the view fixed to an ideal
that is outside the world, dystopia is the strong desire that is inside the powers
of the current mode of production, thus within our real horizon. It isnt an
accident that the word communism is being slowly reconstructed. ... From
a theoretical point of view, an enormous mass of thought and development of
theory is converging around the attempt at a definition of communism as the
only alternative to postmodernism and as the beginning of a new great cycle
of civilization.

Here socialism becomes the sedimented, saturated remainder of the failures of twentieth-century communism, charged with statism, bureaucratization, party dogma, repression, complicity, and so forth. This sharp designation, however, is put into question when we take seriously the Hegelian
point, that the forms of actualization are decisive for the consideration of
the concept itself. Without a firm consideration of the extraordinary strides
made by the socialist movement, by the socialist experiments today in Latin
America, Asia, Africa, not to mention Europe under austerity (here the
struggle of Greece is exemplary), we cannot invent new significations for
the project of communism. This dialectical tension between the retrospective accounting of history and the open creation of new politics in Magris
workwhich fully deserves to be seen as a key part of this current return
to communismcan provide us with new insights.
In rethinking the question of how to consider the organizational question and the possibilities of communism today, Magri calls attention to the
need for a new communist identity. Such a concept is not automatically gen-

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erated by a rethinking of communism as a hypothesis for the overturning of

injustice. How could such an identity be a given, with the dark and dramatic
history of failures and shortcomings that have characterized our twentiethcentury experience of this name? And what, in a concrete sense, does it
mean to be a communist in our current moment? A fidelity to Marxian economics and its competing theories of crisis? The reality is that today even
the apolitical and those who uphold the dominant order recognize the selflimitations of capitalism, and in the general ideological field, almost no one
celebrates anymore the possibility of endless growth. So what would it mean
if a communist identity were simply based on a shared and generalized evaluation of the objective social process? It must be something else, something
that is shared in a deeper and more decisive way.
Although the new discussions of communism have reminded us of
the need to uphold the primacy of politics, the basic link between the history of this idea and its forms of actualization remind us that such a politics
never emerges completely ex nihilo, generated only by political will and so
forth. Rather, the historical process itself furnishes us not with a necessity
but with a ground on which such a politics can be generated. Magri (2011:
38889) writes:
The fact that human history is moving beyond the threshold of basic needs,
that new technologies permit a reduction in necessary labour, that educational levels and the speed of information allow a great diffusion of power and
decentralization of decision-making, that quantity is no longer the only or
main criterion of progress, should mean that the discourse of communism, in
its original, emancipatory meaning, has come of age for the first time in history. All this is true: we were arguing it in 1968 and we are still convinced that
it is the key to a communist identity that involves both recovery and profound
innovation.

This emphasis on a dialectic of recovery and innovationnot an invention

but a reinventionis key to Magris intervention in this debate. If we were
to focus only on a recovery, we would remain at the level, derided by Negri,
of a simple and blind traditionalism, a traditionalism that would be not
only untimely but also unable to account for the new social movements
and scenarios emerging before our eyes on a global scale.
Magri continues:
A different society cannot come about through a sudden break, a revolution
from above; it must advance as a long transformation of the mode of production and consumption, of technologies and ideas and lifestyles, both individual

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and collective. But this new society does not grow in tiny increments within the
interstices of existing society (as was the case with the bourgeois revolution): it
needs power, a project, an organization; it is a social transformation that must
not only conclude but originate in an antagonism, a hegemony, a political rupture. All this definitely offers a solid basis and possible mass audience for the
full recovery, or the refoundation, of a communist identity. (41718)

The formation of this communist identityneither recovery nor invention

but somewhere in betweenfor our current moment means taking seriously this task of the long transformation, of institutions, of practices,
but also of thought and theory, the formation of new mass critiques. 4
Magri warns us, against the more euphoric ends of the thinking of communism today, that
the redefinition of a communist identity appears to be a long haul theoretically and culturally, which involves switching away from a decades-long mode
of thinking. It has to pass through a period of trial and error, with all the risks
of eclecticism and false trails, within a horizon dominated by new bourgeois
ideas and old working-class ideas; it will require a long educational effort
before it acquires the strength of a diffuse culture, a new world view and a
common store of deeply rooted ideas. (41819)

A new worldview but also a new grammar, a new vocabulary, a new conceptual register are forming today. We must be clear: there is not yet a fully
developed and elaborated way to be a communist in contemporary thought.
But there are stirrings of a possibility. We ourselves must reinvent this term,
reinvent its metaphors and implications, and especially we must rearrange
the sense of geography that corresponds to it. The long educational effort
that would go into this practice would require, above all, a new globality.
Globality
If we can even pose it in these terms, this new communist trend appears
first and foremost as focused on negative tasksthe overturning of a system
of statements, words, and concepts associated with the relation of politics to
thoughttropes, typical moves in theory, expected expressions of location,
directionalities of flows of thought, and so forth. The affirmative content of
this new trend remains to be seen. We can nonetheless detect one of its key
features, namely, the globality of a communist identity and thought, located
in the refusal of the traditional schema of the West and the rest, associated
for so long with the development of theory. The irony is that theorys work

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had always been to disrupt the easy Eurocentrisms and civilizational narcissisms of the university even as it found itself largely incapable of bypassing
the cognitive mapping of theory itself onto the West and data or empirical circumstances onto the rest. Today, a great many of the references of a
new communist point of departure are not coming from the conventional
cartographic arrangement: Badiou has refocused our attention on the importance of the Chinese revolutionary experience and its universality, while
Bosteels has insisted on the centrality of the Latin American conjuncture.
This marks a break with the traditional set of references and the privileged
position accorded to theory from outside the markers of the European workers movement. An acknowledgment that the center of political gravity today
must be diffusely located, rather than taxonomically stratified into a center
and a peripherywhat would such a model even mean, if the central theorizations, the central political experiments in our world today, are especially
occurring outside Europe and, in many cases, the West? What possibilities
does this globality hold?
Many of the most exciting experiments in politicsthe other side of
this debate on the idea of communismare coming from Latin America,
South Asia, East Asia, Africa as well as from sites within the West that
have been peripheral in this theoretical register, such as Greece, Spain, and
Quebec. Even the crucial experiments of the new mass parties of the Left
in Western EuropeDie Linke especially, but also the Front de gauche and
otherstake inspiration from the vast strides made in Venezuela, Bolivia,
and elsewhere. In this sense, it is a question less of inverting our expected
schema than of developing our theoretical orientation (the rational) toward
the concrete political movement pushing forward the global motion (the
real), developing theory in concert with the new flow of influence, not a
simple reversal of core and periphery, but a new and fully global movement,
at last. A communist critical theory today, therefore, would be generated out
of two negations: first, against the political discourse of the prevailing trends
of theory, and second, out of a refusal of the same tired genealogy of Western Marxism, a dead trend corresponding to an old imago mundi. How the
communist trend in critical theory will assert itself over the middle and long
term will be tested by both the possibility of a new affirmative project linked
to this work and a deepening and sharpening of this globality, a globality as
a project, summarized effectively by Bosteels (2011: 28687):
Finally, perhaps we have not yet come to grips with the fact that the critique of
political economy with its focus on the question of property and commodity
fetishism, which thus far has been the dominant if not the exclusive concern

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of communism as well as the favorite measuring stick with which orthodox

communists denounce the excesses of ultraleftism, cannot in fact be performed without at the same time adopting an internationalist point of view.
This means that we cannot let the Western European history lessons, regardless of whether their master-teachers are despondent or enthusiastic or both at
once in a manic-depressive oscillation, determine the agenda for the rest of
the world. It also suggests ... that we look elsewhere for models or countermodels to put to the test the hypothesis of the actuality of communism.

Is It Simple to Be a Communist in Theory?

What then, do these two elementsthe new political scenarios created by
mass organizational experiments within and beyond the state and the new
situation on the theoretical fronthave to do with each other? And how
can our own practices contribute to a deepening of the articulation between
them? In a few concluding remarks, I want to sketch some possible destinies
of this new communist moment, whose profound political and theoretical
potential contains no privileged mechanisms to ward off the possibility of
failure, only our own effort, our own capacities, our own courage. The answer
to the question, in the Althusserian style, is it simple to be a communist in
theory? is an emphatic no. It is not simple or obvious. What is to be done is
neither evident nor straightforward.
In thinking this question, we cannot simply erect new theoretical barriers that would serve also as apparatuses of political division within the
communist camp. The distinguishing characteristic of this new communist
moment is not theoretically understandable simply in its differentiation
from a socialism charged with the crimes of our genealogical past. Rather,
the term over which a continual struggle is in process is democracy. Pilloried as meaningless parliamentarist twaddle by Badiou, treated by iek as
the pinnacle of ideology, seen by Dean as the structural principle of communicative capitalism, and so forth, the concept of democracy has largely
become the target of deep and principled opposition.
This contrasts directly with the calls, dominant in an earlier conjuncture, for new developments and expansions of the concept of the democratic
road to socialism.5 But today, in the context of the most powerful and broad
movements of the global Leftthe revolutionary processes in the Latin
American states, the mass multitendency parties in Europe and elsewhere
have we not seen in fact a strong and principled reinvention of precisely this
process? In Venezuela, in Bolivia, in the practices of Die Linke, Syriza, Qubec Solidaire, and others, there is a new signification to the struggle to invent

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novel approaches to the combination of electoral and nonelectoral political

strategies, to the combination of a strong and militant political core capable
nevertheless of building party organizations based on mass principles.6 The
struggle to produce not minuscule sectarian formations but mass hegemonic forms of organization is the challenge of a communist politics today.
A new communist critical theory must also work, at the level of concepts and
statements, for hegemony in the intellectual field, on the theoretical front.
Is not the ultimate philosophy of defeat in fact the left-adventurist position,
seeing in every minimal gain on the level of immediate tactics inklings of
the secret reformist program? This is not only a political position; it is a theoretical position.
Of course, a simple recourse to the state cannot be seen as itself a part
of this communist horizon. But the essence of defeatism in the theoretical
field is also contained in the tendency to elevate the struggle in thought, the
struggle over concepts, into a litmus test of political participation. Do you
adequately reject the state? This questionthis injunctionends in fantasy and magical thinking; it skips over and renders meaningless the entire
field of questions, so central to Marxist theoretical and practical work, particularly in the political register, related to the formation, maintenance, and
victory of communism. What we need today is a communism of success, not
of defeat, a real and profound economic, political, and cultural communism
that treats the question of institutions, authority, law, the distribution of
means of subsistence, the production of new cultural and ethical forms, not
as mere elements of debate, minuscule psychodramas of the small narcissistic political organization, formed at the level of hobbyist trivia, but as concrete political alternatives in everyday life, practices that educate us politically, change our thought, but that also change our conditions of living at the
practical and immediate level by introducing new modes of life and theory.
A brilliant moment in The German Ideology strikes us today with vital
force:
In history up to the present it is certainly an empirical fact (eine empirische Tatsache) that separate individuals have, with the broadening of their activity
(Ttigkeit) into world-historical activity, become more and more enslaved
under a power alien to them, a power which has become more and more enormous and, in the last instance, turns out to be the world market (in letzter
Instanz als Weltmarkt ausweist). But it is just as empirically established that, by
the overthrow of the existing state of society by the communist revolution and
the abolition of private property which is identical with it, this power will be
dissolved. ... Only then will the separate individuals be liberated from the

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various national and local barriers (nationalen und lokalen Schranken), be

brought into practical connection with the material and intellectual production of the whole world and be put in a position to acquire the capacity to enjoy
(Genufhigkeit) this all-sided production of the whole earth (the creations of
man). (Marx 1964: 37; 1975: 51)

Borrowing from the phrasing of Althusser (1971: 12), to be a communist in

theory today means to be simultaneously a partisan and artisan. To be a
partisan is to choose a side, to choose a position in politics, to not abstain
from the strategic and tactical considerations that inform politics, but to
enter fully into their consequences. If we choose a side, we also accept a
genealogy of failure, a genealogy of incompletions. The dimension of being
a partisan means to recognize the politicality of this choice. But added to
this emphasis on taking a position is the dimension of being an artisan. If
our status as partisans forces us to accept a genealogy of failure, our status
as artisans compels us to create new genealogies of reinvention. The reinvention of communism today requires both aspects, joined together in a
dialectical torsion that works on itself at all times: the courage to choose
the side of politics and struggle, to contribute to and assist in projects and
fronts, but also the exigency of invention, of creation, of an emphasis on
new forms, new contents, new languages and concepts. It is this point that
Daniel Bensad emphasizes so clearly when he reminds us that what we
must actively reinvent today is not a Left in denial or shame, not aliteor
dehydrated Left, but a Left of struggle, upto the mark of the challenges of
the age (2014: 313). If the nascent trends detectable in our current moment
are to be extended into a genuinely new threshold of thought and practice,
we must be partisans and artisans of a new global, multipolar, and heterolingual reinvention of communism.7
Notes
1

A great many texts could be located under this general term, but for the present purposes, see in particular Badiou 2010, Bosteels, 2011, and Dean 2012. On Badious text
in particular, see Walker 2011: 13039.
We could in fact add another, somewhat unexpected thinker to this other genealogy:
Michel Foucault, who always insisted not on the given nature of politics but instead
on the fragile possibilities of politicization.
Here I want to point out that I find Badious image of this thought a caricaturenot
a misrepresentation as such, but an excessive and stark portrait that raises certain
effects of Deleuze and Guattaris work into dominant principlesthat nevertheless
illustrates and identifies a genuine point of theoretical and political contestation.
Here I would like to point to an important essay of Panagiotis Sotiris, Hegemony
and Mass Critical Intellectuality.

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Walker

The Reinvention of Communism 685

Here, although I cannot develop it for reasons of length, the work of Nicos Poulantzas, in particular his last work, State, Power, Socialism, contains a concept of democracy related to the struggle for a mass socialist movement that is entirely different in
content from the parliamentary democracy we are used to today, and which is nothing other than the political form of the domination of capital.
On the rethinking of the concept of party today, see Walker 2013, in addition to the
other essays in the same special issue, particularly the intervention of Peter Thomas,
with whom I am in a strong agreement.
I take this term from the work of Naoki Sakai, and particularly his theoretical development of the concept of heterolingual address. This concept is deeply linked to a politics
of globality, and, I would argue, any possible reinvention of the term communism.

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