THE COMMUNIST NECESSITYJ. MOUFAWAD-PAUL

Published by Christophe Kistlerchris@kistler.red

Utrecht, 2016

1st printing : 100 copies

This book is under license Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0International (CC BY-SA 4.0)https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

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CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter 1 : 21st Century CommunismAgainst UtopianismThe Problem of MovementismScience and NecessityPuritanismSectarianism

Chapter 2 : Collaboration and ContingencyThe Haunted PastContingenciesCollaborationLanguage Idealism

Chapter 3 : New ReturnsAnti-revisionismThe Electoral TrapThe Refoundationalist TrapThe Trade-union TrapThe Imaginative Lack of ImaginationNew Returns

Coda

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INTRODUCTION

The leftist milieu in North America and Europe hasnow reached a point where the movementism of thelate 1990s is approaching its limits. Following thecollapse of the Eastern Bloc, China’s descent into statecapitalism, and the degeneration of abandoned andsmall socialist satellite states such as Cuba, the left atthe privileged centres of global capitalism entered anera of chaos. Unwilling to accept that capitalism wasthe end of history, while at the same time believingthat communism was a failed project, leftistorganizations dealt with their confusion by eitherdisintegrating or distancing themselves from the past.If the history of actually existing socialism had indeedproved itself to be a grand failure, then the only hopefor the activist of the 1990s was to discover a new wayof making revolution.

In those days, when fragile affinity groups embracedcontingency and chaos in the hope that thisdisorganized method would somehow producerevolution, we imagined we were building somethingnew. We were incapable of understanding that all wewere doing was uncritically replicating past methodsof organization that had already revealed theirineffectiveness prior to the spectacular failure ofcommunism. We returned to anarchism withoutreflecting on the anarchist limits of the SpanishRevolution. We returned to disorganization without

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understanding all of those incoherent currents ofsocialism that had failed to build anything beyondutopian speculation. We refused to think through theproblem of the state, forgetting the limits encounteredby the communards in Paris. Incapable ofunderstanding the precise meaning of the communistfailure, we ended up repeating the past whileimagining we were building something new.

The 1999 protests against the World TradeOrganization in Seattle. The mobilization against the2001 Free Trade Areas of the Americas Summit inQuebec City. The 2001 G8 protests in Genoa. Thesewere the high-points of the anti-globalizationmovement. Together, along with other explosivemoments of angry first world resistance, thesestruggles demonstrated a belief that innumerable anddisconnected movements could topplecapitalism––that their fractured efforts would intersectand amount to a critical breaking point. Eventuallythis practice would collide with the fact of highlyorganized and militarized states that, unlike thechaotic activists challenging the power of capitalism,were more than capable of pacifying discontent. Thiswas movementism: the assumption that specific socialmovements, sometimes divided along lines of identityor interest, could reach a critical mass and together,without any of that Leninist nonsense, end capitalism.

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By the time of the 2010 G20 Summit in Toronto thisanti-capitalist methodology had already become acaricature of itself. The confrontations were echoed astragedy or farce, there was a tired recognition thatnothing would be accomplished, and the militantsarrested were guilty only of demanding the right toprotest. All of the high-points, if they were indeedhigh-points, of 1999 and 2001 were repeated in a tiredand banal manner––the state remained unharmed, theactivists resisting the state were punished. Before thisfarce, the coordinating committee of the 2010demonstrations would absurdly maintain, on multipleemail list-serves, that we were winning––and yet itcould never explain what it meant by “we” nor did itsclaim about “winning” make very much sense when itwas patently clear that a victory against the G20would have to be more than a weekend of protests.Had we truly reached a point where victory wasnothing more than a successful demonstration, wherewe simply succeeded in defending the liberal right toassembly? After all, it would be bizarre to assume thatthe people responsible for this triumphalist languageactually believed that world imperialism would bedefeated that weekend––they had already dampenedtheir expectations, and when they spoke of winningthey were simply demonstrating a defeatist acceptanceof lowered stakes.

Those who refuse to recognize 2010 as a caricature,who continue to argue that this organizational form

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and strategy is the only way forward, are like thehippies of the 1960s––behind the times, focused ontheir “glory days” in the late 1990s and early 2000s,myopic in their inability to look beyond theboundaries of their time and space: they refuse toexamine the past revolutions just as they refuse toexamine the revolutionary movements of today, inthose zones that they claim to defend againstimperialism, that had never been enamoured with thismovementist praxis. They are willing to settle forreformism and pretend that it is revolution, acting as ifa successful defense of the right to assembly and theability to make one’s complaint heard are the onlyvictories the movement can achieve.

In order to make sense of our impasse, we adoptednew theories of organization, anything that did notresemble the failures of the past, desperately hopingwe would find the holy grail that would make anotherworld possible. We ventured out into theoreticalterrains we believed were exciting because of thewhirlwind jargon some theorists employed: we spokeof rhizomes, of bloom, of deterritorialization, of themultitude, of anything that did not completelyresemble the old-fashioned jargon that stank of failure.

And yet our failures were not even world historical;we failed long before reaching those moments of grandfailure that had disciplined us into adopting thesealternative practices of rebellion. We were not even

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capable of replicating the failure of the ParisCommune, let alone the failures in Russia and China:we did nothing but protest, sometimes militantlyagitating without any long-term plans, and fantasizedthat our activism was synonymous with revolution.

Meanwhile, even before we embarked upon thisconfused path of social movementism, people’s warswere being launched in those zones we claimed torepresent under the auspices of a theory we hadassumed was dead. Incapable of looking beyond theboundaries of our own practice, we often refused torecognize these movements, cherry-picking thosemoments of resistance that resembled our ownpractices. Instead of the Sendero Luminoso wechampioned a particular narrative of the Zapatistas;instead of Nepal we focused on Venezuela; instead ofthe Naxalites we lauded the Arab Spring. Possessingthe privilege to ignore everything that did notresemble our supposedly new way of seeing the world,we dismissed anything that could teach us otherwise.

But now some of us––whose experiences of this banalfailure have taught us that if another world is possibleit is only possible by abandoning the methodspromoted by the anti-globalization movement––arebeginning to question the normative anarchism andmovementism that we once treated as common sense.The movementist dream is crumbling; we arebeginning to peer through its cracks. We are

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glimpsing the problem of revolutionary necessity––theneed to organize in a manner that goes beyond theinfantile methods of movementism.

Finally the name communism is being revived at thecentres of capitalism as part of an effort to reclaim therevolutionary heritage we abandoned, although therevival is incomplete: there is a gap between name andconcept; there is a refusal to recognize the communistrevolutionary struggles that persisted in the globalperipheries.

First, the gap between name and concept. While thereis an ongoing project, amongst first worldintellectuals, to reclaim the name “communism” thereare still only a few small steps made to reclaim theconcepts this name once mobilized. This gap mightdemonstrate some confusion on the part of those whoare dissatisfied with the anti-globalization variant ofmovementism but are still uncertain of how to freethemselves from this morass. More importantly, thisgap might also echo a gap between theory andpractice.

Secondly, the refusal to recognize contemporarycommunist revolutions. Perhaps because of the firstproblem, we have a veritable lacuna of radicalacademic analysis when it comes to the experience ofcontemporary people’s wars that have erupted and arestill erupting outside of the imperialist centres. When

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we do not denounce these revolutionary movementsaccording to various conservative or liberal narratives(they are “terrorists”, “adventurists”, “murderers”,“nihilists”, etc.), we simply pretend that they do notexist.

Hence, those of us who have struggled withoutcommunist ideology for decades are only beginning tomake sense of the meaning of the name we had oncerejected; we are still trying to recapture our heritage.

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CHAPTER 1 : 21ST CENTURY COMMUNISM

Finally, after decades of post-modernism and capitalisttriumphalism, it is no longer considered impolite foracademics and popular intellectuals to speak the wordcommunism. For there was a time, not long ago,when we would have been seen as uncouth, or at leastanachronistic, if we were to declare fidelity to a termthat certain intellectual fads had declared old-fashioned, totalizing, violent. Until recently, we couldescape by referring to ourselves as marxist instead ofcommunist, but only so long as we did not hyphenateour marxism with any of those suspicious names suchas Lenin or Mao, those people and movementsresponsible for applying marxism and, in thisapplication, declaring the word communism.

Marxism, though passé, was considered toothlessbecause it was only a theory, whereas communism wasits possibly catastrophic application. And those whopreserved this theory in the academic universe wereoften those who would never dare bridge the gapbetween theory and practice, content only to teachand sing the praises of marxism but never speak ofcommunism except when they spoke of failure. As itturned out, very little was needed to convince manyacademics and intellectuals to be marxists in theoryrather than practice: the job security of tenure, liberal

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rights such as freedom of speech, and publicationcontracts.

In this context, those intellectuals who refused toabandon political practice but who could not stomachthe failed name of communism would fall back untothe more innocuous sounding socialism when theysought a label for their activities. A term that wasonce synonymous with communism, but that throughthe experience of the great revolutions of the 20thCentury had come to mean something altogetherdifferent, became a fall-back definition for thosemarxists who would not remain content withinaction––a retreat, of sorts, back into a “pure”marxism before Lenin where concepts that shouldhave been irrevocably transformed by world historicalrevolutions were reordered to resume their germinalstatus. A retreat from history, a retreat from thedevelopment of revolutionary concepts won throughclass struggle.

By the dawn of the 21st century it had become voguefor the more daring first world marxist academics andintellectual partisans to speak of a “21st CenturySocialism” as if they were identifying a newrevolutionary moment. More than one book waswritten with this catch-phrase embedded somewherein its title or subtitle, more than one speaker at a

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mainstream demonstration bandied it about, and yetthere was generally no consensus regarding itsmeaning. Some imagined that this new socialism wasemerging in the movementist tides of the anti-globalization protests that began in Seattle; othersthought it was happening in the jungles of Mexicowith the Zapatistas [EZLN]; others would eventuallyascribe it to Chavez’s Venezuela or some other leftpopulist phenomenon in the Americas. Just whatmade this “21st Century Socialism” new or a productof the 21st Century, though, was rather uncleardespite all attempts to make it seem apparent; it wasmore of a branding than anything else, an attempt tomobilize other and successive maxims––“anotherworld is possible,” “we are everywhere,” “the cominginsurrection”––that were always little more thanslogans. And this nebulous fad avoided speaking ofcommunism, of anything that would remind us ofthose significant decades in the 20th Century thatwere seen as abject failure. This was the 21st Century,after all, and we would be old-fashioned and out oftouch if we spoke of those moments withoutmelancholia.

But now, in the past three or four years, there hasbeen a resurgence of the name that was banned, thename we were told was obsolete, from the samequarters where it had been declared anathema. Now

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we have academics and popular intellectuals speakingof communist hypotheses, communist horizons, andcommunist possibilities. What was once taboo inthese spaces is now being pronounced openly andthese pronouncements are not destroying the careersof those who make them. Quite the opposite, in fact:now some careers are being made by declaring fidelityto the name that was once banned.

At the same time, however, this new intellectual trendof declaring the name communism cannot break fromthe previous period of fearfulness and so shares all ofthe defects and nebulous speculations of the screeds to21st Century Socialism. In many ways this is just asubstitution of one term for another, apparently moreedgy because it now chooses to speak the name thatwas once forbidden. While it is true that there is anexcitement in reclaiming a word that once frightenedthe capitalist order, this truth is toothless if it isnothing more than a name.

Some would speak of communism as an idea orhypothesis that existed for thousands of years, nearlywrenching it from those generations who died ininnumerable brave attempts to make it the watch-word of the oppressed in the 20th Century. In thissense the word was dehistoricized, transformed into aPlatonic form, and those instances of fear and

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trembling where it was elevated to greatheights––heights, true, from which it wouldfall––were treated as ruptured moments to beremembered only for their nostalgic importance.1

Others would speak of communism as a far-offhorizon, some distant point we could only glimpse,and thus more of an inborn desire for another andpossible world. A dream communism, something wemight approach if we only have enough faith indisorganized and rebellious movements to take usthere on directionless tides. A communism across agreat ocean, hiding like the lost island of Atlantis.2

Still others speak of the word as a name that must beadopted simply because it makes the ruling classestremble. We must renew this name, we are told,because it is correct to veil ourselves in theterminology our enemy despises––as if revolutionaryaction is a monstrous mask that will scare capitalisminto retreat. At the same time we are also told thatrenewing those traditions that provided us with thisname, that handed us an important concept throughgreat sacrifice, should be avoided. Again: this is the

1. Alain Badiou’s concept of the “communist hypothesis” andSlavoj Zizek’s concept of “the idea of communism” representthis trend.2. Jodi Dean’s concept of the “communist horizon”, taken fromBruno Bosteel’s book The Actuality of Communism (London:Verso, 2011) is paradigmatic of this trend.

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21st Century and we are supposed to find a newmethod; even if it must share its name with pastmovements, we are told that we cannot take anythingfrom this past because this past was only, and can onlyever be, tragic.

Despite a return to the name communism there stillappears to be a refusal to accept everything this namewas supposed to mean––because we were told it meantmass murder, totalitarianism, and most importantlyfailure. We want to reclaim it, we might even want toargue against the cold war discourse that speaks ofmass murder and totalitarianism just to set the recordstraight, but we have been convinced that thecatastrophe of 20th Century communism means wemust start anew, that we can learn nothing from thepast except to ignore this past altogether.

Perhaps this refusal to reclaim communism in morethan name is due to the “end of history” proclaimedwhen the Soviet Union collapsed, when capitalistsimagined they were finally triumphant and wanted toconvince us that class struggle was antiquated. Herebegan a discourse about communism––a discourseevinced by the rise of post-modern theory––where wewere taught that to even speak the name communismwas backwards, and that we should just accept thatcapitalism was “the best of the worst.” In this context,

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it is not surprising that the first academic attempts toreclaim the word are tentative. Better to hedge ourbets and remake communism than speak moreprecisely of a theoretical tradition supposedlyconcluded when capitalist victory closed thathistorical chapter.

And yet, despite this supposed “end of history”,communism as a revolutionary tradition never did goaway. For though it might seem daring for academicsand popular intellectuals at the centres of globalcapitalism to reclaim the word, communism hasremained a vital necessity for individuals andmovements living at the margins of both the worldsystem and acceptable discourse. At the global centrescommunists generally hid themselves within thelabour and student movements, grudgingly acceptedthe terminology of socialism, and often practiced afearful blanquism. At the peripheries, however, thereare communists who have openly proclaimed arevolutionary communism from the very momentcapitalism was declaring itself victorious: theCommunist Party of Peru [PCP] launched a people’swar in the 1980s; the Communist Party of Nepal(Maoist) [CPN(Maoist)] launched a people’s war in thelate 1990s; the Communist Party of India (Maoist)[CPI(Maoist)] is engaged in a people’s war now; theCommunist (Maoist) Party of Afghanistan [CmPA] is

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planning on launching its own people’s war in thenear future; the Communist Party of the Philippines[CPP] has been carrying out its people’s war, withsetbacks and re-initiations, for some time now. Inthese spaces outside of the academic and intellectualarena––an arena where our daringness is measured byreclaiming only a name––communism remains a liveoption in the most forceful and momentous sense. Ithas not gone away, it is not just a name upon which aradical academic career can be built.

So while it might seem, for those of us who live at thecentres of capitalism, as if communism has beenabsent for decades and is only now being reclaimed byour daring new theorists, the fact is that this is simplya mirage: communism did not bow off the historicalstage, it is not only now being renewed by SlavojZizek, Alain Badiou, Jodi Dean, and whoever else hasre-pronounced the word here at the centres ofcapitalism. The fact is that it renewed itself again, in arevolutionary sense, in the 1980s just when capitalismwas proclaiming the death of communism and the endof history. But many of us who live in the globalmetropoles missed this event, or even continue toplead ignorance, content to imagine that we canremake history here. That we can reinvent themeaning of communism as we please, ignoring thoserevolutionary movements that, if we have learned

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anything from Marx, are responsible for makinghistory. Movements that have the most obviousfidelity to the name and that express this name, evenin failed revolutions, are better than our tentativeattempts to merely reclaim and rearticulate a word.

The word communism remains and will always be re-proclaimed and reasserted as long as capitalismremains. More than a hypothesis or horizon,communism is a necessity that will never cease being anecessity for the duration of capitalism’s hegemony:all successes and failures need to be appreciated andeven claimed in this context. If we understandcommunism as a necessity we can comprehend notonly the need for its renewal and re-proclamation, butwhy it cannot simply actualize itself outside of historyaccording to transhistorical hypotheses and nebulousfuture horizons. We must speak of a necessarycommunism grounded in the unfolding of history, acommunism that is simultaneously in continuity withand in rupture from the past, a communism that isalways a new return.

Against Utopianism

To speak of renewing communism as a necessity is tobegin from that point, first opened by Marx andEngels, where the tradition of anti-capitalism was torn

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from its utopian basis. As Engels wrote in Anti-Duhring, that diatribe which Marx believed was thebest summation of their theory to date:

“if the whole of modern society is not to perish, arevolution in the mode of production and distributionmust take place, a revolution which will put an end toall class distinctions. On this tangible, material fact,which is impressing itself in a more or less clear form,but with insuperable necessity, on the minds of theexploited proletarians––on this fact, and not on theconceptions of justice and injustice held by anarmchair philosopher, is modern socialism’sconfidence in victory founded.”3

3. Friedrich Engels, Anti-Duhring (New York: InternationalPublishers, 1987), 146. Of course, at the point in history whenEngels used the term “modern socialism” he meant “scientific”socialism––which is to say communism. For it is not untilMarxism-Leninism that the concepts of socialism andcommunism are disentangled; until then, there was still somesemantic confusion. Indeed, up until the great betrayal of theSocial Democratic Party of Germany [SPD], whose foundershad known Engels, it was still considered normative to use theterm “social democracy” as a synonym for both socialism andcommunism; it is only with this party’s betrayal––first withEduard Bernstein and then with Karl Kautsky––that “socialdemocracy” became associated with social reform. Similarly, itwas only after Lenin that the term “socialism” became thetheoretical designation of the dictatorship of the proletariat.Theoretical terminology was ironed out over the course ofrevolution and, if we believe that revolution is the locomotiveof history, we cannot go back to a pure marxism before the firstworld historical, communist-led revolution in Russia.

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The above passage would later be simplified, by RosaLuxemburg, to mean socialism or barbarism. That is:either we embrace the possibility of a socialistrevolution that could establish communism or weaccept that capitalism is the end of history and thusthe fact of barbarism––that “modern society is toperish.” Communism, then, is a necessity becauseotherwise capitalism, due to its intrinsic logic, willdevour existence.

And it is senseless to speak of communist horizons inany other way. For what is the reason to imagine thatcommunism is some desire pushed beyond theforeseeable future except for a way out of a brutalcapitalist logic that means the destruction of thehuman species and the planet? Because it is mean,evil, immoral––because we don’t like it? These are, asEngels was quick to note at the end of the nineteenthcentury, the complaints of armchair philosophers:abstract moral theorizing cannot escape the problemof competing class morality, and those who attempt toestablish a concrete morality that is universal, evenwhen they are not pulled back into the terrain ofabstract morality, are still incapable of producingrevolution. Such justifications do not provide a reasonto transcend capitalism, to speak of any horizon, forthey are most often caught within a dialogue ofcompeting moralities: the morality of the oppressor is

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to continue oppressing; the morality of the oppressedis to revolt. The only reason why the latter is superiorto the former is a reason that must come from outsideof this debate: the necessity of revolution due to thefact that the position of the former is, in the lastinstance, contingent upon the annihilation of the basisof existence. And that the latter––the exploited, theoppressed, the wretched of the earth––make history.Communism, then, is more than an ethical necessity:it is an historical and material necessity.

But it is precisely this point of necessity that recenttalk of communism, which speaks of hypotheses andhorizons, seems to evade. To claim that “anotherworld is possible,” after all, is not the same as claimingthat another world is necessary. (Or, more accurately,that even this world is unsustainable as it exists now;another world, then, becomes necessary if we are tosurvive and flourish as a species.) Instead we speak ofthe importance of a transhistorical hypothesis, or thetheoretical significance of a world somewhere over therainbow. Hence the immediacy of the communistproject––that which speaks to the immanence ofrevolution––is often ignored.

For to speak of a communist necessity is to speakprecisely of the need for revolution: if we claim thatcommunism is an immediate need–-a necessity

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produced by the logic of capitalism as Engelssuggests––then we should be led to thinking throughthe necessary steps that would end capitalism andbring communism into being. A hypothesis is simplya philosophical quandary, a horizon is little more thana fantasy, a possibility is a useful way of recognizingthat the current reality may not be eternal, but anecessity is so much more. Communism is necessary,a material need: this tells us what it means to declarefidelity to the name communism.

To dodge the question of necessity is to dodge theneed for revolution. To take the question ofcommunism and place it in the stark frameworkEngels emphasized in Anti-Duhring, though, mightnot seem as sexy as to speak of hypotheses andhorizons. Why bother returning to a supposedly“scientific” statement made by Engels at the end of the19th century, after all, when the 21st century is uponus and we need to repopularize communism withoutrecourse to some stodgy and apparently old-fashionedway of looking at the world? But now, with theannihilation of the entire ecosystem an immediatepossibility because of the logic of capitalism, Engels’framing of the question of necessity should be evenmore striking. The question socialism or barbarism?is no longer a philosophical thought experiment (notthat it ever was) but a momentous demand.

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The dream of a possible horizon does nothing toanswer the immediacy of this question because it failsto address the problem of necessity. Dreams are likethis: fantasies projected upon the future that tend toside-step those messy real world events where therewere significant attempts to build the content of thesedreams. The thing about real life, unfortunately, isthat it never identically resembles the dream. Thus,instead of dreaming about horizons it is better torecognize that we are currently caught in the dream ofcapitalism, lucid dreamers in a terrible nightmare; andwhen we recognize that we are in a nightmare, it iswaking that becomes a necessity rather thansubordinating ourselves to another fantasy.

And yet to speak of communism as something otherthan a necessity is an easy way to reclaim the wordwithout reclaiming anything but a vague idea behindthe word. It is to intentionally ignore what is needed,in a very concrete and material sense, to bringcommunism into being. Hypotheses are things thatcan be worked out, that require academicinvestigation; horizons are points of existence out ofsight; possibilities are open questions. Necessities,however, demand our immediate attention andmobilize practice. When the movements behind thetwo great but failed world historical revolutions of the20th century recognized that communism was a

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visceral necessity, they developed theories that spoketo this necessity and that, despite their eventualfailures, brought us closer to the possibility, torecognizing the hypothesis, to breaching the horizon.

The recognition of the necessity for communistrevolution, first in Russia and then in China,produced a certain level of revolutionary success thatcould only lead to the encounter of successivenecessities learned both from success and,unfortunately, failure. If anything, these failuresshould remind us of the importance of communismand its necessity; we shouldn’t hide from thesefailures, attempt to side-step them by a vaguerearticulation of the terminology, or fail to grasp thatthey were also successes. Nor should we pretend thatother movements currently en vogue, upon which wewant to paste the name communist, are capable ofspeaking to the same necessity. If we are to learn fromthe past through the lens of the necessity of makingrevolution, then we need to do so with an honestythat treats the practice of making communism as anhistorical argument.

The Problem of Movementism

All of this new talk about communism that avoids thenecessity of actually bringing communism into being

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demonstrates a fear of the very name communism. Inthis context one can be a communist in theory butnot necessarily a communist in practice: whencommunism becomes a philosophical problem, oreven a significant dream, it is no longer vital and thepeople speaking of its vitality are refusing to ask thecrucial questions that would make communismapparent.

If the unfocused rebellions that are emerging globallysomehow prove the importance of communismbecause they are revealing the lie of the capitalistreality, then we demonstrate a certain measure offearfulness over this importance if our suggestions,when we bother to make them, result in tailing themasses––those masses whose rebellions are vagueenough to be fantastical––and hoping they willmagically bring communism into being. The ArabSpring, the “Occupy” movement, the next uprising…Why do we look to these examples as expressions ofcommunism instead of looking to those movements,organized militantly under a communist ideology, thatare making far more coherent and revolutionarydemands? Movements that have not forgotten thatcommunism is a necessity, that are not enamoured inthe rediscovery of a name that only fell out of favourin the centres of global capitalism.

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Those who understand communism as only anhypothesis, a horizon, a possibility are also those whoare incapable of bridging the gap between theory andpractice and figuring out what it would mean to makecommunism a reality. This is because the act ofmaking communism a reality is generally unpleasantdue to the fact that the real world is also unpleasant. Ifwe have learned anything from the last two earth-shaking revolutions, it is that bringing communisminto being is a messy business that cannot beaccomplished by dwelling on hypotheses or staringout into a distant horizon. Here we must rememberMao’s aphorism that revolution is not a dinner partybut a tragically violent upheaval in which one classseeks to displace another––and the ruling classes weseek to displace will not easily abdicate the historicalstage.

To speak of communism as a necessity, then, is tofocus on the concrete world and ask what steps arenecessary to make it a reality. If the point of necessityis also, as Engels wagered, a scientific axiom, thenperhaps it makes sense to treat the process ofrevolution in the manner of a science: something thatis open to the future, that is still in development,while at the same time possessing moments ofuniversalization that have been established throughworld historical victories.

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But there seems to be a concerted attempt, on the partof those intellectuals at the centres of capitalism whoare attempting to reclaim the name, to focus onanything other than communism’s necessity. Whilelip-service might be given to Luxemburg’s maxim“socialism or barbarism”, what the application of thismaxim would mean in practice––that is, the questionof how to make the necessity of communism areality––is generally avoided. And so we must askwhy these re-popularizations of communism containno significant attempt to adequately theorize the stepsnecessary, in any particular context, for makingcommunism.

If anything, those first world intellectuals engaged inrepopularizing communism tend to makemovementist strategies and tactics their defaultpractice. Placing their faith in disorganized rebellions,they argue either explicitly or implicitly that we musttail every unfocused mass protest that erupts inresponse to global capitalism. The argument, thoughnot always stated, is that these protests will somehowand magically, through some inexplicable mechanismof combination, produce a revolutionary critical mass,at some point on the distant horizon, that will finallysolve the communist hypothesis––this is preciselywhat is now called movementism.

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There was a time, at some point in the late 1990s andearly 2000s, where most of us believed thismovementist strategy was synonymous withrevolutionary praxis. We went to Seattle to protestthe World Trade Organization; we assembled inQuebec City to challenge the Free Trade Agreementof the Americas; we proclaimed that we were part of abeautiful and fragmented chaos of affinity groups,conflicted organizations, disorganized rebels, all ofwhom were somehow part of the same socialmovement that was greater than the sum of its parts.We believed ourselves to be raindrops that wouldproduce a flood capable of sweeping away capitalism,unwilling to recognize that this was perhaps a falseanalogy and that we were more accurately, in veryconcrete terms, a disorganized mob of enragedplebeians shaking our fists at a disciplined imperialarmy. Years ago we spoke of “social movementism”but now it only makes sense to drop the “social” sincethis phase of confusion was incapable ofunderstanding the social terrain.

So while we should endorse every rebellion againstcapitalism and imperialism, no matter how desperate(as Frantz Fanon once put it), we should also realizethat the unfocused nature of these rebellions areincapable, by their very nature, of responding to theproblem of necessity. As the Parti Communiste

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Révolutionnaire [PCR-RCP] argued in its 2006document, How We Intend To Fight:

“[T]he ruling [political] tendency… has totallyassimilated the idea that there is no more unity. Forthem, social facts are like a bag of marbles that fall onthe ground in all directions and with no commontrajectory, and they want everybody to think of this asbeing a normal fact. […] As a matter of fact, thecurrent situation tells us that many movements“tumble,” like Mao said (or they will stumble in thefollowing period), because they refuse to see things intheir entirety. They preserve this concept of a bag ofmarbles and like to see multiplication of trajectories,solutions, possibilities, alternatives and reformprojects. It is a rather accommodating, yet ineffectivediversity.”4

It concludes, a few paragraphs later, that “[t]his pathgoes nowhere and will literally be punctured by thefacts of the decades to come. Will we overcome thisdivision, or will the bourgeoisie completely crush us.”It goes nowhere because, due to its very nature, itcannot approach the point of unity––the point oftheoretical and practical totality that the post-modernists warned us to avoid––that should emanate

4. PCR-RCP, How We Intend to Fight (http://www.pcr-rcp.ca/old/pdf/pwd/3.pdf), 13.

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from the understanding that communism is anecessity. For when we speak of necessities we alsohave to speak of building a unified movement that,due to this unity, will possess the intention of makingwhat is necessary a reality. Disparate, unfocused, anddivided movements lack a unified intentionality; theyhave proved themselves incapable of pursuing thenecessity of communism.

The all-too-easy movementist solution, either implicitor explicit in these new endorsements of communism,should be understood as an assimilation of an idea ofdisunity that has, indeed, become “a normal fact” atthe centres of capitalism. Nearly a decade ago, in2003, the anti-globalization editorial collective, “Notesfrom Nowhere”, put together a book called We AreEverywhere that argued:

“[D]ifferent movements around the world are busystrengthening their networks, developing theirautonomy, taking to the streets in huge carnivalsagainst capital, resisting brutal repression and growingstronger as a result, and exploring new notions ofsharing power rather than wielding it. Our voices aremingling in the fields and on the streets across theplanet, where seemingly separate movements convergeand the wave of global resistance becomes a tsunamicausing turbulence thousands of miles away, and

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simultaneously creating ripples which lap at ourdoorstep.”5

Lovely words, to be sure, but what happened to themovements this book documented––movements thatwere meant to converge, without taking power, in a“movement of movements”6 and end capitalism?From movements as disparate as the EZLN in Mexicoto the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty [OCAP] inToronto, the disunified terrain in which this bookplaced its hope evaporated within a few years of thebook’s publication. For it was never really unitedwith a focused intention dedicated to the necessaryend of capitalism. Dream-like and carnivalesque, thesewere movements that might or might not have beenimportant rebellions but could never producerevolution.

It is significant, perhaps, that We Are Everywhereconcludes with a poetic excerpt from Arundhati Roy’sCome September speech7: Roy, after all, moved onfrom movementism––today she spends most of hertime defending the people’s war in India, arevolutionary movement that would have greatly

5. Notes from Nowhere, We Are Everywhere (London: Verso,2003), 29.6. Ibid., 511.7. “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On aquiet day, I can hear her breathing.”

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offended the editors of this book and their idealistproclamations of making revolution without takingpower. Significant because, if read in historicalcontext, this chronicle of the previous and failedmovementist approach to revolution is an opening, aninvitation, to a new return to the communist necessityit refused to address.

Since the movementist approach to revolution isincapable, due to the very fact of its disorganization,of producing consistent historical memory (for howcan we have such a memory if we are focused onincoherence and thus, ultimately, forgetting?), it isonly natural that the failed movementism of the lastdecade would be echoed by the failing, and yet stillpopular, movementism of this decade. And perhaps itis also only natural that the proudly edited andpublished collection of today’s movementism wouldalso echo the collection of the past movementism:now we have a book called We Are Many that isfocused on the so-called “Arab Spring” and the“Occupy Movement” and, generally amnesiatic aboutthe fate of the movements in We Are Everywhere,recycles the same tropes in one of those historicalrepetitions that Marx would have understood astragedy and then farce. And it is in this generalcontext where we find the odd intellectual speaking ofcommunist hypotheses, possibilities, horizons––a

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context that remains ignorant of the preceding contextwhich established nothing because it was incapable ofaccomplishing anything.

So why, then, do those who now speak ofcommunism desire a continuation of the failedpractice of movementism that, at least in the perioddocumented by the “Notes from Nowhere” collective,was wary of uttering this banned name? Because to gofurther than simply speak the name is an act of fearand trembling, a terrified remembering of a pastexperience that we have been told was a cataclysmicfailure.

Here, at the centres of capitalism, we have inherited asuspicion of a project we have been socialized intobelieving was nothing more than totalitarianism, abrutal “Animal Farm” that can teach us nothing. Sowhen only the name, and not the necessity behind thename, is reclaimed, this deficient way of seeing theworld is inherited. And from this inheritance, becausewe do not want to conceptualize a return that willboth continue and rupture from these pastrevolutions, the only praxis we can imagine is anotherarticulation of the same movementism that, onceupon a time, was even suspicious of communism.

For it is a fearful thing to direct oneself towards

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actually making communism rather than babblingabout hypotheses and horizons. Talk is cheap in theface of necessity; talk that avoids necessity will onlylead to failure because, refusing to conceptualize praxisas something more than a philosophical problem (andin this refusal remobilizing the same movementistcategories), we will remain trapped on the abstractlevel of appearance rather than descending to theconcrete realm of necessity:

“By only sticking to the appearance and subjectivityborn out of any given situation, by remaining blind tothe totality of the movement in denying the links andmediations, we give rise to a practice which moves farfrom the true power of the struggle. It is a waste; it isas if we refuse the immense and superb capabilities ofthe revolutionary struggle. The petty-bourgeoisie maybe able to ignore and go without this potential but theproletariat cannot. […] That is why we say that in thecurrent situation… nothing is more right, useful andconstructive than to struggle for developing a genuineand ‘common class’ project. Therefore, we mean toconceive our tools, our methods and our objectivesunder the terms and conditions of totality and unity.We have a great need for conceiving this revolutionarystruggle. We must carry out ‘the interests of the

8. PCR-RCP, How We Intend to Fight (http://www.pcr-rcp.ca/old/pdf/pwd/3.pdf), 14.

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movement as a whole.’”8

And carrying out the interests of the movement as awhole, a demand produced by the intentionality ofnecessity, is something no errant hypothesis and noimagined horizon, still land-locked within themovementist terrain, can produce.

Science and Necessity

Before examining the phenomenon of movementismin more detail, however, it is worth pausing to thinkabout the word science that, from its very firstutterance, places us beyond the pale of polite activistdiscourse. We now live in a time where this word istreated as suspect by many involved in anti-capitalistprojects; woe betide those who would connect it tothe word revolutionary and speak of a scientificassessment of struggle!

There are, of course, laudable reasons behind thissuspicion. We know how the scientific method andscientific labour have been used by capitalism. Weunderstand the horrors of technologies adapted tomilitary logic, of the vicious and exclusionary natureof the medical-industrial complex, of the sciencesharnessed by colonial and imperial projects tocategorize, control, and dehumanize subject

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populations, of the ways in which science has acted asa discourse to promote the interests of the rulingclasses. We rightly mock the “scientific” gibberish ofevolutionary psychology and other bio-deterministnonsense. Decades of critical theory and philosophyhas made us cynical.

But what has this totalizing cynicism produced? Onthe one hand, a scornful mistrust of the word sciencewhen it is used to speak of history and social changeon the part of those who benefit, by living at thecentres of global capitalism, from a monopoly ofscientific advancement. On the other hand, aconscious anti-scientism and flight back intomysticism that was not only evident in the US hippymovement of the 1960s, but in every contemporarycollaboration with religious obscurantism––activistswho visit psychics, leftists who fetishize thespirituality of colonized nations’ oppressed cultures,radical ecological movements chasing a “primitivism”that existed only in an imaginary state of nature.

Both rejections of science combine and diverge inevery movementist space. It is not uncommon towitness, at an activist meeting, someone from anindigenous nation hired to pray to their ancestors andperform a tobacco smudging ceremony. While weshould be aware that colonial conquest was, in part,

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achieved through a cultural suppression where thespirituality of the colonizer (i.e. Judeo-Christianity)was treated as “rational” (and perhaps even, thoughwrongly, scientific) in comparison to the supposed“barbaric” spirituality of the colonized––a culturalstrategy aimed at dehumanization––there is somethingquite patronizing, about these kinds of practices. Inone sense they are cynical, because the majority ofpeople present do not believe in anything, neitherscience nor religion, but are simply tolerating theceremony out of a sense of a “decolonial” duty that isdriven by colonial guilt––we would not expect thesame people to tolerate the prayers of a priest, a rabbi,or even an imam. In another sense such a practicerepresents a conscious anti-scientism where science istreated as a colonial practice and spirituality thebusiness of the colonized; the latter is fetishized and,in this fetishism, appropriated in the most racist,though implicit, sense of the term. After all, byassuming that science is something “invented” byEuropeans is to erase all of the scientific practices anddiscoveries of those peoples European colonialismgenocided and colonized, stealing and claimingscientific discoveries in the process.

But if we are to reclaim the immediacy ofcommunism-as-necessity then we must also reclaimthe conceptual meaning of science. In the crudest

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sense of scientific advancement––of technologicalinstruments––this fact should be obvious. Capitalismpossesses a monopoly over those technologies that arecapable of maintaining social control: guns, tanks,drones, etc. We will not topple this brutal systemthrough meditation of any sort, let alone our moraland spontaneous will to “speak truth to power” ininnumerable demonstrations where the state’s policeand military are better prepared than the averageprotestor. Movementism has already produced amythology of struggle that would lead us to believeotherwise, little more than a moralism that runscounter to reality––wishful thinking that if we are allout in the streets, all spontaneously producing aninsurrection, the state’s technological machines willrefuse to initiate a blood bath.

Let us go deeper into this problem, though, so as tothink the possibility of scientific thought. To reclaimthe concept of science is more than simply recognizingthe efficacy of instruments; it concerns anti-capitalisttheory itself. And to argue that there is such a thingas a revolutionary science is even bolder than arguingfor the necessary recognition of the scientificinstruments monopolized by the ruling classes. Hereis a totalizing assumption: science should find itshome at the heart of theories of organization andstrategy because science, the only thing capable of

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generating facts and truths, is superior to non-science.

What do we mean, then, by science? In the previouschapter there was an appeal to Engels and a briefrecognition that science was open to the future, aprocess in development that produced, throughhistorical struggle, universal truths (that is, facts thatare applicable in every particular context, though alsomediated by these contexts). But let us go further: ascience is that which speaks to material conditionswithout mystification––a natural explanation ofnatural phenomena. Physics is a physical (broadlyunderstood) explanation of physical phenomena;biology is a biological explanation of biologicalphenomena; chemistry is a chemical explanation ofchemical phenomena; and historical materialism is anhistorical/social explanation of historical/socialphenomena. Why, then, is historical materialism arevolutionary science? Because the historical/socialexplanation of the same phenomena is the mechanismof class struggle, i.e. revolution… And this scientifichypothesis is that which is capable of demystifying thewhole of history and myriad societies, a way in whichto gauge any and every social struggle that is capableof producing historical change.

Hence, without a scientific understanding of socialstruggle we are incapable of recognizing when and

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where failed theories manifest. The physicist has noproblem banning Newtonian speculation to the pastwhere it belongs; s/he possesses a method ofassessment based on the development of hir scientificterrain. If we resist a similar scientific engagementwith social struggle we have no method of makingsense of the ways in which revolutionary hypotheseshave been disproven in the historical crucible due tohistorical “experiments” of class struggle. To reject ascientific understanding of struggle is to assert thatthese past experiments––the complete failures, thehalf-successes, the half-failures––have taught usnothing, and so we are doomed to successive attemptsof directionless reinvention.

A scientific understanding of struggle, however,teaches us something about the theoretical terrain ofstruggle that has been presented by history, throughhumanity’s past endeavours, and is still open to thefuture. What social struggles established new truthsdue to marginal, but universalizable successes? Whatsuccessive social struggles learned from these pastestablishments of truth and went a little further beforealso meeting failure? How, then, do we apply whathas been scientifically proven in these socialexperiments to our particular circumstances so as togo even further? These are questions that can only beasked if we have the meter of science to gauge our

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practice––that demands, at every moment of struggle,an attention to necessity. Without such anunderstanding of reality, we have no way of makingsense of our practice; we might as well forget the past,act as if everything is particularly unique, and ignoreevery moment when the repetition of failure ought tobe treated as obvious.

Movementism receives its strength in this grandproject of forgetting.

Puritanism

Those who cling to the movementist strategy aregenerally insensible to critique––how can they not bewhen they have rejected any scientific standard forassessing organization and strategy? Often imaginingthat they have embarked on a new anti-capitaliststruggle, they label all challenges to this strategy old-fashioned and dogmatic. But is it not the very heightof dogmatism to resist critique, to imagine that one’smethod is pure, and to flee from historical conviction?Indeed, those puritan pilgrims who led thecolonization of North America also believed that theystood in opposition to the dogmatism of mainstreamChristianity; they refused to recognize a similardogmatism in their rigid morality, in their hatred ofthe Church of England and the Papists of Rome. And

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since movementism finds its theoretical centre in themost powerful nations of the Western Hemisphere,despite being echoed and encouraged by similartendencies in Europe, perhaps it is only natural thatthis sense of puritan self-righteousness––thisprotestant ethic of decentralization and disunifiedtheoretical praxis––would eventually hamper thesocial movements in the US and Canada.

Perhaps.

At the same time it would be rather simplistic toreduce the current cult of disorganized activism to asentiment inherited from the predominant religiousideology of these nations’ establishment. There areother factors, after all, some of which may providegreater explanatory depth and many that intersect andcombine: generations of anti-communism, the collapseof actually existing socialism, the comparative level ofprivilege enjoyed by those who live at the centres ofcapitalism––possibly more concrete and materialfactors

If anything, this appeal to an unquestioned sentimentinherited from a puritan protestantism might be ableto explain the self-righteous need to arrogantly clingto the movementist strategy in the face of historicalevidence. Better to accept only the evidence of

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actually existing socialism’s failures, its supposedtotalitarianism, just as the fundamentalist accepts onlythe evidence that the world is irrevocably fallen andwrithing in sin. In this sense, the movementisthorizon becomes akin to the rapture. Such ananalogy, however, is only interesting as an exercise inhermeneutics; it is better to simply accept that adogmatic commitment to a supposed non-dogmatismexists rather than speculate on its possibly arcaneideological origins.

And this sentiment to cling to decentralized activistorganizing is evident in the constant appeal tomethods, politics, and scattered social movements thatwere enshrined by the past movementist cycle. Thelingering fetishization of the EZLN, for example, istelling: there is a reason that the Zapatistas havereceived sainthood while the Sendero Luminoso hasnot. Whereas the former never did much to theMexican regime except stake out a space in the jungleand make innumerable proclamations against someabstract notion of power––refusing to push a largerpolitical line beyond peaceful marches and widelybroadcasted proclamations––the latter failed in aviolent spectacle after nearly bringing the Peruvianstate to its knees. The PCP’s failure, following theviolence of its near victory, can be ascribed to the“old-fashioned” nature of its politics. The Zapatistas,

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however, never failed because of their inability, by2001, to push their 1993 armed uprising into a full-scale revolution; at that time, they were against theseizure of power.

For when a movement actually tries to take power,and goes so far as to almost succeed, when it fails themeaning of its failure will be written by the rulingclass intelligentsia and everyone beholden to thecommon sense of this class. Organizations like theEZLN have avoided the fate of the PCP because theydid not walk the same path of revolutionary necessitythat is often tragic and brutal––where there willalways be mistakes, where the problem of differingclass morality produces ethical confusion, wherefailure is more spectacular with each heightened level

9. None of this is to say, however, that the experience of theEZLN should be dismissed or that this organization willremain in revolutionary limbo. They still exist and, like anymovement that is able to persist, are not necessarily static intheir theory and practice. Here, I am more interested in theover-fetishization of the politics they expressed in the 1990s,with the emphasis on refusing to take power, and the way theywere conceptualized by USAmericans and Canadians who werelooking for a movement to express their eclecticpolitics––hence the reason more than one academic called theEZLN’s movement “the first postmodern revolution”. But atthe same time, just as we should reject the eurocentricfetishization of the Zapatistas, we should also reject theeurocentric rejection based on fidelity to some ortho-Trotskyistnotion of class struggle. For more detail on this latter problem,the reader should consider Bromma’s Racist “Anti-Imperialism”? Class, Colonialism and the Zapatistas(http://kersplebedeb.com/posts/racist-anti-imperialism).

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of struggle. Failure is impossible, after all, if one doesnot attempt to do anything that can result in eitherfailure or success.9

So maybe the desire to cling to movementism speaksmore to a desire for a political purity free from thetaint of necessity. Beneath this desire for purity, then,a fear of necessity: we do not want to confront what itwould mean to address the dilemma of socialism orbarbarism because the only movements we endorse arethose that have never developed far enough to treatthis question as anything more than an abstraction.

But this was always the problem with movementism, asymptom of the past cycle of disorganized strugglewhere everything communist was rejected a priori as adead end. At the very least we can understand thisprevious rejection as a product of the times: actuallyexisting socialism had only crumbled a decade earlier,the ruling class ideologues were working overtime tofoster the belief that communism was irrelevant, andmost activists living at the centres of imperialism(typically myopic when it comes to most of the world)were largely ignorant of the new round of communiststruggle that was erupting in the global peripheries.Even the fact that the anti-globalization anarchistswere capable of noticing an armed movement outsideof the first world was surprising––though the reason

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they would choose to focus on the Zapatistas insteadof the Senderistas was perhaps predictable. Still, atleast that stage of movementism was a sign of thetimes, the product of a defeated working classmovement in the world’s most privileged nations.

So we must wonder why the same praxis lingers,repeating as farce, when popular intellectuals are nowreasserting the name communism. After all, the pastcycle of movementist struggle declared fragmentationand disunification to be virtuous in an attempt todistance itself from the failure of communism. Andthough we might disagree with this distancing, weshould recognize that it was honest; at least it realizedthat communism was precisely those regimes that hadfailed.

But now we have a strange hybrid: a reclamation ofcommunism as an abstraction that asserts itself in themidst of renewed movementism that is no different inpractice from the movementism that dismissedcommunism as a dead-end. Thus, all these attempts toreclaim communism cannot help but sublimate thesentiments of anti-communist movementism. Theonly difference is in the jargon, in an abstract desire tosave a terminology rather than a concrete practice.

And yet the truth is that this abstract reclamation of

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communism has come too late. The movementism oftoday shares the same problems as the movementismof yesterday precisely because it is predominantlycomposed of people who think no differently fromtheir antecedents and thus are not necessarilyinterested, regardless of their popularity, in thereclamation of the project of communism. Thus wefind movements that are still built upon nebuloustheoretical foundations, composed predominantly ofpeople who might not be interested in even the namecommunism, and ideologues attempting to speak forthese movements in the very name that might beperceived as alien.

For these movements often emerge from popularrebellions and only those who attempt to explain theirdisunification will appeal to common slogans andconcepts. The ideologues of the past cycle ofmovementism were at least humble enough torecognize this element of disarticulation; they werealso theoretically consistent when they elevated thisdisarticulation but refused to call it communism.Today’s grey eminences, in their desire to reestablishthe name communism as simply an abstract notion,are trying to brand a series of disorganized and limitedrebellions according to their own conceptualconstellation. Hence the problem of tailism where theattempt to popularize the name communism amounts

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to running behind a rebellion that rejects articulation,attempting to make it conform to a jargon that itwould otherwise reject because the fact of itsdisorganization makes it incapable of recognizingtotalizing concepts.

Even worse is the fact that those who are attemptingto reclaim communism end up catching the sameplague that infects the movements they tail: the fear ofnecessity. It is one thing for an activist involved in theOccupy movement to reject all of the principles ofpast communisms, to treat world historicalrevolutions as a failure; it is quite another thing forthose who want to renew the tradition of communismto act in the same manner and, in the midst of thisperformance, worry about alienating themselves byspeaking of a concrete communism.

Better to just tail the masses, without even wonderingat the class composition of the masses that are beingtailed. Better to hope that this rebellion is arevolutionary movement, and that we can influence itsdirection with our books about “hypotheses” and“horizons” instead of wondering about the problemsof strategy and historical efficacy. We must wonderwhen the [now pretty much defunct] OccupiedWallstreet Journal refuses to communicate anythingopenly communist and yet is being edited by known

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communists… In the manic flurry to become part ofthis current round of rebellions we have inherited themovementist fear of necessity. And in this context itis no wonder that we are terrified of speakinganything but the name of communism.

Sectarianism

The shibboleth of sectarianism is one of the commonexcuses for endorsing the most banal forms ofmovementist praxis. After all, if a unifiedrevolutionary movement requires, by its verydefinition, a unified theory, then such a theorynecessarily excludes other theoretical approaches.While it is true that every theoretically unifiedorganization will experience multiple and competingpolitical lines, it is also true that there cannot be aunified movement in which contradictory theoreticallines operate; the fantasy of movementism is that therecan indeed be this type of multiplicity that, despitethis fragmentation, will spontaneously produce anapocalyptic moment of unity. As noted above, thismoment has never and will never come.

Hence, any talk of the necessity of a revolutionaryorganization unified in and disciplined by a coherenttheory must be judged as heretical by movementism’sideologues and adherents. To speak of this necessity is

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to be charged with pushing an exclusionary politicalline, fostering “division”, and behaving in a sectarianmanner. Amongst those committed to movementism,then, it is a great sin to reject this approach and argueinstead for a praxis in which revolutions have beenmade historically: the sectarians, here, are similar tothe heretics of the Catholic Church who wereexcommunicated for promoting rebel sects.

Clearly, we would be remiss if we were to argue thatsectarianism is not a problem. We know that there aresome marxists and marxist organizations, most ofwhom act as if they are still living in the first twodecades of the 20th Century, that are indeedfrightfully sectarian. These tiny grouplets areincapable of participating in coalitions, dogmaticallyunwilling to engage in meaningful ideological linestruggle, and spend most of their energy attackingother small sects that are similar to themselves. Theirpolitical praxis is little more than an act of religiousself-righteousness where they imagine themselves to bethe guardians of a pure marxist theory that must beprotected from historical contamination.

But the charge of sectarianism is levelled at every andany organization that dares to question thefundamental movementist doctrine. And though thecharge of sectarianism is also meant to imply that the

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“sectarians” are dogmatists (and in some cases this isindeed correct), the very fact that they are beingcharged with sectarianism––because they are refusingto abide by what is intended to be a hegemonicdoctrine––is due to their unwillingness to declarefidelity to movementism. They are sectarian simplybecause they are seen as sects who have broken fromwhat those who are making the charge deem thenormative terrain of anti-capitalism. Thus, the verycharge of sectarianism is often generated by adogmatic unwillingness to question socialmovementism.

In this charge there is also a myth: people ororganizations united around particular revolutionaryprinciples are responsible for the worst excesses of theleft in the 20th Century. Made by stuffy academicswho have rarely bothered to think throughrevolutionary history, this is a charge that is levelled atan ideology that possesses principled clarity. In aword, the charge is unprincipled; those making itwould prefer a lack of principles, a willingness to unitebehind any vague standard, a rejection of theoreticalstruggle. Here we discover an intentional amnesiaregarding what was actually significant in anti-capitalist history: anti-revisionist movements that, intheir principled refusal to peacefully co-exist withcapitalism, launched innumerable revolutions––some

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of which were world-historical.

Beyond this very crude and etymologicalunderstanding of sectarianism, however, where we canunderstand the word (sectarian) by its root (sect), weneed to go further and examine the concept of theword that is obscured by the name. For sectarianismmeans something more than the theory and practiceof a sect, just as the word hegemony means somethingmore than the polity of a hegemon. And the way inwhich the charge of “sectarianism” is commonly usedby the normative movementist left demonstrates afailure to understand the word’s conceptual depth.

A dyed-in-the-wool sectarian is someone who declarescomplete fidelity to the principle of politicaldifference and, in this declaration, accepts thisprinciple as hir primary operating ideology. Thesectarian will not engage with people outside of hirsect, except to treat them as enemies, because s/hefears ideological pollution. The sectarian closes hirselfoff from history, treats hir ideology as sacrosanct, andadvocates cultish behaviour. The sectarian imaginesthat hir sect possesses a completed truth and, due tothis great act of imagining, refuses to recognize thatthe lack of growth in hir sect is a sign of stagnation.An organization that is sectarian will not grow in anysignificant manner, and will remain doomed to

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political irrelevance, due to a rigid dogmatism that canonly collect those adherents that every religious cultpreys upon: a small minority of religious-mindedindividuals who are looking for easy answers, desirean excuse to act in a self-righteous manner, and aregenerally maladjusted troglodytes who dream ofleading the masses even as they despise these massesfor failing to recognize the great truths of their sect.

But principled political difference by itself does notamount to sectarianism, though it is often treated assuch by those who would judge any moment ofprincipled difference as sectarian heresy. Indeed, ifendorsing a principled and politically differentrevolutionary ideology was the measure ofsectarianism, then Marx and Engels would have to besectarian for daring to wage an ideological linestruggle against the other and utopian socialistapproaches that threatened to mislead the movementin the 19th Century. Let us go further so as tounderstand how this definition is completely absurd: ifwe were to define the concept of sectarianism assimply “principled political difference” then we wouldhave to also accept that every anti-capitalist, evenmovementists, are sectarian insofar as they maintain aprincipled political difference with pro-capitalists.

Maintaining a principled political difference is itself a

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necessity, part of developing a movement capable ofdrawing demarcating lines, and even those who wouldendorse movementism have to do so if they are to alsomaintain their anti-capitalism. Political lines can andmust be drawn: the enemy draws them, and thusunderstands that we are the enemy, and so we need tohave the very same understanding if we are to survive.Only liberals, who imagine that there really is noenemy and that everyone will get along under thepeace of welfare capitalism, believe that the drawing ofthese lines is a violent act that––like violence itself––is“immoral” because it is the way in which the enemybehaves. In this context, however, the liberal standswithin the lines drawn by this enemy and is thusincapable of understanding that s/he is endorsing areality determined by this enemy.

Moreover, political differences do matter because thereare significant differences between political ideologies.The praxis of movementism, despite some of itsadherents’ claims about big tent socialism, is generallybased on an anarchist assessment of reality and is thus,in itself, a political ideology at odds with those itsadherents would seek to pull into its orbit. Anddifferent marxist approaches are indeed quite differentin how they understand the political fault-lines andwhat needs to be done: to pretend that all of thesetrajectories are ultimately identical––metaphorically

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similar workers with identical tools attacking theidentical problem10––is a myth fostered by those whoimagine that class struggle is homogeneous despitetheir claims about the importance of heterogeneity.Movementism demands a homogeneity thatmasquerades as heterogeneity: a multiplicity oftrajectories but if and only if these trajectoriesrecognize that the overall approach is correct and donot dare to organize outside of the movementist praxisor call it into question.

The Maoist is not identical to the Trotskyist; themarxist is not identical to the anarchist: their tools arenot the same, their grasp of the object with whichthey are engaging is not precisely identical. Topretend otherwise is about as useful as pretending thatMarx and Engels were the same as Proudhon andDuhring, forgetting the ideological war waged againstthese differences so as to define the terrain ofrevolutionary theory.

But some of those who speak now of communisthypotheses and horizons, who are attempting to revisethe word without very much attention to its concrete

10. This analogy is drawn from a comic by Stephanie McMillan(http://stephaniemcmillan.org/2013/04/23/sectarianism/)where she attempts to make this rather banal and typical pointabout “sectarianism” that is little more than a conflation of theword sectarian with political difference.

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historical development as a revolutionary concept, arethe same people who would have us believe that thesetheoretical differences do not matter. Thus, the dismalcharge of sectarianism is yet another example of thefear of necessity… Ideological line struggles are indeednecessary.

We must not forget that part of the communistnecessity is to draw political lines of demarcation andto understand, in this moment of drawing, the forcesof revolution and counter-revolution. And a furtherline must be drawn between those who would treatcommunism as a necessity––and in this treatmentlearn from the past world historical revolutions––andthose who would treat it only as a hypothesis, ahorizon, an ideal possibility.

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CHAPTER 2 : COLLABORATION ANDCONTINGENCY

Despite the unwillingness to examine the riddle ofnecessity, to speak directly to its demands, there isoften the a priori recognition of its fact. All of thesenebulous attempts to reassert communism mustaccept, even in their failure to make concreteassessments, that the end of capitalism isnecessary––though not, it must be admitted andaccepted, preordained. Some attempts go so far as tosummon the name of Lenin and other revolutionaries.Jodi Dean, for example, speaks even of the need for aLeninist style of organization, a significant andlaudable statement on the part of a popular academic.Unfortunately, her Leninism is reduced to a formwithout content––a better organized Occupy,something that emerges spontaneously from Occupy.There are even times, with this Leninism in mind,when she argues that communism cannot be deferredindefinitely, thus denying the concept of an infinitelydistant horizon… With such a defanged Leninism, thatwill invent processes as it spontaneously develops, therevolution can only be deferred; her horizon isdistant.

So after all this talk of horizons and ideal forms,necessity itself is recognized only insofar as it hovers

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as a storm over that distant horizon. Afterdenouncing the failures of the communist pastaccording to a vague “anti-Stalinist” narrative, it seemsrather cheap to conjure the name of Lenin. Afterspeaking of revolutionary processes that will emergespontaneously through struggle, it is strange to argueagainst deferring communism indefinitely.

It is difficult to know what we should make of thisrecognition of necessity, sometimes sublimated andsometimes reified. For if the concept of necessity is anassumption pushed under this new discourse ofcommunism, or an abstract notion perceived as anideal form, then it ceases to matter. The questions itdemands, the historical experiences it has produced,are left either misconceived or unanswered.

Pushing the concept of necessity to the margins, thepolitics mobilized (or, rather, under-mobilized) by thisdiscourse generates the appearance of radicalismunmoored from concrete foundations. Hence theproliferation of various groups promoting an excitingnew radicalism free from our supposedly boringrevolutionary past: the Invisible Committee and its“coming insurrection”; the prior Tiqqun group and itsnebulous notion of “bloom”; Franco Berardi’slinguistic revolution that explicitly denies historicalnecessity. Theory wrenched from the framework of

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revolutionary science can only be radical in form…But perhaps this was always the intent: fear eithersupervenes––fear of the necessities demanded by anactual revolutionary movement––or is sublimated,beneath the appearance of radicalism, along with theconcept of necessity itself.

In this context, then, we must ask why the unfoldingtheory, hard-won through world historical revolution,is considered obtuse and alienating by the same peoplewho never tire of inventing “new” and impenetrableconcepts, whose writing seems intentionally opaque,and whose radicalism appears to be little more than anintellectual exercise. What should those of us whodeclare fidelity to a revolutionary communism thatemerged from the experience of class struggle care fora theory that primarily locates its radicalism on thelevel of appearance––that is obscure and abstract, thatproperly belongs at an academic conference ratherthan in the streets and countryside? For thesetheoretical abstractions are indeed only popularamongst first world academics and dilettantes,students and would-be intellectuals, anarchists frommiddle-class suburbs searching for words and ideas toguarantee a revolutionary ideology. At the marginsand in the peripheries these theories have gained verylittle credence.

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These “new” manifestos, greeted with so muchexcitement by a small population of privileged radicalsat the centres of capitalism, are not as new as theirchampions believe. The working-class movement, therevolutionary struggle of the masses, has experiencedinnumerable and similar attempts to reviserevolutionary theory. Eugene Duhring, for example,attempted to provide an alternative and prettier theoryto the supposed boringness of communist ideology,and though the theoretical categories he used mightnow seem hackneyed, this is only because we have theprivilege of historical perspective: Duhring was in factdrawing upon a conceptual constellation that a latenineteenth century intellectual would haveunderstood and found exciting, a constellation thathad little to do with the concrete experience of theEuropean proletariat of that period. Duhring’sinfluence was significant enough amongst intellectualsflirting with socialism that other prominent thinkerstreated him as an equally prominent representative ofsocialism: Nietzsche’s various and confused attacks onsocialism come mainly from his reading of Duhring(there is no evidence that Nietzsche ever read Marx orEngels); Herzl’s Zionism, along with the Dreyfusaffair, was partially influenced by an assumption thatsocialism was anti-semitic due to an understanding ofsocialism derived from Duhring who was also an anti-semite.11 But now we only know Duhring because

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Engels took the time to thoroughly destroy histheoretical doctrine and, in doing so, prove thestrength of what Duhring took to be out-of-step withintellectual fashion.

To Duhring we can add Guy Debord andSituationism, a theory that crystallized during theParis rebellion of 1968 and that is still beloved bypseudo-intellectuals and those privileged activistsobsessed with vague theoretical-praxis such as “culturejamming”, “psycho-geography”, and other abstractconcepts that are compelling because of theirobscurantism. And though Debord might have hadno significant impact on concrete struggle even in thecontext from which he emerged––it might even beaccurate to claim that Situationism matters little toeven most academic leftists these days––he is worthmentioning because so many of these “new” attemptsat reclaiming communism often speak his name.

11. The fact that these conservative thinkers, whosephilosophies have been associated with every form of politicalreaction, focused on Duhring’s socialism rather than therevolutionary currents represented by Marx and Engels isworth some reflection. Perhaps when socialist intellectualsmake a big deal about a specific thinker their anti-socialistcounterparts––the ideologues of the ruling class––follow thelead of the former and mistake chic radicalism as moresignificant than it actually is. Glenn Beck, for example, hasdone more to popularize The Coming Insurrection than theInvisible Committee itself. Of course, the InvisibleCommittee, unlike Duhring, is not anti-semitic, and Beck,unlike Nietzsche, is an intellectual troll.

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There are other names and other attempts, and thosethat were not preserved by academic and publishinginstitutions were forgotten by the end of the 1980swhen the communism they sought to revise wassupposedly defeated. More than a critical reflection ofthe supposedly “orthodox” communism, these eclecticand overly academic communisms are the symptom ofa larger problem: the inability to overcome normativeideology even in the midst of recognizing its existence.

At the centres of capitalism, where capitalisthegemony is generally complete, we have been trainedsince birth to accept the ruling ideas of the ruling classas common sense. And though we have beensuccessful in stepping outside of this common sense inorder to recognize the need to end capitalism, we areoften incapable of apprehending the meaning of thisnecessity due to how we have been taught to perceivethe world. We have been taught failure, we have beeneducated to believe this failure was because of atotalitarian communism, we were raised to think thatthere were no successes but only failures––and thatthese failures are precisely what a class ideology that isconcerned with preserving the current state of affairsclaims they were. So when we step outside of the endof history narrative it is easier to gravitate towardsthose supposedly critical strains of communism,dismiss what these strains name as “orthodoxy”

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according to the standard of capitalist propaganda, andembrace “new” communist ventures.

This is what the Invisible Committee is and what itspredecessor, the Tiqqun group, was; this is Berardi’sUprising, unintentionally satirical with its imaginaryrevolution; this is what all of these banal reclamationsare and can ever be: an attempt to profess communismwhile simultaneously accepting the end of historynarrative. Rather than attempting to figure out boththe successes and failures of previous rounds ofstruggle, these approaches transform failure into avirtue and, in this transformation, are unable to graspany establishment of success. This is why the vastmajority of these “reclamations” of communism refuseto speak of the vital revolutionary struggles that haveemerged at the peripheries of global imperialism; thisis why there is rarely any mention of people’s wars.

In such a context the only solution is to tail popularrebellions and, in this tailing, refuse to provide activeand unified leadership. The theoretical constellationmight differ but the practice remains the same:movementism––above all else, the disorganization ofsocial movements must be treated as the commongood. To intervene in these spaces and attempt toprovide leadership is treated as an act of violence; if anorganization of the Leninist style is indeed needed,

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then we are led to believe that it must invent itselfovernight, spontaneously emerging from the nextrebellion.

But in this context there are several questions worthasking. Why are there so many new manifestos aimedat delinking from the communist past, and what dothey accomplish? Just why do academics have anobsession with an opaque theory that resonates onlywith these same academics and activist intellectuals?What theoretical constellation is being dismissed asold-fashioned, boring, and “orthodox”? And just whatdoes it mean to reclaim the concept of necessity assomething that is neither sublimated nor reified?Again, it is worth pointing out that these are onlyquestions that, sadly, are pertinent at the centres ofcapitalism where we lost our way a long time ago. Sowe also need to ask the most important question thathaunts all of these questions, which is a question ofnecessity: how do we find our way back to the road ofcommunist revolution? For the moment, however, letus put aside this last question to focus on the hauntingitself.

The Haunted Past

So what should we make of every new academic“manifesto” that attempts to delink communism from

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its revolutionary past? At the very least we shouldbegin by recognizing that many of these reassertionsof communism are not total rejections of history;significant names and movements are occasionallynoted, and this is a partial victory. Dean conjures theghost of Lenin, Badiou appeals to the spectre of Mao.The gap between name and concept is occasionallybridged; sometimes there is a recognition that certainelements of history are ours to define. Badiou, whoonce defined himself as a Maoist against intellectualfashion, remains unwilling to surrender historicalmemory to capitalist ideology––he goes so far as tochallenge the discourse of “totalitarianism” thatidentifies Stalin with Hitler.12 In some of these cases,then, there is a laudable attempt, and an ideologicalstruggle, to return a variety of names to what isconsidered “acceptable” discourse even amongst left-wing academia. In 2007 Slavoj Zizek, SebastianBudgen, and Stathis Kouvelakis initiated the openingsalvo of this reclamation by releasing the collectionLenin Reloaded, an attempt to make Lenin palatablefor academics and intellectuals at the centres ofcapitalism.

Before this reassertion of communism as a name, andunder the auspices of a simplified Marxism or

12. Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis (London: Verso,2010), 3.

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socialism, it was inappropriate to speak of Lenin––letalone Mao or Stalin––unless we were speaking offailure or the “betrayal” of some vague socialist ideal.Indeed, those Trotskyists and post-Trotskyists whowere the primary authorities of marxism in first worldacademia would only speak of Lenin outside of anacademic setting. They were obviously content toaccept the discourse that compared Stalin to Hitler,due to their obsession with an imaginary “Stalinism”,just as they were happy to ban the name of Mao fromacceptable discourse. Thus, we should at leastrecognize the significance of this reclamation.

And yet the rearticulation of communism, regardlessof the names that are often mobilized, still persists inthe delinking of communism from its revolutionarypast. Although such a delinking appears to belaudable, these manifestos easily find resonanceamongst those raised in the so-called “end of history”where anti-communist ideology is ascendant.Moreover, many of these reclamations still refuse tospeak those banned names since they remainedconvinced of their failure and betrayal. As noted, thefailures of past revolutions are factual; if their successeswere total they would not have collapsed. Thus, allattempts to alienate ourselves from our revolutionaryhistory can be presented as pragmatic and critical.

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The desire to close those historical doors throughwhich the ghosts of past revolutions emerge has beenthe tactical practice of radical anti-capitalists at thecentres of global capitalism for a long time,crystallizing after the collapse of actually existingsocialism. Even before this collapse it was often thehallmark of supposedly “critical” marxism in the firstworld, perhaps due to the influence of Trotskyism, todenounce every real world socialism as Stalinist,authoritarian, totalitarian… But ever since thereification of anti-communist triumphalism thisdenunciation has achieved hegemony; it is the positionto which all would-be marxist academics gravitate andaccept as common sense, an unquestioned dogma.Hence all these attempts to reboot communism bycalling it something different, by making its pasteither taboo or meaningless, by resorting to a self-defeating philosophy where the idea of a “true”communism is eternally conjured in order to dismissthe past revolutions as “false” due to their inability todemonstrate fidelity to this pure idea.

Beneath these attempts to alienate communism fromits past we occasionally discover moments of Platonicidealism: out there, somewhere, is the idea of TrueCommunism upon which we must reflect in order toreach that distant horizon of human freedom.

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But the ghosts of history cannot be exorcized;attempting to ignore them by choosing to speak of acommunism without reference to these shades willremain haunted. Most often this discourse willpresuppose, as a default principle, that this hauntingmeans precisely what the anti-communist discourseclaims it means. Occasionally it will seek a differentpast, skipping over the entire history of revolutionarycommunist experience, and pretend that utopiantheories and movements––alienated, mystified,idealist––are the only worthwhile precedent forcommunism.

In the end, the attempt to delink from ourrevolutionary past, treating it as a prison from whichwe must escape, does violence to history. To claimthat we must “unshackle” ourselves from this past andseek a new communist horizon is to denounceeverything for which revolutionaries have fought anddied… These ghosts can teach us something, both intheir successes and failures, and we learn nothing bydismissing them as unwelcome poltergeists.

And yet the obsession to discover a new approach tocommunism that is somehow free from the past (as ifwe can ever escape this past that weighs upon us “likea nightmare”) prides itself in its supposed creativityand critical depth. We must ask, however, what is

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creative about pretending the past does not exist andtrying to reboot a tradition by deleting its worldhistorical moments? This is much like the cliche ofreinventing the wheel: it might indeed be “creative” tomake a triangular or octagon wheel but it is not a verymeaningful creativity. And just what, precisely, is“critical” about building a communism by repeatingthe common sense anti-communist ideology aboutpast socialisms? It is very easy to believe we are beingcritical by challenging the supposed “dogmas” ofcommunism when, in point of fact, we are simplyrepeating what every capitalist textbook has beenclaiming about communism for decades.

The creativity and criticism of academic theory hasalways been rather banal. The jargon might seemexciting, the supposed newness of neologisms andclever frameworks might indeed be challenging, butthere really hasn’t been anything thoroughly creativeand critical that has emerged from the ranks ofacademic speculation for a long time. There areinnumerable obscurantisme terroristes (to cite theterm Foucault once applied to Derrida), clevertheorists who achieved the illusion of criticalcreativity by a framework defined by obscurantistjargon, but nothing that has provided a new concreteanalysis of a concrete situation––nothing capable ofchanging the world. The exciting theory, the most

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creative theory, the theory capable of thoroughlycritiquing the world has only ever emerged fromrevolutionary movements. But since this was aninsight of Marx and the tradition of marxism, it isonly natural that non- or anti-marxist academicswould dismiss this axiom and lose themselves in anobsession to produce new theories and newmanifestos… none of which will ever matter to themasses, which is to say will ever be capable of doingwhat this kind of manifesto claims it can do in thefirst place––change history.

Thus, we have little patience for those who complainabout the supposed poverty of thought amongst theranks of today’s anti-revisionist communisms. Thisconstant whining about the so-called “dogmatic”fidelity to figures such as Mao or Lenin or evenStalin––this fear and trembling caused by those whoeven dare to uphold the failed people’s war in Peru––isa symptom of a false critical creativity. It’s a bit liketelling a physicist that s/he is not critical or creativefor daring to take the General Theory of Relativityseriously and thus proposing that it would be betterjust to pretend that Einstein and all of the trouble histheory caused did not exist. Most importantly, such acomplaint demonstrates a very uncreative anduncritical fidelity to anti-communist ideology… Wereally must ask: what is so critical about accepting the

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fixed interpretation of the world that we’ve beensocialized into accepting since birth? It is ratherasinine to complain about dogmatism and orthodoxyif you adhere to the height of dogmatic orthodoxy:the bourgeois way of seeing the world.

Embracing the risk of sounding academicallyunfashionable, we want to suggest that there can be nocreative or critical manifesto that exists outside thebounds of a concrete and revolutionary understandingof necessity. Specifically, and in this context, we wantto suggest that the only worthwhile manifestoes arethose that are capable of producing an understandingof reality as seen from below:

“When seen from below or seen from above, the samereality is often viewed very differently. Two differentpoints of view, which generate two differentunderstandings, and consequently, two different kindsof feelings ad reactions… The first revolutionary act inclass struggle is to recognize, understand and seize theworld from below! We must not fall into the trap thatis believing that the bourgeoisie’s hallucinations fromabove are truthful reality. […] The current worldsituation is a good example of this double-standard,this two-faced way of seeing things. Seen from above,everything is prosperity, enrichment, wealth anddemocracy. Seen from below, it is crisis, corruption,

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war and misery.”13

And none of these new academic manifestoes, evenwhen they veil themselves as “marxist”, are capable ofrepresenting the world from below. They are alwaysabove, filtering down from the heights of academicspeculation, divorced from revolutionary struggle.Concerned with a distant horizon, and not the brutalnecessity that demands revolution, they are constantlylooking towards a future that is unchained from thepast. Here we must recall Walter Benjamin’s warningin Theses on the Philosophy of History––for thoughhe was also an estranged academic, he was aware of thedanger of a movement that premised solely on a futureunshackled from its past––where he claims that thisfocus on a utopian horizon results in the passing of“[t]he true picture of the past” and that “every imageof the past that is not recognized by the present as oneof its own concerns threatens to disappearirretrievably.”14

All this talk of supposedly “new horizons” must beabandoned if we cannot honestly engage with theimage of our past and how it affects the present.Those horizons that are alienated from the world of

13. PCR-RCP, How We Intend to Fight (http://www.pcr-rcp.ca/old/pdf/pwd/3.pdf), 5.14. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (Schocken Books: NewYork, 1968), 255.

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below, that do not emerge as goals produced by thepast struggles of the wretched of the earth, should betreated as idle speculation.

Contingencies

If it is unfashionable to return to the concept ofnecessity as the basis for human emancipation, it isbecause a theoretical tradition that forbade thisconcept, and instead demanded that we speak only ofcontingency, is still prevalent. But let us qualify thisprevalence: this is a tradition that matters primarily atthe heart of first world academia and has little to dowith the world-as-seen-from-below that was discussedin the previous section. When placed in contact withthe global masses, the wretched of the earth, such atheoretical tradition is meaningless… But it is indeedmeaningful in the context of this treatise because wehave been discussing, from the outset, the problem ofthe academization of marxism. And all of these newmanifestos with their endless talk of “horizons” and“hypotheses” are manifestos that mainly concern thosemarxists who are academically embedded.

This embedment means that, regardless of any attemptto reclaim the “totalizing narrative” of communism,we are still forced to deal with all of those theoreticalcritiques that forbade us from speaking of the

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necessity of communism for decades. For to speak ofnecessity was to deny the fact that history might benothing more than contingent moments incapable oftelling us anything significant––and that to demandnecessity from this chain of contingency would betantamount to totalitarianism.

In “Nietzsche, Genealogy and History” MichelFoucault argued that history should be seen as nothingmore than a procession of contingency, where nomoment produces the necessary demand for another,and every historical development must be recognizedas murderous. To speak of the necessity of revolutionin this context is to also speak of a totalizingdiscourse, another game of power and knowledge, thatis no more or less valuable than the past and futureavalanches of murder which amount to “history”.Beyond the eternal manifestation of power-knowledge,then, there is no such thing as historicaldevelopment––to imagine progress, even in thequalified sense of successive modes of production, is tosubordinate the contingent and ultimately unchangingreality of history to a totalizing narrative.

Such an understanding of history can only treatrevolutionary moments as further examples ofmurderous totalization. A revolution is no betterthan what it is revolting against––ultimately

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contingent, and its claims regarding necessity littlemore than excuses for the exercise and mobilization ofpower. According to this interpretation, the momentof revolution is simply another meaningless cipher ina swamp of contingent expressions of power-knowledge. The Bolsheviks overthrow the Tsaristregime, providing supposedly progressive andnecessary reasons for this revolution, but this is onlythe point at which one discourse supersedesanother––it has nothing to do with the necessity tosweep the Tsarist regime from the historical stage.Necessities are imagined after the event, imposed on achain of contingency, and are able to masquerade asprogressive simply because there has been a violentoccupation of the historical stage. The Bolsheviks caninvent historical necessity, and convince theirrevolutionary adherents to accept their interpretation,simply because they have successfully replaced onediscourse with another. “An event,” Foucault tells us,“is not a decision, a treaty, a reign, or a battle, but thereversal of a relationship of forces, the usurpation ofpower, the appropriation of a vocabulary turnedagainst those who had once used it.”15

Hence we discover the emergence of an analysis thatcan speak only of contingency while forbidding all

15. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”(http://noehernandezcortez.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/nietzsche-genealogy-history.pdf), 88.

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talk of necessity. Here is a demand to treat history asa series of particular ruptures, connected only to thedeployment of power, that rejects a priori all talk ofcontinuity and universality. Due to an almostneurotic desire to avoid totalization, this demand hasdone, though often unintentionally, great damage tohistory.

At the very least we should admit that the rejection oftotalization, the replacement of necessity withcontingency, was a logical response to the excesses ofrevisionism and crude historical materialism. Thepost-modern currents in thought, that along withcapitalism sought to banish communism to thenetherworld of theory, cannot be simply dismissed asa petty-bourgeois phenomenon, though it mostcertainly amounts to petty-bourgeois ideology. If weare honest, then we would have to admit that it was atheoretical retort to an equally petty-bourgeoisdeformation of communism that, by the time Chinahad fallen, was briefly hegemonic. Here was acommunism that tended to understand social realityaccording to the crudest comprehension of socialclass––an understanding that might have caused evenMarx to shudder––that excluded other oppressedsocial positions and argued that ideologies such asfeminism, anti-racism, queer radicalism, etc. were littlemore than petty-bourgeois politics that had nothing to

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do with the serious business of class struggle.

Partially in response to this crude class essentialism,which was a dogmatic desire to adhere to a puremarxism (as if it was ever “pure”), the radicalproponents of this new theoretical fad wouldchampion the idea of disunified identity-basedstruggles because, sometimes influenced by their ownexperience, the most popular communistunderstanding of necessity at that time seemedincapable of pulling these other concerns into itsorbit. In many ways this practice was the penalty ofthe sins of dogmatic and chauvinist communism, andit worth recognizing this fact and using it as anoccasion for reflection. In other words, we need toadmit that it was a necessity to take these otherconcerns into account, to understand how theypossibly determined social class, rather than dismissingthem as entirely contingent.

At the same time, however, the politics produced dueto the rejection of a totalizing necessity was a politicsthat could lead nowhere. Sites of identity-basedstruggles could only and ever produce a praxisincapable of solidarity. Theories of intersectionalitywere always banal, merely a recognition of the factthat multiple moments of oppression andexploitation, including economic class, intersect.

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Simply noting the possibility of intersection, though,is not an analysis; it is an ineffectual truism. Thesetheories were thus incapable of explaining themeaning of this intersection––after all, to provide thismeaning would be an act of totalization. Affinitygroups, safe spaces, border wars in the name of“feminism” or “queerness” or some other category ofoppression… A general theoretical chaos that couldproduce nothing more than confusion that necessarilyamounted to a political limbo.

Thus necessity again rears its unpopular head, andthose who would reject its logic would be entirelyuncomfortable with the claim that their praxis ofcontingency produces also its own necessity. For here,at a point where totalization is rejected as murderous,the valorization of contingency must become entirelynecessary. And if we examine the practice of thispolitics we are forced to conclude that these politicsnecessarily lead to the limited practice of socialreformism… for what else can identity politics, whichhas no political content beyond valorizing sites ofoppression as radical identities, produce? Definitelynot the solidarity and organization that worldhistorical revolutions have taught us are necessary forrevolution. Indeed, reformist practice is precisely theconcrete result of this type of politics––its most vocalproponents, if they are active at all, are generally

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active primarily in struggles for social reform. Thehope behind this activity, though, was the hope ofmovementism: that multiple sites of struggle wouldbecome more than the sum of their reformist parts,that the avalanche of multiplicity would produce aradical movement capable of eclipsing the simpleunity of past practices.

This practice of combining contingency withmultiplicity is probably best expressed in Deleuze andGuattari’s concept of the rhizome that is meant toreplace a revolutionary ideology based onrevolutionary unity based on the assumption that suchunity implies totalization, the capture of radical desire.The metaphor of a potato root spreading ininnumerable directions is meant to replace themetaphor of a party with roots in the masses––howcan we root ourselves in the manner of a tree if thesubterranean reality is so vast? Something rhizomaticis required, capable of spreading along multipletrajectories without any apparent unity.

Interestingly enough, a young Badiou understood thepolitical direction indicated by the theory of therhizome and, in this understanding, was able topredict the emergence of movementism at the centresof capitalism post-1968:

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“Under the anti-organizational pretexts, it is not todifficult to see the rejection of the point of view ofclass. Its theme was the need to add up the revolts(immigrants, women, ecologists, soldiers, prisoners,students, homosexuals, etc.) to enumerate thepunctual social forces to infinity, but obstinately tocombat anything resembling the political unificationof the people’s camp, seized in its antagonisticinflection, in its living class being. Organization andits alleged ‘castrating hierarchy’ make for broadtargets: the One of the multiple in revolt is a questionof content, of the politics of the people. Some hid

16. Alain Badiou, “The Fascism of the Potato”(http://www.scribd.com/doc/112405252/Alain-Badiou-The-Fascism-of-the-Potato), 1-2. What is meant, here, by “the One”versus “the Multiple”, aside from being a long-standingontological question that is tangental to this treatise, is Deleuzeand Guattari’s complaint that capitalism is a singularity thatcrushes and represses multiple expressions of identity. In thissense, any organizational unity is also a reflection of thisrepressive singularity, necessarily muting difference, and is thustantamount to a conflict between two different singularities(two opposed versions of the problematized “One”) thatnecessarily ignores the fact of multiplicity. Hence, Deleuze andGuattari’s attempt to replace the materialist dialectic (the one ofthe bourgeois order divides into the two of proletarian versusbourgeois) with their concept of the rhizome (the division issimply two versions of totality and so it is better to conceive ofresistance according to multiple lines of flight). Badiou isarguing, however, that social and historical reality does reduce,in the last instance, to a “scission” between two differentpositions and that the multiplicity of revolt necessarily requiresthe unity that can be located in the default totality of bourgeoisorder; myriad expressions of revolt may in fact demonstrate theneed for this unity. An unqualified multiplicity left to its owndevices enshrines a unified bourgeois order.

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behind the blunders of the form, here and there, inorder to deny the content. Badly camouflaged behindthe hatred of militancy was the hatred of the classstruggle. […] In effect, if the people do not have theirown politics, they will enact the politics of theirenemies: the political abhors the void.”16

Thus, in focusing on multiplicity at the expense ofunity––and especially at the expense of the primarydivision between a unified ruling class and theexploited masses whose unity is necessitated by theunity of the former––a reification of the totality ofcapitalism, the politics of the enemy, is accomplished.Decades later we have seen the result of these politics;the anti-globalization movement shattered against theunity of the state’s totality. If Badiou has since made adetour from the mindset behind the above quotation,it is only because he has also passed through a periodof retreat that has affected his attempt to reassert thename of communism. Social being does determinesocial consciousness, to a significant extent, and it isdoubtful that he would disagree with this axiom.

In any case, the desire to replace unity necessity withcontingency, and unity with multiplicity, is oftenbased on a misunderstanding of the two concepts.There is a common misconception aboutrevolutionary necessity that defines this term

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according to a crude enlightenment concept of linearprogress: here necessity is confused with destiny, as ifto argue for the scientific necessity of communism isidentical to arguing that communism will necessarilyhappen, is preordained by history. Thus, if necessitydoes indeed mean destiny then it is easy to understandwhy contingency is seen as preferable. After all, norevolution is fated; the science of history is not thekind of science that automatically determinessignificant transformations in the mode of production.

But we would be dishonest if we denied thatcommunist theory has never dabbled in thesesimplistic and quasi-superstitious historical claims:even the great communist leaders and theorists havebeen wont to argue that communism’s necessity wasalso a destiny, an unavoidable truth produced by theargument of history. Whether or not these argumentswere made for rhetorical reasons, or because thosemaking the arguments were living at a specifichistorical conjuncture (socialism was alreadyestablished and so communism could be seen as beingon its way), however, ignores the fact that, regardlessof this dabbling in antiquated concepts of unilinearprogress, many of those who have argued for necessityhave also been quite honest in their claims that thisnecessity might never emerge.

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As noted in previous chapters, Engels claimed that thescientific strength of communist theory was based onthe fact that there was a choice (and a choice is neverpreordained) between a communist future and acapitalist apocalypse––Rosa Luxemburg defined thischoice as one between socialism or barbarism. Marxclaimed that revolution was a necessity and once onespeaks of revolution one must also realize that,according to Lenin, revolutions are not spontaneousevents and thus the very fact of organizing arevolution undermines the concept of someunavoidable communist destiny. Mao spoke of eventhe stage of socialism as being a moment in therevolutionary chain that could be overthrown so thatcapitalism could be reestablished. To these insights wecan also add the insights of innumerable marxistacademics who have challenged this fated teleologicalinterpretation of necessity for over a century.

While it is true that this unilinear concept ofrevolutionary progress has often been part ofcommunist discourse, it was never properly part ofrevolutionary science––there is too much evidence tothe contrary, regardless of the occasional and spuriousclaims in the polemics of its most faithful adherents.The same adherents were also known to makecontrary claims, after all, even if some of their moredogmatic readers and militants focused on these

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throwaway lines regarding some vague notion ofscientific destiny. No critical marxist devoted to theconcept of necessity has truly believed in theinevitability of communism; only anti-communistsand those organizations that made the mistake ofaccepting this rhetorical discourse believedotherwise.17 Necessity means only that communism isnecessary to solve the problems produced bycapitalism, not that its emergence is destined: water isa necessary requirement for human existence, after all,but this does not mean that every human being willhave access to water simply because it is a necessity.

And yet these theorists, whose understanding ofcommunism parallels an anti-communist discourseinherited from the cold war era, continue to assert thisstory about necessity’s synonymity with outdatedconcepts of unilinear, destined progress. Just as itwould be ignorant to dismiss modern physics due tothe errors of the Newtonian paradigm, it is similarlyignorant to dismiss historical materialism due to thepast moments of the science that, in any case, were notas erroneous as this anti-communist narrative assumes.But such a dismissal became common sense by the end

17. Note, for example, the RCP-USA’s belief, gleaned fromtheir embarrassing “new synthesis”, that they are the firstcommunist organization to ever think beyond this“inevitabilism” when it is clear that communists have beenthinking outside of this positivist box since Marx and Engels.

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of the 20th Century in first world academic andintellectual circles: totality, unity, and necessity werereplaced with fragmentation, difference, andcontingency.

It is in this context that these new academic attemptsto reclaim communism have manifested. Therejection of necessity, universality, continuity on thepart of those who speak of hypotheses and horizonsonly makes sense if seen as a tendency to reclaimtotalization in a manner that will appeal to thetheoretical traditions that rejected this totalization inthe first place. We want to again speak of communismbut are unable to properly engage with that history weonce dismissed as totalitarian. We want to speak ofuniversality but end up endorsing particularity in ourrefusal to examine necessity.

The result is a theoretical eclecticism that is onlycapable of producing, sometimes intentionally,movementist strategies: it is better to tail adisorganized rebellion without goals, withouttheoretical organization, without a coherence bornfrom revolutionary necessity, than to coherentlyaddress the problems raised by the chain of worldhistorical revolutions. But anarchists and left liberalscan also claim these movementist rebellions, and theformer camp has more reason to adopt this

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incoherence as an organizational principle. What doesa “communist” analysis matter when it tells usnothing more significant than what the anarchistshave been preaching since Bakunin? How does anacademic assessment of “communism”, incapable ofactually stepping outside of the framework of history-as-contingency, contribute anything theoreticallysignificant? All of this recent and abstract talk ofhorizons and hypotheses is ultimately silenced bythese questions. Alter the terminology in theseaccounts, delete the word “communism”, and we areback in the same anti-communist framework thatthese new manifestos claim to transcend.

All of these accounts, from Foucault to the recentacademic reclamations of communism, share a disdainfor actual revolutionary moments. In the act ofdisparaging revolution as either totalizing or failing torepresent true liberation, they are forced to dismissthose mass movements that fought to establish a betterworld. Hence these academic fads, whatever theirstrengths, are in the last instance alien to those people,the wretched of the earth, who are still fighting for theend of capitalism.

Collaboration

The dead-end of the radical theory described earlier

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casts a shadow over any attempt to reignite anti-capitalist praxis. In this context it is no wonder thatacademics speak vaguely of horizons and ideals, thatintellectual groups invent fanciful terms andimaginary insurrections, and that movementismbecomes the default practice. We should not besurprised that these “new” radicalisms that dare tospeak the name communism are always fashionableamongst the academic left. It is quite normal, and evenencouraged, to judge past revolutionary theoryboring, predictable, and unworthy of reclamation.

When some of us speak of “revisionism” or“opportunism”, or any of those conceptual names thatwere understood and reasserted over-and-over by pastrevolutionaries, we are charged with orthodoxy.Compared to those theorists who are constantlyinventing new terminologies (here, what is exciting isoften defined by what is the most conceptuallynebulous) we appear anachronistic, old-fashioned, out-of-step with reality. Occasionally we might be toldthat we are alienating people with these old concepts,as if the new concepts are any less alienating, andthose responsible for such charges forget that, justdecades ago, we would have been charged with thesame alienating practice simply by using that old-fashioned word communism.

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(Let us leave aside, for the moment, the fact that themass revolutionary struggles at the peripheries, sincethe end of the 1980s to the present, draw from thesame theoretical tradition because it resonates withtheir understanding of the world. Let us bracket thefact that this charge of being old-fashioned is also acharge levelled at every significant third worldcommunist struggle to date––some that are happeningeven now––and pretend, as Tiqqun and the InvisibleCommittee must indeed pretend, that there are nostruggles that matter beyond the centres of globalcapitalism.)

Obviously we cannot discount attempts to conceive ofstruggle through new concepts; it is entirely dogmaticto adhere to a pure theoretical constellation and toreject all interventions that challenge static ways ofseeing the world. At the same time, as we havealready discussed, it is equally dogmatic to reject thetheoretical tradition that emerged through concreterevolutionary struggle––this may be the worst form ofdogmatism, in fact, because it echoes precisely whatwe were taught was normative by triumphalistcapitalist ideology.

The question we need to ask, then, is what clarifies thecurrent historical conjuncture and, in thisclarification, arms the masses with an ideology capable

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of producing revolution. The truth is that none ofthese new manifestos, regardless of how exciting theirtheoretical approach looks and sounds, is capable ofproviding a new framework for revolution. Asaforementioned, these “new” approaches simplyreassert the same tired theoretical substitutions thathave been proposed since the emergence of scientificsocialism––they might sound interesting, but donothing beyond the echo of their words.

Another question worth asking is this: do the broadbrush-strokes of revolutionary theory that emergedwith Marx, passed first through Lenin and thenthrough Mao, provide a simpler and clearerexplanation of theory and practice than any of these“new” approaches that attempt to ignore thistheoretical development by classifying it as orthodoxand dogmatic? This is not to say that these broadbrush-strokes should ignore and dismiss the conceptsof parallel traditions; the question simply has to dowith what framework is capable of providing a clearerpicture of reality and, in this provision, producingrevolutionary action.

In these cynical days all attempts to mobilize theconcepts of past revolutionary movements are treatedas out-of-step with intellectual fashion. Whilereturning to Marx is no longer unfashionable,

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returning to some of those theories that developedmarxism through revolutionary action is in bad taste.Tiqqun and the Invisible Committee, for example,associate Marxism-Leninism with fascism––lazilyadopting right-wing jingoism and the wisdom ofOrwell––while celebrating social chauvinists such asSade and Nietzsche.18 Despite conjuring the name ofcommunism, it is clear that the Invisible Committeesees those who have actually succeeded in makingrevolution as their enemy. So better to reconstructmarxism, if not a vague communism only slightlyinfluenced by Marx (but just Marx!), according tonewer and exciting concepts, a fanciful jargon buffet,than draw upon that tired conceptual terrain that wasjudged a wasteland by the so-called end of history.

But why should we settle for intellectual fads, andwhy should the practice of revolution be confusedwith the business of academic fashion? We must recallthat Marx and Engels broke from academic fashionand chose instead to develop and establish their theorywithin working-class struggle. By doing so, theyachieved something far more significant than theywould have produced had they remained within theivory tower circles: a theory that resonated with thosewho possessed the concrete need to overthrow

18. The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection, 93-94.

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capitalism. And though they might have been deemedunfashionable by the academic standards of the time,they produced a revolutionary legacy that eclipseswhatever legacy has been left by their onceacademically popular contemporaries whose namesare only now remembered mainly because of Marxand Engels––Feuerbach, Stirner, Bauer, evenDuhring…

None of this is to say that we should ignore the factthat the word “communism” has become ratherunfashionable at the centres of global capitalism––thisis the reason, after all, for all of these new attempts atreclamation. We should know, however, thatcommunism is unfashionable at the imperialist centresdue to decades of anti-communist propagandacombined with a privileged labour aristocracy and theaforementioned “end of history” discourse. Soperhaps the desire to rebrand communism with a newlanguage and costume is an attempt to reconstruct itspopularity amongst the anti-communist “middle-class”at the centres of capitalism––a communism thatsounds different but that is secretly the same as the oldcommunism that we once rejected.

But rebranding communism, aside from thecommercial logic inherent in such an approach, canonly fail if it is aimed solely at that class of people who

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possess the privilege to wallow in the theoreticalobscurantism that is offered as a replacementrevolutionary theory. That is, a theory that can onlybe appreciated by those petty-bourgeois intellectualswho believe that conceptual opaqueness impliesradicalism. If these theoretical substitutions do notresonate with the lived conditions of the mostexploited and oppressed, but only by those whoseclass outlook is somewhat elitist, then we mustwonder at their revolutionary status.

This does not mean we should endorse some banalanti-intellectualism and fetishize illiteracy asproletarian. After all, even the revolutionary theoryof yesteryear might at first seem opaque now thatlarge portions of the masses have been socialized, afterdecades of anti-communism, to forget the conceptsthat emerged from their struggles. Moreover, there isthat theory and an accompanying philosophy that,due to the complexity of the terrain, will necessarilyrequire significant education and study to grasp––puremathematics, theoretical physics, philosophy of logic,ontology––but none of these areas of study pretend, atleast not regularly, to be theories about makingrevolution. Hence we should wonder at those opaquetheories that did not emerge from revolutionarystruggle, that were imagined by academics usuallydisconnected from these struggles, but claim to be the

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answer to the masses’ quandary about makingrevolution.

The point, here, is not whether or not a theory isdifficult to understand; this is problem that can besolved by making education accessible to the mostoppressed and exploited. Rather, whenever weencounter a new theory that speaks of overthrowingthe existing social order, and claims to offer theconceptual tools for doing so, we should ask whetherthese tools are capable of providing a concrete analysisof concrete conditions and reflect the lived experienceof the world’s most exploited and oppressed. Whatwe often discover when we ask this question, though,are theories that primarily speak to the livedexperience of a very small and particular populationbased at the centres of capitalism: academics andintellectuals, activists already converted to socialism…the very lived experience of the chic theoretician whois attempting to make what was once understood as aprivileged and “petty-bourgeois” social position intothe basis for revolutionary action! Theory alienatedfrom practice that contrives to speak in the name ofpraxis should be treated with suspicion.

There is at least one answer to this problem, a way toescape the charge of academic obscurantism: morethan a few of these new theorists have claimed, from

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the 1960s to the present, that privileged students andacademics have become the new revolutionaryagent––a new vanguard, but in a spontaneous sense.Middle-class children rioting in the streets of firstworld privilege, students versed in obscurantist jargonsmashing Starbucks windows, movementist leadersfamiliar with the discourse of critical theory.Anything to ignore the fact that these eclectic attemptsto re-establish communism are entirely moribund,disconnected from what would make them trulyrevolutionary: an organized and militant massmovement spear-headed by the grave-diggers ofcapitalism.

While it is tempting for those of us who are petty-bourgeois intellectuals and students to believe that wewill command the revolution––that our class privilegeis more of an asset than an inhibition––we need torecognize this empty fantasy for what it is. Our classhas never led revolutionary movements and has mostoften ended up hampering these movements; thetheory we occasionally invent to justify theassumption that we will command the nextrevolutionary movement might be an attempt tomaintain our privilege in a movement that should beaimed at ending privilege altogether. Here is a terriblenotion, one that we avoid whenever we embrace thosetheories that justify our class privilege: we will more

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than likely be sent down to the countryside, whateverthis “countryside” happens to be; we will have to bereeducated by serving the masses. Most of us areterrified by this possibility, disgusted by the necessityof rectification, which is why we like to equivocate theold communism with fascism.

We would rather imagine ourselves as heroic theorists,struggling against dogmatism to establish new ways ofseeing the world. And if we imagine ourselves asheroic, if our “labour” is the contribution of newtheoretical concepts, then we can argue that there isno need for rectification––it would be a crime to sendus down to the metaphorical countryside, suchrectification is a violation of freedom! But the greatestrevolutions must force those who occupy positions ofprivilege down to the level of the mostunderprivileged, if only to place those who were nevergiven the opportunity to develop themselvesintellectually in contact with people who have had themeans and time to be students and intellectuals. Topretend that this is a violation of freedom, to feeldisdain for these necessary downward movements, isto reject the basic principle of communism and thusreveal our failure to adhere to anything but its name.

We need to recognize that being “dragged down” tothe level of the masses is at the same time a “dragging

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up” of the masses to a level that, under the currentstate of affairs, only some are privileged enough tooccupy. To reject this radical moment of equalizationis to reify class, to believe that even after a revolutionwe are superior to those who were never given ouropportunities, to act as if the necessity ofrevolutionary levelling is akin to oppression. Thosewho maintain that going “down to the countryside” isoppressive must also maintain, at the same time, thatit is not oppressive for the people of this“countryside” to remain in ignorance and continue towork so that we can benefit from their labour.

It is interesting to note that the most prevalent left-wing anti-intellectualism––where critical literacy itselfis treated as “bourgeois”––generally maintains thesame elitism. By placing value on some imagined“authentic” proletarian intelligence and culture, itargues against the necessity for mass education andmass reeducation: it claims that the “dragging up” iselitist because it is secretly fearful of being draggeddown. The proletariat must stay true to thisimaginary essence, to its supposedly illiterateconsciousness, that is understood as beautiful in itsignorance of anything but its spontaneousrevolutionary values. The intellectual division oflabour remains, cloaked simply by a clumsy attemptto argue that some illiterate but authentic “working

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class culture” (as if the proletariat possesses ahomogenous culture) should be valued and preserved.It is worth noting that this class culturalism tends tobe promoted by those people who already possessintellectual privilege; this politics is an attempt toreplace theories of declassing with a quasi-theory ofpatronization.

In any case, we do not want to admit that oursupposedly “new” theories are quite often little morethan cleverly concealed justifications of our classprivilege. We do not wish to wonder at our ability totheorize in the course of an actual revolution… Best toassume our leadership of a revolution, best to inventtheories that justify our right to lead, best to packagecommunism in wrapping we find pleasing.

But instead of tendering new theories, new ways topackage communism that are always doomed tofailure, we need to confront our historical inability toaddress the anti-communist ideology that has becomeprevalent at the centres of capitalism: we collaboratedwith our silence, we accepted the bourgeois discourseof failure, we refused to organize and share oureducation, and we hid within the abyss of academicprivilege, withdrawing from struggle, allowingcommunism to become an unfashionable term. Wecollaborated and still collaborate with every lie

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promoted about the failed Soviet Union or the failedCommunist China and their supposed crimes againsthumanity––falsely compared to fascism due to adiscourse of “totalitarianism” that we have also, out offear and ignorance, supported. We have collaboratedwhen we chose to tail rebellions, refusing to organizethem into anything militantly coherent, out of thefear that the masses were not ready for revolution. Wecollaborate when we refuse to recognize the ongoingcommunist people’s wars at the peripheries of globalcapitalism and fail to transpose this experience intoour own concrete circumstances. We collaboratewhen we dismiss the demands of necessity, embracesome banal notion of contingency, and refuse to speakof communism as anything other than an abstractideal.

Language Idealism

Academic collaboration reaches its nadir when it sinksinto a vague language idealism. Here is where theconcept of communism is misunderstood as a Platonicform. Here is where the concrete politics of thisconcept are reduced to a language game and thenecessity of revolution is abandoned.

When some theorists claim that communism is anotion that can be projected into the distant past as a

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hypothesis that was always present, then therevolutionary articulation of this name that was firstprovided by Marx and Engels––and thus meantsomething different from the name that was used, if itwas used, in prior epochs––is dismissed. Names areconflated with concepts and a concept that could onlyemerge at the end of the 19th Century, regardless ofthe etymological cipher used to earmark this concept,is suddenly imagined to have existed prior to the onlymoment in which it could have emerged.

The word “communism” is thus dissected according toa vague notion, dislocated from what it meant when itwas used by Marx and Engels, and can bemisunderstood as transhistorical and a priori: therewere always movements that believed in community,in holding property in common––why not pretendthat the crude and utopian socialisms of the earlyChristians were conceptually the same as the scientificsocialism expounded by Marx and Engels? Theanswer should be evident, though its simplicity mightappear at first glance to be too vulgar to be accepted:Marx and Engels went to great lengths to demonstratethe difference of their socialism from the utopiansocialisms of their time and thus named it ascommunist so as to not just use the word socialist thatwas also being used by the utopians; hence, they werenot at all interested in using this word as it had been

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used in the past, regardless of the vague conceptualsimilarities the name evoked.

And yet academic collaborators have consistentlyobsessed over a name and, in this obsession, confusedthe moment of naming with the moment ofconceptualization. Jean-Luc Nancy’s essay“Communism, the Word” is paradigmatic of thislanguage idealism: here is an instance where aphilosopher uses some vague notion of etymologicaldestiny to confuse names with concepts.“Communism” as a word is traced back to the 11thand 14th centuries; some similarities between themodern conception and the nebulous pre-modernconception are established (“people having incommon” and “common property” and ultimately“being-in-common”), and then the modern [andrevolutionary] notion is dismissed because of aninability to adhere to the name’s supposedetymological roots. The end result? “Communism,therefore, means the common condition of all thesingularities of subjects, that is of all the exceptions, allthe uncommon points whose network makes aworld… It does not belong to the political.”19 A vagueand nebulous definition, designed to exclude therevolutionary definition, based on some etymological

19. Jean-Luc Nancy, Communism, the Word(http://www.lacan.com/essays/?page_id=126).

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game that takes the Latin communitas as its point ofdeparture. Meaning is located in etymology; anyconceptualization of the word that does not strictlycohere to its etymological origins is erroneous.

But Marx and Engels did not employ the namecommunism because they sought fidelity with anesoteric and etymological meaning; it was simply oneword, chosen amongst many, to define a scientificconcept that, during their time, was entirely new andin search of a name. They could have used otherwords, if they had so chosen, and only used the wordcommunism because it appeared to represent whatthey meant. And what they meant was a concept, notsimply a name, but a concept to which this name isnow irrevocably attached. As Engels wrote in 1885:

“Communism among the French and Germans,Chartism among the English, now no longer appearedas something accidental which could just as well nothave occurred. These movements now presentedthemselves as a movement of the modern oppressedclass, the proletariat, as the more or less developedforms of its historically necessary struggle against theruling class, the bourgeoisie; as forms of the classstruggle, but distinguished from all earlier classstruggles by this one thing, that the present-dayoppressed class the proletariat, cannot achieve its

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emancipation without at the same time emancipatingsociety as a whole from division into classes and,therefore, from class struggles. And Communism nowno longer meant the concoction, by means of theimagination, of an ideal society as perfect as possible,but insight into the nature, the conditions and theconsequent general aims of the struggle waged by theproletariat.”20

To speak of some inner communist truth based on arecourse to language games, then, is ultimatelydisingenuous: it tells us nothing of the conceptualterrain opened by those theorists who were arguingfor the necessity of revolutionary science. Althoughone is always welcome to embrace the meanings ofnames before the emergence of a coherent concept,this recourse to an incoherent hypothesis or someetymological essence is an abandonment of history.

For if etymology determines conceptual destiny thenevery science is non-sensical. Modern particle physics,after all, utilizes the word atom and only the anti-scientific ignorant would dare to argue that today’sphysicists are committing a grave error by failing toadhere to that word’s etymological roots. Indeed, to

20. Friedrich Engels, On The History of the CommunistLeague(http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/communist-league/1885hist.htm)

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suggest that the modern scientist remain faithful to theoriginal ancient Hellenic conceptualization of thename “atom” in order to properly understand theirscience is laughable at best… At worst it is reactionary.

Words in any language are always mediated by thehistorical moment. Words are not substances; they donot possess intrinsic essences. Concepts stand overand above words, though they often use specific namesthat communicate some sort of vague meaning to theconcept––such a meaning, though, is ultimatelydemonstrated in a succession of a posteriori wordsdesigned to further demarcate a concept. We areindeed limited to our language, but this language isnot in and of itself a destiny. Etymological analysis isuseful to explain a given word’s origin but it does notdecide conceptual meaning. As Wittgenstein onceclaimed, “the meaning of a word is its use inlanguage.”21 And since marxists believe that a givenlanguage is in the last instance the product of concretehistory, and that language is always mediated by socialand historical circumstances, we must go further andclaim that the meaning of a word is ultimatelydetermined by concrete social processes.

After all, this attempt to locate the meaning of the

21. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, I § 43.

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word in its historical point of origin immediatelybecomes non-sensical, and even eurocentric, once wetake into account communities that do not share thesame grammatical history. Communists in India,Nepal, and Afghanistan, for example, do not have theetymological concept of communitas––a Latinword––from which to derive the modern concept ofcommunism that, for them, is precisely the conceptoriginally theorized by Marx and Engels. Does thismean that they have failed to properly understood thisconcept because it belongs to those languagecommunities who share Latin and Greek as theirgrammatical roots? Obviously not. But does thismean, on the other hand, that they are importing aconcept that, due to the Latin origins of its name, isitself a eurocentric imposition on their ownstruggles––clearly Badiou’s form of language idealismwould deny this etymological tendency since, quiteobviously, we can find utopian “communist” practicesin these non-European spaces as well. Contrary toBadiou’s assumption, though, these early practices,like those elsewhere, were not at all the same practicesas the clear-cut theoretical and scientific concept at theend of the nineteenth century. Just as one cannotproject capitalism back into the ancient world, one canalso not project communism into the pre-capitalistpast.

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Any reclamation of the word communism, then,cannot be a reclamation that relies only on thisnebulous academic exercise which attempts to locatemeaning outside of concrete historical practices andinstead obsesses over names and vague utopianarticulations that preceded the most coherent andcontemporary variant of the concept. Concepts arenot transhistorical but are produced by humans livingin real social and historical circumstances.

Returning to the demand of necessity, then, we mustask what practices this type of language idealismnecessitates. Nothing concrete because such theoriesreject the concrete in favour of nebulousproclamations… And if nothing concretelyrevolutionary is produced by these radical theories,then their radicalism is little more than a theoreticalgesture.

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CHAPTER 3 : NEW RETURNS

COMMUNISM. We know it is a word to be usedwith caution. Not because, in the grand parade ofwords, it may no longer be very fashionable. Butbecause our worst enemies have used it, and continueto do so. We insist. Certain words are likebattlegrounds: their meaning, revolutionary orreactionary, is a victory, to be torn from the jaws ofstruggle.

The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection

If we are to speak of a new return to revolutionarycommunism then we must first think through theproblem of an old return. Having so far rejected all ofthe “new” rearticulations of communism that attemptto distance the name from the conceptual content ofits history, it would be easy to assume that I amadvocating a return to the way communism wasconceptualized and practiced before the “end ofhistory” was declared. Such an assessment would besimultaneously true and false.

On the one hand, it is true that this treatise isadvocating a return to an understanding ofcommunism that has been distanced from thecontemporary renewal of its name. After all, againstthe rise of post-modernism and chic radical theories, Ihave argued for a return to the recognition of

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“revolutionary science” and its truth procedures,developed and established through a dialectic ofsuccess and failure, that resulted in a rich theoreticalterrain. Such a terrain is far more useful forrevolutionary practice, for making sense of the worldso as to transform it, than contemporary movementistcommunism; the former should not be rejected due toa cold war ideology that has socialized us intothinking of it only as catastrophe. Moreover, I feelthat there is an ahistorical discourse that has produceda totalized representation of past communistmovements and theories: it is quite common toencounter the argument, made particularly by post-modernists and post-colonialists, that the marxism ofthe past could not theorize anything other than acrude and eurocentric notion of social class.

On the other hand, however, this treatise is notarguing for a return to a communism that is unawareof the developments of social and theoretical strugglethat have taken place since the end of the 1980s. Thatis, it would be false to assume that I am demanding areturn to the particular communism that waspracticed directly after the October Revolution in1917, or even to the particular communism that waspracticed in the course of the Chinese Revolutionunder Mao. The most obvious problem of makingsuch a demand is the fact that these revolutions didfail. And though we should not comprehend these

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failures according to an end of history discourse thatforbids memory––we should recognize that there wereimportant truths established in these revolutions,hard-won by the struggles of past revolutionaries––weshould not fetishize the possibility of perfectrepetition.

There is, after all, a rather dogmatic way of assessingour revolutionary past: all failures are attributed to alack of fidelity to the perfect theory of makingrevolution, the result of the errors of individuals andthe organizations they controlled; the solution is torepeat precisely what allowed these revolutions tohappen but with attention to a proper and “pure”understanding of theory. Is this not the rallying cryof every marginal Trotskyist sect? “If only comradeTrotsky had been in charge of the Bolsheviks afterLenin; the revolution was ruined when Stalinbastardized a perfectly good revolutionary theory!”As noted in the previous chapter, however, there is nopure communist theory just as there is no purescience. Indeed, an absolutist conceptualization ofscience is one in which scientific truths cannot bechallenged by successive experiments; this is a scienceclosed to the future and, due to this closure, dogmaticrather than scientific. The concept of necessityexplains why this is the case: encounters withhistorical necessity demand that we establish rupturaltruths in continuity with an unfolding truth

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procedure. Hence, we must maintain the samestandard of assessment when we engage with theterrain of revolutionary theory and practice; we mustassert that there is no ideal communism to which wecan ever return. There are no precise formulae butthere are universal axioms. It is easy to conflate thesetwo categories and end up either fetishizing ordismissing the concepts developed throughout thehistory of revolutionary struggle.

Many of us can easily recall those ortho-communistswho frequent activist demonstrations, actions, teach-ins, and panels. Missionaries of a communism thatbelongs to the first two decades of the 20th Century,these tragic individuals deliver the same“interventions” and “denunciations” at every eventwhere they are permitted to speak. The same formulais given in every instance with little attention to theevent’s particular context: “the solution is for theworking-class to unite and overthrow capitalism.”Often this formula is meant as a denunciation becausethese unimaginative persons are under the impressionthat nobody in attendance has ever thought aboutunity or the overthrow of capitalism based on the factthese events concerned Palestinian self-determination,or the role of politics in art, or a current example ofstate repression. Indeed, perhaps another reason manyof us never wished to identify with communism in thepast was because we mistakingly associated it with

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those fringe dogmatists who were always making thesame vague claims about working-class unity based ona working-class that was clearly imaginary because,according to all empirical evidence, these “comrades”did not represent the interests of the masses in whosename they spoke.

We should be able to recognize such an old return tocommunism as a return that is ultimatelyconservative. Learning nothing of how struggle hasdeveloped since 1917 to the present––filtering nearly acentury of history through unyielding dogmaticcategories of thought that in fact deform history so asto remain ignorant despite a veneer of savvy “know-how”––this practice of communism lacks vitality. Ofcourse, it is correct to argue that the solution is tounify the proletariat so as to overthrow capitalism, butthis is a slogan that deals only with the last instanceand, as Althusser never tired of reminding us, the lastinstance often never arrives. How many historicalmoments and sites of struggle operate so as to mediatethis truism about working-class unity and force us toask about the meaning of unity, the composition anddefinition of the working-class, the precise strategy ofoverthrowing capitalism? What does this sloganeeringhave to do with every particular event that may betalking about something that is also vital, and alsoconnected to class struggle? Could it be thatformulaic maxims might indeed shut down our ability

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to understand the content of particular sites ofstruggle? And why is it that these individuals oftenassume that many of these other instances of socialstruggle, mainly because they do not resemble adoctrinaire definition of praxis, are not themselvesabout class unity and the overthrow of capitalism? Inother words, could these “comrades” actually beopposing concrete class struggle by mystifying thedebate according to an idealized definition of theproletariat and bourgeoisie? We could ask morerhetorical questions but there is no point; most of usare viscerally repelled by the idea of becoming thiskind of old-fashioned marxist––it is as compelling asbecoming a Mormon.

Let us go further, leaving behind these tragiccommunist conservatives, and think through the factof communist catastrophe. We should have noproblem admitting that past communist movementsdid end in catastrophe. These were catastrophes notfor the reasons provided by various anti-communistnarratives, but because of the trauma of these failureswas due to the very fact of the earth-shaking successesthey established. That is, the failures of both theRussian and Chinese Revolutions were catastrophicbecause they fell from such great heights––they hadaccomplished so much, unleashing the world-historicalpotential of the masses only to collapse. Whereascapitalism is a catastrophe because of its successes,

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communism was a catastrophe because its successeswere overthrown by its eventual failures. It is nottragic that capitalism is catastrophic because it is not afailure on the part of capitalism: according to itsinternal logic it does precisely what it is meant todo––exploitation, commodification, over-accumulation, etc. Indeed, the problem is not that“capitalism doesn’t work” (as some slogans would haveus think) but that it works very well22. Pastexperiences of communism, however, have been tragicin the same way that Oedipus, Antigone, and Hamletare tragic: we celebrate them and mourn the ways inwhich they have been laid low.

And yet communism is not a tragic hero that, upondying, can never be recovered except in the literaryepic. Communism’s tragedy is due to the fact ofhistorical necessity: it is always open to the future,

22. To be fair, there are those utopian capitalists who areenamoured with Ayn Rand, Smith’s “invisible hand”, and otherunscientific understandings of capitalism who actually dobelieve that capitalism is not working in the way it was“intended” to work. These are speculative fantasies and poordefinitions of capitalism that are forced to rely on a vague andsupernatural definition of the market. Most successfulcapitalists are realists who understand very well the meaning ofcapitalism. These realists also have their ideologues, hard-minded “pragmatists” who scoff at the utopianism of theirlibertarian peers, whose only moral value is in their honesty.Thomas Friedman, for example, has argued that the market’s“invisible hand” also requires an invisible fist.

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reversed upon each new return that seeks to reignitethe greatness that was overcome by failure––a seekingthat proceeds by grasping the meaning of thisgreatness and what led to its failure. By acceptingwhat truths were established, what errors producedfailure, each moment of communist necessity canpossibly establish new truths and encounter successivefailures. Hence the Bolsheviks under Lenin overcamethe failures of the Second International under Kautskyand Bernstein. Hence the Communist Party of Chinaunder Mao overcame the failures of the ThirdInternational under Stalin and Khrushchev.

We do no favours to the revolutionary masses’ pastsacrifices by acting as if this past is either beyondreproach or utterly reprehensible. To speak of a newreturn is to speak of a way in which to make sense of ahistory of successes and failures through the livedexperience of the present. Moreover, all of thequestions raised by those radical theories that haverejected this revolutionary past need to be answeredby this new return, and not always in a dismissivemanner.

To speak of a new return is to recognize that the pastalways returns through the present. We need torecognize this return rather than allowing it to speakthrough our unconscious actions. History has itsrevenge, and it is not worth quoting that annoying

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Santayana platitude––of which even conservativesmake much ado––to recognize this point. Marxrecognized the same point earlier, after all, and did soin the context of thinking through social movementswhere history might indeed repeat as tragedy andfarce. To be unaware of the weight of deadgenerations is to repeat all of the mistakes of the past:movementism has been doing this for decades;communism cannot afford to make the same error.

So if we are to think through the possibility of a newreturn we must also think through the way in whichsuch a new return emerged, at the centres ofcapitalism, in the recent past and, following thisinvestigation, remember the ways in which there havealso been new returns to all of the erroneous practicesthat could prevent us from ever pursuing a similarnew return now––or even in the future when the samemistakes are repeated. Anti-revisionism and the “NewLeft”, all of the reformist traps, the false promises ofspeculative theory, and finally the necessity of a newreturn to a contemporary anti-revisionism against thenew return to groundless utopian communisms.

Anti-revisionism

All of the academic collaborations mentioned in theprevious chapter are little more than history repeatedas tragedy, if not farce. In the past generations of

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revolutionary struggle at the centres of capitalismthere arose a “New Left” that also attempted toreconfigure communist ideology because of apresumption of failure: the Soviet revolution wasapproaching the moment of revisionism and, due tothis approach, some argued for the need to return tothe foundations of marxism for a reassessment ofrevolutionary philosophy––both the Frankfurt Schooland the Situationists, to name two significantexamples of the New Left, argued for this return and,in the course of making this argument, defended theneed for an academic reassessment of revolutionaryscience.

These academic rapprochements, because they werealways little more than theory lacking practice, wereincapable of recognizing those movements that werealso calling the current state of revolutionary praxisinto question but were doing so in a manner thatignored the cautious academic insights of the NewLeft. For the New Left failed to recognize theChinese Revolution just as it failed to recognizeinnumerable anti-colonial revolutions influenced bythat world historical event in China.

While this primarily academic regroupment argued fora theoretically opaque (but practically banal)rebooting of marxian philosophy, an “other left”––theleft of the peripheries, the revolutions beyond the

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scope of academic civility––demanded a return to therevolutionary marxism that was considered uncouthbut, in this return, also a theoretical developmentbeyond the limits reached by the Soviets. Where theNew Left lapsed into critiques of “totalitarianism” inan effort to produce a marxist philosophy that couldescape the traps of actually existing socialism, thisother left theorized a continuity with the bannedscience that, in the moment of continuity, wouldnecessitate a further point of rupture. Can we returnto a foreclosed past, it was argued, and in grasping thedemands of this past also grasp the necessity forrevolutionary transformation? Here was a questionthat these academic leftists could not answer becausethey had dismissed it out of hand. Moreover, suchdismissals were not simply academic: Horkheimerbecame a conservative reactionary; Adorno refused totake a principled stance on the Vietnam War andinsultingly compared the anti-imperialist studentmovement (that would birth the Red Army Fractionand other urban guerrilla movements) to the HitlerYouth.

Hence the rise of the so-called “New CommunistMovement”, the anti-revisionism of yesteryear,throughout the centres of capitalism. Against theoverly academic standard of the New Left, these anti-revisionists raised the demand for a new return to thedialectic of actually existing revolution; against a

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retreat into banal student politics, they defended thevery concepts the New Left claimed were out-of-dateand, in this defense, produced a period of struggle thatwas far more significant and interesting than any ofthe theoretical output of the New Left.23 Althoughmany of these anti-revisionist militants were oncetrained in the discourse of the New Left, and indeedlearned from some of its useful insights, theydiscarded the limitations of this discourse in the faceof revolutionary necessity.

Thus, when judged according to the standard ofrevolution, the New Communist Movement shouldbe considered far more significant than the New Left:these anti-revisionist Marxist-Leninist groups,however limited they might have been, were notcontent to focus on theory; they returned to thenecessity of class struggle and, in this return, producedinnumerable moments of creative theory that eclipsedthe New Left in the terrain of revolutionary praxis.If the contributions of the New Communist

23. I am not arguing, here, that there is nothing useful in thetheory and philosophy produced by the New Left. Indeed, Ithink that there were important aspects of this theory that,regardless of its problems, was useful in theorizing thepossibility of a marxism that could be critical of the CPSU,that was becoming revisionist at the time, without beingTrotskyist. Moreover, some of the New Left’s engagementwith culture are still relevant. In this sense, it is is interesting tonote that the Red Army Fraction was somewhat influenced byHerbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man, one of the iconicworks of the New Left.

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Movement are generally forgotten by those whocontinue to adore the New Left, it is because the latterwere preserved in academic discourse. Academia has along institutional memory; universities controllibraries and sites of publication, the ability to freezethe thought of its favoured intellectuals in time andreproduce, when it is necessary, the popular academicbooks of a past decade. The militants of the NewCommunist Movement, however, did not controlprinting presses or journals; most of their publicationswere pamphlets, programmes, self-published books.

When the anti-revisionist movement of that timecollapsed, the contributions of this vanishingmovement, published by organizations that had ceasedto exist, suddenly became scarce.24 Academia does nothave to deal with this impediment since it is also abourgeois institution: it remains even if the New Leftof the past no longer exists, and since it remains it canrepublish the work of its popular leftists, sellpublication rights to other established presses, andpropagate the thought of an intellectual movementthat was never as important as the vanished movementthat had once outpaced its influence amongst themasses. The ideas of the New Left will continue toresonate in academia, but the terrain in which the

24. Many of these publications, however, can now be accessedonline at the Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism Online(https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/).

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theory of the New Communist Movementresonated––the terrain of concrete class struggle––is aspace that has been largely cleansed, for variousreasons, of the revolutionary theory of the pastgeneration.

In this context, academia even preserves the memoryof thinkers who were marginal to the New Left, letalone unimportant and completely disconnected fromthe popular social struggles of the time. For example,we can find contemporary academic leftists citing HalDraper, a rather unremarkable thinker whose“socialism from below” is a better slogan than it is atheory, but dismissing all of the possibly excitingtheoretical developments of the New CommunistMovement since this movement operated largelyoutside of the boundaries of academia.

So if history repeats itself, either as tragedy or farce,then we can understand the current academic fadaccording to the vicissitudes of the past: those whospeak of communist hypotheses and horizons are the“new left” of today, another generation of academicsalienated from class struggle who are attempting torefocus our intention on a supposedly “new” and“fresh” approach to communism. Just as theircounterparts of the previous generation ignored therevolutions that were eclipsing the disintegratingSoviet revolution, today’s new left ignores the people’s

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wars and revolutionary struggles that are not at allinterested in their specious insights.

A new phase of anti-revisionism at the centres ofcapitalism is required, one that is already in theprocess of emergence. And this phase must begin bymilitantly aligning itself with those revolutionarymovements that are producing people’s wars and, inthese productive moments, also producing the germ ofrevolutionary theory. Now, in the very moment thatthis generation’s version of the New Left is publishingtreatises on the reclamation of communism, we alsosee the germ of an anti-revisionism that will againeclipse those radical academics who, in imagining thatthey are embarking upon the uncharted seas of newtheory, are unconsciously repeating all of the errors oftheir predecessors.

The Electoral Trap

At the very least we can be thankful that many oftoday’s new communisms are anti-revisionist enoughto reject the electoral system. Some of them arenotable for recognizing the uselessness of evenparticipating in the spectre of contemporary state-sanctioned elections: Badiou has referred to such ademocratic practice as a “bourgeois trap” that shouldbe rejected entirely; the Invisible Committee claims“that it’s only against voting itself that people

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continue to vote.”25 So, according to some of thesecontemporary reclamations, we are at least on an anti-revisionist trajectory. We should expect nothing less;we should even wonder why there are still communistparties and marxist organizations that run inelections, attempt to enter bourgeois parties, and basetheir entire strategy on an a priori assumption thatthere can be a peaceful co-existence with capitalism.

Anarchists have always been more militant in theirrejection of state conventions, though not always forthe right reasons, and so the rejection of the electoraltrap on the part of those reclamations of communismthat approach anarchism might not be surprising.Rather, it is when we find anarchists talking aboutelectoral practice as a valid tactic that we are surprised.

Of course, there are also those amongst today’s newleft (which is the same as yesterday’s New Left),militants of a new reclamation of communism, thatfind such a rejection irresponsible. To be fair, thischarge of irresponsibility is not premised on thedoctrine of “peaceful co-existence”––all of those busyreclaiming communism for a new generation at leastrecognize that communism cannot be voted intoreality––but simply on the assumption that we should

25. The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection, 23.

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not abandon any terrain of social struggle. If oneparty is capable of defending social welfare better thananother, it is argued, then it is our responsibility topush them into power while continuing to strugglebeyond the limits of the framework of socialdemocracy.

Old arguments are wrenched from particular socialand historical contexts in order to justify the practiceof pragmatic electoral participation. Despite allefforts to kick the “antiquated” terminology ofMarxism-Leninism out the door, it returns throughthe window––but stripped of its revolutionary vitality.Sometimes the old slur of “ultra-leftism” is used, butwith anxiety and embarrassment. Those who rejecteverything Lenin wrote about opportunism andorganization are wont to fall back on his argumentregarding electoral participation in Britain, in theearly decades of the 20th Century, and the “infantile”nature of refusal. Hence Lenin becomes authoritativeonly in reference to electoral pragmatism… But if hehas been dismissed as an authority in every othercontext, why should we bother to conjure his ghost inthis particular area? Simply because we are hauntedby everything we have abandoned and, in thishaunting, seek to hold on to those aspects of the pastthat justify our behaviour in the here and now.

But to treat elections as a viable space of struggle now,

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decades following the ascendancy of a discourse thatproclaimed capitalism “the end of history”, is a grandact of cynicism. This cynicism is one that is alreadyaware that it is not viable to assume that communismcan be voted into existence: we know that elections donot matter, and that capitalism continues itsmurderous onslaught, regardless of what party is inpower. To waste time and energy, then, in a strugglethat will not move us any closer to our distanthorizon is to participate in a convention we recognizeas fraudulent… It is a bit like an unemployed biologistwho pays the bills, and maintains some sort of“influence” over her students, by teaching six-daycreationism at a private religious school.

The truth is that, by rejecting the theories oforganization and strategy born of necessity, we areoften only capable of struggling in those reformistspaces that the current social order considers viable.We know nothing else; an imagination of practice hasatrophied. Movementism as a whole promotes such astrategy: in lieu of the “coming insurrection”, lurkingbeyond that unapproachable horizon, and in lieu ofbuilding a militantly structured organizational force,we might as well busy ourselves with damage controlwithin the framework of the current state of affairs.At the very least we can achieve some results, nomatter how paltry and useless, in the space ofbourgeois democracy than we can in the odd

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demonstration or radical parade. Seattle and QuebecCity produced nothing but spectacle. Years after theArab Spring and Occupy and the might of capitalismand imperialism are as strong as ever. But if we areable to vote into power someone who is evenmarginally sympathetic to our politics, regardless ofwhether or not they actually do anything, then we canbe successful at something, even if it is simply thesuccess of getting a politician elected.

Here, it is worth wondering whether this cynical andpragmatic understanding of parliamentarianism isbetter than the old left’s revisionist illusions aboutparticipating in the bourgeois electoral system. Whileit is tempting to argue that the former is refreshinglyhonest, I would argue that the latter is probably morehonest in that it is actually not participating in deceit.Indeed, those old communist parties that still runcandidates in various elections do not recognize thecontradiction of their practice; they have variousrhetorical strategies and dogmas that allow them tobelieve that they are engaged in revolutionary practiceand represent the will of the proletariat. One onlyneeds to argue for an hour with an average member ofthe Communist Party USA or the Communist Partyof Canada or the Communist Party of India (Marxist)or any other similar organization to realize that this isthe case––they will accuse you of being a counter-revolutionary and in league with the bourgeoisie

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simply because you challenge their political direction.They truly do believe that they can vote communisminto existence, or at the very least organize primarilywithin bourgeois democracy. Those who believe thisis an illusion, however, and sublimate their energy inelectoral pragmatism cannot defend their practice withsuch a fantastical doctrine.

But what other options, our pragmatist might argue,do we have while waiting for the communist horizonand the next convergence of movement forces? Theanswers come quickly, perhaps too quickly, since theyhave been the answers for decades: rebuild a new leftthat is better than the old left, embed oneself withinthe struggles of trade-unions…

The Refoundationalist Trap

Unfortunately, at the centres of imperialism,refoundationalism is the most common way in whicha renewal of communism is attempted, one proposedsolution to the electoral trap. Rather than establishinga movement theoretically unified in revolutionarynecessity––that is, establishing the kernel of arevolutionary party of a new type––the tendency isinstead to establish projects and processes andnetworks and assemblies that attempt to unify a vagueand fractured left that has no intention of achievingclarity or unity. Assuming (and often correctly) that

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the left is dead, refoundationalism asserts that thisdeath is precisely the death that was declared bycapitalism and that, in order to live again, yet anothernew left must be established. The strategy is to gatherall the elements of moribund left grouplets into onegrouping and pray that something that is greater thanthe sum of its parts will emerge from this process ofgathering.

Here is yet another horizon projected into the distantfuture, a hypothesis that will magically be solved bysimply mixing together people and groups who appearto share the same ideology. Again, there is nothingnew to this approach, regardless of what some of itsdefenders might claim, and it should not be surprisingthat the refoundationalist tactic is not mutuallyexclusive to movementism––indeed, the latter tends toemerge from the former. For when a variety oforganizations with competing ideologies and strategiesare gathered together under one banner, the onlytheoretical unity that can be achieved is the mostvague anti-capitalism. Since revolutionary strategy isderived from revolutionary unity, the vagueness oftheory produces a vagueness in practice: tailism, neo-reformism, nebulous movementism.

Refoundationalism produces a variety of tactics:university talk-shops where representatives of differentmovements are invited to debate in closed spaces

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where the left gathers to watch the left talk about theleft; websites that advertise themselves as arevolutionary process; city assemblies filled withorganizations that dislike each other. The aim is toproduce the foundation of a new anti-capitalistmovement that will miraculously cohere frominnumerable incoherent elements.

The problem with this approach is not the belief that,due to past failures, a new revolutionary movementneeds to be built and developed, but the assumptionthat the historical basis of such a movement must beentirely refounded. For this assumption carries with itthe utopian belief that those involved in theserefoundationalist projects will not be bringing all ofthe errors with them, will not be militantly investedin the ideologies of their own failed organizations, andthat the refoundationalist project as a whole will notbe yet another repetition of the past and similarattempts… For we know what happened to the lastattempted New Left and its refoundationalist projects:it was eclipsed and swept aside by a radical anti-revisionism.

Historical necessity should teach us that the kernel ofa militant organization, unified according torevolutionary theory, is the only thing capable ofrefounding a revolutionary movement. And thismovement will grow by proving itself to the masses

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and thus by organizing the masses according to theirrevolutionary demands––not by tailing them, not bymanufacturing a disunified organization out of alreadyexistent component parts, some of which do not fittogether. The great revolutions of history shouldteach us that we cannot produce an organizationcapable of fighting capitalism if we are building anorganization that we hope will produce a clearpolitical line out of its confusion.

Indeed, history should have taught us that to controlthe political line is to determine the movement.Inversely, to have an indeterminate movement is tolose control of the political line. And when amovement is based on an indeterminate politics,however broadly anti-capitalist, those organizationswho possess the most coherent political line will bethose who end up redirecting and determining theorganization, whatever its initial intent. Most oftenthis means that some version of “common sense”ideology will triumph in these spaces since, in theabsence of ideological coherence, we often fall back onthe way we have been socialized to understand theworld: reformism will trump revolution.

While it is true that political lines are never static (thefact of line-struggle means that they are essentiallydynamic) they still must be more coherent and directthan a vague anti-capitalism that lacks the strategy and

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theoretical assessment necessary to make revolution.Theoretical unity is itself a process––revolutionaryparties are themselves processes––and it is thus strangeto pretend, as some do, that we must have arefoundationalist process in order to produce a party,as if the party is the end result of a process rather thanbeing the process in itself. Rather, we must beginwith a political line and prove the efficacy of thispolitical line in concrete class struggle: we provenothing by forming new organizations with thealready organized left because all we are doing isdemonstrating that we want to work with the alreadyorganized rather than organizing the currentlyunorganized based on a clear political line.

Those committed to the refoundationalist strategy,however, believe that they are involved in revitalizingthe left and it is unlikely that this belief––which islittle more than a dogma––will disappear anytimesoon. Even the most radical refoundationalist projectswho dare to speak the names of Lenin and Mao willdiscover the limitations of the boundaries they havedrawn: they too will tail the masses, will fail to pursuenecessity, will always be staring at some distanthorizon that will never arrive because they are notinterested in making it arrive. Again: a new anti-revisionism is required––not a new refoundationalism,not another New Left, but a new return to thecommunist necessity.

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The Trade-union Trap

Another appropriate organizational practice uponwhich to embark while awaiting the communisthorizon––and one that can be simultaneous (and evenamount) to reformism and refoundationalism––isunion organizing. Being an old practice, long pre-dating movementism and today’s reclaimedcommunism, trade-union activism is often chosen outof sheer laziness, in lieu of nothing better to do.There is a tradition to unionism, an assumption that itcan be revolutionary based on its history and alreadyexistent organization, that is compelling: we do nothave to think about what it means to pursue the largerquestions of necessity when we submerge ourselves inthe day-to-day economic struggles of unionizedworkers, or even when we spend our energy fightingto establish a union. All we need to think about is theunion, and the particular goals of the union, and notwhat lurks beyond the limits of this logic.

Movementism finds its home in today’s trade-unionism because unions are social movements that,along with other social movements, might participatein the coming insurrection, the communist horizon.The limits of trade-union consciousness describedfamously by Lenin, and one of the foundationalconcepts behind any necessity of a revolutionary

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party, can be dismissed in the same cavalier way allpast communist theory is dismissed––by choosing toendorse other past communist theories, some ofwhich are older than Lenin, so as to justify ourpractice. All of these old theories regarding unions asthe basis of revolutionary struggle can be rebranded inthe name of a movementist communism.

This is why, more than anything else, Draperism hasbeen revived. There is no need to build a communistorganization since the working classes are alreadyorganized in unions, Draper argued, and this priororganization may indeed constitute a “socialism frombelow.” So submerge oneself within unions, the mostorganized working-class institutions, and build acommunist project through unionism. One does nothave to care very much about Draper (after all, he wasso disconnected from social struggles in his own timethat his thoughts on revolutionary practice should betreated as laughable) to accept something akin to thepractice he advocated. Social unionism as part of anunquestioned insurrectionary strategy, albeit usually amovementist one, is one of the valid communistpractices at the centres of capitalism––at least far morevalid than any of that Leninist party-buildingnonsense!

The fact is that the liquidation of communist practiceamongst union activists has historically been known

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to produce a phenomenon that was once called“economism” where the necessity of communism isreplaced by an activism determined by the need topromote the union’s ability to secure its members’economic stability. Revolutionary necessity hamperedby immediate economic necessity. The late ActionSocialiste, a Quebecois revolutionary project thatpeaked in the 1990s, has assessed its own experiencewith economism in the following manner:

“The whole organization was deeply affected by whatwe called ‘economism:’ spontaneous interventionwithin immediate (economic) struggles, abandoningagitation, propaganda and communist organizing.Economism is a form of right-wing opportunism; forits proponents, the movement represents everything,while the final goal (communism) no longer meansanything. In [pursuing economism], we neglect todevelop the revolutionary camp, and begin to abandonour most basic principles in order to achieve moreimmediate gains. […] Several comrades then heldleadership positions in student unions, communitygroups or workers’ unions. The important goal for usat the time was to conquer the organizationalleadership of mass movements. We sometimes gtothere, in some cases easily, because of ourorganizational talents. But this rarely meantideological or political leadership. The contradictionbetween our ‘communist’ orientation and the

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dominant bourgeois viewpoint, even within themasses, was becoming more obvious as we escalated inthe mass movements’ hierarchy. […] What tends tohappen in those times is either we put aside and ‘hide’our real points of view (or even defend viewpoints wedon’t believe in), or we begin to develop bureaucraticpractices to impose our minority viewpoints and keepthe positions we attained in one movement oranother.”26

The experience described above is paradigmatic oftrade-union activism on the part of communists; thiseconomism is experienced, in greater or lesser degrees,by every communist who has sought to make unionactivism the basis of hir revolutionary practice. If thesituation was otherwise, after all, we would have longago achieved the promise of Draperism: multiple redunions would have produced our revolutionary party.Instead, those of us who have attempted to find ourcommunist way within union spaces should be able torecognize some of the claims made in the abovequotation. Bogged down by collective agreements sothat our activism becomes the management of unionsurvival; fighting for a union leadership that is onlymarginally left in essence; finding ourselves on anexecutive or union working group that is politically

26. Action Socialiste (1986-2000): An Unforgettable Experience(Montreal: Maison Norman Bethune, 2009), 5.

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divided; stranded in a union with people whosepolitics we despised, who were our “comrades” simplybecause they shared the same work space.

Every strike, no matter how radical, should remind usof the economist limits. Right when our immediateeconomic demands our met, regardless of thosedemands that challenge the economic system as awhole, we shut down the lines and go back towork––sometimes we end the strike even earlier,acceding to the strength of the employer in these timesof “austerity” and because, in any case, we must keepthe union alive!

Immediate economic demands, of course, are nolaughing manner. We have to put food on the tableand pay the bills; we want job security and benefits.Solidarity amongst workers is laudable, and it wouldbe a mistake to oppose unions and union drivesbecause they are not as revolutionary as a communistparty. The option, however, should never be the falsedilemma of “liquidate communist practice within theunions or oppose unionization on principle!” Toreject economism, to recognize that trade-unions,particularly at the centres of capitalism, may not beour primary spaces of organization should not lead usto treat these spaces as identical to the cynicalreformism that often leads us into the electoral trap.

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Hence, the mistake is to veil these immediatedemands, little more than a level of survival that ispossible because of an organized workplace, with thetrappings of communism. Revolutionaryconsciousness demands more than a consciousnessdetermined by immediate demands, which is whytoday it is more likely to be found amongst the non-unionized workers who have not, through unioneconomism, been integrated with the system. Wecannot find the worker with “nothing left to lose” in atrade-union; at the centres of capitalism, unionizedworkers have much to lose, in the sense of immediateeconomic privileges, if they were ever to succeed,however improbably, in painting their union red…which is why, of course, it does not happen. Notnow, not at the centres of capitalism.

The Imaginative Lack of Imagination

In the previous chapter we confronted those “new”theories that attempted reclamations of the namecommunism, that were little more than collaborationswith the current state of affairs due to theirunwillingness to think the concrete. To take recoursein fantasy, to divorce themselves from struggle andpretend that imagination itself is struggle… inactuality, this is an ironic demonstration of a limitedimagination. After all, regardless of one’s creativefeats in theoretical fantasy, the relegation of the

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question of organization and strategy to the possibilityof spontaneity is rather uncreative: to assert thatcommunism will just happen at distant point x basedon our grandiose assertions and the combination ofsocial movements is a rather bland assumption.

So what, then, do these reclamations, all premised onhypotheses and horizons, tell us about reviving ananti-revisionist and revolutionary tradition if we arenot to endorse the traps of bourgeois elections,refoundationalism, or economism? Not very much,perhaps, but in their failure to creatively grapple withnecessity we might be able to learnsomething––namely, how not to think.

Tiqqun’s Theory of Bloom is a paradigm-example ofthis imaginative lack of imagination. After awhirlwind of theoretical eclecticism––from Debord toBaudrillard to Agamben and all through Joyce!––theyassert the name of the collective under which theywould write their next movementism best-seller:

“The Invisible Committee: an openly secret society, apublic conspiracy, an instance of anonymoussubjectivation, whose name is everywhere andheadquarters nowhere, the experimental-revolutionarypolarity of the Imaginary Party. The InvisibleCommittee: not a revolutionary organization, but ahigher level of reality, a metaphysical territory of

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secession with all the magnitude of a whole world ofits own, the playing area where positive creation alonecan accomplish the great emigration of the economyfrom the world.”27

Very imaginative language to simply conclude thatthere is no point in building a militant and organizedmovement in the real world. After all, how can onebuild a mystical blanquist society that operatesprimarily upon a metaphysical terrain? The solutionis to hope such a chimera can emerge spontaneously,through our creative play, which of course means areonly responsibility is to write and read theory, or atmost embark on great acts of literary and artisticproduction.

And yet someone (or some people) decided that it wasworth speaking in the name of this mysticalorganization, despite its impossibility of actuallyexisting, because five years later we were given TheComing Insurrection by the Invisible Committee.Although there is something more concrete in theInvisible Committee’s unflinching reclamation of thename communism, it is reclaimed only insofar as toappropriate it from an ideological tradition itdespises––indeed, it refers to those Marxist-Leninists

27. Tiqqun, Theory of Bloom, 52.http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/tiqqun-bloom-theory.pdf

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who developed the term historically as its enemies.28

More importantly, though, is the fact that the InvisibleCommittee relies on a lazy understanding of thetheory of insurrection, a strategy that has only metwith failure after the October Revolution, butcleansed of its Leninism. Spontaneous insurrectionswithout the wretched business of a civil war, and theassumption that the military and police forces will bewon over by the fraternization ofinsurrectionists––because “[t]he militarization of civilwar is the defeat of insurrection.”29 Necessity is deniedmerely on the assumption that the state’s armedbodies of women and men will not violently putdown untrained insurrectionists, that they will bepolitically won over by the insurrection itself… Butthe state has and will put down insurrections, andevery insurrection since 1917 has indeed beenviolently suppressed––why pretend otherwise?Because we do not want to think through the hardquestions demanded by necessity.

The Uprising, by Franco Berardi, veritably shuddersin its attempt to hide from the fact of revolutionarynecessity: here the revolution is not even somethingthat happens in a concrete sense, that has to do withunavoidable social truths (i.e. there are armies trained

28. The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection, 18.29. Ibid., 129.

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to control populations, weapons monopolized by theruling class, a coercive state apparatus that will notdeign to avoid a blood-bath when it is challenged), butrather something that happens in the imagination, alinguistic phenomena, the business of poetry!30 Sincethe best satire is delivered with a straight face, it istempting to speculate on whether or not Berardi isbeing serious or lampooning other chic social theories.After all, in the face of entire populations who areeven now being bombed and occupied––theseeveryday massacres that are part of the normaloperation of finance-capital––to seriously suggest alinguistic and poetic revolution that is neither violentnor non-violent is tantamount to spitting in the faceof the wretched of the earth and telling them that theyshould resist by writing poetry.

One might as well be a revisionist and an opencollaborator with capitalism and imperialism to abideby the logic of these theoretical reclamations of thename communism. Even if those who limit theirreclamation to a vague talk of “hypotheses” and“horizons” refuse to go this far down the road of asupposedly “new” communist imaginary, this is theterrain into which their trajectory falls. In the past

30. Franco “Bifo” Berardi, The Uprising: on poetry and finance(Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2012), 21-22.

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these speculations were utopian, but to be utopiannow, after so many earth-shaking revolutions wherethe masses won almost as much as they lost, is tobecome lost in the revisionist abyss––to wait in hopeof spontaneity while, in the meantime, practicing apeaceful coexistence with this brutal reality.

The solution, however, is indeed imagination andcreativity. But not a groundless imagination andcreativity that cannot think through concreteproblems, uncreatively reifying the current state ofaffairs. No: the kind of imagination and creativitythat we find in the other sciences––imagining a future,and creatively building this future, based upon thetruths won through past struggles. All of thesuccessful or nearly successful revolutions and people’swars, the ways in which revolutionary unity, howevertemporarily, was actually built… this past radiatesmultiple necessities, the most important of which iscommunism.

We can predict, however, the way in which thesetheorists will respond to an analogy of scientific truth:they will remind us of the dangers of techno-scientificrationality and the totalizing nightmare of scientificprogress. Since we addressed this complaint in thefirst chapter, there is no reason to defend scientificnecessity here. Instead, let us engage with thesetheories’ lack of imagination according to the history

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of imagination and creativity itself––the history ofliterature, music, and the arts that the Tiqqun group,for example, treats as significant.

Indeed, in the universe of creativity the unreflectiverepetition of previous artistic production is usuallytreated as unremarkable. If we were to encounter anartist, unaware of the history of hir craft, posturing as“original” while reproducing Duchamp’s work in theearly 20th Century, we would treat them as arrogantand barely worthy of consideration. We know there isa history to literature and art that might teach ussomething, and this is the basis of any thoughtfuljudgment made in the terrain of imagination. EvenTiqqun believes that there is merit to this kind ofjudgment, if only implicitly; there is a reason itchooses to reference James Joyce rather than DanBrown, Paul Valéry rather than Robert Frost, that isnot reducible to literary elitism.

What do these theories offer, then, even according tothe general standards of creative quality? The samemovementist spontaneity, the same vagueinsurrection, the same distant horizon. Eclecticism isnot that imaginative; it is about as creative as a gradeschool collage. And in this eclecticism, thismobilization of theory that is only imaginative inappearance, there is a return to all of the utopianmistakes of the past.

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New Returns

To speak of a communist necessity is to also speak, inevery particular situation in which a universalizedcommunist theory might be articulated, of concretepraxis. And since all this talk of hypotheses,possibilities, horizons, produces nothing but a returnto a failed movementism, how can we recognize a newreturn as the organized and totalized revolution thatwe are supposed to assume was an even worse failure?This is the question, unfortunately, that is alwaysposed at the centres of capitalism where the wordcommunism, after decades of suppression, is finally re-emerging.

Against this academic fad of reclaiming a name towhich is attached a dubious concept we assert that asingle revolutionary programme that emerges from aconcrete analysis of a concrete situation on behalf of adynamic movement is worth more than a thousandacademic marxist books, regardless of the authors’credentials, about communist hypotheses andhorizons. If communism is a necessity, then wecannot accept abstract reclamations of communismthat ignore the need to make it a reality. We need todemand the concrete, we need to focus on literatureproduced by movements that are active in classstruggle and, due to this activity, have produced a

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theory that is itself generated by the necessities ofstruggle.

Nor can we ignore the fact that revolutionarycommunism was already reclaimed, right at themoment of failure, in the people’s war in Peru, in thebirth of the Revolutionary InternationalistMovement, in the launching of the people’s war inNepal, in the current people’s war in India… Allmovements that have spoken the name ofcommunism, despite failure and setbacks, withoutameliorating themselves in some inchoatemovementism. Why all of this was mostly ignored bythe current intellectual fad of reclaiming the once-banned name is worth considering. Why self-proclaimed “communists” get annoyed when some ofus speak of these actual revolutionary movements,complaining that they have heard enough aboutpeople’s wars, and yet become excited with everydoomed uprising or moribund populism, should makeus wonder.

For in many ways this excitement over banalmovementist strategies represents a return to theutopian communisms that Marx and Engels onceexpended so much energy combatting in order toplace the practice of making revolution upon scientificfoundations. Indeed, Engels’ focus on necessityrepresents this attempt to break from utopian idealism

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so that the pursuit of revolution would be more thanan idle dream, a post-political hallucination. But theerrors of history are not so easily silenced and therewill always be new returns to utopian anti-capitalismfor as long as capitalism remains hegemonic: unlikethe “hard” sciences, where previous paradigms areonly endorsed by a minority of people who aregenerally understood as backwards obscurantists, thescience of revolution is a messy affair whereinnumerable dead-ends are preserved as vestigialphilosophies that masquerade as science.

So in the face of the nightmare of capitalism, it isoften tempting to resist with idle dreams of a utopianhorizon and pretend that these dreams, asphilosophically attractive as they sometimes mightseem, are akin to revolutionary science. Often it iseven more tempting to discard the terminology ofscience altogether, adopting philosophical skepticism,for it is quite dangerous for those who wish to avoidthe problems of necessity to accept that revolutionand history can be treated scientifically. Indeed, inthese days where totality is seen as suspect andcontingency has become a standard of theoreticallabour, the speaking of science is often treated as anact of bad faith. Better to speak only of philosophyunmoored from the totalizing confines of science and,in this speaking, plunge back into the philosophicalsocialism of the nineteenth century: utopianism.

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The problem with this new return to utopianism isthat those most taken with this approach tocommunism often believe that they are indeedengaged in something new; the amnesia intrinsic tothis idealism prevents them from realizing that it isalso a return. Oh, they are quite willing to accept thatthey are returning to the name of communism butunwilling to accept that their manner of speaking thisname––the fetishistic search for a new revolutionarystrategy––is a return to a species of communism that,as Marx and Engels recognized, is incapable ofmanifesting revolution because it is incapable ofrecognizing its own necessity.

Thus there can be no absolute “dustbin of history”,not until communism emerges, because we will alwaysreturn, often in new ways, to the flawed ideas ofyesteryear just as our enemy also remobilizes andrearticulates the reactionary ideologies of the past. AsMarx noted, just when we assume we are engaged inrevolutionizing ourselves, “in creating something thathas never yet existed, precisely in such periods ofrevolutionary crisis [we] anxiously conjure up thespirits of the past.”31 The trick, however, is todiscover what historical spirits we are conjuring, whatmasks we are donning and that we are even donning

31. Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (NewYork: International Publishers, 1969), 15.

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them in the first place. Otherwise we run the risk ofhistorical repetition that is either tragedy or farce:these repetitions have already happened and arehappening again.

But whereas the old communist utopianism spoke of“kingdoms of reason” and imagined emancipatorysocial systems that, divorced from material and socialrelations, “the more they were completely worked outthe more they could not avoid drifting off into purephantasies,"32 this new utopianism has drifted furtherinto fantasy by hypothesizing a distant horizon thatwe could possibly and nebulously reach on oneapocalyptic day. Now we have a utopianism thatremains utopiann about the practical means ofachieving its fantasy while, at the same time,occasionally declares fidelity to Marx or evenLenin––militants who had nothing but scorn forutopianism.

And this utopianism is a new return for itsmanifestation can be observed in all of the spontaneistcurrents of the early twentieth century that attemptedto distinguish themselves from the theory of a militantand vanguard revolutionary party by arguing for the“self-organization” of the working class. Although the

32. Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (NewYork: International Publishers, 1998), 36.

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utopian communists of today might claim that theyknow where the Leninist model of organization leads(to Stalin, to the gulags, to totalitarianism), they arequite often unreflective of a model that has failed toeven place us on the road to revolutionary upheaval.The former model, regardless of its eventual failure,brought us closer to the supposed horizon ofcommunism; the latter was a larger failure that wouldend up producing nothing but an excuse to taildisarticulated mass movements in the name of ahorizon these movements were not even trying toreach. So if we must have a new return to the past’srevolutionary processes, then we should be aware ofwhat process was the larger failure: the utopiantheories of self-organization that led nowhere or theconcrete theories of organized revolutionary necessitythat produced world historical revolutions that, withall their failures, still shook the foundations ofbourgeois reality? In thinking through this questionwe should be led to recognize, as discussed earlier, thattoday’s utopianism amounts to making social peacewith capitalism.

Unfortunately, those who would like us to focus onhypotheses and horizons, committed as they are toresurgent utopianism, would argue that a new returnto the communism that developed through the path ofnecessity is also, and can only be, tragic and farcical.Despite the return to the name of communism, this

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new utopianism, due to its emergence in the heart ofleft-wing academia and petty-bourgeois studentmovements, has absorbed the post-modern fear ofthose who speak of a communist necessity, arevolutionary science, which can only be totalizingand thus totalitarian. The failure to develop anyconcrete strategy of overthrowing capitalism, insteadof being treated as a serious deficiency, is apprehendedas a strength: the movement can be all things for allpeople, everything for everyone, everywhere andnowhere,“for when ‘we’ are truly everywhere, we willbe nowhere––for we will be everyone.”33 But wheredid this utopianism lead; where can it lead? Nowhere,obviously, which was not the same as everywhere:these nebulous proposals sound nice, might even bemore enjoyable to read than a party programmeproduced by a coherent revolutionary movement, butthey are devoid of the strategy necessary for making asustainable existence beyond the limits of capitalism areality.

What is interesting about this new return to utopiancommunism, however, is that it has somehowsucceeded in veiling itself in a praxis (or, due tomovementist spontaneism, lack of praxis) that, by the1990s, was considered the province of an anarchism

33. We Are Everywhere, 511.

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and an anti-capitalism that saw communism as a greatmistake. In the days leading up to Seattle, at the heartof global imperialism, those who spoke of refusing totake power, of some new movement that couldspontaneously end capitalism upon reaching a criticalmass, and of the political fantasy described (but, ofcourse, not prescribed) in We Are Everywhere wouldhave eschewed the word “communism” since it stankof failure and totalitarianism and everything they weretaught to despise in school textbooks. Now the wordcommunism is being spoken into these spaces and,though dressing itself in the name of that failure, isattempting to reinvent itself as something new. Eventhe so-called “Invisible Committee”, that imagines itsown fantastical horizon of a coming insurrectionwithout a Leninist party, has remobilized the wordcommunism when, only decades earlier, the samepeople probably would have been made anxiouswhenever it was spoken.

Which is why, in the face of this utopianism, it isimportant to argue instead for a new return to therevolutionary tradition that treated communism as anecessity. Not simply a dogmatic reassertion ofsomething Lenin said in 1917, or something Marx saidin 1848, but a return to the living science of thiscommunism that originates with Marx and Engels,loops through Lenin, twists through Mao, and is stillopen to the future. All returns are always new, as

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Lenin learned when he creatively applied marxism tohis social context, as Mao learned when he creativelyapplied marxism-leninism to his social context, asthose of us who understand that communism must beunderstood as a necessity are trying to learn when wereturn to these past developments of necessity with aperspective that is always new because societychanges… but also a return because society is burdenedby the weight of dead generations.

Such a return must be concrete, must be able to speakthe history of universal revolutionary necessity intoeach and every particular context in which we live andstruggle. It is meaningless to only return to aname––to an uncritically inherited method of strugglethat derives from a focus on vague hypotheses andhorizons––unless we are willing to pursue everythingthis name came to mean over the course ofrevolutionary struggle since Marx. For when wereturn anew, over and over, to the necessity of makingcommunism we will be confronted with greatdifficulties and the always immanent potential offailure… So much still needs to be accomplished:

“Even at the international level, our class only firedthe very first bullets of the struggle against thebourgeoisie in order to build and rule a new society.Even though the proletariat did achieve a lot, thebasics are still to be done, above all, to destroy the old

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capitalist mode of production and make it disappearforever from the face of the earth. […] There is arevival of the revolutionary struggle and since it isbased on the achievements of past struggles, it isstronger than ever. When the big NATO leaderspredicted… that ‘the first 30 years of the 21st centurywill be the period of revolutionary uprisings,’ theywere confessing how much they still fear the spectre ofcommunism and of revolution from the oppressedmasses.”34

So let us fire more bullets, let us advance the strugglefor making communism a concrete reality, and let uscease this prattle about some ideal communism thatexists outside of time and space and instead, with all ofthe messiness this would imply, return to therecognition that its necessity requires a new return tothe revolutionary communist theories and experienceswon from history.

34. PCR-RCP, Party Programme, chapter 14.

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CODA

Reality being what it is, the questions raised by thistreatise might not be solved anytime soon. If there isnew return to the problematic of necessity, and a newanti-revisionist epoch of struggle replaces today’s tiredmovementism, there is still the chance that only newfailures will be encountered in the course ofestablishing new successes. We might succeed intemporarily breaching the distant communist horizononly to be catastrophically wrenched back into thenightmare of the present. The importance ofnecessity might again be forgotten, communismrelegated once more to the realm of failure only to beyet again reclaimed by another new left that is evenmore wary of thinking of communism as anythingmore than a hypothesis or distant horizon.

We should wonder how many repetitions are evenpossible; the window in which we can makerevolution is closing as the world approaches thearmageddon promised by the logic of capital. The factof historical necessity is more visceral today than ithas ever been: we cannot wait for a spontaneousarrival of the communist horizon when capitalism isnearing its own horizon––environmental collapse, anew ice age, the devastation of human existence as weknow it––promised by its necessary and day-to-dayoperations. We cannot afford to tinker with its

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framework in the hope that the questions ofrevolution will be solved at some unknown point inthe future. We cannot afford to waste our time inspaces and practices premised on the continuation of asystem of exploitation, commodification, and eternalwar.

Here, at the centres of capitalism, it is sometimes easyto banish the contemporary nightmare to the limboregions of thought. While we may understand thelogic of capitalism in theory, the gap between theoryand practice often prevents us from embracing activitythat is driven by the logic of revolutionary necessity.The contradictions of the system are more apparent inthe peripheries; here they are muted by a “cultureindustry” that persists only because of the most brutalexploitation and oppression elsewhere. Is it anywonder that the imperialist camp’s longest war––theWar on Terror––is not even experienced as a war bythe masses who live at the centres of capitalism? Someof us have grown to adulthood with this war servingas an early childhood memory and yet, unlike thosewho have grown up in regions such as Afghanistan,have been able to live without experiencing the mostdirect and brutal affects of this “task that never ends.”

From its very emergence, capitalism has waged warupon humanity and the earth. The communistnecessity radiates from this eternal war: capitalism’s

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intrinsic brutality produces an understanding that itslimits must be transgressed, just as it produces its owngrave-diggers. How can we be its grave-diggers,though, when we refuse to recognize the necessity ofmaking communism concretely, deferring its arrival tothe distant future? Perhaps one answer is that those ofus at the centres of capitalism are no longer theprimary grave-diggers.

Indeed, the permanent war capitalism wages uponentire populations is a war that is viscerallyexperienced by those who live at the globalperipheries. Lenin once argued that revolutions tendto erupt at the “weakest links”, those over-exploitedregions where the contradictions of capitalism areclear. Thus, it should be no surprise that communismremains a necessity in these spaces––it is at theperipheries we discover people’s wars. Conversely,opportunism festers at the global centres, theseimperialist metropoles where large sections of theworking-class have been pacified, mutingcontradictions and preventing entire populations fromunderstanding the necessity of ending capitalism. It isnot as much of a nightmare, here; it is a delirium, afever dream.

Simply recognizing this fact, however, is not enough.Often, such a recognition embraces the veryopportunism it claims to critique. A recognition of

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opportunism that is opportunism itself: we cannotmake revolution here, there are no cracks in which tobuild a militant organization capable of fightingcapitalism at the global centres, we might as well waitupon the revolutionary labour of those comrades inthe third world to save the world for us… we willembrace opportunism by declaring it an immutablefact! Again, the horizon is placed beyond our reach;breaching its limits is the business of others.

Meanwhile, time is running out.

Communism is no longer an historical necessity if andwhen we fail to transgress the limits set by capitalismand are instead catapulted into the post-apocalypticnightmare promised by the latter’s intrinsic logic. Insuch a terrible event, if humanity survives only to finditself in another ice-age or devastated wasteland, it willencounter other necessities that are similar to thenecessities encountered in the pre-capitalist past: howto persist as a species, how to build sustainablesocieties, how to produce historical memory. Therewill not be an eternal communist hypothesis whenour existence is determined instead by moreimmediate questions of survival.

Due to the possibility of armageddon, the necessity ofcommunism is immediate now. In order to bring thisnecessity into being, though, we must learn to accept

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what has been established through every past, earth-shaking revolution that has also attempted to pushbeyond the boundaries set by capitalism. It may bethe case that, in one sense, communism is thepermanent dream of everyone who lives in a worldstrangled by capitalism, though a nightmare for theruling classes. In another sense, however, we shouldstop thinking about communism solely as a dream, afantastic horizon, and instead understand the ways inwhich past movements have temporarily made thisdream concrete, briefly but significantly succeedingbecause they reversed the terms of dreaming:capitalism is the nightmare, communism theawakening. Often we would prefer to dream becauseit is easier; waking is never pleasant, especially in theearly morning when, upon opening our eyes, werealize we have to go to work, clean our homes, raiseour children, and deal with a host of concreteresponsibilities––necessities––that we could forgetwhile we dreamed.

Hence, communism should be approached as a rudeawakening. In shaking off the nightmare ofcapitalism, the dreamers will also be shaken by all ofthe arduous tasks they must accomplish. As Maoreminds us, revolution is not a dinner party––nor is ita dream, a utopia, an eternal hypothesis, a distanthorizon. But it is a necessity that is growing moreimmediate every year capitalism persists, a necessity

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that might vanish if and when capitalism’s deaththroes obliterate existence.

In Borges’ story, Pierre Menard Author of theQuixote we are introduced to a fictional author, PierreMenard, who set himself the task of reproducingCervantes’ Don Quixote, not “anotherQuixote––which is easy––but the Quixote itself.”35

Rather than a rewriting of the same story in moderntimes, a reinvention of the proverbial Quixotic wheel,Menard ends up producing passages that are identicalto the passages of Cervantes’ original. And yet, as thenarrator informs us, reproduction is impossibledespite the word-for-word duplication; the differenthistorical contexts in which the same passages arecomposed changes the meaning of both form andcontent. He concludes that Menard’s version of theQuixote, though at first glance a reproduction of theoriginal, is superior.

Similarly, whereas movementism demands a modernrewriting of the story of communism, we shoulddemand a reproduction that is at the same time not areproduction. By rearticulating the theoreticalweapons of the past now, by creatively reassertinguniversality in today’s particular instances, we will

35. Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories & OtherWritings (New York: New Directions, 1964), 39.

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remember everything we were taught to forget. Andin this remembering, painful as it might be, we willfind ourselves standing on the shores of necessity.