Is It Simple to Be a Communist in Philosophy? Review of Alberto Toscano, Communism in Philosophy

Still from Peter Watkins, La Commune (Paris, 1871), 2000.

Michel Foucault once remarked that the twentieth century would perhaps one day be known as Deleuzian. He may have been joking, at least in part, but in truth the time span of academic trends is much shorter, at least in the Anglo-American world of philosophy and theory. It is written in decades, not centuries. The 1990s were Deleuzian; it was during this decade that his major works, Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense, were translated, and that some of the major scholarly studies of his work began to appear, most notably Michael Hardt’s Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy and Brian Massumi’s A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia. The Deleuzian nineties followed an eighties dominated in part by Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. Following this periodization, it is possible to argue that the first decade of the new millennium was dominated by Alain Badiou and Antonio Negri. This happened despite the fact that both authors had been writing for decades. Badiou’s first published texts date back to the late sixties, though his works did not begin to appear in translation until the end of the nineties, with his book on Deleuze appearing in 1999. Being and Event, his major work from the eighties, was translated into English in 2005. Subsequent works followed, with a new book by Badiou appearing nearly every year. Antonio Negri’s writings also date back to the sixties. While a few of his books—most notably The Savage Anomaly, on Spinoza, and Marx Beyond Marx, on the Grundrisse—were translated in the nineties, they began to garner much more attention after the publication of Empire in 2001. Does anything connect Alain Badiou and Antonio Negri besides the out-of-joint nature of their reception, as two writers of the twentieth century who began trending in the first decade of the twenty-first?

There is perhaps no one better situated to answer this question than Alberto Toscano. He has translated works by both Badiou and Negri into English, and has been one of the main commentors on both thinkers in the Anglo-American world. His recently published Communism in Philosophy: Essays on Alain Badiou and Toni Negri makes the claim that there is something more connecting these thinkers than just the timing of their translation. This can be grasped from the title of the book alone. Badiou and Negri are both committed to the idea of communism, which is necessarily distinct from socialism. It is no small irony that two of the last European philosophers of the twentieth century were committed communists, especially given that the major schools of thought which came out of France and Italy in the latter half of the twentieth century, from structuralism to deconstruction, were generally understood to be anti-communist, if not anti-Marxist. Furthermore, both Badiou and Negri break with their contemporaries with respect to the question of the subject. While it has become commonplace to identify the various philosophical tendencies dominant in France during the latter half of the twentieth century with a general “critique of the subject,” Badiou and Negri, in different ways, affirm the subject as a category for politics and philosophy. This is not a simple return to a phenomenological or Cartesian subject. Both Badiou and Negri incorporate the demand to historicize the subject, and in doing so they connect it not just to domination or ideological interpellation but to revolutionary transformation. Finally, Badiou and Negri are also committed to the idea that communism is not just a matter for politics but for philosophy. They understand communism as a fundamental transformation of philosophy, and philosophy as an integral aspect of what it means to be communist. This distinguishes them from a previous generation of philosophers, such as Louis Althusser, for whom the relation between Marxism and philosophy was a perpetual question, or even a problem. As Toscano writes, for Badiou and Negri, “communism, philosophical communism, is essentially affirmative.”1 This does not mean that it is simple to be a communist philosopher. As Toscano argues, both Badiou and Negri struggle, in some sense, with the failures of the Marxist revolutionary project—and it is also with respect to this that their different projects break from each other dramatically. 

For Badiou, the crisis of Marxism leads to a rejection of what many have understood to be its core thesis: the connection between the working class (those exploited by capital) and the proletariat (the revolutionary subject). The assertion that one could go from one to the other, from an objective condition to a subject, is broken, and not just at a sociological level. It is not simply a matter of the changing nature of the working class, especially in the developed world—from a class of those with nothing to lose but their chains to a class that risks losing its mortgage, vacations, health insurance, and good credit: in other words, a class that is materially and ideologically implicated in capital. For Badiou, the severing of the link between the working class as an object of analysis, as in Marx’s Capital, and as a subject of revolutionary activity, as in Marx and Engel’s Manifesto, is also a metaphysical problem. It is a matter of an absolute break between objective reality and a subjectivity that is always in excess of the given conditions of reality.2 Rather than attempt to ground revolutionary subjectivity, or the party, in any condition of the working class, or in any objectivity, it is necessary to think subjectivity as precisely a break with any reality. This is its revolutionary dimension. As Toscano writes,

Philosophy (in its indifference to experience) and politics (in its scorn for the administration of reality) bear more than elective affinity. Abstraction and subjectivation, as moments when the “human animal” lays claim to the status of the “immortal,” precisely involve a disfigurement of the limits of the possibility that define any reality principle.3

Philosophy and politics—revolutionary politics—are connected by their shared break with the representation of the existing order of things. The link between philosophy and politics undermines any attempt to connect politics with an economic or sociological understanding of objective conditions.

Toscano takes up a particular version of Badiou’s paradoxical relation to Marxism—a relation that often takes the form of a communism without Marxism, or at least a communism without Capital. This relation has come under criticism, especially by those who understand Capital as the central text of Marx’s thought. As Nick Nesbitt writes,

Badiou’s relation to Capital is nonetheless an uncanny mixture of manifest disinterest to the point of disavowal and censorship (is it not odd for such a committed philosopher of Marxist communism never to have discussed Capital at some point in over two hundred monographs?), and the corresponding recurrent, unacknowledged reinscription of the order of Marx’s critique within the abstract terms [of] Badiou’s universal logic.4

Toscano takes a somewhat different perspective with respect to this reinscription. First, he draws our attention to Badiou’s essay “The Factory as Event Site” (originally a chapter in Being and Event that Badiou pulled from the manuscript and later published separately). There, Toscano argues, Badiou abstracts the particular coordinates of his political philosophy from Marx and Engel’s historical analysis:

These [coordinates] are the void, which in the Marxist apparatus is connected to the peculiarity of the proletarian (having nothing to sell but his labour-power, the proletarian is the bearer of a generic capacity), and the site, which Badiou links to Engel’s inquiries into the localized material conditions under which exploitation is organized and resisted.5

These two conditions, that of the void and the site, allow Badiou to move his analysis from the factory, and with it the traditional working class, to other struggles and other subjects, most notably undocumented workers, who are situated at a void—“a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society,” in Marx’s terms—and at a particular site of struggle.6 As Badiou writes, “When we speak of the figure of the worker, it is not at all an economic figure, but a political one.”7 Politics in this sense refers to the relation between what is and what is counted. If the worker did not count, was not part of civil society, in the nineteenth century, that place, the void, is now occupied by other figures such as the immigrant, or the undocumented. It is the political process of exclusion and domination that matters, not the economic role in the production of value.

Badiou’s attempt to abstract from Marx and Engels’s historical analysis of the condition of the working class a general problem of inclusion and exclusion runs up against another problem, that of capital itself. As much as Badiou leaves behind much of Marx’s historical analysis, he holds onto one central point from The Communist Manifesto, the famous line that “all that is holy is profaned.” According to Badiou, capital is that which abstracts from every social relation, breaking every social bond. This is not just a social matter, “the empirical effectuation of a ubiquitous unbinding as determined by the measureless measure that is money”; rather, capital is in “some sense the historical medium of a subtractive ontology.”8 Badiou’s break with Marxist historicism in some sense retains the general historical problem of Marx’s thought, that is, how to distinguish the revolutionary transformation of capitalism from the revolutionary aspect of capital itself. This is another version of what Toscano argues is Badiou’s general tendency to find what is inseparable by focusing on separation—only in this case, what turns out to be inseparable is the relationship between the revolution as a transformation or break with capitalism and revolution as the logic of capitalism.9

Negri confronts the same problem as Badiou—that of the failure of the working class to become the revolutionary subject—but in a fundamentally different manner. For Negri, it is not a matter of separating the objective from the subjective, the working class in capitalism from the party that breaks with capitalism; it is rather a matter of examining the extent to which the revolutionary transformation of capital is also a transformation of the working class, of the proletariat. Of course, following the famous “autonomist hypothesis,” we need to reverse the terms, looking at the way in which working class resistance precedes and prefigures capitalist structure. This means seeing the displacement of the traditional working class, and the factory, as a product of resistance against factory domination. As Negri writes: “The strong result of Marx’s analyses of the struggles around the length of the working day and the Factory Acts consists thus in indicating a new constitutive process, not inside but outside the dialectic of capital and situated in the autonomy of cooperation, that is, in the subjectivity of the working class.”10 Negri’s strategy, following that of operaismo in general, is not so much to separate subjectivity from objectivity, politics from economics, but to think of the further implication of power in economics. As Toscano argues, “In other words, workerism revitalizes the Marxian thesis whereby the parameters of the capitalist domination and exploitation of labour-power and the extraction of surplus value are political through and through.”11 This focus leads to an examination of the changing dimensions of the capitalist relation—what is referred to as “class composition.” There is not enough space here to chart the transformations of class composition in Negri’s writing; however, it is worth noting that the figure that most people are familiar with from Empire and the other books coauthored with Michael Hardt—that of the “multitude”—comes in at the end of this process. It is a product of the social factory. As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri insist, “Multitude is a class concept.”12 The defining characteristic of the multitude—its constitutive multiplicity—stems not from a post-Marxist emphasis on the multiplicity of sites of conflict but from an investigation into the expansion of exploitation from the factory into various social spaces. It is capitalism that moves beyond the factory as other sectors of the economy become sites of exploitation: sites of distribution and consumption, as well as those spaces outside of the economy such as the home and the school. As Toscano writes,

Negri’s turn to an expanded reproduction of antagonism throughout the social sphere, beyond the factory and the mass party, depends once again on a certain assessment of the tendency at work within late capitalism, a tendency characterized by an ever-increasing exercise of command, crisis and control on the side of capital, aimed at the subjection of workers, the decomposition of any possible form of class unity and an extraction of surplus value that tries to emancipate itself from any dialectic or negotiation with the bearers of labour-power.13

It is capitalism itself, not the demands of politics or philosophy, that has multiplied the working class beyond the factory gates to encompass all of social relations. This transformation is also a fundamental transformation of the terms of conflict. As the multitude produces social cooperation itself, the role of capital is increasingly that of pure extraction. As Toscano argues, this assertion of a non-dialectical relation between labor and capital seems increasingly relevant in an age in which “profit is a product of political and juridical decisions and we inhabit what are supposedly neo-feudal forms of appropriation and domination.”14

What we see in Negri’s later writing, with and without Michael Hardt, is a radicalization of the autonomist hypothesis—the idea that working class resistance precedes and prefigures capitalist exploitations. As the cooperative actions of the multitude permeate more of society, their capture can only take the form of violence and appropriation. One of the points of commonality between Badiou and Negri is that both in different ways ascribe a primacy to revolution that is not just political, but also philosophical. (Of course this idea of the primacy of revolt can also be found in Gilles Deleuze’s works, especially those written with Félix Guattari. Toscano’s work points to the possibility of an examination of these three different, and overlapping, thinkers of revolution.) In Negri this primacy of revolution takes the form of the revolutionary action of the multitude, while in Badiou it takes the form of the primacy of the event before any reaction. “From a subjective point of view, it is not because there is reaction that there is a revolution, it is because there is revolution that there is reaction.”15 This revolutionary optimism perhaps makes sense in the early years that formed both thinkers—May ’68 in France and the seventies in Italy—but what is even more striking, as Toscano argues, is that both maintained fidelity (to use Badiou’s term) to this idea even through the reactionary eighties and beyond. It is also perhaps one of the main reasons that Badiou and Negri took on such importance in the early decades of the twenty-first century. Theirs were books to bring to an occupation, and to read alongside the revival of interest in Marx and the communist tradition. As Toscano writes, describing this reception:

Tell me how you survived the 1980s and I’ll tell you who you are. This might be an apt adage for the handful of contemporary radical theorists from the 1960s (the 1950s in Negri’s case) who have garnered such attention in the last decade from younger generations learning to cope with and contest neoliberalism. If the likes of Negri, or Badiou, or Rancière, garner deserved interest and admiration today, it is also because they succeeded in inventing conceptual configurations that permitted them to traverse a period of punishing reaction that either destroyed or co-opted many of their erstwhile comrades.16

Of course the eighties are now history. Even the first decade of the twenty-first century—the decade that brought Badiou and Negri into focus through the uneven and incomplete history of translation and reception—is now part of history. The period of their reception, punctuated by such events as the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle in 1999, the Arab Spring, and Occupy Wall Street, has come and gone. The events of this decade in some sense shaped part of the reception of Negri and Badiou. Empire was an attempt to put the practice of the anti- or alter-globalization movement into theory, and Badiou’s reception in the US was conditioned by the revival of more militant forms of engagement and struggle. Now that these moments have passed, we can ask about how these theories stand in a different era, one in which, yet again but even more so, reaction effaces revolution.

To what extent can Badiou and Negri offer more than just reminders of a different political era—a kind of political nostalgia? How can they help us not only get through an era of reaction, but make sense of it, and see the revolutionary potentials that are occluded? As Toscano argues, Badiou’s writing since the eighties has increasingly tried to develop a theory of reactionary and obscure subjectivity. In particular, he has theorized “the Islamist” as a figure that has appropriated resistance to imperialism. Toscano argues that there is an often neglected side of Negri’s thought that has focused on the way in which the state uses law and criminalization as a force against the emergence of new forms of resistance—something that Negri knows very well, given his time as a prisoner of the state. Negri’s own incarceration under an expansive sense of the state’s emergency powers led him to think about the connection between emerging forms of struggle and the state of emergency. As Toscano writes, “This confrontation between emergence and emergency is one of the expressions of what I think is for Negri a broader, and we could say ‘ethical’ transformation in the deeper social, political, and economic logic of the capitalist societies that we inhabit.”17 Toscano’s book makes a strong argument that Badiou and Negri are in some sense our contemporaries, that their struggle to think a new dialectic, or even a non-dialectical relationship, between capital and revolution is in some sense a reflection of the fact that we are living in non-dialectical times of repression. Ultimately, however, he makes the case that the part of Badiou and Negri we need most right now is not their revolutionary optimism, but the way in which they struggled to understand the full nature of the reaction they lived through. It is only by grasping reaction in its depth that we can once again return to the primacy of revolution.