Mateusz Sapija, MFA Curating, Goldsmiths College

Groys, Boris. 2010. The Communist Postcript. London and New York: Verso Books

Philosopher, essayist, art and media critic as well as theorist Boris Groys is mostly known from his
body of work devoted to the Russian Avantgarde and late-Soviet art and literature. However, his
book The Communist Postscript is devoted to the legacy of communism and its key ideas.
To some of the readers a provocative piece, described by the publisher as 'radical and
disturbing', introduces communism as a system operating mainly through language, and what
follows communist leaders as mainly philosophers rather than politicians. In comparison to the
economical system of capitalism – an anonymous 'medium of money', communism with its
revolution is a medium of language. In capitalism, language is powerless, while in in communism
it occurs as an object of desire for political leaders, without which they could not control the
crowd, and through which most of the violence that happened in totalitarian systems of the
postwar Eastern European countries was executed. Commodity, a key subject of capitalism, in
communist system is a statement. In capitalist system driven by economy every statement
becomes a commodity and every social protest is successful when it sells well. To those kind of
comparisons and key differences between these two crucial for 20th century history systems
Groys devotes his introduction to the book, in order to set the scene for his further
investigations.

In the first chapter titled Linguistification of Society the author presents and overview of key
philosophical works devoted to rhetorics and language - from ideas of Plato and Socrates to the
oeuvre of Bataille and Derrida. Those thinkers are used by Groys to justify his theory of Soviet
Union as a state governed through philosophy alone, based on Marxist-Leninist theory being a
'unity of dialectical materialism, historical materialism and scientific communism'. Especially the
first concept seems crucial for Groys to understand the Soviet's vision of understanding the
world. The author cites Joseph Stalin:

If logic is understood as a system of rules of universal validity, then logic must

collapse in the face of human nature, for each human is singular in his or her inner
 Mateusz Sapija, MFA Curating, Goldsmiths College

contradictoriness and cannot be subsumed as an individual case under a general rule.

And this entails further that anyone who strives for the realization of utopia must fight
against what human as such. Either what is human is thus destroyed or utopia is
destroyed by what human is.1

Groys concludes that for Stalin the whole world is contradictory by itself. Contradictions
constantly reproduce themselves by the medium of language being most crucial, something
treated not only as a connection to all human activities, but also a key to the power. Thus,
Stalinist communism occurs for the German thinker as in fact a realization of Plato's kingdom
of philosophers, 'those who operate by means of language alone'. Legitimacy of power in
the communist system is not based on the body of monarch or a philosophical force – as in
classical monarchy – but rather by thinking and speaking.

In the following two chapters Groys looks on western discourse around communism, and the
historic perspective. He points that communism was seen as turning humans into machines
working on a previously set programme. From an aesthetic point of view, the rivalry between
East and West was presented as a battle between feelings and cold rationality, humans and
robots, love and freedom versus a rationalist utopia. An example of this kind of approach
might be found in a CIA's operation of supporting abstract expressionists' exhibitions – a
planned clash of improvisation and free spirit versus cold logic ruling the soviet art. Groys
points also how the western critique of communism turned against itself. Orwell's idea of the
Big Brother, invented as a parody of totalitarian communist system is now perceived mostly
as a vision of the contemporary western world with its mania of security. Author points also,
that even though the Cold War is long behind us, the ideological discourse between the
West and the rest of the world has not really changed. What have changed are the objects of
critique, nowadays the Islamic world, while the arguments stayed rather homogenous.

Groys finishes his book with an attempt to explain the reasons of the end of the 'communist
project' and its possible results. He touches upon three main issues: financial; generational
one – understood here as death of the protagonists and lack of next generation's interest to
continue it; finally, a change of perception 'from the project itself to the context of this
project' connected with the classic philosophical idea of metanoia (coming from a ancient
Greek word μετάνοια meaning 'changing one's mind in a spiritual way') which Groys
describes as ' the transition from an individual subjective perspective to a general
perspective, to a metaposition'. Groys claims also, and that might be one of the most
controversial of his thesis, that the disintegration of the Soviet Union was not a defeat of the
project against the efforts of other nations for independence, rather an agreement between
Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian government. He understands the elevation of
postcommunism as 'not a consequence of economic or political necessity, nor an
unavoidable and 'organic' historical transition' but an artificial production of a privileged class
of private property owners being pillars for the construction of the new system. Just as
imagined by classical Marxism. However, this turn to privatisation is seen by Groys not as a
finish of the communist utopia, rather its completion. According to him 'completed here
means finished, and thus set free for repetition'. In a Groys vision the kingdom of philosophy
will arise again, more democratic than money and more universal than before. Even if 'radical
disturbing', it is hard to call Groys 'wrong'.

1 History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course, ed. by a commission of the CC of the CPSU (B),
Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1939, 106