Must the Communist Hypothesis Be Abandoned?

Alain Badiou

The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, Volume 55, 2009, pp. 79-88

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Published by University of Toronto Press

DOI: 10.1353/cgl.2011.0014

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must the communist hypothesis
be abandoned?

Alain Badiou

M
y beginning will be a provocative convic-
tion: concerning the becoming of Human-
ity, communism is the right hypothesis. In
fact, there is no other; in any case, I know no other.
Whoever abandons this hypothesis must immediately
be resigned to the market economy, to parliamentary
democracy (which is the form of State appropriate to
capitalism), and to the inevitable, ‘natural’ character of
the most monstrous inequalities.
What does ‘communism’ mean? As Marx argues in
the Manuscripts of 1844, communism is an idea related
to the destiny of generic humanity. We must absolutely
distinguish this use of the word, from the sense of the
adjective ‘communist’ in expressions such as commu-
nist parties,’ ‘the communist world,’ the communist
camp and so on. Even if, as we shall see, these uses of
the word are part of the step by step historical develop-
ment of the hypothesis.
In its generic sense, ‘communist’ first signifies nega-
tively, as we can see in the canonic text, Manifesto of the
Communist Party. It signifies that the logic of classes,
of the fundamental subordination of real workers to a
dominating class, can be surmounted. This structure,
which is that of History since Antiquity, is not inevita-
80 The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, Volume 55

ble. Consequently, the oligarchic power, crystallized in

the power of States, of those who detain the wealth and
organize its circulation, is not ineluctable. The commu-
nist hypothesis is that another collective organization
can work, which will eliminate the inequality of wealth
and even the division of work: each and every one will
be a “polyvalent worker.” In particular, people will cir-
culate between manual work and intellectual work, as
well as between the city and the country. The private
appropriation of monstrous fortunes and their trans-
mission within families by inheritance will disappear.
The existence of a coercive State apparatus protected by
the military and the police, separate from civil society,
will no longer appear to be an obvious necessity. There
will be, Marx tells us, considering this point as his ma-
jor contribution, after a brief sequence of a “proletarian
dictatorship,” charged with destroying what remains of
the old world, a long sequence of reorganization on the
basis of the “free association” of producers and creators,
which will support a “decline of the State.”
‘Communism’ only designates this very general set
of intellectual representations. This set is the horizon
for any initiative, as local and limited in time as it may
be, which, breaking with the order of established opin-
ions (or the necessity of inequalities and a state instru-
ment for their protection), composes a fragment of a
politics of emancipation. It is, in short, an Idea whose
function is regulatory and not a program. It is absurd
to qualify the communist principles (in the sense I have
just given) as a utopia, as is often done. They are in-
tellectual schemes, always practiced in different ways.
They serve to produce, between different politics, lines
of demarcation. Overall, for a given political sequence,
it is either compatible with these principles, and is
emancipating in the wide sense, or else it is opposed
to them and it is reactionary. ‘Communism’ is, in this
sense, a heuristic hypothesis frequently used in polem-
ics, even if the word does not appear.
Maybe you know this violent sentence of Sartre,
in the fifties of the last century: “any anticommunist
is a dog.” If we correctly read this sentence, it’s true.
For any political sequence that, in its principles or its
Must the Communist Hypothesis Be Abandoned ? 81

absence of any principle, appears formally contradic-

tory with the communist hypothesis in its generic
sense, must be judged as opposed to the emancipation
of the whole of humanity. And so it’s opposed to the
properly human destiny of humanity. Whoever does
not enlighten the development of humanity by the
communist hypothesis reduces it, for what concerns
its collective development, to animality. As we know,
the contemporary, that is to say, capitalist, name of this
animality, is ‘competition.’ That is to say, it’s the war of
interests and nothing else. But the war of interests is
the infra-human part of Humanity.
As pure Idea of equality, the communist hypothesis
has existed in practice probably since the beginnings of
the existence of the State. As soon as the action of the
masses opposes, in the name of equalitarian justice, the
domination of the State, we witness the appearance of
some fragments of the communist hypothesis. This is
why in a small book whose title was De l’idéologie (On
Ideology), written in collaboration with the regretted
François Balmès and published in 1976, we proposed
to identify what we named “communist invariants.”
Popular revolts, the revolt of the slaves under the di-
rection of Spartacus, or that of the German peasants
under the direction of Thomas Munzer, or the revolt
of French workers during the Commune de Paris, or
of the Chinese workers of Shangai in the twenties, and
so on, are examples of this existence in practice of the
communist invariants.
Nevertheless, under the explicit form that revolu-
tionary thinkers gave it, the communist hypothesis in-
augurates political modernity. It broke away from the
mental structures of the Old Regime, without however
connecting up to ‘democratic’ political forms which the
bourgeoisie will make use of to conquer the power. This
point is essential: from the beginning, the communist
hypothesis is in no way identical to the ‘democratic’
hypothesis which completely dominates the contem-
porary world. The communist hypothesis subsumes
another history, other events. In the light of the com-
munist hypothesis, what seems important and creative
is of another nature than what democratic bourgeois
82 The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, Volume 55

historiography has selected. This is precisely why Marx,

giving his materialist foundations to the first great se-
quence of the modern politics of emancipation, on the
one hand takes up the word ‘communism’ and on the
other hand takes his distance from any purely demo-
cratic orientation. In particular, Marx, at the school
of the Commune of Paris, affirms that the bourgeois
State, even as democratic as one could wish it, must be
destroyed.
In an interview, Sartre says this in substance: “If the
communist hypothesis is not right, if it is not applica-
ble, this means that humanity is not in itself something
very different from ants or termites.” What is he saying
there? That if competition, ‘free market,’ the search for
little jouissances and the walls that protect you from
the desire of the weak are the alpha and omega of all
existence, collective or private, the human beast is not
worth a scrap.
So, only to be a real actor, a real activist, of the be-
coming human of the human beast, we have to know
the history of the communist hypothesis.
In fact, there are two great historical sequences of
this hypothesis: that of its creation, and that of the first
attempts to realize it.
The first sequence spreads from the French Revo-
lution to the Paris Commune, let’s say from 1792 to
1871. It lasted then about eighty years. This sequence
links, under the Idea of communism, the popular mass
movement with the notion of the seizure of power. It
was about organizing the popular movement, under
multiple forms—demonstrations, strikes, uprisings,
armed actions, etc.—around the figure of overthrowing
the State. This overthrow is obviously an insurrectional
overthrow, which is called ‘revolution.’ This revolu-
tion must suppress the existing form of society (private
property, inheritance, the separation of humanity into
nations, the division of work, etc.) and establish com-
munist equality, or what the working-class thinkers, as
my friend Jacques Rancière has so well analyzed, name
the “community of Equals.”
The old order will be overthrown by a combina-
tion of its own immanent corruption and the pres-
Must the Communist Hypothesis Be Abandoned ? 83

sure, armed if necessary, of the popular movement. It is

also at this moment that the specific parameter of the
workers’ movement appears. The old revolutionary cat-
egories, the little people in the cities, the artisans, the
students and the intellectuals, the poor peasant masses,
will be transformed, raised up, by the directing func-
tion of the working class.
This sequence closes with the astonishing newness
and the radical failure of the Paris Commune. The
Commune was the supreme form of this combination
of popular movement, working-class direction and
armed insurrection. It showed the extraordinary vital-
ity of this formula: it was able to exercise a power of a
new type for two months, in one of the largest capitals
of Europe. But it also showed its limits. For it was not
able either to extend the revolution to a national scale,
or efficaciously organize the resistance to the counter-
revolution, which, with the tacit support of foreign
powers, was able to count on an efficient military ap-
paratus.
The second sequence goes from 1917 (the Russian
Revolution) to 1976 (the end of the Cultural Revolu-
tion in China, but also the end of the militant move-
ment which arose throughout the world somewhere
between 1966 and 1975), and whose epicenter, from
the point of view of political innovation, was May
1968 in France and its consequences during the years
that followed. This second sequence lasts about fifty
years. But notice that it is separated from the first by a
gap of about the same length (more than forty years).
This second and very complex sequence, which also
includes, at its terminal border, what we have inher-
ited, is dominated by the question of time. How can
we be victorious? How, to the contrary of the Paris
Commune, can we endure in the face of the sanguinary
reaction of those who possess and their mercenaries?
How can we organize the new power, the new State, in
such a way that it would be sheltered from being de-
stroyed by its enemies? Lenin’s great question was how
to find an answer to these questions. And it is certainly
not for nothing that he danced on the snow when the
insurrection lasted in Russia one day longer than the
84 The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, Volume 55

Paris Commune.
During this second sequence, the problem is no
longer the existence of a popular workers’ movement
acting under the communist hypothesis, nor of the ge-
neric idea of revolution in its insurrectional form. The
problem is that of victory and duration. We can say
that the question is no longer one of formulating and
experimenting the communist hypothesis, but of real-
izing it. From this point of view, the general maxim
is the one formulated by Lenin, which is in substance
this: “We are entering the period of victorious prole-
tarian revolutions.” This is why the first two thirds of
the 20th century were dominated by what I called “the
passion of the real”: what the 19th century had dreamed
of and experimented with, the 20th century had to ac-
complish integrally.
This obsession with victory and the real was concen-
trated on the problems of organization and discipline,
and starting from 1902 and Lenin’s What Is to Be Done?
was entirely contained in the theory and the practice
of the centralized and homogenous class party. We can
say that the communist parties embodied, in their ‘iron
discipline,’ the real of the communist hypothesis.
This characteristic construction of the second se-
quence of the hypothesis, the party, actually did resolve
the question bequeathed by the first sequence: the
question of the victory. In Russia, in China, in Czecho-
slovakia, in Albania, in Korea, in Vietnam, and even in
Cuba, although a bit differently, under the direction
of communist parties, the complete revolution of the
political and social order had won out by insurrection
or a prolonged popular war, and had endured, under
the form of what was called ‘the socialist State.’ After
the first sequence, whose guiding line was the formula-
tion of the communist hypothesis and of its reality as
a movement, there was effectively a second sequence,
whose guiding line was disciplined and militarized or-
ganization, local victory and duration.
As is normal, the second sequence created in its turn
a problem it did not have the means to resolve with
the methods that had permitted it to resolve the prob-
lem left to it by the first sequence. In effect the party,
Must the Communist Hypothesis Be Abandoned ? 85

adapted to the insurrectional or military victory that

was successful against the weakened reactionary pow-
ers, proved to be inapt for the construction of a State
around the dictatorship of the proletariat in the sense of
Marx, that is, a State organizing the transition towards
the non-State, a power organizing the non-power, a
dialectic form of the decline of the State. Under the
form of the Party-State, a new form of authoritarian,
or even terrorist State was experimented with, which
was in any case very far from the practical life of the
people. The deployment of excessive and sanguinary
police violence was in no way sufficient to save it from
the inertia of its internal bureaucracy, and with the fe-
rocious competition imposed on it by its adversaries, it
had hardly taken more than fifty years to demonstrate
that it would never triumph.
The most important contemporary problem is that
the political form of the Party is inadequate to assure
the real duration and the creative transformation of the
communist hypothesis. And it’s to this problem that are
consecrated the last important convulsions of the sec-
ond sequence: the Cultural Revolution in China and
the nebulously named ‘May 68’ in France. In China,
Mao’s maxim on this point is: “No communism without
a communist movement.” The party must at any cost be
steeped in the masses to regenerate it, to de-bureaucra-
tize it and launch it in the transformation of the real
world. The Cultural Revolution attempts this task, and
quickly becomes chaotic and violent, the definition of
the enemy being either uncertain, or directed against
the unique pillar of society: the communist party itself.
Mao had something to do with this when he declared:
“We do not know where the bourgeoisie is? Well it’s in the
communist party!” Finally, without support for the most
radical experiences of the decentralization of the State
(the ‘Shanghai Commune,’ in the beginning of 1967),
the old order had to be reestablished in the worst con-
ditions. In France, after May 68, the dominating mo-
tif was that the organized collective action must create
new political spaces, and not reproduce the centralized
management of the State. The principal content would
be new forms of organization and action enveloping in
86 The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, Volume 55

the same political vision intellectuals and workers, and

proposing to prolong the communist hypothesis even
beyond the logic of the seizure of power. Nevertheless,
even if this experience was pursued under new forms,
from the end of the 1970s it can be considered that,
overall, the modern form of the reactionary State, capi-
talo-capitalism, was once again dominant in the mind,
under cover of ‘democracy.’ Let’s say that the political
processes of a new type are at the stage at which Lenin
found himself at the very beginning of the 20th cen-
tury when the question “What Is to Be Done?” admits
of precise experimental responses, in a general context
dominated by the adversary, and which moves, slowly
but surely, towards the acceleration of the subjective
phenomena that always accompany war.
Recall in effect that between the first and the second
sequence, between the last positions of Marx and the
first of Lenin, there are forty years of triumphant im-
perialism. From the repression of the Paris Commune
until the First World War, we have the apogee of the
bourgeoisie, which occupies the planet, devastating
and plundering entire continents. I talk about sequenc-
es of the communist hypothesis, but these sequences
are separated by intervals in which what prevails, in
terms of balance and stabilization, is certainly not the
communist hypothesis. It is declared on the contrary
that this hypothesis is untenable, or even absurd and
criminal and must be renounced.
This authorizes us to return to our question: where
do we stand now? Admit that for the world, the second
sequence was achieved towards the end of the 1970s.
Admit that since then, drawing the lessons of the criti-
cal experiences that marked the terminal border of this
sequence—May 68 and the Cultural Revolution—dif-
ferent collectives, in different situations, have been
looking for the path towards a politics of emancipation
adequate for the present times.
Of course, in one way or other, we accumulate theo-
retic and historical teaching that was born of the first
sequence, and the central function of the victorious
discipline, born of the second. However, our problem
is neither the existence in movement of the hypoth-
Must the Communist Hypothesis Be Abandoned ? 87

esis, nor its disciplined victory on the level of the State.

Our problem is the proper mode in which new political
thought, ordained by the hypothesis, is presented in figures
of action. In short: a new relation between the subjec-
tive and the objective.
What our concern is today, since the negative expe-
rience of the socialist States, and since the ambiguous
lessons of the Cultural Revolution and May 68—and
that is why our research is so complicated, so vacillat-
ing, so experimental—is to give existence to the com-
munist hypothesis in a different mode than the mode
of the first sequence. The communist hypothesis re-
mains the right hypothesis, as I have said, and I see no
other. If this hypothesis must be abandoned, it is of no
avail to do anything whatsoever, as far as a collective
action is concerned. Without the horizon of commu-
nism, without this Idea, nothing in historical and polit-
ical evolution is of a nature to interest the philosopher.
Let everyone mind his own business and talk no more
about it. In fact, what has become our task, or we can
even say our philosophic duty, is to contribute to defin-
ing a new mode of existence of the hypothesis. New by the
type of political experimentation this hypothesis can
give rise to. We have learned from the second sequence
and its final attempts: we must return to the condi-
tions of existence of the communist hypothesis, and
not only perfect the means of our struggle. We can-
not be satisfied with the dialectic relation between the
State and the mass movement, with the preparation of
the insurrection, with the construction of a powerful,
disciplined organization. We must, in reality, reestablish
the hypothesis in the ideological and militant field.
With respect to this, we are closer to a set of prob-
lems already examined in the 19th century than we are
to the grand history of the revolutions of the 20th cen-
tury. Just as after 1840, we are now confronted to ab-
solutely cynical capitalists, more and more inspired by
the idea that only wealth counts, that the poor are just
lazy, that the Africans are backward and that the future,
with no discernible limit, belongs to the ‘civilized bour-
geoisies’ of the western world. All kinds of phenomena
from the 19th century reappear: extraordinarily extend-
88 The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, Volume 55

ed zones of misery within rich countries; inequalities

forever growing; a radical cut between the people of the
working classes, or the unemployed, and the middle
classes; the complete dissolution of political power in
the service of property and capitalist profit; the disorga-
nization of revolutionaries; the nihilist despair of large
portions of the youth; the servility of a large majority
of intellectuals; and the experimental activity of some
groups in quest of the contemporary means to establish
the communist hypothesis. All these characteristics are
very close to the political situation which was domi-
nant in Europe in the middle of the 19th Century. And
this is probably why, as in the 19th century, it is not the
victory of the communist hypothesis that is, today, our
problem. Everyone knows this, but the conditions of
its existence. And that was the great question of the
revolutionaries of the 19th century: first, give a histori-
cal existence to the hypothesis. Well, that is our task
in the interphasal period that is oppressing us. And it
is exalting: by combining constructions of thought,
which are always global or universal, and political ex-
perimentations, which are local or singular but univer-
sally transmissible, we must assure the new existence of
the communist hypothesis in consciences and in situa-
tions. Youth of today! Do that!
The European Graduate School