choppedliver
03-19-2009, 07:05 PM
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/mar/12/philosophy/print
Move over Jacko, Idea of Communism is hottest ticket in town this weekend
* Duncan Campbell
* guardian.co.uk, Thursday 12 March 2009 18.03 GMT
* larger | smaller
* Article history
The hottest ticket in London this weekend is not for a pop singer or a football match but for a conference on communism which brings together some of the world's leading Marxist academics. The international financial crisis has led to a resurgence of interest in a philosophy that many claimed had been buried with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Such has been the interest in the conference, entitled On the Idea of Communism, being staged at London university's Birkbeck college from tomorrow, that the venue has been changed three times to accommodate the extra demand and is sold out. Participants are flying in from the US, Latin America, Africa and Australia to hear from some of the world's big hitters on the subject.
One of the organisers, the Slovenian philosopher and writer, Slavoj Zizek, has emphasised that the purpose of the gathering is not to "deal with practico-political questions of how to analyse the latest economic, political, and military troubles, or how to organise a new political movement". He added: "more radical questioning is needed today – this is a meeting of philosophers who will deal with communism as a philosophical concept, advocating a precise and strong thesis: from Plato onwards, communism is the only political idea worthy of a philosopher."
Although the conference seems particularly timely, it was planned last summer, well before the scale of the current economic collapse had become apparent.
"The response has taken us by surprise," said Costas Douzinas, director of the Birkbeck institute for the humanities, which is hosting the three-day event. "It must be related to the wider political context. There is a sense that we have to start thinking again."
He said that the gathering was about the meaning of communism and speakers had indicated that they would be very critical of the Soviet model. Among the questions to be addressed is whether "communism is still the name to be used to designate the horizon of radical emancipatory projects".
The participants include the radical Italian writer and academic, Toni Negri, who was once sentenced to a long prison term for "insurrection against the state" in Italy, Terry Eagleton and the French philosopher, Alain Badiou, author of the recent book on the French president, The Meaning of Sarkozy. Other speakers include Michael Hardt, Gianni Vattimo, Bruno Bosteels from Cornell university, Alessandro Russo, Judith Balso, and Alberto Toscano.
"The communist hypothesis remains the good one, I do not see any other," said Badiou, in his foreword to the conference programme. "If we have to abandon this hypothesis, then it is no longer worth doing anything at all in the field of collective action. Without the horizon of communism, without this idea, there is nothing in the historical and political becoming of any interest to a philosopher. Let everyone bother about his own affairs, and let us stop talking about it... what is imposed on us as a task, even as a philosophical obligation, is to help a new mode of existence of the hypothesis to deploy itself."
After the event:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/16/communism-philosophy-commun
ist-party/print
Communism: a viable alternative?
As the epoch of liberal capitalism and the free market falls apart, the question of an alternative must be re-opened
Comments (…)
* Bernard Keenan
*
o Bernard Keenan
o guardian.co.uk, Monday 16 March 2009 19.00 GMT
o larger | smaller
o Article history
Let's get one thing out of the way to begin with: history is back in fashion. A generation on from Francis Fukuyama's claim that the fall of the Soviet Union marked the "end of history", the epoch of liberal capitalism and the free market fell apart in spectacular style during a few short months last autumn. As jobs disappear and anger rises, the bare bones of ideology that prop up the present system are exposed.
The speedy panic with which our governments agreed to throw billions of pounds away to restore "confidence" suggests that the dream is over and we are awakening to a strange new socialism, in which an increasingly authoritarian government has taken public control of financial capitalism in order to save it from itself. We read today that equal pay reviews no longer matter. Migrants are left to starve on the streets as the government heads off the far right by pandering to it. And so it's precisely now that the question of an alternative must be re-opened.
Against this backdrop, Birkbeck College this weekend hosted a symposium on the idea of communism. Originally planned as a meeting of philosophers and those who enjoy hearing their debates, the unexpected material circumstances of history instead gave the event a genuine sense of urgency. Even the BBC came to hear Slavoj Zizek, Alain Badiou, Jacques Ranciere, Michael Hardt, Toni Negri, and others speaking on the possibilities and challenges of reinventing the communist ideal today.
The conference was happily free of dogmatism. No one on the stage was there to represent a particular party or doctrine. There were disagreements, but at heart was a simple proposition. Communism is an idea that has been with us in different forms for thousands of years, as Terry Eagleton pointed out. The task is now to think what the concepts of egalitarian voluntarism, self-organisation, common ownership of common means of production, abolition of class-structured society, and freedom from state power can mean today.
It's a bold statement, declaring oneself a communist. The cultural revolutions of 1968 were the beginning of the end of the party-state, when programmatic communism was replaced by a more postmodern, abstract idea of "the left". Freedom of thought and nomadic thought undid the old certainties of Marxist political knowledge. No one has quite figured out how to replace them, and this perhaps more than anything else can account for the current weakness of the left, even as capitalism is in crisis: what is to be done?
First, the question of the role of the state and the economy remains open. While Judith Balso, Toni Negri and Alain Badiou insist on creating new political movements at a distance from the state, Zizek and Bruno Bosteels point to the experiences of Bolivia and Venezuela as contemporary proof that by taking power, a progressive radical movement can survive even against overwhelming reactionary forces. For Zizek, to reject the idea of a revolutionary state in the absence of a clear alternative is a cop-out.
However, such considerations all seem to beg the question of how to organise. It is difficult to imagine a new Communist party, but without one, the idea of communism remains just that: a quasi-religious article of faith. This was perhaps Eagleton's point when he observed that it is not so difficult to imagine a communism of scarcity, foisted upon us by disaster rather than rapture.
Perhaps the true question is: why communism? It does no harm to remember that for Marx, communism was not something anachronistic and programmatic. Marx insisted on the simple id
ea that we and no one else are responsible for remaking the world. Communism can only be enacted from what really exists. The party-states attempted to bend society to match some abstract idea. A true philosophy of communism cannot provide all the answers, because it has not yet encountered the problems.
Separating the promise of communism from the disasters of the 20th century is no easy task. But it feels necessary. Already we know that choices will have to be made and sides taken. Impending ecological disaster suggests that this could be our last chance to do so. If another world is possible, it will happen in action, not abstract theory. The first choice is very simple: to begin.
* guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2009
Move over Jacko, Idea of Communism is hottest ticket in town this weekend
* Duncan Campbell
* guardian.co.uk, Thursday 12 March 2009 18.03 GMT
* larger | smaller
* Article history
The hottest ticket in London this weekend is not for a pop singer or a football match but for a conference on communism which brings together some of the world's leading Marxist academics. The international financial crisis has led to a resurgence of interest in a philosophy that many claimed had been buried with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Such has been the interest in the conference, entitled On the Idea of Communism, being staged at London university's Birkbeck college from tomorrow, that the venue has been changed three times to accommodate the extra demand and is sold out. Participants are flying in from the US, Latin America, Africa and Australia to hear from some of the world's big hitters on the subject.
One of the organisers, the Slovenian philosopher and writer, Slavoj Zizek, has emphasised that the purpose of the gathering is not to "deal with practico-political questions of how to analyse the latest economic, political, and military troubles, or how to organise a new political movement". He added: "more radical questioning is needed today – this is a meeting of philosophers who will deal with communism as a philosophical concept, advocating a precise and strong thesis: from Plato onwards, communism is the only political idea worthy of a philosopher."
Although the conference seems particularly timely, it was planned last summer, well before the scale of the current economic collapse had become apparent.
"The response has taken us by surprise," said Costas Douzinas, director of the Birkbeck institute for the humanities, which is hosting the three-day event. "It must be related to the wider political context. There is a sense that we have to start thinking again."
He said that the gathering was about the meaning of communism and speakers had indicated that they would be very critical of the Soviet model. Among the questions to be addressed is whether "communism is still the name to be used to designate the horizon of radical emancipatory projects".
The participants include the radical Italian writer and academic, Toni Negri, who was once sentenced to a long prison term for "insurrection against the state" in Italy, Terry Eagleton and the French philosopher, Alain Badiou, author of the recent book on the French president, The Meaning of Sarkozy. Other speakers include Michael Hardt, Gianni Vattimo, Bruno Bosteels from Cornell university, Alessandro Russo, Judith Balso, and Alberto Toscano.
"The communist hypothesis remains the good one, I do not see any other," said Badiou, in his foreword to the conference programme. "If we have to abandon this hypothesis, then it is no longer worth doing anything at all in the field of collective action. Without the horizon of communism, without this idea, there is nothing in the historical and political becoming of any interest to a philosopher. Let everyone bother about his own affairs, and let us stop talking about it... what is imposed on us as a task, even as a philosophical obligation, is to help a new mode of existence of the hypothesis to deploy itself."
After the event:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/16/communism-philosophy-commun
ist-party/print
Communism: a viable alternative?
As the epoch of liberal capitalism and the free market falls apart, the question of an alternative must be re-opened
Comments (…)
* Bernard Keenan
*
o Bernard Keenan
o guardian.co.uk, Monday 16 March 2009 19.00 GMT
o larger | smaller
o Article history
Let's get one thing out of the way to begin with: history is back in fashion. A generation on from Francis Fukuyama's claim that the fall of the Soviet Union marked the "end of history", the epoch of liberal capitalism and the free market fell apart in spectacular style during a few short months last autumn. As jobs disappear and anger rises, the bare bones of ideology that prop up the present system are exposed.
The speedy panic with which our governments agreed to throw billions of pounds away to restore "confidence" suggests that the dream is over and we are awakening to a strange new socialism, in which an increasingly authoritarian government has taken public control of financial capitalism in order to save it from itself. We read today that equal pay reviews no longer matter. Migrants are left to starve on the streets as the government heads off the far right by pandering to it. And so it's precisely now that the question of an alternative must be re-opened.
Against this backdrop, Birkbeck College this weekend hosted a symposium on the idea of communism. Originally planned as a meeting of philosophers and those who enjoy hearing their debates, the unexpected material circumstances of history instead gave the event a genuine sense of urgency. Even the BBC came to hear Slavoj Zizek, Alain Badiou, Jacques Ranciere, Michael Hardt, Toni Negri, and others speaking on the possibilities and challenges of reinventing the communist ideal today.
The conference was happily free of dogmatism. No one on the stage was there to represent a particular party or doctrine. There were disagreements, but at heart was a simple proposition. Communism is an idea that has been with us in different forms for thousands of years, as Terry Eagleton pointed out. The task is now to think what the concepts of egalitarian voluntarism, self-organisation, common ownership of common means of production, abolition of class-structured society, and freedom from state power can mean today.
It's a bold statement, declaring oneself a communist. The cultural revolutions of 1968 were the beginning of the end of the party-state, when programmatic communism was replaced by a more postmodern, abstract idea of "the left". Freedom of thought and nomadic thought undid the old certainties of Marxist political knowledge. No one has quite figured out how to replace them, and this perhaps more than anything else can account for the current weakness of the left, even as capitalism is in crisis: what is to be done?
First, the question of the role of the state and the economy remains open. While Judith Balso, Toni Negri and Alain Badiou insist on creating new political movements at a distance from the state, Zizek and Bruno Bosteels point to the experiences of Bolivia and Venezuela as contemporary proof that by taking power, a progressive radical movement can survive even against overwhelming reactionary forces. For Zizek, to reject the idea of a revolutionary state in the absence of a clear alternative is a cop-out.
However, such considerations all seem to beg the question of how to organise. It is difficult to imagine a new Communist party, but without one, the idea of communism remains just that: a quasi-religious article of faith. This was perhaps Eagleton's point when he observed that it is not so difficult to imagine a communism of scarcity, foisted upon us by disaster rather than rapture.
Perhaps the true question is: why communism? It does no harm to remember that for Marx, communism was not something anachronistic and programmatic. Marx insisted on the simple id
ea that we and no one else are responsible for remaking the world. Communism can only be enacted from what really exists. The party-states attempted to bend society to match some abstract idea. A true philosophy of communism cannot provide all the answers, because it has not yet encountered the problems.
Separating the promise of communism from the disasters of the 20th century is no easy task. But it feels necessary. Already we know that choices will have to be made and sides taken. Impending ecological disaster suggests that this could be our last chance to do so. If another world is possible, it will happen in action, not abstract theory. The first choice is very simple: to begin.
* guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2009