The Leftist Hypothesis First Draft

Posted on February 10, 2016 by comradecraig

What we are addressing is Lenins notion of the infantile disorder embodied within the
leftist hypothesis[1]. In what sense are now justified in repeating this statement? Given the
formation of the left internationally and locally, can we repeat Lenins statement? Does a
reversion to Lenins orthodox denunciation assist us in resurrecting the Idea of
Communism? Or rather, can we separate the Idea of Communism from leftist practice,
history and theory? There is certainly a difficulty when embracing Communism of being
accused of being ultraleftist, or adhering to the extreme left, which in a binary comes to
be seen as the opposite of the extreme right and thus reinforces the politics of the same,
and as belonging to a cabinet of historical political curiosities. Indeed, as Bruno Bosteels as
put it, [d]oes not then the attempt to demarcate the communist hypothesis from various
forms of leftism fall in line with this tried formula by which ideologues of the status quo
time and again seek to keep at arms length the extremism of the real movement which
abolishes the present state of things?[2].

In what sense then did Lenin address the question of Leftism? It is interesting to note here
that Lenins point of departure was medical: left-wing communism for him was not so
much a sin as a disease to be diagnosed through a set of symptoms and cured with
the appropriate treatments. Lenins conceptual effort at defining the phenomenon itself
involved defining leftism or left-wing communism as an extreme position that positions
itself against parliamentary or bourgeois electrical politics, in unions and even or especially
in party discipline. Subjective impatience in this framework takes the place of the arduous
and persistent work of party organization and discipline; in Lenins words: It is
tantamount to that petty-bourgeois diffuseness, instability, and incapacity for sustained
effort, unity and organized action, which, if indulged in, must inevitably destroy any
proletarian revolutionary movement[3]. However, Lenin was not the first to hurl abuse at
leftist movements; indeed Engels and Marx had long struggled against the uncompromising
radicalism of the Blanquist Communards,

The thirty-three Blanquists are Communists just because they imagine that, merely
because they want to skip the intermediate stations and compromises, that settles the
matter, and if it begins in the next few days which they take for granted and they come
to the helm, communism will be introduced the day after tomorrow. If that is not
immediately possibly, they are not Communists. What childish innocence it is to present
ones own impatience as a theoretically convincing argument[4]

Following Bosteels, the leftist hypothesis can take one of two forms. The first form is that
of the purification of the central Marxist idea of contradiction reduced to an unmediated
and often explicitly anti-dialectical opposition such as the one that pits the masses in direct
opposition to the State. This point is seemingly drawn out from the Communist Manifesto
where the notion that our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, has simplified class
antagonisms Society as a whole is more and more splitting into two great hostile camps,,
into two great classes directly facing each other[5]. This is kind of politics that opposes the
creative classes against a repressive system. In this regard, the massist ideology that
came out of 1968 excels in flattening out the dialectical analysis, Badiou remarks in his
Theory of Contradiction: Always the same exalted masses against the identical power,
the invariable system[6]. This view fails to take into account how political and ideological
struggles proceed through internal splits between the old and the new. It is never the
masses nor the movement that as a whole carry the principle of a division. Furthermore,
however, this kind of leftist hypothesis was already the target of attacks in the eyes of Marx
and Engels:

All these daring revisions, which are supposed to raise up the striking novelty of the
marginal and dissident asses against totalitarian Marxism-Leninism are a word that
which Marx and Engels, in The German Ideology, had to tear to pieces around 1845!
in order to clear the terrain for a finally coherent systematization of the revolutionary
practices of their time.[7]

This type of presentation is often subject to the melodramatic, in the sense in which
Althusser defines as a kind of consciousness as a false dialectic of good/bad conscience. In
this sense, melodrama is a foreign consciousness as a veneer on a reel condition, Althusser
writes: One makes oneself one of the people by flirtatiously being above its own
methods; that is why it is essential to play at being (not being) the people that one forces the
people to be, the people of popular myth, people with a flavor of melodrama[8]. The left
often falls for a melodramatic representation of the political by presenting itself in the
guise, on one hand, between a pure social force the people, the masses and on the other,
the corrupt machinery of the rich and powerful, protected by the State. Expanding on well-
known interpretation of the melodramatic imagination in 19-th century Europe as a morally
reassuring answer to the turmoil to the French Revolution, Bosteels argues that melodrama
has not become the privileged genre in which contemporary forms of post-politics
nonetheless give themselves an aura of left-wing radicalism after the alleged decline or
death of the revolutionary ideal of communism[9]. This type of leftism reduces the
complexity of the system to a set of simplistic contradictions, but are not found empirically.
Neither can the plebs be depicted as those who are excluded from power: Nowhere is the
conflict of power and nonpower played out. Everywhere the task of the State stumbles
upon, not the plebs but classes, corporations, collectives and their rules, their forms of
recognition and democracy, but also of exclusion and even oppression[10]; Rancire
draws an important lesson here from the developments of leftism in the 1970s: Lesson
perhaps of this confrontation: that there is never any pure discourse of proletarian power
nor any pure discourse of its nonpower, referring here to a task first developed by Marx:
The force of Marxs thought but perhaps also its untenable character resides no doubt
in the effort to hold on to these contradictions, which since then have been stripped bare
into the police fictions of proletarian powers of the pastoral dreams of plebian
nonpower[11].

The second form of the leftist hypothesis which lies in the area of immanence or reciprocal
presupposition between power and resistance[12]. This form of leftism presupposes a
communism that departs from within capitalism. As Bosteels puts it,
We might even say that, against the corrupt forms of really existing communism, this
paradigm of leftism traces the contours of a virtually existing communism within the
current state of affairs, arguing with Marx and Engels that the conditions of the communist
movement result from the now existing premise[13]

This hypothesis also has its origins in Marx, for example in the statement:

new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their
existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself. Therefore mankind always
sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, it will
always be found that the task itself arises only when the material conditions of its solution
already exist or are at least in the process of formation[14]

Or,

It will then become evident that the world has long dream of possessing something of
which it has only to be conscious in order to possess it in reality. It will become evident that
it is not a question of drawing a great mental dividing line between past and future, but of
realizing the thoughts of the past. Lastly, it will become evident that mankind is not
beginning a new work, but is consciously carrying into effect its old work[15]

Time, as understood in this hypothesis of immanence, no longer responds to the theoretical

notion of the absolute rupture, but rather to that of a paradoxical fold or wrinkle. It is no
longer the case of skipping ahead by leaping over all the intermediate stages but rather or
seizing the new warped into the old; a matter no longer of breaking the history of
humankind in two, with a great mental line between a before and an after, according to
some Nietzschean-style grand politics, but rather to track down the latent counterfinalities
within the existing state of affairs in order to awaken them and empower their potential for
resistance, subversion or destruction[16]. In this view, unlike that of the first, orientation is
ontologically prior to oppression[17]. In particular, it is Negris work on leftist communism
that contains the most articulate expression of this orientation towards immanence:
Communism is already alive within the capitalist and/or socialist societies of today, in the
form of a secret order dedicated to cooperation in production where the argument is taken
up from Marx, As Marx teaches us, communism is born directly from class antagonism,
from the refusal of both work and the organization of work, whether in the bourgeois form
or the socialist form[18]. This form of leftism then takes as its form of struggle the notion
that we need only push hard enough: The multitude, in its will to be-against and its desire
for liberation must push through Empire to come through on the other side[19]. Without
the use of any dialectical process, the multitude thus emerges to contest Empire[20]. This is
rooted in some of politico-ontological optimism that characterizes the brand of materialism
Negri and Hardt subscribe to: The creatives forces of the multitude that sustain Empire are
also capable of autonomously creating a counter-Empire, an alternative political
organization of global flows and exchanges[21]; ironically this formulation leads to the
logic that the more capitalism there is, the better for Communism: Perhaps the more
capital extends its global networks of production and control, the more powerful any
singular point of revolt can be[22].
In a worldwide situation of conservatism and blunt reactionary politics, when new forms of
political organization are lacking or insufficiently articulated, it is tempting to adopt a
position of radical left-wing idealism.

[1] Lenin, V.I. Left-Wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder in Selected Works.

(Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1961), vol.3, pp.371-460.

[2] Bosteels, B. The Leftist Hypothesis in Zizek, S. and Douzinas, C. (eds.). The Idea of
Communism. (London: Verso, 2010) p.35.

[3] Lenin, V.I. Left-Wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder in Selected Works.

(Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1961), vol.3, pp.394-5.

[4] Ibid, p.414-415.

[5] Marx and Engels. The Communist Manifesto. (London and New York: Verso, 1998),
p.69.

[6] Badiou, A. Thorie de la contradiction. (Paris: Francois Maspero, 1975), p.69.

[7] Ibid, p.72.

[8] Louis Althusser, The Piccolo Teatro: Bertolazzi and Brecht. Notes on a Materialist
Theatre, in For Marx. Trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 1990), p.139.

[9] Bosteels, B. The Leftist Hypothesis in Zizek, S. and Douzinas, C. (eds.). The Idea of
Communism. (London: Verso, 2010) p.43.

[10] Rancire, J. La bergre au Goulag, in Les Scnes du people. (Les Rvoltes

Logiques, 1975/1985) (Lyon: ditions Horlieu, 2003), p.319.

[11] Ibid. Rancire palys on the difficulty of holding onto or holding together (tenir)
what is otherwise untenable (intenable).

[12] Bosteels, B. The Leftist Hypothesis in Zizek, S. and Douzinas, C. (eds.). The Idea
of Communism. (London: Verso, 2010) p.44.

[13] Ibid, p.45.

[14] Marx, Preface, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, in Marx and
Engels, Collected Works, vol.29., pp.261-5.

[15] Marx, Letters from Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbcher, p.144.

[16] Bosteels, B. The Leftist Hypothesis in Zizek, S. and Douzinas, C. (eds.). The Idea
of Communism. (London: Verso, 2010) p.46.
[17] Such is the paradoxical modes of reasoning about power, oppression and rebellion we
find from Foucault to Deleuze to Negri. Even more, the last word on power holds that
resistance comes first, as Deleuze writes in his book on Foucault: Thus, there is no
diagram that does not contain aside from those points it connects, other relatively free or
unbound points, elements of creativity, mutation, resistance; and we should start from
these, perhaps, to understand the whole

See Deleuze, G. Foucault. (Paris: Minuit, 1986), pp. 96 and 51.

[18] Negri, Postscript, 1990 trans. Jared Becker, in Communists Like Us, pp.166 and
168.

[19] Hardt and Negri, Empire, p.218. See also p.62:

From one perspective, Empire stands clearly over the multitude and subjects it to the rule
of its overarching machine, as a new Leviathan. At the same time, however, from the
perspective of social productivity and creativity, from what we have been calling the
ontological perspective, the hierarchy is reversed. The multitude is the real productive force
of our social world, whereas Empire is a mere apparatus of capture that lives only off the
vitality of the multitude AS Marx would say, a vampire regime of accumulated dead
labour that survives only by sucking off the blood of the living.

[20] In fact, Empire has never been anything other than impossible project to capture and
control the creative mobility and desire of the multitude, whose vital constituent force
should therefore be considered anterior to all the attempts at medication on behalf of a
constituted power whether in terms of the market and globalization, the people, or the
modern State.

See Bosteels, B. The Leftist Hypothesis in Zizek, S. and Douzinas, C. (eds.). The Idea of
Communism. (London: Verso, 2010) p.48.

[21] Hardt and Negri, Empire, p.xv.

[22] Ibid, p.58.