@e_flux wrote:
The Verso blog has posted a rich interview with Alain Badiou about the legacy of twentieth-century Marxism. Badiou defends Lenin and Mao against accusations of totalitarianism, asserting that they fought fiercely to defend the independence of mass movements from state bureaucracy, only to be betrayed by their successors. Badiou also suggests that Marxist thought has reached a crossroads today, when it must formulate a conception of mass power beyond the party form. The interview originally appeared in the French magazine Les Inrockuptibles and is translated by David Fernbach. Here’s an excerpt:
In the debate on totalitarianism, you have taken an unambiguous position, writing: ‘This Russian revolution of 1917 was anything except totalitarian.’ According to you, it has been wrongly equated with its degeneration into a totalitarian party-state under Stalin.
AB: The identification of Lenin in 1917 with Stalin of, say, 1937 is a still more striking absurdity than that propagated by the monarchists in the early twentieth century, when they put Robespierre and Napoleon in the same sack. We should say that amalgams, fake figures and apocalyptic visions of the horror show type have always been instruments of the counter-revolutionaries. The Russian revolution is the appropriate name for the historical sequence running from 1917 to, at the maximum, 1929.
During the whole of this period, not only was the slogan ‘all power to the soviets’, to popular assemblies, axiomatic for Lenin, or those faithful to Lenin, but the same Lenin diagnosed, immediately after the victory of the Reds in the ferocious civil war, the advanced degeneration of the state established by the Bolshevik party. A common feature of both Lenin and Mao was the great suspicion they had towards everything that, under the pretext of state power, bureaucratized the revolutionary party and rendered it inert. For those who insist on the word ‘totalitarianism’ to denote the fusion of party and state, it would be more correct to say that Lenin and Mao were both severe critics of totalitarianism!
Image of Alain Badiou via theoryleaks.org.
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