The Idea of Communism 3 (original) (raw)

This book is a collection of speeches and interventions that were presented at the Idea of Communism Conference in Seoul, 24 September–2 October 2013. The pursuit of communism has a long history throughout the Asian region. For countries like North and South Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia and China, the passage to a form of ‘modernity’ is even unthinkable without this history. The struggle between communism and anti-communism still defines the region’s politics. The anti-communism once employed during the Cold War era, especially in South Korea, has not yet faded away, and is still used for attacking the left in many Asian countries. In this sense, Asia is a lively location for discussing the idea of communism from a non-Western perspective and evaluating whether the idea is universal; or, instead, whether it is to be defined by its regional situation, or by its historical or temporal moment or movement(s). The idea of communism, as Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek conceive it, involves the global struggle towards absolute equality. Seoul, the capital of South Korea, was chosen as the conference venue because here the idea of communism is once again in the air, reinsinuating the excluded passion for the real into the struggle for independence, justice and rights, into the seamless reality of global capitalism. The Korean peninsula is divided into two regimes, the North being an ‘actually existing’ communist country and the South, on the contrary, a highly developed capitalist country. But a conference such as this could never take place in the North, any more than in China. How should we read this apparent paradox? Here, in summary form, we have the history of communism’s development: the negation of communism = anti-communism, and then the liberal negation of anti-communism (negation of the negation) = anti-anti-communism. But what of communism itself? As the authors in this collection all agree, today one should face up squarely to the legacy of anticommunism, and also to its future, and to the political and intellectual oppression of the idea of communism. Crucially, however, the alternative to such oppression is nothing so negative as anti-anti-communism in the Asian context. The contributors to this volume intervene on many issues relating to the reassessment or reaffirmation of the idea of communism in light of the various political experiments found across Asia and elsewhere.