Bruno Bosteels The Speculative Left Communism without Marxism (original) (raw)
Related papers
1 Communism and democracy – a problematisation
2007
As startling as the sudden and total disintegration of the Soviet Union may have been, the complete oblivion to which communism has quickly been consigned has been no less surprising. Political analyses of democratisation in eastern Europe have all but forgotten the rise of communism in Russia after 1917 and its enormous influence on the politics of the twentieth century. This book brings communism back into the study of democracy. The reason for such a return is not nostalgia for a failed political experiment, but the conviction that the rash classification of communism as an object of study for historians overlooks its active role in shaping the post-communist order. The unexpected collapse of communism indicated that much social science research was prejudiced with ideas about the immutable and eternal nature of communist power. Its sudden disappearance not only prevented corrections of this cognitive failure but also privileged views on communism as a ‘legacy’ rather than a soci...
Communism and the emergance of democracy
The long crisis of communism was a powerful impetus for the development of critical social theory, but critical social theory has not had much to say about the end of communism and what has followed in Eastern Europe and the former USSR. There are some monographs and edited collections on post-communism that use ideas and concepts from critical social theory, but they are few in number in comparison to work that starts from mainstream social science perspectives. This is especially the case for the study of post-communist politics where perspectives from 'mainstream' comparative politics have shaped debate about the nature of post-communist political development. Harald Wydra's Communism and the emergence of democracy should therefore be welcomed for attempting to apply ideas from critical social theory to the study of post-communist politics and filling in a significant intellectual lacuna. There is a need for a volume written from this perspective, ideas about transition should and can be criticised, and there is nothing wrong with interpretation of events through secondary sources. Unfortunately, Wydra's book fails at almost every level: it fails as a critique of conventional wisdoms, which are parodied rather than rebutted; it fails as a theoretical alternative because of the confusion of ideas and terms used and the avoidance of any effort to establish the relationship between the concepts deployed in the book; and it fails as interpretative analysis because analysis takes second place to the avalanche of concepts that Wydra deploys and what is left of it after the theoretical deluge is often conventional, frequently simplistic and sometimes erroneous.
Communism and the Emergence of Democracy
2007
Before democracy becomes an institutionalised form of political authority, the rupture with authoritarian forms of power causes deep uncertainty about power and outcomes. This 2007 book connects the study of democratisation in eastern Europe and Russia to the emergence and crisis of communism. Wydra argues that the communist past is not simply a legacy but needs to be seen as a social organism in gestation, where critical events produce new expectations, memories and symbols that influence meanings of democracy. By examining a series of pivotal historical events, he shows that democratisation is not just a matter of institutional design, but rather a matter of consciousness and leadership under conditions of extreme and traumatic incivility. Rather than adopting the opposition between non-democratic and democratic, Wydra argues that the communist experience must be central to the study of the emergence and nature of democracy in (post-) communist countries.
Do Not Be Afraid, Join Us, Come Back? On the "Idea of Communism" in Our Time
This article critically assesses the recent return of “communism” in contemporary political theory. The principal focus is Alain Badiou’s formulation of the “idea of communism” and its “sequences,” which are approached here in relation to the body of work collected in Douzinas and Žižek’s The Idea of Communism. Critical of Badiou, the article argues that communism should be understood as a “real movement” immanent to the mutating limits of capital, and not as a subjective “truth procedure.” In taking the latter route, Badiou not only produces a faulty philosophy of communism but also misdiagnoses its historical record, allowing Lenin and Mao, the spectacle of revolution, to stand as its genuine expressions. In this, Badiou contributes to the contemporary nostalgic image of a “real communism” that in practice was nothing of the sort.
2011
One of the rising stars of US critical theory, Bruno Bosteels discusses the new currents of thought represented by figures such as Badiou, Ranciere and A iA ek, who are spearheading the recent revival of interest in communism. Bosteels examines this resurgence of communist thought through the prism of speculative leftismA"-an incapacity to move beyond lofty abstractions and thoroughly rethink the categories of masses, classes and state. Debating those questions with writers including Roberto Esposito and Alberto Moreiras, Bosteels also provides a vital account of the work of the Bolivian Vice President and thinker Alvaro Garcia Linera.
Revolutions, Reforms or Reformulations? Marxist Discourse on Democracy
This contribution takes as its starting-point the notion of a'Third Way'to socialism between Stalinism and social democracy which has emerged most markedly from a political and theoretical debate which has been going on in France, and more especially in Italy, for some time now.r First used in the present debate by the ltalian communist Pietro Ingrao (generally acknowledged .as the spokesperson for the left of the Italian Communist Party-pcr), it was taken up by others after him and has, to a certain extent, become a watchword for those on the European left who have been concerned to brihg Marxist theory and practice out of a pervasive and disabling set of dichotomies.
Democratisation as Meaning-Formation - Lessons from the Communist Experience
This paper argues that the democratic breakthrough in 1989-1991 was prefigured by meanings of democracy that emerged during the political evolution of communism. Meanings of democracy are not understood as variations of a universal model but as contingent interpretive acts following the existential uncertainty of political crises under communism. Whilst institutional perspectives associate democratic freedom with abstract principles of individualism, autonomy, or the rule of law, the anthropological perspective on the experience of democratisation proposed here emphasises the power of spirit and consciousness in the formation of meanings. This argument is developed by elaborating three propositions: Historically, communism was not simply an undemocratic, totalitarian system but a social organism in gestation; The emergence of communism in 1917 in Russia and 1945 in eastern Europe, but also major challenges to its power in 1956, 1968, and 1980, created new democratic aspirations at the level of symbolism and political consciousness; Democratisation was prefigured both in the political imagination of democracy as an undifferentiated good and in the "power of the powerless," by which Eastern European dissidence aimed to make a political choice at the existential level of recognising the people as a political subject.