Chapter 5: Our Utopian Predicament

I have written previously about the illusion of free markets—about the misleading idea that “less regulated” political economies are more efficient or optimal, or that there could even exist a “less regulated” or an “unregulated” market.117 As I demonstrated in The Illusion of Free Markets, all political economies are fully regulated, and the regulatory mechanisms produce distributions of wealth and resources. The purportedly “free market” does that primarily through a complex enforcement mechanism involving private property; but it is just as “regulated” as state-controlled economies.

The upshot of that earlier work is that the type of political economic regime does not determine distributional equity. It is the minutiae of the second-order rules and regulations that do so. A nationalized, state-controlled economy can distribute wealth in a hideously unequal manner, by for instance privileging a central party apparatschik. On the other hand, a privately-owned corporation can distribute most of its wealth to its workers, or to charity, if the owners are so inclined. We’ve seen cases of that in the United States, for instance, with Chobani or Ben & Jerry’s. And vice versa. State-owned enterprises could distribute to the public or workers, and private corporations could distribute primarily to shareholders and executive officers, as they tend to do.

The fact is, capital does not have an inherent distributional tilt. Capital—as accumulated wealth or machinery or human potential—exists at both extremes of nationalized and private economies. Capital itself does not dictate distributions. It is only greedy capitalists who deploy capital in selfish ways. It is only the advanced capitalist tradition—tied to certain values—that has produced increasing disparities between workers and executives. None of this is natural or inevitable. It rests instead on myths, in the sense that illusions about the “free market” naturalize what we say about these different regimes—namely, that capitalism has proven to be more efficient, or that capitalism necessarily entails inequality. Every political economy is regulated, regulated in a particular way, and all we can do is judge the distributional outcomes that result from its operating rules and mechanisms.

The result is that we, critical theorists, cannot say ex ante that one type of political economic regime—centralized, nationalized, communist, socialist, syndicalized, guilded, unionized, private, or anarchist—is more favorable to our ideals than another. We cannot promote, in the abstract, a socialist state or a communalist regime. We can only judge the distributional outcomes of already-existing political economies, and we can only judge them based on our values, values that are associated with certain traditions, in this case, critical Left values.

This represents a foundational break from traditional critical theory, which oriented its praxis around a specific utopian vision generally involving a particular political economy. To embrace a pure theory of illusions, in other words, creates a genuine conflict with earlier critical utopias. It triggers an authentic dilemma. The history, again, is telling and reveals a structural transformation of critical utopias.

I.

For most of its history, critical theory was oriented toward a communalist utopia.118 To be sure, there are still critical voices today calling for traditional Marxist utopias—for a communist horizon or a communist hypothesis.119 But the prospect of a traditional proletarian future has faded, especially in the absence of a robust self-consciousness among workers or students. Etienne Balibar is surely right that such futures may still be possible; as he suggests, “civic and democratic insurrections, with a central communist component against ultra-individualism, also involving an ‘intellectual and moral reform’ of the common sense itself (as Gramsci explained), are probably not destructible.”120 And Balibar might still want to call those possible futures “revolution.” “Call ‘revolution’ the indestructible? I would suggest that possibility,” Balibar adds.121 But any such future would probably be better understood through other rubrics than traditional Marxist revolution—for instance, through the different modalities of uprisings, riots, revolts, disobedience, and so on. And it is not clear whether or how traditional critical theory would guide us through these modalities.122 Words matter, of course. As Koselleck reminds us, “In politics, words and their usage are more important than any other weapon.”123 But if that is true, we are indeed in a radically anti-foundationalist place. Truth is, critical theory is in disarray when it comes to utopias and visions for the future.

The reasons for this trace in large part to a disenchantment with the conventional Marxist philosophy of history and an exhaustion with the notion of a social revolution, which were at the heart of nineteenth century critical utopias. In an earlier time, dialectical materialism remained more central to critical theory, either as an animating force (for instance, in much of the critical thought and writings on insurgency even in the 1970s), or as a foil and point of resistance, reconceptualization, or augmentation (for instance, in Foucault’s and Deleuze’s writings through the mid-1970s). But the geopolitical changes at the turn of the twenty-first century, the dissipation of segments of the left-leaning working class—with the rise of alt-right and far-right groups that have cannibalized the white working class base of the communist parties—and the exhaustion of meta-histories have dramatically eroded the hold of ambitious philosophies of history. The result is that today, even the writings of first-generation Frankfurt School authors feel out-of-touch with present critical sensibilities.

The reasons also trace, in part, to the transformation of the concept of “revolution” that was embedded in more traditional critical theory. Reinhart Koselleck and Hannah Arendt famously traced the emergence of the modern concept of revolution to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By contrast to ancient conceptions tied to the etymology of revolving cycles—of the cyclical returning to the point of origin, of the astronomical cycle of the stars, or of the ancient philosophical progression of constitutions (from monarchy to its dark twin tyranny, to aristocracy and then oligarchy, and finally democracy and ultimately ochlocracy, or mass rule)—the “modern” concept of revolution signified a watershed transformation or a binary break, a singular moment represented by the collective concept of “Revolution,” in capital and in the singular. What characterized this conception of revolution was the passage from the idea of a political to a social revolution: the idea that a revolution is about social change, about “the social emancipation of all men, [about] transforming the social structure.”124

Toward the latter half of the twentieth century, this modern concept of revolution seemed to collapse under the weight of its own exigency, leading to other late-modern concepts of uprising, insurgency, and insurrection. The transformation was brought about, in part, by the anticipated failure of the revolution, which nourished a certain expectation or fear of miscarriage—what Etienne Balibar refers to as an “accumulation of factors which make the failure of revolutions their only possible outcome, therefore depriving them of their historical meaning and their political effectivity.”125 The transformation was due, in part also, to the recurring idea that revolutions lead only to terror—or, in Simona Forti’s words, that revolution “hosts in its genetic code the mark of terror and totalitarianism”126—a thesis notoriously made famous by François Furet and other mid-century historians. It was partly due, as well, to the omnipresent fear that the prospect of revolution brings about a more powerful preemptive counterrevolution; and to the fact that words and things have become so intertwined that it is practically impossible to talk about revolution without merely interpreting it—hoisted, as we are, by our own discursive and disciplinary practices in a time when knowledge and gewalt (power, violence, action) have become so reflexively imbricated.

These historical transformations pushed critical theory and praxis from their origins in Marxist class struggle, through the disruption of Maoist-inspired forms of insurrection, to more contemporary models of assemblies, occupations, strikes, and hashtag social movements that have a completely different texture and offer a different vision of the future. The move from Marx to Maoist insurrection and ultimately to these forms of uprising and occupation has laid a new foundation for critical utopias. It was driven by forces that will have a lasting impact on our present. Two in particular.

A. The Hold of History

The first was the loosening grip of the philosophy of history. This was a gradual process, first in Mao’s thought, but more so in the later receptions of his writings starting in the 1960s and 70s. Mao started with a strongly Marxist philosophy of history, no doubt; but it slowly dissipated from his writings, and even more so, out of their reception. Today even insurrectional writings that are still inspired by Maoist thought have a far less determinist historical tone.

Mao’s early writings—or, at least, the official English translations of his early writings produced by the Foreign Languages Press of the Chinese government in the late 1960s—were heavily influenced by a Marxist philosophy of history. His Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan (March 1927) firmly embraced dialectical materialism, trumpeting the coming revolution in resolute terms—echoing the Marxist inevitability of social revolution.127 Similarly, Mao’s more philosophical writings from the period, for instance his essay On Contradiction (1937), represented a vigorous appropriation of Marxist dialectical materialism by contrast to what Mao called the metaphysical or vulgar evolutionist world view—what we might refer to today as the liberal progressive view of history. But even early on, Mao’s emphasis on internal contradiction as the driving force of history, of social science, of physics, in sum of everything, already felt less historical than Marx, particularly than the Marx of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoléon. There was already in Mao an almost mechanical feel to the notion of contradiction, as it passed from the human to the natural realm and back. Drawing on Lenin, Mao illustrated “the universality of contradiction” in the following terms:

In mathematics: + and - . Differential and integral.

In mechanics: action and reaction.

In physics: positive and negative electricity.

In chemistry: the combination and dissociation of atoms.

In social science: the class struggle

In war, offence and defence, advance and retreat, victory and defeat are all mutually contradictory phenomena. One cannot exist without the other.128

This reflected a mechanical dimension to Mao’s philosophy of contradiction that, at least on my reading, sounded more in natural science than in history. The problem may well be in the translation; but the imposition of a natural science framework and rhetoric on history and human affairs foreshadowed an eventual loosening of the grip of history.

By the time of the Cultural Revolution, the urgency of the laws of history had dissipated. Already in 1957, right after the uprisings in Hungary, Mao began to acknowledge that the classical Marxist teachings and doctrines were no longer as compelling as they were before. “It seems as if Marxism, once all the rage, is currently not so much in fashion.”129 And by 1964, certainly, there had been a loosening of the bind of history. Class struggle remained key, but the call to churn society through the Cultural Revolution was presented more as a productive pragmatic idea than as historical necessity. The universality, the absolute, the mechanical was now muted, and instead, there was more of a practical sense to politics. Almost a recommendation now, rather than a command of nature:

You intellectuals sit every day in your government offices, eating well, dressing well, and not even doing any walking. That’s why you fall ill. Clothing, food, housing and exercise are the four great factors causing disease. If, from enjoying good living conditions, you change to somewhat worse conditions, if you go down to participate in the class struggle, if you go into the midst of the ‘four clean-ups’ and the ‘five antis’, and undergo a spell of toughening, then you intellectuals will have a new look about you.130

Notice how the tone had changed, the relation to history, the form of argument. The grip of history had loosened. There was now a certain pragmatism and softening to the discourse and to the argumentation (once again, at least in the translation). There was cajoling and reasoning that sounded of a different nature.

The loosening of the grip of history became even more accentuated with the Western European reception of Mao in the 1960s and 70s. When Maoism became a form of Dadaism, for instance, with the Mao-Dadaism of the 1970s in Italy and the publication of the review A/traverso, which pursued “a ‘poetic of transformation’ and invented a language called Mao-Dadaism, whose starting point was the idea that Mao’s declarations, if read under the right light, are pure Dadaism”131; or when Jean-Luc Godard portrayed Maoism in La Chinoise (1967) as a form of summer training camp for youngsters in love and in depression—at that point, the siren call of determinist history was hard to hear.

Of course, the reception of Mao by young critical leftists in the 1960s and 70s—as well as by more mature philosophers and activists, such as Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre—was entirely situational—as I will discuss shortly. They needed an alternative to Soviet communism, and the only demonstrable alternative on offer was Maoism. Mao became a mirror on which they projected their ideas and desires—and internecine conflicts. (One can get a good sense of this rereading the debate between two young Maoists, Benny Lévy and André Glucksmann, and Michel Foucault that took place in June 1971, “On Popular Justice: A Debate with Maoists”).

But by the time we get to the twenty-first century, even the most Maoist-inspired insurrectional writings have lost their Marxist history. This is evident, for instance, in the Maoist-inspired book of the Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection (2007). The grip of the philosophy of history has been loosened. Rather than a determinist future, the situation is described as a doomsday scenario. Dialectical materialism and theories of contradiction have been replaced by the powder keg: things are about to explode, the pressure is too great. The insurrection is coming because everyone is sick, depressed, pushed to the limit. We are in a state, the Invisible Committee tells us, of “the most extreme alienations—from our selves, from others, from worlds.”132 Political representation is over. “The lid on the social kettle is shut triple-tight, and the pressure inside continues to build.”133 There is no theory of institutional change here, but instead a movement from institutions to the personal, to the subjective. “Organizations are obstacles to organizing ourselves,” the Committee writes.134 Instead of forming organizations, there is a turn inward to transform the self. There is little hope for social change, and no use for traditional political means. “There will be no social solution to the present situation,” the Committee states.135 Instead of politics, if anything, there is a negation of politics. Instead of history, there is a ticking time bomb.

B. The Soviet Conjuncture

The second factor is more conjunctural. The movement away from traditional Marxism and the reception of Maoist thought in the West and South in the 1960s was influenced by the historical conjuncture of, on the one hand, European communist parties that were captured by the Soviet Union, with a Stalinist shadow, and, on the other hand, the absence of an attractive socialist alternative. Young militants projected onto Maoism their hope for a substitute to Soviet communism. This was true across the political Left—from the more hard-core Leninist or Jacobin or Bolshevik politics of someone like Alain Badiou and his Union des communists français marxistes-léninistes at one end, to the more aesthetic, libidinal, and subjective politics of the Vive la revolution! group in France at the other. In this regard, incidentally, the reception of Mao in the West and South has to be understood through the lens of orientalism and of the projection of Western leftist desires onto China.136

From lengthy conversations with Daniel Defert and François Ewald, who were both Maoists in the late 60s and early 70s, it is clear that they turned to Maoism primarily as an alternative, as a way to avoid both the Stalinism of the PCF and the dogmatism and top-down hierarchies of the French socialist party.137 Maoism had on offer—or at least, it was perceived by these young militants as offering—an opening to a new left politics and a new form of insurrection. A fresh alternative. For some, a more creative and aesthetic politics. For others, a more dynamic and engaged politics. And still for some others, a more extreme insurrectional politics. But a new horizon all around.

There is a passage from Simone de Beauvoir’s memoir from the period, All Said and Done, that captures perfectly this dynamic:

Despite several reservations—especially, my lack of blind faith in Mao’s China—I sympathize with the Maoists. They present themselves as revolutionary socialists, in opposition to the Soviet Union’s revisionism and the new bureaucracy created by the Trotskyists; I share their rejection of these approaches. I am not so naïve as to believe that they will bring about the revolution in the near future, and I find the “triumphalism” displayed by some of them puerile. But whereas the entirety of the traditional Left accepts the system, defining themselves as a force for renewal or the respectful opposition, the Maoists embody a genuinely radical form of contestation. In a country that has become sclerotic, lethargic, and resigned, they stir things up and arouse public opinion. They try to focus “fresh forces” in the proletariat—youth, women, foreigners, workers in the small provincial factories who are much less under the influence and control of the unions than those in the great industrial centers. They encourage action of a new kind—wildcat strikes and sequestrations—and sometimes they foment it from within… I shall never regret whatever I may have done to help them. I should rather try to help the young in their struggle, than to be the passive witness of a despair that has led some of them to the most hideous suicide.138

C. A Restructuring of the Landscape

These two forces brought about a structural transformation in the landscape of critical utopias over the course of the twentieth century. The influence of Maoism on European militants during the late 1960s and 1970s represented a rejection of a more classical, unified, or coherent Marxist vision of proletarian revolution led by an organized, industrialized working class, guided by an intellectual vanguard, and determined by history.

The Maoist shift represented in part the replacement of the proletarian working class with agricultural workers or “peasants,” one important dimension. It would mirror other anti-colonial voices that opposed the universalism of the proletariat worker. Frantz Fanon too, and other post-colonialist thinkers, challenged the Euro-centric notion of the proletariat.139 As Fadi Bardawil notes, “In opposition to the colonized militants dabbling in ‘abstract’ slogans of power to the proletariat, Fanon elevate[d] the ‘wretched of the earth,’ who are not assimilated to the colonial world and whose bodies bear its brunt, to the role of the primary revolutionary agent.”140

But an equally important shift was from a unitary notion of revolution (with a capital R and in the singular, as Koselleck emphasized) involving a tidal wave of one class rising up against another, to the idea of micro-insurrections by minority insurgents that would culminate in a massive movement of the people. It thus entailed far more insurrectional strategies at the micro level, insurgent tactics, and game-theoretic strategizing—which inspired the movements of May ’68, the groupuscules and anarchist cells of the 1970s and 80s, and the more strategic activism of the last decades of the twentieth.

The evolution produced a fundamental shift in the map of revolutionary visions. At first, for Marx and still for the first-generation of the Frankfurt School, the driving force of history was class struggle, imagined as a struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. In other words, it was a struggle between two classes, two entities, two enemies. By contrast, for Mao, the struggle involved three parties: the active insurgents, the active counterinsurgents (early on, the Kuomintang), and the peasant masses. The central Maoist strategy was for the small minority of active insurgents to gain the allegiance of the masses in order to seize power from the counterrevolutionary minority. (To a certain extent, Marxist Leninism got closer to this tripartite mapping, but it was still far more binary than Maoist insurgency theory). Mao’s discourse was all about embracing the peasant masses—about striving to win over their hearts and minds. This was evident not only during the original insurgency leading to his victory against Chiang Kai-shek in 1949, but even as late as the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1968. One can still hear it when, in confronting the Red Guards—the young radical high school and university students empowered under the Cultural Revolution—Mao told them that their mission had been precisely to embrace all segments of society, to serve the people.141

In the following decades, the map of the political struggle was essentially similar to Mao’s—in the sense that there was a demarcation between the small minority of activists, the police state, and the general population; however, it often felt that the more radical activists viewed themselves as an embattled minority with little interest and even some disdain for the masses. The discourse of uprising became that of a pitched battle against the counterrevolutionary forces of the state (as was the case against the Kuomintang), but at a distance from the majority of the population—masses that did not seem movable or winnable. The general population had become the consumerist, neoliberal bulk of individuals, more objects of disdain than a popular force to be won over.

The resulting vision was very different. It did not start with a union of workers uniting to take power and end with the withering of the state, but instead, it started with a small cell of activists disrupting and causing havoc, or an assembly prefiguring a new democratic form, without much of an end-game. Although Mao insisted on the idea of winning the hearts and minds of the masses, it is not at all clear that later cellular uprisings hoped any more to bring the masses to their side. There was a far more separatist element to critical activism, a desire to live apart, in a commune, away from others. Critical visions embraced cellular, secessionist futures.

The shift from Marx to Mao and to later insurrectional visions can be characterized as a transformation from the Marxist theory of binary class struggle that leads to revolutionary upheaval and a communalist condition as a necessary product of dialectical materialism, to a paradigm of tripartite warfare in which a small minority of insurgents win over the masses through insurgent theory and practices, to a micro-strategic insurrectional notion of an embattled minority in violent struggle against a police state, with little hope of gaining the allegiance of the neoliberal masses. The critical utopias had morphed, and fragmented.