The Communist Hypothesis by Alain Badiou

Author:Alain Badiou
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Verso Books

The workers enter the universities

By February 1968, after the movement’s involution at the end of the summer of 1967, the conservatives think that their time for revenge has come. Mao and his group, however, are still on the alert. They launch a campaign stigmatizing the ‘February counter-current’ and they renew their support for the revolutionary groups and the construction of new organs of power.

In the meantime, the universities can no longer be kept under the yoke of rivalling splinter groups, given the general logic of a return to order and the perspective of an upcoming party congress charged with drawing up a balance sheet of the revolution (in fact, this congress will be held at the beginning of 1969, confirming the power of Lin Biao and the military). An example must be set, all the while avoiding the crushing pure and simple of the last Red Guards, concentrated in the buildings of the University of Beijing. The adopted solution is totally extraordinary: thousands of organized workers are called upon, without any weapons, to occupy the university, to disarm the factions and directly to ensure their authority. As the leaders’ group would say later on: ‘The working class must lead in every aspect’, and ‘the workers will stay for a long time, and even forever, in the universities’. This episode is one of the most astonishing ones of the entire period, because it renders visible the need for the violent and anarchic youth force to recognize a ‘mass-based’ authority higher than itself, and not only, nor even principally, the institutional authority of the recognized leaders. The moment is all the more surprising and dramatic in that certain students open fire against the workers, there will be deaths, and in the end Mao and all the leaders of the Maoist group will gather with the best-known student leaders, most notably Kuai Dafu, the venerated head of the Red Guards in the university of Beijing, and renowned nationwide. There exists a retranscription of this head-to-head meeting between the stubborn revolutionary youths and the old guard.8 We can see Mao expressing his profound disappointment caused by the spirit of factionalism among the youth, together with a remnant of political friendship for them, and the will to find a way out. We can clearly see that Mao, by bringing in the workers, wanted to prevent the situation from turning into one of ‘military control’. He wanted to protect those who had been his initial allies and had been the bearers of enthusiasm and political innovation. But Mao is also a man of the party-state. He wants its renovation, even a violent one, but not its destruction. In the end he knows full well that by subjugating the last outpost of young rebellious ‘leftists’, he eliminates the last margin left to anything that is not in line (in 1968) with the recognized leadership of the Cultural Revolution: the line of party reconstruction. He knows it, but he is resigned. Because he holds no alternative hypothesis –

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