The Communist Necessity: Prolegomena To Any Future Radical Theory by J. Moufawad-Paul

Author:J. Moufawad-Paul [Moufawad-Paul, J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781894946636
Publisher: Kersplebedeb Publishing
Published: 2014-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

In any case: if these theoretical substitutions do not resonate with the lived conditions of the most exploited and oppressed, but only with those whose class outlook is somewhat elitist, then we must wonder at their revolutionary status.

We should not, however, endorse some banal anti-intellectualism and fetishize illiteracy as proletarian. Even the revolutionary theory of yesteryear might at first seem opaque now that large portions of the masses have been socialized, after decades of anti-communism, to forget the concepts that emerged from their struggles. There is that theory and an accompanying philosophy that, due to the complexity of the terrain, will necessarily require significant education and study to grasp—pure mathematics, theoretical physics, philosophy of logic, ontology—but none of these areas of study pretend, at least not regularly, to be theories about making revolution. Hence we should wonder at those opaque theories that did not emerge from revolutionary struggle, that were imagined by academics usually disconnected from these struggles, but claim to be the answer to the masses’ quandary about making revolution.

The point, here, is not whether or not a theory is difficult to understand; this is a problem that can be solved by making education accessible to the most oppressed and exploited. Rather, whenever we encounter a new theory that speaks of overthrowing the existing social order, and claims to offer the conceptual tools for doing so, we should ask whether these tools are capable of providing a concrete analysis of concrete conditions and reflect the lived experience of the world’s most exploited and oppressed.

What we often discover when we ask the above question, though, are theories that primarily speak to the lived experience of a very small and particular population based at the centres of capitalism: academics and intellectuals, activists already converted to socialism—the very lived experience of the chic theoretician who is attempting to make what was once understood as a privileged and “petty-bourgeois” social position into the basis for revolutionary action! Some of these theoreticians and their readers might even pride themselves in being “anti-intellectual” and treating academia with scorn, though the work they produce is still consumed mainly by a population divorced from those who have nothing left to lose but their chains. The most oppressed and exploited masses are reading neither Badiou nor Debord, neither Zizek nor the Invisible Committee; most of them are not even reading Marx or Lenin, Luxemburg or Mao. The difference between the former and latter categories of theory, however, is that the latter, emerging from concrete revolutionary history, does speak to the lived experience of the masses whereas the former does not. Theory alienated from practice that contrives to speak in the name of praxis should be treated with suspicion.

There is at least one answer to this problem, a way to escape the charge of academic obscurantism: more than a few of these new theorists have claimed, from the 1960s to the present, that privileged students and academics have become the new revolutionary agent—a new vanguard, but in a spontaneous sense.

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