Don't Believe The Rumors

"There is a hypothesis which is both stronger and simpler: it is that the political and thus subjective history of communisms is essentially divided from their State history. The criminal objectivity of the Stalinist State is one thing, the militant subjectivity of communists is another; the latter has its own referents, its own singular development, and its own nonobjective prescriptions. Criminal objectivity only ever functioned as a general argument - it has always perfectly functioned for reactionaries [...] inasmuch as political subjectivity, the sequential "we", was obsolete.

"It is not the revelation of a crime, by Solzhenitsyn or anyone else, which ruined the political hypothesis of communism ('communism' understood here within the twentieth century's sequence of 'we'). It is the death - once again, the ancient death - of the hypothesis which allowed these 'revelations' to have such efficacy. Because if political subjectivity has become unable to support, by itself, in thought and act, the singularity of its trajectory (and thus also its philosophical connection to emancipatory eternity, to the invariants), then there is no longer any other reference than that of the State, and it is clear that the criminal character of such and such State becomes an argument without an answer.

"It is not because the Stalinist State was criminal that the Leninist prescriptions, crystallized on October '17, ceased to expose communism to its eternity within time (moreover, what relation is there between these prescriptions, that event and the Stalinist State apart from pure empirical consequence?) It is because there were no longer any possible militants of such an exposition, for intrinsic and purely political reasons, that the Stalinist State - once it had retroactively become the absurd incarnation of the Idea - functioned as an unanswerable historical argument against the Idea itself.

"This is why the ruin of the Party-State is a process immanent to the history of States. It succumbs to its objective solitude, to its subjective abandon. It succumbs by the absenting of politics, and singularly of any politics deserving the name 'communist'. The anarchic confused deplorable spectacle - but necessary and legitimate because what is dead must die - of this ruin testifies, not to the 'death of communism', but to the immense consequences of its lack."

-Alain Badiou