This example will combine the temporal gap (between 81 BC and 1975) and the geographical one (it comes from China).
Ten years after the seizure of power by the Chinese communists, in the years 1958–59, bitter debates arise in the Party over the country’s development, the socialist economy, the transition to communism. Some years later, these debates will lead to the turmoil of the Cultural Revolu-tion. It is altogether striking that, in Mao Tse-tung’s work during this period, the critique of Stalin occupies a very important place, as if, in order to find a new path, it was necessary to return to the balance-sheet of the USSR’s collectivization in the thirties. It is even more striking that this confrontation between the Stalin of the thirties to the fifties and Mao at the threshold of the sixties evokes, down to its very detail, an infinitely older quarrel: the one that took place in 81 BC in China between the Legalists and the Confucian conservatives after the death of the emperor Wu—a quarrel which is recorded in the great Chinese classic (obviously written by a Confucian), the Discourses on Salt and Iron. This reference is immediately intertwined with the revolutionary history of contemporary China, given that in 1973 a campaign was launched which jointly vituperated Lin
Biao—a Party potentate, leader of the Cultural Revolution, Mao’s one-time designated successor and probably murdered in 1971—and Confucius. This campaign drew on the ancient Legalists, and proposed a new reading of the Discourses, whose watchword was that ‘Lin Biao and Confucius are two badgers on the same hill’.
The Discourse is an astonishing text in which, before the emperor Zhao, the (Legalist) Great Secretary endures the questioning of the (Confucian) scholars on all the crucial subjects of state politics, from the function of the laws to the strictures of foreign policy, via the public monopoly over the trade of salt and iron.
Today we can circulate between:
–the minutes of a political reunion dating more than two thousand years;
–Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR, a text in which Stalin, at the very beginning of the fifties, confirms his abiding orientations;
–two series of considerations by Mao regarding Stalin’s text: a speech from November 1953 and some marginal annotations from 1959;
–the convulsions of the Cultural Revolution at the beginning of the seventies.
This circulation spans enormous historical and cultural differences.
We traverse disjoined worlds, incommensurable appearances, different logics. What is there in common between the Chinese Empire undergoing its centralization, the post-war Stalin, and the Mao of the ‘Great Leap Forward’, and then of the Red Guards and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution? Nothing, save for a kind of matrix of state politics which is clearly invariant; a transversal public truth that may be designated as follows: a truly political administration of the state subordinates all eco-nomic laws to voluntary representations, fights for equality, and combines, where the people are concerned, confidence and terror.
This immanent articulation of will, equality, confidence and terror can be read in the proposals of the Legalists and of Mao. It is rejected in the proposals of the Confucians and of Stalin, which inscribe inequality into the objective laws of becoming. It follows that this articulation is an invariant Idea concerning the problem of the state. This Idea displays the subordination of the state to politics (the ‘revolutionary’ vision in the broad sense). It fights against the administrative principle, which subordinates politics to the statist laws of reality, in other words against the passive or conservative vision of the decisions of the state. But, in a more essential
sense, one can see in this entire immense temporal arc that thought, con-fronted with the state’s logic of decision, must argue on the basis of consequences and that, in so doing, it delineates a subjective figure that detaches itself from the conservative figure. The argument from con-sequences is valid for all the four points whose invariance structures a revolutionary vision of the state (will, equality, confidence, terror). I will now show this in what concerns political will and the principle of confidence.
The Confucian scholars explicitly declare that ‘if laws and customs fall into obsolescence, they must be restored [. . .] what is the use of changing them?’ Against this subjectivity of restoration, or reaction, the (Legalist) Secretary of the Prime Minister affirms the positive material consequences of an ideological rupture:
If it was necessary to blindly follow Antiquity without changing any-thing, perpetuating all the institutions of our fathers without modifying them in any way, culture would have never been able to burnish the old rustic ways and we would still be using wooden carts.
Similarly, Mao rises up against Stalin’s objectivism. He argues that Stalin
‘wants only technology and cadres’ and only deals with the ‘knowledge of the laws’. He neither indicates ‘how to become the masters of these laws’, nor does he sufficiently illuminate ‘the subjective activism of the Party and the masses’. In truth, Mao indicts Stalin for a veritable depoliticization of the will:
All of this relates to the superstructure, that is to ideology. Stalin speaks only of the economy; he does not deal with politics.
This depoliticization must be envisaged in terms of its most remote con-sequences: the transition to communism, the only source of legitimacy for the authority of the socialist state. Without a political break, without the will to abolish ‘the old rules and the old systems’, the transition to com-munism is illusory. As Mao never tires of repeating, in a key formula:
‘Without a communist movement, it is impossible to advance into com-munism’. Only a will inhabited by its consequences can politically over-come the objective inertia of the state. In refusing such a risk, Stalin ‘has not found the good method and the good path which lead from capitalism to socialism and from socialism to communism.’
In truth, if Stalin does not want ‘subjective activism’ or—it’s the same thing—a ‘communist movement’, it is by dint of his systematic distrust
of the great mass of the people, who are still peasants. Mao repeats it unceasingly: in the writings of Stalin, one ‘discerns great mistrust towards the peasants’. The Stalinist conception entails that ‘the state exerts an asphyxiating control over the peasantry’. In brief: ‘His fundamental error derives from [. . .] not having enough confidence in the peasantry’. But here too it is the principle of consequences that authorizes a judgment:
without confidence in the peasants, the socialist movement is impractic-able, everything is fettered and everything is dead.
This is because Mao founds a relation, unexplored before him, between the future of the socialist process and the confidence placed in the peasants.
Because he entertains distrust, ‘Stalin does not approach the problem in terms of its future development’. Seen from the standpoint of politics and its consequences, the development of collective property, including its capacity to produce commodities, is not a goal in itself, or an economic necessity. It aims to serve the constitution of a popular politics, of a real alliance internal to the communist movement, which alone is capable of guaranteeing that the transition to property will be in the hands of the entire people:
The maintenance of commodity-production inherited from the system of collective property aims to consolidate the alliance between workers and peasants.
We can see here the outline of that truth for the sake of whose deploy-ment Mao and his partisans waged, between 1965 and 1975, their last battle. This truth is the following: political decision is not fettered by the economy. It must, as a subjective and future-oriented principle, subordin-ate to itself the laws of the present. This principle is called ‘confidence in the masses’. Now, this is also what is advocated by the Legalist advisors of the emperor Wu, despite their constant appeals to implacable law and repres-sion; even though, quite obviously, the stakes of confidence are entirely different, or even opposed. The Confucian scholars defend the immutable cycle of peasant production and oppose all novelties in artisanship and trade. They argue that all is well when ‘the people devotes itself body and soul to agricultural tasks’. The Great Secretary retorts with a vibrant encomium for commercial circulation, voicing complete confidence in the multiform development of exchange. Here is an admirable monologue:
If you leave the capital to travel through peaks and valleys in all directions, through the fiefs and principalities, you will not find a single
large and handsome city that is not traversed from one end to the other by great avenues, swarming with traders and grocers, brimming over with all kinds of products. The wise know how to profit from the seasons, and the skilful how to exploit natural riches. The superior man knows how to draw advantage from others; the mediocre man knows only how to make use of himself. [. . .] How could agriculture suffice to enrich the country, and why would the system of the communal field alone have the privilege of procuring the people what it needs?
In these lines, we can make out a singular correlation between will and confidence, rupture and consent. It constitutes the kernel of a trans-temporal political truth, of which Mao’s meditations on Stalin of 1959 and the Great Secretary’s diatribes against the Confucians in 81 BC are instances: forms of its appearing in separate worlds. But what is worthy of note is the fact that there corresponds, to these totally distinct or even opposed instances of a kernel of truth, a recognizable subjective type, that of the state revolutionary. This type too may be read through the four terms of the generic correlation (will, equality, confidence and terror).
I will show this now with regard to the classical pair equality/terror, dis-continuous instances of which we could also find in the likes of Robespierre or Thomas Müntzer.
The Legalist advisors of the emperor Wu are known for their apologia for the most ferocious repression in the implacable application of laws:
The law must be implacable in order not to be arbitrary, it must be inexorable in order to inspire respect. These are the considerations that presided over the elaboration of the penal code: one does not flout laws that mark with red-hot iron the slightest of crimes.
The Confucian scholars counter this repressive formalism with the classical morality of motive:
Penal laws must above all take motives into account. Those who stray from legality but whose motives are pure deserve to be pardoned.
We can witness the appearance here, with regard to the problem of repressive exigencies, of a correlation between formalism and a revo-lutionary vision of the state, on the one hand, and the morality of motive and a conservative vision, on the other. The Confucians subject politics to prescriptions whose value derives from their longevity. The sovereign must above all ‘respect the established rites’. The Legalists desire a state activism, even at the price of a forcing of situations. This opposition is still at work in
Mao’s reactions to the Manual of Political Economy published by the Soviets under Khrushchev, at the height of the post-Stalinist ‘thaw’. The manual recalls that under communism, taking into account the existence of hostile exterior powers, the state endures. But it adds that ‘the nature and forms of the state will be determined by the particular features of the communist system’, which comes down to assigning the form of the state to something other than itself. Against this, as a good revolutionary formalist, Mao thunders:
By nature, the state is a machine whose purpose is to oppress hostile forces. Even if internal forces that need to be oppressed no longer exist, the oppressive nature of the state will not have changed with respect to hostile external forces. When one speaks of the form of the state, this means nothing other than an army, prisons, arrests, executions, etc. As long as imperialism exists, in what sense could the form of the state differ with the advent of communism?
As we’ve known ever since Robespierre and Saint-Just, the central category of state revolutionary formalism is terror—whether the word is pronounced or not. But it is essential to understand that terror is the pro-jection onto the state of a subjective maxim, the egalitarian maxim. As Hegel saw (to then ‘overcome’ what in his eyes was its purely negative dimension), terror is nothing but the abstract upshot of a consideration required by every revolution. Since the situation is marked by an absolute antagonism, it is imperative to maintain:
–that every individual is identical to his or her political choice;
–that non-choice is a (reactive) choice;
–that (political) life, having taken the form of civil war, is also the exposure to death;
–that, in the end, all individuals of a determinate political camp can be substituted with one another: the living take the place of the dead.
It is then possible to understand how the Legalist Great Secretary is capable of combining an absolute authoritarianism with a principled egalitarianism. It is true, on the one hand (the formula is hard to forget) that ‘the law must be such as to give the feeling that one is on the verge of an abyss’. But the real goal is to forbid inequalities, to suppress speculators, hoarders and factions. Without terror, the natural movement of things lies in the dissidence of the power of the rich. State revolutionary subjectivity, built on confidence in the real movement of politicized consciences and
the exaltation of will, brings together terrorist antagonism and the con-sequences of equality. As the Great Secretary says:
When one does not keep the ambition of the great families in check, it is like with branches which, having become too heavy, end up breaking the trunk. Potentates take control of natural resources.
It is then that the ‘powerful will be favoured to the detriment of the meek and the assets of the state will fall into the hands of brigands’.
We are reminded here of Robespierre’s cry at the Convention, on 9 Thermidor: ‘The Republic is lost! The brigands triumph!’ That’s because behind this type of political terror lies the desire for equality. The Legalists know perfectly well that ‘there is no equality without the redistribution of riches’. State revolutionary subjectivity is identified as an implacable struggle against the factions that arise from wealth or hereditary privilege.
Mao’s language is no different, including when he’s dealing with the hereditary privileges reconstituted by the power of the Communist Party.
The action of the revolutionary state aims to ‘eliminate, on a daily basis, the laws and powers of the bourgeoisie’. That is why one should ‘send cadres to the countryside to work in experimental farms’, because it is ‘one of the methods to transform the system of hierarchy’. If the Party becomes an aristocracy, state revolutionary subjectivity is done for:
The children of our cadres worry us greatly. They have no experience of life and society. But they act arrogantly and have a very obvious superiority complex. We must educate them so that they do not depend on their parents or on the martyrs of the revolution, but only on themselves.
Equality means that everyone is referred back to their choice, and not to their position. That is what links a political truth to the instance of decision, which always establishes itself in concrete situations, point by point.
Having reached this point, the reader may imagine that he or she has hit up against a contradiction. Haven’t I persistently upheld two theses pro-posed and developed by Sylvain Lazarus, which are essential to the politics of which we are both militants, that of the Organisation Politique: first, the thesis of the separation between the state and politics; second, the thesis of the rare and sequential character of politics? Doesn’t the figure of the ‘state revolutionary’ directly oppose the first of these theses, and the idea of the eternity or invariance of this figure—and more generally of political
truths—stand against the second? I have devoted a long note, which is to be found in the section entitled ‘Notes, Commentaries and Digressions’, to this question. It establishes not only that there is no contradiction on this point between Lazarus and me, but also that the two fundamental theses in question are both presupposed and sublimated in the philosophical context in which I (re)cast them.
We can now confidently draw some conclusions regarding the general characteristics of the truths of politics, which are also those of the historical sequences (and thus of the worlds, or logics of appearing) in which the radical will that aims at an emancipation of humanity as a whole is affirmed.
1. All these truths articulate four determinations: will (against socio-economic necessity), equality (against the established hierarchies of power or wealth), confidence (against anti-popular suspicion or the fear of the masses), authority or terror (against the ‘natural’ free play of competition).
This is the generic kernel of a political truth of this type.
2. Each determination is measured up against the consequences of its inscription in an effective world. This principle of consequence, which alone temporalizes an instance of politics, knots together the four determinations. For example, wanting the real of an egalitarian maxim implies a formally authoritarian exercise of confidence in the political cap-acity of workers. This is the whole content of what was once referred to as the dictatorship of the proletariat. This movement is nothing other than the
‘Marxist’ instance of a real (or corporeal, we would say) knotting together of the four determinations.
3. There exists a subjective form which is adequate to the different instances of the generic kernel of truths. For example, the figure of the state revolutionary (Robespierre, Lenin, Mao. . .), which is distinct from that of the mass rebel (Spartacus, Müntzer or Tupac Amaru).
4. The singularity of instances (the multiple of truths) accounts for their appearance in a historically determinate world. They can only do this to the extent that a subjective form is ‘carried’, in the phenomenon of this world, by an organized material multiplicity. This is the very question of the polit-ical body: Leninist party, Red Army, etc.
Becoming of consequences, generic articulation, identifiable subjective figure, visible body. . . these are the predicates of a truth whose invariance is deployed through the moments which allow its fragmented creation to appear in disparate worlds.