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发帖数: 14447 | 1 The Triumphant Restoration
http://positions.dukejournals.org/cgi/reprint/13/3/659
Alain Badiou
So it is that Deng Xiaoping, this Louis XVIII of all the bureaucrats whom
the Cultural Revolution had turned into internal political émigrés, wants
to signal his restoration with a great “trial,” where history will be made
to
appear before a handful of obedient judges.
Like the Moscow trials, of which they represent the farcical imitation that
follows in the wake of tragedy, the Peking trials aim to turn a revolution
and potent political confrontations into a juridical and police matter that
concerns only a few supposed common law “criminals.”
Yet these trials retain from the Maoist heritage the following difference:
the accused do not give up. That is the trace, in this miserable rewriting
of
the storm of the revolution, of the force of the storm itself.
The attempt to judge ten years of upheavals centered on essential questions—
truth be told, around the question: must we, and can we, march toward
communism?—through a settling of accounts in which the vanquished
of politics are captured by the fiction of being mere guilty individuals,
this attempt is neither new nor glorious. Did not the official France of
the restorations, for at least a century, present Robespierre as a “brigand
”?
Did it not sum up five years of the Revolution, an unprecedented historical
rupture, in the personal “malevolence” of a “guillotiner”?
Of course, like every other revolution, the Cultural Revolution combined
the exceptional with the worst; it witnessed dramatic reversals, tortuous
maneuvers, obscure confrontations, major repressions. All of this matching
the scale of an unprecedented endeavor: to block the process of emergence
of a bureaucratic bourgeoisie, the process that has turned the USSR into an
aggressive empire managed by state profiteers.
Behind the enormous confusion about its various stages, the lines of force
of the Cultural Revolution, the entrance on the stage of tens of millions of
actors, and the blockage of its goal, all bear on what is essential: the
reduction
of the gap between intellectual and manual labor, between town and
country; the subordination of the productive impetus to the institution of
new social relations; the end of university elitism; the reduction of the
insolence
of cadres; the end of wage systems of inequality and stratification; the
ideological opposition to the degenerate “Marxism” that rules in Moscow
and in the “communist” parties pledging allegiance to it, and so on.
The Failure of the Revolutionary Endeavor
The objection according to which the storm of the Cultural Revolution also
juxtaposed the persons of different political leaders is extremely meager.
Always and everywhere, in the final analysis, major political conflicts are
embodied in men and women.
The ones who pretend to see in the Cultural Revolution nothing but a
“rivalry of bureaucrats” are the same ones who are most eager to show that
what Deng Xiaoping says and does is opposed point by point to the Maoist
line. Most often, it is true, it is in order to then rejoice in “
demaoization.” . . .
The politics of Deng, the politics of Coca-Cola, of the omnipotence of
factory directors, of productivity incentives, of the reduction of education
to
exams, and of the suppression of the rights to strike and to post one’s
grievances provide the rigorous proof that what the revolt rose up against
did
indeed exist and that the Cultural Revolution did not err when it came to
identifying its adversaries.
The revolutionary endeavor has failed. It has come up against the question
of the party, the contradictory place in which the old and the new coexist
in an ambiguous relationship to the state, to privileges and to the new
bourgeoisies begotten by the so-called socialist societies, societies built
on
positions of power.
The Thermidor that has followed the death of Mao provides a career
opportunity for the avengers of the cultural counterrevolution. The “trials”
now taking place indicate what these avengers are capable of, in their
zeal to organize the cowardly appeasement of lost epochs and to stage their
triumph in the basest forms authorized by the control they exercise over the
state apparatus.
For us, the Cultural Revolution remains the obligatory historical reference
for whoever holds fast to the communist project, in the conditions offered
by our time: conditions that are fixed by the necessary Marxist assessment
of this monster that the October revolution—through an inversion whose
political laws need to be investigated—ended up engendering.
The tribunal of history is certainly not the tribunal that is currently in
session in Peking. They wish to tell us that the Chinese revolution is
finally
over. It is possible that this is temporarily true. But just as after the
Paris
Commune, which too was terminated, defeated by the appearance of the
trials of Versailles, our heritage consists of the universal that was borne
by the Cultural Revolution. Positively, in what concerns the requirements
of the march toward communism. Negatively, in what concerns the question,
which requires to be rethought and recast, of the type of communist
party—a post-Leninist party—that this march demands.
Compared with this, the “trials” of Peking are nothing but the delayed
spectacles that those who profit from the temporary arrest of a people give
themselves—the simulacra of their appetite for security.
Though it has been deferred, the judgment of history, which bears on
these false judges, is nonetheless guaranteed.
Translated by Alberto Toscano
positions 13:3 Winter 2005 662 |
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