Negativity in Communism: Ontology and Politics

Abstract

The article addresses the notion of communism with a special angle of factuality and negativity, and not in the usual sense of a futurist utopia. After considering the main contemporary theories of communism in left-leaning political thought, the author turns to the Soviet experience of an "actually existing communism. " Apart from and against the bureaucratic state, a social reality existed organized around res nullius, that is, an unappropriated world that was not a collective property, as in the case of res publica. The alienation from things and from the state resulted not only in the sense of oppression, but in a new culture of a paradoxical "communality" (A. Zinoviev), where the "Other, " be it a thing or a person, appears rather as ground, not figure. This culture of a non-thematic gaze led to a formation of a communality as a given, and not as a utopian desideratum. I claim that this is a major difference between the current Western society and a post-Communist society. The former is more solidary and collectivist, but only consciously and deliberately so, operating from an individualist ontology, while the latter is individualist, but with an assumption of the "Other" as a pre-given fact. In this chiasmus, both "communisms" are problematic, so that an alternative model of individuation (Virno), rather than the atomization of an assumed collectivity, would be preferable.

Social Theory and Everyday Marxists: Russian Perspectives on Epistemology and Ethics

“…But their childhoods were also “Soviet” in the sense that they were by no means insulated from the indoctrinations delivered at schools and the quotidian public communication that assumed a degree of mastery in thinking with, and speaking with, a number of “pseudo-sociological” (Magun 2014: 206) conceptual and discursive elements (see also Lemon 2004). Significant among these “objectified social imaginaries” (Kalinin 2012) was obschestvo , “society,” an imagined collective of Soviet people—the builders of communism.…”

“…Marxism is certainly a semiotic ideology, and yet we cannot talk about “local semiotic ideology” without noticing how locals cringe at the word “ideology.” But even more curious problems arise if we keep in mind that Russian Marxism is, explicitly, an atheistic materialist ontology (Magun 2014). In “semiotic ideology,” a relationship between a thing and its sign or, as Keane extrapolates, between thingness and agency, assumes a possibility of separation (albeit mostly theoretical, “in the mind”; see Lambek 1998) between thingness and agency.…”