Introduction

This essay is written in response to the immensely valuable intervention by Cam West in his piece “Rupture Theory.” West’s essay addresses some of the most critical questions faced by communists in the present conjuncture. Namely, West discusses the need for communist organization while presenting a critique of the party form; he calls into question the default treatment of class and social analysis as the principal bases for determining political intervention; and he draws a critical distinction between politics (i.e. “the everyday struggles that are intrinsic to capitalism”) and Politics as “moments of rupture that we understand as revolution proper.”

This essay seeks to respond to key points raised in “Rupture Theory” by asserting the continuing relevance of the party-form, the need for social analysis as a guide for political intervention, and an analysis of the question of rupture and its dialectical double, residual.

As a preliminary note, this response to “Rupture Theory” primarily refers to the condensed theses version of the essay to facilitate precise citations to West’s work.

Points of Convergence

As this is a comradely engagement, it is worthwhile to first identify the common ground between us. 

West correctly asserts that making communism an express objective of our organizing efforts is essential. As West states in Thesis No. 8, if we abandon the communist hypothesis, “we are only left with forms of adjustment to the world as it currently exists… Without sustaining the communist hypothesis, we will not have the capacity to produce a communist world, nevermind the ability to fully topple capital.”

West is equally correct when he asserts in Thesis No. 77 that “in order to intervene in moments of rupture, there needs to be some level of pre-existing mass organization… and communists need to be integrated into every area of life.” 

West’s 17th thesis is correct in asserting that 20th century approaches to building a revolutionary movement, particularly those in the Marxist-Leninist milieu, were insufficient. Even the most advanced 20th century anti-revisionist Marxist-Leninist organizations in the imperialist core who resisted integration into bourgeois electoralism reached a fatal impasse when attempting to seed communist militants in the trade unions only to produce a reformist and economist practice as revolutionary politics were sidelined by the day to day requirements of securing a better contract. At their worst, these parties actively suppressed revolutionary initiatives like Communist Party of France during the events of May ’68 in France. 

This essay will also sustain and expand upon West’s distinction between “politics” and “Politics” in Thesis No. 75. West refers to politics as “the everyday struggles that are intrinsic to capitalism” and Politics as “moments of rupture that we understand as revolution proper.” But Politics, as per Alain Badiou, is more than just the destruction of the present situation but also the recomposition of a new one. Political or revolutionary circumstances are exceptional and typically arise from “something extra” that destabilizes the entire mode of production and dramatically transforms everyday life. As much as communists can try to facilitate these conditions, it would be a voluntarist error to suppose they do not generally arise from the complex alignment of various contradictions that converge to produce a crisis. “Instead, communists must prepare for when these exceptional conditions unfold.”

Rupture and Residual

“It is thus indispensable to announce that there is only one law of the dialectic: One divides into two.” — Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject 
“Everything reactionary is the same; if you do not hit it, it will not fall. This is also like sweeping the floor; as a rule, where the broom does not reach, the dust will not vanish of itself.”— Mao Zedong

Following the lead of Sylvain Lazarus, West disavows dialectical modes of thought by neglecting the dogged persistence of the past that coincides with whatever novel forms of social organization arising from a moment of rupture. According to West in Thesis No. 2, “an issue in the history of the communist movement is an attachment to the world as it currently exists, but revolutionary situations throw everything out the window, and the entire world as we know it is on trial while people invent new ways of living...” The dialectic, however, provides key insights into the functioning of the structure and its relation to its elements. The dialectic helps to explain how these elements are determined by the structure and why aspects of the old world persist following an event.  

In Theory of the Subject, Badiou breaks the concept of contradiction into three parts. “1. A contradiction is first of all some Two, that is a difference. Difference will be strong or weak, depending on whether its terms are violently heterogeneous, or merely distinct… 2. A contradiction does not concern a numerical, indifferent Two, but the Two connected in division, the Two linked in a process… 3. A contradiction is not the equilibrium of the Two, but on the contrary is the law of its inequality. The principle of dissymmetry is essential. Mao concentrates this in the doctrine of the principal aspect of the contradiction.”1

The dialectic is the contradiction between the outplace and the splace.2 The splace is Badiou’s term to describe the structure which serves as the foundation of the dialectic. The outplace is that which disrupts the structure/structuration and acts as the motor that drives the dialectic’s spiraling repetition.3 According to the materialist dialectical outlook, Politics is the torsion force applying to that from which it conflictually emerges. In other words, Politics is the process by which the revolutionary subject acts upon its own determinations.4

Badiou identifies two political deviations: 1.) the rightist deviation: a refusal to recognize the ruptural moment; and 2.) the leftist deviation: the belief in a pure emergence without regard for the original determination.5 Treating Politics as pure rupture is a left deviation that fails to consider how the old invariably persists in the new. A key insight of the materialist dialectic which distinguishes Politics (i.e. the destruction of the present situation and the recomposition of a new situation) from Deleuzian or anarchist fragmentation is recognition of this persistence. 

To accomplish its revolutionary objectives, the party must keep itself maximally out of its structurally determined place, but it never fully escapes the structure from which it emerges. In Badiou’s terms, “force is impure because it is always placed. The new of historicality is infected by the continuity of the structures.”6 For Badiou, the party is “inescapably divided between the part of itself that is subjected to repetition (since it is placed) and the part that interrupts, blocks, and brings about the nonrepeatable.”7 As a result, there is not a simple distinction between structure and rupture. The subject undergoes at once two processes; one of repetition/interruption and one of lack/destruction.

The persistence of the old in the new is precisely why Badiou calls on the party to engage in “purification.” Purification is the process by which the party concentrates itself by breaking from its determined place.8 Purification is simultaneously the concentration of newness (i.e. the correct ideas of the masses) and the abolition of the old. Despite this insistence on purification, Badiou concedes “it is pointless to try to live without repetition.”9 This suggests that setting out to engage in Politics on the basis of rupture alone is an imaginary distortion. 

Materialism and Politics

To grasp the conjuncture and each of its several contradictions, one must subject these conditions to a materialist analysis. To formulate effective strategies, tactics, and slogans, one must understand the terrain upon which they stand. This knowledge is not only useful after an event to take stock of the event and the complex contradictions that made it possible; it is essential before making any intervention at all. Marxist science is the tool by which we demystify the conjuncture and can gain the political virtu to seize upon an evental moment. Science provides the basis for how we assess previous political mobilizations and take stock of their strengths and weaknesses so as to better prepare for and respond to evental moments in the future. Science gives us the ability to evaluate contemporary political movements and assess whether they are engaging in a genuine novelty, or if they are rehashing old modes of struggle that failed to produce revolution.

Materialism is the basis upon which militants can assess the nature of the old and the capacities of the new. Politics calls for a topological and algebraic conception of materialism.10 Algebraic materialism is the systematic study of the relations between elements of a set or structure. Despite its utility, algebraic materialism is constrained to the analysis of snapshots of the structure. It is not equipped to detect active forces and tendencies. Topological materialism, on the other hand, provides tools to understand changes in proximity between elements, torsion, and novelty. In short, algebra tells you whether a term belongs to a set and topology tells you how it belongs. The party must “articulate... the algebra of its placement and the topology of its novelty.”11

The distinction between the algebraic, or structural, being of class and its topological position must be firmly asserted.12 As an example, pointing to the fact that the worker is one who sells their labor power to be included in a production process controlled by capital, and is thus part of a class made up of other similarly situated workers, is an algebraic move.13 Class composition and the contradictions between classes are weak forms of correlation which can be detected through algebraic analysis alone.  Class struggle and other forms of Political intervention, on the other hand, represent breaks from such structural facts and generate strong correlations. The process by which these elements coalescence and act upon the structural contradictions that determined their placement prior to the event requires a topological analysis. To eliminate this distinction between topology and algebra is to fall into economism. The proletariat is made, not found. 

The union is a weak topological neighborhood which challenges the utterly dispersed status of workers as competitors on the labor market and creates a stronger consistency between them. Although stronger, this consistency remains relatively weak, however, because it “remains subservient to the algebra of exploitation.”14 Trade unionism is the prime example of lower-case “p” politics because it is wholly subservient to the law of the social and its repetition due to the union’s need to become a legitimate base of worker power within the capitalist structure. This attachment to attaining structural legitimacy produces economistic opportunism, a way of accepting the place assigned to the working class within the bourgeois world.15

By contrast, the party originates in the constant destruction of any structural legitimacy it may acquire.16 In other words, the party fulfills its historical task by rupturing from the law of the social and its cycles of repetition, even if it is not capable of fully doing so. When worker mobilization transcends the statist, algebraic mode of organization (i.e., the union) and reaches the level of antagonism, however, this antagonism gives rise to a heterogeneous consistency that undermines the underlying algebra.

Strong topological intervention is fundamentally partisan. Its stakes “lie in exceeding the algebra all the way to its limit point, where it can break. The party is the support of the complete subject, by which the proletariat, built on the working class, aims at the dissolution of the algebraic frame in which this class is placed.”17 Generally speaking, the objective is stronger than the communist subjective.18 It is only in rare moments, events, when the subjective is able to determine the objective. The real of class is this reversible asymmetry of algebra and topology.

West contends “social analysis is well and good when it’s restricted to analysis as such, but it shouldn’t be used to determine the tasks of politics.” Without social analysis, however, how should communist militants approach multivalent social movements that preexist any intervention by their organization? When communist organizations are constrained by limited resources and a limited number of cadres, how do they determine which fragment(s) of a mass movement to align themselves with without making recourse to scientific or algebraic analyses?

Sylvain Lazarus, and perhaps West, would presumably argue that an anthropological inquiry into the thought of each faction would indicate which faction operates at the greatest distance from the state and is therefore the most likely ally of communist militants. This runs into a problem, however, because other factions which, for the time being, may be operating in closer proximity to the state, have the potential to change course and operate at an even greater distance from the state, especially following an event.

It should go without saying that certain types of political intervention are only possible by people occupying specific structural positions. In orthodox Marxism, the working class is the privileged social class for communist struggle because of its structurally determined ability to leverage its unique social position to disrupt the status quo and clear the way for new modes of being. Students engaging in academic walk outs, however militant, are unlikely to produce effects of the same magnitude as a major strike in the transportation sector. This is not to suggest communists abandon the question of student organizing or to foreclose the potential for real Political novelty arising from students (especially student workers), but it is a recognition of the greater necessity for mobilizing and organizing segments of the population located at the lynchpins of capitalist society. 

Perhaps West is correct that theory should not be treated as “sheet music” for the revolution, but all Political interventions are made on the basis of a wager and that wager can be informed by an analysis of the terrain in which an event occurs or it can be made blindly without regard for the structural potentialities of various classes or class fragments.  

Contrary to the assertion that we should pursue a post-classist mode of politics, class must be vigorously re-centered in our Political interventions even if our vision of class Politics must anticipate the emergence of post-classist formations and take into consideration the ways in which class itself is overdetermined by (settler-)colonialism, patriarchy, racism, etc. 

It is abundantly clear that deindustrialization and the collapse of the 20th century’s socialist alternatives have made working class life increasingly precarious and that existing forms of worker organization are marginal if not outright subservient to the status quo. This is not random, nor is it an accident. It is a product of the virtually unopposed class struggle waged by the imperialist bourgeoisie. 

This moment of apparent weakness, however, should instead be seen as an opportunity. There is over a century of working class history showing that the 20th century labor movement in the core nations of global capitalism gave rise not to communism, but to a conservative labor aristocracy. This movement provided greater security, comfort, and stability to its members and had positive down river effects on some non-unionized workers, but did not expand workers’ political capacities to break from their algebraic structural position. Wages and conditions of work became fair game for negotiation, but even modest managerial decision-making power remained expressly off limits. 

It is in light of this that we can reach the conclusion that new forms of worker organization capable of overcoming the depoliticizing and economistic limits of traditional unionism and 20th century party politics must be created even if we cannot forecast how or when they will emerge or what they will look like.

On the Party

West makes a number of claims about parties and their dangers. Thesis No. 31 states “the primary issue with the party-form, historically, is that it tries to subsume everything under it, which is why it becomes a neutralizing force in emancipatory struggles…” In such cases, West declares, the party assumes that because it possesses the correct analysis and theory, it is naturally the vanguard of the movement and thus has the right to dictate the strategies and tactics of struggles outside of the party. This culminates in the claim that parties are hardwired to act in such ways because revolutionary communist parties cannot exist as such in bourgeois society and are “forced into functioning like social democratic parties that grow more concerning with mediating class conflict… rather than trying to overthrow capitalism.”

As an alternative to the party-form, West proposes (in Thesis No. 102) “cadre organizations… whose essential functions would take on what are traditionally the benefits of the party-form… analysis of the conjuncture, cadre development, and mass diffusion of organizers positioning communists to serve as the vanguard in moments of rupture.” Given that these are the core tasks of the party, it is unclear how these cadre organizations which, according to West, can be organized on a local or national scale, are distinguishable from a party in any substantive way. West seems to treat the non-party cadre organization as a correction from the historical pitfalls of the party form, but fails to articulate why a non-party formation that performs all of the essential functions of a party would not lapse into the same rightist errors if given the opportunity. This is not to say we should forego cadre organizations, but it does raise the question of whether West is making a distinction without a difference. 

For the purposes of discussion, let’s try to create an outline of what a communist party is or does in the wake of the great successes and failures of the Cultural Revolution: 

• A party is a cadre organization whose defining characteristic “is not its firmness, but its porosity to the event.”19
• A party aspires to develop a unified line and has systems of internal debate and external engagement to develop that line and purify it of bourgeois ideology. Here, we are positing a mass line that has primacy over the party organization.20
• A party seeks to establish an organic vanguard role but recognizes this vanguard status is not preordained or guaranteed by the assumed correctness of the party line. It must develop organically and cannot be simply declared. The party neither tails nor commands the masses. It attempts always to stay just one step ahead of the masses to deepen their revolt. In West’s terms, the party aspires to be the body “leading the way at a given time” while recognizing its status as vanguard is contingent, temporary, and always subject to being surpassed by the revolutionary initiative of the masses. 
• A party develops analyses of the local, national, and international conjunctures to inform its pre- and post-evental interventions.
• A party links together dispersed movements such as the labor movement, tenants’ unions, and student organizations as well as the feminist, LGBT+, anti-racist etc. movements to broaden their spontaneous ideologies.
• A party instills an internationalist perspective in the mass movements.
• A party is an anti-parliamentary body that carries out its tasks at a distance from the State.

The primary task for communist militants in pre-evental circumstances is to diffuse themselves among the masses and participate in their pre-political activities like labor unions, tenants organizations, student groups, etc...  As West correctly points out, “the more diffused amongst the social formation that communists are, the more relationships can be built.” These relationships mean that when an event occurs, communists are already seen by the masses as trusted comrades as opposed to unknown usurpers when they assume an organically developed, rather than imposed, vanguard role. Importantly, the close proximity of openly communist militants to the organized masses can help inoculate the latter against red-baiting and smear campaigns so essential to anti-communist counter-insurgency. 

Given the conjunctural nature of an event, its effects are unevenly dispersed. Some segments of the population will be more readily mobilized than others. The responsiveness and discipline instilled by a revolutionary party means its members can be rapidly redeployed from one site of struggle to another by a centralized body of leadership possessing a correct reading of the event. This transfer of militants can either be used to concentrate communist forces in hotbeds of revolt to force a break, or if the break has already occurred, militants can be dispersed to less advanced sites in an attempt to fan the flames of discontent among broader swaths of the masses. 

Having a large, centralized organization can build trust and accountability to the masses. If militants conduct themselves well, build close relationships with the masses, and earn their trust, the masses will be more inclined to place their trust in other members of the same organization. By contrast, if the organization permits anti-social behaviors internally or among the masses, its credibility will be destroyed and it will lose everything. 

Before and after an event, a centralized national cadre organization, the party, because of its advanced analysis of its own social formation and the need for an internationalist perspective, would be best positioned to foster relations with communist parties and progressive organizations in other social formations. Building such relationships is essential to destroying imperialism and developing solutions to climate change which will require international cooperation on a massive scale and difficult negotiations to address the contradictions between populations in the “core” and “peripheries” of global capitalism. 

The Withering Away of the Party

“Every victory is the beginning of a failure of a new type.” — Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject

“The special privileges and high salaries of the class of ‘Red’ capitalists were built on the basis of the oppression and exploitation of the broad masses of the people. In order to realize the ‘People’s Commune of China,’ it was necessary to overthrow this class.” — Shengwulian, Whither China? 

“In Hunan, Chang Ping-hua and Liu Tzu-yun were dismissed from office, but that did not remove the acute antagonism between the new bourgeoisie and the masses of the people. Instead, the acute antagonism between the preparatory group for the revolutionary committee and the people as represented by Sheng-wu-lien is present in the new situation.” — Shengwulian, Whither China?

West is correct to suggest that the objective of communism is to abolish the distinction between leaders and led, but from this point, it does not necessarily follow that a communist project can do so from the outset. Just as the state withers away as it becomes superfluous with the advent of communist social relations, the party will become a political obstacle as the masses attain a certain level of political capacity that is, for now, just barely on the horizon. Socialism is a period not only of heightened class struggle between the proletariat and bourgeoisie, but also increasingly antagonistic struggles between the party and mass movements outside of the party as the capacity of the masses to act upon their determinations expands. 

For the time being, the political and theoretical capacity of the masses is limited. Were it not so, we would already be standing in red territory. If the masses were already equipped with the full skillset and knowledge required to administer a communist society, they would readily seize upon evental moments like the uprisings in the Summer of 2020 and push them beyond the riot form into a thoroughgoing rupture from the bourgeois world. However, as we have seen, the most significant mass movements since the Ferguson uprising have not surpassed the riot form. 

A communist rupture requires something greater than revolts against state violence. This is not to say these moments were not of immense significance, but it is clear to see how “Abolish the Police,” the most advanced slogan of the past decade, was eventually defanged and turned into “Defund the Police,” before it was fully domesticated and transformed into liberal calls for greater police training. The masses were not yet equipped with the theoretical or practical capacities to sustain their radical demand to abolish the police and transform it into an actionable program. This was in part because these were reactive slogans that failed to approach the affirmative demands of the communist hypothesis. 

As Badiou highlights in Theory of the Subject, the politics of anti-repression falls short of Politics proper because the State is the only active force while the masses are only operating reactively. Politics requires the “reciprocal application of forces indifferent to anything other than their own expansion.”21 The politics of anti-repression denies “any active autonomy, any real independence, any affirmative political virtuality, to what rises up in the guise of the enraged rebel of good faith. ‘Down with repression’ leads no further than to a planned reactive. The force of the people is here the flat shadow cast by the horrors of the state, and the conflictual correlation remains caught in the unifying weakness of the structural.”22

West is correct to point out that the organized left, including the innumerable self-proclaimed communist parties, were caught unprepared by these uprisings and were completely incapable of pushing them beyond the riot form. In fact, the left was severely lagging behind the righteous outrage of the masses whose militancy deserves the greatest admiration.  It does not, however, follow that a genuine communist party, one that has yet to be born, could not have played a vanguard function that turned these uprisings into a sustained break from bourgeois society.

In recent years, the spontaneous movement of the masses has not amounted to more than the reactive riot form. Evidently, something more is needed to push these movements beyond the narrow horizon of reacting to state repression. A party capable of establishing an organic vanguard relationship to the masses could be this surplus that opens the flood gates to a rupture that produces an explosion of mass initiatives that are influenced by the party and influence it in return. The most significant lesson of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is that a genuinely communist party must necessarily be porous to outbursts of mass initiative occurring outside of its control. 

As the theoretical and political capacities of the masses become increasingly advanced leading up to and under the dictatorship of the proletariat (however such a dictatorship is conceived), the division between mental and manual labor in the political terrain narrows and the party, which has become mired in the depoliticized functions of statecraft, loses its vanguard status. At this point, the “from the masses to the masses” dynamic between the party and masses breaks down and transforms into the relationship between rulers and ruled. 

Historically, this was reflected by Mao’s great political retreat from supporting the commune form to advocating for the Three-In-One Revolutionary Committees following the “January Storm” and the establishment of the Shanghai Commune. This was also reflected by official directives to dismiss capitalist roaders in the party as opposed to the masses’ revolutionary demand to establish sites of independent proletarian power outside of the statified party. 

Conclusion

As discussed above in greater detail, every novelty is marked by the situation from which it arises and is, at least at first, described using the language of the pre-evental situation. A key objective of Politics is to purify this novelty of the material and linguistic residue of the old. Such novelties create a new situation in which the old laws and analyses no longer have the same purchase, but this does not mean these laws were not a partial basis for the emergence of novelty in the first place. West is correct to highlight how the language of class struggle became outdated and even stifled the emergence of a post-classist forms of social organization at the height of certain emancipatory struggles in the 1960s and ‘70s, but the logic of class society has violently reasserted itself and must necessarily guide our interventions today.  

This re-assertion of class as the principal structuring mechanism of the present situation requires a return to theory, namely the theoretical explication of the capitalist mode of production and its structural vulnerabilities. Without this theoretical grounding, it is impossible to determine whether purported Political novelties are in fact the product of strong topological interventions that subvert and recompose the structure (i.e. whether they are in fact novelties).

The party-to-come will be uniquely equipped to facilitate this convergence of emancipatory mass movements and theory. It will have the theoretical and organizational wherewithal to advance the spontaneous activity of the masses and to unleash their creative political capacities in the advent of communism.

Notes

1. Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject (A&C Black, 2009), transl. Bruno Bosteels, p. 23-24.
2. Ibid, p. 11.
3. Ibid, p. 21.
4. Ibid, p. 11.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid, p. 38.
7. Ibid, p. 142.
8. Ibid, p. 38.
9. Ibid, p. 39.
10. Ibid, p. 211.
11. Ibid, p. 214.
12. Ibid, p. 237.
13. Ibid, p. 236.
14. Ibid, p. 237.
15. Ibid, p. 9.
16. Ibid, p. 141.
17. Ibid, p. 238.
18. Ibid, p. 42.
19. Alain Badiou, Metapolitics (London: Verso, 2005), transl. Jason Barker, p. 74.
20. Theory of the Subject, p. 286.
21. Ibid, p. 31.
22. Ibid, p. 32.