The Revaluation of All Values: Extremism, The Ultra-Left, and Revolutionary Anthropology

ABSTRACT

The notion of “extremism,” we argue, can be understood as an element of the contemporary liberal consensus or “post-politics.” In particular, the anti-utopian character of extremism discourse necessitates robust critical theoretical attention. As part of this critique, we seek to return to the historic far-Left and examine various dimensions of Leftist “extremism,” reading and retrieving this material in light of its utopian significance. Here, we examine far-Left extremism that deals with the utopian re-making of the subject, what might be called the “revolutionary anthropology” found in far-Left work. Exploring some of the historic twists and turns of this revolutionary anthropology, drawing on the work of Luc Boltanski and associates, we suggest three distinctive facets of this renewed critical bearing within contemporary far-Left thought: insurrectionary immediatism, a new anti-foundationalist collectivism, and a theological turn. Attention to the sphere of revolutionary anthropology, we hope, might help us think the subject(s) able to not only resist the current social order but also to realise a new one.

KEYWORDS:

• Extremism
• utopia
• critique
• Marxism
• anarchism

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on Contributors

Chamsy el-Ojeili lectures Sociology at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He is author of Beyond Post-Socialism, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2015.

Dylan Taylor lectures Sociology at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He is author of Social Movements and Democracy in the 21st Century, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2017. He is editor of Counterfutures: Left Thought & Practice Aotearoa, and is a researcher for Economic and Social Research Aotearoa.

ORCID

Dylan Taylor http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7188-3731

Notes

1 On this last, see, for instance, Sonn (2010).

2 Terrorism and Communism posits the very opposite to many anarchist insistences that ends and means must not be separated.

3 Chen (2008) contends that the specific terminology of the “new man” can be traced to the Russian intelligentsia from the 1860s—notably in Chernyshevsky’s What is to be Done?

4 We have retained the gendered pronoun, because this notion is deeply gendered.

5 See, for instance, Bauman (2007), Castells (1997), Gauchet (2000).

6 This modality continues in some prominent ways, say, in T. J. Clark (2012, 63), who declares the world “very dark and barren” and calls for a Left abstention from futurity, or the journal Salvage, but, here even, we see a predominantly artistic form of critique, in both form and content.

7 The family, for instance, in Badiou (2013b), is depicted as a mere consumption unit, and he speaks of the communistic “withering away” of the family form.

8 Badiou, for instance, emphasises the Event as tied to the new.

9 In Badiou (2008a) love as needing to be reinvented, as violent, irresponsible, and creative. In Hardt and Negri (2009, 180), love as a philosophical and political concept.

10 For instance, the insistence of fidelity or loyalty to the Event, in Badiou (2008b, 2008c), a new discipline as “joyous indifference to the political and commercial law of the world that otherwise prevails on all sides” (Badiou, 2008a, 39). In a very different mode, Critchley (2009) speaks of a new anarchist ethics of commitment and responsibility, emphasising the limits of the human, under Levinasian influence. See, in similar vein, Newman (2010). Meanwhile, the Invisible Committee speak of a “certain discipline of paying attention” (2004), and view communism as “an ethical disposition (2015).

11 Which is not a possibility that resides in the situation (Badiou 2010a).

12 See also Critchley (2009).

13 Something of this scepticism is contained in an earlier form in Bookchin’s (1995) rejection of “lifestyle” in favour of “social anarchism.”