Revolution as Finality

Definition

"Revolution as finality" is Baudrillard's name for the transformation of revolution from an immediate exigency into an end of history — a terminus that organizes the whole temporal field around itself. His formula is exact: "The Revolution as 'end' is in fact equivalent to the autonomization of the means. What has happened is clear: it has the effect of stifling the current situation, of exorcizing immediate subversion, of diluting (in the chemical sense of the term) explosive reactions in a long term solution" (ch. V, "Revolution as Finality: History in Suspense," p. 162). When revolution is posited as a finality, the struggles that occur now are not the revolution but its anticipations, concepts "in transit"; and the means — organization, program, party, the accumulation of forces — acquire an autonomy that outlives the end they were to serve.

The concept has a historical narrative. Marx's early work carries "a millenarian element": "communism as a 'proximate future,' an imminent revolution," an exigency that runs from the Introduction to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right through the 1844 Manuscripts, the Theses on Feuerbach and the Manifesto (ch. V, "Revolution as Finality: History in Suspense"). After the failures of 1848 comes a reconversion: communism "could become a real possibility only much later," at the end of a long historical detour. The subject is adjusted with it: "The proletariat no longer leaps out of its shadow; it grows larger in the shadow of capital." What was the negativity of the present becomes the positive subject of a positivist history of the revolution, and "there is a conversion from the here-and-now to an asymptotic fulfillment." Baudrillard likens the move to the passage from the millenarian sects to orthodox Christianity with its deferred fulfillment: "As we know, sublimation is repressive."

The concept has a political form, which is the class-theoretical argument. To make a class of the proletariat is already to enclose it in the order of rational production: the proletariat becomes "the subject of history," and "class consciousness" becomes the ideology of the organization that secretes it. Baudrillard's target is Lukács: "The rational vocation of the class as the subject of history, the articulation of this process through the consciousness that the class has of itself—in these notions the path is paved for hypostasizing the being of class, for the triumph of the reality principle and the representability of the class, hence, really for the triumph of the Party" (ch. V, "Marxist Theory and the Workers' Movement: The Concept of Class"). The conclusion is blunt: "It is the bureaucracy itself which, in line with the extension of its power, secretes class consciousness as its ideology. … To the imaginary subject of history corresponds profoundly the paranoic machine of the bureaucracy." The imaginary subject of history and the bureaucratic machine are the two faces of revolution-as-finality — the deferral of the end and the autonomization of the means that awaits it (see ideology).

Against this, Baudrillard sets immediacy: the exchange of immediacy for ascetic sublimation is the whole transaction he refuses. "Each man is totally there at each instant. Society also is totally there at each instant. Courderoy, the Luddites, Rimbaud, the Communards, the people of the savage strikes, those of May, 1968—in every case the revolution does not speak indirectly; they are the revolution, not concepts in transit" (ch. V, "The Radicality of Utopia," p. 166). The "savage strikes" and May 1968 are his evidence that revolutionary speech is symbolic — answered, spent, lost — rather than an investment in a future totalization; hence "To enclose the 'exploited' within the single historical possibility of taking power has been the worst diversion the revolution has ever taken" (pp. 166–167). The concept therefore belongs with the book's wider thesis that the deferred subject is a religious figure: the transparent, total man recovered "at the end of history" is "just as religious a vision as the reintegration of essences."

Key Thinkers

• Jean Baudrillard — the concept's author: the Revolution as end equates to the autonomization of the means; the deferral "exorcizes immediate subversion"; revolution happens as speech, not as a concept in transit.
• Karl Marx — the source of the millenarian exigency and of its reconversion after 1848; his proletariat becomes the subject of a historical law it cannot leap out of.
• Henri Lefebvre — the adjacent theorist of the everyday and of the bureaucratic recuperation of the revolutionary project; see theory-of-the-everyday.
• Friedrich Nietzsche — cited for the transformation of the sign of slavery into a cardinal value ("the workers have elevated into a cardinal value the very sign of their slavery"), the mechanism Baudrillard sees in class consciousness.
• Georg Lukács — the direct object of the critique: History and Class Consciousness's "very beautiful dialectic" is "totally ambiguous" because it paves the way "for the triumph of the Party." Not yet paged.
• "Cardan" (Castoriadis) and Kalivoda — the adjacent references in the same argument on participation and on Marx's millenarianism. Not yet paged.

Related Concepts

• Utopia — the excluded alternative: not a future but a present radicality, "speech against power" that "wants only the spoken word."
• Non-Marked Terms — the revolts that displace the class subject and the finalist schema of history.
• Cultural Revolution — the rival strategy: a revolt against the code rather than the capture of power at the end of history.
• Ideology — class consciousness as the bureaucracy's ideology, and the imaginary subject of history as an ideological formation.
• Praxis — the concept whose finalist reading (praxis as the realization of an end) Baudrillard refuses in favour of activity that is already total.
• Historical Materialism Critique — the wider argument within which revolution-as-finality is the temporal form of productivism.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The Mirror of Production (Baudrillard 1975) — the concept's defining statement: "The Revolution as 'end' is in fact equivalent to the autonomization of the means. What has happened is clear: it has the effect of stifling the current situation, of exorcizing immediate subversion, of diluting (in the chemical sense of the term) explosive reactions in a long term solution" (ch. V, "Revolution as Finality: History in Suspense," p. 162); "It is the bureaucracy itself which, in line with the extension of its power, secretes class consciousness as its ideology" (ch. V, "The Concept of Class," p. 158); and "Each man is totally there at each instant. … the people of the savage strikes, those of May, 1968—in every case the revolution does not speak indirectly; they are the revolution, not concepts in transit" (ch. V, "The Radicality of Utopia," p. 166).
• Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (Butler 1999) — the book-length secondary study that reads Baudrillard "in his own terms": the paradox of the sign (paradox-of-the-sign), simulation as the realization rather than the loss of the real (simulation-hyperreality), seduction as the limit to simulation, and the doubling power of theory (doubling, the-real, double-strategy).

Open Questions

• Is immediacy a politics? Baudrillard's alternative — the revolution as symbolic speech, spent and lost — refuses accumulation, organization and power. Can a concept of revolutionary practice survive that refusal, or does the page end in a gesture?
• What is the status of the historical narrative? The millenarian-then-asymptotic story is Poster's charge of "an untheorised discontinuity in his own history of social systems" applied to Marx. Is Baudrillard's periodisation of Marxism well founded, or is the reconversion-after-1848 story itself a standard trope?
• Lukács with and against himself. Baudrillard calls the History and Class Consciousness dialectic "very beautiful" while convicting it of paving the way to the Party. Is there a reading of Lukács — as in the wiki's ideology material — that resists the convicting?
• Savage strikes and May 1968. These are the concept's empirical anchor, but the book offers no analysis of either. What would the wiki need in order to test the immediacy thesis against an account of those events?