WHAT FELT? REMARKS ON THE ONTOLOGY OF COMMUNISM
Ana Bazac
Professor
Politehnica University
The paper, only an introduction to the theme, intends to make out some different discourses about communism in order to suggest its ontology. But this one means a structure of concepts related to both the static and dynamic (principles) of communism, as well as to its position in space and time, and to its realisation. Ontology of communism appears in this way to be challenged by the intertwined and complex levels of practice.
However, ontology itself is a discourse: concepts as possibility, readiness, necessity, conjunctures, identity, forms, essence, transformation, accidents, universals and particulars, factors and forces of communism issue from discourses as active positions of the transmitters (including from their desire to form reality according to theirs representations about it). Thusly, the relationship between discourses and existence is not one of exteriority, but of inclusion of the former into the given reality. Even the given character of reality is the result of interferences between discourses (and the intertwining of many types of discourses) and existence: in this way, discourses could exclude elements of the existence, or construct new ones, generally alternative virtual existences.
The remarks in this paper are made in a traditional philosophical view: not starting from practice which does criticise itself, so deducing ontological properties of communism from this critique (as I should be tempted to do), but going from some concepts to reality, for grasping how and if they are reciprocally fit. In other words: I suggest the questioning of the theoretical representation that the concepts would be a Procrustean bed for the communist ‘reality’ (as process and discourses), just researching the framework of concepts and somehow postponing the problem of the pressure of ‘reality’, issuing from its ontological essence, for new interpretations (discourses).
The rhetorical lecture of some discourses about communism sends to an ideological one. The paper gives some definitions of the presuppositions used here: rhetorical lecture, ideology, ideological lecture. The discursive theory appears to be not an alternative to the ideological one, but a part, also an antecedent of this one.
Therefore, after an introduction about the above-mentioned aspects, the paper summarises the logic of Marx’s and Lenin’s theory on communism from the standpoint of some of the above-mentioned concepts of ontology. The same outlook is affected to the concept of communism as revolution in Lenin and Trotsky and some Trotskyites. By this token, the problems: the correspondence of the discursive properties of communism and the real process, and the essential and accidental features of ‘communism’ remain open. As a consequence, a non-conformist opinion concerning what felt is suggested.