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To Conquer the Anonymous: Authorship and Myth in the Wu Ming Foundation

2011; University of Minnesota Press; Volume: 78; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/cul.2011.0016

1460-2458

Nicholas Thoburn,

Chinese history and philosophy

To Conquer the AnonymousAuthorship and Myth in the Wu Ming Foundation Nicholas Thoburn (bio) It is said that Mao never forgave Khrushchev for his 1956 "Secret Speech" on the crimes of the Stalin era (Li, 115–16). Of the aspects of the speech that were damaging to Mao, the most troubling was no doubt Khrushchev's attack on the "cult of personality" (7), not only in Stalin's example, but in principle, as a "perversion" of Marxism. As Alain Badiou has remarked, the cult of personality was something of an "invariant feature of communist states and parties," one that was brought to a point of "paroxysm" in China's Cultural Revolution (505). It should hence not surprise us that Mao responded in 1958 with a defense of the axiom as properly communist. In delineating "correct" and "incorrect" kinds of personality cult, Mao insisted: "The question at issue is not whether or not there should be a cult of the individual, but rather whether or not the individual concerned represents the truth. If he does, then he should be revered" (99–100). Not unexpectedly, Marx, Engels, Lenin, and "the correct side of Stalin" are Mao's given examples of leaders that should be "revere[d] for ever" (38). Marx himself, however, was somewhat hostile to such practice, a point Khrushchev sought to stress in quoting from Marx's November 1877 letter to Wilhelm Blos: "From my antipathy to any cult of the individual, I never made public during the existence of the International the numerous addresses from various countries which recognized my merits and which annoyed me. I did not reply to them, except sometimes to rebuke their authors. Engels and I first joined the secret society of Communists on the condition that everything making for superstitious worship of authority would be deleted from its statute" (Marx, quoted in Khrushchev, 8). It would be difficult to imagine a setting more incongruous for a reading of these words than a closed session of the Soviet Party [End Page 119] Congress—and Khrushchev's deployment of Marx certainly did not indicate any late Soviet flourishing of Marxian principles. But I am not interested here in Khrushchev. Neither is it my intention to build these lines of Marx into a developed critique of the cult of personality. My concern in this article, rather, is to use Marx's words as an emblem to signal the existence of a communist alternative to the cult of personality—not the power of the privileged individual, but a desubjectifying politics of anonymity. The logical basis for Marx's critique of the personality cult is his materialist understanding of ideas and practices as products of collective experience and struggle, not individual capacity, of genius or otherwise. From this perspective the cult of personality is not only misguided, but perpetuates an essentially capitalist structure of identity. This correspondence between socialist and capitalist modes of identity and authority is clearly asserted by Amadeo Bordiga, one of the strongest communist critics of the personality cult.1 He makes the case in the early 1950s with typical intransigence: "[I]t is the attribute of the bourgeois world that all commodities bear their maker's name, all ideas are followed by their author's signature, every party is defined by its leader's name. . . . Work such as ours can only succeed by being hard and laborious and unaided by bourgeois publicity techniques, by the vile tendency to admire and adulate men" (Bordiga, quoted in Camatte, 176). Hard and laborious or not, efforts toward the supercession of such modes of identity and authority have often been made through the thematic of organization (workers' councils, spontaneity, disorganizations, and so forth). But Bordiga extended his critique of the personality cult and its capitalist structure of identity into a rather more unusual site of communist politics, the form of the author—opting to publish his considerable contributions to communist thought anonymously. 2 There are no doubt other ways to develop Marx's critique of the cult of the individual, but I want here to take a cue from this move of Bordiga's and pursue a communist anonymity through the thematic of authorship and the politics of...