The letters stand for Union de la Jeunesse Communiste Marxiste-Léniniste, which translates as Young Communist League (Marxist-Leninist). I’m putting together the notes I’ve got on the UJCML. I’m also collecting new notes. More info from folk is welcome, as always.
Badiou, Ranciere, and several other culture figures were part of the UJCML. As far as I know, it was a group of students of Althusser who got censured by the PCF. Donald Reid, in the intro to Ranciere’s Nights Of Labor, writes
“Althusser became a leading intellectual in the Parti Communiste Francais (PCF) in the late 1960s by maintaining a distinction between “science,” the province of intellectuals, and politics, the Party’s responsibility. But whereas Althusser sustained his balancing act with respect to the Party - offering the requisite autocritique when necessary - his students did not. They conceived of Althusserianism as offering the chance for “real participation, as intellectuals, in the transformation of the world.” This will to act led them to identify themselves as “pro-Chinese.” Such a stance was antithetical to the neo-Stalinists who headed up the PCF. Not suprisingly, the Althusserian Maoists of the Cercle d’Ulm were kicked out of the Union des Etudiants Communistes. Galvinized by the news of the Cultural Revolution in China, they founded the Union de la Jeunesse Communiste (marxiste-leniniste) late in 1966.”
The UJCML were surprised by the 1968 May events, and split shortly thereafter (around a year later Ranciere wrote a pointed criticism of Althusser and Althusserian thought, including the UJCML). Subsequently, one group from within the UJCML and other groups outside the UJCML formed Gauche Proletarienne (Proletarian Left).
Here is a piece in Spanish on Althusser. Short excerpt, translated by moi:
“1965 We allude to the work of the Epistemology Circle at the Ecole Normal Superior in Paris” to which Althusser and Bachelard were connected. “The work of the group appeared, from 1965 to 1968, in a journal entitled Cahiers pour l’analyse. The publication of this journal was interruped brusquely after May of 1968, due to the crisis that the ideological and political battles of those months brought about among the editorial board.” The piece, which is some sort of bibliography, lists among the editor of the journal “A. Badiou, A. Grosrichard, J.-A. Miller, J.-C. Milner, F. Regnault” and cites the journal has having an “indirect influence on l’École Freudienne in Paris (E.F.P.).”
Mark Poster makes some unclear reference to the Cahiers pour l’analyse, saying it was part of some group that became part of the UJCML. (Note 33a in the linked text, which is ch9 of his book the title of which I can’t remember - existential marxism in postwar france, I think it is.)
Excerpt from a book on French Maoism.
Link re: connection w/ Godard
Hi Nate
This stuff on French Maoism is very interesting. I do feel though that Donald Reid misrepresents Althusser’s “autocritique” though. The self-criticism is when Althusser finally breaks with Stalinism in theory, and when his group begin to turn the attention towards the PCF’s complicity with the State. No doubt this is because Reid is taken in my Ranciere’s representation of events. Badiou is better on the self-criticism because he was a student of Althusser’s during the period when the self-criticism began, 1966-68. Ranciere broke with Althusser in 1965 and attributes all of his own failings as a youthful Communist to his teacher, a none-to-generous approach to what was in fact by all accounts a collective endeavour. As a result Ranciere’s Althusser looks suspiciously like Ranciere’s hyper-structuralist Marxism in his essay on the Paris Manuscripts in Reading Capital.
I’ve been reading Badiou’s Metapolitics as per your suggestion and I have found that there are some symptomatically consistent distortions of Althusser’s position on philosophy in there but I’m going to get to the end of the book and live with it a while before coming to any conclusions on it. Certainly many aspects of the book seem to be very worthwhile, and I should read his Infinite Thought, which I’ve had lying around here for a long while. Did I send you those essays on Linhart by Reid and the others on Badiou and Maoism that I have here somewhere???
take care
David
Comment by David McInerney — April 17, 2006 @ 3:05 am
hi David,
Thanks for your comment. I know you sent me Reid’s article on Linhart and the establis (sp?), I’m not sure about the other stuff - can you send it to me just in case, when you can? The Linhart book is somewhere in the stack of library books on top of my bookshelf. Re: Ranciere and the break with Althusser, I’ll defer to you on these. I’m not invested in Ranciere’s criticisms applying to Althusser. I do think the apply by analogy to a certain academic way of thinking. Re: Ranciere’s break, I didn’t know it was so early as 1965. I thought it was later. His vitriolic denunciation was written after the ‘68 May stuff (1969 I think, with that being expanded into a book in the early 70s).
I’d love to hear more on the misrepresentation of Althusser in Metapolitics. I don’t know Althusser at all (looking forward to that reading group to rectify that, I’ll have more time in about a month), I think all I’ve read is the ISAs piece, which I liked quite a bit. I started to read Ranciere’s Reading Capital piece and didn’t finish it - knowing he’d later lumped it and given how dull it was I decided to bail out on that one.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — April 18, 2006 @ 12:48 pm
Figures a search for Linhart and Ranciere would bring me to you, Nate.
Comment by MJ — November 26, 2007 @ 11:10 pm
What can I say man, it was meant to be.
Comment by Nate — November 27, 2007 @ 9:52 am