The Communist Hypothesis
Alain Badiou
Language: English
Pages: 288
ISBN: 1844676005
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
“We know that communism is the right hypothesis. All those who abandon this hypothesis immediately resign themselves to the market economy, to parliamentary democracy—the form of state suited to capitalism—and to the inevitable and ‘natural’ character of the most monstrous inequalities.”—Alain Badiou
Alain Badiou’s “communist hypothesis,” first stated in 2008, cut through the cant and compromises of the past twenty years to reconceptualize the Left. The hypothesis is a fresh demand for universal emancipation and a galvanizing call to arms. Anyone concerned with the future of the planet needs to reckon with the ideas outlined within this book.
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unimaginable, a week earlier. The solid union and party dispositif usually kept workers, young people and intellectuals strictly apart in their respective organizations. The local or national leadership was the only mediator. We found ourselves in a situation in which that dispositif was falling apart before our very eyes. This was something completely new, and we were both immediate actors and bewildered spectators. This was an event in the philosophical sense of the term: something was
scene I want to cite comes immediately after the failure of this premature ‘autumn offensive’. It is set outside the gate of the SNOMA factory, early in the morning. The defeated workers are returning to work, heads bowed, between two lines of soldiers, managers and police. The workers’ chorus was, according to the stage directions, born of this compact procession. The entire chorus has to do with how defeats can be divided and subsumed into a higher mode of thought. Here it is: And so, one
Slavoj Žižek: On the Work of Mao Zedong Preamble: What Is Called Failure? 1 The mid-1970s saw the beginnings of the ebb the ‘red decade’ ushered in by the fourfold circumstances of national liberation struggles (in Vietnam and Palestine in particular), the worldwide student and youth movement (Germany, Japan, the USA, Mexico …), factory revolts (France and Italy) and the Cultural Revolution in China. It finds its subjective form in a resigned surrender, in a return to customs – including
the continental shattering of history! The sailors who threw their officers to carnivorous fish, the utopians of solar cities who opened fire in their territorial outposts, Quechua miners from the Andes with an appetite for dynamite! And the successive tidal waves of African rebels sheltering behind flaming leopard-skin shields in the colonial stench! Not forgetting the lone man who took down his hunting rifle and, like a suspicious wild boar, began to resist the aggressor in the forests of
important to note here is that an event is not the realization of a possibility that resides within the situation or that is dependent on the transcendental laws of the world. An event is the creation of new possibilities. It is located not merely at the level of objective possibilities but at the level of the possibility of possibilities. Another way of putting this is: with respect to a situation or a world, an event paves the way for the possibility of what – from the limited perspective of