The Communist Hypothesis

by Alain Badiou, David Macey (Translator), Steve Corcoran (Translator)

“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.

Genres: Philosophy, Politics, Nonfiction, Theory, History, Economics, France

288 pages, Hardcover

First published May 26, 2009

About the author

Alain Badiou, Ph.D., born in Rabat, Morocco in 1937, holds the Rene Descartes Chair at the European Graduate School EGS. Alain Badiou was a student at the École Normale Supérieure in the 1950s. He taught at the University of Paris VIII (Vincennes-Saint Denis) from 1969 until 1999, when he returned to ENS as the Chair of the philosophy department. He continues to teach a popular seminar at the Collège International de Philosophie, on topics ranging from the great 'antiphilosophers' (Saint-Paul, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Lacan) to the major conceptual innovations of the twentieth century. Much of Badiou's life has been shaped by his dedication to the consequences of the May 1968 revolt in Paris. Long a leading member of Union des jeunesses communistes de France (marxistes-léninistes), he remains with Sylvain Lazarus and Natacha Michel at the center of L'Organisation Politique, a post-party organization concerned with direct popular intervention in a wide range of issues (including immigration, labor, and housing). He is the author of several successful novels and plays as well as more than a dozen philosophical works.

Trained as a mathematician, Alain Badiou is one of the most original French philosophers today. Influenced by Plato, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze, he is an outspoken critic of both the analytic as well as the postmodern schools of thoughts. His philosophy seeks to expose and make sense of the potential of radical innovation (revolution, invention, transfiguration) in every situation.

Reviews

[Malcolm · Rating 4 out of 5]

The underlying premise of this book seems to be threefold: 1) that to talk of the defeat of communism is empty triumphalism or deep pessimism (depending on whether we are on the right or left respectively); 2) that the communist idea of an equal world where the wellbeing of one is the wellbeing of all is worth keeping; and 3) that progress towards this condition depends on learning from the revolutionary failures of the past. In this, Badiou's work sits in an interesting and productive relation to Žižek's (especially the books First as Tragedy Then as Farce, and In Defence of Lost Causes, but also a number of articles).

Badiou's Maoist past means that he is unlikely to see the collapse of the Soviet Union as evidence of the failure of communism, because the structure of the Soviet Union and the equation of the State with the Party is evidence of its departure from building communism (there is an often unaccepted parallel between Maoist and Trotskyist analyses of the Soviet Union here although they tend to part company after this point). This view of the Soviet Union means that Badiou was never likely to select it as one of his cases to explore – and he doesn't, focusing instead on the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China (1966-76), the events of May '68 in France, and the Paris Commune of 1871. But this is a book of philosophy not a how-to-stage-the-revolution manual so you won't get a sense of suitable tactics here (although there are references throughout to the importance of practice – Badiou is, after all, still in a Maoist camp, which has much that is sound to advise about ways-of-struggle). There is, however, much that is useful about analyses of struggle and hierarchies of actions within those actions – this sense of a hierarchy of importance is most clear in discussion of the Paris Commune, both in his analysis of it, and the argument that the Bolsheviks' tactics can, in part, be explained by what they learned from it. The point here is that not only do we need to learn from the Bolshevik's mistakes, but understand the problems they were trying to avoid that led to those mistakes.

There is much to disagree with here (although this for me is at the level of detail and does not undermine the overall argument as both coherent and for most part correct). It is, in its assertion of the Idea of Communism (perhaps the most difficult chapter because he asserts the idea as such and engages in a discussion with Žižek's Lacanian position), a ferocious critique of late capitalist cynicism in its demand that we have, defend and strive for a collective idea. It is also an optimistic book: communism is not what we see or saw in an of the 'socialist' states and is not something that is laid down by Marx (he explicitly rejected predictions), Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky or Mao – or any of the others often depicted a prophets of a new world: communism is an idea that we need to engage with in our local struggles and day-to-day resistance, because it is from those day-to-day activities that the path to a better world emerges. You don't need to agree, but it is an important book for those of us on the left (and I've not even considered the crucial methodological point about the centrality of the 'event' as a moment of choice).

[Jonfaith · Rating 2 out of 5]

The communist hypothesis is that a different collective organization is practicable, one that will eliminate the inequality of wealth and even the division of labour. The private appropriation of massive fortunes and their transmission by inheritance will disappear. The existence of a coercive state, separate from civil society, will no longer appear a necessity: a long process of reorganization based on a free association of producers will see it withering away.

I fear my response to this book, particularly to Badiou's horrific hagiography of The Cultural Revolution will lead to my expulsion from Zizek's cool kids club. Some matters are indefensible. That may not be philosophically progressive, it certainly doesn't coincide with Badiou's living for an Idea. This text isn't John Carpenter's They Live, if I wear the shades, Mao doesn't become decent, the denouncement remains too human and the idealism in the Cultural Revolution is negligible at best.

The section on the Paris Commune is easier to address. Strange how Badiou begins the book with pages of citation from his own play. Bad form.

[sologdin · Rating 3 out of 5]

An attempt to be scientific--and thus using hypothesis within its technical significance:

Take a scientific problem, which may well take the form of a hypothesis until such time as it is resolved. [...] failure is nothing more than the history of the proof of the hypothesis, provided that the hypothesis is not abandoned.

Within the history of left politics, Badiou identifies three primary types of failure of the hypothesis:

The best known, or the most circumscribed, is the failure of an attempt in which revolutionaries who have briefly taken power over a country or a zone and tried to establish new laws are crushed by an armed counter-revolution.

This sort of failure is exemplified by the Paris Commune, which he discusses at length.

The second type of failure is that of a broad movement involving disparate but very large forces whose goal is not really the seizure of power, even though they have forced the reactionary forces of the state on to the defensive for long periods of time.

He exemplifies this sort of failure in 1968's various actions.

The third type of failure concerns an attempt to transform a state that officially declares itself to be socialist, and to bring it into line with the idea of a free association, which, ever since Marx, has always seemed to be stipulated by the communist hypothesis

This third type gets extended discussion regarding China's Cultural Revolution. There's lotsa great comments along the way, both on point and as asides. He does try to rehabilitate the Cultural Revolution, but not those violent and intolerant aspects that we normally deplore: its principle is more important for him than the material particulars. That said, we also get real head-scratchers at times:

Let’s recapitulate as simply as possible. A truth is the political real. History, even as a reservoir of proper names, is a symbolic place. The ideological operation of the Idea of communism is the imaginary projection of the political real into the symbolic fiction of History, including in its guise as a representation of the action of innumerable masses via the One of a proper name. The role of this Idea is to support the individual’s incorporation into the discipline of a truth procedure, to authorize the individual, in his or her own eyes, to go beyond the Statist constraints of mere survival by becoming a part of the body-of-truth, or the subjectivizable body.

Okay then! He definitely builds this argument out of the more fundamental concepts of Being and Event. The ultimate point is that failure should not discourage--it's part of the process of working out a hypothesis to encounter falsifications. We should not be surprised, he argues in a different text, if thousands of years of entrenched private property regimes bring communism's first few attempts to disaster.

[Amirsaman · Rating 3 out of 5]

انقلاب‌های خوبی هم داشته‌ایم، ولی همین که به انتخابات منتج شدند، با روی‌کار آوردن دولت‌مردان و پارلمانی‌ها، به باد رفتند - این مهم‌ترین درس می ۶۸ بود (که میترانی نو نیاوریم سر کار). کمون پاریس خوب بود از این جهت. اما شوروی کلا خودش را مسخره‌ی رفرمیسم و سیاست-فقط-درون-حزب کرد. چاره را مائو فهمید که ضد حزب-دولت شد؛ سازمان‌دهی باید غیرحزبی باشد و محلی (مثل کمون شانگهای). حالا اینکه انقلاب فرهنگی چین بخاطر رقابت‌های قدرت‌طلبانه‌ی بالایی‌ها بود و مائوئیسم چه فلاکت‌ها که نیافرید، باعث نمی‌شود بدیو طرفدار و غم‌خوارش نباشد (و حتا در نامه‌اش به ژیژک قضایا و قحطی را توجیه می‌کند). کلا می‌گوید فرضیه‌ی کمونیسم را حفظ کنیم و نگذاریم سرمایه‌داری لغات چپی را ترور کند. منظورش از ایده‌ی کمونیسم هم یک مفهوم‌سازی لاکانی است:
«اگر، برای یک فرد، یک ایده‌ همان عملیات سوبژکتیوی است که به‌واسطه‌ی آن یک حقیقتِ تاریخیِ خاص طی فرایندی خیالی به درون حرکت نمادین یک تاریخ فراافکنده می‌شود، می‌توان گفت یک ایده حقیقت را چنان عرضه می‌کند که گویی یک امر واقع (= فاکت) است.» و نیز «هر حقیقتی همان امر واقعیِ سیاسی است. تاریخ، حتی در مقام خزانه‌ی نام‌های خاص، مکانی نمادین است. عملیات ایدئولوژیکی آینده‌ی کمونیسم همان فراافکندن خیالی امر واقعی سیاسی به درون داستان نمادین تاریخ است، از جمله در زمانی که این ایده در نقش یک بازنمود ظاهر می‌شود، بازنمودی از کنش توده‌های بی‌شمار به یاریِ یکتاییِ نامی خاص.»

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Before delving into the actual content of ‘The Communist Hypothesis’, let me first comment that this edition is incredibly cute. I assume it’s a pastiche of Mao’s Little Red Book. More critical theorists should adopt this adorable mini hardback format, I’m fond of it. As to the book itself, Badiou is adamant that it is philosophy, not critical theory or political analysis, or indeed history. Within I found it a mixture of all four, but I suppose philosophy sounds more exalted and can cover a wide space. Quite early in the reading process, I was reminded of Combined and Uneven Apocalypse which approaches similar topics in a different way. Broadly, if I am not misinterpreting, Badiou is calling for a new Idea to counter the pervasive narrative of there being not alternative to representative democracy subordinate to free market capitalism. Meanwhile, Evan Calder Williams argues that, in the absence of any such big idea, all we can do is cobble together an alternative system from the wreckage of experiments with alternatives. What unites the two is an emphasis on the value of failed experiments in what can broadly be referred to as Communism. Whilst the No Alternative (TINA) narrative tells us to discard all these experiments as completely worthless in themselves, or indeed see them as vindications of capitalism’s inevitable and incontestable ascendancy. Whilst Calder Williams uses apocalyptic media to support his arguments, Badiou examines May 1968, the Paris Commune, and China’s Cultural Revolution.

I found Badiou’s analysis of these three historical events (I use the term in the normal sense, rather than in his philosophical sense) totally fascinating. Of the three, I as already most familiar with the Commune and found the comparison of the standard interpretation of how and why it failed with Badiou’s view very thought-provoking. Although Badiou’s writing can be very dense and sometimes made me wonder if it would be easier to follow in the original French, he does have the excellent habit of arraying his thoughts systematically. He often states that a particular point is composed of, say, three elements, then goes through each in turn. (His dear friend Žižek never assists the reader in this fashion.) I knew less about the upheavals of ‘68 and largely considered the Cultural Revolution as a time of turmoil (which of course it was, but that elides why it was happening). The examination of these events in terms of the groups involved, their dynamics, and the implications for party politics is thoughtfully done. A few particular points that I appreciated now follow.

On the paradox of Mao:

In all aspects, ‘Mao’ is the name of a paradox: the rebel in power, the dialectician put to the test by the continuing needs of ‘development’, the emblem of the party-state in search of it overcoming, the military chief preaching disobedience to the authorities… This is what has given to his ‘cult’ a frenetic appearance, because subjectively he accumulated the accord given to the stately pomp of the Stalinist type, together with the enthusiasm of the entire revolutionary youth for the old rebel who cannot be satisfied with the existing state of affairs, and who wants to move on in the march to real communism. ‘Mao’ was the name for the ‘construction of socialism’, but also for its destruction.

On the Paris Commune:

The proclamations of the Commune, the first worker power in universal history, comprise a historic existent whose absoluteness manifests the coming to pass in the world of a wholly new ordering of its appearing, a mutation of its logic. The existence of an inexistent aspect is that by which, in the domain of appearing, the subversion of worldly appearing is played out. It is the logical marking of a paradox of being, an ontological chimera.

My interpretation of that is: ‘The Paris Commune was unprecedented and is therefore important’. It’s less unwieldy to read in French, I imagine. Whist I could just about parse the above in context, occasional comments like this proved unrewarding:

Take any situation whatsoever. A multiple that is an object of this situation - whose elements are indexed by the transcendental of this situation - is a site if it happens to count itself within the referential field of its own indexation.

Perhaps Hegel and/or Lacan are to blame for this. The final chapter, which is grounded in theory rather than historical events, is unsurprisingly harder to read. Nonetheless, the effort is worthwhile. I liked the points about the ongoing importance of proper names (rather than dismissing cults of personality as madness without considering why they came about) and that the problems of the 21st century are closer to those of the early 19th than the 20th. I can certainly support both the need for an Idea to counter TINA and the utility of examining past mistakes to build a better future. One thing that came to mind whilst I read this book was how communism would manifest given the 21st century level of economic development. Whereas Russia and China’s communist regimes raced to industrialise and precipitated terrible famines through agricultural restructuring, today agriculture is vastly more productive, has a very different role in the economy, and industry is increasingly mechanised. So Badiou’s discussion of the past needs to be balanced with books like Paul Mason’s Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future, that focus on the present and future. The Idea of Communism can learn from past events, however Badiou’s comparison of economic inequality now to the 1840s is a little facile. The rise of information as a means of production seems to me a vital consideration of any 21st century Idea to counter capitalism.

Badiou ends his book with a letter he wrote Žižek about the latter’s work on Mao. This amused me as Badiou dismisses Jung Chang and John Halliday’s Mao biography, a copy of which I was given three days ago, as ‘a piece of propaganda, completely mendacious, perfidious and devoid of all interest’. Well, I’ll be the judge of that. Given the experiences she recounts in Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China, as well as the untold millions who perished due to famines and political upheaval, I can very well understand why Jung Chang would take a distinctly negative view of Mao! This aside does raise an incredibly difficult issue, though, which the whole book alternately discusses and dances around: to what extent do the atrocities of self-defined communist regimes taint the Idea of Communism? There are three points I think apposite here. Firstly, if body counts are to be used as a proxy for the validity of political ideologies, the manifold victims of slavery, war, famine, pollution, and poverty under capitalism should also be accounted for. Secondly, my 15 year obsession with Robespierre has taught me that personifying terrible events leads to over-simplistic, unhelpful interpretations. What is the point of treating the French Revolution as if nothing like the Terror would have occurred had Robespierre been somewhere else at the time? All nuance and interest is removed by unequivocally demonising a single individual. Finally, I think it is possible to deplore the cruelty of a regime whilst still taking positive lessons from it. This is really what Badiou and Žižek argue for, in their sometimes obscurantist fashion. There is an important difference between saying, ‘Nothing like this can ever happen again because in the past there were appalling consequences,’ and saying, ‘In the past there were appalling consequences, so if we are to try something similar in the future we must understand why these occurred and thus how we might avoid repeating them.’ The former promotes fatalism, the latter some hope of failing better, at least.

[Brixton · Rating 1 out of 5]

Let's say you're invited to a dinner party. The other guests will be Jesus Christ, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr, and Alain Badiou. Don't go. It isn't worth it. Stay home. Badiou is going to dominate the entire evening's conversation, and he won't say anything that has a damn bit of impact on anyone or anything in the world outside his own head.

This is exactly the kind of material that filters thinky, introspective kids with exciting ideas out of every philosophy department in the nation, and leaves only those career academicians who desire nothing more than to get their Masters of Incomprehensible Gobbledy-Gook and P(ompous)h(abitual)Diatribing so that they may someday become a department Head of Alienating People Through Verbosity and be alone with their books, their tenure, and their inflated egos.

I was reading this book on the bus the other day when a friend of mine got on at the university. They have a professor who just told the class, "Any paper longer than five pages is bullshit." I said he has a point. The Communist Manifesto was a fucking pamphlet, and it changed everything in the world. The Communist Hypothesis, however, doesn't lay down a single sentence in 279 pages that is going to have any effect on anything. So why bother?

I see Jesus and Gandhi at that dinner party exchanging sideways glances of patient discomfort, Marty shaking his head and chuckling to himself, and myself throwing the fork down and groaning "Oh, shuuut the fuuuck uuup!" when I can no longer stand Badiou's reminiscences of Paris in 1968. (Wait, I did actually say that in a few waiting rooms and on the bus... often, and out loud.) Despite the amazing company, if Badiou were present at such an event I'd only go in order to show off my new custom T-shirt, which I'm having made to wear while stuck with books like Badiou's that really needn't ever be distributed outside the university lecture circuit: "I'd rather be reading The Pooh Perplex ."

[Claire_n_h · Rating 2 out of 5]

this book is a nightmare of inaccessibility by someone who claims to be theorizing the liberation of the working class. it may be compounded by poor translation, but honestly, it's hypocritical to write in such a pompous, inaccessible way if you claim to be working for the liberation of working people. i learned some interesting facts about the Paris Commune, and the letter between him and Zizek is interesting, but other than that, don't read this unless you are prepared to have many headaches.

[William West · Rating 4 out of 5]

The neo-communist philosopher Alain Badiou begins his book by noting that “communism” has been labeled a failure in the world in which we operate. He then asks, what do we mean by “failure”? Does it mean to lose a confrontation or war, cold or otherwise, which would imply a death or end to that which fails? Or does it rather mean simply an experiment that failed to prove, for the time being, its hypothesis? A failed experiment, or “truth procedure” as Badiou calls an attempt to prove a new truth through political practice, certainly does not prove its hypothesis, but it also does not negate the possibility of the hypothesis's validity. “Failures,” if understood as experimental, can be seen not as ends but as part of an ongoing attempt to think social change in the present, which is always continuous and situational.

The communist hypothesis is that which continues to assert that we can move beyond capitalism without yet knowing how to prove that theory. The capitalist world in which we operate tells us that capitalism is insurmountable, that to move beyond it is actually unthinkable. In fact, writes Badiou, the central proscription of this world is not to live with any idea other than oneself-as-consumer. The ultimate taboo of our world is philosophy.

Badiou identifies the purpose of this slim book as defining the generic form taken by truth processes when they come up against the incompatibilities between the hypothesis of the given truth procedures with the social world in which they are attempted. All truth procedures, Badiou argues, come to what he calls a “point,” a moment in the experiment when a single binary choice determined the fate of the experiment. If one therefor tracks the point at which a truth procedure fails, the failure can be understood and learned from, as any failed experiment can give life to other attempts to prove a certain hypothesis. The failure can thus become a positive part of an on-going macro-truth process.

Badiou identifies three types of failed truth-processes. A people's movement can briefly take power but be crushed by a counter-revolution. Badiou's example is the Paris Commune. Another form of failure is when a broad front of progressive forces manage to make the ruling class tactically retreat, but whose forces are too loose to demand the seizure of power, such as happened in France during May of '68. Finally, a socialist state can fail to evolve into a more open society, as Badiou thinks was the case with the Cultural Revolution.

Some of the most enjoyable parts of the book are Badiou's compact but lively tracings of his three model truth procedures. I learned a great deal about all of them. His first person accounts of May of '68 are particularly dramatic, and include a beautifully written remembrance of preparing to storm a factory with other radical students, just to see the workers unfurl a red flag from its roof, signaling that it had been liberated from within. He arrives at a point of failure for all three examples, but his historical arch is counter-linear, starting with May of '68 and ending with the Paris Commune, in order to show the repetitive nature of some aspects of rebellion.

Badiou believes that we are still today dealing with the problems posed by the French rebellion in 1968. The students and workers abandoned the leadership of entities like the Communist Party of France because they viewed the Party and the actually-existing-socialism to which the Party was the national link as simply other lifeless structures in a state-ist landscape. Parties, for Badiou's generation, had to be moved beyond because they aspired to no more than control of the state apparatus, and state-ism was exactly what the workers and students of May of '68 were trying to transcend. Today, in the post-Soviet world, Badiou thinks that emancipation without state-ism, rebellion without a Party, is still the task that must be envisioned.

I disagree with Badiou on this point. I think that what I will call, for lack of a better term, Badiou's ultra-leftism is a nostalgic response to the world of May of '68, a world bifurcated by the Cold War. State-ism would have seemed as that which separated one half of humanity from the other and kept the world as it was. The fact is that, according to the terms of Badiou's own philosophy, that world no longer exists. That world ended with the event of the fall of the Soviet states. We live in a world with only one super-power and one, unchallenged, empire. The role of political parties is different in such a (this) world.

Badiou's view on political parties is also influenced by his understanding of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Badiou views the Cultural Revolution as a heroic but failed attempt to give unity to revolutionary politics without relying on top-down bureaucratic state-ism. This leads Badiou to the conclusion that the Cultural Revolution constituted the saturation of the concept of revolution as defined as the seizing of power by a state-ist party.

Finally, Badiou posits that the Paris Commune fell because of state-ist problems that the Leninist party solved, but the Commune perhaps solved political problems that the Leninist party cannot. While the Bolsheviks paid homage to the Commune upon taking power, their morning for the fallen workers, who could be seen as the “victims” of the “bad idea” of the Commune, was, Badiou suggests, as much a proscription of the political form of the Commune as an homage to its happening. The Cultural Revolution, claims Badiou, had more in common with the political form and goals of the Paris Commune than of the October Revolution. In both cases, the masses were trying to achieve radical change without turning to the state, even in the form of seizing it.

After tracing these past failures, Badiou turns to trying to define the role of the idea of communism in the present. It is clear from this, and other recent works by Badiou, such as “Rebirth of History” which covers the recent uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, that Badiou sees change as emanating from what he terms “historic riots,” localized uprisings that occasionally give rise to new modes of political practice. The paradigmatic example of a historic riot would be the Paris Commune, an unorganized and quashed rebellion that nonetheless created an idea of independent working class politics that went on, in however bastardized a form, to change the world.

Following Mao, who said that the world is in constant transformation due to different contradictions acting upon and transforming one another, Badiou views all being as a multiple of multiples. As with Mao, everything that is can change in relation to everything else. A “world” is a particular relation of being, of multiples to one another. The state-of-a-world, Badiou sometimes calls it the “transcendental” of a world, determines the cohesion of the given world by indexing its multiples with more or less existence. Thus, states can deploy ideologies such as white-supremacy, to make non-whites seem “less human,” for non-whites to count for less than whites within a social world.

Badiou labels the territorialization of the possibility of a new world presenting itself the “site.” For Badiou, sites generally begin as localized riots. Unlike an ordinary state-of-a-world, the multiplicity of existence under an emerging world in the context of a riot that is becoming historic is open rather than concealed. The existence afforded to various elements within the world is fluid, the world is just constituting itself and everything is in question. If the full potential of a new “transcendental” is achieved, then the existence of that which had been previously denied existence is proven. This is what Badiou calls an “event”- the proving of the possibility of a new order. What the event of the Paris Commune brought into being was the full existence of the working-class, that workers could determine their own future and forge an independent proletarian politics. While socialist ideas had been floated around for years before the Commune, including in Marx's writings, the Commune was the first instance of the proletariat seizing power for itself. Of course, the Commune failed to hold on to power. But an event does not realize a possibility. It creates a new possibility, in the case of the Paris Commune, the possibility of the validity of the Communist Hypothesis, of liberation in real life as opposed to theory, in the age of capitalism.

Badiou traces the Communist Hypothesis all the way back to Plato's “Idea of the Good”. Badiou breaks the Idea down to three essential elements. Along the way he subtly equates Plato and one of Badiou's own mentors, Jacques Lacan. The first element of the Idea of the Good, the generic form of the Communist Hypothesis, is the political one, a temporal period in which a new idea and practice of collective emancipation arises and then disappears. The Platonic (political) Idea corresponds to the Lacanian notion of the “real”. Neither can be symbolized.

The second element of the Idea is historical. This involves the interplay between different types of truths from different worlds, all of these worlds possessing their own notions of time, in the consciousness of the emerging political subject. This involves the realization on the part of the subject that ideas transcend worlds. Ideas are trans-temporal. This reveals the Lacanian point that History exists only symbolically. History is the narrative of the totality of human experience. To exist on the level of the Real, history could only come about after the end of humanity. The historical is a symbolic vantage point from which the emerging subject avoids the real, but can still glimpse the eternity of the Idea.

Finally, there is the subjective element. Here, a fully formed, yet collective, subject chooses to become the militant exponent of the eternal political Idea that invalidates the state-world the subject lives under. In Lacanian terms, the collective subject projects the Real of the Political Idea into the symbolic of history. The (collective political) Subject is the imaginary of the Real, or the Idea, since the Real/ Idea cannot itself be symbolized. There is an interplay between the subjective moment of (Real) political truth and that moment's symbolization into the universal/imaginary of History. The Idea exposes truth (the Real) through the structure of a fiction (the imaginary/history).

Badiou calls on his readers to rescue the Idea of the Good (the Communist Hypothesis) both from the capitalist world-that-is and from the temptations of state-ism, the temptation of the (impossible) task of dragging the Real into the muck of the symbolic realm, which in this work Badiou (like Derrida) would claim was the mistake of “actually existing socialism”. For, Badiou repeats, the state is always, whether socialist or capitalist or whatever, the agent of the finitude of possibility. An event is always the opening of the infinite. The event symbolizes the discovery of the Real. It does not symbolize the Real, the Idea itself. The event merely gives a sense of what might be possible.

I guess my main criticism of this work is that, for all of its attempts to negate the “dangerous” elements of revolution, i.e: that the revolution thinks of itself as truth-itself-in-action, Badiou's fusion of Lacan and Plato ends in a dangerous notion of the “immediate” (riotous) subject as transcendental- as the imaginary embodiment of a Real that the rest of us are not even allowed to glimpse or question. This is, indeed, the nature of leaderless movements such as anarchistic riots. Vanguard parties, on the other hand, are, at least in theory, participatory bodies.

[Σταμάτης Καρασαββίδης · Rating 2 out of 5]

Meh. I wanted to read this book for quite some time and when i finally ordered it i was really hyped and excited to read it. To my dissapointment the book isn't what it either wants to be or what it is claimed to be. It has some pretty good points and some parts where he states the obvious but in a nice way (for example in his comparison of socialist "cults of personality" with western fandoms for artists), his description of stages of the relevance of the Paris Commune and his Lacanian analysis of the communist Idea. But overall the book is just a mess of incoherent, vague, ahistorical, idealist, and at some points racist and orientalist ramblings. His idealised communist experiments are only the ones that failed miserably but nonetheless they are important to take into consideration but at the same time not forget that they failed, his suggestion of an organizational structure of new communist politics is just an one page vague mess with nothing specific mentioned, his record of the cultural revolution is through extremely orientalist lenses and at one point he states that the cultural revolution happened because the party state PROVED to be wrong and needed to be reconsidered while even till this day in countries like China, DPRK, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos etc we can see how this "party-state" model which Badiou so much is religiously obsessed of getting over for reasons he doesn't specify, not only works, but China alone has managed through it to lift 850 million people out of poverty.
His racist remarks are that at one point he claims that the documents of the cultural revolution are "harder for chinese people to read than for someone in the West" which if you actually say that to a Chinese person living in mainland China they will laugh their heart out, and not only that but it considers China as a "capitalist tyranical dystopia akin with western capitalist states" where this subtle racism of leftists usually appear as the chinese are all brainwashed and cant research their own history on their own and need the white saviour to come and teach them their own history.

Secondly one absolutely horrid remark is his comparison of colonialism to Chinese billionaires in his letter to Zizek. I'm absolutely no fan of billionaires myself but comparing centuries of genocide, looting, underdevelopment, slavery, manmade famines, racism, discrimination, segregation etc with Chinese billionaires simply existing having no power of their own outside what the CPC allows them to have, is straight up an insult to all the victims of Colonialism.

Another problem that this book had is the absence of citations. Badiou, as most other French (and generally western) intellectuals love to make huge claims which they consider as "common knowledge" without any kind of citation. Many claims in the book where he talks about Stalin's policies, the cultural revolution, the paris commune and the Deng Xiaoping era are left uncited and supposed as "common knowledge".

Very dissapointing in general and i found it really hard and slow to read due to my dislike of it. even tho i'd rate it 3/5 stars im going by the Goodreads standards of "it was ok" instead of "liked it" It wasn't bad overall, but by no sense it was any "good". So i will compromise at 2.5/5

2.5/5

[Ethan · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The Cultural Revolution is the Commune of the age of Communist Parties and Socialist States: a terrible failure that teaches us some essential lessons.” So writes Alain Badiou in a letter to Slavoj Zizek.

Badiou offers a great rundown of three important people’s movements—May ‘86 in France, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and the Paris Commune—that occurred outside the auspices of a disciplined communist party. While noting their failures, Badiou takes kernels of inspiration from these events to argue that the pursuit of emancipatory politics must not be tied parties any longer. Hardly a new argument, but Badiou makes his case without resorting to snobbish anarchism or a fetishism of workers’ spontaneity. He does not disparage the controversial figures of our movement, but learns from their errors and shortcomings while honouring them.

My only problem with this book—which is not so much the book’s problem as it is mine—was the verbosity in the final two chapters which may be difficult for those without a philosophical background (like myself) to comprehend with ease.

Definitely a must read for all progressives, especially those who believe that the building of socialism must occur under a single party with a monopoly on all forms of political organising.

This book reminds me of one of my favourite quotes by Mao:

“The people, and the people alone, are the active force in the making of world history... while we [Communists] are often childish and ignorant.”

[David Barrera Fuentes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mi primer acercamiento a Badiou. Me gustaron sus planteamientos sobre el fracaso. De alguna manera, lo leí como el reverso espejeado o el "negativo", aunque con un origen y voluntad comunes, de Mark Fisher. Si en Fisher lo que hay es una diatriba contra cierta inclinación de la izquierda hacia el fracaso, Badiou lo analiza y lo aprehende --siguiéndolo a él mismo, abraza el síntoma-- para articular el sentido de una política para el futuro; si Fisher utiliza la cultura popular, Badiou abraza la filosofía y la antifilosofía lacaniana para estudiar la emancipación como Acontecimiento. No obstante, ambos ofrecen salidas para aquella "cancelación" ideológica que los liberales bienpensantes plantean. En ese sentido, la lectura de lo RSI de Lacan para la cuestión política me pareció genial. Además, resulta un libro iluminador para entender algunas cosas del Mayo 68 francés y, sobre todo, para evitar caer en los clichés liberaloides contra la Revolución Cultural china.

[Me da rabia que ahora no puedo agregar nuevas ediciones, para agregar la que leí realmente, así que chanto la edición francesa. Que la única traducción al español sea desde Chile me parece un intento notable de salir de la trampa metropolitana de depender de ediciones españolas, con sus traducciones de mierda, de muchos de los textos de filosofía en lengua francesa].

[Derek · Rating 3 out of 5]

About three quarters of this collections of essays of largely impenetrable, although Badiou occasionally drops a gem on em, to quote Mobb Deep. There are enough interesting anecdotes and propositions to make it worth reading, but there are also entire sections of utter verbosity that aren't worth the headache.

His argument that we are closer to the "first" stage of communism, a stage of intellectual (re)formation, rather than the "second" stage of parties and states (ie. Political power/victory) is obviously compelling and objectively accurate. At the same time, his argument that politics must *always* be separate from the party and the state (a politics without parties) seems contradictory to the very models that *are* in some matter making an impact today: PSUV in Venezuela, SYRIZA in Greece, Podemos in Spain, etc. His assertion that the Cultural Revolution is our Paris Commune (disastrous defeat upon which we center our politics) is rather far fetched, and although these "events" (anyone exhausted of such tiresome analytical distinction?) are important, I'm not entirely sure his chapter on either of them were particularly rigorous or helpful.

At any rate, read the text and decide for yourself. There are moments of brilliance and inspiration, but more often moments of perplexity and verbosity that does little to further any "real" communist politics (although for Badiou the adjective form of the idea of communism is a crime....).

[Felix · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alain Badiou is an old school communist. It seems strange to even write this in 2019, about a book published in 2010: but in The Communist Hypothesis, Alain Badiou passionately advoates for Maoism. I had heard of Badiou before reading this, and his name was usually synonymous with 21st century Maoism, but nevertheless it still took me by surprise to actually read it on the page.

All of this is not to say that I oppose talk advocating for Maoism - it is just that I don't expect to see it. Although I disagree with his conclusions, I struggle to summon up too much hostility towards Badiou and this text. It certainly doesn't read as though it belongs to the 21st century, but it is refreshing to read something which is so optimistic about the future of communism. I'm so used to reading about it only as a historical phenonmenon.

[Keanu Iscramuon · Rating 4 out of 5]

I rated this book 4 stars on a scale that describes how much satisfaction I gained from reading it. It is in no respect an objective measure of how good a book is.

There are many things wrong about the Cultural Revolution in China. But that doesn't mean we have to succumb to the idea that this bourgeois-capitalist system that is currently prevalent is the best we can do. Despite its many failures, there are essential lessons on emancipatory politics (communism) to be learned from the Cultural Revolution.

[Wyatt Browdy · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Get rich!”

We can translate that as: “Live without an Idea!”

We have to say that we cannot live without an idea.

[Adrian Mendizabal · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Dare to struggle and dare to win" - Mao

Alain Badiou has made it clear more than ever the need to fortify the political virtue of courage, 'the courage to defend and practice our ideas and principles, to say what we think… to be bold enough to have an idea' (P. 50). And the Idea is communism, which for Badiou is not merely a concept or an adjective, but an operative term with three components: a truth procedure, a belonging to History, and individual subjectivization. This idea of communism has already been defined before in the line of praxis that traverses from Marx through Lenin and Mao. What Badiou did in this book is to reconstitute it again in its renewed form using his innovative method of Truth procedure.

The book starts with announcing the defeat - the crumbling of the great political experiment of socialism at the end of 1980s, which would eventually be replaced by what Badiou calls the capitalo-parliamentarian order or what we commonly know now as Western Democracy ran by global capitalism. Using different methods, Badiou shifts back and forth in the history of class struggle to find similar instances of defeat which can offer valuable lessons for future militants: the May '68 uprising in France, the Cultural Revolution in China (1965-76), and the 1871 Paris Commune.

One can learn from the May '68 uprising in France that disorganized violence without ideological unity and a strong united Party cannot triumph for a long time. The same can be said during the Cultural Revolution in China which was plagued by factionalism and Party's refusal to overcome the Party-state organization pulling China back to conservative politics. On the hand, during the 1871 Paris Commune, while one can see it as an Event in itself, or the becoming-possible of the impossible, it lacks organization and a united ideological front to sustain it over a long period.

The book reads not so much as a guide to action but an exemplary way of reading and revaluating historical moments and their contradictory contents and relations.

[Shulamith Farhi · Rating 4 out of 5]

A stimulating book. The most important idea here is the "communist invariant," formalizing Bordiga and Camatte. Badiou's ahistorical Maoism sticks out, and one wishes that he took Trotsky more seriously, but it's an important text that resurrected a political idea that many had written off as dead and redundant. Badiou is culturally conservative, sticking doggedly to his cartoonish 1950s vision of straight sexuality but he's a charming ancient white haired geezer so we forgive him. It's not his fault that he's a dinosaur; we can extract from his fossilized bones the blueprints for constructing more LGBTQ+ friendly invariants.

[Mohammadobia · Rating 3 out of 5]

الثورة، أي ثورة تفشل لثلاثة أسباب، الأول هو هزيمتها المباشرة من قبل ثورة مضادة تسحقها وتخضعها تحت سيطرتها، الثاني هو هزيمتها غير المباشرة من خلال تبني الثورة المنتصرة مشروع عدوها ليصبح نظامها في إدارة العهد الجديد، الثالث حين تصبح سلطة الدولة التي ناضلت الثورة ضدها هي نفسها آلية الثورة لتنفيذ طموحاتها. يحاول آلان باديو أن يحلل اسباب فشل اليسار التاريخي، حركة ماي 68 وكمونة باريس والثورة الثقافية وحتى الثورة البلشفية. يبقى هنا أن نثبت محاولة باديو فلسفة الفشل وإكسابه معنى متجاوز، فالفشل صديق اليسار لحمايته من لعنة الانتصارات المفضية دائمًا إلى يمين وأن قدر اليسار هو الفشل الدائم كي يظل أفلاطونية جديدة، مثال خيالي لا يوجد ولن يأتي ليظل عراب دائم للتغيير!

[Ceena · Rating 3 out of 5]

بدیو عادتی بس عجیب در تکه پاره کردن ایده های خوب و نابش دارد. مثل کرونوسِ گویا که فرندش را تکه پاره میکند. کتاب خوش خوان نیست. تکه پاره است. ولی در لا به لای سطرها، نکاتی آنچنان بدیع و جسورانه ارائه شده که خواننده هوشیار را با خود همراه خواهد کرد. خواننده قطعا باید با تاریخ معاصر دهه 60 به ویژه چین کمونیست و دوره انقلاب فرهنگی آن آشنا باشد. بدیو به هیچ وجه از اینکه خود را مائوئیست بداند طفره نمیرود و تنها همین صداقت گفتار متن کافی است. بخش مربوط به کومون پاریس بسیار جالب نوشته شده و خواننده را ترقیب به خواندن بیشتر میکند.

[Dante · Rating 4 out of 5]

3/5 but the final chapter, the Idea of Communism and Badiou's idiosyncratic reading of revolutionary potential lacking inscription in the present, makes it worthy of another star. An odd (controversial?) reading of the Cultural Revolution, but an appealing and insightful one; only in their unity are his perspectives on May '68, the Paris Commune and the Cultural revolution hard-hitting.

without theoretical terrorism, there can be no revolution:

[Roberto Yoed · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Podemos, entonces debemos."

Si bien, Badiou falla en algunas cosas, el mensaje general del texto es esencialmente vigente: dejemos de lado el nihilismo y vicios pequeñoburgueses; apuntemos hacia una realidad comunista posible de construir.

El marxismo nunca morirá siempre que el capitalismo exista.

[Grig O' · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Communist idea will remain valid as long as we can find new ways to fuck it up. And of course embed these failures in theory, which is what this book does. It's often stimulating as a mental exercise, and motivational in its idealism, but that's about it.

[Jordan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A little disorganized as a whole, but a really interesting and insightful look at a variety of historical and philosophical topics through Badiou's Maoist lens. The thesis boils down to the idea that The Paris Commune was the starting point for Lenin, Lenin was the starting point for Mao, and Maoism in its 'oppose the internal party bourgeoisie, build people-power outside the party' form needs to be the starting point for those of us who believe in the communist hypothesis that 'capitalism isn't necessary' today.

I needed a little more hand-holding than was available through the (brief) theoretical philosophy sections, but Badiou's summarizations were enough to keep me on board and up to speed.

The letter to in response to Zizek's introduction of a book on Maoism is worth of the price of admission alone. It includes this very important bit about the need to vehemently resist the reactionary, alarmist, invalidating lens of mainstream histories:

"When it comes to figures like Robespierre, Saint-Just, Babeuf, Blanqui, Bakunin, Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Tito, Enver Hoxha, Guevara, Castro and a few others (I am thinking of Aristide in particular), it is vital not to give any ground in the context of criminalization and hair-raising anecdotes in which the forces of reaction have always tried to wall them up and invalidate them. We can and must discuss amongst ourselves (meaning those for whom capitalism and its political forms are horrors, and for whom egalitarian emancipation is the only maxim that has any universal value) the use we make, or do not make, of these figures. The discussion may be lively, and sometimes antagonistic, but it is amongst ourselves, and the rules of the discussion imply an absolute refusal to collaborate with the adversary’s ranting."

Also from the book, about the need to hold up the icons of communism as a conceptual focusing device despite communism's being opposed to exactly that 'cult of personality' on its face:

"On the one hand, in effect, emancipatory politics is essentially the politics of the anonymous masses; it is the victory of those with no names, of those who are held in a state of colossal insignificance by the State. On the other hand, it is distinguished all along the way by proper names, which define it historically, which represent it, much more forcefully than is the case for other kinds of politics. Why is there this long series of proper names? Why this glorious Pantheon of revolutionary heroes? Why Spartacus, Thomas Müntzer, Robespierre, Toussaint Louverture, Blanqui, Marx, Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Mao, Che Guevara and so many others? The reason is that all these proper names symbolize historically – in the guise of an individual, of a pure singularity of body and thought – the rare and precious network of ephemeral sequences of politics as truth. The elusive formalism of bodies-of-truth is legible here as empirical existence. In these proper names, the ordinary individual discovers glorious, distinctive individuals as the mediation for his or her own individuality, as the proof that he or she can force its finitude. The anonymous action of millions of militants, rebels, fighters, unrepresentable as such, is combined and counted as one in the simple, powerful symbol of the proper name. Thus, proper names are involved in the operation of the Idea, and the ones I just mentioned are elements of the Idea of communism at its various different stages."

[Joseph Spuckler · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Communist Hypothesis by Alain Badiou is a work of political philosophy (even though the author denies it). Badiou is the former chair of Philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure.

Communism failed and that is a given, but what is failure? There is a saying that goes "Failure is not falling down. It is refusing to get back up." I was expecting to read a detailed account of how the left and the working class will rise again. As a Marine in the Cold War, I was committed to defending America and its allies from the communists. Since that time, I have gotten older, more read, more educated, and more aware.

Badiou spends a great deal of time discussing the Chinese and Soviets. I have a problem with that. Marx and Engles explained what was needed for communism to start. Communism needed to rise from industrialized societies, not underdeveloped and agrarian societies. Both examples, China and Russia, occurred in undeveloped countries. In fact, every example of a communist revolution has happened in an undeveloped country. The Soviet Union and China were, and in China's case still is, a totalitarian state. There no doubt that a class system exists or existed in both systems. Both systems are failures even without competition from the West. China has even joined the west in limited capitalism and foreign investment. Communism in theory is very different than how it has been practiced.

Badiou seems to want to defend the failed system. He looks down at the successful democratic socialist governments in Europe as being polluted. It would seem that system has done more to bring equality to a society than the "communist" systems. When you fail, you want to learn from your mistakes, not repeat them. By defending the Maoist and Soviet systems, Badiou is just repeating the same failures over again. I understand his passion, but not his direction.

I am glad Badiou mentions Hegel. Hegel dialectic is known to every political science student. It works like a pendulum. On one extreme is a thesis* and the other its anti-thesis* and eventually the pendulum stops in the center where the forces of both sides equal out and a stable state is maintained -- Synthesis*. If this exercise is run with communism as the thesis, capitalism as its antithesis, democratic socialism is the result. That is the position of most of the successful and content countries of the world.

There may be a reason revolution does not happen in industrial societies. These members of those societies regardless of class know they are pretty well off in a world view of their situation. Also, the producers in these societies depend on the workers to make their products as well as consume them. No workers mean no consumers which mean no profits. Many people realize that unregulated capitalism is a bad thing, but few are willing to take up arms. We vote, we make our voices heard, but little else. The Occupy movement started quickly but lost steam as people realized that they were not threatened by the system enough to make an effort to change it. Industrialized countries have become complacent in their consumer culture. If they can buy, things are well.

Communism failed more from its method than its message.




*Kant's terms often attributed to Hegel.

[Gerardo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Per "ipotesi comunista" si intende l'apparire, nella storia umana, di certe possibilità che vengono aperte dal pensiero comunista. L'intento di Badiou è quello di mostrare come, nonostante il fallimento di molte rivoluzioni e rivolte comuniste, queste abbiano comunque cambiato il volto dell'umanità in senso positivo.

Infatti, secondo il filosofo, questi eventi hanno permesso l'apparire di nuove possibilità per l'umanità, attualizzando nuove modalità di esistenza. Il fallimento di alcune di esse, non ha, però, impedito all'umanità di pensare quelle possibilità.

La storia, infatti, non sempre è capace di realizzare in maniera perfetta le possibilità apparse a seguito di grandi eventi: a volte, non si riesce a essere fedeli alla novità dell'evento e si continuano vecchie pratiche, che conducono il nuovo al fallimento.

I tre eventi analizzati da Badiou sono il Maggio '68, la Rivoluzione culturale cinese la Comune di Parigi. Il primo fu caratterizzato da tre linee distinte (proteste studentesche, proteste operaie e liberalizzazione dei costumi), ma oggi si ricorda solo l'ultima: in sostanza, è rimasta solo la lotta più conforme ai bisogni del capitale. Coloro che vogliono screditare quelle lotte per l'uguaglianza, mostrando il '68 come un momento di inizio della perdizione consumistica. Il secondo evento, invece, seppur violento, ha mostrato come, in ogni Stato comunista, si annidi il rischio di un imborghesimento dei quadri e, quindi, una riproposizione delle vecchie gerarchie. La Comune, invece, seppur nel suo totale fallimento, mostrò al mondo la possibilità di pensare alla comunità in maniera libera e ordinata, senza dover fare necessariamente affidamento al potere poliziesco o militare. Purtroppo, il fallimento è avvenuto proprio per mancanza di forze militari per combattere i nemici esterni.

[Dallas · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 rounded up. A principled and vivacious defense of communism always, always necessary. The fact that even just the word "communism" has been essentially blacklisted in popular (and even Left) discourse is something we urgently need to reckon with if we actually want to create a better world. Even if you struggle with Badiou at a philosophical level, he's beyond necessary on a political one. This book is a great antidote to the inane waffling in the name of "nuance" that's omnipresent in our contemporary leftist spheres. Nuance is great for thinking but terrible for writing; that's how you get decades of Western intellectuals hand-wringing instead of organizing, or doing literally anything besides writing another paper on the "complicated legacy" of Castro or whoever. I mean--there's a reason why Marxist militants in the Global South are reading Badiou and not any of those guys. Writers that are able to take a strong stance and defend it (e.g. Badiou on Mao) are, in my eyes, an essential part to building your own "nuanced" worldview-- which is the thing that will propel you to, in Badiou's words, the political real. A house needs to be built on a solid foundation and a movement needs to be built on strong Ideas. Hats off to Badiou for reminding us of this

[Carla · Rating 3 out of 5]

The highly personal 3/5 rating is attributed to the fact that it's not particularly friendly to the so-called common reader (commentary on the Cultural Revolution/ China I found to be the most impenetrable).
In other words, a reasonably basic (interpret that as you will) historic knowledge is preferred if you don't wish to flounder through paragraph after paragraph on events such as the Wahun incident et al.
I haven't done even the most cursory readings on the Maoist years, so I was pretty much in the dark the entire time.
I would've also loved to have read beforehand Donny Gluckstein's book on the Paris Commune as well, although Badiou's analysis on the Commune was not as abstruse; and the same goes for May '68.
Reverting to what I said earlier: I'm fairly convinced you'll get much more enjoyment, or at least, a more intellectually rewarding experience after preliminary readings of May '68, China's Cultural Revolution, and The Paris Commune + assuming you've also, at the very least, an idea about communism: otherwise, what are you doing reading Badiou's political texts?

[L7od · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nunca faço aqui uma revisão crítica dos livros que leio, primeiro porque acho que há gente muito mais capacitada pra isso e segundo porque meu objetivo é simplesmente registrar meu pensamento após a leitura e eventualmente estimular alguém a ler o mesmo livro. Assim, gostei bastante desse. Da ideia de que as experiências socialistas que tivemos na história sejam não simplesmente fracassos, mas o desenvolvimento da hipótese comunista, ou seja, como fazer para que as ideias de Marx possam ser implantadas e tenhamos um mundo mais igual.
Muito interessante a ideia de que o Partido Comunista acabe virando a nova burguesia nos países que passaram pela experiência comunista e que talvez outras formas de organização sejam necessárias para que não apareça esta diferença nas sociedades.
O livro me estimulou muito a conhecer mais profundamente o pensamento de Mao e mais detalhes sobre a Comuna de Paris.
Vale a pena ler.

[Doug · Rating 3 out of 5]

“The essential function of utopia is a critique of what is present” - Ernst Bloch

Feels slightly out of date given the events and failures of the “mass protest decade” that was the 2010s. The language used here is also typically esoteric in the way that most philosophy is, not exactly “readable.” The Idea, the communist Idea, must still persist, it’s still present and as relevant as ever especially post-COVID, but the lesson learned, according to Bevin for example, is that it must be given power through political organization and leadership. The Overton Window has become disastrously small and this Idea serves as a reminder of possibility to pry it open. Found the refusal to relegate failed or even horrific revolutionary moments to the annals of history and irrelevance refreshing; elements of them can and should be taken as instructive for the future.

[Charlie Kruse · Rating 3 out of 5]

The history of 3 revolutions from the lens of Badiou. He takes each chapter to extrapolate what we can still learn from May '68, the Cultural Revolution, and the French Revolution. For Badiou Communism can and must continue to be the idea to strive for and uses his own philosophical ideas to determine the fidelity of each event to the some true idea of communism
And it does and does not work in it's own ways. Reading this against Crowds and Party, Badiou's arguments against "reformism" or even participating in party politics seem to waver as Ocasio-Cortez and others continue to change the landscape of the Democratic party, and if Jodi Dean is correct, the party can become much more than some top down organization. History shows this too.