Benjamin Britton’s Reviews > What Is To Be Done?: A Dialogue on Communism, Capitalism, and the Future of Democracy > Status Update

“If communism is so often ridiculed as an archaic, dreary, obsolete alternative, it’s because its historical realization remained trapped in the straitjacket of tradition. We need to extricate it from that. Being trapped in it is not a destiny.”

“No one wants to create a little, isolated France, entrenched behind its borders, which would become impoverished in record time. Only the far right relishes this identitarian fantasy that would drive us into powerlessness. So the communist hypothesis must prove itself locally while at the same time taking over the world stage.”

“But I think your dialectic of cautiousness and audacity fails to take sufficient account of the fact that in any political situation there are enemies. Real, genuine enemies.”

Alain Badiou
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“The Party attacked the Party: terror was logically involved in this process, so the psychological analyses that attempt to account for it (they mention Stalin’s paranoia, Mao’s megalomania, and so on) are pointless. No, it was a properly political mechanism that was set in motion.”

“When it came to the new revolutionary experiments, in the late 1960s and beyond, the PCF was, if anything, the enemy. A despised and very real enemy: the “official” militants wanted to hold on to their political monopoly in the factories.”