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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“Once again, communism and Nazism are totally different from each other. To equate them and to equate historical communism with any kind of totalizing religion strikes me as highly problematic and ultimately unjustified.”

“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.”