The Communist Hypothesis
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.
Hardback, 288 pages
ISBN: 9781844676002
July 2010
$19.95 / £12.99
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Part of the Pocket Communism series
Reviews
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“A figure like Plato or Hegel walks here among us!”
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“A Little Red Book for our time?”
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“An heir to Jean-Paul Sartre and Louis Althusser.”
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“Shaking the foundations of Western liberal democracy.”
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“One of the saddest, funniest books of the past 20 years.”
Blog
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On your Marx...
Stuart Jeffries gives an overview of the mainstreaming of Marx in today's Guardian, featuring Verso authors Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière, Owen Jones and Slavoj Žižek as well as the new edition of The Communist Manifesto.
Class conflict once seemed so straightforward. Marx and Engels wrote in the second best-selling book of all time, The Communist Manifesto: "What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable."...
Today, 164 years after Marx and Engels wrote about grave-diggers, the truth is almost the exact opposite. The proletariat, far from burying capitalism, are keeping it on life support.
Jeffries interviews Jacques Rancière, philosopher, radical social historian (and Ségolène Royal's favourite thinker) to shed light on the 'new Marxism':
Aren't Marx's venerable ideas as useful to us as the hand loom would be to shoring up Apple's reputation for innovation? Isn't the dream of socialist revolution and communist society an irrelevance in 2012? After all, I suggest to Rancière, the bourgeoisie has failed to produce its own gravediggers. Rancière refuses to be downbeat: "The bourgeoisie has learned to make the exploited pay for its crisis and to use them to disarm its adversaries.
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Communism, A New Beginning? conference now online
We're pleased to finally post video from our Communism, A New Beginning? conference from back in October in the debut of our incredibly novel YouTube page. It's an interesting look back to a weekend of what was the first month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street; around when Étienne Balibar spoke on "Communism as Commitment, Imagination, and Politics," peaceful protesters just uptown at Times Square were arrested and en route to Central Booking.
Here is a guide to the talks given at this conference:
DAY 1
Alain Badiou: Politics and State, Mass Movement and Terror (presented by Bruno Bosteels)
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Full Communism
There are Reds under the bed. Or in the academies. Or worse: about to spill into the streets. So warns Alan Johnson in World Affairs, the esteemed Washington-based international affairs journal. Tracing the rising profile of a group of authors such as Alain Badiou, Bruno Bosteels and Slavoj Žižek and the popularity of their books, the columnist outlines what he sees as a nascent threat lurking in the incendiary words of Terry Eagleton and Toni Negri.
Discussions
Begin a discussion about this book-
Alain Badiou's political writings, such as his recent Communist Hypothesis, are marked by their association with his theory of the Event (characterised by some as akin to a miracle) and the notion of a politics "at a distance from the state". This has led to criticisms regarding the abstraction of Badiou's politics and the lack of organisational mediations. For example, Luke Evans in Socialist Review says: "Badiou's conflict between the "Event" and the "State" leaves no space for how the immediate struggle for reforms may change gradually over time and become a revolutionary movement as the working class begins to realise its own power. Rather Badiou's revolution is a sudden movement of force. Revolutions don't seem to be able to emerge as a result of the obvious struggles and conflicts that we all see and live through right now." In the face of pressures pushing in the direction of political "realism" and even electoralism, is Badiou's stance a necessary corrective, or rather a replay of classic debates on abstentionism, ultra-leftism and so on?
Other books by Alain Badiou
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Five Lessons on Wagner
by Alain Badiou -
The Meaning of Sarkozy
by Alain Badiou -
Metapolitics
by Alain Badiou
