## Metadata - Author: [[Alain Badiou]] - Full Title: The Communist Hypothesis - Published: 2009 - Category: #books ## Highlights ### Preamble: What Is Called Failure? - Lumping together Stalin and Hitler was already a sign of extreme intellectual poverty: the norm by which any collective undertaking has to be judged is, it was argued, the number of deaths it causes. If that were really the case, the huge colonial genocides and massacres, the millions of deaths in the civil and world wars through which our West forged its might, should be enough to discredit, even in the eyes of ‘philosophers’ who extol their morality, the parliamentary regimes of Europe and America [◊](https://readwise.io/open/304495171) ^rw304495171 - failure is nothing more than the history of the proof of the hypothesis, provided that the hypothesis is not abandoned [◊](https://readwise.io/open/304495172) ^rw304495172 ### We Are Still the Contemporaries of May ’68 #### 1May ’68 Revisited, 40 Years On - Almost all the factories were occupied and decked with red flags. Now that is a great image! You have to have seen what this country looked like with all the factories flying red flags. No one who saw it will ever forget it [◊](https://readwise.io/open/304495175) ^rw304495175 - That sunny day, we marched in a long, compact procession towards the factory. What were we going to do when we got there? We didn’t know, but had a vague idea that the student revolt and the workers’ strike should unite, without the intermediary of the classic organizations. We approached the barricaded factory, which was decked with red flags, with a line of trade unionists standing outside the gates, which had been welded shut. They looked at us with mingled hostility and suspicion. A few young workers came up to us, and then more and more of them. Informal discussions got under way. A sort of local fusion was taking place. We agreed to get together to organize joint meetings in town. The meetings went ahead, and became the matrix for the establishment of the ‘Chausson solidarity fund’. This was something completely new and had links with the Union des Communistes de France marxiste-léniniste (UCFml), the Maoist organization established in late 1969 by Natacha Michel, Sylvain Lazarus, myself and a fair number of young people. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/304495176) ^rw304495176 - That is what I propose to call the communist hypothesis. It is in fact mainly negative, as it is safer and more important to say that the existing world is not necessary than it is to say, when we have nothing to go on, that a different world is possible. This is a question of modal logic: how, in political terms, can we move from non-necessity to possibility? Because quite simply, if we accept the inevitability of the unbridled capitalist economy and the parliamentary politics that supports it, then we quite simply cannot see the other possibilities that are inherent in the situation in which we find ourselves. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/304495177) ^rw304495177 #### 2Outline of a Beginning - Violence does pay, but only when used in the place assigned it by the conjuncture or at the point when the balance of power has been reversed. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/304495179) ^rw304495179 #### 3This Crisis Is the Spectacle:Where Is the Real? - The Sarkozys, the Paulsons, the Merkels, the Browns, the Trichets – the monetary fire-fighters, pouring billions upon billions into the central Hole. One day we will ask ourselves (this is for future episodes) where they got the money from, because whenever the poor ask for a little something, they’ve said for years as they turn their pockets out that they haven’t got a penny. For the moment, that doesn’t matter. ‘Save the banks!’ [◊](https://readwise.io/open/304495181) ^rw304495181 - They greedily recycled what had become a shapeless mass of shares, securitizations and money, and then they panicked. The distinction was absurd, and was usually contradicted two lines later by the very different metaphor that described financial circulation and speculation as the ‘bloodstream’ of the economy. Can the heart and the blood be divorced from the living reality of a body? [◊](https://readwise.io/open/304495182) ^rw304495182 - Most of them are ugly, get in the way, and are useless, impractical and useless. And billions have to be spent to convince people that they are not. Which presupposes transforming people into capricious children and eternal adolescents whose lives revolve around getting new toys. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/304495183) ^rw304495183 - capitalism is nothing but banditry, and it is irrational in its essence and devastating in its becoming. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/304495184) ^rw304495184 - Ultimately, all this came about because tens of millions of people are on such low incomes – or non-incomes – that they cannot afford anywhere to live. The real essence of the financial crisis is a housing crisis. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/304495185) ^rw304495185 - We will contrast the wicked spectacle of capitalism with the real of peoples, with the lives of people and the movement of ideas. The theme of the emancipation of humanity has lost none of its power. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/304495186) ^rw304495186 #### IIThe Cultural Revolution:The Last Revolution?1 ##### Red Guards and Chinese Society - The truth is that, armed only with the slogan of ‘the fight of the new against the old’, many Red Guards gave in to a well-known (negative) tendency in revolutions: iconoclasm, the persecution of people for futile motives, a sort of assumed barbarism. This is also an inclination of youth left to its own devices. From this we will draw the conclusion that every political organization must be transgenerational, and that it is a bad idea to organize the political separation of youth. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/304495189) ^rw304495189 ##### The power seizures - Frequently, the old guards who resist are ‘shown to the masses’, which is not a peaceful ceremony. The bureaucrat, or the presumed bureaucrat, carries a dunce’s cap and a sign describing his crimes; he must lower his head, and receive some kicks, or worse. These exorcisms are otherwise well-known revolutionary practices. It is a matter of letting the gathering of ordinary people know that the old untouchables, those whose insolence was silently accepted, are themselves from now on given over to public humiliation [◊](https://readwise.io/open/304495191) ^rw304495191 ##### The cult of personality - Finally, one person, a single body, comes to stand for this superior guarantee, in the classical aesthetic form of genius. It is also curious, by the way, to see that, trained as we are in the theory of genius in the realm of art, we should take such strong offence to it when it emerges in the order of politics. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/304495193) ^rw304495193 #### A Brief Chronology of the Cultural Revolution - By 20 August, arriving from high-school and university institutions, activist groups of ‘Red Guards’ spread out in the city, in order to ‘destroy completely the old thought, culture, customs and habits’. In particular, a very harsh persecution of intellectuals and professors, once more considered, according to Mao himself, as ‘evil geniuses’. Succession of immense gatherings of Red Guards in Beijing, following in particular the right given to them to circulate freely on the trains, for the sake of ‘large exchanges of experience’. Criticism [◊](https://readwise.io/open/304495195) ^rw304495195 ### IIIThe Paris Commune:A Political Declaration on Politics1 ##### Reference points, 2 – the classical interpretation - It is not for nothing that, as legend has it, Lenin danced in the snow the day Bolshevik power reached and surpassed the 72 days in which the Paris Commune’s entire destiny was brought to a close. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/304495198) ^rw304495198 ### IV The Idea of Communism - In keeping with the current reassessment of the Idea of communism, as I mentioned, the word’s function can no longer be that of an adjective, as in ‘Communist Party’, or ‘communist regimes’. The Party-form, like that of the Socialist State, is no longer suitable for providing real support for the Idea. This problem moreover first found negative expression in two crucial events of the ’60s and ’70s of the last century: the Cultural Revolution in China and the amorphous entity called ‘May ’68’ in France. Later, new political forms, all of which are of the order of politics without a party, were – and are still being – tried out.13 Overall, however, the modern, so-called ‘democratic’ form of the bourgeois State, of which globalized capitalism is the cornerstone, can boast of having no rivals in the ideological field. For three decades now, the word ‘communism’ has been either totally forgotten or practically equated with criminal enterprises. That is why the subjective situation of politics has everywhere become so incoherent. Lacking the Idea, the popular masses’s confusion is inescapable. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/304495217) ^rw304495217