The Communist Hypothesis Quotes

“For a politics of emancipation, the enemy that is to be feared most is not repression at the hands of the established order. It is the interiority of nihilism, and the unbounded cruelty that can come with its emptiness.”
― Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis

“In political practice, we must be both 'the arrow and the bull's eye', because the old worldview is also still present within us.”
― Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis

“What remains of the labours of the ‘new philosophers’ who have been enlightening us – or, in other words, deadening our minds – for 30 years now? What really remains of the great ideological machinery of freedom, human rights, the West and its values? It all comes down to a simple negative statement that is as bald as it is flat and as naked as the day it was born: socialisms, which were the communist Idea’s only concrete forms, failed completely in the twentieth century. Even they have had to revert to capitalism and non-egalitarian dogma. That failure of the Idea leaves us with no choice, given the complex of the capitalist organization of production and the state parliamentary system. Like it or not, we have to consent to it for lack of choice. And that is why we now have to save the banks rather than confiscate them, hand out billions to the rich and give nothing to the poor, set nationals against workers of foreign origin whenever possible, and, in a word, keep tight controls on all forms of poverty in order to ensure the survival of the powerful. No choice, I tell you! As our ideologues admit, it is not as though relying on the greed of a few crooks and unbridled private property to run the state and the economy was the absolute Good. But it is the only possible way forward. In his anarchist vision, Stirner described man, or the personal agent of History, as ‘the Ego and his own’. Nowadays, it is ‘Property as ego’. Which”
― Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis

“Struggle exposes us to the simple form of failure (the assault did not succeed), while victory exposes us to its most redoubtable form: we notice that we have won in vain, and that our victory paves the way for repetition and restoration. That, for the state, a revolution is never anything more than an intervening period. Hence the sacrificial temptations of nothingness. For a politics of emancipation, the enemy that is to be feared most is not repression at the hands of the established order. It is the interiority of nihilism, and the unbounded cruelty that can come with its emptiness. 4”
― Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis