By Nathan Brown (από Lana Turner)
In the first chapter of Le Réveil de l’Histoire, Alain Badiou takes up a question often posed about his work: its relation to Marxism. He relates an exchange with Antonio Negri at the 2009 conference on “The Idea of Communism,” in which Negri took him as an example of those who claim to be communists without even being Marxists— to which Badiou replied that this was better than being Marxist without even being communist. What is at stake in this exchange is not so much the relation of Badiou to Marxism, nor of Negri to communism, as the present relation between Marxism and communism. This is what I want to address at the prompting of Badiou’s invigorating book.
For Badiou, “genuine Marxism” is “the organized knowledge of the political means required to undo existing society and finally realize an egalitarian, rational figure of collective organization for which the name is communism.” He proposes this definition against a Marxism that consists in assigning a determinate role to the economy and the social contradictions that derive from it. This is an economistic or vulgar Marxism at which, Badiou argues, stock brokers and the advisors of politicians are at least as adept as the theoreticians who espouse it.
