The Little Red Book.

• Author: Burke, Richard
• Position: The Communist Hypothesis - Book review

The Communist Hypothesis, by Alain Badiou, Verso 2010, ISBN-13:978-1-84467-600-2, 279 pages, $19.95.

The cover design of Alain Badiou's newest book The Communist Hypothesis gives a clue to his political orientation: It is taken from the iconic Quotations From Chairman Mao Zedong, also known as the "little red book." In The Communist Hypothesis Badiou provides a surprising and unorthodox interpretation of Maoism relevant to the dilemmas of the contemporary world-left.

A professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School, Badiou has been concerned with a revitalization of Marxist political theory and action in an era in which the very idea of a socialist alternative to capitalism seems to have failed. Amazingly, he seeks to do so by examining events frequently held up as an example of that failure: May '68 in France and the Cultural Revolution in China.

One of Badiou's basic insights is his concept of a series of sequences in the evolution of the communist movement, each followed by a roughly 40-year period in which the idea seems to have failed and been discredited. The first sequence began with the French Revolution and involved the creation of the workers' movement and the work of Marx and Engels. This sequence came to an end with the failure of the Paris Commune in 1871. The second sequence opens in 1918 with the Bolshevik Revolution, and its major innovation, the vanguard party. Lenin, it seems, was haunted by the failure of the Paris Commune--it is said that he danced in the snow when the Bolsheviks remained in power one day longer than the Commune did--and sought to find a way to solve the problem of that failure.

Thus Lenin's creation of the disciplined, centralized vanguard party that sought to take and hold state power while concentrating political and economic control in the party-state's hands. Lenin even believed that such a party could substitute itself for the working class in situations, such as early 20th century Russia, where the proletariat was a minority of the population. Marxist-Leninism had created an instrument, the party-state, which was a perfect tool for attaining and maintaining political power, but which was completely unsuited for the building of socialism. According to Badiou this sequence ended in 1976 with the death of Mao Zedong, and the end of the Cultural Revolution.

For Badiou the Cultural Revolution was the "last revolution." His work is far from simplistic Maoist propaganda, however. He recognizes...