January 31, Tuesday, 7-9 pm at Revolution Books in Berkeley
Discussion of Alain Badiou's "Politics of Emancipation"
Alain Badiou, a French philosopher, has attracted attention, and come across to many as someone rescuing communism, at a time when as the polemic puts it "Communism, and the communist project, is at a crossroads" - the first stage of the world communist revolution ended, and it has been followed by 30 years of vilification of communism.
Badiou's work and perspective, while it talks of communism at a time when few major thinkers do, in reality does not lead people to break free of the bourgeois world - in thought, or in deed. The polemic compares and contrasts Badiou's core views - that "the age of revolutions" is over; that forming a revolutionary vanguard party is wrong; that seeking to establish a new, revolutionary state power can only be oppressive - with opposite views contained in the new synthesis of communist revolution brought forward by Bob Avakian.
As the polemic states "It is aimed at enabling people to compare and contrast two opposed lines, and to understand why one, whatever the intentions of its author, remains captive to and would objectively lock us in to the world as it is; while the other offers a way forward and out of this madness."
