http://www.newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=2705

THE COMMUNIST HYPOTHESIS

Alain Badiou

What is the communist hypothesis? In its generic sense, given in its canonic Manifesto, 'communist' means, first, that the logic of class—the fundamental subordination of labour to a dominant class, the arrangement that has persisted since Antiquity—is not inevitable; it can be overcome. The communist hypothesis is that a different collective organization is practicable, one that will eliminate the inequality of wealth and even the division of labour. The private appropriation of massive fortunes and their transmission by inheritance will disappear. The existence of a coercive state, separate from civil society, will no longer appear a necessity: a long process of reorganization based on a free association of producers will see it withering away.

What is the Left? by Alain Badiou

An excerpt from The Paris Commune: A Political Declaration on Politics in Polemics, Verso, 2006. To read the full essay in pdf click here.

To start with, let's note that before the Commune there had been a number of more or less armed popular and workers' movements in France in a dialectic with the question of state power. We can pass over the terrible days of June 1848 when the question of power is thought not to have been posed: the workers, cornered and chased from Paris upon the closing of national workshops, fought silently, without leadership, without perspective. Despair, fury, massacres.