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Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Zizek (eds.), The Idea of Communism London: Verso, 2010
In March 2009 a large conference was held at the Institute of Education in London to discuss the 'Idea' of communism. It brought together a number of Marxist philosophers, mostly academic celebrities; scholars such as Jacques Rancière, Antonio Negri, Terry Eagleton, Jean-Luc Nancy and Slavoj Zizek. It was focussed around a keynote address by Alain Badiou. An ex-Maoist, Badiou is now heralded as one of the great philosophers of the twentieth century, at least by his Marxist friends. Badiou, a latter-day Platonist, suggested that communism was the only political idea worthy of the true philosopher, and that it had the status of an eternal idea. It was essentially a kind of hypothesis about emancipation. The question was therefore posed as to whether the term 'communism', given its association with that 'historical failure' - the communism of the Soviet regime under Stalin - could be usefully applied to the 'new forms' of radical politics that the Marxist academics at the conference clearly felt they were initiating. This book is thus a collection of some rather abstruse reflections on the 'Idea' of communism by some fifteen academics, although who they are and where they came from is never indicated in the text.
The term 'communism', of course, has many different meanings and connotations - the determinate negation of capitalism; the state control of the economy; the visions of the nineteenth-century Utopian socialists; the state capitalism of the current Chinese Communist Party; or, as Marx wrote, 'the positive expression of the abolition of private property' (p. 139). As Michael Hardt puts it, in an...