Badiou

Badiou reconciles Sartre's theory of the Subject with Althusser's theory of structure by demoting Plato's Truth to a materialist category and using Cantor's set theory to unite these in a cohesive ontology. Althusser's "Materialism of the Encounter" is already displaying his student's (Badiou's) influence upon his teacher.

Post-maoist, but whatever. "Third-worldists" betray the spirit of Mao for the letter.

Exactly. Would love to see the butthurt generated by Unruhe's take on Badiou.

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I'll bumpo some more bewks.

this is considered to be the optimal entry point to Badiou

tl;dr modern anarchism is revisionist?

I don't disagree

that's a proper tl;dr right there

well yeah if it's longer than a few words it's a terrible tl;dr

ech, anyway. define in a meaningful way "revisionism"

IMO Marx was the first revisionist, reworking his own concepts, his own critiques, until his death.

modern anarchism has abandoned its initial precepts in an attempt to adopt contemporary philosophies which has resulted in something drastically different than what anarchism was

k

…that totally didn't answer your question

You're right, revisionist is a largely useless term

I need something else to refer to labels being used to refer to something completely different from what it initially did because a few dickheads along the way decided to steal the term in an effort to create some weak attachment between their ideas and movements of the past

like mls and mlms do to marx

take ur time, mah boi

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Most modern Anarchists are Post-Anarchists I would claim. Which means they are also inflected by Poststructuralism and Postmodernism

no your not

this

nobody is 2dumb for anything

to theoryfags: where does a total noob to philosophy start? any works/books one should start with to get a proper general understanding of the basics?

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thanks. i will start reading it now.

There aren't any Maoists today. It was a short lived anti-revisionist position in the late-60's and early-70's, it was extremely critical of the Soviet Union, Stalin, and most existing Communist parties, most Maoists today, on the other hand, are Marxist-Leninist-Maoists, which is a specific body of theory developed by the Communist Party of Peru (Shining Path) in the 90's during the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement, and as for "Third Worldists", well even they don't consider themselves Maoists by their own admission, they have their own idiosyncratic reading of the Cultural Revolution that positions Mao as evil, but Lin Biao as the secret hero of the Revolution.

Badiou, on the other hand, believes the experiences of the Communist Movement in the 20th Century prove that the Left has outlived the usefulness of political parties all together as a mode of organization, and, like many Maoists in the 60's, sees the Cultural Revolution as a moment of revolution from below, a moment when the Proletariat itself rebelled against the Party and came close to dismantling the State. By a certain strange logic Badiou may have more in common with Leftcoms today then he would Maoists.

This is quite interesting. Where would one start with Badiou?

If what you say is true, notably an abandonment of party politics, then as far as left communism goes he would only be similar to the council communists and situationists of the left communist faction.

As far as contemporary politics go, this does have a lot in common with the ultra-left and communization theory, which are both spiritual successors of left communism and take parts from left communism, even Bordigism, but exclusively the anti-activist and anti-opportunist elements (not party politics).

Yeah, when I think of Left Communism today I mostly think of Communization Theory, Gilles Dauvé particularly, along with Endnotes, they seem like the most representative of a 21st Century Left Communism, one that seems to synthesize a lot of Bordiga and Pannekoek. Personally I'm not vey familiar with the arguments of Council Communism, I'm much more familiar with Bordiga.

As far as Badiou goes there are lots of great pdfs in this thread, personally I think Philosophy and the Event is a great place to start, as well as The Communist Hypothesis. I'm also a huge fan of his hypertranslation of Plato's Republic. He basically wrote two huge books on ontology (Being and Event, and Logics of Worlds) and the rest of his bibliography is composed of slimmer texts concerning random observations on politics, culture, philosophy, and even love. I don't think he's ever written anything expressly polemical or systemic on his opinions on organizing or struggle, but tons of random fascinating observations are sprinkled through these smaller, more easily digestible texts.

Also, it should be noted that Dauvé and Badiou both came out of the same historical moment and milieu, the "spirit of 68'", it hangs over all of their work, so I think a bit of unintentional overlap is just inevitable.