Frenchfags: Badiou on Macron

No problem.

Look, if someone wants the effort, I'll do it. But know two things: my summary is fairly good if I say so myself, and Badiou speaks very much the language of a philosopher and, while he is not a post-modernist by any means, use words in the same way: concepts in the plural, poetic visualization, et cetera. I think these are amazing and that Badiou's writings are fucking amazing reads because of it, but it's a whole bunch of work for almost nothing, and most of his positions can be found in texts already available in English, which are amazing.

Revered as philosopher and neo-Platonist, shunned or really mostly ignored as a communist.

People do take him seriously, but it depends on whom'st, and most importantly on where he writes. In America, all of his stuff in English makes him a legend on the same levels of impressive as Zizek or even higher, just not on the same levels of popular.

He is at odds with the French left at large, but France still has ultra groups like Troploin, or even youth organic communist organizations like the OJTR (translates to Organization of Young Revolutionary Wage-Labourers, to give you a picture), that take his proposing side seriously, while a lot of the smarter leftoids take his philosophy and analysis (just not his proposals) seriously, although this grows (not because Badiou tells them, but because reality tells them lol).

It depends on who you ask, again. The libsuccs like BHL and Friot all say this, and, this is absolutely beautiful, they get utterly BTFO every time they have an exchange, even on national television. Badiou leads them around the discourse like a matador does to a bull and has them basically being forced to admit that everything they accuse him and communism for is not just non-attributable to muh human nature, but is also tragically for them entirely the responsibility of people like them: liberals, opportunists and their fancy-sounding non-solutions alike. Zizek also famously BTFO BHL once, but it was far from as beautiful.

Well no, as I said above I think that, from what little I have seen of American radleft discourse OTI as well as IRL (excluding for a moment the SJWs/transgressives) is nothing but admiration for Badiou's philosophy.

Everyone is sooner or later going to go what you call communization theory. Reality makes it harder and harder to believe in the historical artifacts of the 20th century, and I believe that even in time the most ardent nostalgists won't be able to think that their failed vampire projects were good at being anything but living corpses (looking mostly at the Stalinists here).

And I said "what you call communization theory", because the communizers are but one of those who adopted this perspective. Late capitalism, post-modernity, the neoliberal era, et cetera, joint capitalism, or whatever you call what we saw gradually shift and solidify as a real change in the capitalist mode of production starting in the late '60s/early '70s, has forced just about everyone on the left, starting with the ultras, to really smell the roses. Communization theory is for me still one of the best and also one fo the first to do this, but everyone's doing this in one way or the other. Badiou is but one of those who pierce through the clout of the old Marxist conclusions, and critically reexamins reality with Marxism and his neo-Platonic hot take just like others have their methods (including to the credit of for example the anarchists, the insurrectionists have also done, even if I mostly disagree).

>While we're at it, can any user give us some kind of brief summary of what's going on in this debate? youtube.com/watch?v=VpTi6L31MSo
More importantly:
youtube.com/watch?v=6cNxXg8XEGk
Badiou vs. Piketty

>While we're at it, can any user give us some kind of brief summary of what's going on in this debate? youtube.com/watch?v=VpTi6L31MSo
More importantly:
youtube.com/watch?v=6cNxXg8XEGk
==Badiou vs. Piketty==>>1896505
Zizek is (as always) rather ambivalent on voting. I explicitly remember him saying in interviews that "I don't vote, I'm a Marxist!"

His "support" for any reformist movement should be read through this lens. Moreover, whenever there's a Zizek "supported" populist-leftist party (syriza, podemos, latin americans, etc.) his enthusiasm goes only as far as hoping that the changes they introduce trigger further, larger, unstoppable events…

meant for

youtube.com/watch?v=VuEVWhr2D1g

Anyway, thanks for your TL;DW!

Please, indulge us, snail-eating comrade! ;^)
your work would be highly appreciated
how about downloading the vid, editing it, adding engrish subtitles, and reuploading it to youtube?

I've been looking at Badiou's french youtube interviews lately, and although I don't speak the language I have this stupid habit of using google translate to understand the frenchy comments. Usually we have two kinds of negative comments: 1) criticizing his past (maoism) 2) criticizing communism from a neo-lib POV…

The positive comments acknowledge him as The philosopher of 20-21th century…

No, not really. And attempts to portray him as an "anarchist" or an "ultra" fall short of his political/philosophical project. He basically wants to move beyond the 20th century experiences (en masse), believing that since communism is one of the truth-procedures, it will (and have to) gain a contemporary articulation.

I thank you too for your work.

Heresy!

INTRODUCING BADIOU: A GRAPHIC GUIDE:
4shared.com/office/eRApAsRice/Introducing_Alain_Badiou__A_Gr.html

This is just ignorance, I'm inclined to say. What is pomo? It's not easy to answer. Most contemporary philosophers would say that we live under a post modernist edifice. Writing, or writing style, more particularly, by itself, if identified as "pomo," reflects upon (at the most basic level) "moving signifiers," philosopher's concepts that change meaning according to context and vim. Badiou's project is the exact opposite. See the graphic intro posted before, please!

Who is this BHL and why does le sniff man want to liquidate him? I know pretty much nothing about modern France.

Badiou is not a Platonist, nor a neo-Platonist. Plato's conception of Idea(s) and Badiou's conception of Truth(s) have entirely different ontological statuses. Again, the graphic intro…

Badiou is, imo, much less pragmatic than Zizek, due to his misfortunate past as a Maoist: Badiou tries to reverse, erase, all his past fidelities in his new philosophical edifice. This is a totally legit way to do "pol.phil." and a totally legit was to face your past. But Zizek does something completely different (and also filter in his unique past!)…

To cut this thread short… Read Adrian Johnston's Badiou, Žižek, and Political Transformations: The Cadence of Change (2009) to understand the main, underlying disagreement regarding parties between the two!

For fucks sake, snail-eating comrades, translate these texts/debates for us, underdeveloped Anglo-speakers!

[citation needed]

Am I incorrect in assuming that you took Badiou's rejection of the 20th century communist projects as a pretext for assuming he supports your fantasies?
…

In another words… I've never read a Badiou text where he directly advocates for "communization theory…"

This seems like a classic case of projection, stemming from ignorance, I'm sorry to say.

I'm sorry for being a cynic, but… God damn! When the leftcom uses socdem symbolism… Is one thing… But when the leftcom uses projection ON a philosopher to legitimize his own discourse… That's another thang.

As an illiterate eternal anglo, this is a very interesting thread.

I wish I was a cool continental.

Always kekworthy.

Dude, I know pomo is a meaningless term when used like this, and I do not characterize Badiou as pomo. I'm just saying that his literary style will summon into the minds of the ignorant quasi-Sokalites the reflex to call him a pomo for it.

Okay, that is both at once a mischaracterization by me (I do not claim to understand the deeper side of Badiou, or at least here is my admittance) but also what I "know" about Badiou based on peoples' characterization of him as such. I will absolutely peep at the graphical intro and further inveistigate Badiou beyond my ignorance.

Read an entire section of this because it featured a critique (ultimately more of a vindication) of Lacan Re: materialism versus idealism in (his) psychoanalysis. Fascinating and convincing, so it sounds like I should undust that PDF and read the whole thing.

Read the rest of my post. "Communization theory" is one of the many nominalities outside of it that, at least to me, respond to the pressing need to drink some fucking fruit juice, is that okay for you?

No.

Ebin. No, please reread my posts and if you want me to further elaborate on my suspicions or give you texts that provide an example of them, just give me the go sign.

So why advertise/imply this underatanding?

muh gomrad

He's been sold by the media as a hardcore antisemitic tankie… which is not half-wrong. Certainly he isn't liberal enough for the modern "left".

Because while at once advertising it (I forgot to mention that it's a stupid reflex that will otherwise often compel it automatically), I say that it should be ignored and make the case for myself and ya'll that my translation would involve a lot of this type of language, which again is nice to hear but mostly poetic and an acquired taste in the climate of "big words = pomo!!!!11one", hence probably not going to be worth much unless you're you (and me).

Fetch me a some fucking kolbász and gimme those dubs, László. {*|:^)

Can someone write a tldr on what communization theory is ples

Anarchism for Marxists who want to feel superior to anarchists.

k, muh mane

RÁNKTÖRTEK

Communization theory makes sense, if you foresee the theoretical limits of its practical applications, and supplant it with a broader party.

Let me give pragmatic examples of my understanding of the concept.

You are a commiefag, and you had the opportunity to invite 30 friends to a commie-movie watching night, and 10 ppl came. Good. This is now a potential space for communization: the community has been (temporarily) established, the material has been tried, what remains is the repetition of the same format.

Another: you work in a factory, and you push your commie agenda by proposing to have a socialist book club. People show up, reading experiences are shared… This is another possible space for communizing: pushing forward this non-hierarchical, free-association group to its limits…

Again, I believe this should be done alongside a party, which, at the very least harmonizes these diff. comm. projects.

I hope that leftcom comrade lurking here will correct me.

I went into it here:

tho nobody went into it at all.

I don't "feel superior" to anarchists at all, and most worthwhile Marxists have long-since accepted that many quarrels with anarchists were either nonsensical or involved outright bullshiting from the Marxist side: youtu.be/feepQg_Dx7U?t=12m14s.

Also, in this

thread I posit a few of the problems I do have with certain historical anarchists and am beyond fair with my posts all throughout. To me, Bakunin and Makhno's theory are indispensible to my own.

That's a very vulgar way of describing it but I'll take it. Only touches on the most primitive ways of communizing tho and you and everyone should peep the thread I posted above to see a few real-world examples of it mentioned, which are already in their very essence the germ of communized commonalities.

so… being a communist and watching a movie with your friends is communization?

Is torrenting music, vidya, books, etc. communization? Since the technology for that stuff to be distributed to everyone that want it for free exists but is being held back by capitalist relations?

Excuse my pedagogic pragmatism, but I'm trying to give an "on the ground" account of what it means to people who are unfamiliar with the concept. It occours to me that direct examples, however fragmentary bearing the whole truth of a thing have more impact than the "pure" theoretical exposition. Meanwhile: what the fuck am I supposed to do? I'm not a communization theorist, so, yeah.

I'd prefer you give further examples (along the lines I did!)

Not because I'm a fag that likes to hear his own line of thought repeated or expanded, but because I'm also in the situation I've explained above.

Bear in mind that I have a critique kept in waiting.

No. Creating and upholding a space of collective, non-commodity form of gathering, rather.

Having a birthday party? Not communization.
Having a socialist reading club that operates upon communist principles, letting the members expand their rule-sets and the material is.

again, incoming lefctom critique…

I'd say no. Anonymous interactions, random file-sharing(s) don't open up a space for further and long-lasting interactions based on communism…

Sort of. Almost.

Bordiga once said that communism would be the material human community as it already desperately tries to exist everywhere in spite of the prevalence of private property. He hated this so much; that the human spirit was chained by value, that he's one of the only communists I know of to have written something like this: quinterna.org/copyright.htm#copyen.

Yes, because you treat the goods (vidya, books, music, etc.) as a freely transferring use-value, rather than a commodity that circulates with an exchange value, and most of all you follow what Marx called the "free association of individuals'" (communism's) principle of immanent recirprocity: you sustain the process by downloading because you also upload.

I just said it was vulgar, not that it was bad ("I'll take it!").

Unless you're using "leftcom" here to refer to me as individual, there is a problem here: I use my leftcom flag because I stand with the spirit of left communism and the ultra left. This was once council communist, Leninist or even proto-Trotskyist, but I am none of those.

I hope your critique will involve this understanding of me and my position and will involve points that hopefully involve you, I think still a class-party Leninist, attacking me as such.

Long-lasting or not, it is there, and the consequence of sensuous human activity. Same as the Free Software movement, really, and only the reactions imposed by new developments in capital will determine whether or not this is long-lasting, because they otherwise do nothing but grow and grow under the nose of capitalist production's stinking face.

Absolutely based. Forgive my trollan'.

I disagree wholeheartedly. The very form torrents or P2Ps take are in contradiction with what communization is about, in my humble opinion: communization can't happen without a "further link" to the community that committed the act [of sharing, etc.]. For me you are likening facebook "likes" to communization…

I'd like to make it, but you are consciously not stepping on the mines I've planted.

Absolutely hogwash. With an open source project you have a platform wherein people can interact around a common project, not subordinated to the commodity form. With torrents you have user and temporal interactions that cease to exist as you've gotten the whole of the file you were downloading.

So, without further ado, and holding back my main critique, you are equating basic anonymous interactions with communization, that I protest to!

Communization, in my understanding, requires long-lasting spaces to be opened, and further integrated to other comm. projects.

So, again, and I'm not an expert on these things. If the project is temporary, if it evaporates, if ot can't triiguh further connectivity, it's not communization.

which could bring me to my main critique of so called "communization theory"…

Of course you'd like Bordiga; you're still, despite transgression beyond the need to formally "disown" the 20th century before advancing, still a historical Leninist. :^)

If it were something like "liking" on Facebook, itself not a communized organ, where the whole from start to finish is still mediated by property, then yeah. But torrenting is already primitively communized because: it imposes a new form of being of the sharing. Of course there is not still today even a majority of torrenters using Free torrent clients, on Free OSes, or even Free hardware (doesn't even fucking exist yet outside of primitive ARM processors!). But what is unique here? That in all these nominally propertied things, the totality functions on a baseline of the communized good: the sharing, and most importantly that it is as such in its very being, no longer of conscious doing (this doing preceding this being; the establishment of torrenting code, the very idea, and so on).

I must emphasize here again that for me this is on the whole meaningless. We are not in a meaningful sense communized when we now only freely distribute and pass on the utility of a titty mag scan or our favorite prog rock album. My point is that at its core, we here have an example of communized good in the primitive. In that other thread was a link to another thread in which I showed another example of this, which was: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planka.nu. Look at how we here again see this primitive form of modern communizing in our seemingly totalizing post-modernity.

This is misrepresentation.

That's the fucking goal, I hope, yes.

I suggest one of the many communization theory groups to read more on this. The same problems you have are taken under the looking glass too, and most crucially: what, truly, is to be done?.

ancom for people who want to think they are marxists

BHL is THE fuckboy of neoliberalism in France. He is also well known for being regularly "entarté" ( people throwing pie at his face)

Read "a contribution to the critique of political autonomy" by Gilles Dauvé, and stop being a retard.

libcom.org/library/a-contribution-critique-political-autonomy-gilles-dauve-2008

American here. Can a French user give a run down of who these people are? I'm kind of curious as to what the French Left landscape looks like.

Does Badiou no longer identify as a Maoist? What are his opinions on Mao and Marxism-Leninism today?

Rootless cosmopolitans, effete and decadent to the core.

Well all that I assumed as a natural given, I just meant what do they even advocate politically? Is it moderate Social Democracy, idpol stuff, maybe Chomsky-style anarcho-liberalism?

Bump. I want my Hungarian comrade to engage with my replies.

Bump. Because I also am curious about this. I always thought Badiou was a Maoist. Does he no longer identify as such? Lay it down for us French anons. Or any Badiouians I guess.

He NAZBOL now

retractionwatch.com/2016/04/07/philosophy-journal-spoofed-retracts-hoax-article/

I feel like what they should have done is kept the article and insisted that it was actually really good theory, and that they unintentionally made a lot of good points without realizing it.

Le Monde Diplomatique is le serious leftist newspaper (it is apparently translated in gorillions of languages). It has lots of articles about international issues.
mondediplo.com/

Frédéric Lordon is a French economist, he criticizes neolib economics in Le Monde Diplomatique. He is also a member of Les Économistes Atterrés (Appalled Economists), a leftist group of economists.

François Ruffin is a leftist journalist. He used to work on France Inter (big public radio station) with Daniel Mermet (another commie journalist) before they got fired by Phillipe Val (fake leftist and true neocon). François Ruffin has launched his own newspaper, called Fakir, and made a "Michael Moore-like" documentary called "Merci Patron!", which is about Bernard Arnault, a French billionaire. He (and his documentary) is credited for the creation of the Nuit Debout movement. François Ruffin is deputy since last June (he is in the France Insoumise group, with Jean-Luc Mélenchon).

Bernard Friot is a holier-than-thou commie who promotes life salary and spergs out when you say "universal income" (like Richard Stallman who can't bear people saying "open-source"). He wants everything to be managed like a mix of the universal healthcare and civil servant system, ie his project is to communize the earnings of everyone, and redistribute the money according to your qualification level and your activity.

Interesting. I had never heard of any of these things. For some reason I was under the delusion that all French Leftists spent all their time reading Dauvé and Badiou till their eyes bled. But apparently they're in the same Anarcho-Liberal moment the US is stuck in. A bit like Occupy and the anti-austerity protests of the UK, but I assume with more empty appeals to the radicalism of '68. Also, most of what you say Friot proposes essentially just sounds like what most NeoLiberals will end up doing themselves in a decade or so when the Global Recession gets so bad that universal basic income becomes the ultimate replacement for all welfare programs.

Why is Badiou so fucking based

He just is dawg.

Calling on that Lenist w the IntBrig flag to come back and face me like a man.

anyone else think he looks exactly like marcuse?