The ultimate show of power on the part of the ruling ideology is to allow what appears to be powerful criticism. There is no lack of anti-capitalism today. We are overloaded with critiques of the horrors of capitalism: books, in-depth investigative journalism and TV documentaries expose the companies that are ruthlessly polluting our environment, the corrupt bankers who continue to receive fat bonuses while their banks are rescued by public money, the sweatshops in which children work as slaves etc. However, there is a catch: what isn’t questioned in these critiques is the democratic-liberal framing of the fight against these excesses. The (explicit or implied) goal is to democratise capitalism, to extend democratic control to the economy by means of media pressure, parliamentary inquiries, harsher laws, honest police investigations and so on. But the institutional set-up of the (bourgeois) democratic state is never questioned. This remains sacrosanct even to the most radical forms of ‘ethical anti-capitalism’ (the Porto Allegre forum, the Seattle movement etc).

via the LRB

In the middle of a vibrant middle-class dinner party, the host’s old flatulent dog staggers into the dining room, flops down, and promptly begins to enthusiastically and noisily lick its scrotum in full view of the now suddenly quiet guests. To ease the unbearable sense of embarrassment that descends upon the party, a male guest says, ‘I wish I could do that.’ This produces a round of cathartic tittering … that becomes heavy laughter when the hostess adds tartly, ‘If you give him a biscuit, you can.

Read the whole thing.

Each speaker expressed his own particular enthusiasm and sense of urgency regarding the necessity of reconstituting communism for the 21st century, though what this means exactly, still remains very abstract. For the most part Badiou and Zizek avoided any discussion of concrete or practical tasks (aka “What is to be done?”) aside from

1. the need to restore the Communist Hypothesis to its proper place among philosophers and other thinking people, and
2. to pay close attention to those new forms of political practice that emerge through current struggles.

As Badiou himself put it, this hypothesis is essentially a negative operation, amounting basically to the assertion and belief –recurrent throughout history, from at least Sparatacus on—that it is possible and necessary to transcend the structures and limitations of class society, and to establish an egalitarian order.

Audio of the talk is available at Impose Magazine.