Speaking of Communism: How Badiou Subtracts Class from Marx’s Speeches on the Paris Commune to Produce a New (Infantile) Communism

Abstract

Because of the crisis of global capitalism there is renewed public interest in Marx, Marxism, and Communism as workers around the world are beginning to fight back. In “Speaking of Communism: How Badiou Subtracts Class from Marx’s Speeches on the Paris Commune to Produce a New (Infantile) Communism,” Stephen Tumino argues that what will be of particular importance in the contemporary encounter with the intellectual and political legacy of Marx today is to engage with the speecherly theory of communism put forward in Marx’s speeches on the Paris Commune of 1871. Through a sustained analysis of them he explains how Marx’s critique of the infantile communism of the anarchists implicates the writerly communism dominant on the North Atlantic left today, as in the writings of the “new communists” (e.g., Badiou, Negri, and Zizek) who subtract class from communism so as to affirm an egalitarian idea of the “common.”