Bruno Bosteels - The Leftist Hypothesis: Communism in the Age of Terror →

fourwindsshotgun:

from The Idea of Communism, edited by Slavoj Zizek and Costas Douzinas

"Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an idea to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The condition of this movement result from the premises now in existence."

Marx & Engels, ‘The German Ideology’ 

"[T]he materialist dialectic thinks the unity of A and not-A. If A is a project, then not-A is the context of this project. To impel project A ever onwards is to act one-sidedly, because the context of the project, namely not-A, is then ignored forever. Moreover, the context of such a project becomes its fate, for this context dictates the conditions within which the project is to be realized. Passing from the project to the context is a necessity for anyone who seeks to grasp the whole."

Boris Groys, ‘The Communist Postscript’ 

"I will understand communism to be the project of subordinating the economy to politics in order to allow politics to act freely and sovereignly. The economy functions in the medium of money. It operates with numbers. Politics functions in the medium of language. It operates with words - with arguments programs and petitions, but also with commands, prohibitions, resolutions and decrees. The communist revolution is the transcription of society from the medium of money to the medium of language. It is a linguistic turn at the level of social praxis."

Boris Groys, ‘The Communist Postscript’ 

"I would agree with Alain Badiou that what counts for us as the history of communism or the history of emancipation is above all the history of communist moments, which used to be moments of vanishing or disruption of state powers and of the influence of instituted parties. A moment is not only a vanishing point in time. It is also a momentum: the weight that tips the scales, producing a new balance or imbalance, an effective reframing of what the ‘common’ means, a reconfiguration of the universe of the possible. Nor is it the time of a mere chaotic whirling of unbound particles. Communist moments display higher forms of organization than the routine of bureaucracy. But this organization is always the organization of a dis-order with respect to the ‘normal’ distribution of places, functions and identities."

Jacques Rancière, Communists Without Communism? (from The Idea of Communism)

(Source: de-bel-aizin)

"I would agree with Alain Badiou that what counts for us as the history of communism or the history of emancipation is above all the history of communist moments, which used to be moments of vanishing or disruption of state powers and of the influence of instituted parties. A moment is not only a vanishing point in time. It is also a momentum: the weight that tips the scales, producing a new balance or imbalance, an effective reframing of what the ‘common’ means, a reconfiguration of the universe of the possible. Nor is it the time of a mere chaotic whirling of unbound particles. Communist moments display higher forms of organization than the routine of bureaucracy. But this organization is always the organization of a dis-order with respect to the ‘normal’ distribution of places, functions and identities."

Jacques Rancière, Communists Without Communism? (from The Idea of Communism)

(Source: de-bel-aizin)

"You are horrified because we would abolish private property. But in your existing society private property is already abolished for nine-tenths of the population; the essential for its existence is that is shall not exist for these nine-tenths. Thus you reproach us with desiring to abolish a form of property the necessary condition of whose existence is that the great majority of society shall be entirely propertyless. In one word, you reproach us because we would abolish your property. Precisely so; that is our intention."

Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party 

"All Property relations have undergone continual historic change corresponding to the change in historic social conditions. The French Revolution, for example. abolished feudal property in favour of bourgeois property. Thus the distinctive feature of Communism is not the abolition of property in general, but the abolition of bourgeois property. But modern bourgeois private property is the final and most perfect expression of the system of producing and appropriating products based on class antagonism, on the exploitation of one by another. In this sense the Communists can condense their theory into one sentence: abolition of private property."

Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party 

"The bourgeois system has become too narrow to contain the wealth which it creates. How does the bourgeoisie overcome these crises? On the one hand, by compelling the destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other hand, by the conquest of new markets and the more thorough exploitation of the old market. And with what result? With the result that they pave the way for more widespread and more destructive crises, and at the same time diminish the means whereby those crises can be avoided."

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party

"

The modern state is but an executive committee for administering the affairs of the whole bourgeois class.

The bourgeoisie has played in history a most revolutionary part. The bourgeoisie, wherever it has conquered power, has destroyed all feudal, patriarchal, and idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder all the many-coloured feudal bonds which united men to their “natural superiors,” and has left no other tie twixt man and man but naked self-interest and callous cash payment. It has drowned religious ecstasy, chivalrous enthusiasm, and middle class sentimentality in the ice-cold water of egotistical calculation. It has transformed personal worth into exchange value, and substituted for countless dearly-bought chartered freedoms the one and only unconscionable freedom of Free Trade. It has, in one word, replaced an exploitation veiled by religious and political illusions by exploitation open, unashamed, direct, and brutal.

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every profession previously venerated and regarded as honourable. It has turned doctor, lawyer, priest, poet, and philosopher into its paid wage-laborers. The bourgeoisie has torn away the veil of sentiment from the family relation, and reduced it to a mere money relation.

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Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, Manifeto of the Communist Party