PETER MASON is beguiled by a fascinating account of the importance of cricket to immigrants from the Caribbean to the UK
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Breaking Badiou
MARTIN HALL steps gingerly through a work of French political theory, picking out the gems
Meeting of the Petrograd soviet in 1917
[Boris Kavashkin/RIA Novosti/CC]
The new corporate version of Robin Hood is a betrayal of the anti-colonial hero of the people of yore, suggests DENNIS BROE
PETER MASON is gripped by a novel that confronts corporate callousness with those prepared to act to bring about change
KEN COCKBURN relishes the memoir of a translator, but wonders whether the autobiography underlying the impulse would make a better book
A mesmerising novel by Mexican Daniel Saldana Paris, and fierce poetry by Peruvian Dalmacia Ruiz-Rosas Samohod, and Jonathan Gonzalez
PAUL BUHLE an RAYMOND TYLER enjoy an issue of the radical comic WW3 that gives a platform to Palestinian artists, and uncensored commentary
A New Dawn for Politics
Alain Badiou, Polity, £9.99
GIVEN that Alain Badiou said in 2009 that “from Plato onwards, communism is the only political Idea worthy of a philosopher,” it is not surprising that this latest collection of essays and lectures covers familiar ground for his readers. Badiou has always remained faithful to the communist Idea (as he would write it), stating that “there is no other” for those who do not wish to accept Western liberal democracy as the only form of organising a mode of production.
However, what has crept in is a certain level of negativity regarding how that “Idea” might become concrete. It wasn’t always so.
In 2011, Badiou was confident enough to describe the Arab Spring as the “rebirth of history” and by the time of his 2016 book, Greece and the Reinvention of Politics, in an attempt to get beyond the “state-managerial construction” that he calls capitalo-parliamentarianism, he was proposing “the invention of a new political truth that both confronts the principal contradiction between capitalism and communism and... institutes and develops a new modernity.”
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