Can communism still be defended after the experience of the regimes that claimed its name? Does democracy possess the means to transform capitalism, or does it remain subordinate to economic power? These questions run through the exchange between Alain Badiou and Marcel Gauchet published in 2014 as Que faire ? Dialogue sur le communisme, le capitalisme et l’avenir de la démocratie.

Moderated by Martin Duru and Martin Legros, the discussion turns on a disagreement about both the interpretation of the past and the possibilities of political action. Badiou seeks to reopen the communist hypothesis by learning from the failure of its state-based forms in the twentieth century. Gauchet argues for a renewal of democratic reformism capable of restoring political control over the economy without promising capitalism’s abolition.

Their intellectual journeys help explain the divide. Close to Claude Lefort and influenced by the debates on autonomy to which Cornelius Castoriadis made a major contribution, Gauchet gradually moved away from Marxism. Badiou, by contrast, describes his passage from socialism to communism in the late 1960s. Their exchange is therefore more than a confrontation between capitalism’s opponent and its defender. It brings together competing accounts of social transformation and of the lessons revolutionary history has to offer.

From Marx to Lenin

The book’s second chapter, “From Marx to Lenin”, examines the relationship between Marx’s thought and the revolutions of the twentieth century, particularly the Russian Revolution.

For Gauchet, a central difficulty lies in the conception of history that allowed communists to present their project as the fulfilment of a process open to scientific knowledge. On this reading, economic change determines the succession of social formations, while overcoming capitalism promises a society freed from the divisions it generates. The danger arises when a political organisation claims to understand that process, represent its historical agent and, on those grounds, possess the authority to lead society towards its destination.

Gauchet does not suggest that Lenin merely put Marx into practice. He emphasises the transformation introduced by the Bolshevik leader. Where a particular reading of Marx located the conditions of change in capitalism’s contradictions and the political development of the proletariat, Lenin made revolutionary organisation decisive. A revolutionary break required systematic preparation and a force capable of recognising and seizing the political opportunity. It would not follow simply from the maturation of economic contradictions (p. 30).

The difficulty lies in how these two positions were combined. The party acted to bring about a break that would not occur spontaneously, yet justified its intervention through its supposed knowledge of history’s direction. Political will drew its authority from a claim to science.

The revolutionary party sought state power with the eventual withering away of the state as its objective. After October, however, it became both the instrument of transition and the centre of the new regime. Its supposedly temporary role justified a domination whose conditions and duration it determined for itself (p. 31).

For Gauchet, this claim helps explain the emergence of political and ideological dictatorship. The party no longer presented itself as one force among others. It claimed to embody society’s true historical movement. Those who challenged it could consequently be treated as obstacles to emancipation itself.

Gauchet thus stresses continuity between Lenin and Stalin. Forced collectivisation and the war against the countryside marked a decisive expansion of terror rather than a complete break with the regime’s political foundations (p. 32).

Badiou redirects attention to the problem Lenin sought to address: how could a popular uprising withstand the organised forces attempting to crush it? In his account, the defeat of the Paris Commune is crucial. It raises questions about revolutionary leadership, discipline and the capacity for defence.

Badiou accordingly emphasises the autonomy of politics in Lenin’s thinking. A revolutionary situation cannot be deduced from an economic description. It requires an assessment of circumstances, a decision and an organisation. Political agency—the capacity to act consciously within a particular situation—cannot be absorbed into a science of economics or history (p. 34).

The disagreement becomes clearer. Gauchet examines the authority claimed by an organisation convinced that it knows society’s future. Badiou insists that revolutionary action cannot wait for a supposedly necessary historical development to accomplish the political break on its behalf. The unresolved question is how an organisation needed to make that break can avoid becoming a power standing apart from those it claims to liberate.

Modernity and totalitarianism

The discussion of totalitarianism leads both philosophers to clarify their understanding of modernity.

Gauchet approaches it as a historical transformation in the principles through which societies organise themselves. In heteronomous societies, collective order derives its legitimacy from an authority beyond human choice, particularly religious authority. Autonomy, by contrast, means that people can recognise their institutions as their own creation and make them subject to debate.

His account of society’s “exit from religion” therefore does not necessarily imply the disappearance of belief. It describes the end of an order in which religion governs the organisation of social life as a whole. Political power must instead find its legitimacy within society, while laws can be debated and changed by those who live under them (pp. 39–40).

Within this framework, Gauchet interprets totalitarian regimes as attempts to restore a collective unity that democratic modernity has made uncertain. Their novelty lies in the political and ideological means used to close that opening. They do not simply reinstate an old order. They seek, within modern societies, to reconstruct an authority capable of subordinating collective life to a single principle.

Badiou acknowledges features shared by twentieth-century fascist and communist regimes: single-party rule, political policing, militarisation, repression and terror, including against their own supporters. He disputes whether these similarities are sufficient to explain their histories.

He also connects their emergence to the crisis of parliamentary regimes, whose depth the First World War exposed (p. 42). In his view, comparison must take account of political projects, social forces and international ambitions as well as forms of domination.

Badiou further emphasises conflict within the Soviet and Chinese experiences. He reads the Cultural Revolution, in particular, as an attempt to mobilise against the bureaucratisation of the Chinese Communist Party (p. 47). Yet this interpretation leaves a difficulty unresolved: a government can intensify conflicts while claiming the exclusive authority to interpret and resolve them. Internal conflict does not, by itself, establish political pluralism.

Badiou’s criticism centres on state communism. A project seeking a free association of individuals and the withering away of the state contradicts itself when it entrusts its implementation to an authoritarian apparatus. The state that is supposed to prepare its own disappearance becomes the master of the society it was meant to emancipate.

Badiou recognises Lenin’s responsibility here: the military and party foundations of the new government contributed to that contradiction. Describing the arrangement as transitional did not neutralise its effects (p. 50).

From this he draws a broader distrust of the state, emphasising its violence and its tendency to preserve the existing order (p. 51). Gauchet objects that the explanation is too general. States have existed for millennia; totalitarianism is a historically specific form of domination. Explaining communist terror requires an account of what distinguishes its project and institutions from those of other regimes.

The objection bears directly on the lessons of the twentieth century. Did terror arise principally because the communist project was entrusted to the state? Or did it also expose a difficulty within the project’s ambition to reorganise society as a whole (p. 53)?

The communist hypothesis

Badiou rejects the view that the historical failure of communist regimes permanently closes the question of communism. He distinguishes the formulation of the idea, its implementation through states and the search for a new political sequence. The central lesson of the twentieth century, he argues, is precisely that emancipation cannot be entrusted to the state (p. 61).

The hypothesis must therefore be reconsidered in light of its historical trials rather than sheltered from them. Badiou uses the term to designate a political possibility whose forms emerge through experience, rather than a complete blueprint for a future society (p. 62).

Three commitments define it: the possibility of freeing collective life from the domination of capital; the refusal to regard a state standing apart from society as an unavoidable necessity; and the challenge to a division of labour that durably assigns individuals to unequal functions and positions (pp. 62–63).

These commitments leave their practical forms open. What collectives can advance them, and how should they organise? Badiou refuses to assign the agents of emancipation a social identity fixed in advance. They emerge through struggles and can assume different forms.

Communists, he argues, must participate in broader movements, propose a direction within them and help identify the possible next stages of action (p. 65). Their role is not to stand outside a movement and impose a truth of which they claim exclusive possession.

This position informs his criticism of the vanguard party, whose centralisation can turn an organisation into an authority over those it represents. Rejecting single-party rule, however, does not resolve the problem of organisation. A politics committed to the diversity of its participants must also explain how decisions are made, how they can be challenged and how decision-makers can be replaced.

Internationalism remains essential to Badiou’s communism. It does not absolve its supporters from participating in local struggles. It places those struggles within a perspective that does not confine equality to national borders or the interests of a particular group.

Gauchet distinguishes the idea’s appeal from its political feasibility. He recognises the force of the ideals of equality and common ownership. His objection concerns their implementation: can the institutions and mediating structures that communism regards as obstacles be abolished without recreating, in another form, the powers it sought to overcome?

The discussion returns to Marx. Gauchet contests a reading of history that gives the economy decisive explanatory power and expects changes in the relations of production to resolve other social divisions. He also rejects the assumption that emancipation necessarily culminates in the disappearance of the state.

In his account, modern history provides no knowledge from which the economic and political organisation of a better society can be deduced with certainty. Experience requires an acknowledgment of the limits of prediction and the revisability of collective arrangements (p. 73).

Here the disagreement with Badiou is less straightforward than it first appears. Badiou also rejects economism and the conception of history as governed by a science. He argues that they restrict the field of possibilities and provide those in power with a justification for their decisions (p. 74).

Badiou seeks to preserve a rational possibility of transformation without making it a historical necessity. Yet he still needs to explain how the hypothesis can be tested, revised or, in some of its forms, abandoned. Otherwise, calling it a hypothesis could shield the idea from the experiences meant to inform it.

Parliamentary democracy

The final part of the exchange examines democracy’s capacity to transform economic relations.

For Badiou, parliamentary government is structurally bound to the domination of capital. Electoral competition, parties and representative institutions do not provide a politically neutral arena. He doubts that a fundamental break can be achieved solely through the mechanisms of that system (pp. 78–79).

His criticism raises a longstanding question, also present in Castoriadis: do elections secure popular power, or select those who already possess the resources needed to govern?

Comparison with Athens helps distinguish democracy from representation, provided its institutions are not confused with ours. Many public offices were allocated by lot, while certain positions, particularly military commands, were filled by election. Payments also supported the exercise of civic functions. The contrast cannot therefore be reduced to modern elected representatives versus ancient representatives chosen by lot.

Gauchet refuses to define democracy solely through its dependence on capital. He argues that its political organisation possesses autonomy in principle: citizens can change collective rules, impose limits on economic power and alter the conditions under which it operates (p. 80).

He consequently proposes a renewed democratic reformism. Its ambition is to regain control over the economy and make societies more liveable, without treating capitalism’s abolition as a prerequisite for every improvement (p. 81).

This shifts the difficulty without entirely resolving it. If democratic institutions possess such a capacity, why has it weakened? What forces could restore it? An answer requires an examination of collective organisation, the levels at which decisions are made and the power relations that constrain citizens’ influence. Democracy’s autonomy must become an effective capacity to act.

Gauchet finally stresses a fundamental lesson of totalitarian experience: no society can legitimately seek to eliminate opposition altogether. A project of transformation must recognise its opponents’ right to speak and organise. Pluralism is a condition of political action, including action intended to bring about profound change (p. 83).

Badiou accepts the need for debate and confrontation but introduces a distinction between adversary and enemy. He considers defensive action when conflict moves beyond political discussion, while presenting such a situation as remote from the present balance of forces (p. 84).

Here the disagreement becomes most concrete. Who decides when an adversary becomes an enemy? What institutions prevent rulers from treating every challenge to their project as a threat? How can necessary defence be distinguished from violence used to retain power?

These questions apply to any politics of transformation. They require institutional answers as well as commitments in principle.

Transforming society without taking its future out of its hands

The exchange does not end in reconciliation. Badiou maintains that emancipatory politics must retain the possibility of a break with the capitalist order. Gauchet argues that democracy remains the framework within which society can transform itself while recognising the legitimacy of its divisions.

Their positions face distinct challenges. Badiou must explain how communist politics can build lasting organisations while protecting pluralism and preventing the emergence of a new power standing above society. Gauchet must show how democratic institutions can recover the means to make economic power answerable to collective decisions.

Keeping the communist idea open is insufficient, as is invoking democracy’s resources. Both thinkers must explain how their principles can become effective political action.

The value of their exchange lies in this double demand. Criticism of capitalism does not, on its own, provide the institutions of emancipation. Defending democracy does not guarantee democratic control over the economy. The question that gives the dialogue its lasting force is how a society can change the conditions of its existence while preserving its members’ right to challenge the direction it takes.

Book discussed

Alain Badiou and Marcel Gauchet, Que faire ? Dialogue sur le communisme, le capitalisme et l’avenir de la démocratie, dialogue moderated by Martin Duru and Martin Legros, Paris, Philo éditions, 2014.

Page references refer to the French edition discussed.