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Even if this were the case, all it would show is that workers take risks too – though with their labour power rather than their capital, and because they are forced to rather than choosing to. It does not demonstrate that, say, the shareholders in a company who "earn" dividends are in any...

True but irrelevant. "Risking a loss" isn't working – it's gambling. True but irrelevant. All this shows is that investors may have worked in the past. But they do not work for moneys they receive from investing (interest, dividends, rent etc) – ie investors qua investors do not work. No...

No, because investors do not work.

Making a living by flogging stuff that's a product of your own labour is "artisanal" production, if I recall correctly. Used to be loadsa them in the middle ages, but they get squeezed out by big capital in the long run. Employing staff does mean that you're exploiting their labour, I'm afraid...

Commodity exchange and systematic accumulation of capital go back donkeys years – the crucial point is when capitalists take over the means of production, ie break out of their confinement to supplementary "mercantile" roles such as distributors and/or financiers. That's when capitalism as such...

My simplistic answer is: he doesn't. Or more precisely – the foundational metaphor at work here is misleading when it comes to situating the position of set theory within Badiou's theoretical edifice. The important point is Badiou's equation ontology = mathematics. This is a strictly...

Bethnal Green & Bow Respect........................George Galloway......15801..........35.9% Labour..............................Oona King............14978..........34.0% Conservative.................Shahagir Faruk.........6244...........14.2% Liberal Democrat..............Syed...

Oliver Feltham's been working on the English translation for a while now. Some drafts of the earlier chapters are available for download from the Yahoo! groups site (search for the Badiou Dispatch group and have a look through the archives). I've got a few amateur translations of some of the...

I've heard Badiou speak in English a couple of times and he is disappointing - he sketches a vague outline but doesn't fill in details. But I'm almost certain it's the language barrier. I went up to him and asked him a fairly straightforward question in English once, he kind of looked...

Voted on principle? Hahahaha! And you have the nerve to accuse others of "credulity".

Well here are the details: Respect came top of the poll in Tower Hamlets at the 10 June 2004 elections. It has contested two council byelections since then, winning one and beating Labour in the other. It certainly isn't a "minority" party in Bethnal Green. The election here will be a contest...

Yeah, until it started. Galloway's the one for Bethnal Green. Even friends of mine who don't like him are voting for him just to get rid of our current incumbent, the unctious Blairite toady Oona King.

The Pentagon's "extraordinary renditions" programme of shipping "terror suspects" off to torture camps was highlighted earlier this month at the extradition hearing of Babar Ahmad, the south London IT worker currently facing extradition to the US on bogus terrorism charges. Babar's defence is...

True - but they are mistaken.

What I'm getting at is not so much a "refusal of communication" as a constitutive impossibility of communication between politics and philosophy - no meaning is exchanged between them since each interprets the other in its own terms. As a rather cheesy analogy, think back to those off-yer-face...

I think the problem lies with the theory/practice disjunction. Once you pose it, political activity gets folded into practice-as-opposed-to-theory, so necessarily becomes some kind of empirical intervention that only happens "on the ground", something *unthinking* or blind, which is of course a...

Yes. Doing anything worthwhile involves a risk. And as you say, learning how to be self-critical is essential. I don't think the left's failures in this respect are down to some sort of psychological blindspot, I think it's down to the fact that achieving something worthwhile is perforce...

It's a dreadful place to start. For starters it's a recipe for reaction and timidity. And more pertinently, you cannot know what your limits are unless you try to break them. Nice to bump in to you again, btw, anyone else from the old UKD crew around apart from you and meme?

Zizek was asked what sort of alternative to capitalism he'd like to see in an interview a couple of years ago with Haaretz. He replied: "There's the puzzle. I would say, a new version of what was once called socialism." Personally I think it's expecting too much for a philosopher-critic, no...

Strictly speaking, the event is a kind of "vanishing mediator" that sets off a chain of consequences, which is the truth process. Badiou's currently reformulating the mechanics of how this all happens. Re your question, the "change in thought" does not "precede" or "make possible" the...