This work was  first published on our sister site Khukuri — where it appeared in three parts. Here is the whole work in a highly printable PDF format.

Into the Wild:

Badiou, Actually-Existing Maoism, and the “Vital Mix” of Yesterday and Tomorrow

by Bill Martin

From the opening:

Can we fashion an approach to the communist project that allows us to sift through certain experiences and ideas and evaluate them without becoming stuck in a backward-looking posture?  Can we forge some new roads, or find these roads, or perhaps let these roads find us, without entirely forgetting some of the places where we have been?  Can we truly go someplace new, “into the wild”?

For those of us who want to set out on this journey, and who see the necessity of it, it might help to have a “workbook” of sorts (or several of them).  Our theoretical work in this phase cannot help but be a bit “raw,” which is not to say that we should not aim for as much refinement as we can attain along the way.  But the point is that it is “theory” done “along the way,” in something closer to “real time,” what Edward Said called “traveling theory.”

Two somewhat rough-and-ready terms that I would like to introduce in what follows are “actually-existing Maoism” and the “vital mix.”  I will also introduce the term “socialist hypothesis,” in contrast to Badiou’s term, the “communist hypothesis.”  I hope that these terms will help our work and that they might gain some currency.

Click for the pamphlet

Coming soon here on Kasama: excerpts and discussion of this essay.