Alain Badiou and Karl Marx

Alain Badiou and Karl Marx are joined by a revolutionary ambition but divided over the status of political economy. Slavoj Žižek treats this as more than a disagreement about emphasis: Marx’s analysis makes economic relations a site of political antagonism, while Badiou’s politics risks isolating emancipatory action from that terrain. The relation therefore turns on a question of scope: can a political event be understood and sustained without confronting the economic forms through which social life is organized?

A shared revolutionary inheritance

The book acknowledges a strong affinity between Marxism and communism in Badiou’s account. As Bruno Bosteels presents it, the two depend on each other through a paradoxical history of revolt: Marxism without communism is empty, while communism without Marxism is blind. Yet Žižek argues that this affirmation does not resolve a substantive gap. Marx’s theoretical core is the critique of political economy, and Žižek finds that critique largely absent from Badiou’s work. Badiou instead emphasizes a sequence of revolutionary eruptions, from the Jacobins through the Paris Commune and the October Revolution to Maoism, and is especially interested in the political sequence that ends with October 1917.

That selection shapes Badiou’s relation to Marx. In Žižek’s account, Badiou follows Sylvain Lazarus in treating the revolutionary sequence as more compelling than the subsequent effort to build a new state after the Bolsheviks took power. The distinction protects the evental force of revolt from being absorbed into state administration, but it also leaves the economic organization of society at the margins. The disagreement is not simply between revolution and reform: it concerns whether the work of reorganizing material life belongs to emancipation itself or falls outside the properly political event.

Marx, value, and the importance of economic form

Žižek’s account of Marx clarifies what Badiou’s relative neglect of political economy leaves out. Drawing on Kojin Karatani, he describes Marx’s treatment of value as a parallax rather than a choice between rival explanations. David Ricardo’s classical political economy locates value in labor and treats money as a sign of value inherent in the commodity. The relational account associated with Bailey, by contrast, rejects an intrinsic substance of value: a commodity’s value depends on how it relates to other commodities. Marx’s advance, as Žižek presents it, is to hold together what these views separate. Value must be considered in production and in circulation; neither side alone supplies the complete account.

This perspective also changes how money is understood. A mercantilist view treats money as a special thing; a Ricardian view rejects that fetish but risks naturalizing value as an inherent property of the commodity; a neoclassical account makes price a relation shaped by supply and demand. Marx’s formal analysis instead attends to the social position an object occupies. Gold is not money by nature: it functions as money by occupying the place of the general equivalent. The distinction is between an object’s material properties and the structural role it acquires in a social system.

The same method informs Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism. A table made from wood remains an ordinary useful object, but as a commodity it enters a network of relations in which it appears to possess a strangely independent, almost transcendent character. The mystery does not arise simply from its usefulness or from the physical labor that made it. It arises from the social form in which people’s labor is represented through commodities and their relations. For Žižek, this is why Marx’s central move is not merely to penetrate appearance and uncover production as the hidden truth beneath exchange. It is to return to the form itself and show why that form is essential to the way the underlying relations operate.

The contrast matters for Žižek’s criticism of later Marxism. Social Democratic and Communist versions, he argues, often elevated production as the real foundation and dismissed exchange and consumption as illusory. Even sophisticated critiques of commodity fetishism could then explain the lack of revolutionary movement by pointing to consumer seduction or ideological manipulation, shifting attention toward cultural criticism. Marx’s parallax approach resists this one-sidedness: the circulation of commodities cannot simply be discarded as a veil, because the form through which social relations appear is part of their reality.

Equality, exploitation, and political autonomy

Marx’s analysis also places a limit on a politics centered on equality as an independent principle. Žižek argues that capitalism already establishes formal equality between those who meet in the market. The worker and capitalist can enter an exchange that is legally and formally equal; in principle, the worker receives the value of the labor-power sold. Exploitation, on this account, does not depend on an unequal exchange that could be corrected by making the transaction fairer. It is compatible with equality and emerges through the operation of the economic system itself.

This complicates Badiou’s emphasis on equality as a political axiom. If equality remains an abstract form, it can coexist with material inequality. Attempts to impose equality directly through measures such as equal salaries or equal services can, in turn, generate new forms of formal differentiation in the name of correcting disadvantage. Žižek’s point is not that egalitarian politics should be abandoned, but that its limits become visible when it treats equality as a sufficient answer without examining the social relations that reproduce inequality.

The same tension appears in the discussion of revolutionary terror. Žižek challenges the view that political terror simply results when instrumental reason and technological control are extended from nature to society. He proposes the reverse possibility: terror can arise when production is denied its relative autonomy and subordinated to an all-encompassing political logic. In this reading, political action that disregards the provision of goods and the organization of material life may proclaim freedom while leaving the economic conditions of freedom unexamined. Žižek sees this as a point at which Badiou’s separation of politics from the economy risks moving away from Marx’s insistence that political freedom must be read in relation to social relations that are commonly treated as nonpolitical.

Revolution, Stalinism, and historical consequences

The relation between Marx and Badiou is also tested by the history of revolution. Žižek rejects both the idea that Stalinism was merely an accidental deviation from the October Revolution and the claim that the Communist project was totalitarian at its core. The task, as he frames it, is to recognize the October Revolution’s emancipatory potential while also confronting the historical necessity of its Stalinist outcome. This formulation resists a clean separation between revolutionary promise and later institutional violence.

The historical account of collectivization and rapid industrialization sharpens that argument. Sheila Fitzpatrick’s interpretation places these transformations within the dynamic of the October Revolution and dates the end of the revolutionary sequence proper to 1937, when the purges were cut short and the Party nomenklatura stabilized into a new class. Žižek emphasizes that the decisive social transformation did not occur evenly across the earlier revolutionary years. From 1917 to 1921, society remained in a state of emergency; the New Economic Policy consolidated Soviet power while leaving much of the social texture intact. The drive beginning in 1928, by contrast, aimed directly at changing that texture: peasants were liquidated as a class of individual owners, and the old intelligentsia was replaced by a new one. A Moscow recognizable to someone returning in 1924 would, in the comparison drawn from Fitzpatrick, have become unrecognizable by 1934.

Isaac Deutscher’s account helps Žižek describe the mechanism behind this inward turn. With revolution unable to expand beyond the Soviet Union, its dynamic force turned inward, and forced industrialization and collectivization became substitutes for revolution spreading abroad. The liquidation of the Russian kulaks functioned, in this account, as a substitute for overthrowing bourgeois rule elsewhere. This history makes the consequences of political isolation difficult to separate from the revolutionary project itself: the energy of an unrealized international expansion was redirected into the violent restructuring of Soviet society.

The unresolved economic deadlock

Žižek’s final criticism is that Badiou recognizes the exhaustion of the revolutionary party’s project of taking over and demolishing the state, yet does not grant the economic sphere comparable potential for an event. Because that sphere belongs, in Badiou’s framework as Žižek presents it, to the order of Being rather than to possible evental sites, the remaining option is a supposedly pure political organization operating outside the state and relying largely on mobilizing declarations. Žižek regards this as a deadlock, not a completed alternative to Marxism.

The proposed way beyond it is to restore the economic domain to the status of a possible site of truth and political events. That proposal follows from the book’s account of Marx’s parallax: political struggle and economic relations point toward one another but cannot be translated directly into each other. Class struggle is inscribed within economic relations, yet cannot be reduced to a mirror of economic interests; economic production, in turn, cannot be dismissed as merely the sediment of a prior political act. Badiou and Marx thus remain connected by the problem of revolutionary emancipation, while Marx’s critique of political economy marks the point at which Žižek believes Badiou’s account must be enlarged.