1967: The Shanghai Commune, French Maoism & the Case of Alain Badiou

Abstract

Alain Badiou’s Maoism has long been the subject of controversy. In this paper, we approach the topic of Badiou’s Maoism by way of the references he and his erstwhile Maoist group, the UCFML, made to the 1967 Shanghai Commune. We argue that Badiou and the UCFML’s invocations of Mao and Mao’s writings are subordinate to their interpretation of the political stakes of the Shanghai Commune as a privileged episode in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. We proceed by comparing Badiou and the UCFML to two of the most prominent French Maoist groups, the PCMLF and the GP, before situating Badiou’s use of Mao’s name within the conceptual terms of his 1982 work Theory of the Subject.