A Fractured Lineage

Over the last decade, a small group of thinkers has sought to pose the question of politics, to formulate a theory of emancipatory politics. In the work of Alain Badiou and Sylvain Lazarus there emerges a unique theory of politics that challenges the core principles of Marxist theory, even as their frameworks emerge from Marxism itself. We are not necessarily Lazarusian or Badiouian. We are not necessarily Marxists. We are people who think.

Asad Haider, who tragically passed away at the end of 2025, was influential in transmitting this theory of politics to the American left. His articles “On Depoliticization” and “Socialists Think” were both widely circulated and introduced the Lazarusian notion: “people think,” and the method of saturation, which views politics as sequential and rare. As Haider says,

We have to be able to simultaneously understand that the great revolutions of the 20th century were major events in human history which fundamentally changed what was possible, and that the efforts to follow through on the consequences of these revolutions ended in failure. Politics exists in particular sequences which have a beginning and an end; they end when the existing procedures and aims of politics have been exhausted.

Today, amidst a great deal of organizing and political maneuvering, there is no politics to speak of. This is to say there is no universal referent for emancipatory politics today. Many important and volatile struggles have been waged over the last two decades. It is our observation that the socialist movement has insisted on applying old theoretical frameworks, which “represent little more than forms of adjustment within the existing world, and therefore an investment in what is.”

The crisis of Marxism is our jumping off point. The Marxist party-states either collapsed under the weight of their own contradictions (USSR and Eastern Bloc) or have morphed into capitalist powers (China). The national liberation struggles in Africa and Latin America have ceased. The workers movement in the West was likewise crushed. By the end of the twentieth century, something “snapped” between Marxism and these referents that sustained it. There was a fracture.

The crisis of Marxism gives us no respite. But it is the denial and forgetting of the crisis that places us at the precipice. In the absence of a reckoning, our contemporaries instead try to resuscitate the corpses from Marxism’s graveyard. Faced with the anxieties of the present — including fascism in the White House, ICE raiding the streets and brutalizing the population, economic malaise, and ecological ruin — our contemporaries seek to act. To organize. To respond. These responses are grounded in the guarantees of old frameworks.

There is little patience for thought, much less a crisis. There is a world to win, Marxism is powerful because it is true, etc. etc. etc. The failure to acknowledge the crisis of Marxism goes back over half a century, perhaps longer if we are to believe Karl Korsch. For us, it was announced most clearly and correctly in 1977 by Louis Althusser. For daring to suppose that we think through our conjuncture, Althusser was denounced by figures like Perry Anderson and Ellen Meiksins Wood. Althusser was distancing himself from Marxism, abandoning historical materialism, becoming a nihilist. Anderson and Wood’s hysterics were a denial of the crisis of Marxism. Denials such as these have led to forgetting and consequently more defeats for communist parties and the left in general. This, however, is not the space for a detailed discussion of the crisis of Marxism. Instead, let us say that the title of Asad Haider’s article “Althusser, or Forgetting” is very instructive.

Some thinkers did not deny the crisis. Badiou, for example, took it as a starting point. Fracture adheres to the communist hypothesis as formulated by Badiou: that this world is not necessary. Adherence to the communist hypothesis is maintained through our commitment to emancipatory politics. It is our commitment to emancipation that permits us to pose the question of politics.

We understand communism to be an instance of emancipatory politics, but not entirely reducible to it. There have been attempts at emancipation that have existed outside of the Marxist framework. As Haider says, “emancipatory politics, on the other hand, exceeds the existing world. It mobilizes existing social categories only insofar as they elaborate a politics which affirms the political capacity of everyone, independent of the place they occupy in society.”

To pose the question of politics is to ask difficult and uncomfortable questions. What is the relationship between emancipatory politics and Marxism? What is Marxism? What is the relationship between politics and the social? What is the relationship between politics and history? We seek to sharpen these questions, to push them as far as we can.

Haider emphasizes that the emancipatory subject cannot be found in the world as it currently exists. The category of social analysis merely describes “effects of the social structure.” But this goes against the capacity of people to think something new, something exceptional. “As a result, the attempts to give emancipation a foundation in a category of social analysis will always lead us back to what already exists.”¹

With a commitment to emancipatory politics, and the courage to engage the crisis of Marxism, and skepticism about the power of social analysis, we ask: How do we identify the fracture in the current order? How do we think and organize toward a rupture?

We would like to lay our cards on the table. We believe that the crisis of Marxism is so radical and far reaching, the defeats of the old modes of revolutionary politics so profound, that it requires radical measures. We acknowledge that this approach to politics is uncommon, although it was at the center of organizations formed in France by Badiou and Lazarus throughout the eighties, nineties, and aughts through the UCF(ml) and l’Organisation politique. The point, however, is not to adopt a theoretical framework that can deliver victory. Rather, it is to think the crisis of Marxism and the precious occurrences of emancipatory politics that have come before.

We find ourselves today at the bottom of a mountain. If emancipation exists at the top of the mountain, then we cannot follow old maps to reach the summit. Our mountain is necessarily different, and we need to chart our own course. We should only study old maps, like Lenin’s, Mao’s, or Toussaint’s to understand their process of map-making. In the meantime, we must sustain the hypothesis that this world is not necessary. In way of a prescription, however tenuous, we must transmit the hypothesis, we must explore and produce egalitarian forms, and we must stay attuned to the exceptional.

The first issue of Fracture will largely be devoted to exploring some of the themes mentioned already: the crisis of Marxism, the severing of politics and social analysis, the notion of politics as rare and exceptional, and research into past political sequences. We will be introducing this mode of analysis through engagements with the work of Lazarus, Badiou, and others. We will follow the work of Haider in interpreting this conceptual field in relation to our own conjuncture. We will provide translations to make this discourse more accessible. We will seek to build on existing concepts and experiment with new ones.

In the fracture that exists between those who recognize the crisis of Marxism, and those whose blissful sleep is predicated on the denial of this event, we follow those who seek a way out in the great spirit of invention that unites Marx’s investigations of capitalism with Mao’s China, or the Haitian Revolution with Solidarność. A renewed emancipatory politics requires the end of denial and the embracing of this fracture.