The Actuality of Communism Hardcover - 2011

Media reviews

"The idea of communism is rising from its grave once again—but what does it effectively amount to? Bosteels confronts this issue with no illusions, in a critical dialogue with today’s Leftist thinkers, as well as with radical political practices such those of the Morales government in Bolivia. A beautifully written work which is a must for everyone interested in what’s left of the contemporary Left."—Slavoj Žižek

"The Actuality of Communism is a remarkable achievement. Critically engaging some of the most prominent thinkers in contemporary left political theory, it moves beyond them, resetting the agenda for communism as not only a hypothesis and not only a struggle, but more vitally as the affirmation of the engaged, organized, political movement for emancipation and equality." —Jodi Dean, Theory & Event

"The book does what interventions must, namely draw a line of demarcation, in this case between communism as a real overdetermined process that must engage with the question of power and recent philosophical attempts to resuscitate the term as a pure, invariant kernel of sheer potentiality that exceeds any constitute power or historical actuality--an actuality which always amounts, in this instance, to the questions of state power and of socialism, as a certain modelling and management of the production of social wealth." —Jason E. Smith, Radical Philosophy