[Debate] The Difference Between Riot and Revolution

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

Actions of those who lack "a structure explicitly designed to
constitute itself as an alternative power in place of the state" can
easily be hijacked by those, be they Islamists or imperialists or
both, who have one or can create one:

"The particular problem of the riot, in as much as it calls state
power into question, is that it exposes the state to political change
(the possibility of its collapse), but it doesn’t embody this change:
what is going to change in the state is not prefigured in the riot.
This is the major difference with a revolution, which in itself
proposes an alternative. That is the reason why, invariably, rioters
have complained that a new regime is identical to an old one (it’s
model, after the fall of Napoleon III, is the constitution on 4
September of a regime made up of the old political staff). Notice that
the party, of the type [concept] that was created by the RSDLP then by
the Bolsheviks, is a structure explicitly designed to constitute
itself as an alternative power in place of the state. When the figure
of the rioter becomes a political figure, i.e. when it has in itself
the political body that it needs and recourse to an inveterate
politics [aux vieux chevaux de la politique] becomes useless, we can
say that that moment there is the end of the interval period." --
Alain Badiou, "Alain Badiou on Tunisia, Riots & Revolution," 19
January 2011, <http://wrongarithmetic.wordpress.com/2011/02/02/alain-badiou-on-tunisia-riots-revolution/>
-- 
Yoshie Furuhashi
<http://mrzine.org/>