Regarding the Collective- Alain Badiou

…we must ask the question that, without a doubt, constitutes the great enigma of the century: why does the subsumption of politics, either through the form of the immediate bond (the masses), or the mediate bond (the party), ultimately give rise to bureaucratic submission and the cult of the State? Why do the most heroic popular uprisings, the most persistent wars of liberation, the most indisputable mobilisations in the name of justice and liberty end- even if this is something beyond the confines of their own internalised sequence- in opaque statist constructions wherein none of the factors that gave meaning and possibility to their historical genesis is decipherable? Those who imagine themselves being able to settle these questions with a few evasive replies on totalitarian ideology would be more convincing if it were not so apparent that they had simply abandoned the ideas of justice and the emancipation of humanity and had joined the eternal cohort of conservatives bent on preserving the “lesser evil”. These questions can only be clarified by affirming the hypothesis according to which emancipatory politics, however rare and sequential it may be, does indeed exist, lest we start to resemble a doctor who, unable to comprehend the workings of cancer, ultimately declares it better to stick to herbal teas, crystal therapy or prayers to the Virgin Mary. The truth is that as soon as it becomes a question of politics, our society is full of these types of obscurantists: they seem to have understood once and for all that to strive for nothing beyond what is has always been the surest way not to fail. And, indeed, for the patient who prays to the Virgin and gets better, all well and good; but if the patient dies it is because She willed it. Similarly, if I implore our State to be good towards workers and illegal immigrants, either it does something, and it’s wonderful, or it does nothing, in which case this is put down to the merciless law of reality in crisis-ridden times. Either way, I have done my duty.

Let us do ours, which is a little more complicated……. -Alain Badiou “Metapolitics”