[...] One of the left's vices is its endless rehearsal of historical debates, its tendency to keep going after Kronsdadt or the New Economic Policy rather than planning and organizing for a future that it really believes in. The failure of previous forms of anti-capitalist political organization should not be a cause for despair, but what needs to be left behind is a certain romantic attachment to the politics of failure, to the comfortable position of a defeated marginality. The credit crisis is an opportunity--but it needs to be treated as a tremendous speculative challenge, a spur for a renewal that is not a return. As Badiou has forcefully insisted, an effective anti-capitalism must be a rival to Capital, but a reaction to it; there can be no return to pre-capitalist territories. Anti-capitalism must oppose Capital's globalism with its own, authentic universality.