[...] 1730s Paris, to the so-called 'Great Cat Massacre', described by Robert Darnton, when a group of printing apprentices tortured and ritually killed all the cats they could find, including the pet of their master's wife. [...]

[...] It is not enough to remain faithful to the Communist Idea: one has to locate in historical reality the antagonisms that make this Idea a practical urgency. The only true question today is this: do we endorse the predominant acceptance of capitalism as a fact of (human) nature, or does today's global capitalism contain strong enough antagonisms to prevent its indefinite reproduction? There are in fact four such antagonisms: the looming threat of ecological catastrophe; the more and more palpable failure of private property to integrate into its functioning so-called 'intellectual property'; the socio-ethical implications of new techno-scientific developments (especially in biogenetics); and, last but not least, as has been mentioned above, new forms of apartheid, new walls and slums. [...]

[...] Waiting for another to do the job for us is a way of rationalizing our inactivity. However, the trap to be avoided here is the one of perverse self-instrumentalization: 'We are the ones we are waiting for' does not mean that we have to discover how we are the agent predestined by fate (historical necessity) to do the task. It means, on the contrary, that there is no big Other to rely on. In contrast to classical Marxism, in which 'history is on our side' (the proletariat fulfils a predestined task of universal emancipation), in today's constellation, the big Other is against us: left to itself, the inner thrust of our historical development leads to catastrophe, to apocalypse. Here, the only thing that can prevent catastrophe is pure voluntarism, i.e. our free decision to act against historical necessity. [...]