The second sequence of the #communist hypothesis runs from 1917 to 1976:
from the #Bolshevik #Revolution to the end of the Cultural Revolution and
the militant upsurge throughout the world during the years 1966-75. It
was dominated by the question: how to win? How to hold out—unlike the
Paris Commune—against the armed reaction of the possessing classes; how
to organize the new power so as to protect it against the onslaught of
its enemies? It was no longer a question of formulating and testing the
communist hypothesis, but of realizing it: what the 19th century had
dreamt, the 20th would accomplish. The obsession with victory, centred
around questions of organization, found its principal expression in the
‘iron discipline’ of the communist party—the characteristic construction
of the second sequence of the hypothesis. The #party effectively solved
the question inherited from the first sequence: the revolution
prevailed, either through insurrection or prolonged popular war, in
Russia, China, Czechoslovakia, Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, and succeeded in
establishing a new order.

But the second sequence in turn created a further problem, which it
could not solve using the methods it had developed in response to the
problems of the first. The party had been an appropriate tool for the
overthrow of weakened reactionary regimes, but it proved ill-adapted for
the construction of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ in the sense
that Marx had intended—that is, a temporary state, organizing the
transition to the non-state: its dialectical ‘withering away’. Instead,
the party-state developed into a new form of #authoritarianism. Some of
these regimes made real strides in education, public health, the
valorization of labour, and so on; and they provided an international
constraint on the arrogance of the imperialist powers. However, the
#statist principle in itself proved corrupt and, in the long run,
ineffective. #Police #coercion could not save the ‘#socialist’ state from
internal #bureaucratic inertia; and within fifty years it was clear that
it would never prevail in the ferocious competition imposed by its
capitalist adversaries. The last great convulsions of the second
sequence—the Cultural Revolution and May 68, in its broadest sense—can
be understood as attempts to deal with the inadequacy of the party.

[Alain #Badiou-Bibliography/The Communist Hypothesis/Lacan Dot Com](https://www.lacan.com/badcomm.html)