French philosopher Alain Badiou is, by his own admission, a strange voice to be addressing the youth. “Let’s start with the realities:” he begins his new pamphlet The True Life, “I am 79 years old.” Badiou is also a Maoist of May ’68 vintage, an ontologist who uses set theory, and an advocate for a resurrection of “communism.” Now, skateboard over his shoulder, he has a message for the kids. And some of it is pretty good.

THE TRUE LIFE By Alain Badiou Polity, 80 pp., $12

The True Life is broken into three sections, the first of which, “To be young today: sense and nonsense,” is by far the weakest and least necessary. For a book of just under 100 pages, True Life has a lot of chaff. From the beginning, Badiou misunderstands his burden: Instead of trying to explain why the young would want to listen to him, he feels the need to think out why he wants to address them. It’s a question that I don’t imagine would trouble many young readers; an elderly person wanting to lecture the youth about youth is not quite as uncommon as the philosopher might imagine. Badiou answers himself later when he writes about how people of all ages are obsessed with the young.

Badiou wants to corrupt the youth like Socrates did: not sexually, or for money or power, but by planting another way of living in their minds. The youth are corrupted—in a good way—by a vision of the “true life,” or at least the pursuit thereof. But despite himself, Badiou can’t help adopting a chiding tone, writing off the efforts of Occupy for unclear, grouchy-sounding reasons. His read on the political-economic-generational situation is spotty: At one point he applauds Occupy Oakland as an exception for reaching down the class ladder to the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, which is silly because one of the thing occupiers were angry about is the small likelihood that they’ll ever have access to the kind of unionized jobs where workers feel empowered to take collective action. It’s the ILWU he should be applauding for reaching out.

The author is much better off working with large binaries and conflicts, both true and false. Capitalism, Badiou writes (following Marx), has broken down traditional relationships and modes of living. By way of response, we are presented with a choice that should seem familiar by now. Badiou calls the first option “the desire for the West,” which he describes as “never-ending defense of capitalism and its empty ‘freedoms,’ undermined as they are by the sterile neutrality of market determination alone.” It sounds bad, but in the binary, this is our easy pick. Call it the Clinton or Macron option. The alternative is “the reactive desire for a return to traditional—that is, hierarchical—symbolization.” This is the Trump/Le Pen/ISIS/Peter Thiel choice—not market conservatives so much as would-be tyrants. “In my view, both these alternatives are extremely dangerous dead-ends,” he writes, “and the increasingly bloody contradiction between them is pushing humanity into an endless cycle of wars.” It’s hard to argue with that.

The author is much better off working with large binaries and conflicts, both true and false.

Binaries sometimes get a bad rap on the left, but Badiou shows how they can be a useful tool to proceed through arguments. Once he establishes the false binary between liberalism and fascism, Badiou contrasts it (binarily) with the true binary between “two visions of the inevitable abandonment of the hierarchizing symbolic tradition ... : Western capitalism’s a-symbolic vision, which produces monstrous inequalities and pathogenic disorientation, and the vision commonly known as ‘communism.’” Since the collapse of the USSR and the marketization of the People’s Republic of China, the true opposition has been obscured, and fascism has stepped in to fill the gap as liberalism’s sparring partner. There are certainly liberals who prefer risking the false conflict to handling the true one. Maybe even most of them. But properly considered, the false conflict between liberalism and fascism collapses into a single term (hierarchy, or inequality), whose opposite is the egalitarian symbolic order of communism. The underlying idea isn’t new or unique, but Badiou’s formulation has—at times—a sparkling mathematical clarity.