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By Alain Badiou
The current world situation is characterized by the territorial and ideological hegemony of liberal capitalism.
This thesis is so obvious and banal that there is no need for me to comment on it.
This hegemony is by no means in critical condition, let alone in an irreversible coma; rather, it is in a particularly intense phase of its development.
With regard to capitalist globalization, which is totally hegemonic today, there are two theses as antithetical as they are false. The first is the conservative thesis: capitalism, especially when combined with parliamentary "democracy," is the ultimate form of human economic and social organization. This is indeed the end of history, in Fukuyama's sense. The second is the thesis that capitalism has entered its final crisis, or even the thesis that it is already dead.
The first thesis is nothing but the repetition of the ideological process begin in the late 19702 by the renegade intellectuals of the so-called "red years" (1926-75), which consisted in purely and simply eliminating the communist hypothesis from the field of possibilities. It has made it possible to simplify the dominant propaganda: there is no longer any need to sing the (dubious) praises of capitalism but only to maintain that the facts (the USSR, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, China, the Khmer Rouge, the Western Communist Parties, etc.) have shown that nothing other than criminal "totalitarianism" was possible.
In the face of this verdict of impossibility, the only action required of us is to reinstate, by assessing and going beyond the piecemeal experiments of the past century, the communist hypothesis in all its possibility, force, and liberating potential. This is what is happening now and will inevitably happen in the future, and it's what I'm trying to do in this very essay.
The two forms of the second thesis — exhausted capitalism or dead capitalism — are often based on the financial crisis of 2008 and on the countless episodes of corruption revealed every day. They conclude either that the time is ripe for revolution, that all it would take is one strong push for the whole "system" to come crashing down, or even that all we'd have to do is step aside, retreat — to the country, for example — and we'd then realize that our new "forms-of-life" can be developed there, with the capitalist machine running on empty in its ultimate nullity.
None of this has the slightest relationship to reality.
First of all, the 2008 crisis was a classic crisis of overproduction (too many houses were built in the United States and sold on credit to insolvent people), whose spread, given the necessary time, brought fresh impetus to capitalism, which was cleaned up and invigorated by a strong period of capital concentration, with the weak bled dry, the strong beefed up, and, in the process — a major benefit — the "social legislation" from the end of World War II largely liquidated. The "recovery" is currently in sight, now that this painful clean-up is complete.
Secondly, the extension of capitalist domination to vast areas of the world, the intensive and extensive diversification of the global market, is far from complete. Nearly all of Africa, much of Latin America, Eastern Europe, and India: these are all places "in transition," either looting zones or "emerging" economies, in which large-scale market implantation can and must follow the example of Japan or China.
Thirdly, the very essence of capitalism is corruption. How could a social system whose only rules are "profit first" and worldwide dog-eat-dog competition avoid widespread corruption? Corruption "cases" are nothing but side operations, either local purges for propaganda purposes or the result of a settling of scores between rival cliques.
In reality, modern capitalism, the capitalism of the global market, which, at only a very few hundred years old, is historically a very recent social formation, is only just beginning to conquer the planet, after a colonial period (from the sixteenth to the twentieth century) during which the conquered lands were subservient to the limited, protectionist market of a single country. Today, the looting has become globalized, as has the proletariat, which now comes from every country in the world.
Three active contradictions are undermining this hegemony.
1. The highly developed oligarchic dimension of capital ownership leaves less and less latitude for new owners to join the oligarchy, hence there is a possibility of authoritarian sclerosis.
2. The integration of financial and commercial networks into a single world market is opposed, where the policing of the masses is concerned, by the maintenance of national entities that invariably compete with one another, hence there is a possibility of a world war so that one clearly hegemonic country might emerge, including on the world market.
There is doubt today that, given its current line of development, Capital can put the workforce of the entire world population to work, hence there is the risk that a mass of completely destitute and consequently politically dangerous people might develop worldwide.
Regarding the first point, there are currently 264 people — and the concentration of wealth continues unabated — who own as much as three billion other people do. Right here in France, 10% of the population owns well over 50% of the total wealth. Such concentrations of wealth are unprecedented in human history, And they are not over, not by a long shot. There is something monstrous about them, which obviously means they won't last forever, but which is inherent in capitalist development and is even the main driving force behind it.
Regarding the second point, US hegemony is increasingly under siege. China and India alone possess 40% of the global workforce, which is indicative of devastating deindustrialization in the West. Indeed, American worker now only account for 7% of the total workforce, and Europe even less. As a result of these disparities, the world order, still dominated for military and financial reasons by the United States, is seeing the emergence of rivals who want their share of power over the world market, Clashes have already broken out, in the Middle East, Africa, and the a South China Sea. There will be more of them. The outcome of such a situation can only be war, as the slaughters of the past century have amply demonstrated.
Regarding the third point, already today there are probably between two and three billion people who are neither capitalist owners, or landless peasants, nor wage earners. They roam the world in search of a place to live, and they constitute a nomadic proletariat which, if politicized, would become a very significant threat to the established order.
Over the past ten years there have been numerous, sometimes forceful, revolts against this or that aspect of the hegemony of liberal capitalism. But they have also been suppressed without significant difficulty.
These movements have been of four types.
1. Short-lived, localized riots. There have been large, spontaneous riots on the outskirts of big cities such as London and Paris, usually in response to police killings of young men. Either these riots had no broad support in a fearful public opinion and were ruthlessly put down, or they were followed by huge "humanitarian" mobilizations, focused on police violence and largely depoliticized.
2. Sustained uprisings but with no organizational innovation. Other movements, especially in the Arab world, were much broader socially and lasted for many weeks. They took the iconic form of occupations of public squares, Their numbers were usually reduced by the temptation of elections. The most typical case was Egypt's: a massive movement, the apparent success of the negative unifying slogan "Mubarak, get out!" (Mubarak stepped down and was even arrested), the prolonged inability of the police to regain control of the square, the explicit unity of the Coptic Christians and Muslims, and the apparent neutrality of the army, and so on. But, of course, in the elections it was the party that was active among the masses — and not very much so in the movement — namely, the Muslim Brotherhood, that won. The most militant section of the movement opposed this new government and thus paved the way for the intervention of the army, which put a general, Al-Sisi, back in power. He ruthlessly suppressed all the opposition movements, the Muslim Brotherhood first and the the young revolutionaries, and actually restored the old regime, in a worse form than before. The circular nature of the this episode is striking.
3. Movements leading to the creation of a new political force. In some cases, the movement was able to create the conditions for the emergence of a new political force, different from the old parliamentary hacks. This was the case with Syriza in Greece, where the riots had been particularly numerous and severe, and with Podemos in Spain. These forces dissolved by themselves in parliamentary consensus. In Greece, the new government,m headed by Tsipras, gave in to the European Commission's demands without much of a fight and led the country back down the path of endless austerity measures. In Spain, Podemos, too, got trapped in the game of alliances, whether with the majority or the opposition, not a trace of genuine politics emerged from these organizational innovations.
4. Relatively long-term movements but with no significant positive impact. In some cases, aside from a few classic tactical episodes (such as the "bypassing" of conventional demonstrations by groups equipped to confront police for a few minutes), the lack of political innovation has led to the rehabilitation of the figure of Conservative reaction at global level. This is the case in the United States, for example, where the predominant counter-effect of the "Occupy Wall Street" movement was Trump's coming to power, or even in France, where the end result of the "Nuit debout" movement is Macron.
The reason for this weakness in the movements of the past decade is the absence of politics, or even the hostility to politics, in a variety of forms and identifiable by a number of symptoms.
In particular, the following should be noted as signs of a very weak political subjectivity:
1. Unifying slogans that are exclusively negative: "against" this or that, "Mubarak, get out," "Down with the oligarchy of he 1%," "Say no to the Labor law," "No one likes the police," and so on.
2. The lack of a broad temporality: both in terms of knowledge of the past — virtually absent from the movements, aside from a few caricatures , and no creative assessment of which is proposed — and projection into the future, limited to abstract considerations about liberation or emancipation.
3. Terminology heavily borrowed from the enemy. This is mainly the case with a particularly ambiguous category like "democracy," or the use of the category of "life," "our lives," which is just an ineffective investment in the collective action of existential categories.
4. Blind worship of "novelty" and contempt for established truths. This comes straight out of the commercial cult of the "novelty" of products and out of the persistent belief that something is being "started" that as already happened many times before. It simultaneously prevents people from learning about the past, from understanding how structural repetitions work, and from not falling for fake "modernities."
5. An absurd time scale. This scale, modeled on the Marxist circular flow of money-commodities-money," assumes that problems like private property or the pathological concentration of wealth, which have resisted resolution for millenia, will be dealt with or even resolved in a few weeks of "the movement." The failure to see that much of capitalist modernity is merely a modern version of the triad established several thousand years ago, right from the time of the Neolithic "Revolution," namely: Family Private Property, State. And therefore that the communist system, in terms of the central problems that constitute it, is on the scale of centuries.
6. A weak relationship to the state. What is involved here is a constant underestimation of the state's resources as compares with those of a given "movement," in terms of both armed force and the potential for corruption. In particular, the effectiveness of "democratic" corruption, the symbol of which is electoral parliamentarianism, is underestimated, as is the extent of the ideological domination of this corruption where the overwhelming majority of the population is concerned.
7. A patchwork of different approaches with no assessment of their effectiveness in either the distant or recent past. No conclusion that can be widely popularized is draw from the methods that have been used since at least the "red years" (1965-1975) at any rate, or even the past two hundred years, such as the occupation of factories, union strikes, legal demonstrations, the formation of groups whose purpose is to enable local confrontation with the police, the seizure of buildings, the sequestration of bosses in factories, and so on. Nor is any conclusion drawn from their stationary counterparts: for example, long, repetitive hyper-democratic gatherings in public squares with people, where everyone, regardless of their ideas and linguistic aptitude, is obliged to speak for three minutes, the ultimate aim being only the repetition of the same activity.
We need to remember the most important experiments of the recent past and reflect on why they failed.
From the "red years" to the present. The comment regarding Thesis 5 probably seems quite polemical, or even pessimistic and depressing, especially to young people who may well be excited, for a while, about all forms of action, whose critical re-examination I'm calling for. You'll understand the reason for such a critique if you bear in mind that I myself experienced and enthusiastically participated in absolutely similar things in May '68 and thereafter, and that I had a chance to observe them long enough to assess their shortcomings. So I have the feeling that the recent movements are wasting their energy repeating, as if they were new, well-known episodes of what can be called "the right wing" of the May '68 movement, regardless of whether this right wing grew out of the conventional left wing or the anarchist ultra-left wing that in its own way was already talking about "forms-of-life" and whose militants we called "anarcho-desirers."
There were actually four different movements in '68:
1. A student youth revolt.
2. A revolt of young workers from the large factories.
3. A general union strike attempting to control the two previous revolts.
4. The emergence, often under the name of "Maoism" and with many competing organizations, of a new political initiative, whose objective was to establish a unifying diagonal connection between the first two revolts by giving them an ideological and combative force that seemed able to ensure a real political future for them. It did in fact last for at least ten years or so. The fact that it didn't achieve historical stabilization, which I readily acknowledge, shouldn't lead to a repetition of what happened, without people even knowing they are repeating it.
Let's just remember that in the June 1968 elections the majority voted into power was so reactionary that it was said to be the reincarnation of the post-World War I "blue horizon"[1] majority. The final result of the May-June 2017 elections, with the landslide victory of Macron, an identified lackey of globalized finance capital, ought to make us stop and think about the repetitive aspect of all this.
[1] "Blue horizon" was the color of the uniforms that had been worn by the former military men who won the election to the Chamber of Deputies in overwhelming numbers after the war.
A politics internal to a movement should provide it with five features, concerning the slogans, the strategy, the vocabulary, the existence of a principle, and a clear tactical vision.
1. The main slogans should be affirmative, even at the cost of an internal split once the negative unity has been gone beyond.
2. The slogans should be strategically appropriate, meaning that they should be based on an understanding of the earlier stages of the problem that the movement has placed on the agenda.
3. The terminology used should be controlled and consistent. For example, "communism" is not consistent with "democracy" today; "equality" is not consistent with "freedom;" any positive use of identity terms such as "French or "international community" or "Islamist" or "Europe" should be banned, as should psychological terms such as "desire," "life," "person," as well as any term related to established state constructions such as "citizen," "voter," and so on.
4. A principle, something I call and "idea," should be constantly tested against the situation, since it presents locally a non-capitalist systemic possibility.
Here we need to quote from Marx defining the exemplary militant in terms of their manner of presence in the movements: "The communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things. In all these movements they bring to the front as the leading question in each, the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time."
5. Tactically, the movement should always be aligned as far as possible with a body capable of meeting to effectively discuss its own perspective and the basis on which it interprets and judges the situation. Political militants, as Marx says, are part of a general movement; they are not separate and apart from it. But the one way they differ is in their ability to place the movement in the bigger picture and, on that basis, to plan what the next step should be, but also to make no concessions on these two points, nor, under the pretext of unity, to the conservative views that can easily dominate, subjectively, even a large movement. The experience of revolutions has shown that critical political moments occur in a form that most closely resembles the assembly, i.e, the mass meeting, where the decision to be made is elucidated by speakers, who may also go head to head with each other.
Politics is responsible for ensuring that the spirit of the movements has a duration that is commensurate with the temporarily of states and is not just a negative episode in their domination. Its general definition is that it organizes a discussion, among the different components of the people and on the widest possible scale, about the slogans that ought to be both those of permanent propaganda and those of future movements. Politics provides the general framework for such discussions: it is the assertion that there are currently two alternative ways for humanity to organize itself, the capitalist way and the communist one. The former is merely the contemporary form of what has been in existence since the Neolithic Revolution of several thousand years ago. The latter proposes a second global, systemic revolution in the becoming of humanity. It proposes an exit from the Neolithic Age.
Thus, politics involves determining, though extensive discussions, the local slogan that crystallizes these two alternative ways in the situation. As it is local, this slogan can only come from the experience of the masses involved. It is from this that politics learns what can launch the effective struggle locally, by whatever means, for the communist way. So the immediate task of politics is not antagonistic confrontation but rather the continuous, situated investigation of the ideas, slogans, and initiative capable of locally sustaining the existence of two ways, one of which involves the preservation of what there is and the other, its utter transformation in accordance with egalitarian principles that the new slogan will crystallize. The name of this activity is "mass work." The essence of politics, outside the movement, is mass work.
Politics is done with people from everywhere. It cannot accept the different forms of social segregation imposed by capitalism.
This implies, especially with regard to the educated youth, who have always played a key role in the birth of new forms of politics, the need for a continuous effort to connect with the other social groups, particularly the poorest ones, on which the impact of capitalism is the most devastating. Under present conditions, both in our country and around the world, priority should be given to the vast nomadic proletariat who arrive, as the peasants from Auvergne or Brittany once did, in entire waves, at tremendous risk, to try to survive as workers here since they can no longer do so as landless peasants back where they came from. The method, in this case as in every other, involves patient, local investigation — in marketplaces, housing projects, workers' hostels, factories, and so on. It also involves organizing meetings (even very small ones at first), determining slogans and disseminating them, expanding the labor base, confronting the various local conservative forces, and so on. It is exciting work, once you understand that stubborn determination is the key to it. One important step is to set up schools to disseminate knowledge about the world history of the struggle between the two ways, about its successes and is current obstacles.
What was done by the organizations that emerged for this purpose after May '68 can and must be done again. We need to restore the political diagonal connection I mentioned earlier, which remains today a diagonal connection between the youth movement, a few intellectuals, and the nomadic proletariat. This is already being done, here and there. It is the only truly political task of the present time.
What has changed is the deindustrialization of the suburbs of major cities. That is moreover the source of the far right's working-class support. We need to fight it on site by explaining how and why two generations of workers have been sacrificed in a few years' time and by simultaneously investigating, as far as possible, the opposite process: the extremely aggressive industrialization going on in Asia. The work with the workers in the past and today is clearly international, even here. In this connection, it would be very useful to produce and publish a journal of and for the workers of the world.
There is no longer any real political organization today. The task is thus to explore ways to rebuild one.
An organization is responsible for conducting investigations; for coordinating the mass work and the local slogans resulting from it in such a way as to place them in the bigger picture; for expanding the movements and ensuring the long-term maintenance of their effects. An organization is judged not by its form and procedures, the way a state is judged, but only by its verifiable ability to do what it is responsible for. One of Mao's dictums is worth quoting here: an organization is something that "gives back to the masses in a clear form what it has received from the masses in a confused form."
The traditional party form is doomed today because it has defined itself not by its ability to do what Thesis 10 says — mass work — but by its pretension to "represent" the working class, or the proletariat.
We must break with the logic of representation in all its forms. A political organization must have an instrumental, not a representative definition. Moreover, "representation" means "the identity of what is represented." But identities must be excluded from the political field.
As we have just seen, it is not the relationship to the state that defines politics. Thus, politics takes place "at a distance from" the state. Strategically, however, the state must be smashed because it is the universal guardian of the capitalist way, particularly because it protects the right to the private ownership of the means of production and exchange. As the Chinese revolutionaries during the Cultural Revolution used to say, "We must break with bourgeois law." Consequently, political action vis-á-vis the state is a mixture of distance and negativity. The aim is actually for the state to be gradually surrounded by hostile public opinion and political positions that have become alien to it.
The historical assessment of this issue is very complex. For example, the Russian Revolution of 1917 most certainly combined widespread hostility to the Czarist regime, even in the countryside, because of the war; intense, longstanding ideological preparation, especially among the intellectual class; worker revolts that led to genuine mass organizations, called "soviets;" soldier uprisings; and, with the Bolsheviks, a strong, diversified organization, able to hold mass meetings with orators of the highest caliber due to the strength of their conviction and their didactic prowess. It all came to a head in successful insurrections and a terrible civil war that was ultimately won by the revolutionary side despite massive foreign intervention. The Chinese Revolution took a completely different course, a long march through the countryside; the formation of popular assemblies; a real Red Army; the long-term occupation of a remote area in the north of the country, where land and food production reforms were tried out at the same time as the army was being built up; and the while process lasting thirty years. Moreover, instead of the Stalinist Terror of the 1930s, there was a mass student and working-class revolt in China against the elite of the Communist Party. I consider this unprecedented movement, called the Proletarian Cultural Revolution, to be the last example of a politics of direct confrontation with figures of state authority. None of this can be transposed to our situation. But one lesson does come through this whole experience: in no case can the state, whatever its form, represent or define the politics of emancipation.
The complete dialectics of every true politics has four components:
1. The strategic Idea of the struggle between the two ways, the communist one and the capitalist one. This is what Mao called the "ideological preparation of public opinion," without which, he said, revolutionary politics is impossible.
2. The local commitment to this idea or principle by the organization, in the form of mass work. The decentralized circulation of all that comes out of this work in terms of slogans and successful practical experiences.
3. Popular movements, in the form of historical events, within which the political organization works for both their negative unity and the refining of their affirmative determination.
4. The state, whose power must be smashed, by confrontation or encirclement, if it is that of the agents of capitalism. And if it derives from the communist way, it must wither away, if necessary by the revolutionary means initiated amid deadly chaos by the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
To devise the contemporary arrangement of these four components in real-life conditions is the simultaneously practical and theoretical problem of our times.
The situation of contemporary capitalism involves a sort of disconnect between the globalization of the market and the still largely national character of the police and military control of populations. In other words, there is a gap between the economic scheme of things, which is global, and its necessary state protection, which is still national. The latter aspect is reviving imperialist rivalries, albeit in different forms. Despite this change in form, the risk of war is growing. War is already happening, moreover, in many parts of the world. Future politics will also be responsible for preventing, if it can, the outbreak of a total war, which could jeopardize the existence of humanity this time. It can also be said that the historic choice is: either humanity breaks with the contemporary Neolithic Age that is capitalism and begins its communist phase on a global scale, or it remains in its Neolithic phase, and it will be in great danger of perishing in a nuclear war.
On the one hand, the great powers today are trying to cooperate to ensure the stability of world trade, particularly by fighting protectionism, but, on the other hand, they are secretly fighting for their own hegemony. One result of this is the end of blatantly colonial practices such as those carried out by France and England in the nineteenth century, namely, the military and administrative occupation of entire countries. I propose calling the new practice that has replaced the old ones "zoning": in entire zones of the world (Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Mali, Central African Republic, Congo, etc.) governments are destroyed, wiped out, and the area becomes a looting zone, open to both armed bands and all the capitalist predators on the planet. Or else the government is composed of profiteers linked in a thousand ways to the major global corporations. The rivalries become entangled over vast areas, with constantly shifting power relations. Given these conditions, all it would take is some rogue military incident for us to be suddenly on the brink of war. The blocs have already been carved out: the United States and their "Western-Japanese" clique on one side, and China and Russia on the other, with nuclear weapons everywhere. So all we can do is remember what Lenin said: "Either revolution will prevent war or war will lead to revolution."
Thus, the highest aspiration of future political work could be defined as folliws: that for the first time in history it may be the former possibility — revolution will prevent war — that becomes a reality and not the latter — war will lead to revolution. Indeed, it was the latter possibility that materialized in Russia in the context of the First Woerld War, and in China in the context of the Second. But at what a price! And with what long-term consequences!
Let us hope; let us act. Anyone, anywhere, can begin to get involved in true politics, in the sense meant by this essay. And then speak to those around them about what they've done. That's how it all begins.