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This is chapter three of "In Praise of Politics," a book consisting of a conversation between journalist Aude Lancelin and philosopher Alain Badiou, broken into six chapters.
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One of the obstacles to the return of the communist hypothesis that you are calling for is obviously also — as you mentioned earlier — the sheer magnitude of the crimes committed in its name in the twentieth century. This is hardly news to you, since you're always being criticized in the public arena by media intellectuals and other such journalist types — it's no secret — for persisting in what *they* describe as an error, *perseverare diabolicum*, and for never having given up on defending not only the communist idea, from a theoretical point of view, but also some of its more recent, and more shameful, historical instances. I'm thinking, for example, of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which you continue to largely defend. So, what I'd like to ask you is this: What lessons have you yourself learned from the enormous crimes committed in the name of communism? Because you *have* learned some, contrary to what some people say.
That question is all the more legitimate in that I said earlier that we absolutely must propose our own assessment of "actually existing" communism as a whole. You see, I think that, central to the reflection on this issue, there's the question of the state, that is, the question we started with way back at the beginning of this discussion. Both before and during the 1917 revolution, Lenin still believed that power was the central question of politics. He would qualify that judgment later, in the 1920s. I think that, in the twentieth century, the figure of historical communism in a way boiled down to the deep conviction that if the state were under the control of an organization whose agenda was not capitalism but an economy of a different type, then the essential problem of the communist alternative would have been resolved. But that's incorrect, for a number of reasons.
The first is that oversight of the communist alternative, deliberation about the conditions of its existence and its future, cannot be delegated, cannot be subject to the law of representation. In other words, the idea of the party of the proletariat, or the communist party, as concentrating in itself the entire political process is mistaken. We now know that it's wrong. Yet it was a very popular idea, and that's understandable because it's clear that the Russian Revolution was in a sense an event unprecedented in history. It was the first time that people came to power not because they were representatives of a particular sector of private ownership, whether agrarian or industrial, but simply because of the triumphant new force of the ideas they were defending and because of types of organization that helped them ensure that these ideas would be adopted by very broad swaths of public opinion. They came to power with brand-new tasks for which the simple party apparatus was insufficient because, on its own, it didn't represent enough control, by the people themselves, over their society's destiny — which was the basic agenda of communism, after all. And both Lenin and Mao Zedong (we really need to be acquainted with the texts) very quickly expressed concern about this issue. One of the last ideas of Lenin who, in assessing the situation, said quite bluntly that, in the end, a clique of worthless state bureaucrats had been restored — was to set up what he called a workers' and peasants' inspectorate that would directly oversee the state. He wanted to move toward communism by calling on workers and peasants to form assemblies in which the state would be monitored. And Mao Zedong, whose constant line this was, launched the largest mass movement of the twentieth century, the Cultural Revolution, which incited tens of millions of young people, students, and workers to take to the streets in the cities. Who did he launch this movement against? Against the party-state, against the fusion of the state and the party. Mao was once asked: "You say the bourgeoisie is there, but where is this bourgeoisie?" He replied: "The bourgeoisie is in the Communist Party." He dialecticized the situation to the point where the mass movement ended up showing that the fusion of an extremely violent and authoritarian state with an all-powerful communist party was a deviation even as regards the communist movement. Because, in the final analysis, including under the principles of the communist alternative, it is the masses who make history.
The main lesson to be learned from all this concerns politics specifically. Politics is not a simple matter of an organization with the ability to seize power taking control of a popular movement. Politics combines several different terms that must constantly be in a dialectical relationship with one another. One of them is the existence of real popular movements. The revolution that has brought new forces to power must not be the last mass movement, absolutely not. The masses must continue to be involved. As Mao said when speaking before millions of young people twenty years after the Chinese Communist Party seized power: "Get involved in state affairs."
I'd like to point out that people got very intensely involved in state affairs there, that even the government ministries were open to the masses, who entered the buildings, consulted the archives, and so on. Nothing like that had ever been seen anywhere else. This is an absolutely fundamental point: there must be popular movements. These movements will, as always, divide and disagree when put to the test of politics, but they must exist, especially when an issue is uncertain, unclear. People must be able to rebel, as Mao put it in a famous saying: "It is right to rebel against reactionaries." That's the first point.
The second point is that something will of course remain of state power for a long time to come. Hence the repeatedly proven risk of a sterile confrontation between the masses and the state. An intermediary organization is needed, that's for sure. Such an organization is necessary to organize politics over time, but it shouldn't merge with the state the way the Communist Party did. It should act as an intermediary, over time, over the long term, between what emerges from the popular movements, on the one hand, and the directives of the state, on the other. The problem, then, is a new dialectical relationship of politics as a whole, a dialectical relationship having not just two terms (the masses, on the one hand, and the state merging with the party, on the other) but three clearly distinct terms: the popular movement, which must be allowed the freedom to rebel or suggest new things; the organization, which must not merge with the state but must clarify and centralize what is being debated among the popular masses; and finally state power, which must be controlled as much as possible by the overall movement. This is what will have to be done in the centuries ahead, under the aegis of the third stage of communism, after Marx and Engels, and after Lenin and Mao as well: applying everywhere, as far as the political organization is concerned, something that Mao once said to Malraux: "We will give back to the masses in a clear form what they have given us in a confused form."
I remember seeing you, Slavoj Žižek, and Toni Negri in 2009 at an international conference to revive the word "communism." It was very striking to see that the auditorium at the Birkbeck Institute in London (which is not really known for being a world capital of Marxism) was full of young people, so many of them. What's happening with that revival today? Do you think the specter is on the prowl again, at least in people's minds?
I think that, as was the case between 1840 and 1860, there are two separate but interrelated tasks. The first is a sort of theoretical task in a broad sense: we need to bring the communist hypothesis back up to the surface, to put politics back into the question of the two alternatives. We've got to get back to a situation where there are two alternatives, not just one. That's a task that can also be accomplished in discussions with people, in demonstrations, wherever there are mobilizations, and so on. It's a huge subject of discussion because, as I mentioned, the assumption that there's only one alternative has been pervasive since the 1980s. Unless we can create a significant difference in the way people, on a large scale, think about just this one issue — the fact that we've got to move from the "one" to the "two" — we'll be in big trouble. Because even the large popular movements are confused by the absence of dual alternatives. They're trying to exist in a hostile environment, an environment where there's one dominant alternative, which claims to be the only possible one.
Have you felt that kind of uncertainty in the recent public squares movements?
Absolutely, even in the formidable, spectacular form of one of the largest of them, the Egyptian movement. It came together around the slogan "Mubarak, get out!", or, in other words, "Let's get rid of the military dictatorship," and it ended two years later with the pure and simple restoration of the military dictatorship. So, we need to think: Why was there this terrible back lash? Precisely because, in a way, the movement couldn't get beyond the assumption that there is only one alternative. After quite a long time, given that situation, pragmatism prevailed. In the absence of any direction, they chose from among the people who were there, who were part of the sole alternative: the Muslim Brotherhood first, and then General el-Sisi, a Mubarak clone. It's clear that, because of the pressure created by there being only one alternative, people's minds, even in a large-scale movement, are not open to a real and complete alternative. How could they be? It's no mystery: they can only be open if there is an active presence of militants in the movement — intellectuals, as a rule — who can represent and give impetus to the other alternative, even if it means splitting the movement. It's necessary to create and distribute flyers, organize discussions everywhere with everyone, take stock of the past with people, bring back certain aspects of the communist experience, arrange for the basic texts to be circulated, raise awareness of what happened during the Cultural Revolution, all that sort of thing. There need to be schools devoted to the communist hypothesis, "school" meaning that the communist hypothesis is discussed with everyone, that careful attention is paid to what people think, that the communist alternative is organized as broadly as possible, in keeping with the movement's intentions and the decisions that need to be made.
This is the same thing as Marx was trying to do, meaning that we're back at the beginning, that we have to start all over again. Fortunately, we know a little more than he did. We have to begin again, that is, we have to do our utmost to instill the idea of a different alternative and organize the struggle between these two alternatives in society. Later, the tactics to be adopted will be discussed. But we still need to put an end to the current impasse. That may be a long and difficult task, but it's a priority. The second point is that, armed with this, we need to deal with as many situations as can be dealt with; go where there are problems; connect with refugees, with people living in hostels, with workers in factories, with transient foreigners; go see what's happening in other countries; look closely at the new ideas that emerge whenever there are mass movements; and, on the basis of all these activist investigations, organize a debate between the two alternatives whenever possible. This is a feasible task. Actually, I think the situation was more difficult for Marx in 1850 than it is for us.
More difficult for Marx? What do you mean by that?
I've always been very interested in how long, difficult, extraordinarily severe the period of global reaction was after the revolutions of 1848. Because we talk about these revolutions, but what we forget is that they failed everywhere, without exception, and that they led to a protracted period of construction of a new kind of political reaction, either in an overtly bourgeois form or in the form of political innovations, as was the case with the Second Empire in France. Bear in mind that the upshot of the 1848 revolutions, in France, was the Second Empire! And in Germany it was Bismarkianism, and so on. So, all over Europe, either the consolidation of reactionary governments or the no less reactionary figure of aggressive nationalism took hold. And the counter-revolution was extremely vigorous in Russia, too.
Who are we talking about when we talk about Marx? No doubt the rather romantic Marx of the 1848 revolutions, in which he took part, with his rifle on the barricades. He was still young at the time. And then we talk about the Marx who played a role in the creation of German social democracy in the 1880s. But between the two, what did Marx do? What did he do for thirty years? He sat down at his desk and wrote Capital, while trying to create an International under very difficult conditions. The second bombshell, after the failure of the 1848 revolutions, was the crushing of the Paris Commune in 1871, which again reduced the worker movement, particularly in France, to a state of great weakness. So, when I say that this was a situation somewhat comparable to our own. … It could be said that the movements of the 1960s ultimately failed completely, that the "Arab Spring" uprisings of recent years also failed, just as the revolutions of the 1840s had failed. These failures nevertheless led to the emergence of a certain number of keepers of the flame (of whom I'm one of the survivors), who have worked actively and are paving the way for the advent of the third stage I was talking about, the new communism.
Essentially, the international and organizational situation faced by Marx and Engels in the 1850s was, I maintain, hardly any better than ours. One striking proof of this is that, around 1850 or 1860, nobody, apart from a tight little circle of activists, had heard of Marx yet. One of the examples I always use is Victor Hugo. Victor Hugo knew just about everything about everything. But Marx's name is nowhere to be found in his work. He may not even have been aware of Marx's existence! A retrospective Marx was therefore constructed, as though he'd been a great public figure of the nineteenth century. That was not at all the case. He was totally obscure, as, for that matter, was Lenin for a long time. No one among the European progressive intelligentsia had heard of Lenin before 1917, even though he had already written "What Is to Be Done?" in 1902, which later became a particularly famous work.
We need to remember all this: the career of revolutionary figures is often subterranean and has already gone through long periods of obscurity in the past. Long periods of obscurity that coincide every time, it must be said, with a boost in capitalism's globalism. Every time a further step in the expansion of globalization is taken, capitalism gains a lead over the communist alternative. This allows it to have new spaces and new adherents and to conquer new territories. Napoleon III in France was a combination of political authoritarianism, social liberalism, and all-out globalization. Kind of like Macron today.
Because how did Napoleon III get elected? Everyone has forgotten this, but he got elected on the promise of a return to universal suffrage. In the same way, today, Macron got elected on the promise of democratic totalization. He presented himself as the man who could reunite the country, since he was on both the right and the left. And then what did he do? He said: "I'm obviously maintaining the electoral system, democracy, but there will be an ‘official candidate,' and it will be me…" This was the first time since Napoleon III that France has had an "official candidate," that is, a candidate who isn't the candidate of a party but, on the contrary, a party, hastily cobbled together, that is the party of a candidate, named Emmanuel Macron. The party's name is "La République en marche" [The Republic on the Move]. It could be called anything. In reality, it's Macron's party; it should be called "Macron on the Move," or MoM. Everyone knows that Macron and his inner circle tested and vetted, man by man and woman by woman, who their candidates in the various electoral districts would be. That's so typical of him. Let's summarize Macron's maxims: "I'm not on the right or the left; I'm sociable, I like everyone a lot; and I hold free elections, but you still ought to know which candidate I prefer. The least your president can do is tell you which candidate he prefers!" Like Napoléon III, Macron instituted the "official candidate."
What did Napoleon III do once he was in power? He signed the first free-trade agreement with England; he inscribed France in the globalization of the time, because signing a free-trade agreement with England was tantamount to integrating France into the capitalist system of the time. And that is indeed what's being asked of Macron by his CAC 40 cronies: to globalize, to unite, and at the same time to recommend in an authoritarian way who should be part of the executive staff, who is "qualified" for that: this is a figure that already appeared in France nearly two centuries ago. Something today reminds me of those times. Those times when, precisely, after the huge movements of the 1840s, after an initial revival of the communist idea, which had been seriously damaged as a result of a number of massacres in the streets of Paris, the bourgeois reaction had invented appropriate political structures, taking yet another step ahead in the development of globalized capitalism. That's what Macron is trying to do in France today.
And the worst thing is that the bourgeois bloc on both the right and the left agreed on the essentials — on the economic policies to be pursued, of course, but also on the issues of identity and security, basically — and so they're uniting…
It's fascinating. Macron is the bill come due from the previous decades, which has made it possible to get rid of the old political personnel who'd had their day and done their work. When Napoleon III came to power, too, there were absolutely odious local chieftains from the farthest provinces. Guys like Fillon [prime minister, 2007-12, and center-right candidate for president in 2017], so reactionary that they ended up hurting the cause. Well, under Macron, they've been able to get rid of guys like that. Macron's ascension made it possible to dump both Fillon and Madame Le Pen [head of the far-right National Front Party, now known as the National Rally Party]. They were too old! They were too high-profile, they were causing problems. Capitalist leaders are very alert to any new developments. The enemy, so far, has always been a lot more sensitive to the slightest sign of change than we have been. For example, we really didn't see the political reaction of the 1980s coming. It had been covered up by Mitterrand until 1983. But they see things coming, and in 2017 they thought the time had come to draw the political conclusion from all this, namely to let a strong state entity work hand-in-hand with the real leaders of society, the big capitalists and high finance, the planetary oligarchy. This is the culmination of a perfectly logical process.
In a recent collection of essays, "Un Parcours grec" (translated by David Broder as Greece and the Reinvention of Politics, Verso, 2018), in which you consider what we've learned from the collapse of the left represented by Syriza in Greece, after the hopes that had been raised in 2015, you stress the fact that what initially holds the public squares movements together, and subsequently makes them fail, is the strictly negative character of their demands. Could you elaborate on this problem, which we always ultimately come up against in today's world?
We're back to the problem of the existence of the two alternatives, on the basis of which the possibility of politics arises. We can't be satisfied with the negation of one of these alternatives. Saying "Mubarak, get out" in Egypt is necessary but not sufficient. Mass movements are readily negative in that sense. People come together easily against something, but this being against something is not yet a politics, In this regard, the "against something" is rebellion. I would say once again with Mao Zedong: "It is right to rebel," and, indeed, if people *don't* rebel nothing ultimately happens. But rebellion doesn't immediately open a debate between the two alternatives. It amounts to saying that we don't want a particular aspect of the dominant alternative. Maybe we want something else, but that something else is still unclear. As I said, movements generally have a strong negative unity, but if people really discuss *politics* in a movement, it will inevitably divide. Why? Because the two alternatives exist in everyone's mind. It's a debate, a choice, an option. It's not the same as saying that this government is bad, and we don't want it.
It's absolutely necessary to take part in big mass movements and try to establish a *political* subjectivity within the *historical* uprising. This involves *putting something affirmative, something positive, on the agenda, the discussion of which will prove to be a special case of the struggle between the two alternatives*. It's not easy, because there is much more likely to be unanimous agreement about negation than about affirmation, but there's no way around it. If you think the unity of the movement is the single most important thing, the thing that must be preserved at all costs, then you'll fail because you won't be able to get the affirmative project to prevail over the easy negative unanimity. So, you've got to have the courage to say: "I'm part of the movement, but I'm also in favor of this particular hypothesis, this particular strategic path, and I'd like to know how the movement, in terms of the particular decisions it makes, connects with that orientation." It's necessary once again to adhere to a principle the Chinese introduced as a fundamental point of philosophical discussion. They asked: "Ts the dialectic Two that combine into one' or is it ‘one that divides into two'?" They decided that the latter was the only true political principle.
Of the key political issues of our times, you have often said that the most important one today is what you call the "nomadic proletariat," the immigrant workforce carried along by deplorable globalization. You seem to think that that's the basis — what to do about it — for the current divide between reactive (or reactionary, if you prefer) politics and emancipatory politics. Could you clarify that idea?
If you look at all of recent history — the past fifty years in the West, let's say — it's absolutely obvious that a key issue, first, has been the formation of an international proletariat in every country. People speak about "refugees" now, but let's not forget that millions of foreign workers came to French factories beginning in the 1950s. There were Portuguese and Algerians, followed by Africans, and so on. I, who spent some time in factories, saw them, talked with them, socialized with them and was involved in politics with them. Already at that time, if you considered the proletariat in its most classic sense, that is, the mass of workers in the large factories, well, it was an international mass. That was already a very remarkable aspect, and it was possible to speak, as we did, of the "international proletariat of France."
Subsequently, from the 1980s onward, there was a process of massive deindustrialization in our country. So, we need to see things on a global scale. As I said just now, there are millions and potentially billions of people who are downright destitute, and the conditions for survival in their own countries do not exist. What do these people do? They leave. And, incidentally, given current conditions, they are undoubtedly right to do so. For someone on the verge of starvation, who has a family, to venture out in search of a place to live and support their loved ones, well, that's the least they can do, and it would be criminally absurd to hold it against them. People like this are what I call the "nomadic proletariat." On the one hand, this proletariat consists of the same sort of thing that has always existed, namely people who go to work on a regular basis in foreign countries; and, on the other hand, there is an ever-shifting mass of people fleeing substandard living conditions, either because the economic foundations of their lives have been destroyed because, typically, their lands, the little plots of farmland on which they eked out a living, were acquired by predatory consortiums and they can no longer work on them, or quite simply because there are terrible civil wars, religious wars, imperialist interventions by Western powers, and their countries have been devastated. So, I think that's essentially what the proletariat is today; it is this enormous mass of people roaming the surface of the earth, who, by virtue of their concrete situation, instantiate Marx's famous statement: "The proletariat has no country." Indeed, that declaration has become their reality, purely and simply: they have no country, they are seeking one. I therefore contend: politics consists and will consist of the intellectuals who are politicized in the direction of the new communism forging a bond with this nomadic proletariat and trying to organize it, as far as possible, in a new political movement. The International won't be just a laboriously constructed organization of representatives of various countries but something directly relevant to the global situation of these people.
Personally, I think meetings are the heart and soul of politics. Meetings are the heart of politics because — regardless of their size — they are where people affirm their existence and their capabilities. So, naturally you'll hear: "Oh, but getting all these people from around the world together won't be easy." But that's an objection for the sake of objection. Actually, a network of meetings, of gatherings, can easily be organized, a network that's effective in terms of analysis and decision-making, with regard to situations with global implications. Because it's important to bear in mind that capitalism, for its part, is entirely globalized today. The people running the large companies created by capital concentration are equally at home in Shanghai, Chicago, and Buenos Aires. The other alternative, the communist alternative, is lagging way behind that level of globalization. It is still largely trapped in a very narrow vision, in woefully national parameters. For example, I think the idea that our most urgent task is to pull out of Europe is very unconvincing. J think that, ultimately, if it degenerates into nationalist isolationism, there will always be someone more "nationally isolationist" than we are. Marine Le Pen and her clique are there to take care of nationalist isolationism.
Since the opponent's space is globalized, ours should be, too, and the various forms of nationalist isolationism are among the causes of the failure of the previous communist systems. In the final analysis, they failed to really internationalize, in that they said things like "We are the homeland of socialism." Actually, the "homeland of socialism" is somewhat at odds with the fact that proletarians have no country or homeland. Genuine internationalism is necessary. To that end, what *we* can do is meet extensively with people from all over the world, share in their experiences and take positions on a wide range of situations. What would probably be very useful today would be to found a world communist journal with an editorial board that would itself be globally diverse, that would be published in as many languages as possible and would consist of two things: theoretical, ideological, and political studies of the situation in the world, the construction of the other alternative today; and, in addition, reports on experiences of grassroots action, successes and victories achieved in one place or another, protests and mass movements. *That's* a project on the scale of the contemporary world — the project of the new communism.
You say not only that the issue of the nomadic proletariat is the crucial political issue today, but that it is also the focal point for building a truly internationalist future politics. Let's zero in for a moment on that point, because the fact is, it would be a unique example of the politicization of enormous, completely cross-border groups, without there being a common language most of the time and without there being common organizations either, as there were, at one time, with the communist parties, Could you elaborate on the role you see this proletariat playing and the concrete ways of politicizing and especially of uniting it?
When I say that this proletariat is "nomadic," it means, in particular, that there are fragments, elements, of this proletariat all over, including in the developed metropolises. It is obvious that, today, as has been the case for decades already, the very composition of what can be called the proletariat in France is in fact intrinsically international, meaning that it is characterized by many different languages, places of origin, customs, and religions. As I mentioned, the Maoist organization I belonged to had already in the 1970s proposed the concept of *the international proletariat of France*. It was a sort of shorthand, and it was completely justified because there was no getting around the fact that whenever we went into a large French factory we were immediately faced with the absolute necessity of talking to people who had either just arrived, or were about to leave, or were from foreign countries, people who were still illiterate for the most part, many of them not yet able to speak French. And it was one of the great failings of the PCF [the French Communist Party] and the CGT [the largest labor union in France] not to have organized those people, to have rigidly clung to a nationalist perspective, which later degenerated into the well-known affair of the Communist mayor of Ivry using a bulldozer to demolish immigrant hostels, and the "Let's produce in France" campaign.
In other words, I really think this issue is present, including in every form of nationalism. It's not exactly a matter of organizing the proletariat on an international scale — I'll come back to that question, to the meaning of "organizing" — but of understanding that, today, anywhere, the organization of the proletariat cannot be clearly and simply integrated into a national framework. Even in the United States, a large proportion of the proletarians now are Mexicans who speak Spanish. Similarly, a significant proportion of the German proletariat consists of Turks. And even in Asia, where more than half of the world's proletariat is located, there are already processes of internationalization occurring in the factories. When I was in Korea, I learned that a portion of the residents of the huge workers' housing developments there came from Bangladesh. So, it's an absolutely global problem. There is an internal internationalism of the proletariat that is the result of its nomadism, of the fact that a great many people are forced to move around to find work as laborers anywhere today. In fact, the supply of potentially proletarian masses has dried up in the developed countries. The peasantry has been practically wiped out, and no one knows where to get new workers. They are eventually found, but they are from farther and farther away.
So, firstly, the nomadic proletariat should be considered not only as being a kind of global wandering mass — which also exists — that would have to be organized, with all the problems that you rightly point out, but also as figures of proletarian presence in the different countries, the developed countries included, and whose places of origin may be very far away. We see this here, where we're dealing not only with people from the former French colonial territories, the Algerians having arrived first, followed by the Moroccans and then the Malians, and so on; but also, now, with people from even farther away: Tamils, people from the Middle East fleeing the turmoil going on there, people who are called refugees, Afghans, and so on.
So, the problem this poses is effectively one of organization, in new terms. We shouldn't forget that the idea that the organization of the communist movement had to be international in nature was a very early idea. Marx himself immediately focused on building such an International. He didn't focus primarily on building a German or English party. He immediately saw that internationalism was the only right approach for the development of the new alternative, the communist hypothesis. This is something that began, after all, with the first waves of immigration in the large French factories, with Italians or Poles even before the last war and then people coming massively from the African continent as early as 1950-60. It's not something new. I myself did that kind of political work for years among the objectively internationalized proletariat, along with my friends, first from the UCFml [Union of Marxist-Leninist Communists of France] and later from the Organisation politique [Political Organization], and I can easily give an account of it. It involves special complications: meetings about the language acquisition process; schools that are ideological but also technical; protracted battles over the issue of worker stabilization, linked to the issue of identity documents, certificates of residence, and so on. Tons of problems that can have solutions if they're construed as problems from a militant perspective. And, in addition, this mass work attempts to bring into existence, in connection with the new communism, an international intellectuality that will gradually become part of local experiences. It's admittedly a huge agenda but a feasible one, and there have been some impressive grassroots experiments with it.
For the time being, it doesn't even exist in embryonic form, it's still non-existent…
For the moment, that's right, we're at an all-time low. For the moment, we're just barely at the stage of the ideological struggle for the *possibility* of this undertaking. We've been paying the price for the intellectuals' renegacy since the late 1970s. There were, and still are — a tradition going back to the Surrealists, via Debord — the stylish critical provocations and battles, as symbolic as they are courageous, of a certain ultra-left marked with melancholy, represented in France in recent years by the Invisible Committee.
However, the massive renegacy of the 1980s and 1990s was the intellectual expression of an equally massive show of support by people in the West for their beloved "democracy." Which means their support for liberal capitalism, terrified as they are by the global pressure of the nomadic proletariat. This identity-related tension over petty-bourgeois privileges in our society is not going to disappear overnight! That's why I often say that, from a historical perspective, we ought to repeat the 1840s or thereabouts — that is to say, the time when the task is to re-instill the idea that a radical alternative to globalized capitalism is possible. One statistic stands out from all the rest: for the first time in history, people who are either workers or are looking for blue-collar work make up half the world's population. That wasn't at all the case in Marx's day. So, once again, and at a global level, the objective conditions are somewhat better than they were when Marx laid the theoretical foundation for the very first political communism.
That's true, but the people who were affected by the introduction of the communist idea in that century were more culturally homogeneous than today. Today, there are really people from every background among the ones you mentioned, coming from tremendously different worldviews. Between Korean workers, French or Sudanese proletarians, and Libyan migrants, what kind of solidarity can one hope to create? Constructing a common political subject out of all these different peoples, some of whom may be very vulnerable and displaced, seems extremely complicated…
I don't think it's much more complicated than constructing one with American workers and Russian workers was in the nineteenth century! L honestly don't think it is. You're right to point out the shift from internal migration within Europe to trips involving longer distances, but at the same time we know very well that there is a lot more global homogeneity today than in the past. There are common references and practices, there are shared technologies that connect people to each other, there is the ubiquitous experience of living in big cities, and so on, whereas in the nineteenth century, when rural, religious roots were extremely deep and dominant, that wasn't the case. Even in France, if you take the nineteenth-century working class, politicized subjects were a very small minority. What they were dealing with — this was very clear during the Paris Commune — were rural masses who were very hard to mobilize. Indeed, in working-class circles, rural people were spoken of with prejudicial disdain. Today, I don't think the problems should be overestimated. We can take advantage of the capitalist juggernaut: there's actually real work that's been accomplished by capitalist globalization. That's its only upside. That's its one true positive quality. When it comes to this issue, I remain a Marxist. Capitalist globalization destroys a certain number of identity, religious, racial, and national barriers. That's why there's such a strong identitarian and religious backlash today in some regions of the world, such as the Middle East, some areas of Africa, or even some Eastern European countries. It's because modern capitalism, in and of itself, threatens them, since it is in fact perfectly indifferent to the whole conservative stockpile of identities. In this sense, there are problems that are even easier to solve now than before. After all, everyone knows what acell phone is today, even in the remotest corners of the world! That was simply not the case before. Everyone knows what money is. Everyone knows what all sorts of things are that have become commonplace thanks to the multi-local power of the global market. It's up to us to ensure that everyone knows what the new communist idea is, too.
So, do you think it's the lack of a global political alternative today that gives this sense of total dispersion, this impression of seeing masses of atomized, isolated people, with no way of defending themselves against the enormous forces of global capitalism?
I absolutely think so. Especially since I know from personal experience that when you go into hostels that are home to illiterate Malians, who have come straight from the heart of Africa, it is entirely possible to speak with them, even though it may take some time getting used to it. This is so quite simply because the strategic project of the meaning of speaking with them exists, even for them, and therefore most of these workers are soon very glad to have us come and speak with them.
In fact, right now, the big problem is an intellectual one, not a cultural or identity, one. The problem is that, right now, we're still in a period of crisis of the Idea. You could call it the crisis of state communism, or the collapse of the socialist states, if you want to be more precise. Yes, the collapse of the socialist states is our real problem. It led to the massive bourgeois counter-offensive that was launched in the 1980s, with one of its ideological epicenters being France. This is because France has produced the greatest number of anti-totalitarian intellectuals — actually diehard reactionaries — and made them available, so to speak, to the whole world. With Bernard-Henri Lévy, André Glucksmann, Jean-Claude Milner, and Jacques-Alain Miller, we have, unfortunately, been treated to a totally new intellectual figure: the triumphant turncoat. All these young men — back in the day, around 1970 — had dabbled in militant Maoism. I saw them throw cobblestones through the windows of American banks to show their support for the Vietnamese war of national liberation. I saw them stomp on a stage in a university auditorium and say that all these temples of bourgeois knowledge had to be burned down. I saw them run through the fields, with the CRS [riot police] on their tails, after they'd attempted to forcibly occupy the Renault factory in Flins. I heard them shout "Marx! Engels! Lenin-Stalin— Mao! Long live the revolution!" I heard them call me a "right-winger" because I'd expressed some reservations about their methods of activism, their symbolic violence, their fanaticism that was inappropriate to the circumstances, and all their media hype. And then, disappointed because they had nothing tangible to show for all of this, they adopted the politically expedient stance of people who have had the (according to them) empty and quasi-criminal experience of communist totalitarianism and can therefore advocate liberalism, parliamentary democracy, and human rights with some authority and call for the democratic intervention of the US Army and French paratroopers wherever there's trouble. And they wrote "philosophical" books with all this nauseating liberal pap. They were called the "new philosophers," for as long as it took (and that time has almost, finally, come) for them to show that they were neither new nor philosophers. You know this better than anyone, you who have courageously exposed the aberrations, absurdities, and mumbo jumbo of this philosophical clique, an unsavory French specialty.
Fortunately, these "philosophers" are no longer our bestselling exports!
You're right, they're not our best export products. Besides, they copied a lot from American intellectuals who'd been around for quite some time. American reactionism was highly organized, especially in terms of economic thought. Anti-communism had long been second nature in the American academy. Guys like Hayek were on the neo-liberal frontlines well before our "new philosophers," who could be broadly defined as "new anti-communists," while their "democratic" arsenal, directed against the Idea, had been forged in the United States as far back as the Cold War era. The BHL [Bernard-Henri Lévy]-type French mainly played the ~ ultimately very important — role of people who aim to do away with everything the revolutionary French intelligentsia stood for, in terms of its global appeal. After a while, the Americans realized that, as far as revolution and the new communism in our country were concerned, it was all over, and this is now written about everywhere as "Whatever happened to the French intellectuals?" It's quite true that reactionary French intellectuals are like small-town buffoons: nobody cares about them. Everyone already has their own local product on hand.
One of the obstacles to the return of the communist hypothesis is a kind of revival, at the philosophical level, of a conservative view of human beings. Let me explain what I mean. For a whole tradition of thought that goes from Hobbes to people like Jean-Claude Milner today, polities is what makes peaceful coexistence among people possible, a coexistence that is by definition dangerous in these thinkers' eyes. Ultimately, in this conservative view, politics consists in preventing crimes from happening. It is based to some extent on the fear of the other, and that's perhaps one of the biggest intellectual obstacles today to the revival of politics of emancipation. In a communist and emancipatory tradition, what can you counter that with? And how, as opposed to them, would you define the task of politics?
Contemporary democratic capitalism is one of the biggest criminals in history, after all! You've got to see that. I fully understand why we have an ethics that bans mass crimes, but it's a joke to think that the West as it is today is best qualified to police such an ethics. If you want to count deaths, let's count them: let's count the deaths that are a direct result of the colonial imperialisms and their rivalries from 1850 to the present. You'll see that it's an unprecedented killing field.
Let me just give you one example. Ever since the Russian archives were opened in the 1990s we know that the total number of deaths in the Gulag during the Stalin years — about thirty years, give or take — was 1,400,000. That's a huge number, of course, and it requires explanation and assessment. But it's almost exactly the number of French deaths that occurred in four years, and among a much smaller population than the Soviet Union's, during World War I! And there was no reason for that inconceivable bloodletting other than the imperial rivalry between the Franco-British bloc, which had the monopoly on colonial mass crime, and Germany, which wanted to equal it. It was on account of that despicable issue, and without in any way resolving it (they had to begin all over again, in an even worse way, in 1939), that young peasants from every little village were wiped out by the hundreds of thousands in the appalling conditions of life in the trenches. I maintain — boldly, given the current context — that this one comparison does not favor the French fetish of "our Republic." Absolutely not.
I'd also like to point out how carelessly the statistics, when it's a question of "communist totalitarianisms," are handled, provided they represent "the right deaths," so to speak, the ones on the heaps of which anti-communist propaganda will be based. And this infects even great minds, even communists! In the 1970s Louis Althusser once spoke to me about the "twenty million victims of the Cultural Revolution." Yet today, even staunch foes of communist China, who can hardly be suspected of wanting to play down its violence, cautiously put forward the figure of 700,000 in ten years. That's a huge difference! And don't get me started on the congenial female TV host who, toward the end of a show, breezily asked me: "What about the two hundred million victims of communism?"! Propaganda like that, in its zeal, would end up wiping out all the people involved.
There *is* an issue of crimes, but in no way does it lead to the conservative conclusion, i.e., blind praise for the Western "democracies" and their so-called "values." That's what I think. On the contrary, "republican" conservatism, today, is a political attitude that is probably paving the way for very serious crimes, because it will end in fierce competition among the economic actors of the day, which has always led to war. After all, in today's world, war is already looming. The situation in the Middle East is arguably very similar in some respects to the situation in the Balkans before World War I: an imbroglio involving destatified regions, armed gangs everywhere, all the great powers getting involved, sending in their aircraft, and so on. And then one fine day there will be an incident — it was the assassination in Sarajevo in 1914; it can be just about anything today — and it will set off a firestorm. Look at the situation in the South China Sea, for example, where everyone is vigorously rearming.
It is ridiculous to depict the current situation as one in which the "international community," that is, the consortium of dominant capitalist countries and their corrupt clients, is organizing, with scrupulously democratic ethics, the fight against mass massacres, massacres for which barbarians alone are responsible. I had a discussion about this issue (and this is only one example) with my friend Jean-Luc Nancy, concerning Libya. He argued that the French military intervention in Libya was justified, since a massacre was about to occur there, for certain, in Benghazi, a massacre intended and planned by Qaddafi. What is certain in any case is that, ever since the intervention, which was marked by the assassination of Qaddafi with the direct complicity of our troops, that country has been completely devastated, dismembered; massacres occur every day; armed gangs impose their grim rule everywhere; and the country has, as it were, disappeared, to be replaced by banditry of every sort. This is exactly what happened in Iraq after the American intervention.
So, the reality is that it's outrageous to call in international police forces against crimes when it's a known fact that these same police forces are themselves behind the greatest crimes. There is no question that, since the 1950s, what with wars and "humanitarian" operations, the "democratic" nations of the international community have killed, or created the opportunity for killing, more people than any other player on the world stage. How can we still call nations "democratic" that, without being accountable to anyone, assume rights of policing, destruction, and torture (yes, really!) all over the world? Countries where the heads of state, in the greatest secrecy, sign authorizations for the assassination of this or that individual, carried out at the cost of "collateral" damage, whereby ten completely innocent people are killed for the sake of one successful assassination? This barbaric practice clearly exists in France, and the innocent, peaceloving Francois Hollande used it even more than his predecessors did. Likewise, it is known that the calm, administrative, long-distance dronetargeted assassination was the kind of decision that the charming Obama very often made, regardless of the price that would be paid in "accidental" victims. Even the manner in which the retaking of the city of Mosul from the Islamic State by the "international coalition" was accomplished turned the observers' stomachs: the city was razed to the ground, there were countless civilian victims and hundreds of thousands of people made homeless.
If the desire is really for peace, it is certainly not in the currently dominant sole alternative, the "democratic" arrogance of Capital, that it will be found. What has emerged from this alternative are big sharks, big state monsters in the service of a revitalized capitalism, which is paving the way for a situation comparable to that of the late nineteenth century for us, when, with rivalries and power plays prevailing, major political pathologies appeared. Even now the crudest forms of nationalism are reappearing everywhere: we've got to deal with people like Trump in the United States, or like the leaders of Poland and Hungary, and with the renewed and very active ambitions of the newcomers, China and Russia, who are demanding a seat at the table, just as Germany did before World War L. We are by no means in a world where democratic conservatism guarantees anything for us.
If the purpose of politics is not to protect us from violence from one another, as this whole philosophical tradition thinks it is, then what *is* its purpose?
The basic aim of politics, in my opinion, is to ensure that humanity is seen to be capable of determining its own destiny, in a fundamentally peaceful, because egalitarian, configuration. To that end, politics must be free from an interest regime that, because the interests are private or, by extension, state, interests, is inherently competitive. And so, let's begin by ensuring that these incredibly dominant interest regimes, whose concentration continues unabated, are prevented from preying massively on the world. Let's show how a way of organizing society that is completely divorced from capitalism is really possible.