Alain Badiou on the European Left - Greek anti-fascism protests put the left's impotence on display (2013)
This is an edited extract of an article in Radical Philosophy
NB: Badiou has joined the flirtation of sections of the left with the Muslim right in France in recent years (from 2004 on). Here's the most recent, a meditation on the Charlie Hebdo murders. And this is an essay by Harsh Kapoor on the same event: Charlie Hebdo - Letter to the Left Leaning
I begin with a feeling, an affect, which is perhaps personal, perhaps unjustified, but which I nevertheless feel, given the information at my disposal: a feeling of general political impotence. What is currently happening in Greece is something like a concentrate of this feeling. Of course, the courage and tactical inventiveness of progressive and anti-fascist demonstrators is cause for enthusiasm. Such things, moreover, are thoroughly necessary. But novel? No, not at all. They are the invariant features of every real mass movement: egalitarianism, mass democracy, the invention of slogans, bravery, the speed of reactions … We saw all of these same things, undertaken with the same energy – joyful and always a little anxious – in May '68, in France. We have seen them more recently in Tahrir Square in Egypt. Indeed, these things must have already been at work in the times of Spartacus or Thomas Münzer.
Let us set out, provisionally, from another point of
departure.
Greece is a country with a very long history, one of
universal significance. It is a country, whose resistance to successive
oppressions and occupations has a particular historical density. It's a country
where the communist movement, including the form of armed struggle, has been
very powerful. A country where, even today, the youth set an example by
sustaining massive and tenacious revolts. A country where, without a doubt, the
classic reactionary forces are very well organised, but where there is also the
courageous and ample resource of the great popular movements. A country where
there are certainly formidable fascist organisations, but also a leftist party
with an apparently solid electoral and militant base.
Now, everything in this country happens as if nothing could
stop the utter domination of capitalism, unleashed by its own crisis. As if,
under the direction of ad hoc committees and servile governments, the country
had no alternative but to follow the savagely anti-popular decrees of the
European bureaucracy. Indeed, with regard to the questions posed and their
European "solutions", the resistance movement looks more like a
delaying tactic than the bearer of a genuine political alternative.
Such is the great lesson of the times, inviting us not only
to support the courage of the Greek people with all our strength, but also to
join them in meditating on what must be thought and done so that this courage
should not be, in a despairing way, a useless courage. For what is striking – in Greece above all, but elsewhere as
well, particularly in France – is the manifest impotence of the progressive
forces to compel even the slightest meaningful retreat of the economic and
state powers that are seeking to submit the people unreservedly to the new
(though also long-standing and fundamental) law of thoroughgoing liberalism.
Not only are the progressive forces making no headway, and
failing to score even a limited success, but also the forces of fascism have
been growing and, against the illusory backdrop of a xenophobic and racist
nationalism, now claim to lead the opposition to the European administrations'
decrees.
My feeling is that the root cause of this impotence is not,
at bottom, the people's inertia, a lack of courage, or a majority support for
"necessary evils". Many testimonies have shown us that the resources
for a vigorous and massive popular resistance exist. Nevertheless, no new
thinking of politics has emerged on a mass scale from these attempts, no new
vocabulary has emerged from the rhetoric of protest and the union bosses have
finally managed to convince everyone that we must wait … for elections.
I think that what we are experiencing today is instead that
the majority of the political categories activists are trying to use to think
and transform our current situations are, as they now stand, largely
inoperative. After the sweeping movements of the 1960s and 1970s, we have
inherited a very long counter-revolutionary period, economically, politically
and ideologically. This counter-revolution has effectively destroyed the
confidence and power that were once able to commit popular consciousness to the
most elementary words of emancipatory politics – words, to cite a few at
random, like "class struggle", "general strike",
"revolution", "mass democracy"', and many others. The key
word of "communism", which dominated the political stage since the
beginning of the 19th century, is itself henceforth confined to a sort of
historical infamy.
That the equation "communism equals
totalitarianism" should come to appear as natural and be unanimously
accepted is an indication of how badly revolutionaries failed during the
disastrous 1980s. Of course, we also cannot avoid an incisive and severe
criticism of what the socialist states and communist parties in power,
especially in the Soviet Union, had become. But this criticism should be our
own. It should nourish our own theories and practices, helping them to
progress, and not lead to some kind of morose renunciation, throwing out the
political baby with the historical bathwater. This has led to an astonishing
state of affairs: regarding a historical episode of capital importance for us,
we have adopted, practically without restriction, the point of view of the
enemy. And those who haven't done so have simply persevered in the old
lugubrious rhetoric, as if nothing had happened.
Of all the victories of our enemy, this symbolic victory is
among the most important.
Back in the day of the old communisms, we used to heap
mockery on what we called langue de bois, or hackneyed, cliched
language – empty words and pompous adjectives.
Of course, of course. But the existence of a common language
is also that of a shared idea.
The efficacy of mathematics in the sciences –
and it cannot be denied that mathematics is a magnificent langue de
bois – has everything to do with the fact that it formalises the
scientific idea. The ability to quickly formalise the analysis of a situation
and the tactical consequences of that analysis. This is no less required in
politics. It is a sign of strategic vitality.
Today, one of the great powers of the official democratic
ideology is precisely that it has, at its disposal, a langue de bois that
is spoken in every medium and by every one of our governments without
exception. Who could believe that terms like "democracy",
"freedoms", "human rights", "balanced budget",
"reforms", and so on, are anything other than elements of an
omnipresent langue de bois? We are the ones, we militants without a
strategy of emancipation, who are (and who have been for some time now) the
real aphasics! And it is not the sympathetic and unavoidable language of
movementist democracy that will save us. "Down with this or that",
"all together we will win", "get out"
"resistance!", "it is right to rebel" … This is capable of
momentarily summoning forth collective affects, and, tactically, this is all
very useful – but it leaves the question of a legible strategy entirely
unresolved. This is too poor a language for a situated discussion of the future
of emancipatory actions.
The key to political success certainly lies in the force of
rebellion, its scope and courage. But also in its discipline, and in the
declarations that it is capable of – declarations having to do with a positive
strategic future, and that reveal a new possibility that remained invisible
amid the enemy's propaganda. This is why the existence of sweeping popular
movements does not by itself furnish a political vision. What cements a
movement on the basis of individual affects is always of a negative character:
the sort of thing that proceeds from abstract negations, like "down with
capitalism", or "stop the layoffs", or "no to
austerity", or "down with the European troika'", which have
strictly no other effect than provisionally soldering the movement with the
negative frailty of its affects; as for more specific negations, since their
target is precise and they bring together different strata of the population,
like "down with Mubarak", during the Arab spring, they can indeed
achieve a result, but they can never construct the politics of that result, as
we see today in Egypt and in Tunisia, where reactionary religious parties reap
the rewards of the movement, to which they have no true relation.
For every politics becomes the regimentation of what it
affirms and proposes, and not of what it negates or rejects. A politics is an
active and organised conviction, a thought in action that indicates unseen
possibilities. Watchwords like "resistance!" are certainly suitable
for bringing individuals together, but they also risk making such an assembly
nothing more than a joyful and enthusiastic mixture of historical existence and
political frailty, only to become, once the enemy (who is far better
politically, discursively and governmentally equipped) wins the day, a bitter
redoubling and sterile repetition of failure.
It's not in the contagion of a negative affect of resistance
that we might find what it takes to compel a serious retreat of the reactionary
forces that, today, seek to disintegrate every form of thought and action that
refuses to follow them. It is in the shared discipline of a common idea and the
increasingly widespread usage of a homogeneous language.
The reconstruction of such a language is a crucial
imperative. It is to this end that I have sought to reintroduce, redefine and
reorganise everything that hinges on the word "communism". The word
"communism" denotes three fundamental things. First, it denotes the
analytic observation according to which, in today's dominant societies,
freedom, whose democratic fetishisation we're all familiar with, is, in fact,
entirely dominated by property. "Freedom" is nothing but the freedom
to acquire every possible commodity without any pre-established limit, and the
power to do "what one wants" is strictly measured by the extent of
this acquisition. Someone who has lost any possibility of acquiring something
does not, as a matter of fact, have any kind of freedom, as is plain to see,
for instance, with the "vagabonds" that the English liberals of
rising capitalism executed by hanging, without any qualms. This is the reason
why Marx, in the Manifesto, declares that all the injunctions of communism can,
in a sense, be reduced to just one: the abolition of private property.
Next, "communism" signifies the historical
hypothesis according to which it is not necessary that freedom be ruled by
property, and human societies be directed by a strict oligarchy of powerful
businessmen and their servants in politics, the police, the military and the
media. A society is possible in which what Marx calls "free
association" predominates, where productive labour is collectivised, where
the disappearance of the great non-egalitarian contradictions (between
intellectual and manual labour, between town and country, between men and
women, between management and labour, etc) is under way, and where decisions
that concern everyone are really everyone's business. We should treat this
egalitarian possibility as a principle of thought and action, and not let go of
it.
Finally, "communism" designates the need for an
international political organisation. It endeavours to set people's inventive
thinking in motion, to construct, in a fashion unalloyed with the existing
state, a power internal to any given situation. The goal is for this power to
be capable of bending the real in the direction prescribed by the tying
together of principles with the active subjectivity of all who have the will to
transform the situation in question.
The word "communism" thus names the complete
process by which freedom is freed from its non-egalitarian submission to
property. That this word has been the one that our enemies have most doggedly
opposed has to do with the fact that they cannot endure this process, which
would indeed destroy their freedom, the norm of which is fixed by property. If
that is what our enemies detest above all, then it is with its rediscovery that
we must begin. Have these verbal exercises taken us far afield from Greece
and the concrete urgency of the situation? Perhaps. However, a politics [une
politique] is always the encounter between the discipline of ideas and the
surprise of circumstances. My wish is for Greece to be, for us all, the
universal site of such an encounter.
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