Alan Badiou gave a lecture at Tufts University, Boston, two weeks after the election of Trump during which he attempted to come to terms with this enigmatic and painful happening. His observations have a wider relevance, not least to UK post-Brexit.
Badiou rightly sees Trump as a symptom of financialised capitalism, which he characterises in the following terms: (a) the ‘complete victory of globalised capitalism’; (b) the division of ‘contemporary subjects’ into four possibilities: (i) owner, landlord or capitalist, (ii) employee and consumer, (iii) poor peasant, (iv) ‘nothing at all’; (c) the ‘circulation of money’ as the ‘true definition of the world’; and (d) the ubiquitous view that there is no alternative to global capitalism.
Badiou goes on to highlight the political crisis that has accompanied – been generated by – financialised capitalism. A democratic system, he insists, must embrace at least two different ‘tendencies’, otherwise there is no choice. On the one side we have a tendency to universality and equality, while on the other side there is a tendency to identity and hierarchy. ‘That is the most abstract distinction between the left and the right, between Democrats and Republicans, between communists and capitalists, and so on.’ The political elite represents the tension between these two tendencies in the guise of two different organisations or parties (eg Democrats and Republicans). It is necessarily a constrained tension however, and one in which the two organisations/parties are ‘complicit’: if the tension gets too strong there is civil war (eg the American Civil War).
Communism and fascism existed at the outer limits of this tension, and outside of the normal representation in democracy. So at the global level there are two contradictions: (1) a fundamental and latent one between communism and fascism, and (2) a weaker one ‘at the level of the state’ between left and right, Democrat and Republican and so on.
So what is happening now? Badiou argues that the democratic system ‘everywhere in the world’ is moving from two big parties and their respective alternatives to ‘four dispositions’. In the USA for example, there are now not only the Democrats and Republicans, but also Trump and Sanders, hinting at ‘the true contradiction between communism and fascism’.
Expanding on the sense of crisis, Badiou describes the contemporary scene in terms of: (a) the ‘brutality and the blind violence of contemporary capitalism’, which calls to mind the world documented so vividly by Charles Dickens in 19th century London; (b) ‘popular frustration’ at life with/under (a); and (c) ‘the lack of another strategic way’.
So, recalling Lenin, what is to be done? Badiou says we need to ‘create’ or ‘invent’ something new on the side of universality and equality. We lack a ‘great idea’. He refers once more to communism, in full recognition that it is a concept that requires rehabilitation (there is in fact a considerable, interesting and largely French literature on this concept – the subject for sure of a future blog on my part as we search in the UK for a compelling narrative for change).
Badiou has some suggestions: (a) we must abandon the notion that private property is somehow intrinsic to democracy; (b) we must overcome the distinction between intellectual creativity and government on the one hand and manual work on the other; (c) we must insist on equality across differences and eschew ‘othering’; and (d) we must rid ourselves of the notion of a state ‘in the form of a separated and armed power’, moving in the direction of Marx’s ‘free association’. In sum, ‘collectivism against private property, polymorphous work against specialisation, concrete universalism against closed identities, and free association against the state.’ Badiou freely admits that these principles need to be translated into programmes for change.
I have an observation or two to add. The first is to insist, in line with Badiou, that it is vitally important not to be constrained by ‘what is’. As Bhaskar rightly contended, ‘absence’ by far exceeds and outpaces ‘presence’, what does not (yet) exist what exists. Boldness is essential: there are alternatives to financialised global capitalism. And secondly, as already intimated, the concept of communism can be rescued from the Stalinised, tarnished word communism. An as yet absent ‘utopian realism’ nestles in this concept. But that’s another story, or blog.