In Praise of Politics by Alain Badiou & Aude Lancelin

Author:Alain Badiou & Aude Lancelin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509533701
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2019-05-20T00:00:00+00:00

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.

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