I Know There Are So Many of You by Badiou Alain;

Author:Badiou, Alain; [Badiou, Alain]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509532599
Publisher: Polity Press
Published: 2018-10-24T00:00:00+00:00

Thirteen Theses and Some Comments on Politics Today

Thesis 1. The current world situation is characterized by the territorial and ideological hegemony of liberal capitalism.

Comment: This thesis is so obvious and banal that there is no need for me to comment on it.

Thesis 2. 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.

Comment: 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. It 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 begun in the late 1970s by the renegade intellectuals of the so-called “red years” (1965–75), 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 a 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.

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