What Is to Be Done? by Alain Badiou & Marcel Gauchet

Author:Alain Badiou & Marcel Gauchet
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509501748
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2015-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Notes

3. François Furet, The Passing of an Illusion, tr. Deborah Furet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 502.

Chapter 5

What is the meaning of the crisis?

Up to now, the discussion has focused on the experience of historical communism, from which you drew different lessons. This overview of history allowed us to return to the present, and you each defined your project: a revival of the communist hypothesis, in your case, Alain Badiou, and a reformist resurgence within the democratic framework, in your case, Marcel Gauchet. Could we now examine your differences in greater detail by turning more specifically to the contemporary context? There is a widespread sense today of a pervasive crisis. It was thought that democracy had triumphed over communism, and now it seems threatened again by the turmoil capitalism is experiencing. Have we come back to a crisis comparable to the one in the 1930s? And how can democracy overcome its difficulties in the era of neoliberal globalization?

Marcel Gauchet: That’s a lot of questions! And it’s hard to deal with them seriously if we don’t take the time to analyze them . . .

Then let’s take the time . . .

M.G.: Fine, but then Alain Badiou will have to forgive me because I might go on for a bit!

Alain Badiou: Don’t worry about me, I’ll be preparing for war in the meantime . . .

M.G.: The first and most important issue is to identify clearly the historical situation we’re in. I think that, far from a return to the 1930s, our current situation is absolutely original. It’s characterized by a striking paradox: we’re witnessing the triumph of democracy, liberalism, and capitalism and a new and simultaneous crisis of democracy, liberalism, and capitalism. There are two sides to the picture: on the one hand, the ultimate validation of a political model (liberal democracy) and of a type of economic organization (capitalism) and, on the other, new contradictions undermining each from within.

To understand this situation, we need to go back and choose the right starting point. We automatically trace the victory of the capitalist democracies back to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the USSR. That view strikes me as misleading. What happened in 1989, obviously without my wanting to downplay its symbolic significance, was to my mind the consequence of older and much deeper changes. After all, Communist China’s conversion to a variant of capitalism preceded the fall of the Wall and can be seen to be just as important a phenomenon as the collapse of Soviet socialism. So we need to go farther back if we want to trace the genealogy of our problems.

I propose that we distinguish between two key periods of contemporary democratic history: the period 1945–75, which was a time of consolidation of democracy, and the period since 1975, which is characterized by the threefold crisis I mentioned. The period from 1945 to 1975 was the great phase of political stabilization of the Western democracies, which had emerged as the victors over fascism and Nazism.

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