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    Greece and the Reinvention of Politics
    Greece and the Reinvention of Politics
    Greece and the Reinvention of Politics
    Ebook111 pages1 hour

    Greece and the Reinvention of Politics

    By Alain Badiou and David Broder

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    One of the world’s leading radical philosophers analyses the failure of the Syriza experience in Greece

    Over the last six years, Greece has provided the world with “an open-air political lesson.” The country’s deep economic and social crisis has exposed the fundamental contradictions of the European Union, and indeed the capitalist world as a whole. It has been a test case for movements seeking to put an end to the authoritarian anarchy of neoliberal capitalism. The Greek resistance to EU institutions and financial-market hegemony offered a beacon of hope. Yet the “movementist” politics of 2011 could not build anything lasting, and Syriza’s efforts as a party of government soon led to impasse. For Alain Badiou, it is not enough to mourn this defeat—we must understand why such a vigorous opposition could fail.

    Greece and the Reinvention of Politics argues that an opposition of real consequence must revive the “communist hypothesis,” the vision of an alternative state structure. The “orienting maxims” that this hypothesis provides light the way for effective political action. Written in the storm of the crisis, the interventions collected in this book offer a path out of our contemporary powerlessness.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherVerso
    Release dateJan 30, 2018
    ISBN9781786634191
    Greece and the Reinvention of Politics
    Author

    Alain Badiou

    Alain Badiou is former chair of the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, France, and, with Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, and Jean-François Lyotard, founder of the faculty of Philosophy at the University of Paris VIII.

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      Book preview

      Greece and the Reinvention of Politics - Alain Badiou

      CHAPTER 1

      Questions of Method

      I

      In a country like France, the present is a disoriented time.¹ This has been the case for almost three decades. By ‘disoriented time’ I mean a time that does not offer its youth, and in particular the working class among them, any principle to orient their existence.

      In what exactly does this disorientation consist? Certainly one of its more important functions is to render the previous sequence unreadable – a sequence that was, indeed, oriented. This is a function characteristic of all periods of reaction and counter-revolution, including the one that we have been experiencing since the late 1960s. For example, we could note that the specificity of the Thermidorian reaction of 1794 – after the 9 Thermidor plot and the execution without trial of the great Jacobins – was that it made the prior Robespierrian sequence unreadable. Reducing that sequence to the pathology of a few bloodthirsty criminals was a way of forbidding any political understanding of it. This view of things lasted for decades and was intended to disorient – in a lasting way – the people, who were considered, as they still are today, to be potential revolutionaries.

      Making a period unreadable requires a lot more than simply condemning it. This is because one of the effects of unreadability is a prohibition against finding, within the period concerned, the very principles that might overcome its impasses. If the period is declared pathological, then no principle of orientation can be drawn from it. The conclusion, whose deleterious effects we see every day, is that we have to resign ourselves to disorientation, taking it for a lesser evil. So let us propose that a prior and visible closed sequence of the politics of emancipation must remain readable to us – independently of whatever final judgement we pass upon it.

      In the debate during the Third Republic (1871–1940) on the rationality of the French Revolution, Clémenceau put forward his renowned formula that the Revolution ‘forms a single bloc’. This formula is remarkable for asserting the integral readability of the revolutionary process, whatever the tragic peripeteias of its development. Today, it is clear that when the ambient discourse transforms the preceding sequence into an opaque pathology, what it is making unreadable is communism. So I will take the liberty of saying that the communist sequence – including all its shades identifying with the same Idea, both in power and in opposition – itself forms a single bloc.

      II

      What, then, might be the principle and the name of a true orientation today? Out of fidelity to the history of the politics of emancipation, I in any case propose to call it the communist hypothesis. Let us note in passing that our critics claim the word ‘communism’ has been kicked into the long grass on the pretext that a seventy-year-long experience of state communism tragically failed. What a joke! We are talking about a struggle to overthrow the domination of wealth and the inheritance of power that has lasted for millennia – and they object by invoking seventy years of uncertainty, violence and impasse. In truth, the communist idea has passed through only a tiny portion of the time of its testing, of its coming-into-effect.

      What is the communist hypothesis? It is defined by three axioms.

      Firstly, the egalitarian idea. The commonplace pessimism, again dominant in these times, is that human nature dooms us to inequality. Yes, it’s a shame that things are like this, but it’s essential that, once we’ve shed a few tears over it, we persuade ourselves that this is how things are and accept it. Communism’s response to this is not exactly to propose equality as a programme – as if to say, ‘let’s realise the fundamental equality immanent in human nature’; rather, it declares that the egalitarian principle allows us to distinguish, within any collective action, that which is consistent with the communist hypothesis and thus really valuable, from whatever contradicts that hypothesis and thus leads us back to an animalistic vision of humanity.

      Secondly, there is the conviction that the existence of a separate, coercive state is unnecessary. This is the thesis – common to both anarchism and communism – of the withering away of the state. There are societies without a state, and it is rational to postulate that there could also be others. But, most importantly, we can organise popular political action without subjecting it to the idea of power, of representation in the state, elections, and so on. The liberating constraint of organised action can be exercised outside the state. We have very many examples of this, including recent ones.

      The third axiom: the organisation of labour does not imply the division of labour, the specialisation of tasks, and in particular the oppressive differentiation between intellectual and manual labour. We should – and we can – aim at an essential polymorphy of human labour. This is the material basis for the disappearance of classes and social hierarchies.

      These three principles constitute not a programme but maxims for orientation; maxims that anyone can adopt as operators for evaluating what they do and say, personally or collectively, in relation to the communist hypothesis.

      III

      The communist hypothesis has known two great stages, and I would propose that we are now entering into a third phase of its existence.

      It first established itself on a major scale between the revolutions of 1848 and the Paris Commune of 1871, when its dominant themes were those of the workers’ movement and insurrection. Then came a long interval, extending over four decades between 1871 and 1905, which corresponded to the apogee of European imperialism and the organised carve-up of many regions of the globe. The second sequence of the effectuation of the communist hypothesis extended from 1905 to 1976 – the end of the Cultural Revolution in China. Its dominant theme was that of the Party, with its greatest (and incontestable) slogan: ‘Discipline is the only weapon of those who have nothing’.

      The years from 1976 up till today have been a fresh period of stabilised reaction. This period, which we are still living through, notably saw the collapse of the single-party socialist dictatorships that had been created in the second sequence.

      I am convinced that a third historical sequence of the communist hypothesis is going to open up, different from the two preceding sequences, and yet paradoxically closer to the first than the second. Indeed, as in the sequence that prevailed in the nineteenth century, at stake will be the very existence of the communist hypothesis – which is today the object of a massive denial. We might define what I, along with others, am trying to do as preliminary work for the re-establishment of the communist hypothesis and the unfolding of its third age.

      IV

      As we are at the very beginning of the third sequence, we need a provisional morality for this disoriented time. That means minimally holding on to a substantial subjective figure, even without the support of the communist hypothesis, which has still not been re-established on a large scale. It is important to find a real point that we can hold on to, come what may; an ‘impossible’ point that cannot be inscribed in the law of the situation. We have to hold on to this real point and organise its consequences.

      Today the key witness to the fact of our societies’ evidently inhuman character is the undocumented foreign proletarian. He is the marker, immanent in our situation, of the fact that there is only one world.

      The specific task devolved to the ‘Minister of National Identity’, who disposes of his own police force (the ‘Border Police’), is precisely to treat the foreign proletarian as coming from another world. To assert – against such a state mechanism – that each and every undocumented worker is from the same world as ourselves, and to draw out the practical, egalitarian and militant consequences of this, is a typical example of a provisional moral and local orientation consistent with the communist hypothesis, even amidst the global disorientation. And only the re-establishment of this hypothesis will be able to make up for this disorientation.

      V

      The main virtue we need today is courage. This has not always been the case: in other circumstances, and at other times, other virtues may take priority. Thus, in the era of the revolutionary war in China, Mao promoted patience as

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