A New Dawn for Politics
Alain Badiou, Polity, £9.99

GIVEN that Alain Badiou said in 2009 that “from Plato onwards, communism is the only political Idea worthy of a philosopher,” it is not surprising that this latest collection of essays and lectures covers familiar ground for his readers. Badiou has always remained faithful to the communist Idea (as he would write it), stating that “there is no other” for those who do not wish to accept Western liberal democracy as the only form of organising a mode of production.

However, what has crept in is a certain level of negativity regarding how that “Idea” might become concrete. It wasn’t always so.

In 2011, Badiou was confident enough to describe the Arab Spring as the “rebirth of history” and by the time of his 2016 book, Greece and the Reinvention of Politics, in an attempt to get beyond the “state-managerial construction” that he calls capitalo-parliamentarianism, he was proposing “the invention of a new political truth that both confronts the principal contradiction between capitalism and communism and... institutes and develops a new modernity.”

Some of the essays in this short book represent a step back from the Badiou briefly described above. In particular, Science, Ideology and the Middle Class presents a communist who no longer believes that the self-activity of the working class is the path to revolution; indeed, it can be argued that he no longer believes in the existence of the working class as an objective social relation.

Rather, what we get is a turning around of idealism and materialism from their general usage in philosophy towards the vulgar use common in Western democracies: materialism as commodity fetishism and idealism as the preserve of those who are anti-capitalist. Along with this construction is the tired idea that the middle class is growing, along with a description of politics as “the attempt to induce a certain segment of the middle class to come on to the side of the masses of poor people” who are outside of the vulgar materialism alluded to above.

That being said, before the reader starts to think that this book represents a complete degeneration of Badiou’s thought, some elements of it are brilliant, and most of all his Lecture at the Institution of Political Sciences. 

At the heart of where the French ruling class trains its politicians and state bureaucrats, he argues for the universal status of communism through an analysis of the fall of the socialist states, the failure of the Cultural Revolution in China and what this all means for politics in the 21st century. Specifically, he is interested in resolving the false dialectic between communism and modernity that has been created since global capitalism presented itself as “the sole representative of the only possible political modernity.”

Against that, he argues for a “new desire,” which he reduces to four points: we can organise without private property; without the division of labour; without reference to “identitarian closed sets such as nations, languages, religions and customs” and finally, over time, without the state.

Of course, this isn’t really new, as Badiou admits; it’s a version of communism as described by Marx. Badiou then talks about the Soviet and Cultural Revolutions in the context of these four points. It’s a lovely piece and an excellent distillation of some of Badiou’s ideas for the new reader.

The other essay that best represents Badiou’s thought is the final one: World, Existence, Foreignness: A New Dawn for Politics. In it, he returns to one of his prime philosophical concerns: what is a world? And as a secondary question, what can we say about the world today? The reader is here given a quick run through an enquiry from Badiou’s major philosophical work, Being and Event, which has been published in three volumes over a 30-year period from 1988 to 2018. 

He postulates that we live in a world of “objects and monetary signs,” which despite being posited as the only world since the fall of the socialist states, is predicated upon those who cannot name themselves within it, who Badiou names as “nomadic proletarians” who are separated from the world “by walls and war.” He opposes this world of “the free circulation of products” in which most people have no freedom to move or live where they want, with the contention that we have to say there is “one world of living subjects” in which differences are not subjugated to false notions of “our values” or extending democracy and in which there is equality of existences.

So, should you buy it? It is worth a read but if you’re new to Badiou, perhaps seek out The Communist Hypothesis or The Century as better ways into a most singular thinker.