[D66] “The alleged power of capitalism today is merely a reflection of the weakness of its opponent.”

[A.O.]

https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3549

Darko Vujica
Tijana Okić
03 January 2018
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Alain Badiou: “The alleged power of capitalism today is merely a 
reflection of the weakness of its opponent.”

Darko Vujica speaks with Alain Badiou about the past and future of 
communism.

First published in English at LeftEast.

You have invested a lot of energy in realizing the Idea(s) of communism. 
What drew you to a revolutionary engagement and why?

My father was a socialist, who participated in the Resistance against 
the Nazis. My mother leaned more towards anarchism. My first philosophy 
teacher, Jean-Paul Sartre, was a fellow traveller of the French 
Communist Party. When I was a teenager, there was a terrible colonial 
war in Algeria and I stood up against it. When I was 30, May ‘68 
happened, a huge movement of young people and workers. In short, my 
entire education led me towards politics in its revolutionary and 
communist form.

You have severely criticized the phenomenon of elections, which you 
consider a fool's game. Could you elaborate on that argument? What would 
be its alternative?

Elections only work if there is basic agreement between the majority and 
the opposition concerning the organisation of the society. No one has 
ever seen a complete change of society that resulted from elections! And 
it is perfectly understandable: how could any party supporting a 
conservative idea of society accept a complete overturn simply as a 
result of voting? And inversely, if you change society through a 
revolution, how could you possibly accept a return to the way things 
were and calmly hand back power to the reactionaries? In our “Western” 
countries the rule is fairly simple: once in power, you can change some 
small details, but there is no question of changing the capitalist basis 
of society. Do you know of any “democratic” country that is not in fact, 
and above all, dominated by an extremely stable capitalism? Elections 
are but a façade for preserving the dominant order.

The German economic sociologist Wolfgang Streeck said that today’s 
political imagination has faded due to the capitalistic dynamic and that 
capitalism would crumble without any kind of alternative scenario ready 
to replace it. How would you comment on that?

It is completely false. The heart of capitalism, its absolute condition 
of existence, is private property over the means of production and 
exchange. It is the existence of a very small oligarchy that controls 
the capitals of the big multinational corporations; it is the excessive 
power of money, that creates false values as exchange values, fixed by 
the market, and not by the use value of commodities. If you attack all 
of it, if you change the mode of production, you really step into 
another world. The alleged power of capitalism, its false “dynamism” — 
it actually goes through long periods of crisis and stagnation — today 
is merely a reflection of the weakness of its opponents.

In the Communist Hypothesis you posit that certain great leftist moments 
existed in the previous century, but also that the communism of the 20th 
century is finished and that we should restart. With that in mind, I 
would like to ask you what can be learnt from the failures of the 
20th-century communism and what should be the foundation of communism today?

The weakness of the communism of the 20th century was primarily 
political. Centralised and militarised communist parties were good 
instruments for seizing power. But they were not good instruments for 
organising communist society. They were too attached to state power and 
did not develop a true internationalism. We now have to organise 
communist power around three things: mass movements, organisations that 
continuously forge the slogans and wills of the movements, and, what 
will remain for a long time states, which must be under the constant 
supervision of the movements and organisations. The great failure of the 
20th century was the fusion of the Party with the State, the creation of 
Party-States, gradually cut off from the masses. The political dialectic 
has to comprise three terms: (movement, organisations, states) and not 
two (masses and state), or even one (Party-State).

You called capitalism the sickness of mankind. However, capitalism is 
the reality for many people who consider it the only workable system. 
How can we make communism appealing to people preoccupied with 
consumerist culture?

When only one social and dominant regime is left, once it achieved huge 
victory over its communist adversary — it is obvious that it will create 
widespread support. In 17th century France, the overwhelming majority of 
the French thought that the absolute monarchy was the only possible 
political form. One century later, this belief did not prevent 
republican revolutions and the installation of the capitalist 
bourgeoisie in power. The same is true for today. The thing you call the 
“culture of consumerism” is simply the dominant ideology under the 
“democratic” dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie in effect 
draws its profits from a circulation of commodities that is as rapid as 
possible. However, in one or more centuries, the hold this ideology has 
on today’s minds certainly won’t prevent the replacement of this corrupt 
commodity “order” with a reinvented communism.

With the fall of real socialism, the debates about communism have been 
marginalized. The communism-oriented parties are weak and communism is 
argued only in narrow intellectual circles. How can we transfer the 
debates about communism from the margins into the center of (public) 
attention?

How would your question have sounded in, say in 1840 when Marx and 
Engels, and a few other people began their activity and writing their 
works? They were only a handful of people, and there was basically no 
public opinion in their favour. In 1848 they wrote the “Manifesto of the 
Communist Party” when the party did not exist at all! Since then it has 
become a kind of classic. We, just like them, have to start again, 
begin, first and foremost with an intense ideological activity in order 
to show that today we have not only one, but two possibilities, the 
capitalist and the communist. And we have to participate, at an 
international level, in all relevant popular movements, analysing them 
from the point of view of communist principles, of which we in effect 
have four:

– collectivisation of the means of production and exchange, 
expropriating the oligarchy that possesses them

– reduction and suppression of the “big differences” that affect our 
lives practically: between manual and intellectual labour, between town 
and country city, between managerial and executive tasks… Creation of a 
polymorphous worker.

– gradual disappearance of false collective identities, whether racial, 
national, religious, etc, that poison public life.

– gradual withering away of the state in favour of direct 
self-management of society, in the form of continuous meetings 
determining the slogans, tasks and goals.

Twenty years ago a bloody disintegration took place with Yugoslavia. How 
do you explain the dissolution of Yugoslavia and how do you regard the 
post-Yugoslavian territory from today’s perspective?

I am for the withering away of states, for Marx’s slogan: “the workers 
have no country." I am firmly internationalist. From this point of view, 
I am generally opposed to dismembering of existing states and to 
artificial “independence” supported by chauvinism or tradition. We need 
to abolish nationalist oppressions from above through internationalist 
activity, and not from below by the regional nationalisms. I strongly 
regret the disappearance of the ex-Yugoslavia, and I do not at all 
believe that the existence of some ten states in its place constitutes 
progress. Certainly, the colonial empires had to collapse. During the 
Algerian national liberation war, I supported the Algerians. I also 
supported Vietnamese against the USA army. But this epoch is basically 
over. Today, communist internationalism comes first!

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