Foreword
The future of an alternative

Martin Duru and Martin Legros

[W]e are not children to be fed on the thin gruel of “economic” politics alone; we want to know everything that others know, we want to learn the details of all aspects of political life and to take part actively in every single political event. In order that we may do this, the intellectuals must talk to us less of what we already know and tell us more about what we do not yet know and what we can never learn from our factory and “economic” experience, namely, political knowledge. You intellectuals can acquire this knowledge, and it is your duty to bring it to us in a hundred- and a thousand-fold greater measure than you have done up to now; and you must bring it to us, not only in the form of discussions, pamphlets, and articles (which very often – pardon our frankness – are rather dull), but precisely in the form of vivid exposures of what our government and our governing classes are doing at this very moment in all spheres of life. Devote more zeal to carrying out this duty.

This appeal to the intellectuals to take responsibility for freeing their fellow citizens from the domination of “economic politics” and for enlightening them, through “vivid exposures,” about what it is possible to change in all spheres of life dates from . . . 1902. It was written by Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (a.k.a. Lenin), in a pamphlet entitled What Is to Be Done?,¹ a work that left a lasting mark on history since, a number of years before the 1917 revolution and the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power, Lenin theorized in it the idea of the vanguard revolutionary party.

More than a century later, this appeal has acquired new relevance and resonance. Aren’t we once again, even if in very different ways, prisoners of a politics that reduces everything to economics? Don’t we feel the need for a political knowledge of things, which would enable us to take part in a different, and better, way in the events of our times, instead of submitting to them as a destiny? And don’t we hope that the intellectuals will abandon the abstract arguments of their “pamphlets and articles” and challenge the direction in which the governments of the day are taking our history? In 1902, at the time those lines were written, the future was an open question. The democratic and industrial revolution begun in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was only just starting to take hold in France and England, while Germany and Russia, roiling with turmoil, were still imperial regimes. Liberals, conservatives, and socialists competed for the European people’s votes, while the communist movement was gradually developing by asserting its independence from social democracy. This was moreover one of Lenin’s key questions in What Is to Be Done? To counter the power of capitalism, which approach should be opted for: reform or revolution? Should the workers’ movement be left to organize itself on its own or should revolutionary ferment be introduced into it from outside, through a party with a genuine political project? In any case, no one at the time suspected that the continent would be engulfed in two world wars, an unprecedented financial crisis, and the growing power of fascist, Nazi, and communist totalitarianisms . . .

So, oddly enough, here we are, a little more than a century later, after the short, tragic twentieth century, back at the same questions as Lenin’s. Of course, the Berlin Wall did fall. For a short time, liberal democracy and capitalism even appeared to have won out for good, thereby fueling the over-hasty theory of an “end of history.” But now an acute sense of a radical crisis of democracy and capitalism has returned, raising the question of their long-term survival. Even if the totalitarian systems have lost all legitimacy, Lenin’s perplexity in the face of the future’s uncertainty in 1902 has become ours again. Even the hypothesis of communism, which had seemed to be completely dead, rendered invalid by the fiasco of its historical realization, is regaining currency in the intellectual sphere and within the protest movements that are springing up all over the world. Reform or revolution? Capitalism, socialism, or even communism? It’s as if the wheel of history had begun to spin again: rien ne va plus, all bets are off, we have no idea where we are going. Hasn’t liberal democracy been shaken to its very core by the impact of capitalism, and isn’t capitalism undermined from within by the power of finance? Hasn’t politics lost all capacity to guide history? Does the communist hypothesis, stripped of its totalitarian trappings, offer a credible solution? Or can democracy reinvent itself to meet the challenges of globalization?

To tackle these issues head-on, we sought out two major figures of the contemporary philosophical scene: Alain Badiou, the leader of the current movement for a return to the communist idea, and Marcel Gauchet, the thinker of liberal democracy. Even though they seemed destined to cross each other’s path and exchange ideas, they had oddly enough never met before. No one, up to now, had suggested the idea of a substantive dialogue to them – which goes to show that real opponents face off too rarely on today’s intellectual scene. And that real debates are scarce, too often avoided.

Alain Badiou no longer needs any introduction. Born in Morocco in 1937 to a traditionally socialist family, a graduate of the École Normale Supérieure, influenced by Sartre, Althusser, and Lacan, among others, he was indelibly marked by the events of May ’68 and the Cultural Revolution in China – which led him to head up a Maoist group, the Marxist-Leninist Union of Communists of France (UCF-ML). As a professor at Vincennes and later at the École Normale Supérieure, where he now teaches a seminar, he developed a demanding philosophical system, set out in his two major works, Being and Event and Logics of Worlds (both published by Éditions du Seuil, in 1988 and 2006 respectively, and in English translation by Continuum in 2005 and 2009 respectively). Breaking with some of his contemporaries who proclaim the end of metaphysics, Alain Badiou has sought to re-establish the discourse on being – what is traditionally called “ontology” – on the basis of mathematics, and set theory in particular. He has also proposed a new way of connecting the concepts of event, subject, and truth. A subject, for him, is someone who is faithful to a foundational event, which brings about a truth capable of orienting life (a truth of a political, scientific, artistic, or amorous nature). Apart from his academic works, which are studied all over the world and have helped, particularly in France, to revive interest in metaphysics, he has in the past 15 years or so become known to a wider public through polemical essays on contemporary politics, such as his short book The Meaning of Sarkozy (Lignes, 2007; English translation, Verso, 2008), which met with a resounding success. Generally speaking, in connection with his longstanding Maoist heritage, he stresses the need to revive “the communist hypothesis,” the only one, in his view, that can offer a real alternative to the “parliamentary capitalism” to which democracy has been reduced. Along with other figures on the far left, such as Antonio Negri, Jacques Rancière, and Slavoj Žižek, he has participated in many conferences on the concept of “communism,” which have met with an enthusiastic response among young people.

Marcel Gauchet’s itinerary was very different. Born into a working-class milieu in 1946 in Poilley (Lower Normandy), and a graduate of the École Normale des Instituteurs [a prestige college for elementary school teacher training] in Saint-Lô, this self-educated man resumed his studies in the heady atmosphere of May ’68, when he was introduced to political thought under the auspices of two pillars of the “Socialism or Barbarism” group, Cornelius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort. In little journals such as Textures or Libre he dedicated himself to the rediscovery of the political [le politique] and of democracy, in opposition to the hegemony of Marxism and the denial of totalitarian oppression, which prevailed at the time among the French intelligentsia. After a first book co-written with Gladys Swain, La Pratique de l’esprit humain [The Practice of the Human Spirit] (Gallimard, 1980, new edition 2007), in which he took apart the theories put forward by Michel Foucault in his The History of Madness in the Classical Age, he published a highly controversial book in 1985 (English translation, Princeton University Press, 1999), The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion, which viewed Christianity as the “religion of the exit from religion.” Since then, he has been attempting to think Western modernity as the advent of autonomy on both the individual level, with the rise of human rights, and the collective level, with the emergence of the political form of the democratic nation-state. After becoming editor-in-chief of the journal Le Débat and director of studies at EHESS [Écoles des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales] in the Centre de recherches politiques Raymond-Aron, he began a major undertaking, L’Avènement de la démocratie [The Advent of Democracy] (three volumes of which have already been published by Gallimard). At the same time, he paid constant attention to the new pathologies of contemporary democracy, in particular in La Démocratie contre elle-même [Democracy Against Itself] (Gallimard, 2002). With the warning he issued in 1980 – Les Droits de l’homme ne sont pas une politique [Human Rights Are Not a Politics] – he was one of the first to show that the threats hanging over the democracies are no longer outside, in external enemies seeking to destroy them, but within themselves, in the perversion of their own principles. Democracy, in his view, has become incapable of governing itself as a result of sanctifying its citizens’ independence at the expense of the sense of the collective.

Badiou versus Gauchet. There was something intriguing about the match right from the start. People aghast at Badiou’s constant, glowing references to the Cultural Revolution and Maoism and skeptical about or frankly hostile to the very idea of a revival of the communist idea could look forward eagerly to seeing him pitted against one of the most preeminent theoreticians and proponents of democracy. Conversely, people who are of the opinion that thinkers of anti-totalitarianism like Marcel Gauchet have paved the way for a re-legitimation of the neoliberalism that is partly to blame for the current crisis could also rub their hands in glee at the thought of seeing him debate one of the most consistent and harsh critics of contemporary liberalism. As both these public figures also have a reputation for being real fighters, capable of battling it out with their ideological opponents without flinching, the “fight” promised to be exciting. It didn’t disappoint, even if, as you’ll see, it took us completely by surprise.

Originally, the two thinkers were supposed to meet only once, in the context of Philosophie Magazine’s special edition, entitled “Philosophers and Communism,” which came out in March 2014. The intensity of the first encounter prompted us to propose that they continue the disputatio, and they both immediately agreed. In the end, they met on three separate occasions, for almost three hours each time, and in three successive places with highly symbolic significance: first, the headquarters of the French Communist Party on the Place du Colonel-Fabien in Paris, a futuristic building put up by the Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer between 1966 and 1971; second, the Lutetia, a luxury hotel where the actors of globalized capitalism now stay whenever they’re in Paris; and finally the Éditions Gallimard, a Mecca of intellectualism, where, just for the record, one of Alain Badiou’s manuscripts was once rejected . . .

What were we struck by during these three sessions? The atmosphere and the tone, for starters. There had been two pitfalls to fear. First, the avoidance of debate, where the two philosophers would just sit there glaring at each other, presenting their respective points of view mechanically without comparing and contrasting them. And, at the other extreme, the stifling of the debate by a spirit of polemics, with outrageous caricatures, insults, and ad hominem attacks into the bargain. The match had promised to be a tough, head-on one, and it was, in terms of its content, but, in terms of its form, it took place in an exemplary atmosphere of openness and courtesy, not without a certain cordiality even – there was a lot of hearty laughter – although, at the same time, the gulf between the two sparring partners was growing wider and wider.

Aside from the calm atmosphere, what also caught our attention was the shift in the center of gravity of the debate. We had thought the debate would revolve around the past, around the meaning of the communist experience in the twentieth century and whether it was essentially totalitarian or not. That crucial issue was naturally dealt with, rigorously and abundantly. Faced with Marcel Gauchet, for whom the respect of pluralism is one of the great lessons that must be learned from the totalitarian period, Alain Badiou had to acknowledge that he “[wasn’t] sure whether the problem of enemies [could] be resolved in the democratic framework.” Nevertheless, we gradually realized that their real disagreement wasn’t about that. Why? Because as far as both of them are concerned, the issue of totalitarianism is no longer topical. In Marcel Gauchet’s view, historical communism has collapsed for good, and the totalitarian business has folded. In Alain Badiou’s view, Stalinism betrayed and perverted the communist idea by entrusting its realization to the state, and we now need to rediscover the original creative force of the idea. Neither of them thinks totalitarianism in the strong sense of the term will ever come back. The real dangers lie elsewhere. Where? Right here, in the once again gaping conflict between democracy and capitalism. Can democracy regain control over a financialized capitalism that imposes its logic and hegemony all over the world? That’s the bet Gauchet, who hopes to put the economy back under collective control, is making. By “taking capitalism apart,” deconstructing it from within, the political will be in a position to control capitalism’s inner workings and its aberrations. Alain Badiou, on the contrary, thinks that that cause has already been lost, because capital, as his shock phrase has it, is the “big Other of democracy,” and democracy is subjected to it in its very essence. That is where the beating heart of the discussion lies. It also involves two completely different diagnoses of the current world situation.

What kind of world are we living in in these early years of the twenty-first century? Alain Badiou thinks that, after the collapse of the socialist states, we are returning to the normal course of a capitalism driven by a global imperial logic. To which Marcel Gauchet responds that globalization cannot be reduced to the economic dimension alone. As he sees it, globalization brings with it the promise of a “de-imperialized,” “polycentric” world, in which no power, however dominant it may be, can dictate its law any more. In short, the debate gave rise to totally different opinions across the board. And battle lines as clear as they were deep emerged: on the one side, a far-reaching reformist vision that calls for a resurgence of democracy to restrain globalized capitalism, and, on the other, the idea of a radical change that would break with both capitalism and representative democracy. The specter of Lenin is lurking . . . but the very terms of the fundamental choice (reform or revolution?) he set out have been reformulated.

So what is to be done? In their dispute, Alain Badiou and Marcel Gauchet lay out in detail the approaches they each recommend – readers will judge for themselves and perhaps decide between the alternatives offered them. Without judging anything in advance, let’s conclude with one last surprising fact: after they had battled it out over all the issues, our two philosophers ultimately agreed, at the very end of their exchange, to make a deal. Yes, a grand alliance. What did it involve? We’re going to prolong the suspense and just say that the two opponents were able to see that there might be an advantage for each of them in moving ahead together: that the democratic reformist might be in vital need of the communist hypothesis to have a chance to achieve his own ends, and vice versa. In this ultimate agreement, in which Rousseau took over from Lenin as the reference, there was the same desire to restore genuine meaning to politics as the only sphere in which a collective universal can emerge. To believe in politics again, to convince ourselves that we haven’t finished with it: perhaps that, above all, is what we should and can do.

What Is To Be Done?

A Dialogue on Communism, Capitalism, and the Future of Democracy

Foreword
The future of an alternative

Notes