4 — What Does "The Left" Mean Today?

> While waiting for the hypothetical return of a large-scale communist politics, what should our attitude be toward the existing left-identified options? I'm asking you this because people feel a lot of confusion, a lot of weariness, when it comes to the policies imposed on them, and you can't respond to that simply by waving before them the prospect of a revolution in the next few hundred years. Quite simply because everyone only has one life, and in terms of that life, people would like to experience a few tangible political victories from time to time.

I understand that.

> Sometimes — and this is the case with Jacques Rancière, too, whatever the differences between you — you can seem to be extremely critical of the existing political options, whether it's the Invisible Committee or La France insoumise [Unsubdued France], not to mention the public-squares movement that we were talking about earlier… As a result, many people feel very discouraged, and the anger aroused by the situation subsides. People don't know where to expend that political energy.

Note 5

I completely understand that concern. But you see, there's one ineradicable fact. If you go on believing that significant victories in politics can be won in the current context of domination, you'll never get anywhere. You'll never get anywhere because historical experience shows that only one thing is really required of you, which is to think that, on the whole, the existing order is the only one possible. You're not required to think it's good. You may even think it's bad. That's not a problem as long as you actually think, deep down, or indeed subconsciously: "OK, I'll go through the motions of protesting, but there's no alternative, so I need to get a good job in the real world." As a result, the issue of the other alternative is crucial, that's just the way it is. It's crucial because it provides a different definition of what constitutes a political success, including a strictly local one.

Nowadays, to tell the truth, a political success is nothing much. The world order implies that it's just a small concession wrung from the real master. I'm not making light of that, quite the contrary, but I think that what will remain of this small concession will be judged in terms of whether or not it has strengthened the general belief in the possibility of another alternative and given that possibility a boost. As such, there may be what appear to be big concessions extracted from our masters that are ultimately worthless.

That was the case with the record of Mitterrandism, which we really need to examine. The implementation of the Common Program represented major concessions. There was a renationalization of virtually all credit. There were nationalizations of several large conglomerates. It was a fantastic program, actually! Much more far reaching, for example, than the Popular Front's. But, ultimately, what did this victory amount to? It was a Pyrrhic victory, literally. It immediately preceded, by just a few short years, a reverse process, a very rapid process, which began with the liberalization of credit by a Socialist minister.

Note 6

> What's your take on this backtracking by Mitterrand?

From the time it was drafted in the late 1970s, the Common Program of the Socialist and Communist Parties was stuck in the impasse I'm describing. The leftmost idea behind the program (there were quite a few opportunists who didn't even believe in it) was something like this: We're going to change the system from within, with respect to a few important issues, and that way we'll have scored. a crucial point for a later stage. The truth is, they hadn't in the least scored a crucial point, and, as for a later stage, after barely three years in power they went back to liberal dogmas. Because to score such a point, to the extent that it is possible, means imposing something that, in terms of its own development, conflicts explicitly and irrevocably with the established order in its current form. And, in order to do that, you have to work, intellectually, not within the established order that you're trying to subvert with respect to one issue or another, but within the struggle between the two alternatives that I've been talking about since the beginning of our conversation.

What is basically lacking at the present time are intellectuals. People say there are no workers anymore, and so on and so forth. But the workers are elsewhere; they're in China, for example, and overwhelmingly so. This is the first time, I repeat, that they account for 50 percent of the world's population. There *are* workers, even here there are. And some of them, as we know, overwhelmingly abstain from elections, or don't have the right to vote, or vote for the far right, because, in the absence of an active communist alternative, it's the only force that they perceive as being outside the dominant system. We must, and we can, win these workers back over to the new communist cause. It will require activists, and therefore also — especially when genuine politics begins again — intellectuals. But it's precisely they who are lacking. Because an indispensable condition for being an intellectual in politics today is being someone who is really involved with working-class issues, who is able to think and speak with elements of the international proletariat, and who, in so doing, is not afraid of the word "communism." These are absolute criteria. They really are, trust me, Here in particular, but actually all over the world, we've managed to establish the same relationship to the word "communism" as that of the worst Americans on the far right in the 1950s. In other words, it's become an unmentionable word.

> Even the pale-pink Socialist Party candidate in the last French presidential election was called a communist so as to discredit him…

Of course! Knowing that it was a deadly label, which he would therefore have to defend himself against. That's of course a sign of the failure of twentieth-century state communism ... But it's also a sign of considerable ideological and subjective revenge on the part of the principal adversary, which, knowing that it has succeeded in making that word unmentionable, may assume that the only mentionable thing in politics is its own existence, since its own existence has never been challenged except by communist-type revolutions, organizations, and intellectuality. If that word is unmentionable, then what does "Unsubdued France" [La France insoumise, Mélenchon's party] mean? Unsubdued by what order? I recently read that even the Communist Party is thinking of changing its name now, as the wily, cunning, sly fox that the Italian Communist Party has been throughout its existence did long before it.

> The Communist Party hasn't been communist for ages…

Changing its name won't be a great historical event, I agree with you. But it's nevertheless symptomatic of the prevailing parliamentary totalitarianism. Valls [Socialist prime minister, 2014-16] wanted to remove the word "socialist" from the Socialist Party's name. Pierre Laurent (head of the French Communist Party] wants to remove "communist" from the Communist Party. It's really sort of farcical, as you can see. The accursed nature of these words is symptomatic of the fact that, in reality, there is no longer any revolutionary intelligentsia, strictly speaking, today, and maybe even no really progressive intelligentsia.

> Let's go back to what you were saying a moment ago: we lack intellectuals. Could you elaborate on that?

One very recognizable feature of genuinely revolutionary politics throughout its development has been the real, recognized, accepted relationship between intellectuals and a relatively large portion of the popular masses. That's a fundamental feature. It's almost physically recognizable. Take Robespierre, for example, not in the Assembly and the Convention but in the Jacobin Club. Likewise, consider Lenin in 1917 and the years following: he was an intellectual standing at the podium in enormous mass meetings of workers. ‘What you see is a degree of immediate understanding and mutual involvement between people who are intellectuals, who have written major political texts and analyzed the situation, and popular masses who have understood something of that, with intermediaries who explain it, make it come alive, and so on. That's a sure sign that something politically important is happening. It has taken more than two centuries since then for there to be communist intellectuals. Yet, there's a tremendous dearth of them all over the world today, because the people who were particularly affected by "the desire for the West," by inclusion in the ideological reaction of the 1980s, were mainly the intellectuals. It wasn't the workers who were responsible for those people's success. It was the intellectual petty bourgeoisie who adored the "new philosopher" renegades I mentioned a little while ago, because they embodied the intellectual petty bourgeoisie's disavowal of the earlier period, the realization it had come to about the failure of state communisms, and so on. So, it's true that what's lacking, what's scarce, what's in short supply today is an intelligentsia. There has never been a great revolutionary leader who wasn't an intellectual! Even Stalin was forced to assume that identity. When asked who he was, he ended up saying: "I'm an intellectual."

> Even when those kinds of revolutionary intellectuals exist today, establishing a connection with the working classes nevertheless remains a big challenge… The left still has a lot of work to do before it can reconnect with the people.

Look, if there were more of them and if they spoke more … I'm going to tell you something really anecdotal that might sound like bragging. I'm only mentioning it because it's really symptomatic. Almost every day I get stopped on the street by someone, someone who's not an intellectual, I assure you. And who more often than not is clearly from somewhere other than our part of the world. That man, or that woman, has not read my books. Some of them tell me how they found out about me. They saw me on Taddeï a few years ago, they saw me on TV or heard me on the radio, or someone gave them one of my interviews in this or that publication to read, they looked me up — and, yes, this is absolutely true — they very often listened to one or another of the "Contre-courant" programs the two of us do (one of which this book is based on)*, where we give other intellectuals the opportunity to speak. And so they thank me. Really! There they are, and they say: "You're Alain Badiou, aren't you? Well, I'm glad I ran into you because I wanted to thank you."

7 and 8

That's really very telling. Actually, what's terrible is my isolation, What I mean, of course (so that I'm not instantly accused of being paranoid), is "our" isolation, but it's still a very small group Tm talking about. That's the point. Honestly, isolation was not what I wanted. When someone perfectly ordinary in the metro says "Thank you" to me, it's very gratifying, but considering what I've been able to do, considering the present intellectual situation, it's also undeserved in many respects.

Marx, Engels, Lenin, the young Mao, and Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, and Castro were all intellectuals, of course. They started out by trying to organize, to gather together, enough intellectuals, like themselves, to speak in a controlled and intelligible way to other people, to rally ordinary people systemically, in a way that they could hear. Today, the arsenal the powers-that-be have at their command to prevent that type of speech from circulating amounts to a wall of considerable thickness. And that wall is intended to ensure that it doesn't happen, that it can't happen. The aim is to ensure at all costs that the minimal relationship between intellectuals convinced that other political scenarios are possible and ordinary people is ultimately very difficult to establish, Hence the considerable importance to the powers-that-be of having complete control over the media. By extension, anyone like you who gives the appearance of promoting such a connection has to be fired. They're afraid people will find out that something else is possible. They especially don't want it to be found out through their own media outlets. It's already too dangerous for them. Way too dangerous. In a way, they're right to be afraid because I can tell that that kind of speech has an immediate effect on ordinary people. They hear in it a tone they recognize as not being the typical one. It's not the self-addressed speech of an inner circle; it's addressed to them as well. It is clear enough, intelligible enough, simple enough for it to speak to them. That's the problem with the lack of intellectuals, you see. And changing that is a very long and difficult task.

> You mention "ordinary people" and stress the importance of speaking in a way that can reach them again. That was precisely the task La France insoumise set itself in the last presidential election: to overcome the barrier that increasingly keeps the working classes at a remove from politics and to undertake a genuine work of popular education. You've said practically nothing about this: what do you think about this movement?

I haven't spoken about Mélenchon, and deliberately so. I'll tell you why. In no way do I want to be seen as someone who wants to undermine La France insoumise. I don't want to be put in that position. I can certainly understand why young people, workers, people from the Marseille suburbs, and so on voted for Mélenchon. I really can, In fact, that's what my own experience was like: when I was young, as I already mentioned to you, I was a leftwing social democrat. That's how I began, so I can't blame other people for starting out on their own political journey the same way I did! I repeat: since the nineteenth century all the intellectuals who eventually became revolutionary intellectuals began, more or less, in that leftwing social-democratic, or "moderate" communist, milieu. They were always involved in schisms in social democracy. Like Marx and Engels being highly critical of the German Social Democratic Party, like Lenin creating the Bolshevik faction, like Mao by the late 1920s opposing the majority of the Chinese party on crucial issues. A little like Mélenchon, after all, building his organization outside the Socialist Party … The reason I find Mélenchon hard to take and why I don't at all believe he's committed to the project of a different political alternative is his total defense of Mitterrand's legacy. Frankly, that's an awful model! If all it amounts to is a rehash of Mitterrand, well, thanks but no thanks! If, when he says, "We're ready to govern immediately," it's in reference to a model like that, then no, no way. But what I do hope is that, via Mélenchonism, people able to internalize the need and urgency for a new political alternative will start appearing, particularly among the educated youth. I don't think that Mélenchon, by himself and as a movement, is the vehicle for a genuine alternative, but that's not a crucial objection because it's in such opposition parties, even splinter parties, that young people can cut their political teeth, discuss things, meet other intellectuals, and so on. And that's great. Actually, it's an attempt to reconstruct leftwing social democracy, which has always been necessary for the emergence of a new version of communism. After all, with the "Critique of the Gotha Program", our founding fathers, Engels and Marx, were also schismatics of German social democracy. And I myself, having been a schismatic of the SFIO, which is a lot worse, neither can nor want to throw stones at anyone. But nor is my role, my particular usefulness in the current situation, to give my unquestioning blessing to this type of parliamentary escapade. It's of no interest in terms of my own objectives, and I would be of no use in doing so.

In reality, the French parliamentary system has been thrown out of whack, fundamentally, by a gradual blurring of the difference between the parliamentary right and left. Basically, the systemic legitimacy of the existence of the right/ left system, as the illusion of a real choice, disappeared with Hollande, after having taken a beating from Jospin {Socialist prime minister, 1997-2002], who had himself followed in the footsteps of the "second" Mitterrand. When there's this kind of de-legitimation of the right/ left choice, the threats to the existing system build up on the extremes: on the far right, where a revanchist, identity-based, traditionalist current emerges — Trump or Le Pen — but also on the far left, where something might resurface. That's what happened in 2017, and the gang governing us overcame those threats by concocting their own "neither right nor left," or, let's say, their "right and left" catch-all system.

It all worked like a parliamentary coup d'état because, instead of relying on one of the components of the parliamentary system, they manufactured one outside it. As a result, the traditional left and right are now discredited and powerless. This being the case, it is perfectly natural and logical that a new movement, or one regarded as new, should emerge within the parliamentary system, on its leftmost wing. And that's the role Mélenchon is playing right now. The political future is always linked, more or less, to this sort of adventure, even if things only become really serious when the adventure is itself shaped from within by contradictions and becomes more radical by being to some extent part of the struggle between the two alternatives and therefore related to the new communism.