THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.3, ISSUE#11, SEPT-NOV/2020
Alain Badiou, Metapolitics, trans. Jason Barker, (London: Verso, 2011).
Is there any mistaking the fact that we are living in a moment of political instability and uncertainty? Across the globe, there is a battle being waged between workers fed up with neoliberal austerity and the tiny fraction of humanity that benefits from the gush-up economy, despite the crisis it breeds. Such unrest and anger are marked by the character of the “riot,” which distinguishes our era of mass movement from the history of organized labor strikes, or the kind of political disruptions directed by “traditional” vanguard parties on the revolutionary left—despite the participation, on some level, of both of those elemental forces in current anti-austerity insurgences. The recent uprisings in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, among others, reveal the extent to which such disruptions are needed to bring attention to an undying racism and police brutality. Indeed, as Joshua Clover argues, the riot is a “collective action” that “features participants with no necessary kinship except their dispossession,” and which speaks to both the waning level of organized labor in the struggle against capital while opening up a new realm of thinking through capital-labor relations in the era of globalization. The dialectic between riot as “circulation” and the moment of the organization of capitalist reproduction is both useful in understanding the prospects for emergent anti-capitalist collectivity, and yet it complicates the possibility of moving beyond the impasse of the riot as an ephemeral moment in the longue durée of class struggle against capital’s resilience.[i]
This complication is reinforced by the fact that the ruling class has unfastened the toolbox of fascist oppression to quell worldwide rebellion, as we witnessed on US streets in recent weeks. Faced with the unstoppable crisis in capitalist globalization, repressive apparatuses have been intensified in order to suppress forms of resistance against the systemic dehumanization of marginalized populations across the globe, particularly workers of color who are the most hard-hit by the profit-driven system. And while racism has always been utilized as a tool for maintaining capital’s hegemonic rule, recent examples of militarized police terror and its exoneration by the equally-racist legal system in the US demonstrates the extent to which the mechanism of “mediated tolerance” that had been intrinsic to capitalist “democracy” has given way to the inevitable paradigm of neo-fascism, particularly as a way to weaken the potentiality for multiracial class-unity in the fight-back against deepening levels of inequality and institutionalized violence. The explicit counter-revolutionary forces are complimented by established “liberal” power, which has co-opted the language of opposition as a means to drive workers into the arms of reformist idealism, another level of the counter-revolution that is utilized to circumvent the possibility of revolutionary options beyond the pale of capital’s dominion. The range of so-called “radical” intellectuals in the current era also fall victim to the endgame of state-monitored reformism. As Liza Featherstone reports, from Judith Butler to Donna Haraway to Noam Chomsky, these “radicals” have donated to democratic party candidates from Kamla Harris to Bernie Sanders, “as if the postmodern academics are determined to prove that the anti-intellectuals and the old-fashioned Marxist dudes are right.” Featherstone’s point is that, beyond the writing desk, political containment rules the day.[ii]
Can you blame people (even Chomsky!) for embracing the figments of reform and the scraps offered by the liberal bosses in this moment of crisis? This is where Alain Badiou’s emphasis on developing a “new” dialect of revolt that operates outside the boundaries of political self-satisfaction and the stalemate of the counter-revolution might provide us with a refreshing insight into the potentiality of struggle beyond the status-quo. That is, one crucial lesson we can take from Badiou’s Metapolitics is the idea of revolutionary change is not an outdated, archaic idea, as many on the current Left would have it; rather, Badiou argument is that the contours of emancipatory politics need to be reshaped “as a prescription of a possibility in rupture of what exists.”[iii] In order to characterize the ruptures in history that may lead to the undoing of capital’s containment of “politics,” what underlies Badiou’s notion of the “event,” what is needed is a politicization of political thought itself, or what Badiou argues is a dialect that can re-articulate the necessity of radical collectivity in order to formulate a theory of revolutionary praxis against the futility of liberalism, which dominates our political horizon and clouds the possibilities inscribed in mass movements today:
More precisely, we must ask the question that without a doubt, constitutes the great enigma of the century: why does the subsumption of politics, either through the form of the immediate bond (the masses) or the mediate bond (the party) ultimately give rise to bureaucratic submission and the cult of the State? Why do the most heroic uprisings, the most persistent wars of liberation, the most indisputable mobilisations in the name of justice and liberty end… in opaque statist constructions wherein none of the factors that gave meaning to their historical genesis is decipherable? Those who imagine themselves being able to settle these questions… have understood once and for all that to strive for nothing beyond what is has always been the surest way not to fail. (70-1)
Indeed, what is useful here is Badiou’s insistence that the reliance on “the system,” which in the US context means things like the corrupt legal structure, the “lesser-evil” Democrats, and mostly all electoral political outlets, will not bring about the over-celebrated and imaginary post-capital or post-racial moment. Indeed, the long counter-revolution in the post-68’ era has stifled our ability to think beyond the contours of political statism and its reflective limits in the guise of reformism, lesser-evil acquiescence, and the gratification provided by the “occupation-for-occupation-sake” prototypes.
To what extent, then, does Badiou’s Metapolitics enable a reconceptualization of revolutionary thought in the contemporary era of crisis capital? In particular, how might his insights compliment the struggle against racism and the intensified police state today? Theoretically, Badiou hopes to provide us with the necessary political tools to devise strategies of resistance in this period of systemic counter-revolution in order to move beyond political impotence. In subsequent works, Badiou in fact attempt to reclaim “communism” as an ideological principle and guide for the reorganization of collective action.[iv] And yet, this very move is conspicuous of the post-Marxist trepidation of making explicit gestures toward materialist claims associated with so-called “vulgar” Marxism. Specifically, while attempting to extract a philosophy of militancy from the bonds of managed “politics,” Badiou also sees the example of the revolutionary party as a delimiting formation in order to reclaim space for revolutionary subjectivity. The revolutionary party mediates rather than exceeds its “bond” with the state as the outcome of political transcendence, as Badiou writes:
Ultimately, what true politics undermines is the illusion of the bond, whether it be trade unionist, parliamentary, professional or convivial. Organized in anticipation of surprises, diagonal to representations, experimenting with lacunae, accounting for infinite singularities, politics is an active thought that is both subtle and dogged; one from which the material critique of all forms of preventative correlation proceeds, and which, operating on the edge of that void, calls on homogeneous multiplicities against the heterogeneous order of the State which claims to prevent their appearance. (75)
In his search, in other words, for a “politics unbound,” Badiou deconstructs the classical Marxist emphasis on class struggle via the “vanguard” party formation by offering instead a non-class identity based upon intellectual opposition as the driving force of revolutionary transformation. While not a direct assault on “orthodox” Marxism, Badiou’s reformulation of political speech unfolds thoroughly in the realm of ideological critique, cleansed of its relation to class determination as the guiding force of collective action. Agency here is textualized, a discursive move, instead of a struggle that emerges out of the capital-worker dichotomy. This post-Marxist turn leads Badiou elsewhere to declare in fact that “all emancipatory politics must put an end to the model of the party… in order to affirm a politics ‘without party,’ and yet at the same time without lapsing into the figure of anarchism.”[v]
Though not subjected to the kind of “left-wing melancholia” that affects much of what passes as post-Marxist discourse, with its requiem for the failures of state-socialism and “Stalinist” party formations as the basis for relinquishing the need for a revolutionary alternative to capitalism, Badiou’s search for a “new” materialism recalls the type of aporetic disaffection associated with postmodernism and its plotting of the semiotic desire for emancipation as the central drama of revolutionary activity. At the same time, this is not to say that Badiou’s textual engagement is simply an armchair exercise, as his activism around migrant issues and anti-racism reflects his demand for a political praxis to combat the tide of neo-fascism and its concomitant effects in contemporary France. And yet, while his intention is to manifest a political philosophy to ensure that the wave of militancy on the part of workers fighting against deepening austerity and state-based violence across the globe is not subsumed by state “politics,” it is still unclear from the point of view of “metapolitical thought” how this radical autonomy will play out as praxis beyond such conceptual moves and its discursive overlays.
That said, let us end with an analysis of how Badiou’s Metapolitics might be applied to the current era of the mass uprisings against racism, the fight-back against mass carcereality and imperialist war, or even the collective opposition to globalization and the racist tactics that the capitalist class uses to maintain and control access to markets, resources, and southern labor we see occurring across the globe. As Badiou argues in another context, it is through the image of the “historical riot” that we can gauge the unfolding of things to come, as a rupture of the ordinary space of political impossibility.[vi] Through such a lens, we can say that the Ferguson Uprising in particular was not simply an individual display of rage against the injustices of incessant police violence and intimidation; it also broadened the compass of systemic racism implanted in institutions like the magnified prison-industrial complex, which has expanded since the 1970’s under the regime of flexible accumulation. Did Ferguson materialize a “new” language of revolt, one that can be utilized for building revolutionary consciousness and yet remain “undiluted?” Can we see a trajectory from Ferguson to Minneapolis in terms of the shape of revolt emerging in the context of capitalist catastrophe?
What is clear is that Ferguson was not transitory in nature; rather we should think of the Uprising as a symptom of the marked racist character of neoliberal capital in which previously “concealed” forms of violent subjugation are now turning outward in order to deal with interminable crisis. For we can see in a place like Baltimore or Detroit or Cleveland how decades-long de-industrialization brought immense rollbacks in social services across the board, cutbacks that hit Black workers the hardest, but also had a destructive impact on the working class overall. We can also see how puppets of the ruling class were quick to denounce the protests, since they defied the limits of tolerable forms of political engagement (Badiou’s “impotence” model at work here). While such use of structural and ideological violence is nothing terribly new in the US, the state’s counter-attack was an exercise in tactical warfare not only against the immediate uprisings and activists involved in them, but a totalizing exposé on how it will respond to imminent revolts that seek militant means to end systemic inequities, such as the kind normalized in Ferguson, but across communities of color overall, as the recent protests incited by the murders of Ahmaud Arberry, George Floyd and Breonna Taylor also reveal.
And yet, did Ferguson result in the kind of political rupture that Badiou argues is necessary to detach politics from the precepts of statist management? Without a doubt, Ferguson laid the foundation for Black Lives Matter, a movement that from the start worked within the ideological limits of reformism, catering to the demands of liberals and political moderates, all in the hopes of clearing a path toward racial justice—yet within the realm of the system itself. Here is something that can be extracted from Badiou’s reading of the metapolitical phenomenon: while Ferguson exposed us to a “new” language of revolt against historic racism, Black Lives Matter channeled this vernacular into mainstream politics, thus delimiting the capabilities intrinsic to insurrections that desire to maneuver themselves outside of representative authority. At the time, it seemed that Black Lives Matter was becoming a sort of negation of Ferguson-style militancy which resulted from a capitulation toward liberalism and statist politics, disengaging the possibilities inscribed in the insurrectional “event.” The question is whether its recent manifestation as the beacon of the anti-racist uprisings will end up inhibiting our ability to move beyond mediated forms of political liberation, or if we are in the midst of a truly revolutionary upheaval, albeit in its embryonic stage.
Ultimately, we are still in the midst of the long counter-revolution against radical movements via “new” combinations of both structural and ideological violence that in the end are central to the control over the international working class and the safeguarding of accumulation on a mass scale, managed by a small but powerful transnational capitalist class. On the one hand, the inevitable outcome of the long counter-revolution is revealed in the current turn toward neo-fascism, which is growing across the globe. Consequently, it is no surprise that the capitalist class sees variations of the prison-industrial complex as the most vital and lucrative undertaking today, as profits from prison labor skyrocket into the billions with more and more corporations getting into the mix while being buffered by Wall Street investment firms. In fact, to paraphrase Chris Hedges, as the crisis of capital widens, triggering in its wake further economic deprivation both in the US and globally, we will undoubtedly witness the externalization of the prison-industrial complex and its violent means of oppressing populations that resist oligarchic control over all means of social life, a process that can only come about as a result of a neo-fascist operation that we see unfolding before us. Can there be any doubt that racist police terror and the complicity of the judicial system, the mass incarceration of mostly black and brown workers but poor whites as well, and the consolidated command of wealth are not symptoms of the most recent form of fascism, with the US planting the seeds for its imminent blossoming worldwide? Whether it’s Ferguson-style fascism and its overt utilization of racist police terror, imperialist war for profit, or even the explicit neo-fascist configurations that we see unfolding across the globe, those of us compelled to move beyond reformism need to emphasize how the system will eventually drag down the entire working class, while we also put anti-racist, anti-sexist and anti-capitalist politics at the forefront of our concerns. And while Badiou pushes us to think through these complex and uncertain times, “the collective desire for collectivity,” as Jodi Dean puts it, is rising against political quietism and consensus as we face the formidable enemy of neo-fascism and its racist consequences.[vii]
In the final analysis, the question that Badiou might leave us to contemplate is this: is total insurrection without organization possible against state-based violence, exercised on behalf of the capitalist class in its desire to maintain hegemony? The answer to this question is essential to outline in order to find adequate and sustainable modes of enduring struggle in the current era of crisis. Our collective desire to materialize such models may even lead to the discovery of unobserved forms of revolutionary solidarity as a way toward the “new” multiplicity of historical transformation against the authoritarian deluge.
[i] Joshua Clover, Riot Strike Riot: The New Era of Uprisings, (London: Verso, 2016) p.16.
[ii] Liza Featherstone, “Radical Academics for the Status Quo.” https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/12/radical-academics-judith-butler-kamala-harris-donation
[iii] Alain Badiou, Metapolitics, trans. Jason Barker, (London: Verso, 2011) p.24. For convenience, I will cite in-text for the rest of the article.
[iv] Alain Badiou, “Our Contemporary Impotence,” https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/our-contemporary-impotence
[v] Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis, trans. David Macey and Steve Corcoran. (London: Verso, 2008) p.155.
[vi] See Alain Badiou, The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings, trans. Gregory Elliot. (London: Verso, 2012.)
[vii] See Jodi Dean, The Communist Horizon. (London: Verso, 2012).
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