Trump

Alain Badiou

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781509536092
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política

The election of Donald Trump as president of the United States sent shockwaves across the globe. How was such an outcome even possible? In two lectures given at American universities in the immediate aftermath of the election, the leading French philosopher Alain Badiou helps us to make sense of this extraordinary occurrence. He argues that Trump's victory was the symptom of a global crisis made up of four characteristics: the triumph of a brutal form of global capitalism, the decomposition of the established political elite, the growing frustration and disorientation that many people feel today, and the absence of a compelling alternative vision. It was in this context that Trump could emerge as a new kind of political figure that was both inside and outside the political order, a member of the Republican Party who, at the same time, represents something outside the system. The progressive political challenge now is to create something new that offers people a real choice, a radical alternative based on principles of universality and equality.

This concise account of the meaning of Trump should be read by everyone who wants to understand what is happening in our world today.

Two Weeks after the Election of Trump
Tufts University, Boston

What I’d like to do this evening is to provoke some philosophical meditations on the election of Trump. In itself, the election of Trump is not a great philosophical event. But it’s a very interesting fact on many levels. Is the election of Trump a true disaster, the beginning of the end of democratic freedom, the triumph of racism, sexism, and social violence? Certainly it is a dark day for freedom, justice, and equality. I understand that, on the level of public opinion, many people feel anxious and depressed, that they are afraid for the future of the United States and finally of the world itself. I understand too that they are angry, that they oppose everything that the new president represents for them: violence, vulgarity, corruption, and contempt for the difficult lives of millions of people. I am on the side of revolts in the streets by thousands of young men and women. But, in some sense, we must affirm that Donald Trump in himself is something obscure and not really interesting. We must get beyond our anxiety and reach a point of calm, of determination, of lucidity. After all, Trump is like a blemish on the face of the contemporary political world. Trump must be interpreted as an ugly symptom of the global situation, not only of the United States but of the world, the world in which we are living today. So I propose to take the election of Donald Trump as the point of departure for a meditation concerning our living world today. I propose, if you like, to reconstruct Trump as a philosophical category – which is a strong transformation. I propose to construct Trump in three stages: first, the global situation of the contemporary world; second, the political crisis of what is called “democracy” – that is, a form of state power in the Western world, the world of which the United States, Europe, and Japan are the centre; and, third, the choices with which we are confronted, the answer to the old question: now that Trump is in power, what is to be done?

(I, 1) First, the overall situation of today is in fact – it’s obvious, but we must emphasize the point – a complete victory of globalized capitalism. This has many implications. First, monstrous inequalities, of which I offer only one example: today, 264 people have the same amount of money as a total of 7 billion other people. It’s probably the most important difference in the situation of humanity since the beginning of humanity’s existence. The difference is much greater than during the times of aristocratic power and absolute monarchy. It’s a real difference, since it results in two completely different worlds, two completely different visions of life itself; as you know, moreover, the fundamental law of capitalism, namely the process of capital’s concentration, operates at an accelerated pace today. So maybe tomorrow it will be not 264 people but only two or three. We would have a sort of financial democracy transformed into a financial kingdom. This is the first point, and it is very important, because it is not entirely visible from the perspective of the West. It’s an obvious truth, however, in Africa, in Asia, in Latin America, even if it’s not completely obvious here. But if we want to understand the situation here, we must understand the situation of the world as a whole. It’s a mistake to examine only our situation without thinking about the relationship between it and the situation of the world as a whole.

(I, 2) The second point: what is the “contemporary subject”? What is the human being of today? What are the possible choices of a contemporary subject? I think that the contemporary subject has in fact four possibilities in today’s globalized capitalism. The first is to be an owner, a landlord, a capitalist. The second is to be at once an employee and a consumer – that is, to sell your labour and to buy commodities; to be in the labour market, on the one hand, and in the great marketplace of products, on the other. So the contemporary subject is between two markets, the market of labour, of jobs, and the market of products. This second position is that of many millions of people today. The third possibility is to be a poor peasant, a truly poor peasant, in Africa for example, perched at the limit of existence, of the very possibility of life. And the forth possibility is to be nothing at all, neither a consumer nor an employee nor a peasant nor a capitalist. Probably 3 billion people today are in that position, and they are wandering through the world, searching for a place to live. This point is about the distribution of subjectivities and about how people live today; we must see this point clearly.

(I, 3) The third point, which is the consequence of the previous two, is that the unity of all this, what constitutes it as a world in some sense, is in fact money. It’s the circulation of money that is the true definition of this world. This is the fundamental point to be derived from the monstrous unity of all these contradictory determinations. And the point is probably very important today, although I can agree to call it a hypothesis: it’s a major challenge to understand why, on the one hand, you have so many people without jobs who are wandering through the world trying to find work while, on the other, you have long working weeks for all the people who do have jobs. It would be reasonable to create a working week that would be appropriate to this situation. But that’s not what has happened. In my country, many presidential candidates are proposing to lengthen the working week, from 35 hours to 40 hours. And we have 10 percent of the population in France – not in Africa or in Asia – who are without jobs and who are wandering through the country trying to find something to do. And so, probably, capitalism itself at this point is not able to provide the totality of the world’s population with jobs. What we have here is a sort of limit of the capitalist possibility. Capitalism is incapable of producing jobs for everyone because, as you know, capitalists give work to people only if they expect to make a profit. It’s a complex but obvious law of capitalism that profit is linked to the working week: you must have a long working week to make a profit. So maybe the most important point in the world today is that this enormous mass of wandering people searching for a place to live cannot be forced under the domination of globalized capitalism. In other words, from the perspective of globalized capitalism itself, we have today a surplus of humanity – a surplus of people without any destination, without any reason to exist.

(I, 4) Another point of a different nature concerning the global situation today is the constant affirmation that there exists only one way, only one future – namely, the continuation of globalized capitalism. There can be no global idea that affirms the possibility of something else. It is quite striking that the very nature of propaganda today is not to say that capitalism is a great thing: it suffices to say that there exists no other possibility. In fact, capitalism is the first social organization in which it is possible to say that this organization is very bad; making that statement has no consequences. In the old world, for example in monarchy, we were not allowed to say that the king is horrible; the stability of the world implied that we must be in favour of the world as it is; this subjectivity is really a subjectivity of faith in the world as it is. This is not the case in capitalism. In capitalism, it is sufficient to say that nothing else is possible. It was the position of Churchill himself, who said “it’s not a good system, but it’s the best” – the best, with the possibility that it could be still very bad. And so the nonexistence of another way, another strategy for the life of humanity as such, is a very important point today; it’s a world that is very different from the world before, because another way existed between 1917 (that is, the Russian Revolution) and the beginning of the 1980s. Naturally, we must discuss the validity of this other way – that’s another problem – but you have two possibilities, both on a global scale. There could be many discussions concerning these two possibilities and the relationship between them; it might be asked whether the communist hypothesis is really acceptable, and so on. But there existed two possibilities, and the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Two Days after the Election of Trump
• Two Weeks after the Election of Trump
• End User License Agreement