This blog summarises French philosopher Alain Badiou’s important book A New Dawn for Politics. In it, Badiou criticises Western democracy for acting as the central force sustaining a corrupt and unjust global order. This blog can be read in conjunction with a previous blog on Noah Chomsky whose ideas mirror those of Badiou.

Capitalist Modernity as the Contemporary Neolithic

Since history began, human beings have been living in hierarchical societies ruled by an elite, preserved by a minority (who benefit from the arrangement), while subjugating a majority. This basic form has persisted since pre-history. According to Badiou, contemporary capitalist modernity is simply the latest in a long line of variations on this basic social template that has been with us since the Neolithic. Such a system, by its very nature, can only be maintained through violence and brings with it “monstrous inequalities, military massacres, and false and dangerous ideologies and understandings of the world.”

To illustrate his point, Badiou reminds us that today 10 per cent of the world’s population owns 86 percent of global wealth, while 50 per cent own absolutely nothing. That leaves 40 per cent of people worldwide who own 14 per cent of global wealth. This “middle class” is largely concentrated in the ‘Western’ world and is now, Badiou argues, the decisive class upholding and defending the current global capitalist structure. Western ‘democratic’ elections are the key mechanism for legitimising not only hierarchies within individual democratic nation states, but also the ‘Western free market democratic order’ as a whole.

And what is this ‘Western democratic order’? First, Western democracies constitute the core of a global capitalist system that also includes (and requires) kleptocracies, repressive immigration policies, and a global military complex to maintain the system. Second, as Stephan Lessenich argues in his book Living Well at Others’ Expense, the ‘Western democratic order’ is both an extractive and externalising system. According to Lessenich, capitalist societies cannot – or so far have not – survived without the existence of an “exterior” from which they can both extract the labour and natural resources they need for growth, and into which they can externalise the social and environmental consequences of their consumption.

The extractive, externalising, and exclusionist nature of the system includes, of course, its treatment of people. Western ‘democratic’ countries, through border security, visa regulations and immigration controls, recruit “skilled” labour and keep out “unskilled” and “unproductive” migrants, who are increasingly vilified as spongers, terrorists and criminals.

The Conflicted Democratic Middle Class

According to Badiou, the contemporary middle class – upon which both capitalism and the Western democratic order rely – essentially accepts the contemporary form of the Neolithic, including both the blatantly unjust nature of the global system, and the immense concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny oligarchy – but only subject to two conditions.

The first condition, which Badiou calls democratic materialism, is that the material interests and western freedoms of the middle class must be maintained. These freedoms for those living in democracies are not negligible, including as they do freedom from arbitrary arrest, and freedoms of thought, expression, and association.

The second condition the middle-class demands is that a distinction must be maintained between it and the huge masses who have nothing – the 50 per cent. Badiou calls this desperate need to maintain status, conservative materialism. When this status is threatened the ‘Western’ middle class, will largely support or tolerate repressive policies which defend against the terrible “threat” embodied in “the 50 per cent who have nothing”.

Western capitalist states that domesticate the middle class to defend the unjust structures of the contemporary Neolithic in this way are called “democracies”.

Western Parliamentary Cretinism

Badiou argues that this understanding of western democracy as the middle class shoring up and legitimising both national and global capitalist hierarchies is the only clear explanation of the democratic structure of modern states – namely the two-party system of Left and Right. This Left-Right divide reflects the ambivalence of the middle class, caught between fear of being reduced to the ranks of the ‘nothings and nobodies’ of the global 50 percent, and the acceptance of living within unjust structures which concentrate vast wealth and power in the hands of a few.

Neither Left nor Right aim to dismantle this underlying structure. Instead, both act as what Marx called “the two families of Capital’s middle managers”. And because they are middle managers, western democratic politics requires an administrative state whose primary purpose is to maintain the status quo – not a political system (and civil service) with the capacity to lead social transformation.

Western democratic politics, Badiou argues, has therefore assumed the character of Theatre and Farce. Its true aim is the maintenance of the basic Neolithic structure. This in turn requires the promotion of a culture of narcissism to maintain middle class consumerism (the engine of the entire system), the valorisation of the champions of capital such as Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg as role models, and the diminishing of the immense suffering that the system is causing.

Participation in elections, Badiou asserts, simply divides the electorate – the middle class – between rival political parties that both promise to protect their material interests and personal status while leaving the underlying structures unmentioned and unchanged. Such ‘democracy’ amounts to nothing more than parliamentary cretinism – a politics of theatre and impotence.

Exiting the Neolithic

Contemporary political turmoil – including Trumpism in the US and the rise of far-right politics in Europe – can be understood within Badiou’s framing. The vying factions in current western political factionalism assert that only two paths are available – either the affirmation that there is nothing better than this liberal and ‘democratic’ order, or the reactive desire for a return to ‘tradition’, as espoused by Trump and the far right. Neither of these options truly challenges the fundamental structure of the Neolithic. Both can accommodate themselves to current global inequalities and concentrations of wealth.

Badiou also notes that the current political turmoil in western democracies is not threatening capitalism. On the contrary, capitalism in its full global expansion, (made possible by the collapse of communism in China and the USSR), is doing wonderfully well. Crises and wars? Those are part of its particular mode of development. But capitalism itself is not in crisis – although it is driving societies, nature, and the climate into crises.

Instead, Badiou argues, we need a true politics that fights on three fronts – against the revival of fascisms (and dreams of restoring ‘the old order’), against false promises of perpetual economic growth and shiny techno-futures – and for a methodical and urgent exit from the Neolithic. This third option, he notes, is currently not available.

“The real task before us,” Badiou writes, “is to make a methodical and urgent exit from the Neolithic – this contemporary order which values only competition and hierarchy and tolerates the misery of billions of human beings”. Focusing on this objective would herald the dawn of a new politics.

On Non-Violence

Badiou is regarded as the leading philosopher of communism. Readers of this blog will know that I regard communist leaders of the twentieth century, including Mao, as among history’s greatest mass murderers. I do not share Badiou’s enthusiasm for communism, but his adherence to revolutionary action does raise a critical issue.

Just as history can be seen as the persistence of a single hierarchical social model which humans have lived under since the Neolithic, so too can it be seen as repeated attempts to escape from this unjust and violent order. From early Christianity to the barbarisms of twentieth century communism, history records countless failed attempts to exit the Neolithic.

As my colleague John Barry has argued, the transition to a more sustainable and just global order will require confrontation and conflict as much as consensus. But agitating, even non-violently, for structural reforms of a Neolithic system – and its attendant social institutions of economics, politics, technology, religion, gender, education which are built upon structural violence – will provoke violence.

This points to the centrality of non-violence in exiting the Neolithic. One of the aims of the exit from the Neolithic is to decommission the structural violence within existing social institutions. The Neolithic is a structure that is an engine for the generation of violence, and for the promotion of disordered minds. As history and current events show, violence only serves to empower the violent.  Or as Hannah Arendt warned, “The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is to a more violent world.”

An ethics and practice of non-violence will be essential to transitioning to a more just and sustainable global order.