Alain Badiou on the State of Capitalism

From "Is The Word 'Communism' Forever Doomed?" (via):

Just like maybe after 1840, we are now confronted with absolutely cynical capitalism, more and more inspired by the ideas that only work backwards: poor are justly poor, the Africans are underdeveloped, and that the future with no discernable limit belongs to the civilized bourgeoisie of the Western world. All kinds of phenomena from the 19th century reappear, extraordinarily extended forms of misery within these countries themselves. Forever growing in inequality, the radical cut between the people of the working classes, of the uninformed, and the middle class, the complete dissolution of political power in the service of property and capitalist profits. Several years of ratiocination, disorganization of revolutionaries, and the nihilist despair of large portions of the youth, the servility of the large majority of them, and the experience of the base obsequiousness of formal groups in the quest of the contemporary means to establish, re-establish, find new definitions for the Communist hypothesis.

All these characteristics are very close to the political situation which was dominant in Europe in the middle of the 19th century. Which is why the apparent victory of capitalism, occasion to the second sequence of the Communist hypothesis [1917 to 1976], had been, in fact, a very strong reaction, a very strong return to something very old. The politicization of contemporary capitalism is as you see the return to the cynical capitalism of the 19th century. And it is probably why after the 19th century the question is not for us the victory of the Communist hypothesis, but the conditions of its identity. Our problems are much more the problems of Marx than the problems of Lenin, and that was the great question of the revolutionaries of the 19th century.

Badiou is arguing that the problems the "communist hypothesis," which is a very broad hypothesis, is presented with today are not like those that gave rise to the Bolshevik revolution and the subsequent authoritarianism of the Communist Party, but like those that led to the positing of the hypothesis in the middle of the 19th century. The problem for the Bolsheviks was victory: how to get beyond local action and local successes to the triumph of communism generally. The problem of the 1800s was of how to overcome capitalism and its iniquities, and create a better society. That's where we are today, Badiou argues, and the question once again begs for an answer.

I've often wondered if the crises of today will lead to action and change, or merely a reaffirming of the present institutions. Capitalism, at least in the West, has been quite resilient. When pressed, it bends, but only in order to curve around and tackle the very forces pressing it. And what presses it most, ultimately, is itself. So that it often seems as though capitalism will be the death of itself, only to rise again even more dominant, even more cynical, even more controlling, even more reactive. And what would replace it? I sometimes share Conrad's cynicism in Under Western Eyes. Meet the new boss; same as the old boss? I wish I had more hope. I'm not sure we even have a blueprint for radical change. "Communism" as a hypothesis, as Badiou expresses it, is to abstract. It's little more than "human flourishing" with a ring of equality. And that's barely even a hypothesis. It's more like an impression, and a vague one at that.