Generic Democracy

In “Highly Speculative Reasoning on the Concept of Democracy” (from 1998’s Abrégé de métapolitique, translated as Metapolitics), Badiou claims that since the historical collapse of socialist States, it is now ‘forbidden’ not to be a democrat.  Certainly this silent edict resonates with anyone who was still at school during Glasnost, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of Apartheid (the emerging horrors of Yugoslavia and, a little later, Rwanda, not quite proper subjects for inclusion in this delight in our unified new world, which resembled nothing so much as a Benetton advert without the controversy).   The school projects we were given, the compiling of newspaper clips to present to the rest of the class skipped merrily around certain key concepts: multiculturalism, the liberalisation of information, meritocracy.   Democracy as a kind of inevitable magic glue slinking its slow and binding way across continents.   A consensus all the more successful for its relative lack of content – were we really ever told what democracy was?   A vote every four years from 18-onwards?   Or perhaps something like a projected benevolence on the part of our hard-working, egalitarian leaders that implied that we no longer had to worry about the rest of the world being a threat, so that our major approach could forevermore be a species of apolitical pity and concern: the starving children of Africa, the ‘victims’ of natural disasters, the intermittent Western ‘enjoyment’ - Live Aid to Live 8 - that took it upon itself, to help out, though with the proviso that we never look back, never acknowledge any role in any particular situation:   ‘this is the 21^st century, fergodsake!’ It is no surprise that in the narration of this drama, mediated by the self-disguising gelatinous medium of Democratic nations, the opposite of ‘victim’ can only be something so immeasurably evil that we can only play poker with it, as if gaming with the very Devil himself.

The Marxist critique of ‘democracy’ seems relatively straightforward.  If the aim of politics is the withering away of the State, then bourgeois democracy and even proletarian democracy (the dictatorship of the proletariat) as forms of State organisation can only be understood as unfinished stages on the way to something that dispenses with power and its representation, not to mention private property, altogether:   ‘This is what we might call generic communism’ states Badiou.   Democracy for Marxism is presented by Badiou as neither a properly philosophical word (it remains tied to consensus and opinion, thus sophistic), nor a properly political one (its ultimate aim is not classless generic communism, the free association of men and women, ‘the complete return of humankind to itself as social’, to use the language of the Marx of 1844).

There is, nevertheless, in the very early work of Marx a certain defence of a moment of democracy that also depends on a certain conception of the generic which deserves some explanation. 

Generic democracy?   A simple contradiction in terms insofar as representation will always mask something of that which it expresses?   Or something more useful?   In his Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State (1843), Marx argues, in a discussion of Hegel’s opposing of the people/the monarch, that ‘Democracy is the generic constitution.   Monarchy is only a variant and a bad variant at that. Democracy is both form and content. Monarchy is supposed to be only a form, but it falsifies the content.’ Unlike the contemporary dyads of democracy/totalitarianism (secular–fascist or ‘communist’), or democracy/terrorism (not that a ‘terrorist state’ makes any sense, constitutionally speaking), Marx stands Monarchy on its head, declaring that ‘Democracy is the solution to the riddle of every constitution.   In it we find the constitution founded on its true ground: real human beings and the real people; not merely implicitly and in essence, but in existence and in reality.’   Democracy is thus nothing other than the state as objectified man (just as religion was the alienation of man’s capacities and imagination for Feuerbach before it was for Marx).   So far, so Statist.   Marx’s ‘dialectic against the dialectic’, introduces something of a tension between the State and his notion, however, as he seems convinced that democracy is coterminous with the disappearance of the state – does ‘democracy’ simply stand in here as a cipher for communism, and Marx’s reconstruction of the historical specificity of the emergence of the concept of the ‘state’ evidence that it too shall pass?

Democracy for the early Marx is the ‘first true unity’ of the particular and the universal, because it neither subsumes the individual nor does it define itself against another determination:   if a democracy is truly universal, then the constitution is nothing other than the self-determination of the people, not the false elevation of the state, the law, in its name.

Badiou, in his later writings on the concept of 'metapolitics' attempts to move beyond such oppositions.   Unlike earlier, with Theory of the Subject, in which the antagonisms of the structure of the Bourgeois world could only lead to certain forms of Proletarian destruction, the later Badiou routinely refers to concepts of ‘generic humanity’, of the political ‘collective subject’ that isn’t necessarily understood along class lines and so on – oddly drawing him closer to Feuerbach than to Mao – and his criticisms of democracy become primarily philosophical rather than political.   His putative ‘return to Plato’ is based not only on an attack on opinion as definitive of any properly philosophical endeavour, but also on a strangely under-analysed recourse to a certain kind of minimal philosophical anthropology that defines that human as that capable of bearing the inhuman, the infinite…from the counter-intuitive axioms of set theory to the expansive humanism of a generic politics, that would in fact take its distance from the state, rather than actively destroy it. Despite all his criticisms of the ‘democratic’ pretensions of which he calls ‘capital-parliamentarianism’, Badiou doesn’t exactly take his leave from the term democracy, as might be imagined, so long as it is grasped ‘in a sense other than a form of the State.'   Thus ends Badiou’s debt to Leninism and classical Marxism – we need new concepts, it is claimed.   The thought that is specific to politics must operate at a different level from the State which, Badiou imagines, does not think.   Instead, ‘Democracy could...be defined as that which authorises a placement of the particular under the law of the universality of the political will.’ In this sense, Badiou’s later commitment to the term ‘democracy’ can be seen as a nominal continuation of Marx’s early conception, although one that attempts to entirely side-step the Hegelian-Marxist question of the State.   The question is what, in the age of the almost total psychotic nationalisation of the geo-political arena, this democratic non-Statist distance would be.   Badiou’s definition of the term is ultimately (and disappointly) negative.   Democracy is ‘the impossibility of non-egalitarian statements’.   But is it also the impossibility of a truly democratic confrontation of the ‘democracies’ that are nothing of the sort?