Week 1 - Alan Badiou 'The Crisis is the Spectacle'

Alain Badiou gives a consistent, critical view on the communist experience of the 20th century in the light of the real revolutionary ideas and possibilities that could've been but never were, and what we can learn from that. Badiou describes this situation with a theme most people will be able to understand – a disaster movie. We sit and watch the situation unfold in fromt of us. We can do nothing as the crisis grows and grows and the world is on the edge. Then like any good films the hero flys in and saves us all. The problem how Badiou describes though isn't the world that we need to save but the banks. The pillars of our economy. These fall and economy falls around us but instead of hers its the people and the government that comes to the rescue.

He begins his book by noting that “communism” has been labelled a failure in the world in which we operate. He then asks, what do we mean by “failure”? But with that I ask, what does this actually mean? What is failure?  Is it that we lose confrontation of a war or that we have simply failed an experiment for now? "Failure is not falling down. It is refusing to get back up." 

His writing was difficult to understand and to follow perhaps because his topic of economics is about what we might have floating around rather than what we have in our hand. What does four hundred billion euros look like? Is it even feasible to see that amount of money in real life? In a physical form? Or is this four hundred billion euros just what the government, what the people in a different social space to the common man tell us what it is? If all the computers in the world crashed tonight will that four billion euros still exist? What would it be worth if the economy collapsed or the world suffered a catastrophe? 

This money, this economy maybe its as make believe as Badious idea of the film. We can watch what is being done with the money in terms of buildings being built, goods being bought but what the 'film' is happening behind the scenes - we see whats being staged we don't see behind the stage. We don't see the four hundred billion euros!

If you are working with things that exist as ideas but have no physical presence, do they exist at all? What makes 100 euros worth more than 100 tomatoes? Is it just because the government says you need money to build an economy, to buy goods. If you didn't have any food surely 100 tomatoes would be worth more to you than 100 pieces of paper? 100 euros is only worth more because the banks, the government tell us its worth more. I think it’s all debatable whether Badiou’s ‘Communist Hypothesis’ is a step forward into communism or a step backwards into a political philosophy that advocates stateless societies.