‘The earth is dying and we do not notice it’
Sounds like a climate change quote, but it was scrawled across the download of the ‘Communist Hypothesis’ extract I was reading.
To summarise it, this engaging text is about the financial crisis we are currently experiencing and the detachment that ‘the masses’ have with it. Alain Badiou (a writer born very much in a revolutionary time) puts forward to us a new approach and ideology on the matter, that perhaps we should not sit back and watch as the world crumbles around our ears, but instead do anything but nothing!
Badiou describes the ‘crisis’ like a film, where the politicians are the stars and we watch on, completely removed. In the same way that I couldn’t imagine what it would be like being chased by zombies in a horror movie, we are unable to fathom the debt figures: ‘just what does 400 billion euros look like?’
Usually we go to the movies as an escape from reality, there is a crisis in the movies and we often see a happy ending or know that we can get up and resume normality at the end. However, Badiou highlights that we may not want to, but we are heavily involved and despite the protests against the system, it is after all a system we are inadvertently operating within.
‘The collapse of capitalism? You must be joking. And who wants it to collapse anyway?’
Badiou somewhat hypocritically uses the same fear he protests against to sell us his ideals, but I don’t think this is something that I hold against him. After all, he is not threatening us, and whilst it can be easy to protest something, it is admirable to be able to voice a solution. I am certainly in agreement with his view that the problem can also be shelved with us as well for spending over our means. The real issue is that the ‘characters in the disaster movie’ that have been sent, are not directly affected by the crisis.
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