Appeals for universal health care are a critical precondition for the politics of transforming the world – analyzing and challenging the state is necessary for establishing a better health care system

In Logics, Badiou develops the notion of resurrection by which the truth of an event resurges in a new context, a new world, through the incitement of a new event.133 In my own history, the names of these events would include Wittgenstein, Marx, Nietzsche, Wilde, Lawrence, Derrida, Lacan, Gramsci, Bourdieu, and Badiou (more or less in that order), though this would be to limit the events of my intellectual history through which the subject of a truth has been resurrected and kept alive. Furthermore, this generic truth that unbinds me from the categories of everyday social existence creates the condition for a universal address that recognizes the one thing that all human beings have in common, the foundation of their existence on the void of infinite possibilities, however different the import and significance of the events that force human beings into the subjective formation of a truth. For example, the Holocaust survivor, the victim of torture in Iraq, the political prisoner, the innocent and probably the guilty at Guantanamo, the terrorists and those who survive their terror, the cancer patient whose insurance won’t cover a treatment, the bulimic who has to lie in order to get health care, the raped woman and possibly the rapist, not only the victims of child abuse but the perpetrators who were themselves abused, the displaced and exiled, and all the usual suspects that would include the poor, the exploited, the homeless, and so forth—such people are not merely victims or perpetrators but potential subjects of truth, even though the truth they bear is usually prescribed to inexistence by the hegemonic state of the situation that names them. Even they themselves usually evade the truth by accepting the categorical judgments of the State. It is always easier and more negotiable to be a victim or a perpetrator than to insist on the methodical exposition of the truth that has derived from the event, however negative, that transformed a person into a subject. I don’t mean to say that all these experiences are the same or of equal value in the world as it currently exists. Still, there is no reason to wait for an apocalyptic event that would guarantee the universal disclosure of the truth. The events that make truth possible by forcing the inexistent into existence are everywhere, and the only true universal is the subtractive power of the void that has the creative-destructive power to force a change of base, a change of the transcendental ordinary.134

In the earlier chapters of this book, I exposed myself to the accusation of resentment and tried to challenge or interrogate its truth. My argument was not that I am a man without resentment, since if we have learned anything since Nietzsche, who in his last works proved himself to be everything he criticized, we have learned that there is no resistance or critical ground for challenge to any situation without resentment. However, the larger point and purpose of this essay is to suggest that the truth of an event will not persist at the level of mere resentment. The truth of an event is precisely what constitutes the subject as the power to overcome resentment in the struggle to transform the world itself, which is always one of an infinite number of possible worlds. Ironically, because the truth is infinite, there can never be of the inconsistent multiple that is being in itself and the variation of its worldly unfolding in appearance.135 Marx’s class struggle, Nietzsche’s self-overcoming, Wilde’s perversity and paradox, Lawrence’s sexual folklore, Gramsci’s counterhegemony, Wittgenstein’s curve, Lacan’s ellipsis, Derrida’s deconstruction, Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology, and Badiou’s metapolitics—these are all the names of truth procedures that aim at the transformation of the transcendental ordinary. No doubt, in the lives of all these thinkers, there were events that incited them to the procedures that laid out the consequences of a truth. Sometimes these may have been great historical events, and at other times events that would have gone unnoticed had not a truth impressed itself on a particular person. It seems naïve to claim that any truth procedure necessarily invalidates the possibility of another. In my own case, if my mother had not gone mad, I might have found a truth in some other way. But it was my mother’s madness that forced me into the process of interrogating the values of my society and world. It gave me the means to understand my father and the working class with which he would always be associated in my mind. It taught me that all human beings are more than their material conditions, and that whatever their condition in a particular world they are all capable of the thought that allows them to transform themselves as well as their world. It taught me that the only property common to all human beings is the singularity of the truth that says, We are nothing, so let us be everything.

E P I L O G U E NOT A MANIFESTO

A manifesto is what we need, but this is not it. Such a writing, like Marx’s famous manifesto, is an event in itself, something that decides an undecidable and forces the emergence of a truth. Nonetheless, it seems to me that it is cowardly not to risk a few postulations about what such a manifesto might contain. This is risky because it anticipates the alteration of a world without identifying the event that would occasion it. Furthermore, the more specific you are about the political program that confronts the current state of the situation, which also means the State, the more likely you are to say something that will seem ridiculous to the vast majority who currently cannot imagine any other world. Even Marx had to take this risk at the end of section two of his great manifesto when he listed ten practical measures that the victorious proletariat would need to implement after it had won the battle for democracy and centralized production in the State.1

Today, in light of the failures of actually existing socialist states, it is difficult not to see this moment as Marx’s most critical error, but an error that arose precisely from the universality of his address and the attempt to traverse the field of common sense with a transformative truth. Badiou has argued for a radical principle of democracy that operates by keeping itself at a distance from the State and by affirming the truth of a collective freedom that subtracts itself from the common sense and consensus that the State enforces.2 Nonetheless, he does not argue for withdrawal to some kind of utopia beyond the control of the State but rather for a political organization that struggles based on axiomatic principles, or prescriptions, to force the State into rewriting its norms, regulations, and policies.3 He valorizes democracy only as far as it is something distinct from the State, something that is bound to the universality of a political prescription.4 In effect, democracy is not the rule of the majority through the mediation of the State. It is the struggle to transform a specific situation through the implementation of a political prescription that is universally addressed. Even a minority—indeed even a single individual—can formulate a universal political prescription that derives from a truth procedure. In this epilogue, I will try to elucidate a few political prescriptions that have a universal address but do not overshoot the field of common sense. One can easily formulate more ostentatiously radical principles; but the ones I’ve formulated here, in my judgment, have the power to force a transition that can produce radical effects in the political field of the United States. Since the United States is the last superpower, transformation of its political field inevitably has global impact.

Despite their political differences, both Badiou and Negri have argued for the necessity of going beyond class politics in the traditional Marxist sense of the term.5 I will not enter into the details of their differences, except to say that they seem to me far from insurmountable once you get outside the field of academic disputation. For the purposes of what I want to say here, however, I will accept Negri’s concept of the multitude, which consists of all those who are dominated by capitalist social relations and resist its rule.6 As far as I’m concerned, that means anybody—even the rich—who can be won to the support of a political prescription that is universally addressed. The more serious and problematic question that derives from the notion of politics at a distance from the State, however, has to do with violence. Peter Hallward has argued, in a tentative way, that a true break from the State and its monopoly of violence is not to practice another form of violence but rather to commit oneself to an organized form of nonviolence.7 This strikes me as a very bold statement, but Hallward does not draw out its full implications.

First, nonviolent struggle in the name of a political prescription that derives from a truth procedure makes sense because if a truth becomes the rationale for violence against another who refuses to accept it, then the truth has effectively betrayed itself by subverting the universality of its address and insisting on a distinction between the elect who can see and the preterites who are blind. The State, after all, operates through a hegemony that dominates common sense, so that it is never simply the bureaucracy, the police, and the military that one opposes but the population that tacitly consents to the legitimacy of their authority. Second, nonviolent political struggle can be effective only when there is a willingness on the part of the militant to risk the possibility of injury or death without violent resistance. Personally, I don’t see any point to revolutionary suicide, so there has to be a principle of tactical retreat in a situation that can produce no positive result; and since nonviolence, as I understand it, is not a religious principle but a political axiom, I see no reason why people shouldn’t engage in defensive violence when they are confronted with a violent State that has foregone any universal address or justice. Of course, it is notoriously easy to justify aggressive violence as defensive, witness George W. Bush on one side and those who promote suicide bombing as a political tactic on the other. My point is simply that a truly effective act of nonviolent struggle will not always be able to predict the response of power. The more effective the political act is, the greater the risk of brutal response from the State. Third and finally, the organization of a nonviolent struggle can never be fully identical with a political mass movement, for once it has reached the level of a mass movement the discipline required to engage in active nonviolence is severely limited. Things could go peacefully in the unlikely event that the State accepts the need for change, or they could erupt into a revolutionary event that would no longer limit itself to disciplined nonviolent political action. The organization of nonviolent militants could put pressure on the mass movement as well as on the State, but it should never presuppose the identity of the mass movement with itself. This simply means that nonviolence as a political prescription addresses the masses with its truth but betrays that truth if it tries to substitute itself for the political goal of the masses. It produces a simulacrum of itself that substitutes the means for the end of social liberation.

Nonviolent struggle is consistent with political goals that have a universal address. There’s no way to struggle nonviolently for a U.S. way of life that depends on that population’s disproportionate consumption of energy vis-à-vis the rest of the world, but it is possible to struggle nonviolently for national and global health care. One can postulate as axiomatic that medicine and quality health care belong to everyone. This is not a right based on some appeal to transcendent authority, but a prescription whose address is unequivocally universal. Furthermore, one can argue that the wealth of the world belongs to everyone. This goes beyond the narrow principle that wealth is the product of labor and should be redistributed fairly among its producers. Even Marx recognized that capital was the product of a social activity that included everyone in society, and since his time it has become increasingly apparent that the production of capital requires unemployment, underemployment, and alternative sources of cheap labor in order to control the demand for higher wages and to subordinate labor as a whole to the interests of capital.8 Furthermore, in the manifesto that represented Marx’s most sustained attempt to transform the common sense of his world, he said that the proletarian movement was the autonomous movement of the majority.9 Since the industrial proletariat was nothing like a majority of the population at the time that Marx was writing, it follows that he understood by that term, at least on some occasions, something like what Negri means by the multitude. Therefore, it follows that those of us in the United States who seek the universal address of justice should struggle for a living wage that would replace what is currently called the minimum wage and, furthermore, for the institutional organizations that would allow the masses to determine the true definition of the economic standard of living, which would be a social standard and not mere subsistence. The goal would be to guarantee as high a quality of life as is consistent with our collective resources and wealth. Such a wage should apply to everyone in the country who works, including immigrants, whether they are legal or illegal. Furthermore, the definition of work itself must be socially determined, so that it no longer means labor that produces wealth for another but any creative activity that is consistent with the well-being of the multitude. Inevitably, people would want to come to this country for a wage that would guarantee a high quality of life, and if the axiom that wealth belongs to everyone derives from a truth, then it should also be true that national borders are not the natural divisions of wealth or labor. Though the ultimate address of such an axiom must be the globe, one can begin, as a matter of practice, with the demand for a North American Union of States that would work toward equalization of wages, health care, and education.

These propositions surely sound ridiculous to those who believe that there is only one world and that any change is a monstrosity or a form of terror. I doubt that I am the best person formulate a political program, but you have to begin somewhere. Though it would be the betrayal of any truth to limit its address to something purely local, it seems to me more of a betrayal never to begin a truth procedure or a political sequence with the argument that unless you can immediately embrace the whole world with your truth, you shouldn’t embrace anyone or do anything. Every beginning is necessarily local, and one has to struggle within the framework of a political sequence to keep its address universal by formulating prescriptions that genuinely can and should apply to all people. I don’t see anything to be gained from accepting a local injustice because universal justice cannot be achieved immediately. For me, the local situation is the field in which I work. Though it is a myth that nearly all professors are liberals or even Marxists, it is true that there is a significant cadre of political intellectuals who at least claim some connection with progressive thought and who have repeatedly associated themselves with the demand for social change. These cadres need to organize; and, furthermore, they need to create some organizational structures that can be inclusive of as broad a range of teachers, intellectuals, scholars, and artists as possible. Though I believe that a small organization of intellectuals committed to a nonviolent political struggle for some of the goals that I have already suggested would be an important development, I also believe that one of the goals of such a movement from within the community of intellectuals and teachers should be the unionization of the national professoriate in affiliation with other teachers’ unions. Though this sort of proposal is often labeled by traditional Marxists as reformism, it seems to me that the very concept of a profession that organizes itself in order to achieve political and economic goals is democratic in the sense that it postulates the relation of equality as the condition of its own movement or organization of people for the immediate transformation of a situation or world. Though there are numerous ways in which unions can be corrupted by the State, that is no reason to block such an organization that could become a new field of struggle for other truth procedures and their axioms. Unions in their current form are not effective political organizations because of their centralization. In this way, they imitate the structure of the State and subordinate the interests of their constituencies to the goals of State power. Radical unionization, whether it takes place inside or outside traditional organizations, should aim to transform this situation by decentralizing organizational structures and enhancing the autonomy of constituencies.

For example, if there were a national union of professors, this would be a field in which one could struggle for a transformative understanding of education and scholarship that could include axioms such as the following: 1. Knowledge belongs to everyone, and everyone should have access to as much knowledge as they desire and are capable of. Therefore, education should be equitable and free. 2. Knowledge is not static and constantly undergoes transformation through its encounter with truth procedures or thought. Therefore, all teachers, at every level of education, need time for research and thought; and since truth operates outside the norms, common sense, and self-evident knowledge propagated by the State, time for research and thought should be liberal, unaccountable, and equitable. 3. In line with the previous axiom, the goal of education should not be static knowledge but truth that critically addresses the current state of knowledge. Therefore, achievement should be assessed not by objective measurements that normalize knowledge outside the field of truth but by the actual consequences of the educational process. If individuals seem to achieve nothing, then one should look at the broader social context, and not exclusively at the educational institutions themselves. 4. Since intellectual work cannot be performed in isolation from other forms of work, an organization of intellectuals and teachers should address the situation of all those workers who make intellectual work possible. They should facilitate the organization of all workers, the multitude, in order to maintain both the local autonomy of organizational structures and the global unity of the multitude through the affiliation of organizations. 5. Since all people are intellectuals, as Gramsci stressed, a national union of professors should facilitate constant dialogue and intellectual exchange between people from different social locations and areas of work. 6. A national union, though its structure ought to be decentralized, should still seek affiliations and cooperative relations across national borders in the effort to propagate axioms of education, scholarship, aesthetic production, and political organization that are universally addressed. If something is good for us, it should be good for everyone. If it is not good for everyone, or if the universal realization of a principle is considered to be bad for us, then either the axiom itself is flawed or the truth has been betrayed.

I realize how outlandish these proposals will sound to the bureaucratic mind, including the minds of knowledge bureaucrats. Perhaps they are even more outlandish to the political radical who sees anything short of total revolution as temporizing. Furthermore, the astute reader is likely to see a contradiction in the idea of a national union of professors. Why limit it to professors? Why not include everyone involved in the teaching profession under one umbrella, including teachers at all levels of education, as well as janitors, cooks, secretaries, and all the other employees of the universities and schools? I’ve heard this argument many times over the years, and it usually turns out to be a rationalization for not organizing rather than the opposite. The goal ultimately should be ―one big union,‖ as the Wobblies used to say, but not a centralized union, which lends itself much more easily to corruption and cooptation by the State. A decentralized organization of the multitude means that every organizational division is autonomous, though the different locals and unions can affiliate and work toward common projects that are related to the universal axioms that derive from their own local struggles. Such decentralized autonomy is necessary because a political truth must traverse the field of common sense, and it would be naive to ignore the self-interest of different groups promoted by the current division of labor. Self-interest is the common sense that truth traverses and attempts to transform. There is no guarantee that any organization of those who work within a given field will not betray itself, or the truth that founded it. When a group formulates a demand for equality, such as the demand of women for equal wages or the demand of African-Americans for equal access to education, they are positing their own generic humanity beyond racial, gender, class or other social divisions. To limit the address of their demand would be to undermine the principle of generic humanity on which the demand was based. Though interest must be engaged in the organization of women or other groups to resist exploitation, it is ultimately engaged only to be transformed by the universal address of its generic truth. Two great examples of this thought in U.S. history can be found in the political truth procedures of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. Though these leaders were quite different in their political techniques and commitments, they both gradually came to the position that specific group interests, which they had struggled to organize in different ways, must be transcended, without the surrender of autonomy, in the direction of a universal address to generic humanity. To put it rather simply, the demand for a concrete form of freedom constitutes a truth only if it is addressed universally. As Badiou stresses, equality is not the goal but the axiom of a political struggle.10

The question still remains about what to do with the State. Neither Badiou nor Negri nor any of the hard theorists of the State seem to be able to imagine a world beyond it. Soft theorists, like Wilde and Lawrence, postulate the concept of the State as a glorified housekeeper, and while I frankly admit that such a view appeals to me, one can hardly imagine that any concentration of power in a managerial body or institution will not inevitably lend itself to corruption from the perspective of true democracy. Expediency and self-interest will always enter into the procedures of management and politicize them. If true democracy is the struggle of people for political prescriptions that are universally addressed, then there will always be a tension if not contradiction between democracy and the State, which means that the only form of social revolution worth considering must be a permanent revolution that takes the State, as long as it is impossible to live without it, as a necessary compromise that must be subjected to constant challenge and revision. The State should never be confused with democracy in itself. Though voting may be a necessary tool for reaching collective decisions and compromises, the U.S. system powerfully demonstrates the ease with which a plutocratic order that controls mass media can dominate democratic procedures when they are seen as nothing more than the right to vote. Furthermore, though I can’t embrace Badiou’s argument that political militants should not vote, stand for office, or affiliate with political parties, there must never be confusion between democracy as a political sequence and representation through electoral politics.11 Democracy lies in the content of the political prescription and not in the procedure through which it is implemented or defeated. It seems to me that voting and some intervention in electoral politics can be a tactic within the political sequence of democracy, but only if it is seen not as an end in itself but as an element within a larger strategy that recognizes the State as a form of inertia that must be galvanized by the force of true democracy that exists outside of it and its procedures.