Litvak - Migrants and Militants

Alain Badiou

Translated by Joseph Litvak

polity

Originally published in French as Mfiez-vous des blancs, habitants du rivage Librairie Arthme Fayard, 2019 This English edition Polity Press, 2020

A Massively Single Number by Guo Jinniu from Yang Lian (ed.), A Massively Single Number (Bristol: Shearsman Books, 2015), translated by Brian Holton.
Original poem copyright Guo Jinniu, 2015; translation copyright Brian Holton, 2015. Reproduced here by kind permission of Shearsman Books.

Excerpt from Of Hospitality by Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle. Translated by Rachel Bowlby.
Copyright by Calmann-Lvy. English translation 2000 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4247-5

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Badiou, Alain, author. | Litvak, Joseph, translator.
Title: Migrants and militants / Alain Badiou ; translated by Joseph Litvak.
Other titles: Mfiez-vous des Blancs, habitants du rivage. English
Description: Cambridge ; Medford, MA : Polity, [2020] | Originally published in French as Mfiez-vous des blancs, habitants du rivage! Librairie Arthme Fayard, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references. | Summary: Frances leading philosopher gives a powerful account of our obligations to migrants-- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019047001 (print) | LCCN 2019047002 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509542451 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509542468 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509542475 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Emigration and immigration. | Refugees. | Other (Philosophy)
Classification: LCC JV6035 .B3413 2020 (print) | LCC JV6035 (ebook) | DDC 305.9/0691--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019047001
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019047002

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The first version of this text was a lecture given at the Maison de la Posie in Paris. The idea for this evening came from the Textes & Voix group, directed by Nadine Eghels.

I place at the threshold of this book a Madagascan Song, written in 1783 by varyste de Parny, apparently inspired by Madagascan traditions. The song shows and this is good news that a radical, indeed violent anti-colonialism is as old as colonialism itself. Maurice Ravel, who was himself a true progressive, and who in particular supported the Bolsheviks, took this text, in 1926, as the basis for a superb melody.

A.B.

In certain situations, apparently, one issue can have the power to wipe away another, which had until then seemed to be the most important one.

We all know that the so-called question of immigration, of migrants, of foreigners, of refugees, was until very recently a question that divided and could divide even very seriously, and in all sorts of practical ways public opinion in France, in Europe, and finally in the entire so-called western world that is, in all the privileged countries on our planet. It could be argued that, for a mere handful of weeks now, in France the question of the yellow vests [gilets jaunes] has swept aside the so-called migrant question in the terrors as well as in the enthusiasms of public opinion.

In fact there is a sense in which the question of the yellow vests is exactly the opposite of the so-called migrant question. What is at stake here, essentially, is the destiny of an old France that finds itself threatened. First of all, there are the low-level civil servants, the artisans, the shopkeepers, the small businesspeople, and the farmers, who are revolting against the obvious decline in their status and income and are anxious and angry, given the general lack of interest in their condition and the contempt in which they are held by the transnational oligarchy that runs global capitalism today. This is about stricken lands and territories, about provincial cities that have been turned into ghost towns, about the world of hunting and town meetings. But there is also a vast suburban lower-middle class, and in particular the large number of retired people it contains who, as they struggle to make ends meet, glimpse the spectre of their pauperization, of their proletarianization. This is ultimately about a world in which one can see and feel a very real abandonment by the state powers, themselves subordinate to the powers of capital an abandonment in which one can also decipher the slow and geological decay into which both Europe and the so-called western democratic world are slipping today. What is being abandoned is the old, moribund, provincial world, at once suburban and colonial, that the bright young graduates at the top business and administrative schools couldnt care less about and Macron is their prototype.

We thus have a confrontation between global modernity in the form of an arrogant and ultimately criminal oligarchy on the one side and, on the other, the archaism of an understandable nationwide reaction, driven by that part of society whose little privileges, long in place, are being threatened by the deployment of contemporary capitalism. France, a waning little imperial power up against monsters such as the United States and China, is no longer capable of buying, at a reasonable price in wages, public services, and social advantages, the support of the lower middle classes, which have always been the central resource of our famous democracies.