The two inner enemies that Badiou references in his essay To Be Young, Today, date all the way back to the teachings of Socrates. The first of these enemies is our desire for amusement, gratification, and the immediate world, the other enemy is the “passion for success” and the impulse to climb the existing social order. Badiou has a background as a Maoist in the 1960s, but you don’t need to be a radical to understand and observe the harmful effects of these social phenomena. In my young life (and I’m sure this is an experience many people are familiar with) I’ve already run into many a striver. I suppose college is when you have the most opportunity to “network” but there’s something deeply unsettling and sad about the way some of these people view life. For them there is no chance to enjoy their existence; every moment is spent furthering their goals of securing a position on the capitalist pecking order. Some of these people succeed, some of them don’t.

On the other hand are the layabouts living in the moment. There is clearly value in enjoying life as it happens, (far more value than devoting your youth to the pursuit of rapidly fleeting “career jobs”) but if you fully commit to “going with the flow” you become aimless. This is where you can draw a clear line between the broad American counterculture of the 60s and the political landscape that Badiou experienced in the 60s. Beyond ending the Vietnam War (more out of self-interest than solidarity with the Vietnamese, as seen by the shift in opinion following the abolition of the draft) the white counterculture of America was more interested in “anti-authoritarianism” than any real political movement. Many of the “radical” hippies became fascinated with computers in the 80s, some of the became very rich, and many of them became libertarians. Such is life. Contrast this with the French protest movement in the 60s. The radicals of that time had a vision for the future, they had an idea of what society should look like, and their drive to enact that vision brought the French state to its knees in 1968, forcing a series of sweeping reforms in order to stave off revolution. You should enjoy life, but you must maintain a vision for the future.

Capitalism is in a state of crisis. In history, societies have had their hierarchies clearly demarcated. Capitalism has not emancipated us from these hierarchies, but has instead blurred lines and left a generation confused about where their (eventual) lot lies. Badiou outlines two alternatives to this crisis, but posits that both of them are reactionary and inadequate. The first is the “never-ending defense of capitalism”, essentially the Clinton/Blair/Macron route. This route seeks to stick with the current model of capitalism, perhaps with some social democracy thrown in to appease the serfs. If you’ve ever had the displeasure of reading an op-ed by Thomas Friedman you’d get the gist of it. Imagine a McDonald’s in every city, in every country. The other alternative is a return to traditional hierarchies, based on religious, nationalist, or gendered rules; fascism. America dipped its toes in the water of the latter by electing Trump, but the election of Joe Biden seems to signify that American voters are more comfortable with the status quo. Badiou calls these two paths a false contradiction, in the sense that they are not dialectical. The true contradiction, Badiou argues, requires a new way in which people symbolize themselves. What he calls “the communist Idea” is the idea that after we have normalized the abandonment of tradition, we must work towards an egalitarian symbolization that form the basis for the collectivization of resources and the elimination of poverty. There is a genuine socialist moment in the west. The rise of Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn, and Jean-Luc Mélenchon as popular figures is arguably a result of that. You can see it elsewhere too, the popularity of the Black Lives Matter movement is evident of a worldview that doesn’t fall in line with the Washington Consensus or the mad ravings of fascists.

I was not familiar with Badiou before this reading, and had to do some research on him before I felt like I was ready to write a response to his work. I like him. I like his analysis too. I think he is spot on in his assessment of the two future for capitalism. Rosa Luxemburg said that society stands at a crossroads between “socialism or barbarism” and as capitalism has developed into neoliberalism its clear that the center cannot hold. Our crossroads is between a mass movement of solidarity, and a parasitic hierarchy that seeks to atomize us until we cannot even imagine a collective movement.

The idea of the “true life” is a clearly important to Badiou (its literally the name of the book). Although he never concretely defines it, he sees it as the “true contradiction” of the two inner enemies he described at the beginning of the essay. This view is in line with Freud’s anthropology in Civilization and its Discontents, where humans are put in a dialectical position, where our id seeks the instant gratification of individualism, but society demands conformity. The true life is the synthesis of this dialectic, it is what “constitutes young people’s subjectivity.”