What Is Political Will? Peter Hallward Interviewed by Samuel Grove

Monthly Review Magazine

Samuel Grove [SG]: For a while now you've been working on and defending the old idea of 'the will of the people', and you've described it in terms of a 'dialectical voluntarism'; what do you mean by this?

Peter Hallward [PH]: I'm not stuck on the terminology, and I'm leery of the way these sorts of labels can be slapped onto a way of thinking or line of inquiry.  Some sort of label is unavoidable though, and any defence of voluntarism has to begin with its account of the will: an account of political will should, I think, allow us to consider political action in terms that privilege the role of free, voluntary and egalitarian self-determination, both as a form of political practice and as a critical norm for assessing the exercise of such practice.  The goal is to recognise the importance of deliberate and purposeful action, on both sides of the fundamental class antagonism that divides society, rather than to dismiss it as in some sense secondary or derivative, as the effect of more profound structural or determining forces.  

‘Another World is Possible’

Alain Badiou’s resolute commitment to communism and revolution placed him in the wilderness in the 1980s and ’90s.  Since the economic crisis, however, his ideas have become more germane as part of broader resurgence of interest in the concept of communism.  Samuel Grove interviewed Colin Wright, author of Badiou in Jamaica: The Politics of Conflict and Lecturer in Critical Theory at Nottingham University, about Badiou’s ideas. This is the first part of their discussion, the second will follow soon. New Left Project

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You describe Alain Badiou’s philosophy as revolving around three key questions: i) How does genuine novelty enter the world? ii) How is it distinct from mundane change? iii) And how can it be made to endure? And yet capitalism has become so hegemonic in recent years that it has become pretty difficult to even imagine an alternative to it. 

I think the problem you describe, of the commodification of the political imaginary by capitalism, is a very serious one, especially given that this extends to images of resistance to capitalism as well (I refer to this in Badiou in Jamaica a few times as 'rebel chic').  Zizek's reading of the epidemic of apocalyptic Hollywood disaster movies is relevant here.  He suggests that capitalism's hold on the collective imaginary is such that it is now far easier, particularly in the face of mounting evidence of environmental catastrophe, to picture the whole planet going up in flames, than it is to conceive of the end of capitalism.  So it's a serious problem.  I also think that part of addressing this problem does indeed have to take place on the level of the political imaginary itself.  For all its many problems, at least the motto of the World Social Forum that 'Another World is Possible' acknowledges the need for an imaginative space in which alternatives to capitalism can be elaborated.  But it certainly can't be addressed only at that level, since enormous amounts of energy can be wasted on building utopian visions, when significant change, at least from a Marxist perspective, never comes only from ideas.