What Is a People?

TWENTY-FOUR NOTES ON THE USES OF THE WORD “PEOPLE”

ALAIN BADIOU

Even if we can only nod, time and again, to the “we are here by the will of the people” of the nascent French Revolution, we must acknowledge that “people,” by itself, is not in the least a progressive noun. When Mélanchon’s posters proclaim “a place for the people!” it is only unreadable rhetoric today. Likewise we must acknowledge that neither is “people” a fascist term, even if the Nazi uses of the word Volk seem inclined in that direction. When Marine Le Pen’s “populism” is denounced almost everywhere, this only adds to the confusion. The truth is that “people” is now a neutral term, like so many others in the political lexicon. Everything is a matter of context. Thus we will have to examine it a bit more closely.

The adjective “popular” is more connotative, more active. We have only to look at what was meant by expressions like “popular committee,” “popular movement,” “popular tribunal,” “popular front,” “popular power,” and, even on the state level, “popular democracy,” to say nothing of “popular liberation army,” to observe that the adjective aims at politicizing the noun, at conferring upon it an aura that combines the breaking off of oppression and the light of a new collective life. Of course if a singer or a politician is “popular,” it is only a statistical fact without real value. But not if a movement or an insurrection is so classified exactly like such episodes in areas of history where it was a question of emancipation.

On the other hand, we distrust the word “people” when it is accompanied by an adjective, especially an adjective of identity or nationality.

We know of course that there was nothing legitimate or politically positive about the “heroic war of liberation of the Vietnamese people.” It seems that “liberation” in the context of colonial oppression, indeed even in the context of an intolerable foreign invasion, confers upon “people”—accompanied by an adjective that characterizes said people—an undeniable liberating touch. And all the more so when the imperial colonial camp would prefer to speak of “tribes” or “ethnic groups,” if not “races” and “savages.” The word “people” was only suitable for the conquering powers, elated by the conquest itself: “the French people,” “the English people,” yes…. But the Algerian people, the Vietnamese people? No! And even today for the Israeli government, “the Palestinian people”? An even louder no. The period of the wars of national liberation sanctified “national adjective + people,” by establishing the right—often at the cost of armed struggle—to the word “people” for those to whom the colonizers refused its use, considering only themselves to be “true” peoples.

But beyond the violent process of liberation, beyond the movement to appropriate a forbidden word, of what value is “national adjective + people”? Not much, let’s admit it. And especially now. Because now is the time when the truth of one of Marx’s powerful maxims asserts itself, a sentence as forgotten as it is forceful, even though it was crucial in the eyes of its author: “The workers have no country.” This is even more true because although they have always been nomads—since they had to uproot themselves from the land and rural poverty to be enlisted into capitalism’s workshops—workers are more nomadic now than ever. No longer are they just moving from the country to the city but from Africa and Asia to Europe and America, even from Cameroon to Shanghai or from the Philippines to Brazil. Thus to what “national adjective + people” do they belong? Much more than when Marx, that great prophet of the future of the classes, was forming the First International, now is the time when the workers are the living body of internationalism, the only territory where something like a “proletariat” can exist, “proletariat” understood here as the subjectivized body of communism.

We must abandon to their reactionary fate expressions like “the French people” and other phrases in which “people” is saddled with an identity. Where “the French people” in reality means nothing more than “the inert mass of those upon whom the state has conferred the right to call themselves French.” We will accept this yoking only in cases where that identity is in reality a political process under way, as with “the Algerian people” during the French war in Algeria, or the “Chinese people” when the expression is pronounced from the communist base of Yan’an. And in these cases we should note that “adjective + people” derives its reality only in violent opposition to another “adjective + people,” the one with a colonial army breathing down its neck that claims to refuse insurgents any right to the word “people,” or the army of a reactionary state that desires the extermination of “anti-national” rebels.

Thus “adjective + people” is either an inert category of the state (like “French people” today from the mouths of politicians on both sides) or a category of wars and political processes associated with situations of so-called national liberation.

In parliamentary democracies in particular, the “people” has in fact become a category of the right of state. Through the political sham of the vote, the “people,” composed of a collection of human atoms, confers the fiction of legitimacy on the elected. This is the “sovereignty of the people,” or more exactly the sovereignty of the “French people.” If for Rousseau sovereignty still meant a live and effective popular assembly—let us recall that Rousseau considered English parliamentary government to be a sham—it is clear today that such sovereignty, with its multiplicity of inert and fragmented opinions, constitutes no true political subject. As legal referent for the representative process, the “people” means only that the state can and must persist in its being.

“What being?” we will ask. And so without going into detail here we will propose that our states do not in the least derive their reality from the vote but rather from an insurmountable allegiance to the necessities of capitalism and the antipopular measures (let us stress in passing the undoubtedly strained values that derive from the adjective “popular”) that those necessities constantly require. And this is happening more and more overtly, more and more shamelessly. And that is how our “democratic” governments make the people, whom they claim to represent, into a substance we may call capitalized. If you don’t believe it, if like Saint Thomas you believe only in what you can see, look at Hollande.

But can’t the “people” be a reality that underlies the progressive virtue of the adjective “popular”? Isn’t a “popular assembly” a kind of representation of the “people” in a different sense than the closed, state-controlled one masked by adjectives of nationality and the “democratic” legalization of sovereignty?

Let us return to the example of the wars of national liberation. In this context, “the Vietnamese people” means in effect the existence of a people just as it was refused status as referent for a nation, which can itself only exist on the global scene insofar as it is granted a state. Thus it is in the retrospective effect of the nonexistence of a state that the “people” can be part of the naming of a political process and thus become a political category. As soon as the state in question is formed, regulated, and enrolled in the “international community,” the people it claims as its authority ceases to be a political subject. It becomes a passive mass that the state configures, universally, no matter what the form of the state.

But within this passive mass, can’t “people” designate something singular? If we consider, for example, the great strikes in France during the Occupation in June 1936 or in May 1968, don’t we have to say that a people—a “working people”—emerged there as a kind of immanent exception to the constitutional inertia designated by the expression “the French people”? Yes, we can, we must say it. And as early as Spartacus and his rebellious companions, or Toussaint Louverture and his friends both black and white, we must say that in ancient Rome or on the colonial island of Haiti, they configured a true people.

Even the dangerous inertia of the word “people” modified by a national adjective can, despite the contradiction, be subverted by pressure from within this national and lawful “people.” What did those who occupied Tahrir Square in Egypt at the height of the “Arab Spring” mean when they asserted, “We are the Egyptian people”? That their movement, their own unity, their slogans configure an Egyptian people free from its established national inertia, an Egyptian people with the right to actively claim the national adjective, because the nation of which they speak is yet to come. Because it only exists in the dynamic form of a vast political movement. Because, in the face of that movement, the state that claims to represent Egypt is illegitimate and must disappear.