We have always been told that we cannot afford to pursue utopian projects that might reduce social inequalities, or prevent the millions of avoidable deaths that take place each year as a result of disease or starvation. Our governments and central banks, however, have now spent many trillions of dollars – thousands of times more money than what is required to end global hunger – to bail out some of the most blatantly corrupt institutions the world has ever seen.But this is nothing new. He hits all the usual Leftist buttons about the decline of American power and the war of imperialism against democracy, also proffering the kind of sickening praise of Hugo Chávez that seems mandatory on much of the Left. But here his critique seems simply to stop. He celebrates the uprisings in the Arab world without saying a word about what should come afterward - he decries the bank bailout without so much as hinting at an alternative.
Hallward is a political philosopher and one of Alain Badiou's protégés. He is part of the contemporary Leftist intellectual establishment. And he, like Badiou, like Žižek, has nothing positive to offer.
In my view this is the greatest challenge that the Left faces today. The collapse of the Soviet Union obliterated the philosophical argument for Socialism as a practical political-economic system, and the Third Way politics of the Blair and Clinton school only offered palliative care for those ground up in the gears of global Capitalism, rather than offering a challenge and an alternative to the existing economic and political order. We on the left have still not gotten past that. I believe task no. 1 for intellectuals like Hallward, Badiou and Žižek is to construct a program, a manifesto of concrete proposals that can be implemented to create a more just political-economic system. If the political theorists of the Left cannot do that, then what exactly are they there for?
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