“Another World is Possible”

“Another World is Possible” is presented as a familiar political slogan at the point where a theoretical problem becomes urgent: how can emancipatory politics create a shared world when global capitalism is said to reproduce itself without the constraints of a stable world? The phrase names an aspiration, but the discussion also warns that making a new world can become an ordering project that sits uneasily with the disruptive force of political events.

The Problem of a Worldless Present

The slogan enters a discussion of Alain Badiou’s account of politics under global capitalism. In Badiou’s theoretical writing on worlds, events disrupt the functioning of a world and its transcendental regime. Yet in his analysis of the present, he argues that contemporary times are intervallic or worldless: those who are excluded must be able to invent new names capable of sustaining new truth procedures. The problem is not simply that a different world is desirable, but how such a world could acquire names and forms through which excluded people can act.

The difficulty follows from the account of capitalism developed nearby. Capitalism does not merely describe one historical period among others; its reproduction depends on constant self-revolution, incorporating excess into the system’s ordinary functioning. In this account, it survives by repeatedly exceeding its own constraints. The discussion also distinguishes this capitalist dynamic from biopolitical administration: the two are intertwined aspects of modernity, but neither can be reduced to a mere appearance of the other. A call to build an alternative therefore confronts a system that does not depend on preserving a settled social order.

The Slogan and Its Ambiguity

The phrase is introduced as a slogan with which Badiou’s proposed task may resonate. That resemblance carries a qualification: calling for a new world can sound like an “ordering” task, even though Badiou’s account of the event emphasizes the disruption of existing worlds and their governing regimes. The tension is between inventing names that can sustain a new political truth and turning world-making into a program for organizing what already exists.

The discussion does not treat the slogan as a complete answer to this tension. Rather, it makes the tension legible: the excluded need a world in which new names and political truths can take hold, while the act of constructing that world risks taking on a stabilizing form. The slogan thus serves as a pointed reference for a question about political practice, not as proof that the question has been resolved.

Capitalism, Democracy, and Emancipation

The surrounding critique locates the obstacle to emancipation less in democratic representation itself than in the conviction that there is no alternative to the rule of profit. It challenges Badiou’s strong claim that the principal enemy today is democracy, while maintaining that his attack on the fetishism of democracy is not the issue. The deeper problem, in this account, is the perceived inevitability of capitalism: people may recognize how little influence they have over the management of common affairs and still see no other possible social order.

That distinction sharpens the stakes of “Another World is Possible.” A new political vocabulary must do more than criticize the forms of representation through which the present order operates; it must confront the belief that profit-driven arrangements cannot be superseded. The phrase evokes this demand, while the surrounding argument cautions that naming a different world does not by itself establish how political change can bring it into existence.

Significance

The expression’s significance lies in its double edge. It gives concise form to the need for a world in which those excluded from the present can invent and sustain new political truths. At the same time, its association with a ready-made call to construct another world risks obscuring the tension between evental disruption and the work of building a durable political setting.

The discussion therefore leaves the slogan open as a problem rather than treating it as a conclusion. Its force depends on whether world-making can answer the perceived inevitability of capitalism without simply becoming a new form of ordering. The phrase marks the demand for an alternative; the argument surrounding it insists that the political content and conditions of that alternative remain to be worked out.