In politics, ‘to say is to do’, that is, it is to get people to believe that you can do what you say and, in particular, to get them to know and recognize the principles of di-vision of the social world, the slogans. which produce their own verification by producing groups and, thereby, a social order. Political speech - and this is what defines its specificity - commits its author completely because it constitutes a commitment to action which is truly political only if it is the commitment of an agent or group of agents who are politically responsible, that is. capable of committing a group, and a group, moreover, capable of carrying out the action: it is only on this condition that it is equivalent to an act. The truth of a promise or a prognosis depends not only on the truthfulness but also on the authority of the person who utters it - that is, on his capacity to make people believe in his truthfulness and his authority. When it is acknowledged that the future under discussion depends on collective
will and action, the mobilizing ideas of the spokesperson who is capable of giving rise to this action are unfalsifiablc because they have the power to ensure that the future they are announcing will come about. (This is probably what lies behind the fact that, for the entire revolutionary tradition, the question of truth is inseparable from the question of freedom or historical necessity. If it is acknowledged that the future, that is, political truth, depends on the action of political leaders and the masses - though we would have to specify to what degree-, Rosa Luxemburg was right in her quarrel with Kautsky, who contributed to bringing about what was probable, and which he predicted, by not doing what, according to Rosa Luxemburg, needed to be done; in the opposite case, Rosa Luxemburg was wrong because she did not foretell the most probable future.)
What would be an ‘irresponsible discourse' in the mouth of one person is a reasonable forecast when made by someone else. Political propositions, programmes, promises, predictions or prognostications ('We will win the elections’) are never logically verifiable or falsifiable. They are true only in so far as the person who utters them (on his own behalf or in the name of a group) is capable of making them historically true, by making them come about in history; and this is inextricably bound up with his aptitude for judging realistically the chances of success of the action whose aim it is to make them come about in reality, and with his capacities for mobilizing the forces necessary to achieve that end. by managing to inspire confidence in his own truthfulness, and thus in his chances of success. In other words, the speech of the spokesperson owes part of its 'illocutionary force’ to the force (the number) of the group that he helps to produce as such by the act of symbolization or representation; it is based on the metaphorical coup d'etat by which the speaker invests his utterance with all the power his utterance helps to produce by mobilizing the group to which it is addressed. This can be clearly seen in the logic, so typically political, of the promise or. even better, of the prediction: a veritable self-fulfilling prophecy, the words through which the spokesperson endows a group with a will, a plan, a hope or, quite simply, a future, does what it says in so far as the addressees recognize themselves in it, conferring on it the symbolic and also material power (in the form of votes, but also of subsidies, subscriptions, or the power of their labour or their capacity to struggle, etc.) which enables the words to come true. It is because it is enough for ideas to be professed by political leaders in order to become mobilizing ideas capable of making themselves believed, or even slogans capable of mobilizing or demobilizing, that
mistakes are misdeeds or, in the native language of politics, ‘betrayals'.29
Credit and Credence
