A conversation between Jacques Rancière and Maria Kakogianni
(From lundimatin #515, 08/04/2026)
In a foreword to the translation and publication in Greece of a collection of texts by Jacques Rancière [1], Maria Kakogianni – whose book Sous le ciel étoilé, une nuit d’éte: Réflexions sur l’anarchie et la révolution [Under the Starry Sky, One Summer Night] we have just published – Reflections on Anarchy and Revolution, spoke with the philosopher. The conversation touches on the present, the counter-revolution currently underway, the legacy of ’68, capitalism heading for disaster, and us, who still do not know exactly where we are heading.
Maria Kakogianni: This book is a collection of texts organised around three areas – or rather regions, rather than sections: racism from above; events and symbols; scenes of emancipation. The texts are not arranged chronologically, and it would not be entirely accurate to speak of clearly distinct themes. Some are taken from lectures and conferences, whilst others are newspaper articles with a different tone and a particular rhythm. By bringing them together here, side by side, we have imagined them as a landscape.
Whilst thanking you for agreeing to this brief conversation, I would like, in a way, to start from the middle. To what extent would you say that, with May ’68, something happened to thought? Or to the way we think about the event?
Jacques Rancière: What happened to thought was the collapse of an entire system of descriptive and analytical coordinates based on a hierarchical view of phenomena. Within this system, there was an order of determinations. There were the more or less conspicuous appearances on the surface of events, and beneath them lay the solid realities that were their root causes: the economic process that produced social conflict, which played out on the political stage—which was both its expression and its concealment. And, at the very end of the chain, there was ideology, within which this entire process of causes and effects was either misunderstood or inverted. This also meant that, on the one hand, there were the scholars who had intellectual mastery of the process, and on the other, the masses of the uninformed, mired in ideology. And there was the vanguard, capable of transforming this knowledge into programmes, strategies and slogans, whilst resisting the impatience and naivety of spontaneous uprisings.
It was this hierarchical framework that was shattered by the 1968 movement: a movement that erupted at an unexpected moment during a period of economic growth, and modernist and reformist euphoria; a movement launched from almost nothing by “petty-bourgeois” students, which revived the barricades of the nineteenth century, set the whole of society ablaze and triggered the largest general strike of modern times. One might say, of course, that the fire fizzled out as quickly as it had flared up. But whilst the Gaullist regime emerged victorious, the causalist and hierarchical view of society and social struggle did not survive. It became apparent that words which were by no means “scientific” could shake an entire social order to its core; that this social order, which seemed to rest on solid foundations, was a contingent reality; that politics had its own time, its own mode of producing causes and effects; and that its task was, first and foremost, to create its own space and time, its own specific movements and rhythms. The opposition between spontaneous revolt and revolution grounded in the rationality of historical development was called into question, as was the opposition between the rationality of structure and the illusions of subjects. There was undoubtedly a certain naivety in the anti-structuralist slogan that circulated in Paris in 1968: “Structures do not take to the streets”. Lacan responded that 1968 was precisely the truth taking to the streets, whilst adding that we had seen that the truth spoke a great deal of nonsense. But this “nonsense” of the truth itself refuted the simplistic scientistic view that had underpinned the structuralist faith of the 1960s. The rationality of politics, like that of the unconscious, would henceforth be that of truth in its opposition to knowledge. This rationality would emerge as a matter of subjects who were no longer either the subjects subjugated by ideology or the social groups identified by the social sciences, but who defined themselves through operations of subjectivation. And the event, which had previously been merely the surface of things, was to become the very heart of this new rationality. This is not to say that May ’68 revolutionised thought rather than society, but it is certain that, for my generation, it was a pivotal moment in the transformation of the idea of politics and of the very idea of thought itself.
In the wake of the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet bloc, Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the global reign of liberal democracy. This marked the beginning of the era of consensus. It was the 1990s, and you published several essays (some of which appear in this collection) in which you sought to define the contours of this consensus and what you termed “racism from above”. I’d like to ask you to dwell on this point for a moment: you argue that it is, first and foremost, a state-driven logic rather than a popular sentiment. To what extent can what you then described as “cold racism” help us to understand the present and its new, increasingly despotic, authoritarian and reactionary forms of government?
I have indeed tried to show how the consensus and a new form of racism go hand in hand. For me, the consensus meant agreement on the idea of an objective necessity—that of the globalised economy—which was imposed on everyone, on the “socialist” left as much as on the “liberal” right. Unable or unwilling to change anything about the effects of the free movement of capital, our governments set themselves the task of demonstrating their firmness towards the other form of movement that complements it: that of populations displaced by poverty or violence. The fight against insecurity – the fight against an evil that always comes from others, always from outside – thus became their rallying cry and justified the continuous expansion of police powers. To this end, they exploited the existence of an overt far right, arguing: there is a racist threat that must be combated. And to combat the racist effect, one must combat its cause: immigration. In this way, they rallied a fairly broad consensus around them, particularly amongst the Left and the intellectual community steeped in the progressive tradition. For the latter, racism always comes from below; it is a reaction of “ordinary people”, of “backward” individuals incapable of understanding economic and social changes or adapting to them, and always ready to lash out at the scapegoats that demagogues present to them. Thus, intellectuals and left-wingers have supported the state’s champions of securitarianism in the name of combating the racist threat. But it soon became apparent that the measures supposedly intended to curb racism by curbing immigration had exactly the opposite effect: they merely served to spread racist ideas more widely and reinforce the image of the immigrant as the “other” who cannot be assimilated. And, as for “popular” fervour, in my country we have seen a group of intellectuals invent a new and unstoppable weapon of racism: the denunciation of immigrants’ “communitarianism” and the defence of republican and secular values against immigration identified with Islamist terrorism. When I spoke of “cold racism” or “racism from above”, I had in mind this alliance – which is very strong in France – between a political class that thrives on managing “insecurity” and an intellectual class that equates immigrants with Islamist barbarians. This is not a form of racism specific to the elites, but one that they are revitalising and promoting to everyone. And indeed, it is this racism practised by “republican” statesmen and intellectuals that the far right has adopted in my country. What was still missing from my picture was an understanding of the direct role played by the representatives of Capital in shaping the racist consensus. This has become evident with the antics of the Trump-Musk duo and Milei, or, in France, with the mass buy-up of radio and TV stations, newspapers and publishing houses by a far-right billionaire who made his fortune, notably, in African ports. Capitalists are no longer content merely to make profits. On the one hand, they increasingly feel they are not making enough, because the poor are bleeding them dry, and they have launched a major campaign aimed at the upper classes and all those who believe they belong to them, under the slogan: “We’ve had enough of paying for immigrants, the disabled and the incapable.” On the other hand, profit alone is not enough for them. Today, they seek absolute control over both minds and bodies. The kings of Capital today are no longer car manufacturers. They are the owners of social media platforms and all forms of communication, who seek monopoly control and launch fierce propaganda campaigns against all forms of social solidarity and aid to the destitute. In this way, they equate their economic activity with the dissemination of an unequal vision of the world that everyone can share, because there are always inferiors to be despised and “others” to be feared. But of course they also rely on the dual success of their investments and their worldview regarding the security state, to which, in return, they provide abundant material and intellectual resources for repression.
Milei’s inflammatory rhetoric, Trump’s crude remarks – those who subscribe to them do not do so out of ignorance, because they are poor, lost “little white people” [petits blancs] without a sense of direction, who simply need a bit of enlightenment. You once spoke of a sad pleasure. What is the connection between a fascist way of life and revolutionary affect?
When we talk about a fascist way of life and revolutionary affect, we must bear in mind the composite nature of political affects, which are often made up of contradictory and unstable elements. The first question is what constitutes a revolutionary affect. Historically, it has always been a complex of negative and positive passions: of anger and rage against the oppressive order and a relentless determination to destroy it; but also of confidence in the ability of equals to build another world, and of imagination to establish forms of anticipation of that world here and now. This presence of the future in the present, and this confidence, have been essential in nurturing forms of revolutionary joy that hatred of the oppressor alone cannot engender. It is this very spirit that has been undermined by the counter-revolution at work in our countries since the late 1970s. The offensive of unchecked capitalism has targeted the spaces and forms of solidarity and the collective strength of equals. And in doing so, it has eroded confidence in the collective capacity to develop existing forms of solidarity into sketches for future life. Anger at oppression is no longer accompanied by the joy born of confidence in the collective capacity to create a different world. The intellectual counter-revolution has aided this offensive by discrediting all struggles for equality from 1789 to the present day. Hatred of the oppressor thus turns into a feeling of powerlessness, and this powerlessness fuels the passion of resentment. Yet the strength of resentment lies in its ability to adapt to all conditions and situations. In my country, the rise of the far right is often described as an issue affecting workers and the working classes in particular. They were once united by the collective power of political parties and trade unions, but now they find themselves isolated in the face of oppression, with no other means of collective existence than the sharing of hatred – and, in particular, hatred of others – a hatred that blends contempt for populations perceived as backward with fear of the threat they pose. But resentment also affects intellectuals, particularly those from a progressive and revolutionary tradition. They once had faith in the virtues of Marxist theory to shed light on the present and build the future. Today, this theory continues to explain everything about the reasons for domination, but no one expects it any longer to arm the fighters for freedom and equality. Science serves to understand why things are as they are and will continue to be so. It is indeed a sad pleasure—the pleasure derived from knowledge that produces, above all, resignation to necessity, accompanied by the sole satisfaction of knowing what the ignorant do not know and of being able to despise those ordinary people who do not understand the reasons behind things and allow themselves to be seduced by the rhetoric of demagogues. We thus find ourselves in what I called, in The Ignorant Schoolmaster, a “society of contempt”, a society where everyone despises everyone else: far-right voters despise the immigrants who are “invading” their suburbs, but also those intellectuals from the affluent neighbourhoods who lecture them without knowing what they are going through. Intellectuals despise those in power, who in turn despise them; they are ashamed to be governed by people they despise, yet they close ranks behind them out of fear of the “fascist threat”, even if it means being ashamed of their own fear and submitting all the more, and so on.
In your latest book, Distant Freedom: Essay on Chekhov, there is a reflection on servitude. It appears less as an autocratic regime with repressive laws accompanied by harsh punishments than as a way of life involving a certain relationship with time: “provided nothing new happens”. It is not the act of living under the lash, but rather living in the memory of the lash. Could servitude be, first and foremost, an emotional regime linked to a certain interplay between body and mind, a governmentality of fear, a passion for security that locks out the possible? Can we draw a connection with your writings on “racism from above”? You explain why and how “the problem of immigration” has been constructed in such a way that it can never be resolved, whilst justifying the proliferation of new control measures.
I am not sure whether we can establish a direct link between the analysis of servitude that I discussed in Chekhov’s work and “racism from above”. What is certain is that, in Chekhov’s time as in our own, the subjective component of servitude is very significant and that, in both cases, it is essentially negative. Chekhov tells us that acquiescence to servitude is, first and foremost, a retreat in the face of the experience of freedom, which is like uncharted territory in the land of autocracy – uncharted territory where those who have learnt to live, think and act in the school of servitude fear they will not know how to behave. And the shame one may feel at this fear only reinforces one’s acceptance of the status quo. Above all, Chekhov tells us that even knowing the reasons for servitude does not arm us against it. On the contrary, it makes us complicit in it. Dr Ragin from the novella Ward 6 knows that the wretched state of his hospital is the consequence of an entire social order and that nothing could change unless everything changed. But as he cannot see how everything could change, he lets things take their course. Of course, in Chekhov’s time, there were revolutionaries who sought to turn the saying on its head: the social structure must be changed from top to bottom so that people’s ways of life might change. And this radical change can only be brought about by the weapon of science. We, however, are living in the wake of the failure of this grand endeavour to change the very foundations of society in order to create new kinds of people. This failure has produced what we were discussing earlier: the dissociation between science and the effect that was expected of it; the sad pleasure of fully understanding the nature of servitude without this producing any sense of liberation; and, ultimately, the fear that the only new thing that might come to pass is the worst possible outcome. This is where resentment converges with acquiescence to the security-driven order. There is both the shame born of the powerlessness to change things for the better and the fear that they might change for the worse. Even though our leaders exploit the theme of insecurity to the full, it is not a passion for security that “locks down the possible”. Rather, it is the resentment born of powerlessness. Hence the double game played by our leaders: they seek to win over racists by showing that they are fighting against the immigration “catastrophe” that threatens them, and anti-racists by showing that they are the only alternative to the racist “catastrophe”. They constantly parade a catalogue of all the dangers from which they are protecting us. But I’m not sure they really frighten us. On the other hand, they provide both an excuse for our powerlessness and a target for our resentment.
There is a side to your work that is unknown to the public in Greece: the whole collective experience of the journal Les révoltes logiques, as well as all your work on workers’ archives and Nights of Labour: The Workers Dream in Nineteenth Century France. We are publishing here three texts that form part of this body of work (“The Revolutionary Scene”, “The Proletarian and his Double”, “The Gauny Effect”[2]). I’d like you to tell us a little about the possible links between this work on the archives and these topical texts, between figures of proletarians who challenge you and that of the ‘migrant’ in the long-running saga of the migration issue that you are challenging; in short, between History, individual stories, and the present.
We mustn’t go too far in trying to establish direct links between our present and this or that figure from the past. Conventional wisdom always speaks of the lessons of the past and invites us to search history for situations similar to those we are experiencing, or to trace the sequence of events leading from the past to the present in order to find rules for action. The politics of knowledge we practised at Les Révoltes Logiques was quite different. What we sought in history were moments of rupture, blocks of the present that directly contradicted the evolutionary vision that seeks lessons from the past. Rather than shedding light on the present through the past, we wanted to hurl blocks of the past into the present, like paving stones, to fracture our present, to make strange and dissonant voices heard within it—voices capable of shaking the dominant, consensual analyses of this present and the vision of history that underpinned them. Texts such as “The Proletarian and His Double” and “The Gauny Effect” shed light on a figure of the proletarian and his emancipation that breaks with all explanations in terms of historical and social determinism, specific moments in the development of capitalism, and so on. They do so in opposition not only to the images of the conscious, organised worker propagated by the communist tradition, but also to those of the savage insurgent cherished by leftism. So if there is a connection between my writings from that period and the articles I wrote twenty or thirty years later on “racism from above”, it is not because the migrant today occupies the position of the nineteenth-century proletarian. Such a comparison would only blunt the edge of the archive that I have projected into the present. Nor have I conducted any research on migrants that would run parallel to my work on the workers’ archive. What links the two is a shared struggle against consensus, as I understand it. Consensus is the official mapping of the perceptible and the thinkable, which asserts that whilst people may hold different opinions, reality remains a given. It is this “reality”—supposedly prior to any “opinion”—that I have challenged in various ways. The articles in Les Révoltes logiques and Nights of Labour did so by extracting from the archive a reality of the emancipated worker that shattered the established frameworks of perception regarding the worker and social struggle. The articles on racism challenged the consensual “reality”: “there is an issue with immigrants that needs to be resolved, whether one is on the right or the left, because if it is not resolved, it fuels racism”. But in this instance, I focused primarily on deconstructing this “reality” within the realm of argumentation, by showing how it was constructed and what effect it produced, namely the reinforcement of the perceived “immigration problem” and the portrayal of the immigrant as inassimilable. In both cases, there is always the same critique of identity politics, but it takes various forms.
There are two texts by Foucault that revisit Kant’s “What is the Enlightenment?”, which is a topical piece; the German philosopher wrote it for a magazine of his time. However, it is not merely a philosophical reflection on current affairs; he is not being asked for his opinion on this or that event. Kant raises a question; he poses a new problem. It is less a matter of asking reason – or rather the philosopher, the scholar or the expert – to shed light on the present, but rather to describe, as far as possible, what is happening to thought itself. Are we experiencing an event of this kind that is affecting our reason and our modes of reasoning? Today, we speak of the “Dark Enlightenment”. At first, this may have seemed like a limited phenomenon – even exotic and amusing – emanating from a handful of ideologues in the dark corners of the internet, but the worrying signs are mounting. You said recently that we may be experiencing a revolution in reverse.
It is not “perhaps” but certainly. We are experiencing a counter-revolution that began in the era of Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, which was more or less delayed or simply masked in certain countries by the existence of governments claiming to be socialist. This counter-revolution has set about systematically dismantling all forms of social solidarity, as well as all traditions of thought linked to equality. But it is true that it has recently taken a more intellectual and radical turn. For a long time, it had, in a sense, moulded itself to the logic of consensus: the logic that tells us that reality is the law and that the imperatives of globalisation compel our societies to abandon the social benefits and forms of solidarity born of the social struggles of the past. The capitalist offensive presented itself as the simple acceptance of necessity and still claimed to be guided by progressive reason and democracy. One might have thought that it was merely intensifying its pursuit of profit whilst respecting the official values of Western societies. It is indeed this illusion that has been shattered in recent times. Capitalism is no longer content merely to make profits. It wants to govern directly, to make the laws itself and to define what people should and should not think. This is why it is increasingly shedding the cumbersome trappings of progress and democracy to assert a worldview based on a return to traditional authorities and values, which ultimately boils down to the simple law of the strongest – to which the “freedom” it claims ultimately reduces itself. From libertarianism to the “Dark Enlightenment” via accelerationism, theories that once seemed the preserve of more or less eccentric economists or philosophers have become central to the thinking of Capital and its most “modern” fringes. And the start of Trump’s second term has shown that behind what appeared to be the mere lust for power of a mentally ill individual lay a fully structured ideological offensive. But if this intellectual counter-revolution has gained the upper hand, it is also because our reason itself has found itself increasingly confronted with its own share of darkness and superstition. In conspiracy theories today, just as in Holocaust denial yesterday, reason has been forced to recognise the caricature of its own presuppositions: the principle of sufficient reason, which leads one to refuse to believe in the existence of a phenomenon unless all its conditions are established; a distrust of any evidence provided by the senses, and the idea that the appearance of things is designed to conceal the truth, which is always hidden beneath or behind them. And I must not forget the condemnation of Cartesian reason—which destroys nature—carried out in the name of defending life against the impending ecological catastrophe. Perhaps it is time for a fresh examination of the forms of rationality that govern our world and our minds.
There is a certain school of critical thought that has heralded the end of emancipatory universals and the need to move beyond them. One could cite this or that theory spanning several fields – philosophy, postcolonial studies, gender studies, and so on – but it is above all a climate of thought. When you were young, there was this idea of a revolutionary science that needed to be presented to the workers so that they might rise up; today, the “right theory” has taken on a different form: a systematic scepticism towards universals as tools of subjugation. In this sense, you remain traditional; you keep asking, time and again, the question of freedom and equality… even if it is a gamble that one might lose.
The whole question is what we mean by “universal”. The progressive tradition equated the universal with scientific laws, standards of thought and behaviour, and forms of organisation that were supposed to represent the culmination of civilisation’s long march. It contrasted this universal with a particularism that it equated with the vestiges of the past specific to populations or social groups lagging behind progress and science. This “universalism” was in fact part of the hierarchical tradition that divided humanity into two: “active” men and “passive” men. In short, the universal was the preserve of the elites, whilst the particular was the lot of the poor, women and the backward. This form of universalism fuelled all manner of reactionary undertakings, such as colonialism, but it also affected socialist and revolutionary movements that sought to subject the masses—who were incapable of rising to the general vision of the historical process—to the authority of the scientific vanguard. I did indeed subscribe, during the Althusserian period, to this scientistic vision of vanguard universalism. But my work on workers’ emancipation has led me to a completely different view of things: universalism is not a given. It is not a general rule applied to individuals to measure their progress on the scale of civilisation. It is always a singular process. Political universalism is a movement towards universalisation. It is the movement of those who break free from the situation to which they have been confined precisely as a social, ethnic, sexual or other group condemned to particularity. This has been the movement of workers, women, Black people and other “singularised” groups to assert themselves as full members of society, capable of exercising, as well, the “rights of man and of the citizen” and of infinitely broadening the meaning and scope of these rights. This is what I have sought to conceptualise in my idea of political subjectivation. This concept links the demands of a particular oppressed group with the assertion of the rights of the uncounted in general, the assertion of the rights of those without a share. The political universal is thus a polemical universal that undoes the established separation between humans capable of the universal and those consigned to the particular. It is one universal pitted against another: a constructed universal against a universal that is merely endured. It seems to me that we remain, in fact, trapped within an essentialist conception of the universal when we proclaim the end of universals and the need to replace the universalist movements of yesteryear with an aggregation of movements and demands from particular groups. In doing so, we lose sight of the meaning of political subjectivation. And we tend to transform the political struggle into a clash of cultures, each asserting its own identity. The crux of the problem is that equality – like freedom – is not a relationship between defined identities. It is a way of thinking and acting that rejects both the fixation on identity and the hierarchy of identities.
You spoke of the progressive tradition and of this universalism that divided humanity in two. It is, of course, against this universalism that decolonial thought is directed. But as early as the nineteenth century, another form of universalism emerged: there is the insurrectionary universalism of a figure like Blanqui, who did not believe in progress; there is the universalism of the revolutionaries in Haiti who took up the torch of the French Revolution… It is not a case of the colonial universal on one side and singularities on the other, but rather what you have called a conflict in the way of “world-making”, one universal pitted against another. My question here is twofold. Why and how does this conflict, in your view, differ from the concept of war? And at the same time, what of this confidence in the collective capacity to create another world? Anger accompanied by powerlessness – and therefore resentment – is not an objective outcome of the situation. What happened?
I do not believe the problem lies in pitting a “good” universalism against a “bad” one. One can always declare this “other universalism” in the abstract. But in politics, what is at stake is setting a process of universalisation against a universal that is assumed to be given but which does not, in fact, specify whom it concerns. This requires a process of subjectivation on the part of those without a share, that is to say, the assertion of a capacity for universalisation. This is what is at stake in the example of the Haitian Revolution. The French revolutionaries may well have been convinced that the Haitians, like all human beings, were born free and equal in rights, but they did not draw from this the conclusion that the Haitians had, here and now, the capacity to exercise those rights by constituting themselves as a free people capable of governing themselves. The Haitian revolutionaries had to prove it. They had to take up arms to do so. But there are many kinds of war. The war they waged was unique; it was a war with a political dimension, since the conflict centred on the affirmation of something that combatants on both sides had in common, namely human and civil rights, and thus the capacity to put them into practice. In the wars of decolonisation, this political dimension was constantly intertwined with the simple warlike otherness that demanded the expulsion of the foreign invader.
It is this tension between the “same” and the “other” that has receded from our horizon, where all otherness is supposed to be real (clash of civilisations or the like). What has emerged at the same time is confidence in the ability of equals, when united, to build another shared world. The consensual order—that is to say, the world order constructed by absolutised capitalism—has, for the time being, succeeded in imposing its overwhelming power and thereby stirring up all the negative emotions linked to the sense of powerlessness we have discussed: fear, shame and resentment. There are several ways of compensating for this powerlessness: there is the reactionary version, which directs resentment against those held responsible for our malaise – the foreigner, the immigrant, and so on. But there is also, amongst those who wish to confront the power of Capital and its state agents, a tendency to limit the scope of the power of equals, to relegate its affirmative aspect to the background, and to measure it solely by the sporadic blows dealt to the symbols of the enemy’s power.
The counter-revolution began with the TINA (“There Is No Alternative”) consensus and is now taking a different turn. You said earlier that capitalism is no longer content merely with making profits; it wants to govern directly – “Profit is not enough for them. They want absolute dominion over minds and bodies”. In your writings on May ’68, you argue that this event marked a break – or rather the end – of the confusion between a conflict of worlds and a conflict of social forces. Until then, wherever people were creating a different kind of world, that was also where they were bringing the machine to a standstill and dealing a blow to the adversary. Today, even as the environmental disaster deepens and our living environments seem increasingly unliveable, is there not a case for returning to this confusion, for experimenting with new forms within it? Rather than a moment of clarification, might May ’68 not be the beginning of a new kind of confusion, in a way?
This tension did not begin with May 1968. Both aspects have always been present, sometimes intertwined but often also separate and, at times, antagonistic. In the 19th century, which I have studied, there was the idea of workers’ associations as the heart of a fraternal world, and there were insurrectionary workers’ uprisings (1848, 1871) which were reactions to the state’s provocations. Both could stem from the same fundamental vision of the opposition between two worlds, but they could also give rise to problems in the clash of forces. In Marx’s view, the Paris Commune was both the exemplary nucleus of a world to come and a power incapable of providing itself with all the means necessary for victory. After that, of course, there was the experience of the Russian Revolution, which sought to reconcile the two but ended up prioritising the balance of power, which ultimately worked to the sole advantage of state power. The period of militant activism symbolised by May ’68 was made possible because the negative lesson provided by the degeneration of the Soviet state was countered by the grand illusion surrounding the Cultural Revolution, interpreted through an anarchist lens. The encouragement given to mass indiscipline, and the grand Maoist proclamations on the union of intellectual and manual labour, had created the illusion that a tangible communist world once again existed, and that this world was being forged precisely in opposition to state power. It was against this backdrop that the 1968 movement and its specific “confusion” developed: the belief that the mass presence in the streets and in the occupied universities of the people of the future was already the dissolution, in the making, of the powers of the State and Capital.
We saw this again in the “squares” movements of the 2010s or in the Gilets Jaunes movement in France: there was another world on the streets that presented itself as the living refutation of the world of domination, before which the latter seemed destined to vanish. But this does not mean that the participants in these movements had made the “wrong choice” of neglecting the conflict of forces in favour of the conflict of worlds alone. It is not a question of choice. If the “conflict of worlds” aspect appeared to dominate, it was also because the old material and intellectual structuring of the conflict around the workers’ struggle against Capital had lost both its strength and its theoretical clarity with the capitalist offensive that destroyed factories, workers’ collectives and the entire complex of social solidarity that had built up around them in our countries. And during the same period, the final collapse of the USSR and the disappearance of the Chinese counter-model removed any prospect of a global-scale struggle against the new horizon of globalised capitalism. What then happened was what I have analysed in relation to the concept of occupation: what had been a weapon to block the capitalist machine at its very heart – the factory – became, on the streets, a form of secession alongside the centres of power, even if this meant that, from time to time, some attempted to launch violent operations from the occupied squares that bore no organic connection to the forms of collective self-assertion being expressed there. The fact is that these two forms of conflict are now largely disconnected, but unfortunately this is not merely a matter of adjusting strategy. It presents a twofold challenge: that of identifying, in the present day, where the enemy can be materially struck, and that of giving substance to the alternative world that the democratic movements are both shaping and calling for.
You say in one of your writings that, in practice, ’68 broke with a revolutionary paradigm – that of revolutionary action led by a class and its vanguard. But at the same time, you say that the Spring of ’68 lacked a theory to underpin its practice. The movement largely continued to conceive of itself within that paradigm. Is revolution conceivable today? How does this relate to the current counter-revolution?
It seems to me that the answer – or perhaps the lack of an answer – follows from what we have said previously. In fact, the Spring of ’68 failed to conceptualise the novelty of its own practice. This practice challenged, on the ground, the Marxist vision of revolution as a seizure of power based on the collective strength of the working class. Yet the movement continued to conceive of itself within the framework of that vision. What followed, unfortunately, only served to highlight this anachronism even further, as capitalism succeeded in dismantling, almost without a fight, that collective working-class force which still seemed so formidable in 1968; in reducing communism – which presented itself as the objective movement of reality itself – to the status of a theory for intellectuals; and in appropriating the Marxist notion of “historical necessity” for its own ends. The idea of revolution as the articulation between a social force, a mode of political action and a project for a new world underpinned by a vision of history has not been replaced by anything, despite all attempts: Negri’s cognitive communism, Laclau and Mouffe’s chains of equivalences, Badiou’s idea of communism as an “orientation”, the “Soulèvements de la terre”, and so on. Practices aimed at affirming the capacity of equals have so far failed to create any substitute for the classical model of revolutionary seizure of power. The question of whether a revolution is conceivable today itself warrants two distinct answers. On the one hand, the elements of the Marxist concept of revolution are now dissociated both in theoretical thought and in the reality of struggles. But this does not mean that the current capitalist and state-based order is the final word in human history. Just because something has not yet been conceived does not make it inconceivable. No one can determine the limits of the power of egalitarian self-assertion. And whilst capitalism may be calling the shots today, it does not itself know where it is heading.
[1] To be published in 2027 by Potlatch.
[2] This text is recent; it was delivered during a seminar entitled “Gabriel Gauny: Utopia at Work” at the Saint-Denis Media Centre in April 2024.