Marxism

The theory of politics, language, and class that Rancière elaborates in Disagreement and On the Shores of Politics not only sees him rejecting the assumptions of sociology but also involves him challenging certain key assumptions of Marxism. This chapter examines Rancière’s critical relationship to Marxist theory. In the first instance, it focuses on Marx’s analysis of the failings of the 1848 revolution in his The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, showing how, according to Rancière, Marx’s thought remains caught within the same Platonic, counter-revolutionary, and sociological problematic as we delineated in Chap. 2 . We show how Rancière inverts and subverts key elements of Marx’s analysis, reformulating Marx’s diagnosis of the failings of 1848, so that theatricality, anachronism, and the gap between ‘phrase’ and ‘content’, formal and real freedom, become not obstacles to political emancipation but its very conditions of possibility. The chapter then responds to the criticism that Rancière’s rejection of both Marxist and sociological modes of analysis leads into ahistorical and idealistic formalism. It examines his account of 1848 as a ‘conflict of worlds’, rather than a ‘conflict of social forces’, contrasting this with his accounts of the events of May 1968 and the more recent occupation movements in Spain, France, the United States, and elsewhere.