Rancière's Lesson: October '17, May '68, October '17

Abstract

What can be said of Marxism in the twenty-first century? How can we speak of Marxism a century and a half after Das Kapital, a century after October ’17, and half a century after May ’68? What is Marxism in a time when Marxists mainly look back, commemorating spectacular anniversaries of their greatest achievements, while the future seems to be left to reformist projects like Capital in the Twenty-First Century, a book with the kind of sales for which even Slavoj Žižek would “sell [his] mother into slavery”? (Žižek 2014) 1