Jacques Rancière and the Ethics of Equality

How shall we characterize what is proper to contemporary anarchism? What quality or qualities make it anarchist and not something else? What distinguishes its critique of capitalism from Marxism, or its anti-authoritarianism from nihilism? What draws the various threads of different anarchisms together into a single weave?

At one time, people thought that the uniqueness of anarchism lay in its critique of the state. While Marxists sought to take over the state, or to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat until such time as the state would wither away, anarchists sought instead to abolish the state outright. Is it not Proudhon himself who writes, “To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so” (293-4). And Bakunin, in his criticism of Marx’s program, points out that “the doctrinaire revolutionaries, whose objective is to overthrow existing governments and regimes so as to create their own dictatorship on their ruins, have never been and will never be enemies of the state…They are enemies only of existing governments because they want to take their place” (137).