November 2025

Lenin supposedly once remarked “There are decades when nothing happens, and weeks where decades happen.” The quote, it turns out, is a misattribution. Like so many misquotes, its staying power remains because it synthesizes something important. It points towards a certain rarity at the heart of radical politics. Everyday does not bring with it a seismic shift, the only constant revolution is that of the Earth around the Sun. Another Lenin misattribution: “every cook can govern.” Lenin did not say this (CLR James does say this, however).[1] What Lenin actually said was closer to ‘every cook should learn to govern’, and in the text where he makes this claim he writes “we demand an immediate break with the prejudiced view that only the rich, or officials chosen from rich families, are capable of administering the state, of performing the ordinary, everyday work of administration.”[2]

These two misattributed quotes of Lenin set up two poles of Marxist thought that appear in tension. On the hand, change comes through revolution, and this is a rare event, one where decades could happen in a week. In the second we see something more common and ordinary, an egalitarian belief in the capacities of everyone and an emphasis on the everyday. Both of these poles stem from the fact that at the heart of Marxism is a certain egalitarian ethos. I say certain because there is much that obscures and complicates this egalitarianism. Are not the proletariat given special privileges by Marx and Marxism? Is there anything egalitarian about the dictatorship of the proletariat? And what of Marxism as a concrete, historical movement? The party, the vanguard, revolutionary leadership are hardly egalitarian concepts. And yet Marx and Marxists pen lines about the needs of all being met, about every cook governing and the ordinary intelligence of all. Marxism as a method is one which peels back the curtain and peers into the hidden abodes of not only production but the fundamental structures of capitalist society. In doing so it sees intelligence on display on the production line, in the factory, in the making do of life. 

This egalitarianism becomes more evident in the politics of Marxism. The politics of revolt and revolution are ones against an anti-egalitarian order, against one which determines in advance who should and can rule. That the workers can and should seize power is a principle so radical we have forgotten the animating impulse. Non-domination is one of them, yet such a theory of non-domination would have to match the remarks of Marx and his comrades and thus necessarily include self-determination. And a robust concept of self-determination would necessarily include the idea that one has the means to self-determine, that one is equal to the status of their previous masters. In this sense, a certain egalitarianism is baked into Marxist politics itself.

It is not my goal to decisively adjudicate these arguments. Amongst those who take the egalitarian strain of radical thought seriously there is a strange division that produces a difficult contradiction. On the one hand we have French egalitarians such as Jacques Ranciere, Alain Badiou and Sylvain Lazarus, all of whom follow in a radical tradition they develop from Marxism . Their egalitarian conception of politics produces a particular thesis: politics is rare. On the other hand we have what I shall call the Anthropological Egalitarians. Deriving from lineage that has Henri Lefebvre as one of it majors nodes, these thinkers include Michel de Certeau and James C Scott. For them politics is quotidian and constant. Yet this constancy produces a certain vision of egalitarianism, as their vision of everyday politics stems from the creativity, knowingness and wisdom of the very classes who are ruled and therefore not supposed to be ruled. 

Now of course one here can object that I am comparing anarchists and Marxists. Divergences and convergences in these radical tendencies aside, what I am drawing out here is the conflict between revolution and the critique of everyday life. Marxism is quotidian, it begins with the everyday of production. It also posits a radical and explosive change to the system that one must assume is, by definition, rare. We will see in detail below how this appears in the work of Marx himself, and work of Henri Lefebvre who sought to systematize this tendency. 

The question is if these two positions are in anyway reconcilable. My suspicion is they are, but that we must distinguish revolution and revolt, politics and politics, sequence and occasion and potential and event. Scott and Certeau point to what Badiou will call the non-place of politics, without fully articulating a politics of the non-place. We will see what all this means soon. Along the way we might get some clarity on the fraught questions of egalitarianism in Marx. 

Marx: Egalitarianism, The Everyday and Revolution 

The world is a machine. It churns, it makes, it produces. Humankind finds themselves amidst all this production. They must, as a necessary condition to live, to produce their own survival, join in somehow in this production. In doing so they are transformed at every level, including in their thoughts. In The German Ideology Marx and Engels write that “men [by which they mean humankind], developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.”[3] We should immediately note two things here. Firstly that structural element: in the making and remaking of society lies the key to explaining man’s actions and thoughts. Secondly, the quotidian nature of this claim. Everyday man engages in production, and everyday cements this over determined consciousness. This everydayness is on full display when Marx, in Capital Vol.1, descends into the “hidden abode of production”, into the labour process, the working day, the process of manufacturing.[4] Entering the world of work and production is to enter an everyday world, in both the sense that it is common and that it produces the very things which make up our daily lives. Likewise, when Marx discusses the idea of social reproduction, however passingly, later in Capital, his analysis brings us into the space of home: “the capital given in return for labour-power is converted into means of subsistence which have to be consumed to reproduce the muscles, nerves, bones and brains of existing workers, and to bring new workers into existence.”[5] This rather obtuse sentence simply means that capital extends its slimy reach from the factory floor to the kitchen sink, most of most people’s daily existence. 

Let us get back to men and their consciousness. Marx and Engels seem to suggest that in the making and remaking of the everyday world, man and his thoughts are forged. The actual situation is, of course, more dialectical. A few pages later in The German Ideology he softens the blow: “circumstances make men just as much as men make circumstances.”[6] The statement is balanced, “just as much” holds the centre of gravity. If men are to be determined by their engagement in productive forces, if life determines consciousness, what could it mean for men to make their own circumstances? 

This is one of the many problems Marx bequeaths to us. It gets restated in the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”[7] The key is the balance, the statement’s lack of negativity. Men do make history, but not under self-selected circumstances, not entirely freely. What can this restrained transformation mean, what might transformation under duress concretely look like? One answer offered by early Marx is an emphasis on the proletariat as the emancipators. This appears clearly in his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right:

So where is the positive possibility of German emancipation? This is our answer. In the formation of a class with radical chains, a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society, a class which is the dissolution of all classes, a sphere which has a universal character because of its universal suffering and which lays claim to particular right because the wrong it suffers is not a particular wrong but wrong in general… and finally a sphere which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from – and thereby emancipating – all the other sphere of society, which is, in a word, the total loss of humanity and which can therefore redeem itself only through the total redemption of humanity. This dissolution of society as a particular class is the proletariat.

This conclusion already followed from the ideas Marx was developing in The German Ideology, where he writes of the proletariat the following: “a class is called forth, which has to bear all the burdens of society without enjoying its advantages, which, ousted from society, is forced into the most decided antagonism to all other classes; a class which from the majority of all members of society and from which emanates the consciousness of the necessity of a fundamental revolution, the communist consciousness…”[9] Surprise, surprise… that class is the proletariat. 

In these works, the proletariat is the solution to the problem of consciousness. Everyday man goes out into the world and acts on it, and these actions must become part of his thoughts and his worldview. Yet, transformation must remain possible. In another remarkable example of hedging his bets, the quote above continues on “…, which may, of course, arise among the other classes too through contemplation of the situation of this class.”[10] If contemplation of the class of proletariat can allow one to develop a ‘communist consciousness’ then the problem of determination of consciousness is suddenly and massively weakened; the claims cannot be as strong as they appear to be. 

If the world acts on our consciousness in the process of us acting on the world, and the obvious out is the formation of class whose particular position in class society leads them to be able to dissolve class relations, then we are talking about subject formation. The emergence of a revolutionary subjectivity by the forces of production produces a nightmare for our concepts of agency, freedom and social transformation. If it is a question of emancipation, as Marx makes it in his ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’, then it is hard to understand what kind of emancipation is achieved when it appears so produced. And as soon as we get the possibility of ‘contemplation of the class of the proletariat’ producing communist consciousness it is no longer clear, at all, what the production of a revolutionary subject entails or means. 

I do not think that Marx ever fully resolves the tensions he sets out here, and they become fundamental tensions for him.  He is aware of the possibility of revolt and revolution in other times and other places, and becomes himself an assiduous thinker of his contemporary moments (the 18th Brumaire, The Civil War In France, etc etc). He knows the world has been transformed before and that is in the process of being transformed again. In The Communist Manifesto the goal is in part to gather, agitate and propel the very changes that seem so structural and latent in these early writings. 

Enzo Traverso writes of Marx that he is “a thinker for whom classes are not abstract sociological categories but living historical subjects. Classes do not exist out of their relationships with other classes; they are not “things” – as Durkheim’s “social facts” – but subjects that forge themselves in the name of social relations.”[11] Yet living historical subjects are subject to transformation themselves, and if Traverso is right, the comments on the special role of the proletariat are hard to understand as fundamental. At the same time Marx’s postulating of the world historical mission of the proletariat solves the problems of consciousness so integral to his analysis. 

I think we can understand this problem as similar to the very problem I began with. The tension of thinking about how the consciousness of an individual is transformed structurally is one Marx handles with some care, aware that the system does not simply apply pressure downwards, that the oppressed also push back. At the same time Marx is looking for a theory of massive structural change – i.e. revolution – that can meet the heights of the massive structural theory of modern society he is proposing. Marxism is a theory of the everyday of capitalism, but within that everyday is a pressure cooker of political conflict (and subjectivity) that seems ripe to boil over. Getting a handle on this fact requires a certain dialectical finesse that cannot always be maintained. The problem of Marxism has oft been the defining problem of Spinozism: why do men fight for their servitude as if it were their salvation?

From Everyday Life to Everyday Resistance 

In the 1940s, Henri Lefebvre obliquely tackled this issue from another angle. For Lefebvre it is everyday life that is the most fundamental object of Marxist thought: “Marxism, as a whole, really is critical knowledge of everyday life.”[12] The goal, however, is not just critique, but transformation, as we know from Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach. The everyday becomes, for Lefebvre, a site of both oppression and emancipation, “If revolution – in other words, the radical transformation of society – cannot have as its goal and end either faster growth or a mere change of political personnel, it can only have as its goal and end the transformation of daily life.”[13] Daily life is where the analysis starts and ends. 

Lefebvre approaches Marx’s traditional structure from the other side. For Marx we start on the side of the everyday, in the factory, and seek transformation in the revolt and the revolution. Yet by focusing on everyday life, Lefebvre centres a more prefigurative approach; what in our lives can we transform? This is the source of his influence on The Situationists, for whom even the stroll can and must be transformed. Kristin Ross fills out this Lefebvrean idea of transformation in The Commune Form, where she writes: “Everyday life as the terrain of ever-changing alienations also holds the key to their collective dismantling. A colonized everyday life could be decolonized – not in one fell swoop, perhaps, but through concerted effort of reappropriation of lived time and space.”[14]

For Ross the space in which this concerted effort happens is the commune. In The Commune Form she identifies this commune with paysans, a term meant to denote peasants and farmers who are not agrarian land owners. This idea for Ross plays out in a theoretically intriguing way. For her, the idea of the paysan is announced by Bernard Lambert, whose book Les Paysans dans la lutte des classes [Peasants in the Class Struggle], “gives voice to a genuinely new political subjectivity.”[15] Lambert’s book articulates a figure of the farmer as proletarianized, exploited, dominated and integrated into the economy in precisely the way Marx argues for the proletariat.[16] 

Here an interesting problem emerges. Ross supplies plenty of evidence for the role of small scale farmers (i.e. what someone in Marx’s era would have simply called a peasant) in radical politics and social transformation. However, Marx’s own comments about peasantry strike a decisively different tone to his comments about the proletariat. Famously in the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte he writes that 

The small-holding peasants form an enormous mass whose members live in similar conditions but without entering into manifold relations with each other. Their mode of production isolates them from one another instead of bringing them into mutual intercourse. The isolation is furthered by France’s poor means of communication and the poverty of the peasants. Their field of production, the small holding, permits no division of labor in its cultivation, no application of science, and therefore no multifariousness of development, no diversity of talent, no wealth of social relationships. Each individual peasant family is almost self-sufficient, directly produces most of its consumer needs, and thus acquires its means of life more through an exchange with nature than in intercourse with society. A small holding, the peasant and his family; beside it another small holding, another peasant and another family. A few score of these constitute a village, and a few score villages constitute a department. Thus the great mass of the French nation is formed by the simple addition of homologous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes. Insofar as millions of families live under conditions of existence that separate their mode of life, their interests, and their culture from those of the other classes, and put them in hostile opposition to the latter, they form a class. Insofar as there is merely a local interconnection among these small-holding peasants, and the identity of their interests forms no community, no national bond, and no political organization among them, they do not constitute a class. They are therefore incapable of asserting their class interest in their own name, whether through a parliament or a convention. They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented.

This passage is often used to show Marx’s negative views of peasantry. We should be careful, however. In typical fashion it is immediately followed by a clarifying comment that by far this analysis applies mostly to conservative peasants. While what is called the agrarian question in Marxism is more complicated than this quote makes out, I want to point to a linguistic shift.[18] This is not how Marx talks about the proletariat in works from this time or before it. Ross plays along, by and large, with the Marxist framework in her idea that the peasant as revolutionary class must be announced. In what is surely meant to be a side comment she says Lambert’s Les Paysans dans la lutte des classes belongs alongside “canonical revolution texts” of the era: Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and Simone Beavoir’s The Second Sex. Yet both of these texts also announce revolutionary subjects. Who then is the revolutionary subject supposed to be if it is also a privileged frame for radical transformation? 

The question that is missing here is what makes it possible for a shift in the revolutionary subject. If Lambert is correct to announce the peasantry as revolutionary because of their enmeshment in capitalist production in way hitherto unseen, and this announcement occurs with in the same era that produces the announcement of the anticolonial revolutionary subject and the radical feminist subject, it is no longer clear how the concept of subject formation is operating in our theory of revolution. 

This is the problem the revolution of daily life points to. For Lefebvre and the Situationists, the transformation of everyday life happens at first in a struggle with the everyday. Resistance must be decided upon. The dérive – the Situationist act of walking as one pleases, against the footpath - is an explicit act against the architecture of the city.  Yet who is the agent who could enact this transformation? If we are to zero in on everyday life we have to admit that in theory everyday life happens to everyone. Lefebvre will often repeat Marxist platitudes about the proletariat, but he is aware that is own theory does not quite allow for this: 

Like everything else, the subject is to be reconstructed. How? In the first instance, through action in the everyday pursuing a course opposed to the operational schema of the existing order: that is to say, by opposing difference to homogeneity, unity to fragmentation, concrete equality to pitiless hierarchization, in a real struggle.

Yet this focus on everyday life has led us to a discussion of subjects and small acts, and it seems as if the larger picture of revolution is sliding out of focus. Lefebvre of course assumes a dialectical unity, that small acts become the larger one, but this then requires a theory of what the passage from the micro to the macro entails. 

...

It is the anthropologist and political scientist James C. Scott who theorises a different concept of everyday politics, one where resistance is just as quotidian as oppression. In Domination and the Arts of Resistance he sets out to show how resistance is baked into the everyday interactions the powerful have with the subservient. The book opens with an ‘ancient Ethiopian proverb’ which states that “the wise peasants bows deeply before his master and farts silently.”  This image, which combines deference and resistance, is the core of Scott’s conception of everyday resistance. 

Scott’s research takes its impetus from the issue of the rarity of revolution. In a certain sense he agrees with the idea that politics is rare. In Weapons of the Weak, a work which explicitly theorizes peasant political activity, he explicitly sets out the problematic as that of the fact “peasant rebellions, let alone revolutions, are few and far between.”[20] Scott is wise enough to know that just because they are rare does not mean that nothing is happening. In the Moral Economy of the Peasant he poses his question slightly differently: how do we gauge the potential for rebellion in the absence of the possibility to act?”[21]

In probing this question, Scott sees two alternative explanations. The first assumes that the peasants are ideologically duped, victims of “what Marxists might call ‘mystification’”.[22] The second is about the threat of coercion, what Scott cheerfully calls “the relationships of force in the countryside.”[23] Scott clearly does not agree with the first hypothesis, and indeed so much of his work is clearly inveighing against a robust concept of ideological domination. For the second he assumes that if this was true then relaxing of coercive measures would increase instances of revolt.[24] While this does happen, the relaxing of repressive forces is so often so gradual and slow that the question he poses remains. In true political scientist fashion he is unsatisfied with the reproducibility of his examples. 

For Scott the question is best examined through all the various ways in which resistance appears at the small level. In his studies of peasant resistance, he sees resistance in small acts of theft from landlords, replacing grain with chaff or even in the songs that peasants sing which mock their masters.[25] He also sees it in what he calls the hidden transcript, what subordinates say behind closed doors. For example, he opens Domination and the Arts of Resistance with a discussion of George Eliot’s Adam Bede, in particular a scene where Mrs.Poyser explodes at the squire from whom she rents land. This act of rebellion for Scott is merely to make public of what he terms the “hidden transcript.”[26] The hidden transcript is, for Scott, the discourse that takes place away from the masters and powerholders.[27] It is contrasted to the public transcript that occurs between the dominate and the subordinate, what you say to your colleagues versus what you say to your boss. That the hidden transcript exists at all points towards the constancy of resistance in Scott’s conceptual framework. 

For Scott, the everyday is already the site of transformation and revolt. It is, however, unclear where revolution fits into this picture. To this rejoinder Scott famously speculates that perhaps a coral reef, growing piece by piece without direction, could one day be powerful enough to sink the ship of state.[28] Later, in Domination and the Arts of Resistance he also has a difficult time thinking through when the hidden transcript becomes public. In one of the final sections of that book he writes “who will be the first to make an open declaration of the hidden transcript and exactly how and when it will be made are matters largely beyond the scope of social science techniques.”[29] There are simply too many factors at play. The situation sounds to me, perhaps, a touch overdetermined. 

Part of the problem with Scott’s analysis here is that he has removed the thorny problem of revolutionary subjectivation.[30] In the mere friction of power, resistance occurs. The idea is, of course, Foucauldian in the extreme, but it should give us pause. If we take thinking the everyday seriously, which Marxism suggests we do, then we end up also having to consider the inherent political activity in everyday life. This has a great equalizing effect; Scott sees great invention and subterfuge in every social relation. Yet it is unclear how we come back up to the question of revolution and subjectivation. 

Scott inherits this problematic from Michel de Certeau. Yet Certeau will leave us in a more productive place than Scott. For Certeau the resistances of everyday life may well be intentional but many of them are automatic as well. For Certeau resistance is an almost fundamental, ontological issue. To use language is to craft and remodel, to resist and to remake. The very act of speaking implies resistance. He seeks his way back to a basic and fundamental intelligence in which everyone acts on and transforms their surroundings. His concept of bricolage or making do looks for those who act, not with a clear sense of political purpose, but simply to make something out of nothing. Certeau’s theoretical work begins with a simple idea: that there is multitude of self-directed activity, sometimes intentional, sometimes not, that large scale structures of power and design (from political institutions to the city grid) cannot control, capture or analyse. 

A certain level of immanent resistance is untraceable from the standpoint of power, who understands it as meaningless. He writes “Unrecognized producers, poets of their own affairs, trailblazers in the jungles of functionalist rationality produce…’indeterminate trajectories’ that are apparently meaningless, since they do not cohere with the constructed, written and prefabricated space through which they move.”[31] Against a world that compels us with something as simple as the pedestrian crossing, or the learnt rules of queueing, Certeau looks around and sees strategies and tactics that resist this compulsion. 

One of the classic examples here, shared with the Situationists, is the example of the city. Thinking about a practice as basic as walking, Certeau points out that “one can analyze the microbe-like, singular and plural practices which an urbanistic system was supposed to administer or suppress, but which have outlived its decay; one can follow the swarming activity of these procedures that, far from being regulated or eliminated by panoptic procedures, have reinforced themselves in a proliferating illegitimacy.”[32] Unlike the dérive, however, Certeau sees these illegitimacies as being as simple as the shift in how someone walks, an act that is rarely conscious. This is why his book is titled the “practice of everyday life” and not “the resistance of everyday life.” 

It is important, however, to realise that in de-centring intentionality Certeau also decentres the subject. This at first might seem to take the bite out of his analysis. Yet Certeau finds a way back in. For his interest in practices has a correlate, that “knowledge is not known.”[33] This does not mean that people do not think, it means that that knowledge does not have to be immediate to those who engage in practices. In a following section on Kant, Certeau points out that for Kant judgement becomes a middle term between theory and praxis. Yet the term judgment is broadly defined, and the balancing act is not as grandiose as it sounds, for example Kant himself offer the example of chambermaid deciding what clothes to wear. Yet the point is that the faculty is fundamental to thinking. Judgement, Certeau tells us, bears on “the relation among a great number of elements, and it exists only in the act of concretely creating a new set by putting one more element into a convenient connection with the relations, just as one adds a touch of red or ochre to a painting, changing it without destroying it. The transformation of a given equilibrium into another characterizes art.”[34] This faculty, however, this process of judgement and with it the balancing and unifying of thought in Kantian framework is associated by Certeau, with what he calls ‘la perruque’, the art of doing work for oneself under the guise of doing work for another (typically a boss), a typical act of everyday life and resistance.  ‘La Perruque’, literally in English “the wig”, is for Certeau broadly defined. Writing a letter on company stationary to a loved one counts just as much as a worker who borrows manufacturing equipment to make something for their home.[35]

By tying the Kantian analysis of judgement into the practices and strategies Certeau examines he is actually staking out a nexus of claims that intersect the converging strands of the subject, egalitarianism and revolt. Kant’s three critiques – The Critique of Pure Reason, The Critique of Practical Reason and the Critique of Judgement – are an attempt to outline the strictures and rigors of thought. There is much made of what Kant’s analysis means for understanding the world and our ability to think, but such an analysis misses the most important point that unites Kant’s analysis: it is an attempt to outline what it means to be able to think, to be a rational being at all, and this capacity for thought unites everyone.[36] Or in other words, people think. 

To this universalism of Kant, which can be pushed towards liberalism or Marxism, Certeau finds, especially in the artistic and creative practices which concern our faculty of Judgement, the means of revolt. Making do is in fact making do otherwise. In the vast conceptual apparatus Kant brings to understanding our faculty of judgment, i.e. our aesthetic sensibility, we are required to suspend the strict operation of our powers of understanding and imagination, since to understand something aesthetic is to understand something without a determinate concept. To put this otherwise, the term beautiful which does all the heavy lifting in aesthetics, must be such an indeterminate concept insofar as we can effectively communicate with it – I know what it means for something to be beautiful – without actually forcing agreement on any given beautiful object.[37] 

The lack of a determinant concept is important not only for Kant to solve the issue of the subjectivity and universality of aesthetic experience, but also for making sense of art’s ability to make something new that we are still able to make sense of; ‘The transformation of a given equilibrium into another characterizes art.’ If Certeau has a theory of the subject then, it is one that rests on this creative power. In an essay on the 1974 Gathering of Indians of the Cauca Region in Columbia, Certeau looks towards the growing indigenous political movements, who actions deviate from traditional political movements – they do not seek to form political parties, or directly inveigh in parliamentary politics and frames their uniqueness as such:

Their specificity is no longer defined by a given, by their past, by a system of representation, an object of knowledge (and/or exploitation), but finds its affirmation in a set of procedures -a way of doing things – exercised within an encompassing economic system which creates, among the oppressed, the foundations for revolutionary alliances. “Cultural” specificity thus adopts the form of a style of action which can be deployed within the situations created by capitalist imperialism.

Here we get a glimpse of how Certeau’s concepts expand from stealing at work and the city streets into a broader conception of organised mass politics. It is not clear, however, that despite the distance travelled, we have entirely escaped our original problematic. As we have followed along the thread of the analysis of everyday life, we have come to find the powers and thoughts of the everyday man while drifting away from the issues of class consciousness with which we began. This drift has meant an emptying out of the specificity of the revolutionary subject; as we have followed the contours of this idea, which is a Marxist idea, we have found that the pressure of everyday primes every subject for revolt. And yet we have arrived at a strange place: we have the conditions of class consciousness without its specificity. And furthermore, we have arrived at a broad capacity for revolutionary activity, and yet are still confronted with the problem of revolution. How do we get from Certeau’s lovesick secretaries to the organised political movement of indigenous Colombians? The answer lies, I think, in understanding the level at which the politics of everyday resistance operates, and to understand that level we must now turn to the theorists of the rarity of politics. 

The Rarity of Politics and The Egalitarian Subject in Post-Althusserian Thought 

At the same time, Marxism is the philosophy of revolution. While again it is true that the legacy can always be divided, that the history of Marxism has its reformers, it also spins out several great revolutionaries. Yet what is the situation of revolution? This is the moment where everything is transformed in a singular instant. Revolution has a certain ineffableness to it, it does not necessarily stem from the building up of despair, economic crisis or the proper development of consciousness. And indeed Marxist revolutions have a nasty tendency to occur in places they are not supposed to (Russia 1917, China 1930, etc etc). 

Here we can see a version of what might be called the rarity of politics thesis. If politics is about great upheavals and transformations, then politics does not happen often. A revolution is not an everyday event.  

The rarity of politics thesis is then another side of Marxism, that appears to be far from its emphasis on the everyday. The critique of the everyday leads us to a strange idea that, in order to escape the limits of ideology and bourgeois law making, must be rare and not piecemeal. This idea that politics is rare becomes a major theme in a slew of post-68 Marxist thinkers such as Jacques Ranciere, Alain Badiou and Sylvain Lazarus. 

For all these figures, politics is rare. They all define politics in a particular, transformative sense. Since it is transformative, it cannot be everyday. Whether this is Ranciere’s redistribution of the sensible, Badiou’s Event or Lazarus’ modes, all suggest a rarity that is in conflict with the everydayness of Marx’s analysis. 

For Ranciere, his arch concept of politics is related to what he calls the distribution of the sensible. The distribution of the sensible divides up bodies and roles in space. It is both necessary and arbitrary, society is always divided as such, it is always divided based on confusion about the abilities of people. When Marx says, in The Poverty of Philosophy that a “porter differs less from a philosopher than a mastiff from a greyhound” he is hinting at a similar idea.[39] For Ranciere politics is when this distribution is disturbed, rearranged and altered. So if we believe certain people should not govern – peasants, the proles, ignoramuses, women, etc, etc, - and they, by banding together, forming their own communities and demonstrating their capacity for political actions will end up displaying their very capacity for governance. There all kinds of examples Ranciere draws on:  the trial of French revolutionary Olympes de Gouges, who demands of her judges that if she is to be tried then she is in fact an equal subject of the very legal system that excludes her; the Plebians who gather on the Aventine Hill and force the Roman law makers to come negotiate with them;  the Paris Commune, which was “the demonstration of the ability of ordinary men and women to do what was not supposed to be their vocation: to organize a common world both in its most general and its most everyday aspects”; and all the way to the events of May 68.[40] We should, however, not make the mistake of assuming Ranciere thinks politics is a frequent occurrence. Politics is rare, especially in contrast to the frequency and commonality of the parliamentary debate, the news event, even the four-year election. In fact for Ranciere politics exists outside the time of these events, of a politics that is mediated in such a way; “Politics is identified by beginnings that establish a temporal sequence of a different kind to that of normal social evolution.”[41]

We should notice here a strange affinity to some of the ideas in Scott and Certeau. Not everydayness, but a certain openness about who, exactly, the subject of politics is. For Ranciere because the distribution of the sensible is arbitrary, there is no limit on who can be the subject of politics. Ranciere’s fundamental thesis is that everybody thinks.[42] Likewise, as we saw above, for both Certeau and Scott there is a certain openness to their subject of revolt. In a recent interview Ranciere states that “you cannot define the subject of collective emancipation only out of the development of the economy of capitalism. The subject of emancipation never was the working class as a specific socioeconomic group.”[43] What he opposes, what draws him into the orbit of the egalitarian ethos of Scott and Certeau, is his objection to the idea of class consciousness as something that one must go through. Unlike the suggestions scattered across Marx and codified later by other Marxists, there is no blockage. 

Now Ranciere must be able to explain why revolution does not simply erupt constantly. He has, in fact, two answers to this question. The first is that he claims the emancipated person may choose to do nothing, that to be emancipated means to not be forced into a certain action. In the Ignorant Schoolmaster, Ranciere offers this provocative statement: “whoever emancipates doesn’t have to worry about what the emancipated person learns. He will learn what he wants, nothing maybe.”[44] If emancipation means to be set free, it means that one might do nothing. Secondly, he articulates action not as a question of knowledge but a triggering of new passions.[45] However there is nothing to guarantee that this occurs, politics is possible but it cannot be induced with certainty. Politics has, he says, no specific object. 

What we see in Ranciere is something we have seen above. Starting out with the questions Marxism poses to us about domination, emancipation and egalitarianism, we have ended up somewhere quite different to Lefebvre, Scott and Certeau. Or at least it seems so for now. Ranciere’s vision of politics seems everyday, but he insists time and time again that politics is rare. His everdayness is located into the subject of action. Everyday in the sense of place—anyone, anywhere—but not of time. For Ranciere anyone can do politics, but not all the time. This vision of politics is perplexing. Before we return to assess Ranciere’s concepts, let us look at two other theories of the rarity of politics. 

For Badiou, the rarity of politics lies in his concept of an event. Seeking to place politics outside the framework of suffering and pity and lawfare, for Badiou an event is the emergence of something entirely new, something that cannot be inscribed in “what there is”.[46]  These events force a “new way of being.”[47] Events are stitched onto what Badiou calls the situation, the current arrangement of things, the ruling order, but in such a way as to be undecidable. The event is part of the situation but does not belong to it.[48] It presents elements of its site, but these elements do not belong to the situation. 

What does this mean? We need a quick detour on Badiou’s terminology in Being and Event. The situation designates what is, but what is includes the void which would, to use a non-set theory metaphor, destabilize the situation.[49] There is thus a metastructure which counts what is in the situation so as to avoid any contradictions, conflict or chaos. There is thus a distinction in Badiou between inclusion and belonging. The state of the situation determines what belongs to the situation, regardless of what is included in the situation already. It thus guarantees the “one-ness” of the situation. This, so far, is all ontological and mathematical for Badiou. This all simply denotes how things hang together. Yet because this is an account of reality it also captures the reality of politics, where in The State (not ‘the state’) is what counts the ‘historico-social’ situation so as to ensure one-ness. The State exists to ensure a “uniformity of effect” in the historico-social situation.[50] It does so by an account of counting which determines belonging. The States always has its own methodology for inclusion which is necessarily arbitrary, and thus always open to rupture by an event. 

In less abstract terms, events happen within the purview of the situation or state logic, but their significance, according to the state, is nihil; “the state does not count any event.”[51] For example, Badiou counts the French Revolution as an event, but the state does not say it did not happen, but rather discounts it or dismisses it or attributes to it causes that eliminate the traces of a subject and truth (read that as rough analogy for the agency of revolutionary actors).

Since the event is undecidable, one has to decide upon its having occurred and its significance. This concept Badiou terms fidelity.[52] There are two options when faced with an event. The first is to say nothing happened here. The French Revolution, on such an account, is simply a blimp in the moment of progress, a small peak (or dip) on a steady curve. It does not fundamentally change the situation. If we are progressing towards freedom then the French Revolution merely ensures that. The second, alternative option is to say that the French Revolution is a fundamental episode in the history of emancipation. If we think this then we must think about what the French Revolution means for acting towards and bringing about emancipation. To accept the French Revolution as of extreme importance means reorganizing our practice around the lessons of this event. Or as Badiou explains: “To be faithful to an event is to move within the situation that this event has supplemented, by thinking (although all thought is a practice, a putting to the test) the situation ‘according to’ the event. And this, of course—since the event was excluded by all the regular laws of the situation—compels the subject to invent a new way of being and acting in the situation.”[53]

What, for Badiou, constitutes an event? The French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, Maoism, maybe May 68. The examples he offers are few, and the emphasis on a break with the current order or state of things (the ‘situation’) entails the kind of rarity implied by the term revolution. Like Ranciere’s distribution of the sensible, anyone can be a political subject in relation to the event, because an event simply determines any newly emerging way of being against the situation. Indeed for Badiou, or at least the Badiou of Being and Event, a subject is defined by their fidelity to the event.[54] Badiou offers no limits here to what makes someone be able to decide upon such a fidelity, in theory anyone could become a subject. This anyone is misleading, because for Badiou a subject can name a group. Especially in the space of politics (truths, subjects and events occur also in love, science and art for Badiou), the subject is a collective name.[55] Of course such a collective subject can be comprised of individuals, individuals who still have to decide to come together as a political organization. 

The process of maintaining this fidelity to an event, the process of being a subject, is a process of truth, or rather a process of a truth.[56] To maintain a truth in politics is to maintain a new form of life: “essentially, a truth is the material course traced, within the situation, by the evental  supplementation. It is thus an immanent break.”[57] To develop this fidelity and truth procedure and to become a subject or part of a subject, again, does not come with an inherent place position. 

The fact of undecidability in the nature of the event forces the subject to be the one who decides upon the event, but there are no preexisting determinants for who can make such a decision. Indeed, there cannot be. In the Rebirth of History, Badiou points out that any ordering of society “ascribes intensities of existence to all being inhabiting that world.”[58] This is close to Ranciere’s point, because this ascription ignores the fundamental equality at the heart of existence. In Badiou’s terminology the “concept of being” is one of equality but the “category of existence” is hierarchical. The reemergence of the concept of being, of our fundamental equality, is “always of the order of the event.”[59] This doesn’t mean every single possible assertion of equality is an event, but that it pushes towards one. The lack of precision in what defines an event for Badiou is part of the point. His is not a predictive theory, but a typology. The event is a break, and what constitutes this break may be a surprise. This is the importance of fidelity. The examples Badiou gives are so often of revolutions, and he maintains a fidelity to them in his attempt to make sense of their lessons for the 20th and 21st centuries. That there could be more events than these examples, or even fewer, is entirely possible. 

Here we reached the obverse of the analysis of everyday life. In Scott and Certeau the everyday helps identify and justify an egalitarianism, whereas in Badiou and indeed Ranciere, egalitarianism is a fundamental presupposition to understand how it is even possible that politics in the proper sense can occur, however rarely. 

People Think, whether that is in the Space of the State or at a Distance from the State.

I have spent a long time establishing a divide in the corpus of Marxist and radical thought. I would now like to attempt to bridge that divide, and to do so I want to turn to the work of Sylvain Lazarus. Lazarus, who worked closely with Badiou for a long time, utilizes a somewhat different conceptual apparatus. Lazarus, like Badiou and Ranciere, shares both an egalitarian premise – he thinks ‘people think’ like Ranicere does – and the rarity of politics thesis. For him politics occurs in ‘modes’ defined by a sequence. In these sequences, politics proceeds in ‘interiority’, entirely subjectively. The obverse of this is the idea of politics that happens in ‘exteriority’. This does not need to be defined; it is literally all politics Lazarus is not interested in discussing and defending.  Yet when it comes to listing these modes of politics in interiority, Lazarus offers an extremely small number of examples. For example, in his essay “Can Politics be Thought in Interiority” he offers three (elsewhere he offers a few more): 1) The Classist Mode, 2) The Bolshevik Mode, 3) The Dialectical Mode. Each are identified with three thinkers – Marx, Lenin and Mao, respectively – and three forms of organization – The Movement, The Party and Revolutionary War.[60]

Lazarus offers so few examples because he holds that politics and its modes are singular and rare. This statement seems odd but makes sense if we understand Lazarus’ overall goal. That is to understand a politics that “develops itself” and “thinks itself” without the aid of other doctrines.[61] A politics that thinks itself, is a politics that breaks with what is, and in order for this to hold is a politics that must develop subjectively. In order for a politics, or its thought, to develop subjectively – which Lazarus also calls “in interiority” – it must be detached (but not totally separated, more on this later) from objective determinants.[62] If this is the case then, politics in interiority cannot be determined by previous modes of politics, at least not in the traditional sense. The modes are sequential, which means they begin and they end. Once the mode departs from the realm of subjectification into the world proper, the mode in interiority collapses. So there are no overlapping modes. Hence, politics is singular and rare. 

There is much to define here before we proceed with our analysis but I want to mark two things at the outset. For Lazarus’ fundamental claim, that ‘people think’—a statement his entire intellectual architecture is designed to defend—he adds, immediately and willing that “people think: whether in the framework of a politics at a distance from the State (politics in interiority),or  in  the  framework  of  a  politics in the space of the State (politics in exteriority.”[63] Earlier he says that “people think is worthy of everyone.”[64] People think is thus present across Lazarus’ distinctions between kinds of politics. Secondly, despite his examples of modes of politics, his concrete examples of people’s thought are often drawn from much less grandiose occurrences. He frequently cites strikes at factories in France, and uses them as critical examples of what he means by people think. We will explore these examples in detail below. However this gap between modes and examples is striking, and in untying the knot we might find a way to think through our problematic. 

When Lazarus has to give an example of what he means by people think, he says something interesting. Recalling that in laying out his concept of modes he cites rare and grand moments in history, we might be surprised to find ourselves now descending into the everyday of the factory. In his essay “Can Politics be Thought in Interiority?” he offers an example of people’s thought as “a process in interiority” concerning the word worker. During a 1984 strike at the Talbot-Poissy factory, immigrant workers found themselves being told by government ministers that their strike had more to do with their lack of understanding of France than with the fact they were workers.[65] This comment, according to Lazarus, “substituted the word “worker” with “immigrant,” opening  the period in which the word “worker” disappeared from the official public sphere.”[66] 

Years later, at the Renault-Billancourt factory, Lazarus found in talking to the workers there that this division between worker and immigrant was being challenged. An attempt to dispute this represents, for Lazarus, a clear example of what he means by ‘people think’:

Here, every person was of foreign origin, and the term “worker” was not used as a sociological characteristic, but came in the form of a problematic word designating the function of a person in the factory, given in the statement: “I am a worker. In the factory one calls me a worker, but outside of the factory, one calls mean immigrant because they forgot that I was a worker.” Deciding as to the existence of the word—thus forbidding its disappearance, subjectivating it as what permits a transformation in consciousness of those who pronounce it—is exactly what I mean by people think.

Here a dispute emerges with regards to problematic words, and it is the disputation of these words that we can see an example of people think. Yet, how are we to bridge the gap established here between the grand modes of politics and this quotidian occurrence? At a superficial level it seems there is nothing rare about the politics Lazarus is proposing, since the example of the factory seems so common. What we need to see is how these factory struggles set out the logic which Lazarus is committed to. 

People think is a fundamental premise, but it is not Lazarus’ only premise. At the heart of his system are what he calls the two statements. The first is that people think and the second is that “thought is relation of the real.”[68] This is a tricky concept, which attempts to maintain the singularity and subjectivity of Lazarus’ concept of politics without ceding anything to objective determinants. Since obviously people’s thought is part of the world it has some relation to the real, hence “of” and not “to”. Furthermore, all prescriptions establish relationships with the real in some form. This is not as bizarre a claim as it sounds. It is a perfectly normally procedure in science to suppose something exists, and then to devise an experiment to test if it is true. This procedure articulates a relationship with the real that is prescriptive and experimental. It is something like this relationship Lazarus has in mind. 

When it comes to the question of worker’s inquiry and what workers say for themselves, Lazarus sees this as concerned with not an issue of differing meanings of words, such as ‘can the word worker include an immigrant?’ which he terms polysemy but rather concerning different prescriptions. A prescription concerns itself with the construction of a notion of the real, which comes into conflict with any other prescription.  Let us return to that anonymous worker Lazarus cited earlier. He says” “I am a worker. In the factory one calls me a worker, but outside of the factory, one calls mean immigrant because they forgot that I was a worker.” This dispute organises two prescription, two reals, as Lazarus elaborates in ‘Workers’ Anthropology and Factory Inquiry’: 

So that there are two orders of the real, constituted by two alternative prescriptions: in one order, there is an assignment of the worker to the factory and the maintenance of the figure of the worker; in the other order, assignment to society and the disappearance of the figure of the worker by the qualifier “immigrant.”

This dispute over two reals, this dispute that concerns prescription and not polysemy , organizes itself around the idea of the possible. The conflict over problematic words is a conflict over prescriptions which is a conflict over the possible which is a conflict over the real. In Lazarus’ own words: 

In our process of an anthropology of thought, the possible opens a conflict of prescriptions (there are many possibles) and every prescription supports a distinct order of the real. Because there is a confrontation of prescriptions, and an effective confrontation of different theses on the real, knowledge is confronted with the choice that is not the one between the real and the false, the imaginary and the rational, but that between different orders of the real: taking society as the frame of reference of the figure of the worker consists in making it disappear, as demonstrated by the results of the Renault research, which is not a cognitive “fault,” but the choice of one prescription over another.

In the factory then we see Lazarus’ two statements operationalized. Yet, in what I find to be the most difficult passage of his Anthropology of the Name, he seems unsure of how the politics of the factory relates to the mode. He writes that “the freedom of the worker figure…with regard to the factory as a site of the mode marks the excess of the thought of politics over the thought of the mode.”[71] Earlier he says the following: “let us insist on the fact that thought in terms of mode is not a politics.”[72] Untangling this difficulty is not the purpose of this essay, but I offer a prospective solution. The examples of factory politics that Lazarus cites show how politics in interiority could function, yet that they would form the fabric of daily life for the factory worker is insufficient to constitute a mode of politics by itself, although it represents a kind of politics. The everyday politics that Scott and Certeau point to is a politics, but it is not politics. In the post Althusserian concept of politics that unites Ranciere, Badiou and Lazarus, politics represents an immanent break and an announcement of subjectivity. This does not mean, however, that the capacities required for such a moment are never otherwise on display. 

An Action Without a Place

In The Age of Poets, Badiou charts the distance between the old conception of politics and his:

Classically, politics, revolutionary politics, is a description with places. You have social places, classes, racial and national places, minorities, foreigners, and son; you have dominant places, wealth, power…And a political process is a sort of totalization of different objective places. For example, you organize a political party as the expression of some social places, with the aim of seizing state power.  But today, maybe, we have to create a new trend of politics, beyond the domination of places, beyond social, national, racial places, beyond gender and religion. A purely displaced politics with absolute equality as its fundamental concept. This sort of politics will be an action without a place.

This phrase, “an action without a place” is for Badiou a sign of the great indeterminateness of the event. Yet it can also be read as what has been charted by those theorists of everyday life and politics, who find constant political invention from everyone, including those outside our normal theories of rebels and revolutionaries. It is worth recalling that for Lazarus people think in interiority and in exteriority.  The capacity crosses the line from these modes of politics, and is in theory omnipresent. The valence of the capacity, its significance transforms based on the context. Neither Certeau nor Scott nor Lefebvre chart the crossing of one moment to another. Then again neither really does Lazarus or Badiou. If we develop our theory of equality and subject formation in contradistinction to a hierarchical world and in tandem with a notion of the possible, then we must cede ground to indeterminacy.  The structural indeterminacy foregrounds the existence of capacity and thought which in turn foregrounds the possible. What Scott and Certeau end up providing, in their role as anthropologists and sociologists, is a balance sheet of the raw proof of a statement like people think. They, however, do not ontologise it. Or, to be more precise, they only ontologise from the perspective of politics and not politics, from the perspective of domination and not transformation. 

The subject disappears in Scott and Certeau because the noise overwhelms the signal. Approached from the other side, however, it can be hard to maintain the signal. This is part of what happens in Lazarus’ analysis of the factory, touched on briefly above. Or the difficulties Badiou has in maintaining if a subject is singular or collective being. Despite the fact that Scott and Certeau’s analysis is filled with persons, it is lacking in subjects. In their analysis they have been developing a line that shows that the subject is in fact an empty place. They do not, however, have the conceptual tools to form this into a theory of how such a politics of the non-place functions. They are left with a certain degree of indeterminacy. Scott’s claim that a coral reef could sink the ship of state is couched as a maybe. Toward the end of Domination and the Arts of Resistance, he cites Simone Weil, who invokes the idea of guts to think about workplace resistance. What, Scott asks, will lead to this moment when the worker suddenly has the guts to stand up to the boss?[74] The fact is neither Scott nor Certeau have a structurally determined theory of this transformation because it produce tensions with their own focus on ordinary intelligence. It takes Ranciere, Badiou and Lazarus to formalize the problem, to make this tension and indeterminacy a key and structural part of the theory. An explanation resting on ordinary capacity will almost always have these gaps if it is to honor its insight into that capacity. We should not, however, find it odd that a theory in which anyone can become a subject of change aligns and largely contains those who, wandering after Marx into the hidden abodes of daily life, have themselves disappeared into the egalitarianism of the everyday. 

Notes

1. C.L.R James. A New Notion. (PM Press, 2010). This text contains two essay, one of which is entitled “Every Cook can Govern.”
2. Lenin. “Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?” trans. Yuri Sdobniov and George Hanna.
3. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. “The German Ideology” trans. David McLellan in Karl Marx: Selected Writings ed. David McLellan (Oxford University Press, Oxford 1977): 164. 
4. Karl Marx. Capital Volume 1. Trans. Ben Fowkes (Penguin, London 1990): 279. 
5. Ibid, 716.
6. Marx and Engels, “The German Ideology”, 173. 
7. Karl Marx. “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” trans. Saul K Padover and anon.
8. Karl Marx. “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Introduction” trans.Rodney Livingstone in Early Writings (Penguin, London 1992): 256. 
9. Marx and Engels, “The German Ideology”, 179.
10. Ibid.
11. Enzo Traverso. Left Wing Melancholia (Columbia University Press, New York 2017): 217. 
12. Henri Lefebvre. Critique of Everyday Life. trans John Moore (Verso, London 2014): 168. 
13. Ibid, 835.
14. Kristin Ross The Commune Form (Verso, New York 2024): 84. 
15. Ibid, 27.
16. This summary of Lambert is taken from Ross. See: Kristin Ross, The Commune Form, 26. I am trusting she has not terribly misrepresented his position.
17. Marx, “18th Brumaire”. 
18. For a clarifying discussion of the valences of Marx and Engels comments on the peasantry, see Daniel Finn. “Marxism and the Agrarian Question”, Jacobin August 2024.
19. Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, 838. 
20. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak (Yale University Press, New Haven 1985): 29.
21. James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant (Yale University Press, New Haven 1976): 227.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid, 268.
25. Ibid, 231, 235.
26. James C. Scott. Domination and the Arts of Resistance (Yale University Press, New Haven 1990): 6.
27. Ibid, 4.
28. Scott, Weapons of the Weak, 36. 
29. Scott, Domination, 217. 
30. For example see Scott, Domination, 111.
31. Michel de Certeau. The Practice of Everyday Life trans. Steven Rendall (University of California Press, Los Angeles 1984): 34.
32. Ibid, 96.
33. Ibid, 71.
34. Ibid, 73.
35. Ibid, 24.
36. Lucien Goldman, Immanuel Kant trans Robert Black (Verso, London 2011): 224. 
37. Immanuel Kant. Critique of Judgment trans.Nicholas Walker (Oxford University Press, Oxford 2007): §19
38. Michel de Certeau. Heterologies trans. Brian Massumi. (Minnesota University Press, Minneapolis 1986): 228.
39. Karl Marx. Poverty of Philosophy. trans.unknown.
40. Jacques Rancière. Uncertain Times trans.Andrew Brown (Polity, Cambridge 2024): 87.
41. Ibid, 81.
42. Daniel Tutt and Jacques Rancière. “Interview with Jacques Rancière”. Daniel’s Journal. December 2024.
43. Ibid.
44. Jacques Rancière. The Ignorant Schoolmaster trans. Kristin Ross (Stanford University Press, Stanford 1991): 18.
45. Jacques Rancière. The Emancipated Spectator trans. Greogry Elliot (Verso, London 2011): 72.
46. Alain Badiou. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil.trans. Peter Hallward (Verso, London 2013): 41.
47. Ibid.
48. Alain Badiou. Being and Event trans. Oliver Feltham. (Continnuum, London 2007): 181. 
49. Ibid, 105.
50. Ibid.
51. Ibid, 181.
52. Ibid, 211.
53. Badiou, Ethics, 40-41. 
54. Ibid, 43.
55. “A political organization is the Subject of a discipline of the event” – Alain Badiou. The Rebirth of History trans. Gregory Elliot (Verson, London 2012): 66.
56. Badiou, Ethics, 42.
57. Ibid.
58. Badiou, The Rebirth of History, 67.
59. Ibid.
60. In Lenin and the Party he also adds the revolutionary mode which defines the French Revolution. See: Sylvain Lazarus, “Lenin and the Party, 1902-November 1917” in Lenin Reloaded eds.Sebastian Bugden, Stathis Kouvelakis and Slavoj Žižek (Duke University Press, Durham 2007): 261. 
61.  Sylvain, Lazarus. ‘Can Politics be Thought in Interiority” trans.Tyler Harper, Cosmos and History 12: 1 (2016): 110.
62. Ibid.
63. Ibid, 109.
64. Ibid, 108.
65. Ibid, 111.
66. Ibid.
67. Ibid.
68. Sylvain Lazarus. The Anthropology of the Name. trans. Gila Walker (Seagull Press, New York 2015): 54.
69. Sylvain Lazarus. ‘Worker’s Anthropology and Factory Inquiry: Inventory and Problematics’ trans Asad Haider and Patrick King, Viewpoint Magazine. January 2019.
70. Ibid.
71. Lazarus, AoN, 166.
72. Ibid.
73. Alain Badiou. The Age of Poets. trans. Bruno Bosteels. (Verso, London 2014): 81.
74. Scott, Domination, 218.