The parole by Jacques Rancière East rare. Il had to see the Bozar hall packed to capacity when he came within the framework of conferences “Meet the thinker” in Brussels, March 21th last, pour understand that she porte. Notably neara public of young and d’students, came in large numbers listen to this thinker which spanned part of the 20th century.
“What is retirement? It’s not just a question of balancing the accounts, it’s a question of how you spend your time”.
A militant of the Proletarian Left at the end of the 1960s, he suggested what “the main problem of workers is not so much that they are badly paid, but that their time either stolen”. Thus, for Rancière, the reform current sparked a battle of definitions. “What is retirement? It’s not just a question of balancing the accounts, it’s a question of how you spend your time”he says. In his book The Inglorious Thirty (La Fabrique, 2022), he wrote déjà : “Retirement is how working time produces living time and how each of us is linked to a collective world. The whole question is to know what operates this link: solidarity or private interest.
But for Rancière, “lhe objective of our governments is to ensure that the system of solidarity is replaced by a system of pure individual calculation. That means that one collaborates in his retirement not pwords as a worker but as a capitalist. The fundamental idea, which is that of world capitalist power, is that there must no longer be a collective.
Rancière deplores Thus that the social achievements are today considered as “privileges” and that the idea of solidarity has disappeared: “There was a complete reversal of values, a reversal organized by our States, by our powers, also relayed by a fraction of theintelligentsia : what was an institution of a world of solidarity has become an individual privilege.”