richard-day-gramsci-is-dead

Utopian Socialism Then ... 107not a moralist—he held morality to be ‘the mortal enemy of passionateattraction’ (1971a: 55). Within particular communities he argued thatall relationships should be based on the series, which are formedaccording to ‘affinity of tastes’ (122). Each group must be composedonly of such members as take part ‘passionally, without havingrecourse to the mediums of necessity, morality, reason, duty, andcompulsion’ (159). Unlike all of the writers I have discussed so far,he valued spontaneity and passion over abstract conceptions of duty,and argued that in the age of Harmony, what he called ‘traction’, ornatural authority, would replace abstract conceptions of duty andhierarchical constraints—again, though, perhaps only within thephalanxes and not between them. Despite his critique of moral laws,however, he was unable to free himself from a reliance upon a dubioushope to unite Christianity and natural science. Like Saint-Simon andOwen, he tried to show that his theory was based on a universalnatural/divine law: God, he argued, ‘rules the universe by Attractionand not by Force’ (61; italics in original). He was endlessly critical of‘the sophists’, ‘the philosophers’, because their doctrines were not inline with the laws of God and Nature. He also felt, rather ironicallygiven the place he has been allotted in the history of socialism, thathis discovery of the law of passionate attraction put him above those‘utopia-makers’ (56) who fail to properly observe how the natural,human and divine worlds participate as one entity in a glorious danceof passionate attraction. Fourier’s struggle to justify his commitmentto spontaneity and situated ethics provides another example of thecomplex ways in which the logic of affinity is enmeshed with thelogic of hegemony in his texts.This complexity, I would argue, has been unfortunately obscuredby the readings of Marx and Engels, and by later commentatorsfollowing their lead, who have tended to view ‘the Utopian Socialists’through the lens of a single dismissive label. The dominant readinghas also tended to obscure, through a subtle redirection of the criticalgaze, what can only be seen as Utopian elements in Marx and Engels’own formulations. From the vantage point of the end of the twentiethcentury, we can now see that Lenin’s Soviet Union and Mao’s Chinawere in fact experiments, not objective demonstrations of the validityof the materialist conception of history. Thus it might be argued thatactually existing socialism stands in the same relation to historicalmaterialism as Brook Farm does to the theory of passionate attraction.Both were rationalistic experiments, differing only in the degree oftheir longevity and (very importantly) the amount of damage they