richard-day-gramsci-is-dead

108 Gramsci is Deaddid. Not only Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen, then, but Marx andEngels as well, were under the spell of what Deleuze and Guattari callRoyal Science—they tended to approach reality in terms of generaltheorems and axioms, rather than particular, situated problems.They believed that they had uncovered a fundamental law of humandevelopment that would make it possible to instantiate an idealsociety, and wanted to instantiate that society as soon as possible.The differences between them appear only at the level of the contentof the ideal and the way in which they thought it could be realized.These differences might seem small, but they were enough to ensurethe predominance of a totalizing, class-based politics for the next150 years. The task of developing a more coherent vision of nonhegemonicforms of social organization and transformation was not,however, abandoned. Anarchist theorists such as Proudhon, Bakunin,Kropotkin, Malatesta and Landauer continued to develop and critiquethe formulations of the Utopian socialists, pushing the theory andpractice of affinity-based politics to greater levels of complexity.ANARCHIST THEORY AFTER UTOPIAN SOCIALISM: PROUDHONAt this point I want to recall Martin Buber’s argument regardingProudhon’s relation to Fourier and Owen. In the work of the lattertwo thinkers, Buber suggests, the local communities remain disparate;it was Proudhon’s contribution to show how they might be combinedinto non-statist federative structures. The preceding discussion hasshown that Fourier and Owen did in fact theorize the growth oflarger structures out of the basic units of association. Does this thenmean that Proudhon’s work is less relevant for the genealogy ofstructural renewal than Buber claims? On this particular point I wouldsay it does; and it must be noted that Proudhon also perpetuatedother problematic aspects of Utopian socialism. He believed in ‘theindefinite perfectibility of the individual and of the race’ (1923/1851:243), and declared that the ‘historical law’(1971/1863: 34) he had‘discovered’—the principle of federation—was ‘the one correctsystem’ and represented ‘the greatest triumph of human reason’(1971/1863: 5). Thus he uncritically reproduced the scientism,rationalism and perfectionism of his predecessors. Proudhon’s textsdo contain, however, some signs of struggle with the Sirens of thetransparent society. On the one hand, he proudly states that underfederalism ‘all those partisan divisions which we imagine to be soprofound, all those conflicts of opinion which seem insoluble to