richard-day-gramsci-is-dead

Utopian Socialism Then ... 109us, all those random hostilities for which there appears to be noremedy, will instantly find a definitive solution in the theory offederal government’ (1971/1863: 7). But elsewhere he rejects thisassumption, declaring with equal force that ‘there has never been anexample of a perfect community, and it is unlikely, whatever degree ofcivilization [is attained] ... that all trace of government and authoritywill disappear’ (1969: 105). Proudhon was thus one of the first thinkersof the anarchist tradition to achieve, however fleetingly, the insightthat it might not be possible to entirely eliminate domination fromhuman relationships.In his discussions of federalism, however, he rarely, if ever, talksabout the imperfections that we can expect to linger. He focusesrather on the positive aspects of the New Dawn:The federal system is applicable to all nations and all ages, for humanity isprogressive in each of its generations and peoples; the policy of federation… consists in ruling every people, at any given moment, by decreasing thesway of authority and central power to the point permitted by the level ofconsciousness and morality. (1971/1863: 49)This appeal to a universal progression—graded, of course, by the‘level of development’ of a particular people—makes it clear thatProudhon never fully freed himself from the burden of the Hegelianconception of history that Marx and Engels were so happy to find inhis work. But, even though he thought that ‘historic evolution’ was‘leading Humanity inevitably to a new system’ (1923/1851: 126), healso appealed at times to ‘the fecundity of the unexpected’ (1969:104), that is, to what poststructuralist theorists would later refer toas contingency or the event. Again, this is an early appearance of anelement of anarchist thought that is crucial to the development ofthe logic of affinity. Like the questioning of the transparent society,however, and clearly related to it conceptually, the appeal to theunexpected surfaces in Proudhon’s texts only to be rapidly submergedunder the teleological flow of history towards the Absolute.It is also important to address the question of how Proudhonthought that the sway of authority might be decreased. His thinkingon this question also seems to have been contradictory. In The GeneralIdea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century, published in 1851,he says that the ‘the people’ will have to start the revolution, bygetting together and deciding to tell their representatives: ‘we desire apeaceful revolution, but we want it to be prompt, decisive, complete’