richard-day-gramsci-is-dead

Utopian Socialism Then ... 123on mutual aid. In finding a way out of so many of the impasses thathad afflicted anarchist theory since Godwin, and in anticipatingmany of the insights of poststructuralist theory, Kropotkin appearsas a key figure in the genealogy of affinity—the first postanarchist tobegin to emerge out of the modernist quagmires of eighteenth- andnineteenth-century socialism.EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY ANARCHISMAND THE CONCEPT OF STRUCTURAL RENEWALKropotkin’s many contributions to anarchist political theory, scienceand culture are of course important in and of themselves, and itwould be ridiculous to suggest that I have done justice to him or toany other of the figures I have briefly discussed in this chapter. Rather,I have focused the reader’s attention quite fixedly on a genealogy ofthe logic of affinity, in which Kropotkin’s work appears as crucial inpreparing the ground for Gustav Landauer, who I would argue wentas far as possible, within the constraints of modern revolutionarypractice, in effecting a break in the logic of hegemony. Not wellknown outside of anarchist circles, and a minor figure even withinthem, Landauer lived, wrote and agitated primarily in Germany inthe late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and was murderedfor taking part in the Bavarian uprising of 1919. 10 In keeping withthe anarchist principle of means/ends coherence, but breaking withits long-standing reliance upon ‘the people’, Landauer insisted, in ForSocialism (1978/1911), that a radical transformation of state-capitalistsocieties could not be achieved by the instantaneous destructionof existing institutions, or by their slow reform, or even by somecombination of the two. Rather, new institutions must be created‘almost out of nothing, amid chaos’ (20); that is alongside, ratherthan inside, existing modes of social organization. He argued thatthe social revolution should be carried out here and now, for its ownsake, by and for those who wished to establish new relationships notmediated by state and corporate forms.For this strategy the appropriate tactics involve a complementarypairing of disengagement and reconstruction. ‘Let us destroy’,Landauer suggested, ‘mainly by means of the gentle, permanent,and binding reality that we build’ (93). To the extent that it doesnot seek an abrupt and total transition away from capitalist modesof social organization, Landauer’s strategy of shares with reformisma willingness to co-exist with its enemies. However, it is crucially