richard-day-gramsci-is-dead

CONCLUSION: TAKING THE TALLYUtopian Socialism Then ... 127Indeed, with Landauer we find the full fruition of the anarchistresponse to Marx and Engels’ critique of Utopian socialism. To thecharge that Utopian socialism seeks to emancipate ‘everyone at once’,the anarchists responded by elaborating a non-hegemonic theoryof social change that defied the revolution/reform dichotomy, thatdid not seek to free anyone at all but focused on how each of us, asindividuals and members of communities, must free ourselves, inan effort that cannot be expected to terminate in a final event ofrevolution. Objecting as much as the marxists did to rationalisticsocial experiments, but also rejecting marxist ‘planning’, theanarchists evolved a theory and practice of non-rationalistic socialexperiments, an empirically-based search, if you will, of the evershiftingproblem-solution spaces offered by modern western societies.Finally, as I hope to have shown in this chapter, anarchism afterUtopian socialism was far from a mish-mash of theories. Bakunin,Kropotkin and even Landauer saw themselves as politically motivatedsocial scientists. Individual intent, however, is a sorry category toinvoke in the context of a genealogical analysis. Instead, let us notethe existence of a clear line of argumentation and political practice:the emerging theme of structural renewal guided by a logic of affinity,that was always already present in Godwin but had to go through thevicissitudes of a century of interaction with the hegemonic forms ofliberalism and marxism in order to find itself, as it were, as a theoryof social revolution distinct from both marxist political revolutionand liberal political reform.This is a theory and practice that is decidedly topian rather thanUtopian. It is about the here and now, while not pretending therehas been no past nor that there will be no future. For, as Kropotkinso elegantly showed, the logic of affinity is ever-present, even in themost advanced forms of (post)industrial bureaucratic control. It isnot a dream, but an actuality; not something to be yearned for, butsomething to be noticed in operation everywhere, at every moment ofevery day. Thus we can perhaps see that the ongoing battles betweenScientific and Utopian socialisms are driven by a narcissism of smalldifferences and a mutual ignorance of the advances made by theopposing tradition. And, as postmarxists and postanarchists havepointed out with respect to their own traditions, the theorists onboth sides of the classical debate were Utopian in a sense that did notoccur to either of them—that is, they all believed in the possibility of