richard-day-gramsci-is-dead

140 Gramsci is Dead151–2). Kropotkin differs from Deleuze and Guattari in positing theemergence of the state form at some defined point in history; thatis, he did not fully grasp, as did Landauer, that the state is a stateof relations. Put another way, we could say that while Kropotkinrecognized that the logic of affinity was ever-present as a potentialway of structuring human relationships, he did not see the logic ofhegemony in this way. Rather, he saw it as something that could,and should, be tossed into the dustbin of history. This assumption,which arises from the remnants of his faith in the revolution, hasimportant strategic consequences. It obscures a critical danger thatlies in wait for all who attempt to live a non-statist life, the dangerthat the state form will return, just when we thought we had got ridof it for good. This is not only a problem when constructing socialismin one country—or region, or town—but would remain even in aworld entirely devoid of states. This is because while we might ridourselves of particular states, we can never rid ourselves of the stateform. It is always already with us, and so must be consistently andcarefully warded off.This problem—which was not addressed by the classicalanarchists—is handled in an interesting way by Deleuze and Guattari.Citing Pierre Clastres’ argument in Society Against the State (1989),they note that so-called ‘primitive’ societies maintain ‘collectivemechanisms of inhibition’ that prevent the emergence of hegemonicrelationships (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 358). One of these is modesof leadership that do ‘not act to promote the strongest but ratherinhibit the installation of stable powers, in favour of a fabric ofimmanent relations’ (358). This argument, of course, is a commontrope within anarchist anthropology, from Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid toHarold Barclay’s People Without Government (1992), and by adopting itDeleuze and Guattari take on an obvious, but unacknowledged debt.But they do so at the risk of picking up a problem inherent to allmodernist anthropologies, namely a tendency to see societies withoutthe state as representative of a stage that necessarily comes before, andleads up to, the higher forms of ‘civilized’, or state-based, societies.Despite some lapses of language that seem to indicate they are notup to the task of overcoming primitivism—such as the apparentlyunqualified use of the term ‘primitive’ itself—Deleuze and Guattarido in fact present a critique of Clastres on just this basis:He [Clastres] tended to make primitive societies hypostases, self-suffi ciententities … he made their formal exteriority into a real independence. Thushe remained an evolutionist, and posited a state of nature. (1987: 359)