richard-day-gramsci-is-dead

142 Gramsci is DeadAlthough it is important to understand how the state form assuch operates, it is impossible to analyse adequately actually existingstates without paying attention to their longstanding interactionswith other apparatuses. While it is a commonplace to suggest thatnation-states are less important now than they were in some era‘prior’ to capitalist globalization, it is clear that the state formand capital have grown up together, in a relationship that whileit may be fraught with localized and short-term animosities, hasbeen in the long term mutually beneficial. Following the same antievolutionarylogic that underlies Deleuze and Guattari’s concept ofthe state form, capitalism—as an apparatus of exploitation—mustalso be seen as an ever-present potential, a way of being with othersthat is always possible, if we desire it—perhaps unconsciously—andmust always be warded off if we do not. Just as the state and the warmachine intermix, capitalism is in a perpetual field of interactionwith socialism, that is, with the idea that exploitation should beeliminated, or at least minimized. And we might say that racism,patriarchy, heterosexism, ableism, the domination of nature and anyother discourse that carves up the social-natural field into a hierarchyof identities, are apparatuses of division that undermine communitysolidarityand thereby facilitate capture-exploitation.Deployed and extended in this way, Deleuze and Guattari’s analysisof the state form shows the similarities between their approach andFoucault’s concept of apparatus or dispositif. 4 Not only do they sharean approach to the analysis of the apparatuses of large-scale socialorganization. There are also deep affinities in the ways in which theythought alternatives to these apparatuses might be constructed. Forthis generation, state communism had clearly shown its limits, andthe wild ride of May 1968 had culminated in something worse thana return to the status quo, since it seemed as though not only thisparticular revolution, but the revolution as such, had made its finalexit from European history. The generalization of the state forminto all relationships and the ubiquity of the electronic technologiesassociated with globalization and the societies of control seemedto rule out any desire for, and therefore any possibility of, radicalsocial change on a mass level. These thinkers and activists of theEuropean centre could have turned their attention to the so-called‘periphery’, and to some extent they did. But only in a glancing way,only with a tell-tale lack of the kind of close attention they paid totheir readings of Nietzsche and Heidegger. Spivak was right: at times it