richard-day-gramsci-is-dead

... and Now 151appears as ‘creative constellations of powerful singularities’ (61),that is, as something unknowable, untotalizable, ungraspable. It istherefore appropriate that, in another echo of post-Utopian classicalanarchism, Hardt and Negri declare that ‘[o]nly the multitudethrough its practical experimentation will offer the models anddetermine when and how the possible becomes real’ (411). At thesame time, however, their language often shifts into a Hegelian modein which the multitude appears as an entity that needs ‘a center’, ‘acommon sense and direction’, a ‘prince’ in the Machiavellian sense(65). The philosophical answer to this conundrum of course lies inthe Spinozan notion of immanence, through which the dichotomybetween singularity and totality is supposed to be transcended(77–8). But the practical answer seems to lie in a rather orthodoxcommitment to the logic of hegemony.This observation is based on a few scattered passages in Empire,but is reflective, I would claim, of a general tendency in Hardt andNegri’s work. They are highly critical, for example, of Laclau andMouffe’s ‘revisionist’ reading of Gramsci: ‘Poor Gramsci, communistand militant before all else, tortured and killed by fascism … wasgiven the gift of being considered the founder of a strange notionof hegemony that leaves no place for a Marxian politics’ (235 n.26). What would a properly marxist reading of hegemony look like?Hardt and Negri approvingly cite Lenin’s analysis of imperialism,and give him credit for recognizing, at least implicitly, the existenceof a fundamental dichotomy in modes of radical struggle: ‘eitherworld communist revolution or Empire’ (2000: 234, italics in original).In their comments on the Rethinking Marxism dossier, they declarethemselves as being ‘indebted to Slavoj Žižek for the reformulationof this question [of the ability of the multitude to make decisions]in Leninist terms’ (2001: 242). It is somewhat jarring to see twoautonomists reaching back behind western marxist readings ofGramsci to recover a properly leninist conception of hegemony. Yetit seems clear that the project of counter-Empire, as they conceiveit, would be oriented in just this way. ‘Globalization must be metwith a counter-globalization’, they write in Empire: ‘Empire [mustbe met] with a counter-Empire’ (2000: 207). Near the end of thebook, they suggest that ‘the actions of the multitude against Empire’already ‘affirm [the] hegemony’ of an ‘earthly city’ that is replacingthe modern republic (411). This eschatological tone is maintainedin a later interview, where the authors argue that ‘a catholic (thatis, global) project is the only alternative’ (2002: 184). Finally, and