richard-day-gramsci-is-dead

158 Gramsci is Deadtheory and practice. Perhaps most disconcerting is the fact thatHolloway flees from the task that he has set for himself, that is, tofigure out how to change the world without taking power. We arehistorically lost, he says. ‘We do not know’ (215).Nick Dyer-Witheford, a Canadian autonomist theorist, shows that‘we’ in fact do know how to change the world without taking power,through his familiarity with a wide range of contemporary radicalsocial movements, ‘usually pejoratively and misleadingly termed“anti-globalization” movements’ (2002: 2). He notes thatWhile long faces on the Marxian left have been cheered by the appearance ofwhat are now recognized—even in the mainstream press—as ‘anti-capitalistdemonstrators’, it is equally clear that the renewed militancy is not easilyramrodded into their familiar categories. The demonstrators’ diffusion ofcomposition, diversity of perspective, decentralization of organization and,usually, determined disassociation from the disastrous historical experienceof state socialism, defi es the grasp of most class analysis. (3)Dyer-Witheford reads the autonomist tradition in a much morenon-hegemonic way than Holloway, or Hardt and Negri, as strivingtowards a ‘lateral polycentric concept of anticapitalist alliancesin-diversity,connecting a plurality of agencies in a circulation ofstruggles’ (1999: 68). He also engages much more closely and carefullywith feminist and postcolonial theorists, and approves of what hecalls the ‘postmodern marxism’ of Guattari and Negri, which has‘discard[ed] the marxist habit of nominating some agents as centralto anticapitalist struggle and others as marginal’ (187). At the sametime, however, Dyer-Witheford’s work does retain some remnants ofa class-centric analysis. In a discussion of Donna Haraway’s notionof the cyborg, he laments her refusal to ‘nominate any central axisof conflict along which activism might be arrayed’ (179). This axis isnot named, but the discussion of postmodern marxism gives us a clueto its nature: it is anti-capitalist struggle, carried out now not only byworkers, but by others as well. Thus, while class-centrism is avoided inDyer-Witheford’s conception of the revolutionary subject, it remainsin the formulation of the task which this subject is supposed to takeup. And, once again, anarchism and anarchists barely rate a mention;the only relevant index entry points to a glancing dismissal of whatis probably anarcho-primitivism.In sum, the theorists of autonomist marxism have made importantadvances in the analysis of the information economy and the society