richard-day-gramsci-is-dead

7Conclusion:Utopian Socialism Again and AgainI am totally grateful to the sons of bitches who provokedthis whole thing. Because now the citizens will never be thecompliant lot that they were before. I tell you, I’m seventyfour years old, and I’ve seen a lot of wars, and from eachone I’ve come out better and stronger. Without crisis, youjust wallow along in the happiness of a fool. We need touse crises to give a new birth to ourselves.(Leonor, participant in Argentinianneighbourhood assemblies) 1SIGNS OF FAILURE/SIGNS OF HOPEThe logic of hegemony has been exhausted. Marxist revolutions havefailed to achieve a transparent society and liberal reform has goneneoliberal—that is, it has become reactionary rather than progressivein tone. Even direct action to impede or ameliorate the advance ofthe existing order is limited in its efficacy, as dead power eventuallyflows around any obstacle put in its path. If it were impossible toescape the logic of hegemony, this would certainly be a recipe fordespair. But as I have tried to show, there are other ways of achievingsocial change. Poststructuralist theory teaches us that one of thebasic problems of contemporary politics is figuring out how to getmore people in more places to overcome not only their desire todominate others, but their own desire to be dominated as well. Thenotion of singularity as an example suggests that the best way to dothis is to create sustainable alternatives to the existing order, to showconcretely that the way things are now is not the only way they canbe. As is so often the case, those on the margins are showing the waythat those at the centres must somehow learn to follow: asambleistasin Argentina, LPM activists in South Africa, Zapatista villagers inChiapas, Mohawk warriors within/against North America, squattersin London—all of these groups and movements are exploring thepossibilities of non-statist, non-capitalist, egalitarian modes of203