richard-day-gramsci-is-dead

16 Gramsci is Deadas they struggled with racism, classism, sexism, homophobia, andtheir own faith in Science, Reason and even the Capitalist Market.Through these trials and tribulations anarchism developed what atheory of structural renewal, which begins with Godwin’s notion ofnon-statist federalism and finds its most coherent expression in thework of Gustav Landauer (Buber 1958/1949). Through his contactwith Nietzsche’s work, Landauer anticipated poststructuralist theoryin analysing capitalism and the state form not as ‘things’ (structures),but as sets of relations between subjects (discourses). Based on thisanalysis, he was able to understand how small-scale experimentsin the construction of alternative modes of social, political andeconomic organization offered a way to avoid both waiting foreverfor the Revolution to come and perpetuating existing structuresthrough reformist demands. Thus, although Marx and Engels werequite correct in their critique of Fourier, Owen and Saint-Simon, thetendency to identify all of anarchist theory as Utopian socialism isquite misguided. Classical anarchist theory not only moved beyondthese Utopian elements, it also found solutions to problems thatmost marxisms still refuse to fully confront.This is not to say, however, that classical anarchism has noproblems of its own. Rather, as a number of postanarchist writershave argued, it retains the marks of its birth out of the womb of theEuropean Enlightenment (May 1994; Newman 2001; Call 2002). Noris marxism entirely without an awareness of the viability and valueof the logic of affinity, as council communism, the surrealists, theSituationist International, and most recently the Italian autonomistshave shown. Chapter 5 picks up the logic of affinity as it presentsitself to us today, that is, in the context of late twentieth-centuryand early twenty-first-century encounters between modernisttheories of radical social change and their poststructuralist critics.Against the grain of an interpretation common to both activistsand academics who tend to equate US-style postmodernism withFrench poststructuralism, I argue that poststructuralist theory doesnot necessarily lead us into a zone of apolitical nihilism or puretextual play. Rather, the work of thinkers such as Michel Foucault,Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari should be seen as driven by a seriesof ethico-political commitments that defy the dichotomy betweenmoral certainty and moral relativism. Primary among these is acommitment to minimizing domination in one’s own individualand group practice, while at the same time warding off attempts atdomination by others. As Rosi Braidotti (2002) has pointed out, this