richard-day-gramsci-is-dead

Introduction 17is what it means to work via a micropolitics, a politics of minorityrather than majority, of affinity rather than hegemony; a politics thatremains political despite its rejection of the fundamental assumptionsof (neo)liberal and (post)marxist theories of social change. Dispersingand realizing this politics, however, is a non-trivial problem. Veryinteresting and important steps have been taken in this directionby postanarchism and autonomist marxism, each of which has itsstrengths and weaknesses. The non-leninist strains of autonomistmarxism provide a compelling analysis of the postmodern societiesof discipline and control, and pick up on the anarchist critique ofhierarchical modes of organization such as the revolutionary stateand party. Yet they often display a tendency towards a hegemonictotalization of the field of struggle, which appears most prominentlyin their conception of ‘the multitude’ as a singular entity organizedaround class struggle. Postanarchism has done better at escaping thehegemony of hegemony, but at the cost of an excessive reliance upona ‘nomadic’ conception of subjectivity that appears to reject not onlycoercive morality, but affinity-based ethico-political commitmentsas well. As the complement of both the (post)marxist/(neo)liberalcitizen and the postanarchist nomad, I suggest that the figure ofthe smith, as theorized by Deleuze and Guattari and as exemplifiedin the practices of the newest social movements, offers the greatestpotential for community-based, radical social change in the twentyfirstcentury.If this potential is to be realized we will need not only newways of thinking about ourselves, but also about the communitiesin which we live. This is the task of Chapter 6, which addressesanother common misreading of poststructuralist theory, namely thatit proceeds without any reference to shared understandings of socialworlds. Just as the poststructuralist rejection of coercive morality hasbeen read as a rejection of ethics and politics, here the rejection ofhegemonic conceptions of community is mistaken for a rejection ofcommunity as such. This distinction is highlighted by a discussion ofwhat Giorgio Agamben calls the coming community, which begins tobreak with the Hegelian legacy of state-based conceptions of groupidentity. Like the autonomist marxists with whom he is associated,however, Agamben’s work suffers from a tendency to envelopsingularity in the single—that is, despite his obvious commitment tomultiplicity, he theorizes the coming community in a monolithic way.I suggest that we need to think instead of the coming communities,in the plural, but not in the form of liberal pluralism, and that we