richard-day-gramsci-is-dead

224 Gramsci is Deadtheir sincere belief that though their powers of persuasion and their pacificpropaganda they would succeed in so touching the hearts of the richthat these would willingly give their surplus wealth to the phalansteries;and, secondly, in their belief that it was possible, theoretically, a priori,to construct a social paradise where all future humanity would come torest’ (Bakunin 1867: 116)7. In a different version of this same piece, Bakunin is quoted as saying: ‘Ingeneral, regulation was the common passion of all the socialists of thepre-l848 era, with one exception only. Cabet, Louis Blanc, the Fourierists,the Saint-Simonists, all were inspired by a passion for indoctrinatingand organizing the future; they all were more or less authoritarians.The exception is Proudhon’ ( p. 116).8. I am aware, of course, that Bakunin distances himself from Proudhon inother contexts, where he seems to accept Marx’s critique in acknowledgingthat Proudhon ‘remained an idealist and a metaphysician’ throughouthis career (1990/1873: 142).9. It is interesting to note that Kropotkin also contributed to the (mis)readingof Proudhon as against centralization as such, rather than as advocatingeconomic rather than political centralization. ‘As to centralization and thecult of authority and discipline, which humanity owes to theocracy andto Imperial Roman law—all survivals of an obscure past—these survivalsare still retained by many modern socialists, who consequently havenot reached the level of their two predecessors, Godwin and Proudhon’(Kropotkin 1912: 14).10. Landauer’s forays into Jewish mysticism have had something to do withhis marginal status, but it is perhaps more due to the lack of translationsof his work—a lack that definitely needs to be addressed.11. The best that relatively privileged subjects of the First World can do,as I will argue in Chapter 7, is to create alternatives that drain energyfrom the neoliberal project and thereby minimize the harm that it does,while at the same time working to build links of solidarity with thoseof the global North and South who are not part of the small, but highlyprivileged ‘mass’ that provides the ballast for the global ship of states.5. … AND NOW1. This term came to me by way of an unpublished paper written by EndaBrophy, a PhD Candidate in Sociology at Queen’s University, KingstonOntario.2. Before them, of course, Jürgen Habermas had described a differentmoment in the same relationship through his thesis of the colonizationof the ‘lifeworld’ by the ‘system’ (1987: 301–73).3. ‘We are not anarchists’, Hardt and Negri declare on p. 350 of Empire, ‘butcommunists who have seen how much repression and destruction ofhumanity have been wrought by liberal and socialist big governments.’This is a curious disavowal, not only because it seems that they do protest