richard-day-gramsci-is-dead

Tracking the Hegemony of Hegemony: Classical Marxism and Liberalism 51to the illusion perpetuated by people like Held and McGrew, not onlyas it applies to the United States, but as it applies to the neoliberalproject in general.It as at this point, however, that another sort of illusion comesto the fore—the editors of Monthly Review see Seattle as evidence of‘the partial revival of [a] labour movement that is finally showingsigns of attempting to chart a new course’, that is ‘rising phoenixlikefrom the ashes (Sweezy and Magdoff 2000a: 2). True to theirtradition, and directly after insisting that the working class isleading the way, Sweezy and Magdoff administer their own kind ofcorrective: ‘[W]e are immediately faced by the reality that much—inthe United States most—of this new wave of protest, insofar as ittakes an articulated form, is directed at corporate globalization ratherthan global capitalism’ (3). The article then turns to an analysis of‘the laws of motion of capitalism in our time’, based, of course, onThe Communist Manifesto. This is not to say that the classical marxistcritique of capitalist political economy was off the mark or has beenentirely surpassed—it was not, and it has not. But what the editorsof Monthly Review, like Panitch, call a ‘retreat from class’ (Sweezyand Magdoff 2000b: 1) should perhaps be seen as a necessity ofhistory’s great march forward, rather than a deviance to be lamented.The same goes for Peter Marcuse’s subtle attempt, in the same issue,to defend state domination by ‘dispensing with the myth of thepowerless state and avoiding the fallacy of the homogeneous state’(2000: 27). It is quite possible to be as critical of the state form asone is of capitalism, while holding the state to be neither powerlessnor homogeneous—one simply needs to see these apparatuses, in anAlthusserian way, as overdetermined components of a system thatexceeds both of them.CLASSICAL LIBERALISM AND THE BOURGEOIS REVOLUTIONARIESAlthough marxists have long been known for their revolutionarypolitics, they were not the first to get hold of the idea that the way toachieve desirable social change was through taking state power. Creditfor this innovation must go to the bourgeois activists of the English,American and French revolutions. As Hannah Arendt has noted,the ‘Glorious Revolution’—that fixed the notion of sudden, violentsocial change in the western imaginary was, in fact, a restoration ofEnglish monarchical power after its usurpation by Oliver Cromwell.Revolution originally meant what it sounds like it should mean—a