richard-day-gramsci-is-dead

Postmarxism and the New Social Movements 87and Patricia Monture-Angus (1999) are self-consciously walking a fineline between parochial forms of cultural essentialism and genocidalintegration into European modernity. They have proposed alternativevisions of relations between individuals, human communities andthe natural environment, and they have challenged the inevitabilityand desirability of centralized bureaucracy, capitalism and the stateform. Through this process of intense critique, they have confrontedthe liberal illusion that mere ‘recognition’ of ‘cultural difference’can lead to harmonious coexistence. And they have helped to showhow policies of state multiculturalism, as progressive as they mightbe, direct political and academic attention away from many morepressing concerns.For example, even if some Aboriginal communities manage to avoidthe worst effects of rational-bureaucratic domination and capitalistexploitation in their quest for self-government, there remains yetanother ‘gift’ of Western liberalism that many are reluctant to accept:patriarchy. ‘The denial of Native womanhood is the reduction of thewhole people to a sub-human level’, writes Lee Maracle. ‘The dictatesof patriarchy demand that beneath the Native male comes the Nativefemale’ (1996: 17). On this point at least liberal multiculturalism hashad something to say: gender inequality is sometimes considered asan example of a ‘failure of recognition’ (Taylor 1992: 27). However,when gender is considered, the simple fact that multiculturalism is aliberal discourse militates against the appearance of ‘loaded’ conceptslike patriarchy and oppression. A nod to an equality-based, or perhapsa ‘differential equality-based’ form of ‘citizenship’ is the most one canexpect (Mouffe 1993; Young 1989). Looking beyond liberal feminism,however, we once again encounter many voices challenging the logicof recognition and integration. If we see the pursuit of equality withmen as a quest for recognition, then radical feminism’s rejectionof patriarchal values, cultures and social movements can be seenas a challenge to the integration paradigm (Dworkin 1974, 1989;MacKinnon 1989). 13 Socialist feminism made the same gesturewith respect to the places of women in capitalism (Smith 1977;Eisenstein 1979); anarcha-feminism adds to this a refusal to be cooptedby state apparatuses (Ackelsberg 1991; Kornegger 2002); andBlack and postcolonial feminists have pointed out that the figureof ‘woman’ whom White liberal feminists want to liberate does notresonate with their own experiences (Lorde 1984; Mohanty 2003).This difficult—but very productive—trajectory led to the feminism/postmodernism debates of the 1990s, which engaged with the