'O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark': The many deaths of Antonio Gramsci.(Gramsci is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements)(Book review)

Richard Day

Gramsci is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements

Pluto Press, 2005, 254 pp.

ISBN 189-707103-5 pbk 17 [pounds sterling]

The two purposes of Richard Day's Gramsci is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements are declared in its title: on the one hand, to evaluate anarchist tactics and strategies within a variety of contemporary social movements; and on the other, to perform a critical autopsy on Gramsci and his supposedly omnipresent concept of hegemony. Day canvases a long list of anarchist and autonomist theorists, from William Godwin to Hakim Bey, in search of a radical theory of the 'logic of affinity', guided by 'groundless solidarity' and 'infinite responsibility' (p. 18). This affinity is contrasted with the 'hegemony of hegemony', here defined as the 'paradoxical belief that state domination is necessary to achieve "freedom"' (p. 14). Day's book is both a survey of anticapitalist movements and a polemic against Gramsci. In its first guise, it contains useful information and suggestive analyses. In its second, on which I will focus in this review, it is theoretically and politically deficient.

Leftists are, almost by definition, people who internalise historical narratives and situate themselves and their opponents in terms of overarching periodisations and categories. These abstractions often become more and more reified. In a standard polemical historical account, we are invited to see left history as one extended war. If we are disposed, as is Day, to identify with 'anarchism' today, we scan the past looking for yesterday's 'anarchists'--those who identify 'with the traditions of anarchism', and think 'through his or her own position primarily with reference to markers drawn from this milieu rather than from some other milieu' (p. 150). Then, just like leftists of the 1930s and 1970s, we restage battles pitting 'anarchists' against 'Marxists', constructed as two mutually exclusive left species, locked in epochal struggles of the fittest to survive. Ancestor-hunting produces a form of 'vertical' or 'tunnel' history, and often culminates in a potent blend of sectarianism and sentimentality.

If this polemical, 'vertical' approach invites us to reify our particular species of leftist--a Marxist is a Marxist is a Marxist, whether in 1871, 1917 or 1945--a newer, more challenging 'horizontal' or paradigmatic approach (for one anticipation, see Claeys, 1989) encourages us to agree with Darwin (and Marx) that species of leftists work within historically specific environments, both material and discursive, that condition their conceptual and political frameworks. Such 'species' function, that is, within formations that are broader and more causally efficacious than the narrow identities retrospectively ascribed to past tendencies. In this more rigorously historicist approach, which can be called 'reconnaissance', Marxists and anarcho-syndicalists of, say, 1910--Bernstein, Kautsky, Kropotkin, and De Leon--might, for all their evident disagreements, also be usefully analysed in light of their shared social evolutionary problematic. Once this emphasis on left formations is taken on board, a historiography often narrowly focused on reified 'parties'--in both the narrow and broad sense--is sharpened (and in some cases supplanted) by one that looks at broader and more durable 'formations'. The implications of this strategy of 'horizontal' reconnaissance are profound for rethinking the history of the left, but they might be even more far-reaching for the remaking of contemporary leftism.