Gramsci is Dead Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements Richard J.F. Day Pluto P Press LONDON • ANN ARBOR, MI and Between the Lines TORONTO DDayay 0000 pprere iiiiii 11/8/05/8/05 113:48:013:48:01 First published 2005 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 839 Greene Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48106 www.plutobooks.com and Between the Lines 720 Bathurst Street, Suite 404, Toronto, Ontario M5S 2R4 www.btlbooks.com Copyright © Richard J.F. Day 2005 The right of Richard J.F. Day to be identifi ed as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 7453 2113 5 hardback ISBN 0 7453 2112 7 paperback (Pluto Press) ISBN 1 897071 03 5 paperback (Between the Lines) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Day, Richard J. F. Gramsci is dead : anarchist currents in the newest social movements / Richard J.F. Day. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–7453–2113–5 –– ISBN 0–7453–2112–7 (pbk.) 1. Radicalism. 2. Socialism. 3. Communism. 4. Anarchism. 5. Poststructuralism. I. Title. HN49.R33D39 2005 322.4––dc22 2005001486 Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Day, Richard J.F. Gramsci is dead / by Richard Day. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 1–897071–03–5 1. Anti-globalization movement. 2. Philosophy, Marxist. 3. Anarchism. 4. Poststructuralism. 5. Social movements––Political aspects. I. Title. HN49.R33D395 2005 322.4 C2005–902450–X Between the Lines gratefully acknowledges support for our publishing programme from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program and through the Ontario Book Initiative, and the Government of Canada. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services Ltd, Sidmouth, EX10 9QG, England Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England Printed and bound in Canada by Transcontinental Printing DDayay 0000 pprere iivv 11/8/05/8/05 113:48:013:48:01 Contents Acknowledgements vii Introduction 1 Seattle, anarchism and the corporate mass media 1 Naming ‘the movement’ … and other key terms 4 Who is speaking? 9 The argument 13 1. Doing it Yourself: Direct-action Currents in Contemporary Radical Activism 19 Zero-participation: crusty punks and lifestyle anarchists 20 The incredible lightness of cultural subversion 21 Getting heavy: impeding the fl ows of state and corporate power 25 Direct-action casework: a hybrid form 31 Prefi guring/creating alternatives 34 Beyond reform, this side of Revolution 44 2. Tracking the Hegemony of Hegemony: Classical Marxism and Liberalism 46 We can’t hear you! Liberals and Marxists on the newest social movements 48 Classical liberalism and the bourgeois revolutionaries 51 Hegemony = dictatorship + democracy 54 Gramsci, Lenin and the hegemony of hegemony 65 3. Tracking the Hegemony of Hegemony: Postmarxism and the New Social Movements 66 The long middle of the twentieth century 66 What was new about the ‘new social movements’? 68 Hegemony goes poststructuralist: Laclau and Mouffe 70 Liberal multiculturalism and the recognition/integration paradigm 76 Politics of demand/ethics of desire 80 ‘We’ are not ‘you’: Anti-integration themes in postcolonial, feminist and queer theory 84 Towards a politics of the act 88 DDayay 0000 pprere v 11/8/05/8/05 113:48:013:48:01 vi Gramsci is Dead 4. Utopian Socialism Then … 91 Guiding threads 91 William Godwin: the rationalist who would make no promises 96 The Utopian Socialists proper: Owen, Fourier and Saint-Simon 100 Anarchist Theory after Utopian Socialism: Proudhon 108 Bakunin and the social revolution 112 Kropotkin: expropriation and social (r)evolution 117 Early twentieth-century anarchism and the concept of structural renewal 123 Conclusion: taking the tally 127 5. … and Now 129 Elements of poststructuralist critique: becoming minor 131 Autonomist marxism and the constituent power of the multitude 143 Postanarchism: a bridgeable chasm 159 Citizen, Nomad, Smith 172 6. Ethics, Affi nity and the Coming Communities 178 What are the coming communities? 178 The coming ethics: groundless solidarity and infi nite responsibility 186 The problems of white middle-class movements 197 7. Conclusion: Utopian Socialism Again and Again 203 Signs of failure/signs of hope 203 What of the coming economies? 210 A Utopian future: the end of ‘civil society’ 213 Notes 218 References 227 Index 245 DDayay 0000 pprere vvii 11/8/05/8/05 113:48:013:48:01 Acknowledgements I could not have written this book without drawing upon the labours of student/activist researchers who have been associated with the Affi nity Project, which operates out of Queen’s University at Kingston, Ontario and maintains a website at <www.affi nityproject. org>. These in include Hilton Bertalan, Naila Bhanji, Jake Burkowicz, Enda Brophy, Christopher Canning, Ryan Mitchell, Rick Palidwor, Nadia Knircha, Brianne Selman, Andrew Stevens, and Lori Waller. I have also benefited from conversations with Taiaiake Alfred, Allan Antliff, Mark Coté, Glen Coulthard, Greig dePeuter, David Firman, Dina Khorasanee, Jennifer Pybus, and Scott Uzelman, and from interactions with undergraduate and graduate students in my seminars at Queen’s University. I am particularly indebted to Sean Haberle, who traveled extensively to conduct interviews with activists at various sites around central Canada and the northeastern United States. Sarita Srivastava also deserves special mention for suggesting a major revision that got me past a particularly daunting writing obstacle, and for being an inspiring colleague and friend. Finally, and most importantly, I want to acknowledge the contributions of my partner Alison Gowan, who has for many years been a crucial source of intellectual and emotional support for my work, and much more importantly, for my life as a whole. vii DDayay 0000 pprere vviiii 11/8/05/8/05 113:48:013:48:01 Introduction Seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space. Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities SEATTLE, ANARCHISM AND THE CORPORATE MASS MEDIA For most people in the G8 countries, the Seattle anti-World Trade Organization (WTO) protests in late 1999 mark the point at which a new militancy erupted onto the surface of an otherwise serene liberal- democratic polity. I was living in Vancouver, British Columbia at the time, and decided at the last moment not to go to Seattle because I had a huge pile of papers to grade. Just another protest I thought, and I’d have to sit on a bus for fi ve hours to get there and back. At one point in the day, though, I turned on the television just to see what was happening. I was fascinated and surprised by the now famous images of huge marches, lockdowns, roving bands of riot police, with endless clouds of tear gas shrouding the scene. Over this scene from another (part of the) world, came the voice of a local reporter out in the streets: Reporter: ‘There are some people here, roaming about … well not exactly roaming, they seem organized. I don’t know who they are, they’re all dressed in black, they have black hoods on, and black fl ags … a fl ag with nothing on it.’ Anchor: ‘A fl ag with nothing on it?’ Reporter: ‘That’s right, it’s totally black.’ Thus did the Black Bloc make its fi rst appearance on the North American mass-media stage. After a while, the TV stations in Seattle thought they had it fi gured out: these were ‘anarchists’, whatever that might mean. No one tried to confi rm this with the masked protesters themselves, however—they looked far too dangerous, and despite the fact that they were at a mass protest, it seemed they did not want anyone to know who they were. As more reporters—as well as political commentators, police chiefs and academics—began to weigh in on what happened in Seattle, 1 DDayay 0011 iintrontro 1 11/8/05/8/05 113:47:263:47:26 2 Gramsci is Dead the empty expanse of that black fl ag was fi lled in with the help of stereotypes, prejudices and fragments of knowledge from the previous century. A Time magazine story of December 13, 1999 contained a section on ‘The Violence’, with the subhead ‘How Organized Anarchists Led Seattle into Chaos’. After dismissing the protesters as ‘a sprawling welter of thousands of mostly young activists populating hundreds of mostly tiny splinter groups espousing dozens of mostly socialist critiques of the capitalist machine’, the article tantalized and appalled its readers with images of circle-A placards, store looting and an unidentifi ed person, with no insignia of any kind, climbing through a broken window. The caption read ‘Coffee to go: An anarchist patronizes a Seattle Starbucks’. Since the Battle of Seattle, this one-sided, ill-informed caricature of anarchist activism has become almost obligatory in the corporate mass media. The Vancouver Sun, a right-wing daily, ran a full-page article on the protests against the Organization of American States in Windsor, Ontario in its issue of June 3, 2000 (p. A14). It appeared under the title ‘For the New Anarchists, the Message is the Mayhem’ and included the subheads ‘Organized Radicals’ and ‘One Man’s Philosophy’. It describes anarchism as a ‘long-dormant philosophy’ that has returned with ‘destructive force’ and ‘disruptive power’; words like ‘threat’, ‘mayhem’ and ‘rampage’ pepper the article. It also attempts to belittle the well-known Canadian activist Jaggi Singh by noting that, before he sits down to talk with reporters, he orders a coffee from a Canadian doughnut-shop chain: ‘It turns out that even anti-corporate anarchists appreciate their Tim Horton’s’.