Day de Hegemonia a Afinidad

FROM HEGEMONY TO AFFINITY

The political logic of the newest social

movements

Drawing upon a critique of the (post)Marxist theory of hegemony and examplesfrom contemporary activism, this article assesses new possibilities for theconstruction of radical alternatives within and against postmodern globalizingcapitalism. It notes that many elements of the ‘newest’ social movements havetaken a turn away from the universalizing conception of social change that ischaracteristic of the logic of hegemony as it has developed within (post)Marxismand (neo)liberalism. Instead, these activist currents are driven by an anarchistlogic of affinity. Along with this logic has come an emphasis on direct actiontactics, which is discussed with reference to a theoretical distinction between apolitics of the act and a politics of demand. Although most existing paradigms ofsocial movement analysis have not addressed these shifts, they are implicitlyacknowledged in the concept of constituent power developed by Michael Hardt andToni Negri. Their work falls short, however, to the extent that it remains in otherrespects within the tradition of hegemonic thought. To more fully comprehendcurrent developments, it is necessary to construct an alternative genealogy based onanarchist theory and practice, with a focus on the tradition of ‘structural renewal’that finds it apogee in the work of Gustav Landauer.

Keywords hegemony; affinity; anti-globalization; social movements;anarchism; direct action; Empire

[H]ow these people [the anarchists] propose to run a factory, operate arailway, or steer a ship without having in the last resort one deciding will,without single management, they of course do not tell us.

(Engels 1872/1978, p. 728)

My first problem with anarchism is always ‘Yeah, I agree with your goals,but tell me how you are organized?’.

(Zizek 2002, p. 72)

Richard J. F. Day

Cultural Studies Vol. 18, No. 5 September 2004, pp. 716�/748ISSN 0950-2386 print/ISSN 1466-4348 online – 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd

http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/0950238042000260360

Introduction

The recent rise of activism associated with anti-globalization protests has led toan equally prodigious outpouring of academic texts on radical socialmovements. These range from writers continuing primarily in the traditionof functionalist analysis (Cohen and Rai 2000, Smith and Johnston 2002) tothose attempting to discern a revitalization of Marxist struggles (Panitch 2001,Holloway 2002, McNally 2002). In the middle, so to speak, we findcommentators who argue that these same forces are helping to create auniversal ‘cosmopolitan social democracy’ (Held & McGrew 2002), and thereare of course important analyses emerging from the postcolonial/feminist andqueer traditions (Sassen 1998, Hawley 2001, Mohanty 2003). In this article,though, I want to direct the reader’s attention to interpretations emergingfrom traditions that are less well known among English-speaking academiccircles. Of particular interest for this article are works that deploy conceptsfrom Italian autonomist Marxism (Dyer-Witheford 1999, Hardt & Negri2000), and those that have begun to recognize the centrality of anarchist theoryand practice to the social movements of the 1990s and 2000s (Graeber 2002,Jordan 2002, Antliff 2003). My primary goal is to argue that the field in whichthese interventions are occurring is ordered by the relation of the variousauthors to what I will call the hegemony of hegemony . By this I mean thecommonsensical assumption that meaningful social change �/ and social orderitself �/ can only be achieved through the deployment of universalizinghierarchical forms, epitomized by the nation-state, but including conceptionsof the world-state as well. As I will try to show, this assumption is challengednot only by some important and highly visible forms of contemporary activism,but also by a long-standing tradition of affinity-based direct action that has beensubmerged under (neo)liberal and (post)Marxist theory and practice. Hencemy secondary purpose: to contribute to the ongoing effort to destabilize thehegemony of hegemony, by exploring the possibilities of non-hegemonic formsof radical social change. This might even serve as a provisional ‘definition’ ofthe logic of affinity �/ it is that which always already undermines hegemony.

It should be noted that what I have to say about these struggles is notintended as a contribution to the functionalist debates on social movementtheory, which utilize concepts such as ‘collective action’, ‘resource mobiliza-tion’ and ‘rational choice’. Rather, my comments are more relevant toEuropean traditions that focus on theoretical-philosophical analyses of thebroader field of social change, and that attempt to assess the viability ofdifferent logics of struggle in particular socio-historical circumstances. This lineof analysis emerged in nineteenth-century socialist theory and practice, and hasbeen developed by a series of interlocutors over the course of the twentiethcentury. Among these can be counted the early theorists of British culturalstudies, who were adamant in their claim that culture involves struggle �/ not

F R O M H E G E M O N Y T O A F F I N I T Y 7 1 7

only over meaning and identity, but also over political and economic power(Williams 1973, Hall 1983a). There have been, and will be, debates over thecharacter and limits of these struggles, but the key point is that their existencemust not only be acknowledged, but directly engaged as a basis for politicalanalysis and theorization. It is in this spirit that the members of the Centre forContemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) took up the study of the texts ofGramsci, from whose work the concept of hegemony was finding its way intodebates in the English-speaking world. Many cultural studies scholars havecontinued in the tradition inaugurated by the Birmingham school, resulting in arich set of debates around, and deployments of, the concept of hegemony(Hebdige 1979, Hall 1983a,b, Kellner 1990, McRobbie 1991, Press 1991,Grossberg 1992).

Of course, it could be argued that cultural studies need no longer concernitself with such questions, or that if it is to engage with them, it must do sowithout introducing theoretical paradigms or concepts that might challengecertain definitions of ‘the field’. On this question, I would tend to favour theposition enunciated by Richard Johnson:

A codification of methods or knowledges (instituting them, for example,in formal curricula or in courses on ‘methodology’) runs against some ofthe main features of cultural studies as a tradition: its openness andtheoretical versatility, its reflexive even self-conscious mood, and,especially, the importance of critique.

(Johnson 1987, p. 38)

To engage productively in critique means not only to be cognizant of newcurrents of activism, but to respond to new, or resurgent, theoreticalparadigms that might aid in our understanding of these struggles. As LawrenceGrossberg has put it, ‘cultural studies can only be defined as an intellectualpractice, as a way of politicizing theory and theorizing politics’ (1997, p. 7).

It is also possible that theorists and practitioners committed to the conceptof the new social movements (NSMs) will be wary of the idea that somethingeven newer is afoot. This is a position with which I share a certain amount ofsympathy, since what is at issue here is a matter of genealogies of logics ofstruggle, not mere chronological novelty or definitions. Modes of socialorganization and social change have long existed that cannot be adequatelyunderstood by either (post)Marxism or (neo)liberalism. What is different now,if anything is different at all, is that the hegemony of hegemony is beingbrought into question openly, massively and at the heart of precisely thosestruggles that currently seem to have more momentum than most others.When I refer to the political logic of the newest social movements, then, I amusing the term ‘newest social movements’ guardedly and somewhat ironically.A crucial part of my argument would indeed suggest that the struggles in

7 1 8 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

which I am most interested would not appear within some paradigms ofanalysis as ‘social movements’ at all.1

Yet the question remains: if contemporary non-hegemonic struggles cannotbe adequately characterized by the categories of the Old or New Left, thenhow are they to be understood? Is there anything they share, other than theirdifference from established practices? In this article, I will argue that theircommonalities can be best understood by tracing a genealogy of the logic ofhegemony that shows how its ongoing auto-deconstruction has cleared a spacein which an ever-present, but relatively subterranean, logic of affinity has re-emerged. The discussion will begin with an analysis of the logic of hegemonyas it has developed in Western Marxism, starting with Lenin and Gramsci andproceeding through the work of Laclau and Mouffe. I will then present severalexamples of constructive direct action tactics that are being used incontemporary radical social movements, and link these to a shift from acounter-hegemonic politics of demand to a non-hegemonic politics of the act.To focus attention on one site at which these two political logics productivelycollide, I will discuss the notion of constituent power of the multitude as itappears in Michael Hardt and Toni Negri’s Empire (2000). The analysis willfocus on their ambivalent position with regard to the logic of hegemony, asexpressed in the acceptance of a Leninist dichotomy between revolution andreform. A genealogy of the logic of affinity will then be presented, to supportthe claim that in order to understand the newest social movements, it isnecessary to move away from theories that emphasize the achievement ofirradiation effects within the system of states and corporations, and to focusinstead on the possibilities offered by the displacement and replacement of thissystem. Only then are we able to recognize the particularity of a non-statistpolitics being practiced by what Giorgio Agamben has called the ‘comingcommunities’ (1993). To begin, then, let us briefly recall some of the keydevelopments that contributed to the shift from the theory and practice of the‘old’ social movements that emerged in the mid-1800s, to the ‘new’ socialmovements of the 1960s�/80s.

The Lenin-Gramsci assemblage

As previously mentioned, this discussion will be genealogical is in its intent;that is, while reference will be made to periods of time, the analysis is notbased upon mere novelty or simple succession, but upon the observation ofshifting ‘regularities in dispersion’ (Foucault 1972, p. 38). Further, any shift inrelations or regularities that might be noted should not be read as implying thatpreviously dominant forms have been thrust into insignificance or eveneradicated from the field. Proceeding in this way would be at odds with what Iam trying to do, that is, to challenge the deference that is given to practices


guided by a hegemonic logic. Underneath this mainstream flow, the carefulobserver can discern a logic that self-consciously seeks to remain emergent andunincorporated (Williams 1973), that sets out to challenge not only thehegemony of the values and forms of the currently dominant order, as incounter-hegemonic struggles, but also seeks to avoid the generalization of itsown values and forms. Because they set out to challenge hegemonic formsas such, I prefer to use the term ‘non-hegemonic’ to describe thesestruggles. Finally, it should be noted that in proceeding genealogically Imake no claim to be producing an objectively correct or universally valuablenarrative. Rather, I want to track an emergence that I find interesting andcompelling due to my own ethico-political commitments and theoreticalinterests. Other genealogies are not only possible, they are necessary, and Iwelcome them

In the Prison Notebooks , Gramsci contends that credit for the ‘great event’ ofthe ‘theorization and realization’ of hegemony should go to ‘Illich’, i.e.Vladimir Illich Lenin (Gramsci 1971, p. 357). Debates abound as to Lenin’srelation to the theory of hegemony, and Gramsci’s relation to Lenin andLeninism. Joseph Femia argues that, both pre- and post-prison, ‘the essentialstructure of [Gramsci’s] thought and the core of his political commitment wasMarxist and revolutionary �/ albeit innovative and flexible’ (1981, p. 243).The only point of the war of position, Femia suggests, is to ensure the successof a full frontal assault on state power. On this reading, which is supported byMassimo Salvadori, ‘Gramsci’s theory of hegemony is the highest and mostcomplex expression of Leninism’ (1979, p. 252). Norberto Bobbio, on theother hand, argues that ‘Gramsci’s theory introduces a profound innovationwith respect to the whole Marxist tradition: ‘Civil society in Gramsci does notbelong to the structural moment, but to the superstructural one ’ (1979, p. 30, originalemphasis). Of course, Gramsci’s texts are notoriously fragmentary, and theeffects of prison censorship can be invoked to support or debunk almost anyreading of the Notebooks . I cannot hope to provide a definitive resolution tothese debates, and have no interest in trying to do so. However, I do hope toshow how a particular Lenin-Gramsci assemblage has been deployed withinwestern Marxism and cultural studies, how a certain reading of Gramsci hasbecome dominant. This reading holds that, since at least the time of Lenin,Marxist theories of hegemony have contained a dual aspect of consent andcoercion.2 While the consensual aspect of hegemony remained under-developed in Lenin’s theory �/ and certainly in his practice �/ it was furtherexplored by Gramsci in the context of ‘western’ Marxism.

In the sphere of civil society, Gramsci argued, the ‘great masses of thepopulation’ give their ‘‘spontaneous’ consent’ to the ‘general directionimposed on social life by a dominant fundamental group’. A group seeking‘supremacy’ must therefore ‘lead’ kindred and allied groups (‘friends’) thatrecognize and accept its moral, intellectual and political superiority. It cannot


be assumed that everyone will respond in this way, however. Thus, there mustcome into play ‘the apparatus of state coercive power which ‘‘legally’’ enforcesdiscipline on those who do not consent either actively or passively’ (Gramsci,1971, p. 12). In times of ‘crisis’, the hegemonic group must strive to‘dominate’ or ‘liquidate’ antagonistic groups (‘enemies’), using armed forcewhere necessary (1971, p. 57).3 While he does not consistently specify therequired order in which a ‘dominant fundamental group’ must achieve bothhegemony in civil society and state power in political society, it is clear that forGramsci both are necessary, but not sufficient , conditions of a successful socialtransformation and a stable ‘new’ society. No hegemony without state power;no state power without hegemony.

At other times, though, Gramsci analyses these two modes of power asthough they exist in a hierarchical, rather than a complementary, relationship.In speaking of the ‘two forms in which the State presents itself. . . i.e. as civilsociety and as political society’ (1971, p. 268), Gramsci elevates the state fromits position alongside civil society to a position above both it and politicalsociety. In this model, the state takes on the function of a dialecticalcompletion or subsumption: it ‘presents itself’ as both civil and politicalsociety (1971, p. 263). Here the coercive apparatus of the state is givenprimacy over consensual processes, so that hegemony in civil society appearsnot as an end in itself, but rather as a means of achieving power by ‘becoming’the State (1971, pp. 261�/3).

While it is explicitly derived from Hegelian philosophy and Marxist theory(Bobbio 1979), the privilege granted to the state in Gramsci’s analysis is alsodriven by his empirical observations of modern revolutions, including thetreacherous unification of Italy. Like most revolutionaries of his time, Gramsciwas very interested in discovering how a particular social group (a class) couldachieve dominance over an ‘entire national society’ (1971, p. 56). He assumedthat the natural and inevitable result of hegemony, as a pluralized play ofantagonistic forces within the boundaries of a nation-state, was that ‘only one’of the forces would ‘tend to prevail, to gain the upper hand, to propagate itselfthroughout society’ through its control of the state apparatus (1971, p. 181).Guided by these theoretical and practical assumptions, he argued that the goalof any successful social transformation must be the achievement of society-wide ‘irradiation effects’, rays of control/consent that reach out from a set ofparticular interests to simultaneously create and operate upon a ‘universal’plane, bringing about ‘not only a unison of economic and political aims, butalso intellectual and moral unity’ (1971, p. 182). As Femia notes, Gramsci’sgoal was to achieve a ‘new conformism’, through which ‘individual initiativesmight be disciplined and ordered’ (Gramsci, in Femia 1981, p. 171).

To whatever extent Gramsci’s thought represents a break with or acontinuation of Leninism, I would argue that the Lenin-Gramsci assemblagetheorizes hegemony primarily as a mode of political revolution characteristic of


what some have called the ‘old’ social movements (OSMs). Politicalrevolutionaries seek effects that (1) will be felt over an entire social space,usually a nation-state, and (2) will occur across a wide spectrum �/ indeed, thewidest spectrum possible �/ of social, political, cultural and economicstructures and processes. Political revolutions are totalizing in their intent,and rely upon class-based, state-centred models of social change

Hegemony and the new social movements

Gramscian Marxism, of course, never really caught on in western Europe, asvarious forms of social democracy based on the so-called ‘welfare state’captured the imagination and loyalty of the working class. The Keynesianaccommodation, along with a series of large-scale international wars, helped tomaintain relative class peace for a while. However, this period of limitedstruggle ended with the emergence of the ‘new social movements’ of the1960s and 1970s. In order to better understand what is ‘newest’ about thesocial movements of the late 1990s, it is necessary to spend some timediscussing what was ‘new’ about those of the 1960s. This is far from a simplequestion, since various analysts have produced different and mutuallycontradictory lists of characteristics of NSMs, and disagreements on theirapplicability are rampant. There are observable regularities in the field,however, some of which I will now try to tease out.

First of all, most commentators agree that NSMs differ from OSMs inaddressing a wide range of antagonisms that cannot be reduced to classstruggle, such as those generated by racism, patriarchy, the domination ofnature, heterosexism, colonialism. The displacement of class as ‘thefundamental antagonism’ has led many commentators to see NSM politics as‘merely symbolic’ (Melucci 1989, p. 5, Touraine 1992, p. 373, Pulido 1998,pp. 7�/8). Paul Bagguley uses the term ‘expressive politics’ to describe theactivities of those he sees as ‘bearers of a new hedonistic culture’ of ‘personalfreedom’ (1992, p. 34). While there are certainly some individuals in somemovements who relate to their activism on a purely personal level, it is notentirely clear to me how striving to improve the situations of women, peopleof colour and non-heterosexual orientations, or working against military andecological destruction, can be seen as individualistic pursuits. The burnout rateof activists in these movements would also seem to suggest that their strugglesare not somehow less intense or difficult than those associated with classwarfare. Hence, I would suggest that the most accurate description of NSMs isnot that they have no analysis of or concern for socially structuredantagonisms, but that they do not focus solely on class as the fundamentalaxis of oppression.


It has also been noted that NSMS are unlike their precursors in that theylack a totalizing conception of social change. They are single-issue movements‘not perceived to be struggling for a grand or universal transformation’ (Pulido1998, p. 8). Once again, while there is certainly some value in thisdescription, it is somewhat reductive and ignores long-standing analyses ofrelations between various struggles. As early as the 1970s socialist feministswere discussing links between patriarchy and capitalism (Firestone 1970,Eisenstein 1979) and environmentalists were linking capitalism to thedomination of nature (Leiss 1972, Bahro 1986). For these reasons, I do notaccept without qualification the characterization of NSMs as single-issuestruggles. However, I would agree that agitating for reforms across two orthree axes of oppression is a very different thing from seeking the wholesalereconstruction of an existing order through revolutionary means.

This difference is manifested in various shifts in the orientation of NSMs tostate power. One of these involves the opening up of new fronts outside ofmainstream political institutions. With the acknowledgement of the micro-political, capillary nature of macro structures and processes of power,attention shifted to a ‘politics of everyday life and individual transformation’(Melucci 1989, p. 5). Also, and very importantly for the genealogy of the logicof affinity, the social movements emerging in the 1960s reflected acommitment to the notion that the means of radical social change must beconsistent with its ends (Offe 1985, pp. 829�/31, Melucci 1989, p. 5,Bagguley 1992, p. 31).

However, the absence of a totalizing conception of change and therecognition of the deep entwining of the personal and the political do notnecessarily, or even usually, lead to a rejection of state power as such. As manycommentators have pointed out, 1960s�/80s NSMs are characterized primarilyby a politics of protest and reform (Bagguley 1992, p. 32, Touraine 1992, pp.392�/3). Those new social movements that are most commonly cited asexemplars of their type are like the old social movements in that they tend todesire irradiation effects across an entire social space, usually defined as anation-state container �/ the changes most often cited as their successes haveinvolved modifications to laws, bureaucratic structures and shifts in hegemoniccommon-sense assumptions and practices. This is to say that, in protest politicsthere is still a strong orientation to the state, and this is a crucial moment ofcommonality between the OSMs and NSMs as they are generally analysed. Thedifference between them is that the latter hope to achieve effects on a limitednumber of axes, rather than on all axes at once. Thus, I would argue that thedominant stream of the new social movements remains within a hegemonicconception of the political, and is only marginally and nascently aware of thepossibilities inherent in actions oriented neither to achieving state power nor toameliorating its effects.


Hegemony deconstructed: Laclau and Mouffe

In order to aid the reader in placing my argument, I have provided a quickenumeration of some of the characteristics of the movements usually studiedby NSM theory. For the purpose of the genealogy I am trying to construct,though, the most important theoretical development at this time was thereworking of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony by a new generation of socialand political theorists who were steeped in Lacanian psychoanalysis andDerridean deconstruction. One product of this effort was Laclau and Mouffe’sHegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985), which pushed Gramsci’s theory to itslimits in an attempt to understand and provide guidance to the new socialmovements. Their work has been widely read and cited, and has been a majorinfluence on how the concept of hegemony has been deployed within culturalstudies.

While celebrating the fact that ‘in Gramsci, politics is finally conceived asarticulation’ (1985, p. 85), Laclau and Mouffe objected to Gramsci’sassumption that ‘there must always be a single unifying principle in everyhegemonic formation, and this can only be a fundamental class’ (1985, p. 69,original emphasis). In their anti-essentialist reworking of the theoryof hegemony, the socialist revolution and its privileged agent �/ the workingclass �/ are displaced from the centre of the political, to be considered insteadas one of many struggles that form a broad and indeterminate ‘project forradical democracy’. This project is explicitly linked to the new socialmovements, which are taken to include the peace movement, as well as ‘olderstruggles such as those of women or ethnic minorities’ (1985, p. 165).However, this list is not complete, and is indeed impossible to complete sincenew struggles are constantly emerging, ‘questioning the different relations ofsubordination . . . and demanding . . . new rights’ (1985, p. 165). Laclau andMouffe see the new social movements as working towards a ‘democracy tocome’ (Derrida 1994, p. 59), via a progressive expansion of the realm ofapplication of the values of the French revolution �/ liberty, equality,community.

Many Marxist critics have questioned whether this project is indeed radical,given its abandonment of the centrality of class struggle and its adherence towhat appear to be explicitly bourgeois values (Geras 1987, Bertram 1995). Iwant to raise a similar question, but on a different basis. I want to ask whetherLaclau and Mouffe’s theory takes us far enough away from classical Marxism andthe old social movements, far enough away from irradiation effects and theorientation to state power, to remain applicable in the context of the emergingstruggles of the 1990s and 2000s. To this end, I will discuss the exposition ofthe theory of hegemony found in Ernesto Laclau’s contributions to Contingency,Hegemony, Universality (Butler et al . 2000). It should be noted that in choosingthis particular text, I am operating on the assumption that while the theory of


hegemony presented by this ‘later’ Laclau is more concise and subtly nuanced,it does not significantly diverge from that presented in his earlier collaborativework with Mouffe. In addition, I see Laclau and Mouffe as having pursueddifferent, but not incompatible trajectories since Hegemony and SocialistStrategy . Thus, I would claim that what I am reading here is an up-to-daterendering of the current state of ‘their’ theory of hegemony, which avoids theproblems associated with criticizing a text that is almost twenty years old asthough it had been written today. Most important of all, though, is the waythat Laclau’s analysis brings to the level of consciousness what remainsunconscious in most of Marxist and liberal theory �/ he allows us to see, moreclearly than is usual, the operation of what I call the hegemony of hegemony.4

In these essays, Laclau argues that there are four interlocking ‘dimensions’of hegemony. First, he states that ‘unevenness of power is constitutive of thehegemonic relation’ (Butler et al . 2000, p. 54). This is to say that hegemonyoccupies a middle ground between the war of each against each, where poweris widely and evenly distributed, and the totalitarian regime, where individualsand groups are entirely subordinated to an overarching apparatus. The logic ofhegemony, therefore, operates only in societies where there is a ‘plurality ofparticularistic groups and demands’ (2000, p. 55), i.e. in liberal societies. Inone sense, the first dimension of hegemony can be seen as a mereacknowledgment that something like a (post?) modern condition exists withinthe liberal-capitalist ecumene.5 That is, it simply points out that the politicaltoday is a complex terrain of overdetermined relations within and betweenparticular identities, states and groups of states. But, as I will argue later, thereis also a normative component to the first dimension of hegemony, in theassumption that today’s liberal societies represent the best, or perhaps the onlypossible mode of social organization that acknowledges and thrives upon thiscondition of unevenness of power.

The second dimension of hegemony holds that ‘there is hegemony only ifthe dichotomy universality/particularity is superseded’ (2000, p. 56). ForLaclau, no political struggle can be truly universal, since it is impossible forthose who advance a cause to fully transcend their particular interests.Similarly, there is no such thing as a pure particularity, since no identity canexist without establishing relationships with what it is not (the ‘constitutiveoutside’).6 In a hegemonic articulation, particular interests ‘assume a functionof universal representation’, leading to a mutual ‘contamination’ of theuniversal and the particular (2000, p. 56). This process operates via theestablishment of ‘chains of equivalence’, extended systems of relationshipsthrough which identities compete and co-operate, each seeking to enlarge itselfto the point of being able to represent all of the others. It is crucial to note thatwhile the universalizing element is itself part of the chain, it simultaneouslysets itself above it, via the metaphorical elevation of its particular concerns(2000, p. 302). In practical terms, we can think of this as an extension of


Gramsci’s notion of hegemony to cover situations in which the ‘fundamentalsocial group’ is not a class, but any kind of identity at all. To the extent thatthe Green movement has been successful in its programme, for example, adiverse array of social groups have lined up under the banner of ‘ecologicalsustainability’, each expressing its own particular concerns about environ-mental destruction: parents as guardians of the well-being of vulnerable youngchildren; people of colour as those affected by environmental racism; and soon.

As a corollary of the contamination of the universal and the particular,hegemony ‘requires the production of tendentially empty signifiers’ thatarticulate chains of equivalence (2000, p. 207). The empty signifier �/ not tobe confused with Lacan’s floating signifier7 �/ has a dual aspect. Emptysignifiers are signifiers to the extent that they resonate within existingdiscourses; they do participate in the production of meaning. However, theytend towards emptiness, or lack of meaning, due to the stresses placed uponthem by the exigencies of hegemonic articulation. That is, in order to be seenas a general equivalent for an increasing number of struggles, they must beever further removed from their point of origin in a particular discourse. As anexcellent example of an empty signifier, the term ‘Green’ will again suffice. Itmanages, with apparent ease, to refer to mainstream political groupingsoriented to parliamentary reform (Green Party), underground movements thatcarry out direct action against the destruction of the environment and indefence of non-human beings (Green Warriors), and niche-marketed productsin the capitalist marketplace (Green Detergent). The result of all of thisovertime is that most of us are not at all sure what it means to ‘be Green’.

Finally, Laclau argues that ‘[t]he terrain in which hegemony expands is thatof a generalization of the relations of representation as condition of theconstitution of the social order’ (2000, p. 207). With this thesis, we appear tohave returned to the empirical realm of the first dimension; under conditionsof (post)modernity, representation �/ or the delegation of power in theeconomy, cultural production and political will formation �/ becomes ‘theonly way in which universality is achievable’ (2000, p. 212). However, onceagain, we must be aware that this is no mere description. The claim beingmade is not only that representation is necessary, but also that it is desirable ,because it is through processes of representation that equivalential chains areexpanded, hegemonic blocs are formed, and social transformations areachieved.

This theoretical argument has been taken up in interventions related tomany counter-hegemonic struggles, such as those against Thatcherism in theUK (Hall 1983b), Reagan-Bush conservatism in the USA (Grossberg 1992, pp.377�/84) and studies of the role of television in maintaining consent to theestablished order of racist, sexist, capitalism (Kellner 1990, Press 1991). Thestrength of these interventions is that they move beyond the Frankfurt School’s


postulation of a one-dimensional apparatus of ideological domination, in whichpossibilities for resistance are negligible or non-existent. Their weakness isthat, in valorizing contestation as such, they do not always pay enoughattention to the precise logic of various forms of contestation, or acknowledgethat a diversity of logics of struggle exists. More precisely, they tend toadvocate only for counter-hegemonic struggles against various modes ofsubordination. Grossberg’s ‘affective politics’, for example, sees the strugglefor hegemony as a ‘struggle for authority’ (Grossberg 1992, p. 380�/1). AndKellner echoes Laclau’s thesis on representation quite closely in claiming that‘[b]ecause of the power of the media in the established society, any counter-hegemonic project whatsoever �/ be it that of socialism, radical democracy, orfeminism �/ must establish a media politics’ (Kellner 1990, p. 18).

These deployments of Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of hegemony showexplicitly how the theory/practice of NSMs moved away from the coercion/consent politics of Lenin and Gramsci, into a territory of hegemony by whatappears as pure consent, i.e. into the territory of liberal reform. Rather thanseeking state power, subordinated groups began to focus more on persuadingan existing hegemonic formation to alter the operation of certain institutions,or infiltrating those institutions with a different set of values and therebyconstructing a counter-hegemony. This practice achieved some importantreforms in the countries of the global North, which undoubtedly helped tomotivate the post Marxist re-reading of the theory of hegemony. Over the pasttwenty years, however, the situation has changed drastically. Struggles againstracism, sexism and homophobia, as well as attempts to ameliorate some of theworst effects of capitalist exploitation, have been successfully resisted by areaction against state intervention and so-called political correctness. All thesigns point not only to continuing success on the part of social conservatismand political-economic neoliberalism, but also to a resurging and deepening oftheir hold on what used to be called the masses of what used to be called theFirst World. Therefore, just as it was necessary in 1985 to rethink radicalpolitics in the light of the successes of the new social movements, it isnecessary to do so again, in the light of their failure to effectively limit thecontinued rise of neoliberal ideology and the societies of control.

The newest social movements: anti-globalization and directaction

The term new social movements is rapidly approaching its sell-by date.(Crossley 2003, p. 149)

Just as some ‘new’ social movements perpetuate certain characteristics ofthe ‘old’, it can also be argued that some of them anticipate the ‘newest’. I am


particularly interested in two aspects of NSMs that have already beenmentioned, i.e. the tendency to work outside of state forms, and the desire toexpress chosen ends in the means used to achieve them. In this section, I wantto expand the discussion of these shifts to include their contextualizationwithin a more global conception of the arena of social struggle. On this latterpoint, many critics have noted that NSM theory has tended to focus on ‘oneparticular, albeit interesting, subset of social movements that happen to bepredominantly white, middle class and located in Western Europe and NorthAmerica’ (Gamson 1992, p. 58, c.f. Pulido 1998, p. 12). However, some ofthe most high profile and intense struggles in the 1990s and 2000s arecharacterized by currents that transcend the boundaries of the nation-state, andthus, some analysts argue, should be considered as ‘transnational socialmovements’ (Keck & Sicknick 1998, Tarrow 2001, Smith & Johnston 2002).This brings us to an important cusp or discontinuity, an axis of differentiationbetween the two discursive fields I am trying to discuss using the signifiers‘new’ and ‘newest’ �/ that is, the transcendence of the orientation to what Ihave called the nation-state container.

This tendency has been prominently noted in analyses of ‘the anti-globalization movement’, a disparate and ever-changing network of activistgroups and communities that, like the ‘new’ social movements, resist easyidentification (Starr 2000, Holloway 2002, McNally 2002). Indeed, it is oftensuggested that the term ‘anti-globalization movement’ is a crippling misnomer(Klein 2001, Buchanan 2002, Milstein 2002).8 While I certainly share theseconcerns, I also believe that we need some way to talk about the resurgence ofstruggle that has coincided with the intensification of the global reach ofcapitalism and its electronic systems of exchange and surveillance. Thisresurgence has been made visible in the mass media by way of certainpunctuating events, including: the emergence onto the world stage of theZapatista Army of National Liberation in Chiapas, Mexico in 1994; massivestrikes in response to neoliberal reforms in France in 1995; similar massactions in Korea in 1996�/7, this time on the heels of what many saw as theorchestrated collapse of the East-Asian economies; and, in North America, thesurprisingly powerful direct action struggle against the WTO meetings inSeattle in 1999 (McNally 2002, pp. 13�/23). What all of these events have incommon is their opposition to the agenda of globalizing capital and theneoliberal ideology associated with it, which brings privatization, deregulationand unemployment to the global North, and structural adjustment pro-grammes and increased impoverishment to the global South. This oppositionhas come from all classes, identity groups, and causes, from every part of theworld, and it has reinvigorated both activists and academics who see in it areturn of the countercultural spirit of the 1960s.

Already, though, the energy built up over the 1990s and released soformidably at the end of the millennium has been dissipated by clampdowns on


dissent, or redirected against the adventures of the US/UK global police forcein Afghanistan, Iraq, Philippines �/ the list will surely be longer by the time thisarticle is published. Yet, despite the fact that the regularity and intensity ofanti-globalization street protests have diminished in some parts of the world, Ibelieve it would be hasty to declare ‘the movement’ dead. The same forces ofopposition still exist, as do the antagonisms that drive them �/ and surely thelinks between the globalization of capital and US/UK adventures abroad arethere to be made. Just as globalization and war occur together, so anti-globalization and anti-war are complementary struggles. All of this is to saythat I do not think the current political conjuncture in any way mitigates thepossibility and necessity of engaging with the struggles that make up ‘the anti-globalization movement’. Rather, I would suggest that the reactionaryconsolidation of the status quo and the clampdown on dissent mean that itis more important than ever to take stock of what has been achieved and whatremains to be achieved in the struggles against globalizing capital and thesocieties of control. It is for these reasons that I will henceforth use the term‘anti-globalization movement’ without enclosing quotes, with all of thewarnings against its use in mind.

Many more books could be written, must be written, to adequately addressnumerous questions regarding what the movement is, where it is heading, andwhy it should head there. In this article, I can only hope to discuss one aspectof one of these questions, that is, the question of the political logic that isdriving these struggles. Given their tendency to shun parties, leaders andpermanent foci of organization, all of the groups and communities involved inthe anti-globalization movement could perhaps be productively analysed as achain of equivalences united under the empty signifier ‘anti-globalization’.However, I would argue that while theoretical paradigms oriented to thelogic of hegemony are able to shed some light on certain aspects of some ofthese struggles, they also obscure others that are of equal or greaterimportance.

As previously noted, the NSMs were seen by many commentators asadopting a mode of social change that did not focus only on achievingirradiation effects via the state form. While accepting that this is an importantobservation, I have argued that: (1) NSM-style politics still involves expendinga significant amount of energy in trying to ameliorate state power; and (2) theway in which the personal is made political within the rubric of NSMs tends tobracket the state form, rather than presenting a challenge to it. That is, the factthat the state itself is a system of interpersonal relationships is overlooked. Iwould also argue that the commitment to means/ends identification has tendedto dissipate with time and ‘success’ �/ the devolution of Greenpeace from aconsensus-based direct action group to a multinational pseudo-capitalistpseudo-state provides just one example among many.9 Perhaps this is a resultof what Pareto called the iron law of oligarchy or what Weber referred to as


the routinization of charisma. However, I would like to offer up adifferent interpretation, which would hold that it is the result of an insufficientawareness of the dangers of the logic of hegemony. What I am callingthe newest social movements are very aware of these dangers, and takeactive steps to respond to them at the deepest levels of their structure andprocess of organization. In order to understand precisely how the logic ofhegemony is being superseded by certain elements of the anti-globalizationmovement, I want to return to the discussion of Laclau’s dimensions ofhegemony.

As mentioned previously, I have no quarrel with the thesis that unevennessin relations of power is characteristic of the liberal-capitalist system of states.However, in its normative component, the first dimension of hegemonyimplies much more than this mere description, as is evident in the claim thatsince ‘power is the condition of emancipation’, there is ‘no way ofemancipating a constellation of social forces except by creating a new poweraround a hegemonic centre’ (Butler et al . 2000, p. 208). Following Foucault,it is easy to accept the first part of this proposition (‘power is the condition ofemancipation’). Sufficient work has been done within poststructuralist andpsychoanalytic theory to convince most of us that the desire to achieve atransparent society is based on a fantasmatic relation to the social and thepolitical. However, I do have a problem with the second part of theproposition (‘no way of emancipating . . . except by creating a new poweraround a hegemonic centre’), because it assumes that all political struggles arehegemonic in their intent and realization.

This assumption is what makes it difficult to apply Laclau and Mouffe’stheory of hegemony to the analysis of many contemporary forms of activism.In the case of certain elements of the anti-globalization movement, forexample, the goal is not to create a new power around a hegemonic centre,but to challenge, disrupt and disorient the processes of global hegemony, torefuse, rather than rearticulate those forces that are tending towards theuniversalization of the liberal-capitalist ecumene. As David Graeber haspointed out in a recent article in New Left Review , many of today’s activists haverejected ‘a politics which appeals to governments to modify their behaviour, infavour of physical intervention against state power in a form that itselfprefigures an alternative’ (2002, p. 62). There are many examples of this kindof affinity-based, direct action politics, which take us beyond both reform andrevolution, i.e. that take us beyond the logic of hegemony. John Jordan ofReclaim the Streets [RTS] notes that:

RTS does not see Direct Action as a last resort, but a preferred way ofdoing things. . . a way for individuals to take control of their own livesand environments. . .. If global capitalism does not manage to destroy theecosphere and human civilization. . . and a new culture of social and


ecological justice is developed, RTS would hope that direct action wouldnot stop but continue to be a central part of a direct democratic system.

(Jordan 1997)

At this point, it may helpful to clarify a few points of interpretation. Graeber’sarticle appeared under the title ‘The New Anarchists’, which could be taken toimply that every individual or every group that participates in contemporaryradical activism or anti-globalization struggles should be seen as’anarchists’. Iwould not want to give this impression, since not all of these activists or thegroupings in which they participate self-identify in this way, and since’anar-chism’, like any tradition of theory and practice, is multiple and internallycontested. Thus, I will refer to these practices as ‘anarchistic’, meaning thatthey partake of a logic that can be found within certain self-identified strains ofanarchist theory and practice, which will be identified and discussed later on inthis article. It should also be noted that I am not claiming that RTS is a ‘socialmovement’ in the sense that this term is given within the relevant literature oneither side of the Atlantic. Rather, I see RTS as a non-branded tactic that is beingused by various groups and communities to achieve various ends.10 Therelation of ‘tactics’ to ‘social movements’ is of course another question thatrequires further analysis, which I can delve into only briefly here. Analysed incertain combinations, some might see some of the groups and communitiesthat make use of non-branded tactics as constituting one or more socialmovements. Certainly, in the quote from John Jordan above, we can see thatthere is a hope, on the part of some activists, that what currently registers as anactivist tactic could one day become an accepted part of daily life.

This is precisely what is being done through the use of tactics that not onlyprefigure non-hegemonic alternatives to state and corporate forms, but alsocreate them here and now. The burgeoning network of independent mediacentres (IMCs) is an excellent example of this kind of ‘productive’ directaction. IMC aims to combat corporate concentration in media ownershipthrough the creation of alternative sources of information, and in so doing toparticipate directly in the negation and reconstruction of mass-mediatedrealities. Not only is each centre independent from the corporate world, it isalso independent from the other centres �/ there is no hub that disseminates aparticular editorial line, and on some parts of some sites, there is no editorialline at all. Each centre tends to be driven by the interests and resources of thelocal communities it serves, thus building a high degree of differentiation intothe system at its most basic level. Again, what makes this tactic important inthe context of social movements is its political logic, as the following accountfrom a participant-researcher involved in the Vancouver, Canada IMC makesclear:


Independent Media Centre is, I think, one of the most important recentexamples where grassroots movements, particularly those in the North,work to create spaces that are autonomous from capital and the state,where processes unfold according to logics dramatically opposed to theinstrumentalist logics of accumulation and centralized decision making,even while these movements use technologies created for these purposes.It is also an instance of a subtle shift in political activism and struggle, amove from strategies of demand and representation to strategies of directaction and participation.

(Uzelman 2002, p. 80)

Like RTS, the IMCs show the possibilities of reconstructive community inaction, and orient to a model that can, and has, been adapted to otherinstitutions where corporate and state control are endemic.11 Other examplesof non-branded tactics which prefigure and/or create autonomous alternativesinclude the dissemination and development of the Italian ‘social centre’ modelthroughout the world, Food Not Bombs and countless long-standing and newlyemerging co-operative social and economic experiments. What is importantabout all of these ventures is that they consciously defy the logic of hegemonyby warding off the appearance of overarching centres of power/significationthat would place themselves above the constituent groups. That is, to useLaclau’s’ terminology, there is no general equivalent standing within but above thesenetworks, and their members are committed to maintaining this situation as akey value of their communities.

It is important to note that the use of productive direct action to prefigureand create autonomous alternatives is not limited to privileged subjects of theglobal North. The Zapatistas have been particularly adept in this regard, mostfamously by making use of (relatively) autonomous means of mass commu-nication such as the internet to advance awareness of their cause both withinmainstream Mexican society and around the world (Cleaver 1998, Ronfeldt1998). But at the same time, they have been wary of the politics of recognitionand have proceeded apace with many local, sustainable projects forautonomous control of their affairs (Lorenzano 1998, Rochlin 2003).Indigenous decolonization movements in Australia/New Zealand are alsointeresting on this point. To supplement mainstream strategies, some groupsare pursuing forms of self-determination that run counter to the dominantparadigm of integration within the system of states. These groups often shunboth capitalism and socialism, and their goals are not necessarily liberal, oreven democratic, in the European sense of these terms. Their difference posesdifficult problems for Western theory, problems that so far have not beenadequately addressed (Day 2001a).

Writers in the field of Native American political theory have also advanced aradical critique of the integration of indigenous peoples within the liberal-


capitalist system of states. As in western political theory, these critiques focuson issues of race, class, gender and rational-bureaucratic domination of humanbeings and the land (Kickingbird 1984, Marule 1984, Maracle 1996, Alfred1999, Monture-Angus 1999). Unlike many of their western counterparts,however, Native American political theorists also link these relations ofsubordination to the concept of sovereignty that serves as the horizon of thesystem of states itself. This approach is guided by the reflection that whileredistribution of sovereignty may indeed challenge a particular colonialoppressor, it will not necessarily challenge the tools of his oppression.According to Taiaiake Alfred, sovereignty, as an ‘exclusionary concept rootedin an adversarial and coercive Western notion of power’, is itself deeplyproblematic (Alfred 1999, p. 59). Taken to its limit, this critique approachesthat of the activist communities described above, in positing �/ and positivelyvaluing �/ modes of social organization in which there is ‘no absolute authority,no coercive enforcement of decisions, no hierarchy, and no separate rulingentity’ (Alfred 1999, p. 56).12

Politics of demand vs. politics of the act

Having discussed both the role of hegemonic thought in the history of radicalpolitics and the recent challenges to this paradigm, it is now possible to specifyprecisely what I mean by the term newest social movements. I am talkingabout those direct-action oriented elements within the anti-globalizationmovement very broadly conceived, which are neither revolutionary norreformist, but seek to block, resist and render redundant both corporate andstate power in local, national and transnational contexts. At the same time,these groups/movements/tactics do not seek any irradiation effects on anyspectrum at all, except perhaps in the sense of a postmodernist performativecontradiction �/ they might be seen as motivated by a desire to universalize anabsence of universalizing moments, that is, to undo the hegemony ofhegemony as it is dispersed within (neo)liberal and (post)Marxist theory andpractice.

As a shorthand description of this complex and nascent set of transforma-tions in the logic of radical struggle, I would like to introduce a distinctionbetween what I will call a politics of the act and a politics of demand . By the latterI mean to refer to actions oriented to ameliorating the practices of states,corporations and everyday life, through either influencing or using state powerto achieve irradiation effects. As ‘pragmatic’ as it may be, and despite itssuccesses during the heyday of the welfare state in a few countries, the politicsof demand is by necessity limited in scope: it can change the content ofstructures of domination and exploitation, but it cannot change their form. AsLaclau points out, without a hegemonic centre articulated with apparatuses of


discipline and control, there is no force to which demands might be addressed.However, the converse is also true �/ every demand, in anticipating aresponse, perpetuates these structures, which exist precisely in anticipation ofdemands. This leads to a positive feedback loop, in which the ever-increasingdepth and breadth of apparatuses of discipline and control create ever-newsites of antagonism, which produce new demands, thereby increasing thequantity and intensity of discipline and control.

It is at this point that a politics of the act is required to break out of the loop.This politics can be productively understood in terms of what Lacan has calledthe ethics of the real (Lacan 1992). According to Slavoj Zizek, the force of thisethic derives from ‘going through the fantasy’, from ‘the distance we areobliged to assume towards our most ‘authentic’ dreams, towards the myths thatguarantee the very consistency of our symbolic universe’ (Zizek 1994, p. 82).Clearly, the fundamental fantasy of the politics of demand is that thecurrently hegemonic formation will recognize the validity of the claimpresented to it, and respond in a way that produces an event of emancipation.Most of the time, however, it does not; instead it defers, dissuades or provides apartial solution to one problem that exacerbates several others. Thus, thepolitics of demand can be seen as driven by an ethics of desire, in that it seeksprimarily to reproduce the conditions of its own emergence. Crossing thefantasy in this case means giving up on the expectation of a non-dominatingresponse from structures of domination; it means surprising both oneself �/

and the structure �/ by inventing a response that precludes the necessity of thedemand and thereby breaks out of the loop of the endless perpetuation ofdesire for emancipation. This, I would argue, is precisely what is being done bythose who are participating in the forms of direct action I have mentionedabove.

A final point needs to be made here. At one stage in the development of histhinking on these matters, Zizek argued that an ethic of the real would demandnot only that we traverse our own fantasy, but also that we ‘respect as much aspossible the other’s ‘‘particular absolute’’, the way he organizes his universe ofmeaning in a way absolutely particular to him’ (1991, p. 156). While Zizeklater tried to step away from what he came to see as a ‘universalizing’ momentin his own thought, I would suggest that it is impossible to consider ethicalquestions without some reference to the other.13 Thus, I would see in thisdisavowed underside of Zizek’s version of the ethics of the Real a necessaryelement of the politics of affinity, as it is displayed in the concrete practices ofmany of the most visible and effective of today’s radical social movements.Practicing a politics of the act does not mean simply ‘doing as you please’, justas direct action does not mean simply ‘blowing things up’. All actions arecarried out in complex contexts involving other groups and communities, eachof which must be engaged according to its positioning relative to state,corporate and other forms of domination and exploitation.


Hardt and Negri: the multitude within Empire

The central argument being developed in this article is that groups/movements/tactics that are oriented to a politics of the act cannot beadequately understood by existing paradigms of social movements analysis, andtherefore require the development of new modes of theorization. In thissection, I will address the strengths and deficiencies of one of the mostinfluential recent attempts to carry out this task, Michael Hardt and ToniNegri’s Empire. Empire is a huge text, in more ways than one. I cannot hope toengage with all, or even most, of the issues it raises, or to provide an overviewof its argument.14 Rather, I will focus my attention on the ways in which Hardtand Negri’s book, and the debates it has spawned, help and hinder ourunderstanding of the political logic of the newest social movements.

One important contribution Hardt and Negri have made is to introduce intothe English-speaking world some key concepts associated with Italianautonomist Marxism. Autonomist theory argues that workers have createdand sustained capitalism, not only through allowing their productivity to becaptured, but also by their struggles to overthrow and reform the system thatcaptures it. Each time it is presented with a new challenge, capital responds byadjusting its structures and processes, deepening its sophistication and its holdon our lives (Hardt & Negri 2000, p. 51). Although this may sound like arecipe for despair, it is not necessarily so. Rather, the goal of autonomiststruggles is, as Nick Dyer-Witheford so elegantly puts it, to ‘rupture thisrecuperative movement, unspring the dialectical spiral, and speed thecirculation of struggles until they attain an escape velocity in which labourtears itself away from incorporation within capital’ (Dyer-Witheford 1999, p.68). This action of tearing away is referred to within autonomist theory asauto- or self-valorization, and it appears in Hardt and Negri’s work as the‘constituent power of the multitude’ (2000, p. 410).

Constituent power, I would suggest, is something very similar to what Ihave called direct action; it involves communities of various sorts workingtogether in a circulation of struggles that are simultaneously against capitalismand for the construction of alternatives to it. In their response to the authorswho participated in a special issue of Rethinking Marxism devoted to critiques ofEmpire , Hardt and Negri further clarify what they mean to encompass by theterm constituent power. For them, the project of the multitude involves actionon three levels: ‘resistance, insurrection and constituent power’. They go onto identify each of these elements, respectively, with ‘micropolitical practicesof insubordination and sabotage, collective instances of revolt, and finallyutopian and alternative projects’ (Hardt & Negri 2001, p. 242). Constituentpower thus appears to be strongly identified with constructing concretealternatives to globalizing capital here and now, rather than appealing to statepower or waiting for/bringing on the Revolution.


While it does seem that Hardt and Negri are aware of and positively valuewhat I have called a politics of the act, it is not at all clear how they perceivethe practical political logic of the project of counter-Empire. On the one hand,the multitude is theorized as a multiplicity in the Deleuzean sense, that is, as aformation of subjects in ‘perpetual motion’, sailing the ‘enormous sea’ ofcapitalist globalization in a ‘perpetual nomadism’ (2000, pp. 60�/1). Themultitude is supposed to exist as ‘creative constellations of powerfulsingularities’ (61), that is, as something unknowable, untotalizable, ungrasp-able. Thus, ‘[o]nly the multitude through its practical experimentation willoffer the models and determine when and how the possible becomes real’(2000, p. 411). At the same time, however, Hardt and Negri’s language oftenshifts into a Hegelian mode in which the multitude appears as an entity thatneeds ‘a center’, ‘a common sense and direction’, a ‘prince’ in theMachiavellian sense (2000, p. 65). The philosophical answer to thisconundrum of course lies in the Spinozan notion of immanence, throughwhich the dichotomy between singularity and totality is supposed to betranscended. However, the practical answer seems to lie in a rather orthodoxconception of the logic of hegemony.

This observation is based on a few scattered passages in Empire , but isreflective, I would claim, of a general impasse in Hardt and Negri’s worktogether. They are highly critical, for example, of Laclau and Mouffe’s‘revisionist’ reading of Gramsci: ‘Poor Gramsci, communist and militantbefore all else, tortured and killed by fascism . . . was given the gift of beingconsidered the founder of a strange notion of hegemony that leaves no placefor a Marxian politics’ (2000, p. 235, n. 26). What would a properly Marxianreading of hegemony look like? Hardt and Negri approvingly cite Lenin’sanalysis of imperialism, and give him credit for recognizing, at least implicitly,the existence of a fundamental dichotomy in modes of radical struggle: ‘eitherworld communist revolution or Empire ’ (2000, p. 234, original emphasis). It issomewhat jarring to see two autonomists reaching back behind westernMarxist readings of Gramsci to recover a properly Leninist conception ofhegemony. Yet, it seems clear that the project of counter-Empire is to beguided by this Leninist conception. That is, although it may be internallydifferentiated and fluid, the goal of the multitude is to counter one totalizingforce with another totalizing force. This reading is adequately supported, Ithink, both in Empire and in subsequent interviews and responses by theauthors. Near the end of Empire , Hardt and Negri suggest that ‘the actions ofthe multitude against Empire’ already ‘affirm [the] hegemony’ of an ‘earthlycity’ that is replacing the modern republic (2000, p. 411). This eschatologicaltone is maintained in a later interview, where the authors argue that ‘aCatholic (that is, global) project is the only alternative’ (2002, p. 184).

To be fair, Hardt and Negri have acknowledged that, in Empire , the conceptof the multitude remained ‘too indefinite, too poetic’ (2001, p. 185), and they


have promised to address this problem in their next book. Until this book ispublished, however, it does seem that while Hardt and Negri have madedefinite advances beyond the politics of demand and are aware of theresurgence of a politics of the act, they attempt to install this politics within aparadigm that is, despite their many claims to be operating in a post-Marxistterrain, decidedly pre-Gramscian in its relation to the theory and practice ofhegemony. This is not to say that they fall into the trap of advocating a Leninistvanguard party �/ they explicitly state that they ‘have no desire . . . toreconstruct the Party’ (2001, p. 237). And it is certainly the case that thestrain of autonomist Marxism with which Negri is strongly associated rejectscentralized forms of organization, striving instead towards a ‘lateralpolycentric concept of anti-capitalist alliances-in-diversity, connecting aplurality of agencies in a circulation of struggles’ (Dyer-Witheford 1999, p.68).

And yet what are we to make of the many ways in which the multiplicity ofthe multitude seems to be overwritten by a desire to create a ‘coherentproject’ (Hard and Negri 2001, p. 242), to ‘give to these movements of themultitude of bodies, which we recognize are real, a power of expression thatcan be shared’ (2001, p. 243, emphasis added)? Perhaps the answer lies not inthe autonomist elements of Hardt and Negri’s analysis, but its Marxism.Perhaps to descend out of the realm of metatheory and engage with actuallyexisting struggles in their specificity, it is necessary to indulge in even morehistorical revisionism, to reach back behind not only Laclau and Mouffe,Gramsci and Lenin, but also behind Marx, to the decisive moment when‘socialism’ came to mean ‘Marxism’ and all other logics of struggle wererelegated to a subsidiary position.

‘Utopian’ socialism and the hegemony of hegemony

In liberal theory of both the capitalist and post-Marxist varieties, it is onlywhen a civil society is externally ‘mediated’ by a state form that the defining �/

and highly desirable �/ situation of liberal pluralism arises (Shalem andBensusan 1994). From the liberal point of view, polities in which thisdistinction has been eliminated must become either ‘totalitarian’ (excessivelyordered) or ‘anarchic’ (excessively disordered), depending upon whether it isthe state or civil society that usurps its proper boundaries. A similar perceptionexists in classical Marxism, where state coercion is seen as an unfortunate, butnecessary, evil on the way to a transparent society.15 Within these paradigms,then, it is impossible to imagine that sufficient order can be achieved in(post)modern societies without recourse to the state form.

However, this kind of stateless order is precisely what Hardt and Negripropose via their notion of constituent power. While, as I have noted, this


concept emerges out of the tradition of autonomist Marxism, it bears a strikingresemblance to certain branches of anarchist theory. As early as 1949, MartinBuber argued that the crucial feature of the rise of the state was not that itdisplaced existing forms of association, but that ‘the political principle with allits centralistic features percolated into the associations themselves, modifyingtheir structure and their whole inner life’ (Buber 1958, p. 131). Buber hadthus identified, in its nascent form, the situation which Habermas would laterdescribe as the colonization of the lifeworld (1987, pp. 301�/73), and whichHardt and Negri have characterized as the ‘real subsumption’ of society in thestate (1994). Buber’s use of the term ‘political principle’ marks a crucial pointof differentiation between anarchist theory and its (neo)liberal and(post)Marxist counterparts: for anarchists, it is both possible and desirablefor human beings to live without state intervention, if sufficiently strong non-state (and of course non-corporate!) modes of organization exist to take on thetasks assigned to state coercion in the other paradigms.16 On the furtherassumption that the character of a transformation will have a strong effect onits outcome, anarchist thought has tended to privilege ‘social’ revolutionsbased on the construction of affinities (constituent power) over ‘political’revolutions based on achieving hegemony (constituted power).17

In Paths in Utopia (1949/1958), Buber presents a genealogy of the anarchistconcept of social revolution, under the rubric of what he calls structuralrenewal . This line of theory and practice springs from the so-called utopiansocialism of Saint Simon and Fourier, and runs through Proudhon andKropotkin to Gustav Landauer. While the details of this development areimportant to recent trends in social theory and activism, limitations of spacerestrict me to the task of considering how Landauer’s theory links up with apolitics of the act and constituent power, that is, to showing how thisexpression of the ‘classical’ anarchist logic of structural renewal resonates withthose elements of contemporary radical social movements that are guided by alogic of affinity. Not well known outside of anarchist circles, Landauer livedand wrote in Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Against the grain of both Marxist orthodoxy and social-democratic revisionism,and against the more voluntarist anarchists of his time, he argued in ForSocialism (1911/1978) that a radical transformation of capitalist society couldnot be achieved by either instantaneous revolution or slow reform.Anticipating Gramsci, Landauer insisted that the appropriate social institutionsand relations had to be in place before any change in the political order couldoccur. Contrary to Gramsci, however, Landauer did not rely upon the existinginstitutions of civil society as a source of raw material, nor did he rely uponstate coercion to achieve hegemony. For him, new institutions had to becreated ‘almost out of nothing, amid chaos’ (1911/1978, p. 20); that isalongside , rather than inside , the system of states and corporations.


For this strategy the appropriate tactics involved a complementary pairing ofdisengagement and reconstruction. ‘Let us destroy’, Landauer suggested,‘mainly by means of the gentle, permanent and binding reality that we build’(1911/1978, p. 93). To the extent that it does not seek an abrupt and totaltransition away from capitalist modes of social organization, the strategy ofstructural renewal shares with reformism a willingness to coexist with its‘enemies’. However, structural renewal is more akin to constituent power, inthat it does not provide positive energy to existing structures and processes in thehope of their amelioration. Rather, it aims to reduce their efficacy and reach byrendering them redundant. Structural renewal therefore appears simultaneouslyas a negative force working against the colonization of everyday life by the stateand corporations (what Hardt and Negri call insurrection and resistance), and apositive force acting to reverse this process (constituent power). Just as whatHabermas calls ‘system’ advances by percolating into everyday relations,structural renewal proceeds through its own dispersion of regularities.

If existing social relations are to be rendered redundant, then what will taketheir place? Like Hardt and Negri, Landauer does not offer a vision of a NewHarmony. But neither does he invoke an unknowable totality. Rather, healways refused to say how a new socialist reality ‘should be constituted as awhole’ (1911/1978, p. 29). Also of interest here is Landauer’s insistence thatthe building of socialism will require a spirit of creativity and improvisation.‘We need attempts’, he argues, ‘We need the expedition of a thousand men toSicily. We need these precious Garabaldi-natures and we need failures uponfailures and the tough nature that is frightened by nothing’ (1911/1978, p.62). Again, the resonances with the subject of constitutive power �/ a‘labouring subject, a creative, productive affirmative subject’ �/ are strong(Hardt and Negri 1994, p. 309). But where Hardt and Negri seem to maintaina faith in what used to be called the masses, Landauer did not accept therevolutionary qualifications of the proletariat as an abstract entity.18 Rather, hebelieved that the revolutionary subject could only be created via a process thatmust begin and continue as a proliferation of a large number of small andrelatively disparate struggles. These struggles could be linked by a commit-ment to the construction of non-statist socialist alternatives, but nevertotalized �/ or even pluralized or quasi-universalized �/ through the mediationof an overarching identity.

The final point I would I like to make deals with Landauer’s insight into thenature of the links between everyday life and social and political structures andprocesses. In a formulation of which Lacan might have approved, Landauerasserts that capitalism ‘is not really a thing, but a nothing that is mistaken for athing’ (1911/1978, p. 132). That is, capitalism is a set of relations betweenhuman individuals and groups, a reality or way of being in common. Landaueranalyses the state, law and administration in the same way: not as institutionsin the sociological sense, but as ‘names for force between men [and women]’


(1911/1978, p. 132). For Landauer, then, because capitalism, the state �/ andof course socialism as well �/ are all modes of human coexistence, changingthese macro structures is very much a matter of changing micro relations: newforms ‘become reality only in the act of being realized’ (1911/1978, p. 138).As a practice of changing reality, of giving oneself and one’s communities newrealities in the context of other selves and communities, I hope to have made itclear that structural renewal is intersubjective and deeply ethical in theLacanian sense I have outlined above.

To summarize and clarify the main argument of this paper, I would suggestthat what I am calling the logic of affinity should be seen as emerging out of ananarchist tradition of theory and practice which rejects the struggle forhegemony in its dual (Gramscian) nature as domination over others via thestate form and ‘consensual’ direction of others via ideological sway over ‘civilsociety’. I am suggesting that the logic of affinity logic is discernible in tacticssuch as IMC, RTS and FNB, which are widespread in contemporary radicalsocial activist circles. The key elements of an anarchistic logic of affinity are: adesire to create alternatives to state and corporate forms of social organization,working ‘alongside’ the existing institutions; proceeding in this via disengage-ment and reconstruction rather than by reform or revolution; with the end ofcreating not a new knowable totality (counter-hegemony), but of enablingexperiments and the emergence of new forms of subjectivity; and finally,focusing on relations between these subjects, in the name of inventing newforms of community (Day 2001b).

Conclusion

For these reasons, despite the charges of voluntarism and spiritualism that haveconsigned his thought to relative obscurity, I think that Landauer’s argumentsdeserve serious consideration today. As the possibilities of both revolution andreform have been exhausted, practices of structural renewal are being adoptedby some of the most vibrant contemporary social movements. And, for thosewho find the parallels between constituent power and structural renewalconvincing, it is apparent that similar ideas are emerging within some variantsof (post)Marxism, or what Nick Dyer-Witheford calls more precisely‘postmodern Marxism’ (1999). This is not to suggest, of course, that MichaelHardt and Toni Negri are secretly wearing circle-A t-shirts in the comfort andprivacy of their own homes. ‘We are not anarchists’, they explicitly declare,‘but communists who have seen how much repression and destruction ofhumanity have been wrought by liberal and socialist big governments’ (2000,p. 350). Hardt and Negri’s work certainly takes us a long way towardsunderstanding the direct-action elements of the newest social movements. Iwould argue, though, that it is necessary to step outside of the dichotomy


between revolution and reform to fully comprehend how an anarchist logic ofaffinity is challenging the hegemony of hegemony in (neo)liberal and(post)marxist theory and practice.

Finally, I would like to reiterate that I am not claiming that the socialmovements of the 1960s�/80s have been entirely superseded by a politicallogic that has no precursors. As is always the case with a genealogical analysis,it is not a matter of a clean break, but of a precarious coexistence, a series ofsubtle shifts in the alignment of forces, which show the limits of a hegemoniclogic for certain kinds of social transformation. Just as the current reading ofthe concept of hegemony emerged through the deconstruction of thenineteenth-century Marxist revolutionary paradigm, so the resurgence of thelogic of affinity can be seen as an effect created as this logic has been pushed toits theoretical and practical limits. In the spaces so created, a multiplicity ofnew forms of struggle is emerging. Understanding and nurturing these forms isa problem not only for metatheory, but will also require work that takes intoaccount the practices and identifications of the individuals and groups involved.Without a doubt, a very interesting conversation has been started, and I amhopeful that it will continue. At the very least, I hope to have provided ananswer to the question posed by commentators such as Slavoj Zizek �/ ifanarchist-influenced groups look disorganized, this is perhaps because the waysin which they are organized cannot be understood from within the commonsense maintained by the hegemony of hegemony. Perhaps a new, uncommonsense is needed.

Acknowledgements

Versions of this paper have been presented at the Marxism 2000 conference,Amherst, MA, and Cultural Studies: Between Politics and Ethics , at Bath SpaUniversity College, Bath, UK, 2001. The author would like to thank GreigdePeuter, Mark Cote and David Firman for their comments on previous drafts,as well as the editors and reviewers at Cultural Studies for their comments andguidance through the revision process.

Notes

1 The question of what constitutes a ‘social movement’ is extremely complexand has been debated at great length. One focal point of these debates wasthe winter 1985 issue of Social Research (vol. 52, no. 4), to which a numberof major figures in new social movements theory contributed. As myintention in this article is to focus on logics of struggle rather than definitionsof terms, I will not engage in these debates to any great extent. However,for those readers who prefer a definition I would offer up the one given by


Herbert Blumer, which is quite open and therefore able to respond to avariety of circumstances: ‘Social movements can be viewed as collectiveenterprises seeking to establish a new order of life. They have their inceptionin a condition of unrest, and derive their motive power on one hand fromdissatisfaction with the current form of life, and on the other hand, fromwishes and hopes for a new system of living’ (Blumer 1969, p. 99). ‘Radical’social movements would be those that seek change at what they consider tobe the ‘root’ level of one or more social antagonisms: radical feministsseeking to eradicate patriarchy, radical socialists seeking to eliminatecapitalism, radical environmentalists seeking to end the domination ofnature. However, of course, this term too has been subject to muchcontestation.

2 I would go so far as to suggest that the concepts of ‘false consciousness’ and‘consciousness raising’ in classical Marxism prefigure the consensual aspectof hegemony.

3 The friend/enemy distinction was developed in the context of post-Marxisttheories of hegemony by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985).

4 This choice should in any way be read as a ‘dismissal’ of the work of ChantalMouffe since 1985, in which she has attempted to situate the project ofradical democracy within liberal and feminist debates (see the essayscollected in Mouffe 1993). Although my focus in this article is on the logicof hegemony, I have elsewhere undertaken the task of discussing the relationbetween the logic of hegemony and the project for radical democracy (Day2001b). My position is that Mouffe’s conception of radical democracy isdependent upon the logic of hegemony and a politics of demand. A critiqueof this logic and politics is therefore also simultaneously a critique of thecentral assumptions of the project for radical democracy.

5 In Hegemony and Socialist Strategy , Laclau and Mouffe suggest that the ‘newstruggles . . . should be understood from the double perspective of thetransformation of social relations characteristic of the new hegemonicformation of the post-war period, and of the effects of the displacement intonew areas of social life of the egalitarian imaginary constituted aroundliberal-democratic discourse’ (1985, p. 165). My reading is that they believethat hegemony began to become possible with western modernity, andbecomes in some sense mandatory with the advent of postmodernity.

6 One might say that modern nation-states have long ‘known’ this to be thecase, but the logic of hegemony moves beyond this unconscious, fearfulawareness by acknowledging and celebrating , rather than dissimulating, theimpossibility of achieving a pure identity.

7 That is, the unfixity of the floating signifier arises from the contestation overmeaning that occurs between competing discourses; that of the emptysignifier is a result of its function as a general equivalent within a particularchain (see Laclau in Butler et al . 2000, p. 305).

8 If ‘the anti-globalization movement’ is not a movement itself in the acceptedmeaning of this term, then the question of whether it is composed of one or


more ‘movements’ becomes moot. My own interest, as I have tried to makeclear, is in logics of struggle and tactics, and their relations with establishedtraditions of theory and practice.

9 I am not meaning to suggest here that the trajectory of Greenpeace andother formerly radical groups can be entirely ‘explained’ by a lack ofattention to identification of means and ends. These are undoubtedlycomplex situations.

10 The term non-branded tactic was evolved in conversations with RyanMitchell, a graduate student in the Department of Sociology at Queen’sUniversity at Kingston.

11 See www.indymedia.org for a list of affiliated sites and for accounts of thegenesis of some of the more well-known IMCs.

12 This is to say that both classical anarchism and Native American politicaltheory could benefit from further engagement with poststructuralist theoryin general and the Foucaultian analytics of power in particular.

13 In The Metastases of Enjoyment , Zizek situates the Kantian imperative as acommand to ‘renounce your desire, since it is not universalizable!’ (1994, p.69). In a note, he adds ‘I myself yielded to this temptation in the last chapterof Looking Awry , where I propose the maxim ‘‘do not violate the other’sfantasy-space’’ as a complement to Lacan’s ethics of persisting in one’sdesire’ (1994, p. 84, n. 18). The question of the status of these twomoments in Zizek’s work certainly deserves further discussion.

14 For an excellent and wide-ranging collection of commentary and criticism,see ‘Dossier on Empire’, a special issue of Rethinking Marxism (2001, vol. 13,no. 3/4).

15 Here it is helpful to recall the classical debate between Marx and Bakuninover the role of the dictatorship of the proletariat in revolutionary theoryand practice. In Statism and Anarchy , Bakunin expressed his ‘deep aversion tothe theory of Marx and LaSalle that recommends to the workers. . . thefounding of a people’s state which. . . will be nothing other than theproletariat ‘‘organized as the ruling class’’’. Bakunin worried that if theproletariat became the ruling power, society as a whole would necessarily be‘subject to this new rule, this new state’ (Bakunin 1873/1990, p. 177). Inresponse, Marx asserted that as long its enemies have not disappeared, therevolutionary class must use measures of force, i.e. ‘governmentalmeasures’, to accelerate the transformation to a classless society (Marx1874/1978, pp. 542�/3). Given the Stalinist horrors of the Soviet Union,Bakunin’s critique might appear prophetic. However, the hybrid feudal-capitalist dystopia that has arisen in Russia since the fall of the USSR compelsus to see Marx’s reply as equally forward-looking �/ as soon as the Sovietstate gave up its coercive power, the most ruthless forms of capitalistexploitation re-appeared with a vengeance. Clearly, there is a great dangerin ignoring the specificity of both the state and corporate forms, and themany links that can and do exist between them.


16 The anarchist literature on this question is far more rich and complex than isgenerally recognized and goes far beyond simply ‘wishing away’ the state.Rather, it is focused on how actually existing human societies, from the‘premodern’ to the ‘postmodern’, can and do function without state (orcorporate) intervention. A small sample of this literature, including bothclassical to contemporary writers, would include (Proudhon 1863/1979,Kropotkin 1902/1955, Ackelsberg 1991, Barclay 1992, Ward 1996)

17 Unfortunately this terminology could lead to the assumption that socialrevolutionaries are, or believe themselves to be, ‘apolitical’. This, however,would be impossible, since all modes of social transformation must bothchallenge existing relations of power and instantiate new ones. Thus, theterm ‘social revolution’ should be read in the restricted sense of describingsocial change achieved through methods of affinity rather than hegemony.

18 In fact, in his moments of high anti-Marxist polemicism, Landauer soundsrather classist. Since socialism aims at the abolition of the proletariat, heargued, ‘we need not find [the proletariat] to be an institution especiallybeneficial to the mind’ (1911/1978, p. 49). For him, the proletariat was nota class of ‘natural revolutionaries’, but of ‘born uncultured plodders’ (1911/1978, p. 69).

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