Tag: Antonio Gramsci
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#KeystoneXL: Taking sides and winning
Important news today. I feel so proud of all my friends, colleagues, and comrades who chose to intervene in history, to challenge ‘fate’, to not be indifferent about humanity’s future, to work to stop the Keystone XL. This victory is not everything, but it is certainly something—something important—in this age of resignation and hopelessness. May…
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“Counter-hegemony” and Left Ambivalence Toward Power
I’m reading Cihan Tuğal’s Passive Revolution: Absorbing the Islamic Challenge to Capitalism. I’m still working my way through it, but so far I’ve found it very insightful. There are so many things in the book that I’m looking forward to digging into, so I feel a little bad that I’m about to start with the…
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Falling in love with ourselves
Also published in Occupy! #5. Occupy! is an OWS-inspired gazette, published by n+1. — In late October of last year my cousin came down to Liberty Square, then home of a thriving Occupy Wall Street, to meet me for a drink. He arrived early so he could check things out for himself. I was eager…
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Anatomy of populist hegemonic alignment (part 1)
Building upon the basic idea of hegemonic contestation discussed in my last post, I want to now move into an exploration of the mechanics of this process. Specifically I want to examine a structural pattern found in hegemonic alignments — and, even more specifically, in hegemonic alignments that can also be described as populist. First, I…
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What is hegemonic struggle?
I was supposed to drive to Philly this afternoon for the Occupy national gathering, but alas, my car broke down in southern Rhode Island, and now I’m back in Providence. Not just in Providence, but at a bar in Providence. And not just any bar, but the Duck & Bunny — the somewhat peculiar bar…
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“Asks” & the asymmetry of hegemonic contests
I’ve been thinking more about the processes involved in the projection of primary/proximate group-oriented experiences and instincts onto larger, abstract imagined communities. These processes seem, by all accounts that I put stock in, historically contingent. In other words, the tendency to identify with a large, abstract, realistically unknowable public (e.g. a nation, a religion, a…
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utopianism and the would-be political group
“The attribute ‘utopian’ does not apply to political will in general, but to specific wills which are incapable of relating means to end, and hence are not even wills, but idle whims, dreams, longings, etc.” —Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks In late October my cousin came down to Liberty Square (Zuccotti Park), then home of Occupy…
Jonathan Matthew Smucker 