Michel Bauwens

There is an interesting presentation at the Ungrammatical Multitude blog
which counterposes the logic of hegemony and the logic of affinity. It refers to a book by Richard Day, Gramsci is Dead, Gramsci being the foremost theoretician of hegemony.

In political strategy, the old leftist view was antagonist, two ‘classes’ fighting for hegemony, facing each other as two hierarchies. Today, as distributed networks arise, with their ever shifting connections, it is increasingly difficult to recognize such clear opposing camps. Many people are therefore shifting from an antagonistic stance, “we’re against”, to a logic of creative action, seeking like-minded people through networks. That’s the logic of affinity.
Quote: Day establishes an opposition between the “logic of hegemony” and the “logic of affinity. Hegemony, he tells us, is totalizing and state-centered. It operates, equally in either what he likes to term its “(neo)liberal” or its “(post)marxist” variants, by means of demand, representation, recognition, and integration. From the very moment that politics is predicated on the demand, it implies and invokes the existence of a state before which the individual or group constituted in the demand seeks to be represented, and by which it hopes to be first recognized and then integrated. Affinity, on the other hand, begins with Exodus and establishes self-generated (and self-valorizing) communities predicated on a “groundless solidarity” and “infinite responsibility” that are always open to the new and the other.”