There can be hardly any theoretical discussion without an encounter with the theorists of “crisis of Marxism” or trends that come with a “post” prefix like post-Marxism or post-modernism. But ironically, preceding and to an extent prompting this phase was a period which witnessed a vociferous ‘return to Marx’ and the rise of trends like “structural Marxism”. Interestingly, it is in France that both structuralism and post-structuralism or post-modernism in general have found fertile grounds.
Before we proceed with a critical examination of post-Marxism, let us briefly recall the period of structuralism and structural Marxism. As a methodological-theoretical trend, structuralism sought to understand society by studying not the conscious activity of the human subjects but the unconscious, objective structures these activities presuppose. It evolved from three basic streams:
(a) The linguistic studies of F. Saussure and N. Jacobson who investigated the structure underlying language in general;
(b) Levi-Strauss’ path breaking study of the structure of primitive societies; and
(c) Jacques Lacan’s study of structures in psychology and the early Foucault’s study of the conditions of emergence of certain theoretical discourses like psychiatry, clinical medicine etc.
The influence of structuralism in France led also to a structuralist reading of Marxism. The key figure in this trajectory was Louis Althusser. Jointly with associates like E Balibar and N. Poulantzas, he developed what came to be known as Structural Marxism. Its principal features can be summarised like this:
(i) There is an ‘epistemological break’ in Marxism, separating the mature from the early Marx. What we need, therefore, is not a simple, literal reading of Marx but a ‘symptomatic’ reading. What does this mean? In the words of N Geras, “The explicit discourse (must be) read conjointly with the absences, lacunae and silences which, constituting a second ‘silent discourse’, are so many symptoms of the unconscious problematic buried in the text. Like all knowledge, reading, correctly understood and correctly practised, is not vision but theoretical labour and production”.[1]
(ii) Such ‘symptomatic reading’ leads to the rejection of the humanism (i.e., viewing the human essence as the ‘subject’ of history) of early Marx and its corollary, empiricism. But why? In the words of Althusser, empiricism opposes “a given subject to a given object and calls knowledge the abstraction by the subject of the essence of the object”.[2] By contrast, Althusser believes that it is the task of philosophy to create conceptual tool or framework which are preconditions for knowledge. These tools, much like instruments of material production, are used to work over the available raw material of a given discipline — i.e., the ideological and/or scientific notions specific to it — to get, as finished products, knowledge of the ‘real concrete’. The entire process, to be called ‘theoretical practice’, is as much a transformative process as material production.
(iii) The result of Marx’s theoretical practice was the concept of society as a totality “whose unity is constituted by a specific type of complexity, which introduces instances, that, following Engels, we can, very schematically, reduce to three: the economy, politics and ideology”.[3]
Each of these ‘instances’ is a structure having its own peculiar time, its own rhythm of development. But they are also united in a greater structure — a structure of structures. The complex and uneven relationship of the instances or levels (the economy, politics etc.) to each other at a specific time is called a ‘conjuncture’. Every conjuncture is said to be ‘over determined’ in that each of the levels contributes to determining the overall structure as well as itself being determined by it. Of course, the determining role of each level is not equal; their autonomy is only relative and the economy is the determining factor in the last instance.
(iv) The complex process of determination and over determination shows that causality itself is structural. Therefore, history should be conceived of a process without a subject : “The structure of the relations of production determines the places and function occupied and adopted by the agents of production, who are never more than the occupants of these places… The true ‘subjects’ (in the sense of the constitutive subjects of the process) are therefore not these occupants or functionaries … but the definition and distribution of these places and functions. The true subjects are these definers and distributors: the relations of production (and political and ideological social relations). But since these are ‘relations’ they cannot be thought within the category ‘subjects’”.[4]
Post-structuralism and Post-modernism
The basic point is that Althusser sought to introduce in Marxism an overbearing element of scientific rationality and a rigid structuralism which excluded the human beings as the subject of history. His two major works, ‘For Marx’ and ‘Reading Capital’ (the latter co-authored with E. Balibar) were hailed as a ‘return to Marx’ and a powerful attempt to incorporate certain latest achievements in linguistics, psychoanalysis etc., into Marxist philosophy. But many elements of his systems—e.g., the total rejection o f the ‘subject’, the independence of theoretical practice and so on — came to be severely criticised. From the mid-70s, however, Althusser abandoned some of his positions while his associates and followers went further than him on this road. The decomposition of Structural Marxism and the decline of structuralism led to an opposite trend: a forceful return and backlash of the subject and subjectivity. It is against this backdrop that post-modernism arose in France in 1970s.
To look at this backdrop from another side, SIR had already changed and was daily changing much of the basic structure of capitalism, giving it a new lease of life and introducing wide-ranging changes in people’s lifestyles, outlooks and what not. Simultaneously, the symptoms of growing problems in socialist countries had also begun to acquire increasing visibility. On the other hand, the vanguard revolutionary role of the working class and the communist parties was becoming less and less conspicuous even as it seemed to be counter-balanced by the rise of the New Left (with which many of the post-modernists had sympathised or identified themselves in the prime of their lives) and by new breakthroughs in non-class movements like those of women, students etc. The combined impact of these and certain other developments was that for a good section of intellectuals, the tenets of classical Marxism seemed to lose at least some of their validity. In a word, the changed world demanded a new role of the proletariat and a thorough development of its “ism”, its theoretical arsenal. But that was not forthcoming, at least not in Europe. The ideology and politics of post-modernism arose as yet another petty bourgeois attempt to fill this void.
Viewed from yet another angle, if modernism belongs to industrial societies, postmodernism belongs to ‘post-industrial’ societies. Politically, postmodernism seeks to address a new constellation of issues and movements based on gender, race, environment and ecology etc., in contrast to the traditional emphasis on economy and on classes and class struggle. According to some commentators, the history of capitalism can be divided into three phases, each with its own ‘cultural dominant’. Competitive capitalism was linked with realism; monopoly capitalism was the epoch of modernism and multinational capitalism is the age of postmodernism.
One of the basic strands on which post-modernism flays modernism is on the latter’s so-called obsession with “scientism”. Marxism too is accused of being affected by this scientistic bias. Arising in the 19th century milieu which basked in the glory of science and accepted the latter’s lordship over all branches of knowledge, Marxism too had come to be conceptualised and discussed in terms of scientific philosophy, scientific socialism, political economy as a science, the historical science and so on. In his famous speech at the graveside of Karl Marx, Engels had referred to his departed friend as “a man of science” and said, “Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history.” The “laws” of Marxism came to be accorded the same degree of infallibility as the “proven” principles of Science.
This “scientific” definitiveness and self-assurance began to melt away in the twentieth century owing to — paradoxical though it might sound — further progress in the sciences. Lenin in his “Materialism and Empirio-Criticism” (1914) had spoken of “the crisis of Physics” while the subsequent developments in the theories of relativity, quantum mechanics, probability theory, etc., called into question many of the basic notions on which stood the grand edifice of science. If Gramsci was the first great Marxist whose intellectual formation in this environment led him to a less scientistic and more open-ended reading of Marxism, the post-modernists half-a-century later often went to the extent of questioning the hitherto undisputed sovereignty of science. They were perturbed by the destructive powers of science as witnessed during the Second World War and the possibilities of a nuclear holocaust. A further cause of worry was provided by the totalitarian tendency displayed by certain communist parties in the realm of knowledge and culture — a tendency sought to be justified by the communist leadership’s claimed mastery over the omniscient science of Marxism. It was also fell that emanating from Europe and America, the solemn voice of Science and Reason had actually served as a lieutenant of Capital in its mission of enslaving the whole world.
A zealous crusade against this all-powerful grip of science, a passionate urge to liberate “truth” from the clutches of “power”, provided the basic inspiration to the pioneers of post-modernism. In his bid to “emancipate” all “subjugated knowledges”, Michel Foucault, one of the most influential stalwarts of the post-structuralist or post-modernist school directed his entire theoretical inquiry to analysing “power” and its mechanisms of repression. But “power”, according to Foucault, “is not primarily the maintenance and reproduction of economic relations, but is above all a relation of force … Power is essentially that which represses. Power represses nature, the instinct, a class, and individuals … ”[5] In analysing power as such a generalised and diffused category, Foucault recognises the utility of Marxism as a set of “useful tools for local research”, but he resents “the inhibiting effects of global, totalitarian theories” like Marxism. In his words, “It is impossible at the present time to write history without using a whole range of concepts directly or indirectly linked to Marx’s thought and situating oneself within a horizon of thought which has been defined and described by Marx.” At the same time, he reiterates, “If we have any objection against Marxism, it lies in the fact that it could effectively be a science… When I see you straining to establish the scientificity of Marxism … for me … you are investing Marxist discourses and those who uphold them with the effects of a power which the West since the medieval times has attributed to science and has reserved for those engaged in scientific discourse”.
“Power is that which represses”, Foucault rightly points out. But why does it repress? Just for the sheer pleasure of repression? That may be true for sadists, but what is the most common, or the most widespread motives behind repression? Is it not the securing and maintenance of those positions in society which secure economic and political domination? Marxism says just that and designates those positions as class positions, adding that state power in the hands of the ruling class is the most important instrument to carry out these repressions. Do you deny that? And when you call for “an analysis of the mechanisms of repression”, should you not start with the analysis of the state machine, as we Marxists do?
Foucault also rightly defines “the essential political problem for the intellectual” as changing “the political, economic, institutional regime of the production of truth”. But he maintains a conspicuous silence as to how the intellectual should go about it. Perhaps, this silence is deliberate. Foucault is on principle against any overarching political project of liberation, for any such project, if successful, will only lead to a new — may be more oppressive — institutional ordering of power. So he is openly sceptical of any collective action to end exploitation and oppression once and for all; the only thing he can recommend is localised, partial resistance to power. His political philosophy is an abstract libertarianism that can of and must not set itself any concrete goal, a ‘pure essence’ of rebellion that shuns any real course of action.
Anyway, Foucault does not claim to provide any alternative to Marxism and this is also not the proper place for us to embark on a study and join issues with the stalwarts of this theoretical school. We just touched upon the subject here to point to the emerging theoretical contours where Marxism will have to fight the next great battle for its own defence and development.
Post-Marxism
Modernism in its broadest sense includes Marxism; so it is only natural that post-modernism should include a strand of Post-Marxism. But while a good number of postmodernist writers including Foucault and Derrida have expressed themselves against Marxism from a great many angles, the term Post-Marxism has been used by a different set of authors generally coming from a Marxist background. To give you an idea of what Post-Marxism is like, we will use an example of one of the most powerful theoretical works in this field. The treatise we have in mind is: “Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics” by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985). Both the authors are political theorists and professors in England and US. Let us start with a synopsis.
The book begins on a contemporaneous political note: “Left-wing thought today stands at a crossroads. The ‘evident truth’ of the past — the classical forms of analysis and political calculation, the nature of the forces in conflict, the very meaning of the Left’s struggle and objectives — has been seriously challenged by an avalanche of historical mutations which have given the ground on which those truths were constituted”. The “mutations” refer, first, to the “failures and disappointments in (ex-) socialist countries” and second, to “a whole series of” positive new movements on gender, ecology and other issues. Together, these two developments have “recharged critical thinking” and “given rise to a theoretical crisis”. The authors seek to chart a road out of this crisis by expanding the concept of hegemony “far beyond Gramsci” and outlining a new project of “radical democracy”.
How does this theoretical project relate to Marxism? The authors pose and answer this question in clear-cut terms : “In operating deconstructively within Marxist categories, we do not claim to be writing ‘universal history’, to the inscribing our discourse as a moment of a single, linear process of knowledge. Just as the era of normative epistemologies has come to an end, so too has the era of universal discourses. Political conclusions similar to those set forth in this book could have been approximated from very different discursive formations — for example, from certain forms of Christianity, or from libertarian discourses alien to the socialist tradition — none of which could aspire to be the truth of society (or ‘the unsurpassable philosophy of our time’, as Sartre put it). For this very reason, however, Marxism is one of the traditions through which it becomes possible to formulate this new conception of politics. For us, the validity of this point of departure is simply based on the fact that it constitutes our own past.
Is it not the case that, in scaling down the pretensions and the area of validity of Marxist theory, we are breaking with something deeply inherent in that theory: viz., its monist aspiration to capture with its categories the essence or underlying meaning of History? The answer can only be in the affirmative … At this point we should state quite plainly that we are now situated in a post-Marxist terrain. It is no longer possible to maintain the conception of subjectivity and classes elaborated by Marxism, nor its vision of the historical course of capitalist development, nor, of course, the conception of communism as a transparent society from which antagonisms have disappeared. But if our intellectual project in this book is post-Marxist, it is evidently also post-Marxist. It has been through the development of certain intuitions and discursive forms constituted within Marxism, and the inhibition or elimination of certain others, that we have constructed a concept of hegemony which, in our view, may be a very useful instrument in the struggle for a radical, libertarian and plural democracy.
Further explaining their approach and methodology, Laclau and Mouffe declare that “In the text we have tried to recover some of the variety and richness of Marxist discursivity in the era of the Second International, which tended to be obliterated by that impoverished monolithic image of “Marxism-Leninism” current in Stalin and post-Stalin eras and now reproduced, almost intact though with opposite sign, by certain forms of contemporary ‘anti-Marxism’ … Our own approach to the Marxist texts has, on the contrary, sought to recover their plurality, to grasp the numerous discursive sequences — to a considerable extent heterogeneous and contradictory — which constitute their inner structure and wealth, and guarantee,their survival as a reference point for political analysis.”
So much for “Introduction”; let us now come to the first chapter addressed to “the genealogy of the concept of hegemony”. Here the authors discuss three responses to the so-called “crisis of Marxism” evidenced in the 1890s. The crisis appeared, according to Laclau & Mouffe, in the context of a transition to “orgartised capitalism” and long boom which “made uncertain the prospects of a ‘general crisis of capitalism’. The first response to the crisis of Marxism was “Marxist orthodoxy” of Kautsky and Plekhanov. This was “not a simple continuation of classical Marxism” but was “constituted on the ground of a growing disjuncture between Marxist theory and the political practice of Social-Democracy.” The second response was Eduard Bernstein’s “Revisionism”; the third was “Revolutionary Syndicalism” of G Sorel.
Through an examination of these three responses to the “crisis of Marxism”, the authors seek to trace the different approaches to a developed — that is above class — concept of hegemony. But what about Leninism? This is discussed in the second chapter: “For Leninism, hegemony involves political leadership within a class alliance. The political character of the hegemonic link is fundamental, implying as it does that the terrain on which the link establishes itself is different from which the social agents are constituted. As the field of the relations of production is the specific terrain of class constitution, the presence of the classes in the political field can only be understood as a representation of interests. Through their representative parties they unite under the leadership of one class, in an alliance against a common enemy. This circumstantial enemy does not, however, affect the identity of the classes comprising the alliance, since their identity is constituted around ‘interests’ which are in the end strictly incompatible (“strike together but march separately”).
As we know, the slogan just quoted constitutes the crux of Leninist UF policy. The proletariat should strike against the common enemy (the Tsarist autocracy in the case of Russia) together with other allies, but march separately, i.e., maintain its political and organisational independence. Evidently, the authors do not approve of this insistence on distinct class interests and class identities even when forging a grand alliance. More specifically, their objection is that “The centrality attributed to the working class is not a practical but an ontological centrality, which is, at the same time, the seat of an epistemological privilege: as the ‘universal’ class, the proletariat—or rather its party—is the depository of science. At this point, the schism between class identity and the identity of the masses becomes permanent. The possibility of this authoritarian turn was, in some way, present from the beginning of Marxist orthodoxy; that is to say, from the moment in which a limited actor — the working class — was raised to the status of ‘universal class’.
The main contention here is that if the working class is accorded a special or “privileged” status, an authoritarian trend becomes inevitable.
This is. particularly true when state power is seized by broad masses — i.e., broader than the working class — but the biter’s “political centrality” is “upheld as a principle in classical terms” (emphasis in the original). In contradistinction to this “authoritarian practice”, the authors propose a “democratic” one and lay down the theoretical premise for the same: “the deepening of a mass democratic practice … can be achieved only if it is recognised that these (democratic) tasks do not have a necessary class character and if “stagism” (“the view that democratic tasks are bonded to a democratic stage”) is renounced in a thoroughgoing manner. If this is done, the learned professors assure us, “only then will the obstacle preventing a permanent articulation between socialism and democracy be eliminated.”
There are-thus, “two conceptions of hegemony — democratic and authoritarian”. While the latter is best expressed in the tradition starting with Lenin’s “What is to be Done” and maturing in “the Bolshevisation of communist parties under the Comintern”, the former, i.e., the democratic conception, remains for Mr. Laclau and Ms. Mouffe to develop. We shall now see how they do it. Their “point of departure”, of course, is what they call the “Gramscian watershed”.
Gramsci’s most important contribution, the authors point out, was that he saw hegemony as not merely political (as with Lenin) but as intellectual and moral leadership. “It is this movement… that the decisive transition takes place towards a concept of hegemony beyond ‘class alliances’. Fo”, whereas political leadership can be grounded upon a conjunctural coincidence of interests in which the participating sectors retain their separate identity, moral and intellectual leadership requires that an ensemble of “ideas and ‘values’ be shared by a number of sectors … Intellectual and moral leadership constitutes, according to Gramsci, a higher synthesis, a ‘collective will’, which, through ideology, becomes the organic cement unifying a historical bloc”.
Thus in Gramsian framework, the authors observe, ideology is not “a ‘system of ideas’ or… ‘false consciousness’” but “an organic and relational whole, embodied in institutions and apparatuses, which welds together a historical bloc around a number of basic articulatory principles. This precludes the possibility of a ‘superstructuralist’ reading the ideological. In fact, through the concepts of historical bloc and of ideology as organic cement, a new totalising category takes us beyond the old base/superstructure distinction”.
If this is a “fundamental displacement” introduced by Gramsci with regard to classical Marxism, there is another—and “most important” one:
“For Gramsci, political subjects are not — strictly speaking — classes, but complex ‘collective wills’; similarly, the ideological elements articulated by the hegemonic class do not have a necessary class belonging”. To prove their point, the authors point from Prison Notebooks : “An historical act can only be performed by ‘collective man’, and this presupposes the attainment of a ‘cultural-social’ unity through which a multiplicity of dispersed wills with heterogeneousaims are welded together with a single aim, on the basis of an equal and common conception of the world’.
This is immediately followed by the authors’ comment: “Nothing more distant from this ‘collective man’, “welded together with a single aim’, than the Leninist notion of class alliance”.
Laclau and Mouffe extol this Gramscian ‘advancement’ over Leninism and then in the next, i.e. third chapter render Gramsci more profound. By means of an intricate theoretical analysis they overcome the last remnants of Marxian “essentialism” in Gramsci : (a) that “the ultimate core of a hegemonic force consists of fundamental class” and (b) that, except during “organic crises”, “every social formation structures itself around a single hegemonic centre”. This refinement really takes them “beyond Gramsci” and to the threshold of their own project in the fourth and last chapter. Well, let us accompany them to the end.
In the last few decades, the authors point out, advanced capitalist countries have witnessed a “proliferation of new antagonisms” and new social movements (ecological, anti-institutional, anti-nuke and so on) together with a “radicalisation of the older struggles such as those of women and ethnic minorities”. Such movements must be conceived as “an extension of democratic revolution to a whole new series of special relations” On the other hand, there has been a notable rise of the “New Right” like neo-fascists. The combined effect of these two developments is “a crisis of the hegemonic formation of the post-war period” which was built up on the model of Welfare Statism. The crisis or vacuum can be overcome not only in a “democratic but also an anti-democratic” way represented by the “liberal-conservative discourse, which seeks to articulate the neo-liberal defence of the free-market economy with (he profoundly anti-egalitarian cultural and social traditionalism of conservatism”. Naturally, the task of the left is to preclude the former and ensure the latter, i.e. the democratic option. In the words of the authors, “The task of the Left… cannot be to renounce liberal-democratic ideology but, on the contrary, to deepen and expand it in the direction of a radical and plural democracy”.
Well and good, but what does this term “plural” signify? To be brief, it means that neither the working class nor any other class or strata should be viewed as “an absolutely guaranteed point of total transformation” and that, the Left should accomplish its “hegemonic strategy” through “the extension of the field of democratic struggles to the whole of civil society and the state”. This project, the Post-Marxists assure us, “includes … the socialist dimension — that is to say, the abolition of capitalist relation of production”, but we are kept in the dark as to haw this abolition will come about. Presumably, this will happen through a “democratic discourse” involving anybody and everybody. No fixation of target, no specification of main forces of struggle. In today’s ever-fluid conditions, “the possibility of a unified discourse of the Left is also erased”, giving way to “a polyphony of voices each of which constructs its own irreducible discursive identity”.
From “Introduction” through to the fourth chapter, we are thus treated to a wholesome five course ideological diet:
1. The “new conception of politics” can be derived from almost anything from Christianity to Marxism, but the post-Marxists do Marxism a favour by choosing it as their main “reference point”. To make it usable, first they recover from the “monolith” of Marxism-Leninism “the variety and discursivity in the era of the Second International”.
2. This leads them to explore the genesis of concept of hegemony since the 1890s. This is done by means of examining three historical responses to the “crisis of Marxism”: orthodoxy, revisionism and syndicalism.
3. Next comes the Leninist concept of hegemony: the proletariat, through its party, must establish “political leadership within a class alliance”.
This is an “authoritarian conception” of hegemony, for it (a) upholds the specific identity and centrality of the working class and its party as the depository of science and (b) disallows the dissolution of the latter’s class identity in the general category of the people.
4. A “democratic” alternative is available in Gramsci : hegemony as intellectual and moral (not merely political) leadership leading to a “collective will”, “collective man welded together with a single aim”. However, even in Gramsci there are some remnants of “classism” or “class reductionism”, which the authors now remove by a neat theoretical surgery.
5. All obstacles of Marxist “essentialism” are thus removed. The path is now cleared for a project of “radical and plural” democracy to be achieved by the Left’s non-class “hegemonic strategy” of extending the field of democratic struggles (most notably the “new social movements”) to the whole of civil society and the state.
Well, perhaps the end-result is a bit disappointing, a bit hackneyed. But is not the whole analysis logically very coherent and beautifully pragmatic? We think so. In fact, this is the first reason why we chore this book; the second being its strong connection with the Gramscian framework, the first topic of our class We have already observed that Gramsci’s texts are highly amenable to an idealistic and non-class reading; now we have seen how this actually happens, how Gramsci can be used as a launching pad 10 fly off beyond the frontiers of Marxism, as the last base camp on the Marxist terrain to move up to the summit of Post-Marxism. Now let us take a closer look at the major points of attack. The first thing that attracts one’s attention is the final good-bye to the doctrine of classes and class struggle. This is something at least one of the present authors—Mr. Ernesto Laclau—had tried to achieve even when he was still on the terrain of Marxism. His book “Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory” (1979) had made this theoretical demand on Marxism itself: “Today, when the European working class is increasing its influence and must conceive its struggle more as a contest for the ideological and political hegemony of the middle sectors, it is more necessary than ever for Marxism to develop a rigorous theory of ideological practice which eliminates the last taints of class reductionism” (pp. 141-142).
However, when several years of futile endeavours convinced him that this cannot be achieved within the Marxist framework, he took the next logical step and authored the post-Marxist volume jointly with Mouffe. But they are not alone in abandoning classes and class struggle. To take another example, Andre Gorz in “Farewell to the Working Class: An Essay on Post-Industrial Socialism” (1982) argues that the future of society lies in the abolition or minimisation of work needed for producing the bare necessities and the corresponding expansion of the realm of freedom. The working class cannot be the vehicle of this transformation because it identifies itself with work, the abolition of which cannot be its objective. The impulse of this transformation must, therefore, come from a “non-class of non-workers”. Splendid, isn’t it?
Now to come back to the Laclau-Mouffe treatise. On what grounds do they reject the Marxist thesis of the historical role of working class; on a deliberate misrepresentation of Marxism, which is formulated along the following steps:
(i) The economy, which is the basic thing in Marxism, is a “self-regulated” mechanism, operating strictly by “endogenous” laws with no “indeterminacy resulting from political or other external interventions”;
(ii) This mechanism, by virtue of its own laws of motion, automatically constitutes “social agents” (classes);
(iii) Those “social agents”, by virtue of their different positions in the relations of production, have different “historic interests” which in their turn assumes specific political manifestations — e.g., the “fundamental interests” of the working class in socialism;[6]
(iv) Working class unity and its socialist impulse is thus a “simple effect of capitalist development” without external interventions from the spheres of ideology and politics.[7]
This straw figure of Marxism is now easily knocked down. It is shown that the above theses are grossly contradicted by real life:
(i) The working class is widely fragmented and subjected to a variety of other, i.e. non-class interests (along the lines of nationality, ethnicity etc., we might add);
(ii) The formation of the working class as a unified force is not intrinsic to or automatically ingrained in capitalist development — rather it depends on “external intervention” like political-organisational efforts from without;
(iii) This is equally true for other sections of people, so there is no reason why the working class should be accorded a privileged status as the revolutionary agent.
Readers can easily see how metaphysical the entire argument is. The Marxist position that the classes are basically determined at the level of relations of production (the economy) is stretched beyond recognition and the spheres of economy, politics, ideology etc. are all placed in separate watertight compartments. A challenge is thrown up to this parody of Marxism : either prove that “an absolutely united working class will become transparent to itself at the moment of revolutionary chiliasm”—or abandon yourself.
In other words, since the economy does not determine classes and their respective political inclinations etc. in an absolute, unilinear way, all talk of objectively determined class positions are simply useless. This is more true in these Gays of increasing social mobility when people partake of multiple and changing social identities. So these are the days not of old class politics but of hegemonic politics — the politics of “discursively constructed social identities”. Some of these identities do occupy subordinate positions, e.g., women vis-a-vis men, workers vis-a-vis capitalists. But they can conceive their positions as oppressive and embark on struggle aga’nst that oppression only in so Tar as they come into contact with the “democratic discourse”. To quote Laclau and Mouffe again, “Our thesis is that it is only from the moment when the democratic discourse becomes available to articulate the different forces of resistance to subordination that conditions will exist to make possible the struggle against different types of inequality”.[8]
But who will be the bearer of this democratic discourse? Who will be the hegemonic force? The two scholars are silent on the point. Presumably, however, who else but intellectuals — great scholars — can shoulder this great responsibility?
So in place of the struggle for a clearly defined goal — socialism — carried out by the working class united in class struggle, the post-Marxist agenda is the struggle for a vaguely conceived “radical and plural democracy” carried out by disparate elements of a plural subject bound together by democratic discourse. Socialism is not abandoned, only it is subsumed in the new broader project. In the process, it is thoroughly declassed : neither is it to be achieved through another class struggle under the leadership of any particular class nor can it be identified with a class dictatorship in the primary phase and with abolition of classes in the mature phase.
No less serious are the ideological and philosophical implications of the new political project First, material production is relegated to a peripheral role in the shaping of social life. Second, the socialist project is dissociated from a particular class and relocated in a loose “popular alliance” whose objectives, principles of cohesion and capacity for collective action are not rooted in any specific social relations or interests but are constituted by ideology and politics themselves. Surely we don’t need to explain that this absolute autonomization of politics and ideology implies a grand farewell to dialectical and historical materialism. Post-Marxism here converges with post-structuralism : the ultimate dissociation of consciousness and ideology from any social and historical base.
The Laclau-Mouffe work is, of course, only one brand of post-Marxism. There are many others, but we don’t have the time to take up any other paper here. Let us, therefore, conclude the present discussion by drawing your attention to a comment made by Marx and Engels some 150 years ago on—guess what—post-Marxism. Don’t raise your eyebrows, forthey had called it by another name, a name well known to you: ‘True’ Socialism.
“The ‘true’ socialists… innocently take on trust the illusion … that it is the question of the ‘most reasonable’ social ordtr and not the needs of a particular class and a particular time … They have abandoned the real historical basis and returned to that of ideology… True Socialism, which is no longer concerned with real human beings but with ‘Man’, has lost all revolutionary enthusiasm and proclaims instead the universal love of mankind”.
This is what they wrote in “The German Ideology” (see Collected Works. Vol. 5, pp 455-57). Readers will note that our post-Marxists have rendered the theoretical weapon of their forefathers far more sophisticated and modernistic (or post-modernistic, to be more accurate). But the essential linkage is easily discernible: the same non-class, non-party approach, the same indeterminacy of “mankind” (“people” or “popular alliance”) and above all, the same “belief in the power of concepts (power of hegemonic discourse”) to make or destroy the world”.[9]
The ‘true’ socialists and others of their ilk could not, however, hold or. to their ground for long. Some fifty years later, Lenin declared: “Pre-Marxist socialism has been defeated. It continues to struggle, no longer on its own independent ground, but on the general ground of Marxism, as revisionism.”
About a century has passed since Lenin wrote these words in his famous article “Marxism and Revisionism”. Today revisionism is no longer so fashionable; its place has partly been taken up by new forms, labels and trends, among them post-Marxism. From “pre” to “post”, a great cycle — spanning a century and a half — has been completed, and Marxism continues its historical struggle: as much in theory as in practice.
NOTES
- 1. See the article Althusser’s Marxism: An Account and Assessment in the collection Western Marxism: A Critical Reader (1977) published by New Left Review.
2. See For Marx (1970) p 251.
3. Ibid, p 252.
4. Reading Capital by Althusser, p 180.
5. This quotation and the subsequent ones in this subsection are from Two Lectures included in the book Power/Knowledge (1976), unloss mentioned otherwise.
6. See for detail Chapter 2 of the book under review, particularly
pp 76-77.
7. Ibid, pp 83-84.
8. Ibid, p 154.
9. The German Ideology, Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 5, p 467.
