Though Cowards Flinch

Over the next few months, I hope to be writing several articles on the subject of post-Marxism, how this is interlinked with the struggle over the theory of hegemony and the resultant praxis that can be observed from different sides in the debate. I hope, by this, to (hopefully) encourage the active engagement of several interesting blogs with the subject material. It is both dear to my heart and important to the Left.

I shall begin with a short burst on post-Marxists Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe and their manifesto, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. The authors attempt to deconstruct historical materialism by inserting a ‘logic of the contingent’ and by their struggle against the ‘privileged’ position of the working class and class struggle. This amounts to an attack upon the foundations of Marxist political economy.

Let us consider a concrete example of how this logic of the contingent intervenes in the theories of Laclau and Mouffe on the French Revolution:

“The social body was conceived of as a whole in which individuals appeared fixed in differentiated positions. For as long as such a holistic mode of institution of the social predominated, politics could not be more than the repetition of heirarchical relations… [The French Revolution's] affirmation of the power of its people introduced something truly new at the level of the social imaginary.” (Laclau and Mouffe, p155)

Our authors go on to talk about how the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen made provided the ‘discursive conditions’ which made possible a frank discussion of inequality; which were permissible and which were not.

To me this seems an attempt to turn the French Revolution into its own cause. If ‘politics’ could be no more than repetition of existent inequalities, then the Revolution seems to come from nowhere. If it took the contingent act of writing this document in 1788 to provide the conceptual space within which people could imagine overthrowing the autocracy, where did the document itself emerge from?

It may be argued that the revolution was the product of spontaneous mass action, determined not by class as a relation but by power relations (Laclau and Mouffe come close to emulating Foucault in this regard). Our authors attempt to draw their justification from Luxemburg’s ‘spontaneist’ theory – which they translate as the working class being unified only by the process of revolutionary action.

Marxists will easily recognize this as the process which Marx describes in his 18th Brumaire as the change between a class of itself (i.e. as determined by objective material considerations) and a class for itself (the class using Marxist theory to understand the objective factors and the utilizing them to navigate struggle with the bourgeoisie). However Luxemburg is misunderstood by Laclau and Mouffe.

Her idea was not simply that a class becomes unified through the process of revolution, a class becomes unified by struggle – and struggle is an objective process resultant from the differing interests of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat at the point of production. When our authors state that class the unity of the class is symbolic, it is the objective element of Marxist analysis which they try to abolish.

A comment by Alan Shandro, from his chapter in Žižek’s Lenin Reloaded recommends itself to me:

“Lenin analyzes the spontaneous movement as the movement of the working class, not simply as it is determined by the relations of production, but also as it is subjected to the influence of the ideological apparatus of the bourgeoisie (institutional vehicles of ideas and infornation, such as political parties, government offices, newspapers and churches, whose operation simply assumes or otherwise accepts the dominance of capitalist interests).” (Shandro, p310)

In ‘the Socialist Party and Non-Party Revolutionism‘, Lenin speaks of the special affiliation of the working classes towards Social Democracy as a result of their position within the capitalist mode of production. Yet he also recognizes that the conscious demands even of the proletariat were taken from the minimum programme not the maximum. It was by what workers and peasants were doing that their potential revolutionary credentials could be recognized.

Mouffe and Laclau argue against this by overemphasizing Luxemburg on the special nature of Russian capitalism; tasks were forced on the Russian proletariat that should properly have been the tasks of the Russian bourgeoisie. The confines of the Russian autocracy forced every economic demand to take on a political character (with the corollary that, in the relatively unconfined conditions of Western Europe, such a thing would not happen).

However, even in the UK, spontaneity still exists. Despite the ‘hard and fast boundaries’ which our trades unions have, there exist within them movements specifically dedicated to keeping those unions on an ‘economic’ trajectory and away from political struggle. Regularly this is the argument made by union leaderships, explicitly or implicitly, as a way to pacify their own workers – after all, the union leaderships have been elevated out of their class by the bureaucratic system of organisation.

At a grassroots, spontaneous level, despite the lack of conscious demands, all those activists who fight against this are indulging in revolutionary practice because in practice if not yet consciously it traverses a road towards political struggle first with our own leadership and then with the enemies of our class. As a result of many defeats over several decades, we’re only taking the first steps down that road – but they are steps nonetheless.

Even at a political level, there are ‘spontaneous’ movements such as the Independent Working Class Association, reacting to the contradiction of interests between working class and the current political representation of that class.

Leninism merely adds the notion of the vanguard to explain three politico-organisational theses:

“First, the working-class movement cannot assert its strategic independence without attaining a recognition of the irreconcilability of its interests with the whole politico-social system organised around the dominance of bourgeois interests; second, such recognition implies that attempts to reconcile proletarian with bourgeois interests be assessed in the context of the Marxist critique of capitalist political economy; hence, third, this recognition cannot be brought to bear effectively upon the class struggle in the absence of an organized leadership, informed by Marxist theory.” (Shandro, p311)

In stark contrast to Mouffe and Laclau, therefore, Lenin theorizes the battle for hegemony between the conscious Marxist and the conscious bourgeois ideologue in the context of a proletarian class of itself, the result of which victory is a class for itself. This is not achieved all in one go, of course – it is achieved through years of patient struggle with the organs of bourgeois hegemony, as the Party builds up its own prestige amongst the working class.

Concrete historical examples of this process are readily found – such as the case cited on Dave’s Part as regards the Communist Party directly opposing evictions of poor tenants in the 1930s and how this won over families who’d previously supported Oswald Mosley’s crew.

The class-in-itself is economically determined; it is resultant from the privileging of the working class by its unique position of exploitation within capitalism. This is not to deny the importance of the strategic battle for hegemony, which operates within this class context, nor is it to demolish the special conditions which will inevitably exist in each nation according to history, traditions, specifics of oppression and so forth.

The cardinal sin of Laclau and Mouffe is not their creation of a name for the internal logic by which this battle for hegemony operations – their ‘logic of the social’ – it is to entirely displace the point of the battle from the creation of a class-for-itself, the space for which exists objectively, to the creation of an alliance between disparate ‘subject positions’ (gay, woman, black, Jewish etc) as the means for a ‘radical democracy’.

It is this class-deprived analysis which simultaneously earns them the moniker ‘post-Marxist’ and renders their analysis completely useless as a means for waging a struggle which, ultimately, is still economically grounded.