Hegemony and socialist strategy : towards a radical democratic politics

230 Pages·2014·1.21 MB·English

by  Laclau

This paperback edition published by Verso 2014
First published in English by Verso 1985
© Verso 1985, 2001, 2014
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted Verso
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ISBN-13: 978-1-78168-154-1
eBook ISBN: 978-1-78168208-1
eISBN (UK): 978-1-78168-517-4
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v3.1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Preface to the Second Edition
Introduction
1 Hegemony: The Genealogy of a Concept
2 Hegemony: The Difficult Emergence of a New Political Logic
3 Beyond the Positivity of the Social: Antagonisms and Hegemony
4 Hegemony and Radical Democracy
Notes
Preface to the Second Edition
Hegemony and Socialist Strategy was originally published in 1985, and
since then it has been at the centre of many important theoretico-
political discussions, both in the Anglo-Saxon world and elsewhere.
Many things have changed in the contemporary scene since that time. To
refer just to the most important developments, it is enough to mention
the end of the Cold War and the disintegration of the Soviet system. To
this we should add drastic transformations of the social structure, which
are at the root of new paradigms in the constitution of social and
political identities. To perceive the epochal distance between the early
1980s, when this book was originally written, and the present, we have
only to remember that, at that time, Eurocommunism was still seen as a
viable political project, going beyond both Leninism and social
democracy; and that, since then, the major debates which have absorbed
the intellectual reflection of the Left have been those around the new
social movements, multiculturalism, the globalization and
deterritorialization of the economy and the ensemble of issues linked to
the question of post-modernity. We could say – paraphrasing Hobsbawm
– that the ‘short twentieth century’ ended at some point in the early
1990s, and that today we have to face problems of a substantially new
order.
Given the magnitude of these epochal changes, we were surprised, in
going through the pages of this not-so-recent book again, at how little
we have to put into question the intellectual and political perspective
developed therein. Most of what has happened since then has closely
followed the pattern suggested in our book, and those issues which were
central to our concerns at that moment have become ever more
prominent in contemporary discussions. We could even say that we see
the theoretical perspective developed then – rooted as it was in the
Gramscian matrix and in the centrality of the category of hegemony – as
a far more adequate approach to contemporary issues than the
intellectual apparatus which has often accompanied recent discussions
on political subjectivity, on democracy, and on the trends and political
consequences of a globalized economy. This is why we want to
recapitulate, as a way of introducing this second edition, some central
points of our theoretical intervention, and to counterpose some of its
political conclusions to recent trends in the discussion about democracy.
Let us start by saying something about the intellectual project of
Hegemony and the theoretical perspective from which it was written. In
the mid-1970s, Marxist theorization had clearly reached an impasse.
After an exceptionally rich and creative period in the 1960s, the limits of
that expansion – which had its epicentre in Althusserianism, but also in a
renewed interest in Gramsci and in the theoreticians of the Frankfurt
School – were only too visible. There was an increasing gap between the
realities of contemporary capitalism and what Marxism could
legitimately subsume under its own categories. It is enough to remember
the increasingly desperate contortions which took place around notions
such as ‘determination in the last instance’ and ‘relative autonomy’. This
situation, on the whole, provoked two types of attitude: either to negate
the changes, and to retreat unconvincingly to an orthodox bunker; or to
add, in an ad hoc way, descriptive analyses of the new trends which
were simply juxtaposed – without integration – to a theoretical body
which remained largely unchanged.
Our way of dealing with the Marxist tradition was entirely different
and could, perhaps, be expressed in terms of the Husserlian distinction
between ‘sedimentation’ and ‘reactivation’. Sedimented theoretical
categories are those which conceal the acts of their original institution,
while the reactivating moment makes those acts visible again. For us –
as opposed to Husserl – that reactivation had to show the original
contingency of the synthesis that the Marxian categories attempted to
establish. Instead of dealing with notions such as ‘class’, the triad of
levels (the economic, the political and the ideological) or the
contradiction between forces and relations of production as sedimented
fetishes, we tried to revive the preconditions which make their
discursive operation possible, and asked ourselves questions concerning
their continuity or discontinuity in contemporary capitalism. The result
of this exercise was the realization that the field of Marxist theorization
had been far more ambivalent and diversified than the monolithic
transvestite that Marxism–Leninism presented as the history of Marxism.
It has to be clearly stated: the lasting theoretical effect of Leninism has
been an appalling impoverishment of the field of Marxian diversity.
While, at the end of the period of the Second International, the fields in
which Marxist discursivity was operating were becoming increasingly
diversified – ranging, especially in Austro-Marxism, from the problem of
the intellectuals to the national question, and from the internal
inconsistencies of the labour theory of value to the relationship between
socialism and ethics – the division of the international workers’
movement, and the reorganization of its revolutionary wing around the
Soviet experience, led to a discontinuity of this creative process. The
pathetic case of a Lukács, who contributed his undeniable intellectual
skills to the consolidation of a theoretico-political horizon which did not
transcend the whole gamut of shibboleths of the Third International, is
an extreme but far from isolated example. It is worth pointing out that
many of the problems confronted by a socialist strategy in the conditions
of late capitalism are already contained in nuce in the theorization of
Austro-Marxism, but had little continuity in the inter-war period. Only
the isolated example of Gramsci, writing from the Mussolinian jails, can
be quoted as a new departure producing a new arsenal of concepts – war
of position, historical bloc, collective will, hegemony, intellectual and
moral leadership – which are the starting point of our reflections in
Hegemony and Socialist Strategy.
Revisiting (reactivating) the Marxist categories in the light of these
series of new problems and development had to lead, necessarily, to
deconstructing the former – that is, to displacing some of their
conditions of possibility and developing new possibilities which
transcend anything which could be characterized as the application of a
category. We know from Wittgenstein that there is no such thing as the
‘application of a rule’ – the instance of application becomes part of the
rule itself. To reread Marxist theory in the light of contemporary
problems necessarily involves deconstructing the central categories of
that theory. This is what has been called our ‘post-Marxism’. We did not
invent this label – it only marginally appears (not as a label) in the
Introduction to our book. But since it has become generalized in
characterizing our work, we can say that we do not oppose it insofar as
it is properly understood: as the process of reappropriation of an
intellectual tradition, as well as the process of going beyond it. And in
developing this task, it is important to point out that it cannot be
conceived just as an internal history of Marxism. Many social
antagonisms, many issues which are crucial to the understanding of
contemporary societies, belong to fields of discursivity which are external
to Marxism, and cannot be reconceptualized in terms of Marxist
categories – given, especially, that their very presence is what puts
Marxism as a closed theoretical system into question, and leads to the
postulation of new starting points for social analysis.
There is one aspect in particular that we want to underline at this
point. Any substantial change in the ontic content of a field of research
leads also to a new ontological paradigm. Althusser used to say that
behind Plato’s philosophy, there was Greek mathematics; behind
seventeenth-century rationalism, Galilean physics; and behind Kant’s
philosophy, Newtonian theory. To put the argument in a transcendental
fashion: the strictly ontological question asks how entities have to be, so
that the objectivity of a particular field is possible. There is a process of
mutual feedback between the incorporation of new fields of objects and
the general ontological categories governing, at a certain time, what is
thinkable within the general field of objectivity. The ontology implicit in
Freudianism, for instance, is different and incompatible with a biologist
paradigm. From this point of view, it is our conviction that in the
transition from Marxism to post-Marxism, the change is not only ontic
but also ontological. The problems of a globalized and information-ruled
society are unthinkable within the two ontological paradigms governing
the field of Marxist discursivity: first the Hegelian, and later the
naturalistic.
Our approach is grounded in privileging the moment of political
articulation, and the central category of political analysis is, in our view,
hegemony. In that case, how – to repeat our transcendental question –
does a relation between entities have to be, for a hegemonic relation to
become possible? Its very condition is that a particular social force
assumes the representation of a totality that is radically
incommensurable with it. Such a form of ‘hegemonic universality’ is the
only one that a political community can reach. From this point of view,
our analysis should be differentiated from analyses in which universality
finds in the social field a direct, nonhegemonically mediated expression,
and those in which particularities are merely added up without any
mediation between them being thinkable – as in some forms or post-
modernism. But if a relation of hegemonic representation is to be
possible, its ontological status has to be defined. This is the point at
which, for our analysis, a notion of the social conceived as a discursive
space – that is, making possible relations of representation strictly
unthinkable within a physicalist or naturalistic paradigm – becomes of
paramount importance. In other works, we have shown that the category
of ‘discourse’ has a pedigree in contemporary thought going back to the
three main intellectual currents of the twentieth century: analytical
philosophy, phenomenology and structuralism. In these three the
century started with an illusion of immediately, of a non-discursively
mediated access to the things themselves – the referent, the phenomenon
and the sign, respectively. In all three, however, this illusion of
immediacy dissolved at some point, and had to be replaced by one form
or another of discursive mediation. This is what happened in analytical
philosophy with the work of the later Wittgenstein, in phenomenology
with the existential analytic of Heidegger, and in structuralism with the
post-structuralist critique of the sign. It is also, in our view, what
happened in epistemology with the transition verificationism – Popper –
Kuhn – Feyerabend, and in Marxism with the work of Gramsci, where
the fullness of class identities of classical Marxism has to be replaced by
hegemonic identities constituted through non-dialectical mediations.
All these currents have fed our thought to some extent, but post-
structuralism is the terrain where we have found the main source of our
theoretical reflection and, within the post-structuralist field,
deconstruction and Lacanian theory have had a decisive importance in
the formulation of our approach to hegemony. From deconstruction, the
notion of undecidability has been crucial. If, as shown in the work of
Derrida, undecidables permeate the field which had previously been
seen as governed by structural determination, one can see hegemony as
a theory of the decision taken in an undecidable terrain. Deeper levels of
contingency require hegemonic – that is, contingent – articulations,
which is another way of saying that the moment of reactivation means
nothing other than retrieving an act of political institution that finds its
source and motivation nowhere but in itself. For not unrelated reasons,
Lacanian theory contributes decisive tools to the formulation of a theory
of hegemony. Thus, the category of point de capiton (nodal point, in our
terminology) or master-signifier involves the notion of a particular
element assuming a ‘universal’ structuring function within a certain
discursive field – actually, whatever organization that field has is only
the result of that function – without the particularity of the element per
se predetermining such a function. In a similar way, the notion of the
subject before subjectivation establishes the centrality of the category of
‘identification’ and makes it possible, in that sense, to think of
hegemonic transitions which are fully dependent on political
articulations and not on entities constituted outside the political field –
such as ‘class interests’. Indeed, politico-hegemonic articulations
retroactively create the interests they claim to represent.
‘Hegemony’ has very precise conditions of possibility, both from the
point of view of what a relation requires to be conceived as hegemonic,
and from the perspective of the construction of a hegemonic subject. As
for the first aspect, the already mentioned dimension of structural
undecidability is the very condition of hegemony. If social objectivity,
through its internal laws, determined whatever structural arrangement
exists (as in a purely sociologistic conception of society), there would be
no room for contingent hegemonic rearticulations – nor, indeed, for
politics as an autonomous activity. In order to have hegemony, the
requirement is that elements whose own nature does not predetermine
them to enter into one type of arrangement rather than another,
nevertheless coalesce, as a result of an external or articulating practice.
The visibility of the acts of originary institution – in their specific
contingency – is, in this respect, the requirement of any hegemonic
formation. But to say contingent articulation is to enounce a central
dimension of ‘politics’. This privileging of the political moment in the
structuration of society is an essential aspect of our approach. Our book
shows how, historically, the category of hegemony was originally
elaborated in Russian social democracy as an attempt at addressing the
autonomous political intervention which was made possible by the
structural dislocation between actors and democratic tasks that resulted