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Title: Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics by Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe ISBN: 1-85984-330-1 Publisher: Verso Pub. Date: June, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.33 (3 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: What the struggle with the language may be obsuring from you
Comment: In non-radical democracy, informed consent is viewed as somewhat desirable.
For better or worse, Marxism is no longer considered altogether intellectually respectable, even by Marxists. So they have retooled themselves as "Post-Marxists," and this is their new bible, espousing "radical democracy." Well, that certainly sounds like a good thing, doesn't it? Might there be a catch? Mais Oui. The catch in books like these, as with David Harvey, is usually buried somewhere in the middle. Consider the commandments provided on page 167:
This gives us a theoretical terrain on the basis of which the notion of radical and plural democrcacy -- which will be central to our argument from this point on -- finds the first conditions under which it can be apprehended. Only if it is accepted that the subject positions cannot be led back to a positive and unitary founding principle -- only then can pluralism be considered radical. Pluralism is radical only to the extent that each term of this plurality of identities finds within itself the principle of its own validity, without this having to be sought in a transcendent or underlying positive ground for the hierarchy of meaning of them all and the source and guarantee of their legitimacy. And this radical pluralism is democratic to the extent that the autoconstitutivity of each one of its terms is the result of displacements of the egalitarian imaginary.
The catch, in case you haven't caught on, is that what you have to pay to play is to say it just their way. Whatever the other merits of the 'project,' (and they may be very real,) if you cannot recite this catechism about the 'subject' more or less verbatim, (preferably verbatim,) you are obviously not radical enough to be worthy of democracy.
In other words, a shibboleth, in other words, an ideological poll tax. In other words, theoretical Marxists fully retain their totalitarian commitment to doing for the masses any heavy mental lifting that might be required.
Rating: 5
Summary: Worth The Struggle With the Language
Comment: I studied this text as a graduate student at York University. I must admit that I did not understand the terse theoretical language for a long time. However, I had the good fortune of finding a fellow graduate student in Political Thought who was so well versed in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy that he could extol the hidden meanings of the text for hours on end! I called his ranting, "bible thumping"! But in all seriousness, once you understand the conceptual relationships presented in the book, you find a whole new way of conceptualizing the social, not as an accomplished fact, but as an ongoing practice of articulation. The problem with orthodox forms of Marxism? The fixing of the meaning of the "working class" at the point of production. During the whole development of Marxism up to the theoretical work of Gramsci, we have witnessed the "undoing" of the essentialist meaning/construction of the working class as determined by pure economistic forces. The problem? The larger mediating role of politics and culture. Working class identity is not fixed at the point of production, but is fragmented across other discursive spaces, e.g. nationalism, sports fan, father, mother, reader, lover, etc. There is no neccessary articulation between any of these. The moral lesson behind all this is thus: The Right has been very successful in practicing articulation, providing a broad-based appeal in relation to identities; on the other hand, the left has been "left" with a worn-out, 19th century, industrial model of "working class" identity. The second half of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy takes the reader into a post-Gramscian theoretical muse on the subject of emerging social movements and the discursive (poststructuralist) construction of subject positions, which are always open to new articulations, (both to the left and right), and are never finally fixed. From this theoretical standpoint, the social is open to ongoing struggles over meanings. For the Left to revitalize itself and become a viable force in the new century, it must become more sophisticated in the area of cultural politics and begin to strategically articulate discursive equivalents across social movements--to find common ground in what seems to be a multiple and fragemented emergence of movements. My only criticism is that, by reifying social movements, we lose site of the very complexity and pluralism found within such movements. Does this mean that by its macro perspective it loses sight of the mirco, everyday? On the contrary, no! The model given by Laclau and Mouffe has an applicability well beyond the study of social movement discourses. I utilized the notion of articulation found in the text and the notion of the openness of the social in my critical ethnography of a non-federally recognized Native American group and their struggles over the meaning of their contested identity, (Book Title: Native Americans in the Carolina Borderlands: A Critical Ethnography, Carolinas Press, 2000). The model can be applied in ethnographic works concerned with the social effectivity of larger articulated, social movement discourses. It is the type of contingent theorizing that is itself unfinished and open to new articulations! A must for students, academics, and cultural workers interested in the politics of culture, cultural studies, critical theory, social movements, and social theory in general.
Rating: 5
Summary: Politics After Modernism
Comment: Hegemony and Socialist Strategy is an excelent book. It will become a classic for not only those involved in politics, but to understand the very process of political formations. For Laclau and Mouffe, the Left is in a 'crossroads', where new social fragmentation questions the core of leftist paradigms. The task, then, becomes how to renovate a theoretical paradigm that can open the possibility for the Left to articulate the various fragmented social struggles into its political project. It with such aim, that the authors remodel a notion of hegemony to fit in with the present social circumstance and leftist paradigm impediments. The authors see themselves as post-Marxists, where the post fits in with the theoretical tools coming from the work situated at the post-structuralist thought such as Derrida, Foucault, etc; and Marxists where Gramsci' notion of hegemony becomes a important point of departure. There are at least two main intervention in this book: the author question the supposedly 'leading role' of the working class given traditionally by the Left, and the link of socialism with democracy (or as they see it, radical democracy).
The first two chapters reconstruct the emergence of the concept of hegemony going back all the way to the Second and Third Internationals. They look at the work of Rosa Luxemburg, Kautsky, among other to demonstrate how the social fragmentation was continually repressed by the classist paradigm of the orthodox Marxism. For the authors, the problem was the belief that economic relations are somehow more 'real' than other political conditions. They aim at essentialist reasoning behind such belief, and how subjective identities are overdetermined by various relations that partly overlap one another.
In the last two chapters, Laclau and Mouffe re-work a notion of hegemony though the concept of articulation. Here, actors are brought together in a way that their differences makes them equivalent in a negative dimension, against a system of oppressive relation of power. In this way, their identity is split between their positive difference and the wider articulation that they become engaged with it. What one see here is a way to do politics that does not oppress the particular differences and at the same time does not loose the very ability to create a wider structural change. The author finally links such possibility with a radical democratic way of doing politics. One on the problems with the book, however is the language in which many of the argument makes necessary for one to be familiar with the post-structuralism jargons. Also, it is a bit odd that a book on the Marxism discourse does not a have a single reference to the work of Marx himself. At any case, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy is a brilliant tour de force of argument. It shows the wide variety of excellent books that the Amazon has on its 'shelf'.
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Title: Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left by Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, Slavoj Zizek ISBN: 185984278X Publisher: Verso Pub. Date: July, 2000 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
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Title: The Democratic Paradox by Chantal Mouffe ISBN: 1859842798 Publisher: Verso Pub. Date: July, 2000 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
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Title: Emancipation(S) (Phronesis (London, England).) by Ernesto Laclau ISBN: 1859841651 Publisher: Verso Pub. Date: 01 September, 1996 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
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Title: The Sublime Object of Ideology (Phronesis (Paperback)) by Slavoj Zizek ISBN: 0860919714 Publisher: Verso Pub. Date: 01 December, 1989 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
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Title: The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology by Slavoj Zizek ISBN: 1859842917 Publisher: Verso Pub. Date: June, 2000 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
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