Laclau Ernesto - Hegemony and socialist strategy : towards a radical democratic politics

This paperback edition published by Verso 2014
First published in English by Verso 1985
Verso 1985, 2001, 2014

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ISBN-13: 978-1-78168-154-1
eBook ISBN: 978-1-78168-208-1
eISBN (UK): 978-1-78168-517-4

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v3.1

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 MarxismLeninism 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 Lukcs, 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