The Essence of the Laclau-Mouffe versus Geras Debate
by László Molnárfi
The Calling of Saints Peter and Andrew (1864), Caravaggio
Note: This article was originally published in The Young Irelander.
The Origins of Antagonism
A specter is haunting orthodox Marxism – the post-Marxist specter of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. The militant decrees to the workers from the pulpit; down here, on Earth, is false consciousness, up there, in Heaven, is class consciousness. They preach, mediating between the subjective and the structural, through divine inspiration, making the leap of faith which will bring about paradise on earth. Class struggle, consciousness and combativity are a priori elements of reality, drawn down from up above, diffused to the working masses in heavenly alignment. History does not proceed, it arrives from the future; if history has not proceeded, it is because the future has not yet arrived. A rupture, at the intersection of Earth and Heaven, marks the end of sin.
It was as such, that the questioning of this scripture by (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985; Laclau and Mouffe, 1987) was received with indignation within revolutionary socialist circles (Geras, 1987; Geras, 1988). It is nothing more than a positional displacement within the field of reality. No longer is history an interrelation between a fluid subjectivity and a fixed truth, but a flat ontological plane which is inscribed upon by the masses, like the tip of a seismograph, a plurality of societal processes, culminating in signifiers. Lenin rouses the masses, but does he confer with God? A party is created, engendering a subjectivity which drives sociopolitical action, and the Winter Palace is seized in October 1917. This charismatic leader, perhaps, who zig-zags from writing to writing, stresses the importance of agitation, crafts propaganda with mass appeal, reads Hegel in 1915 and understands that Marxism is non-absolute, that history is not predetermined, that his concepts must be jolted into existence by asserting subjectivity. “Man’s consciousness not only reflects, but creates the objective world”, he writes in his notes (Lenin in Dunayevskaya, 1973), edging closer to a subjectivist-instrumentalist reading of Marx than the essentialism he professes in his earlier philosophical treatise (Lenin, 1909).
So, concepts such as “class struggle”, “class consciousness” and “class combativity”, alongside identities of “the people”, “the working class” and “the nation” to name a few, become non-essential, discursive constructions, in which their very naming brings about their existence. People are not economic units who operate according to “objective laws” which Marxists lay out out, with their listing of proletariat, petty-bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie; in politics, they do not act according to this sort of categorical thinking, nor do they “recognize” some “objective class position” and there is no privileged agent of social change. Illuminated: the worker is not in conflict with the capitalist in most cases, and only when the subjective factor is introduced into the mix does the antagonism make sense. These concepts and identities are ever-shifting non-totalizable multiplicities which lack a fixed origin. Could it be that the political subject is birthed not from its objective necessity, but negotiated through a long process of discourse, involving different agents and signifiers? The masses are mobilized due to a carefully-crafted political package, a conceptual weapon, over-determined from multiple signifiers, solidified into an overarching master-signifier. The question of populism arises, assembled out of aesthetics, emotions and cultural nodal points wrapping around a political project, held together as a plane of consistency, driving history. This is what fills the ‘empty signifier’ of political identity, not objective necessity, material conditions or totalized categorical self-perception. A hegemonic bloc, which is the objet petit a of libidinal investment into a fantasy that shields from the Lacanial Real (Little and Loyd, 2009 : 121), is in this way pitted against the antagonistic Other. As many discourses, as many outcomes. The discourse of Trumpism differs from the discourse of Leninism, the former ‘reactionary’ and the latter ‘progressive’ discursive constructions.
It can be posited that orthodox Marxism interrupts the chain of enumeration of capitalist evils in order to construct an overarching master-signifier depicting the struggle between the working and ruling classes, so as to drive political action, in which case it can slot in within a post-Marxist framework, dissolving the tension. However, in practice, it has been demonstrated to enact a chilling effect on leftist discourse, insisting on a narrow tunnel-vision of revolutionary change. The militant, by fixating on a pure Heaven, seeing it as a truth to bring downwards, discards multifaceted Earth, standing on the sidelines while history is made. At worst, this is expressed by continuous denunciation of the activities of the working class, selling newspapers to bring the Gospel, and standing outside of cultural discourse: the rejection of politics in favour of activism. Thus, the matter at hand is not merely a semantic debate which can be taped over by reductionist equation – such as that of the over-determined signifier-loaded revolutionary subject being the same as the false/class consciousness distinction – but it has practical implications to revolutionary praxis.
There is at least some crossover with mathematical theory (Letts, 1998; Jessop, 2014). A notable difference between the antagonistic frameworks of Marxism and Post-Marxism is the acceptance of granularity. Simple, and complex. Reductionist and holistic. Linear law-like motion and systems theoretical. The parallels are striking. Discursive construction is a process of n-number of intersections. Rather than a fated moment of rupture, mathematical codes, inputs and outputs, push the flow of society into attractors, bifurcating and entering phases. In this way, society can be conceived of as both a stable flow (within a basin of attraction, shifting from low- to high-energy states), endowed with points of instability and possible exit points (circuit-breakers within a flow dotted around a myriad of nodal points which engender phase transitions), and revolutionary and reformist subjectivities (but without a priori origins).
Populism
If post-2008 left-wing populism, such as the likes of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, Bernie Sanders’ social-democratic project within the Democratic Party and Alexis Tsipras’s Syrizia, represent attempts at discursively re-articulating class struggle within a political project, then this gives ample ground for discussion.
The emergence of these political vehicles marked the desire of the masses to fight the class struggle, against the imposition of austerity, on their own terms. The militant retorts: revisionism, reformism and betrayal of Marxism! They identify an essential core within these movements, shoehorning it into a predestined dustbin of history. They wish, rather, to conceive of social revolution as externally-introduced, rather than intrinsically-arising following successive victories, strengthening the collective will, inching towards revolutionary aims. This is why, for the post-Marxist, the situation is nuanced. Granted, these movements failed, overall, but they broke (Gramsci’s in Boggs, 1976) bourgeois cultural hegemony, developing a new socialist common sense, which continues to lurk in the background to this day, ready to spring forward. Class consciousness, thus, in its impure form, was increased. The masses were ready to fight austerity, but not yet overthrow capitalism; these stages, as such, cannot be skipped outright, but must be participated in, contributing to the possibility of a revolutionary vanguard forming. The process itself is the contingent and open-ended class struggle, by default neither opposed or supporting revolutionary struggle, according to this view. There arises a fundamental question: were these political formations pre-determined to fail, co-opted by the system or crushed by the capitalist establishment, based on this essential core (for instance, the claim that the social movements at hand were solely comprised of “petty-bourgoise liberal ideology”), or are all historical moments contingent, signifiers ever-shifting, able to tip-over, like a lightning strike, at a certain threshold to revolutionary action? Could history have gone differently? Does the hydra of revolution truly lurk in every strike (Lenin, 1899)? Here, the division between Marxism and Post-Marxism becomes clear, insofar as the insistence on the totalizing drive and the non-totalizible multiplicity creates a gulf in the perception of social reality. The struggle between the system of ‘capitalism’ and ‘socialism’ is of world-historic importance, representing the choice of humanity between barbarism and life, and so what frameworks organic leaders choose to construct their politics is of vital importance.
When the system is in crisis, orthodox Marxism can come to be understood as a subjectivist-instrumentalist tool which exploits a crisis opportunity to bring itself to life, rather than as an objective necessity or “truth”: this is its only path to salvation. The subjective element of collective identity formation of the reformist or revolutionary kind is not pre-determined, and does not “exist” in a perpetual state, with its distinctions of false/class consciousness, rather it is brought to life by being named through discursive articulation as people wade through chaos. If this is the case, we might as well defenestrate orthodox Marxism from our minds, stop pretending that it arises from an objective standpoint, and expand our political horizons.
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