Introductory Comments on Postmarxism: Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy

In literary and cultural studies over the past thirty years the influence of Marxist thought has spread far beyond the work of those critics who would specifically identify themselves as Marxists. Among the many texts we might have read in this section of the course I have chosen Laclau and Mouffe's Hegemony and Socialist Strategy for a couple reasons. First, unlike conservative post-Marxists such as Michel Foucault, Laclau and Mouffe retain some level of commitment (however arguably compromised) to a recognizably progressive political project. As they write in their introduction to Hegemony and Socialist Strategy:

. . . if our intellectual project in this book is post-Marxist, it is evidently also post-Marxist. It has been through the development of of certain intuitions and discursive forms constituted within Marxism, and the inhibition of certain others, that we have constructed a concept of hegemony which, in our view, may be a useful instrument in the struggle for a radical, libertarian and plural democracy. (p. 4)

But perhaps more importantly, in terms of our practical needs, in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy Laclau and Mouffe painstakingly work their way through a long history of Marxist attempts to account for the gaps between the revolutions that Marx predicted and the revolutions that actually happened and didn't happen. In their first two chapters Laclau and Mouffe present this problematic as a series of responses to the rigid economic determinism of Second International theorist Karl Kautsky. For Kautsky, the communist revolution was inevitable because the proletariat, the revolutionary class, was in place and would be rapidly radicalized by the further development and increasingly frequent crises of capitalism. Laclau and Mouffe provide an opportunity and a framework for us to briefly consider the the ways Marxist thinkers like Rosa Luxemburg, Eduard Bernstein, Leon Trotsky and Antonio Gramsci have theorized class unity and class agency and the relationship of base and superstructure in response to the ways that capitalism has developed (often in direct reaction to the pressures of socialist intervention) during the twentieth century.

In the last part of their book, Laclau and Mouffe turn to Antonio Gramsci's concept of "hegemony" as a way to theorize progressive political agency in the post-sixties indentity politics-driven political climate where, in their view, "class" is no longer a viable basis for revolutionary agency. For background on the term "hegemony," I have provided a couple of reserve text excerpts from the Dictionary of Marxist Thought and Raymond Williams' Keywords.