File spoon-archives/marxism.archive/marxism_1994/94-07-31.000, message 81


Date: Fri, 22 Jul 94 10:30 CDT
From: Andy Daitsman <ADAITS-AT-macc.wisc.edu>
Subject: Re: Laclau and Mouffe and exploitation (repost)


Jeff Popke, referring to L&M, wrote:
 
> it seems to me an important attempt to formulate an anti-
>essentialist theory which can be applied to the conditions of exploitation
 
I was chatting with a friend last night and we couldn't agree what made Marxism
an essentialist theory.  Can you help?  What would an anti-essentialist theory
be?
 
[text deleted]
 
>-----------------------
>Now, a specfic reply:
>
>On Tue, 19 Jul 94 16:17 CDT Andy Daitsman said:
>
>>      It is in this context that L&M introduce their conceptions of
>>subordination, oppression, and domination -- as a way of categorizing unequal
>>relationships.  Subordination, they suggest, is a natural state, and that "we
>>need to differentiate 'subordination' from 'oppression' and explain the
>>precise conditions in which subordination becomes oppressive" (p. 153).  The
>>key element is that an unequal relationship become an "antagonism" in order
>>for it to become oppressive; until that occurs, people will accept such
>>relationships without question.  That is, serfdom or slavery do not become
>>oppressive until a discourse arises that asserts "the rights inherent to every
>>human being" (p. 154), thereby giving rise to a discursive antagonism and to
>>consciousness not just of inequality but also of injustice.  From a Marxist
>>viewpoint, this assertion is little more than absurd.
>>
>
>I would read this a little differently.  I doubt that L & M would deny the
>personal resistance by slaves serfs, women, etc.  However, such individual
>acts of resistance cannot by themselves become politically efficacious until
>they become articluated with struggles outside of these specific sites.
>
>"Our central problem is to identify the discursive condition for the emergency
>of a COLLECTIVE action, directed towards struggling against inequalities and
>challenging relations of subordination." (p. 153, my emphasis).  In fact, "it
>may be a question of relations of subordination ALREADY IN EXISTENCE which,
>thanks to a displacement of the democratic imaginary, are rearticulated as
>relations of oppression" (p 159, again my emphasis).
 
I think the main point here is that L&M don't consider those "relations of
subordination ALREADY IN EXISTENCE" to be "oppressive" until they are
discursively constructed as such.  In other words, "oppression" has no
material basis, and is simply one form in which unequal relationships can be
construed.
 
To reiterate what I said in the first post, a traditional marxist would ground
"oppression" in "exploitation," for which they would rely on what is basically
an economic definition: the capitalist expropriates surplus-value from the
worker.  If the labor theory doesn't hold, however, then the Marxist concept of
surplus-value disappears, and along with it goes the Marxist concept of
exploitation.  And bye-bye as well to the material grounding of oppression,
which can then be freely understood as simply a discursive construction of
unequal social relations.  Which brings us back to L&M.
 
It seems to me that Marxism IS an essentialist discourse because it has a single
referential core -- exploitation -- without which the entire structure collapses
(as Rick Kuhn rightly pointed out the other day).  The question, to me, is
whether we can rescue anything from it.  To do so, I think, we have to
reconstruct a materialist conception of exploitation, not based on the labor
theory, and which can be incorporated into a non-essentialist discourse.
 
Oh, and I'd like a hot fudge sundae with whipped cream and a cherry too, while
you're at it.  :-)
 
Andy Daitsman
Department of History
University of Wisconsin, Madison
adaits-AT-macc.wisc.edu


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