Date: Tue, 19 Jul 94 16:17 CDT
From: Andy Daitsman <ADAITS-AT-macc.wisc.edu>
Subject: Laclau and Mouffe and exploitation (repost)


This is a second attempt of a post I originally sent this a.m.
 
Following my belief that interesting discussions flow from people posing
provocative comments, I decided to share this with you all.  It's a revised
version of something I wrote immediately after reading the book for the first
time.  I hope you like it.
 
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      Laclau and Mouffe attempt to divorce Marxism from its teleological and
determinist origins.   While the attempt is worthwhile, and in some respects
admirable, important components of Marxism get lost.  (They are upfront about
this, and refer to themselves as post-Marxist.)  Most dissatisfying is what
happens to the concept of exploitation.  In Marx, exploitation is a fairly
straightforward analytical concept, based on the capitalist's illegitimate
expropriation of surplus value from the proletariat.  Marx put it like this:
 
'Capitalist production is not merely the production of commodities, it is, by
its very essence, the production of surplus value.  The worker produces not
for himself, but for capital.  It is no longer sufficient, therefore, for him
simply to produce.  He must produce surplus value.'  [Capital vol. 1, cited in
Robert Miles, _Capitalism and Unfree Labour: Anomaly or necessity?_ (London:
Tavistock, 1987), p. 21.]
 
      Now this definition of exploitation is clearly problematic, because the
concept of surplus value depends on the validity of the labor theory of value
and the labor theory of value has essentially been discredited.  Bowles and
Gintis propose assigning a metaphorical rather than a literal meaning to the
labor theory of value (value cannot be measured by units of labor inputs, but
the capitalist still appropriates from the worker something of value produced
through the worker's labor), and in that way attempt to rescue a material
basis for class conflict in which both worker and capitalist understand that
appropriation occurs to the favor of one and the detriment of the other.   [I
believe this cite is S. Bowles and H. Gintis, "Structure and Practice in the
Labour Theory of Value," Review of Radical Political Economics 12:4 (?).]
 
      In L&M however, exploitation gets lost in their differential categories
of subordination, oppression and domination (pp. 153-154).  No wonder they
give Bernstein a sympathetic review early in the book.  Following Foucault,
L&M conceive of social formations as discursive constructs rather than as
expressions of a "material" reality.  This "discursive formation," as they put
it, is characterized by "regularity in dispersion" by which they mean "an
ensemble of differential positions."  (_Hegemony and Socialist Strategy_, pp.
105-6).  I believe they mean that people occupy unequal roles within a social
order, and furthermore that this inequality is in some fundamental sense
unavoidable within any type of social construction.
 
      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.
 
      L&M are grappling with how to understand what Marxists used to call
false consciousness: how is it that people willingly assist in the
reproduction of the circumstances of their own domination by others?  Their
solution is to assert that people in fact do not do that, that domination is
only subordination viewed from an external reference point, and that until
subordination becomes discursively antagonistic it is not in fact oppressive.
(I think I'm reading them correctly.)  This is the precise point where the
concept of exploitation disappears completely from the analysis.
 
      I humbly :) suggest that they have thrown out the baby with the bath
water.  There is a significant body of Marxist historical literature that
demonstrates dissembling as a form of resistance to exploitation (slave
studies in particular -- Eugene Genovese _Roll Jordan Roll_ and Rebecca Scott
_Slave Emancipation in Cuba_).  In other words, people know -- though perhaps
not at a conscious level -- that exploitation occurs, but they also know that
strategic conditions prohibit open resistance to it.  But they do resist when
they can, even if only in covert and personal ways, and even if their personal
resistance only serves in the long run to reproduce the very system that
oppresses them.
 
      What is exploitation?  I don't quite have an answer for that right now.
The Marxist definition relies on the labor theory of value, but that theory --
based on the standard works of classical political economy -- is difficult to
sustain these days.  I think that working from L&M's definitions of
antagonisms (see pp. 122-129 or so) we can develop a definition of
exploitation that has both discursive and material meaning, and I will try to
do that in a later post.  (Hey, I've got a dissertation to write too, and this
stuff is only a small part of that, ok?)
 
Yours,
 
Andy Daitsman
Department of History
University of Wisconsin, Madison
adaits-AT-macc.wisc.edu


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