From: SUBTILE-AT-aol.com Date: Wed, 20 Jul 94 03:16:26 EDT Subject: Re: Laclau, Mouffe, Althusser, Gramsci In his post of 4/19 Jon Beasley-Murray writes that "Laclau and Mouffe are surely trying to respond to a number of perceived failures of Marxism: Andy mentioned the 'economic essentialism' of base/superstructure, but surely more practically L&M are trying to "accomodate" significant social movements and groups which have been left out of traditional left analyses -- most importantly the women's movement and civil rights movement, but also students, queers and so on." To me the most important "perceived failure of Marxism" is its failure to cope with the waning of efficacious resistance WITH the development of capitalism. This can be explained, as Craig Calhoun does in his book THE QUESTION OF CLASS STRUGGLE, as the loss of a communitarianism that had something to defend against the forced immiseration that accompanies the creation of proletarian classes in developing countries. Or to rephrase this question: if the "proletarian revolution" can no longer be organized, as it was in countries with INCIPIENT capitalism such as Russia, China, Cuba etc., then what will bring about socialism? Calhoun argues that "From Marx's day to the present, the conditions of revolutionary mobilization have been continuously eroded in the advanced countries... (What this means) is that the social strength of workers' communities, their links to each other, and their dependence on a traditional way of life incompatible with modern capitalism have been greatly reduced. At the same time, the distinction between the beneficiaries and victims of capitalism has become less clear. Workers have almost never had nothing to lose but their chains, and in any case the degree of their immiseration hardly predicts their radicalism. On the contrary, the question is what workers have had to defend." Calhoun implicitly argues against the idealization of the working class that one sees in Engels or Lukacs with the statement that "Whether well-paid or poor, the "new" workers have different personal experiences and social capabilities. They are a "class" in a way their predecessors were not, but that is more an indicator of isolation as individuals than of unity." So much for the proletarian revolution. We can cheer Laclau and Mouffe for including "groups which have been left out of traditional left analyses -- most importantly the women's movement and civil rights movement, but also students, queers and so on," as Jon says, but are we to assume that they can bring socialism to the First World? What can they do at this point in the struggle besides fight for the bourgeois notion of "rights" that Marx tried to transcend in CRITIQUE OF THE GOTHA PROGRAMME? Is the moment of "resistance for an age which has lost sight of a revolution" extinguished when such "rights" have been granted to women, ethnicities, "races," students, queers etc>? -Samuel Day Fassbinder
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