File spoon-archives/marxism.archive/marxism_1994/marxism_19Jul.94, message 11


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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