Date: Fri, 22 Jul 1994 14:20:02 -0400
From: "Jonathan Diskin" <usr10776-AT-TSO.UC.EDU>
Subject: Re: Laclau and Mouffe and exploitation (repost)


RE Is Marxism essentialist and what does that mean? Much of the Marxian
tradition, I think, has a deep essentialist streak, rooted in the primacy
of economic forces which themselves reflect either human nature or a
transhistorical drive toward progress. Kautsky once referred to 
development as from "the cell to socialism", amplifying a transhistorical
naturalist streak also found in comments by Marx and Engels.
        On the other hand, Marx's efforts to produce or construct theories
and political action which are grounded in the conjunctural meanings of
production and labor (as opposed to "eternal" categories of the same) and
all the rest loosely called dialectics is clearly a break with
essentialism... at least in spirit. It remains for us to extend and connect
various Marxist insights with the openess of contingent developments.

A few sources come to mind also: Mouffe's essay in her edited book on
Gramsci in which she lays out the elements of classical Marxist 
determinism, Wolff and Resnick's intellectual history of economic
determinism in their "Knowledge and Class", chapter 2; Laclau' great
discussion at the beginning of his "New Reflections on the Revolutions of Our
time" in which he argues that essentialism took the form of thinking that
logical contradictions (between classes, e.g.) were the same as social
antagonisms. The essay that Blair Sandler and I published in Rethinking
Marxism 6:3 on Laclau and Mouffe's failure to reconstruct the conception
of the economy also addresses these issues.
Jonathan Diskin