File spoon-archives/marxism.archive/marxism_1995/95-03-31.000, message 97


Date: Wed, 8 Mar 1995 09:24:34 -0500 (EST)
From: Philip Goldstein <pgold-AT-strauss.udel.edu>
Subject: Re: Gramsci, Laclau, Mouffe (and Bhaskar) 


	Justin Schwartz praises Norman Geras' attack on Laclau and Mouffe 
on the following grounds: "They attack a caricature of Marxism qua 
economic determinism and narrow class reductionism which none of the 
theorists they actually discuss in fact holds." This criticism of L & M, 
similar to Kellner and Best's criticism in their book on postmodern 
theory, complains that L&M's account of Marx and Marxists from Marx 
through Lenin to Gramsci is reductive, narrow, fails to see their genius, 
continuiing truths, universal validity, etc. I find the criticism wrong 
headed. In Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, they are not so much 
analyzing the thought and beliefs of particular Marxists; they are 
tracing the development of ideas which they consider incompatible on 
postmodern grounds -- socio-economic determination by class position and 
indeterminacy of value and identify which explains hegemony. Such studies 
of Marxism's development or reception are commonplace among political 
scientists, many of whose textbooks on communism present similar accounts 
of how communism developed out of Marx's thought. L & M's account has the 
aim and the virtue of telling us how Marxism can overcome the quagmire 
into which Soviet communism led it --e.g., how Marxism can overcome its 
totalitarian impulses and recover a democratic ethos. To argue, as Geras 
and others do, that L & G neglect the subtlety and the grandeur of great 
Marxist thinkers beg the point: Totalitarian communism has widely 
discredited Marxist thought and even the most brilliant Marxists are 
implicated in its discrediting. You don't overcome the legacy of Soviet 
or totalitarian communism by claiming that Marx or some Marxists were 
much smarter than their followers thought. The conservative answer is 
Marxism is good in theory but terrible in practice. 

Philip Goldstein


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