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 --- from list marxism-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu --- ------------------
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