Review essay

Post-Marxism and the new social movements

A discussion of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985).

ALLEN H U N T E R American Institutions Program, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Today in advanced capitalist societies there is a rift between radical theory and radical politics, caused by the twin crises of socialism and Marxism. Socialism as model and Marxism as a theoretical approach are unattractive because of the authoritarianism of existing socialist societies, because Marxism's designated revolutionary agent -- the

working class -- does not act as a class, and because many of today's radical issues -- nuclear war, ecology, feminism, gay liberation -- have not been compellingly addressed within the socialist tradition. Neither socialism nor Marxism offers an integrative vision for many activists in today's new social movements. Marxism creatively informs work within various academic disciplines, but the Marxist notion that there are overarching, total explanations of social reality is considered dubious, if considered at all. The current contenders among general, transdisci- plinary outlooks, such as deconstruction, stress the fragmentary nature of reality, indeterminacy, and the lack of a unitary agency for change.

The various post-Marxisms -- mainly filiations out of the Age (!) of Structuralism -- have been debilitating for radical politics. Although there are important contributions in the "linguistic turn," emphasizing non-economic motivations, the fluidity of social contexts, the power of language, and the rhetorical construction of social movements and cul- tural trends, on the whole its message has been that materialist deter- minism has to be replaced with de-ontologized indeterminacy. Decon- struction might mean critical engagement by which wholes are broken apart so their vibrant elements can be reappropriated in changed frameworks. But in casting aside Marxist answers too many of its critics also set aside the questions these answers were meant to address.

Theory and Society 17: 885- 900, 1988 �9 KluwerAcademic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands

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In rejecting an economistic view of the working class as privileged agent of transformative political action, many have set aside questions about economics, class, and agency. Retreating from apocalyptic, Jacobin visions of revolution, many radicals no longer long for revolu- tion. Dismissing dogmatic Marxist assertions about laws of motion of history, there is an emphasis on unknowability, so that strategy ceases to be a category distinguishable from instrumental politics. Rejecting the teleological and perhaps authoritarian implications of such con- cepts as false consciousness, many activists have lost a measure for deciding whether particular actions are in one's own or one's group's interests, and fallen into moralism or uncritical relativism, alternately.

This is the theoretical and political context that Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe address in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. Previously known for their Marxist work on Gramsci and ideology, they have undertaken a critique of Marxist theory responsive to the politics of the new social movements. Rooted in a political commitment to the multiplicity of legitimate social move- ments, Laclau and Mouffe link their critique of Marxism to a recon- sideration of socialism. They view it less as the culmination than as that part of radical democracy that addresses domination, unfreedom, and inequality in the social relations of production. As manifest in their abiding respect for Gramsci, they are among the few post-Marxists intellectuals who organize their work around its political implications, and who concern themselves with what social theory can or ought to replace Marxism. Thus it is all the more disappointing that their criti- cisms of Marxism lead them not to the complexities of multiple social determinations, but to the substantively vacuous category of discursive indeterminacy; not to the tensions between the totalizing and frag- menting tendencies in contemporary life, but to an overestimation of fragmentation in the modern world. They expose orthodox Marxism's failure to accommodate subjectivity and human agency, yet their theory obliterates subjectivity and agency. They propose to radicalize social- ism, yet they as much retreat to liberal pluralism as move beyond it. They thus begin with a powerful immanent critique of Marxism, and conclude with an inadequate, regressive alternative.

Laclau and Mouffe are, of course, far from the first socialists (often former Marxists) who criticize Marx and orthodox Marxism in order to recover the sources of oppositional activity they find suppressed by determinism and reductionism. 1 However unlike some previous critics (such as, say, Cornelius Castoriadis in Modem Capitalism) who sought

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to free the creative activity of the working class from the determinism in Marx's theory of capitalism, they criticize class essentialism as well. Their contribution to the critique of Marxism reveals assumptions about class unity and capitalist laws of motion by investigating the introduction of the concept of hegemony into Marxism. They devote a good deal of their book to a historical reconstruction of the adoption of the concept of hegemony in Second and Third International Marxism, and a conceptual deconstruction of the inadequacies of its insertion into Marxist theory. They trace orthodox Marxism (East and West), revisionism, and revolutionary syndicalism as divergent responses to the unexpected tenacity of capitalism. With the rise of organized capi- talism after the economic depressions of the 1870s and early 1890s, "Marxism finally lost its innocence... [as] it became ever more difficult to reduce social relations to structural moments internal to [abstract economic] categories" (p. 18). Continued forestalling of socialist revo- lution forced Marxists to acknowledge tensions between the (purport- ed) laws of motion of capital and actual social life, for these laws could not explain the role of contingency -- of actual historical events, of daily lived experience -- in constructing the political terrain. This frac- tured the easy relationship Marxists assumed among the capitalist economy, the working class as a unified subject of history, and revolu- tionary action. Adding the concept of hegemony to Marxist theory was a response to the inadequacies of what Russell Jacoby has called "auto- matic Marxism," which assumed that the political transition to social- ism was guaranteed by capitalist laws of motion.

Laclau and Mouffe stress that the concept of hegemony was introduced into Marxism to account for historical contingencies unexplained by determinist theory. It became a way to deal with particular conditions in specific situations for theorists unwilling to abandon an overarching determinist reading of history. Their use of the term is not at odds with the broader usage that emphasizes that ruling groups assure their con- tinued dominance by forging the bases of consent for and collaboration in maintaining the social order in which they hold privileged positions. Rather they emphasize that the activity by which dominant social groups draw other groups into a historic bloc is not fully determined by the structures of capital, nor even latent within them. Hegemony is a necessary concept for understanding social cohesion because -- although structural moments may determine the range of possible his- toric blocs at any given time -- they do not fill in the particular, his- torically specific content, either in the realm of ideas or practices. Yet for all its Gramscian richness, hegemony was used to maintain, through

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modification, an overly determinist reading of hiStory. Its attention to actively forged hierarchical unities was added onto determinist ex- planations, and did not challenge the closed assumptions of the auton- omy of economic laws of motion or of the essential unity of classes.

Laclau and Mouffe argue that class reductionism, economism, and assumptions of one-way determination leave the core of Marxism in a shambles: "the field of the economy is lnot] a self-regulated social space subject to endogenous laws; nor does there exist a constitutive principle for social agents which can be fixed in an ultimate class core; nor are class positions the necessary location of historical interests" (p. 85). In their terms, relations of "exteriority" exist when the identity of "elements" -- things, persons, groups, classes -- exists prior to, and is not modified by, the relationships into which they enter. Relations of "interiority" by contrast, exist when the relation itself at least modifies, if it does not actually constitute, the identities of the "moments" enter- ing into the relation. These terms do not, however, adequately capture their own criticism that in reductionist, Marxist analyses the flow of determination is only one way -- from the economy to the rest of society. Economism and class reductionism are not models of exterior- ity, but of complete interiority from the economy to the rest of society and complete exteriority from the rest of society back to the economy; they are models of unilateral as opposed to bilateral or multilateral processes of determination.

As insightful as these critiques are, Laclau and Mouffe continually col- lapse positions into their most extreme, dogmatic formulations, and do not provide adequate bases for alternative approaches to social theor- izing or political activism. A) They hold that "unfixity has become the condition of every social identity" (p. 85). This claim is true if they mean that not all ideologies and identities can be strictly read out of class positions, and -- more inclusively -- that social identities are not reflexes of social being. But they argue that the identity of hegemonic politics "is given to it solely by its articulation within a hegemonic for- mation. Its identity, then, has become purely relational" (p. 86). The word "solely" suggests that, conjuncturally, any ideology or political project is available to any class or social group. Yet Laclau and Mouffe do not consider that ideologies, and their lived meanings, are generally modified as they are appropriated by different groups. They thereby condemn historically grounded arguments about the class content in and bases of (some) ideologies by conflating them with essentialist and

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exclusivist arguments that claim that ultimately all ideologies express or reflect particular class positions. 2

B) They properly argue that there are no privileged political subjects "in the ontological, not practical sense" (p. 87). They argue that dis- placing the proletariat ought not be prologue to replacing it with any other social group, no matter how oppressed, restive, or large. They attack not only the concept of the proletariat as such, but the Hegelian assumptions of a unitary historical subject upon which its privileged position was constructed. The growth of the new social movements as well as dramatic shortcomings of working-class politics underscore the contemporary importance of this point. But in effect they collapse the practical into the ontological, rejecting the possibility that conditions ever exist under which privileged subjects in the "practical sense" may emerge. There is a difference between assuming the necessity of an essentialist unitary subject, and noting the existence of historic moments of broad and deep unity among people engaged in collective political action. Laclau and Mouffe's positioh lends itself to a focus on coalitions among groups with distinct interests, and makes it more diffi- cult for them to search for counter-hegemonic political visions and practices that might unify diverse democratic movements.

C) There are "no privileged points for the unleashing of a socialist political practice; this hinges upon a 'collective will' that is laboriously constructed from a number of dissimilar points" (p. 87). This position replaces a reductionist notion about the sources of oppositional activism and consciousness with a voluntarist idealism that denies that any determinations are significant, let alone more significant than others.

The common thread through these points is that they dismiss, rather than refine our understanding of, economics, class, and determination. Seeming to fear that any concessions to the importance of these cate- gories will lead to economism and reductionism, Laclau and Mouffe ignore the extent to which economic relations do construct modern social life, class relations do structure social practices and identities. Even after rejecting the economism of Marx's own political economy and at the core of orthodox Marxism, economic dynamics remain criti- cal for understanding social change, and are central to the constitution of social identities. An autonomous mode of production need not be posited to appreciate that capitalist societies are driven largely by the

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extensive reach and power of economic relations, their ability to insert themselves into any and all social practices, their resilience, elasticity, and centrality in setting the course of social change. Not only is the economic promiscuous as it infiltrates into all domains of social life, but those social practices organized around economic tasks and trans- actions are disproportionately influential in determining the pace and direction of social change. Of course economic relations are continual- ly modified by other social practices, and at times are more trans- formed than transforming. We do need to question broadly held (popu- lar, strategic, and scholarly) assumptions about economics, but less to decenter "the economic" than to understand what its unique qualities are. Our understanding of social and cultural -- as well as economic -- formations would be enriched by looking at specific articulations between economic and other relations, and seeking to understand how social and cultural effects are not merely added onto the economic but are incorporated into -- and affect -- the logic of the economy itself. In this way we can accord the economic and class dimensions of social action and identity formation their full weight without assuming that class will always be at the core of identity formation or the agent of change.

Laclau and Mouffe are more indeterminate than the evidence warrants. In their desire to distance themselves from overly deterministic readings of history they deny that some social practices are more likely to be reproduced (even if modified) through time than others, that in capitalist societies the incessant drive for profit, control of labor, and the extension of the cash nexus (intertwined with state-centered moments of decommodification) are among these more firmly estab- lished patterns.

In presenting discourse theory as an alternative to Marx, they en- counter problems not because they go beyond him, but because they pay less attention to what is actually discursively constructed than to deconstructing alternative perspectives. The recent broad turn to lin- guistic and culture theory has taken place at two analytically distinct if often overlapping levels. First, more modestly, is the disciplinary claim that the methods and approaches, questions and sensibilities used by cultural and literary theorists have more purchase on explaining history and society than has been generally recognized. It sparks attention to symbols, images, rhetoric, the complexity of identity formation, and the non-materialist determinants of human intercourse. Although enriching our conceptual repertoires and sensibilities, how far these

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methods and substantive concerns can go in replacing (as opposed to complementing or transforming) other approaches to social analysis depends on their fruitfulness, not abstract theorizing. Second, more grandly, is discourse analysis as philosophical anthropology. Language, it is argued, is foundational; it not only distinguishes humans from other species, but is alone constitutive of human relationships. In this sense the turn to discourse theory -- as indeterminate as particular findings may be -- is a form of reductionism even if it is embraced to reject other reductionist perspectives. An emphatic statement at this general level does not really help us get on with actual historical investi- gations, and Laclau and Mouffe's whole defense of discourse analysis takes place at this theoretical level, never descending to address par- ticular social contexts.

They present an idealist theory, emphasizing indeterminacy and the utter plasticity of political possibilities and outcomes. They argue that society has no "last instance," no structures isolated from modification by human activity, no predetermined social logic, no laws of motion that, from an exterior position, organize human activity prior to human activity itself. No skeletal mode of production gives full shape to the rest of society; because terms like "society" and "social formation" imply a closed finality that does not exist, they reject "the conception of 'society' as founding totality of its partial processes" (p. 95). In them- selves these observations increase our attention to the open-ended quality and multiple sources of human activity. For Laclau and Mouffe, flux, variability, and the rapidity with which seemingly fixed domains of social action can be recomposed all flow from the constructivist view that categories of social experience are constantly made and remade, not fixed by external determinants. Their focus on the constitutive or constructive moment is important, undercutting essentialism, deter- minism, and holism; but in itself (as opposed to the predilections of those who theorize it) this position argues neither against the existence of constituted totalities nor against the greater power, durability, and reproducibility of some forms of social activity over others. Indeed claims for its break with past theory (if not with past applications of theory) are exaggerated. It is a radicalizing recuperation of (the critical) Marx's own point that men and women make their own world. It radi- calizes his insight on the basis of new understandings that show ever more of human experience -- sex and gender, preeminently -- to be neither natural nor derivative of more fundamental social structures, but actively historically constituted by the people involved.

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In discourse theory Laclau and Mouffe seek a radically indeterminate social theory that they claim can ground Gramsci's emphasis on the materiality of ideology as more than ideas and symbols deployed by elites, but as imbricated within the lives, the daily activities, of the members of a social bloc. In part this view is reminiscent of Raymond Williams's notion of cultural materialism, which stresses that the social activity of people itself constitutes the materiality of social life, but they go further than he in rejecting Marxist categories of social activity. Their unit for social analysis is a discursive field, as "an articulatory practice which constitutes and organizes social relations" (p. 96). Dis- cursive fields are actively made and "modified as a result of the articu- latory practice," (p. 105) and do not exist apart from, prior to, or at a more fundamental level than the sum of the articulatory practices that collectively create them. They situate themselves at the extreme end of discourse analysis, viewing everything as discourse. In The Archeology of Knowledge Foucault acknowledged that non-discursive practices play a role in constructing knowledge and meaning. He intended, of course, to demonstrate that the power of the discursive moment in knowledge formation is greater than generally recognized, but (at least in that book) he was not contending that discourse is all there is. In fact, as friendly critics have noted, it remains unclear what the boundaries of the discursive were for Foucault. 3 It is not unclear for Laclau and Mouffe. They see Foucault's claims as too modest, and argue that there is nothing beyond or other than the discursive. With roots in Wittgen- stein and other language theorists, their turn to discourse follows from a rejection of the Marxist notion that objectification through labor is the basic form of human expression and the process by which humans make their world. Not content with Habermas's reconstruction of his- torical materialism, which argues that labor and interaction are irreduc- ible to one another, Laclau and Mouffe subsume labor and its products within interaction, i.e. discourse, as they reject "the distinction between discursive and non-discursive practices" (p. 107). Drawing on an exam- ple from Wittgenstein in which building materials are moved about and placed in particular relations to one another as A orders B about, they note that "the very material properties of the objects are part of what Wittgenstein calls a language game, which is an example of what we have called discourse" (p. 108).

They believe "[t]he main consequence of a break with the discursive/ extra-discursive dichotomy is the abandonment of the thought/reality opposition" (p. 110) and argue that such dualisms as the distinctions between object and subject, structure and agency, and social being and

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social consciousness can be overcome when reconstituted in an en- larged discursive "field of objectivity" (p. 109). These dichotomies a r e

problematic, especially when they are not considered metaphorically but as reified representations of reality. It is important to reject the "thought/reality dichotomy," which sees ideas/superstructure/agency as less real than things/base/structure; they are differently real. Yet it is far from clear how the analytic and descriptive problems that so per- vasively give rise to these dichotomies are overcome by subsuming everything within discursive fields. Intending to overcome such dualisms, they replace determinism (complemented by untheorized instances of contingency) with indeterminacy (containing untheorized "nodal points" of greater social weight). Contingency and fluidity may no longer be theoretically unanchored, but structure and fixity are left unexplained. Discourse theory, as they have presented it, provides no way "in" to study social phenomena; if everything is undifferentiated flux forever in the process of being constituted through articulation, then it is not clear how anything can be even heuristically treated as more fixed or determinate. By contrast, for instance, the distinction between social being and social consciousness -- freed as much as pos- sible from base-superstructure models, and the assumption that each is unified, with distinct boundaries separating it from the other -- helps generate questions that open up seemingly fixed social arrangements, and critiques the prevalent academic hypostatization of social reality as well as reductionism in Marxism.

In some ways we seem to be at a theoretical impasse about issues such as the relation between structure and agency; theoretically the issues a r e obdurate especially when politics as well as analytic clarity is -- or seems to be -- at stake, and Laclau and Mouffe are not alone in pro- viding a more powerful critique than positive contribution. For exam- ple, in attacking Althusser, E. E Thompson collapsed structure and agency into "experience," in part because he opposed privileging the agency of the party over that of ordinary people. As Perry Anderson argued, Thompson's "experience" is far too undifferentiated, but Anderson's own typology of varied "experiences" (based on implicitly retrieving the structure/agency dichotomy) is nothing more than an unsupported restatement of the orthodox Marxist view that privileges proletarian experience over that of other subordinate groups. 4 Although inconclusive the Thompson/Anderson debate nonetheless sensitizes us to substantive concerns that arise in actual social research.

By contrast, Laclau and Mouffe, in arguing against reified dichotomies,

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do not move us toward greater attentiveness to actual variations in social practices. Their commitment to overcoming the structure/agen- cy dichotomy and determinism leads them to use abstract language that does not commit them to any substantive positions. They do not distin- guish various kinds of social practices, and they end up replacing unity with dispersion, a monologic with no social logic, reductionism with an amorphous notion of articulation, class primacy with substantively empty discursive fields, and an exaggerated sense of the power of the economy, with inattention to power itself. In fact, they are silent about the ways in which some activities of some people -- within as well as between discursive fields -- are more powerful, more influential than the actions of other people, and about the ways in which some fields of action are more determining than determined. It is as if they fear that any theoretical acknowledgment of different degrees of determination or different aspects of human experience will inexorably recreate reductionism and reified dichotomous theories. We are thus left with articulations that are neither determined nor determinate, and neither originate with nor affect people. They speak of articulations, fields dis- persions, etc., but seldom of people, groups, organizations, or institu- tions. Actors, agents, and subjects are as absent as structures and deter- minations. In this way their version of deconstruction has affinities with the structuralist argument against humanism. Their turn to cultural/ linguistic approaches as a way of overcoming a subjectless determinism leads them to subjectless indeterminacy. Their opposition to deter- minism produces what Perry Anderson has called "the randomizat ion

o f history. '' s

The above example from Wittgenstein illustrates that discourse theory more obscures than transcends problems in dichotomous theories and issues of determination. At any given moment, there are objective limits to what A can demand of B, depending what the building mate- rials are; in that sense there are at least some non-discursive deter- minants or limits on the social practices in which A and B engage. In addition, it is most likely that the reasons why A can give orders that B obeys are not discursively constructed in the present, but are received from the past in the form of congealed social relations of authority. Now it can be argued that these moments from the past were them- selves discursively constructed. But that is the point. Basing social theory in articulations within and between discursive fields in itself says nothing about how bounded the present is by the past, how constrained some discourses in the present are by more powerful ones, or how in

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specific contexts thought and verbal practices interact with other social practices and the natural and human-made material world.

The consequences of these theoretical shortcomings are evident in various ways. For instance, they are unclear about the relation between their explanatory principles and what they seek to explain. Although they focus on flux, variability and change, they are unintentionally raising a very different, but just as important question: how can we understand social order and continuity without resorting to determinist or functionalist theories? They offer a general, ahistorical social theory that emphasizes radical indeterminacy; and the fact of change, vari- ance, and the capacity of some people in some circumstances to "make their own history" does point to the need for non-determinist theory. Yet most societies through most of history have been relatively stable, i.e., the past has very largely determined the present and future in those societies. Only in the modern era has change become systematic, and Laclau and Mouffe properly note that the concept of hegemony addresses how prevailing forms of social cohesion are maintained under conditions in which Marxists expected to witness radical change. But this means that their turn to discourse theory arose from a search for a non-reductive, non-structural explanation of continuity, not change; i.e. for a more adequate analysis of how the past determines the present and future.

A general social theory would have to provide a non-determinist ex- planation of how people's actions construct relatively stable social orders, a theory specific to the modern world would focus on the increased domain of indeterminacy (or, preferably, the complex inter- action between multiple determinations). Fluidity and fixity both exist, and are forever intertwined, even if their relative weights vary through time, and the social practices that are more fluid or fixed can them- selves change. As long as any social practice is considered unmodified by others it can be considered either thoroughly determined or thoroughly undetermined. But once it is recognized that there are (almost?) no social practices totally unmodified by others, then the issue is the extent to which some social practices are more indepen- dent, internally driven, or more dependent, externally modified ("elements" versus "moments," in Laclau and Mouffe's terms). In this way a clear focus on the tensions between continuity and change would be maintained theoretically, and neither determination nor indeter- minacy would be grafted onto an unreceptive host.

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The political uses they make of their theory are also problematic. On the one hand, they cannot theoretically account for what they empiri- cally recognize as politically crucial. Offering a dramatically different theoretical framework from Marxism, they nevertheless acknowledge the centrality of class, race, and gender as durable axes of domination and conflict, and commodification and bureaucratization as crucial rationalization processes of capitalist societies. But these retreats from their theoretical position are neither integrated together nor theorized, so they are unable to account for the ways in which these durable, powerful features of modern western societies constrain indeterminacy while reproducing undemocratic social arrangements. On the other hand, they offer a dramatically non-Marxist account of modern politics that nonetheless depends on assumptions hard to square with their radical indeterminacy. They argue that bourgeois society creates a "social imaginary" subversive of inequality and authoritarian rule that -- through "logics of equivalence" -- tendentiaUy cuts across all dis- cursive fields. Oppositional activity and consciousness is not en- gendered by an inner dialectic between labor and capital or some equivalent; rather transcontextual logics of equivalence critique rela- tions in one domain with criteria generated in other spheres.

There are problems with this analysis. They do not explain why, as radi- cal indeterminists, they believe that anything (even as plastic as an "imaginary") has the permanence "which permits us to establish a con- tinuity between the struggles of the nineteenth century against the inequalities bequeathed by the ancien regime and the social movements of the present" (p. 160). Given their concern with variability it is odd that they have an unnuanced view of democracy; they do not suggest the variety of compatible and conflicting ways in which democracy is invoked. Nor do they really explain why democratic ideology is so powerful that it articulates itself across varied discursive fields. Demo- cratic ideology is very broadly attractive (hence the readiness with which people with such different political agendas call upon it); but they exaggerate its subversive qualities -- after all, dominant groups are as likely to invoke democracy as subordinate ones. When conflicting groups wrap themselves in the legitimacy of democracy, then there are other bases upon which people align themselves politically. Further, the readiness with which people use analogic rhetoric does suggest that, whatever the sources of their political commitments, a common way of trying to establish the legitimacy of a position is through transcon- textual references. Unfortunately Laclau and Mouffe stress but do not

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explain the power and attractiveness of democratic ideology and the processes through which logics of equivalence are effected.

Laclau and Mouffe's contribution to current political debate also founders. Their search for a way to combine hegemonic politics with a radical, liberatory democracy grows from their criticisms of Marxist Jacobinism for unifying diverse political practices around fixed politi- cal categories and privileged social agents. Unlike developers of previous concepts of hegemony that have collapsed "the relationship between democratic logic and hegemonic project," (p. 188) Laclau and Mouffe deny the existence of privileged positions from which revolu- tionary transformations of societies as a whole can be mounted. Yet they also believe that radical democratic movements remain limited unless articulated with a "hegemonic project.. , of a set of proposals for the positive organization of the social" (p. 189). They thereby argue against easy alternatives to traditional versions of socialism, such as identity politics or a left-wing populism that substitutes some amor- phous version of "the people" for the working class. Their reconcep- tualization of hegemony clarifies the inherent tension between unifying political visions and the impulses of particular mobilizing groups: the latter are necessary for democracy and liberty to flourish; the former is imperative if democratic movements are to combine positively in the re-organization of society. Attending to this terrain -- the open-ended, mutually influencing interaction among various democratic movements and their collaborative creation of a shared political vision -- is one of the critical problems the new social movements face.

Yet Laclau and Mouffe's plea for democratic pluralism combined with a unifying vision remains abstract and voluntarist because it is theoreti- cally unanchored. Their commitment to radical indeterminacy brings them to a political as well as theoretical impasse. In the first place, they have not clarified why hegemonic politics is desirable or necessary. Because they have already banished the concept of society, it is unclear what hegemonic politics ought to address. Conversely, they provide no basis for assuming that democratic movements resist incorporation into hegemonic political projects. They argue that when hegemony is articulated through the suppression of difference totalitarian unifica- tion results. But if the goal is the thorough democratization of life in a plurality of social spheres that are only indeterminately articulated with one another, then it is unclear why reforms in any sphere are limited by lack of reforms in any other sphere. Second, their theory allows for no

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direction to history; theoretically their reaction to determinism tends toward randomization or voluntarism and both deny that present political choices are directly influenced or even constrained at the boundaries by the past. Yet it is hard to see how hegemonic projects can be elaborated without some reference to relatively durable social dilemmas shared by various elements in a social bloc.

In addition, Laclau and Mouffe believe that radical democracy is best served by complete agnosticism about which groups will mobilize, likely arenas of struggle, important issues, viable coalitions. This view can justify political passivity, and it provides no basis for attempting to build a hegemonic politics that respectfully incorporates varied move- ments into a combined project. In claiming that "it is impossible to specify a priori surfaces of emergence of antagonisms" (p. 180), they confuse several levels of analysis as well as the relation between anal- ysis and action, thereby exaggerating the extent of indeterminacy. Analytically we can distinguish among particular issues, social agents, and larger dynamics of the society. It is difficult if not impossible to anticipate particular configurations of the three. But we can make informed judgments about likely future conflicts, based on historical conclusions, not a priori axioms. Because, as Laclau and Mouffe them- selves believe, domination that is formed around class, gender, and race will recur, theory and politics must attend to the particular com- binations of these forms of oppression as potential sites of struggle, even though it is impossible to know exactly how these combinations will present themselves. It is not elitist to argue that certain kinds of issues should be on a radical agenda because they are historically specific constructions of enduring forms of domination, if that em- phasis co-exists with respect for democratic procedures.

Related to indeterminacy is their overly politicized view of the consti- tution of interests. They slip from attacking economism to proposing political reductionism, in arguing that "political practice constructs the interests it represents" (p. 120). They are properly impressed by the rapidity with which collective identities (often assumed to be anchored by membership in fixed social groups) are renegotiated. Indeed, precise crystallizations of interests -- as well as needs and even desires -- are politically constituted, but not out of whole cloth. Political interests do not naturally arise from any unitary social being, but neither are they constituted without reference to other aspects of people's lives. The political negotiation of interests is accomplished through specific articulations of people's needs, concerns, and impulses, which are

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influenced by their economic, ethnic, religious, gender, and other social practices. But an exaggeration of the political constitution of interests potentially legitimates manipulative politics, for if interests exist only through their political constitution, then in what sense can any politics be opposed to the interests of those involved? Yet we know that people drawn together within a given politics may remain latently or actively divided because of very different positions they hold economically, culturally, or because of other political commitments. In fact it is important that in privileging the political over other social practices, they have not distinguished among different kinds of political practices. Different political involvements tap into the rest of people's lives in dif- ferent ways, are more or less capable of creating new social identities and redefining group interests. In replacing economics with politics they have attacked objectivist views of interests and substituted a thorough relativism.

For their theoretical critique of Marxism and their political emphasis on radical democracy to be useful, their inversion of Marxism and their agnosticism about political activism must be rejected. Determinist theory may lead to brash, elitist pronouncements about "what is to be done" But radical indeterminacy itself can legitimate either passivity in the guise of deference to democratic spontaneity or the elitist construc- tion of interests, because if political interests really are indeterminate then it matters not whether they arise from below or are impressed from above. Laclau and Mouffe themselves counsel neither passivity nor voluntarism, yet both positions are as associated with their indeter- minacy-centered theory as different forms of each are linked to deter- minist theories. Better they be faced through theories that place the tensions in social life at their center rather than at the margins. The dilemma we face theoretically is to understand how people's activities create many social logics that then interact with one another to create historically specific arenas in which people may be able to create their futures. It is possible for people to act decisively in certain areas without foreclosing the legitimacy of other actions; it is possible for people to remain grounded in certain political commitments, and also join with others around shared visions.

Laclau and Mouffe's critique of Marxism grows from the spirit and needs of the new social movements. Yet like those movements their many insights remain a "strategy of opposition," for they are not suc- cessfully integrated into a "strategy of construction" of a new theory. Their proposed altemative social theory remains so focused on critique

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that it is inattentive to central categories of contemporary experience and to the particular concerns that face these movements. The new social movements raise critical theoretical challenges to Marxism, but deconstructive flights into indeterminacy do not resolve or even direct- ly address them. Laclau and Mouffe's admirable radical skepticism will have contributed to the reconstitution of radical politics if their critique is accepted and their alternative rejected.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Michael Apple, John Clarke, Murray Edelman, and Linda Gordon for comments and suggestions on an earlier version of this review.

No~s

1. In this review I use "Marx" and "Marxism" to refer to the scientific/determinist work about the laws of motion of capitalist society, not the humanist/voluntarist side of the two Marx's and Marxisms.

2. For an earlier formulation see Ernesto Laclau, "Fascism and Ideology," in his Ideology and Politics in Marxist Theory, (London: New Left Books, 1977), 81-- 142.

3. See Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Herrneneutics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982); and Charles C. Lemert and Garth Gillan, Michel Foucault: Social Theory and Transgression (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).

4. See E. P. Thompson, "The Poverty of Theory or An Orrery of Errors," in The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978) and Perry Anderson, Arguments Within English Marxism (London: New Left Books, 1980). Anthony Giddens is currently attempting to move beyond critique of the structure/agency dichotomy to an alternative theory in which both are subsumed within what he terms "structuration."

5. See his In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (London: Verso, 1983), 48, em- phasis in the original.