Radical+Democracy+Alternative+for+a+New+Left


 * =Title= || "Radical Democracy: Alternative for a New Left." Excerpt from //Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics// (London: Verso, 1985): 176-180. ||
 * =Author= || Ernesto LaClau and Chantal Mouffe ||
 * =Date= || 1985 ||
 * =Summary By= || deRaismes ||
 * =Summary= || NB: I got the feeling that this is one of those Lemert excerpts where we are joining in in the middle of the conversation...

LaClau and Mouffe are criticizing the conservative turn of Great Britain in the 80s (Thatcherism), calling it hegemonic insofar as it attempts to unify "multiple subject positions around an individualist definition of rights and a negative conception of liberty" (492). More specifically, the Conservatives seek to establish a single and uniting political discourse that reformulates social reality to include everyone yet reify difference/inequality -- so that, for example, it becomes //legitimate// to think of welfare recipients as "scroungers". This reminds me of Stuart Hall's discussion of 'being British' under Thatcher's discourse of hegemonic and subsuming identity.

However, unlike Hall who focuses on a Gramscian construction of identity, L&M are more concerned with how the Left should respond to this conservative threat to radical and plural democracy. They believe that the only way to do so is to create an alternative system of equivalents, meaning that the Left should work to expand the concept of revolution and struggle to include more than merely class. It must extend "the field of democratic struggles to the whole of civil society and the state" (492).

Clearly post-Marxist, L&M believe liberal discourse is an ongoing debate. They reject the idea that social revolution has a fixed definition -- namely, class struggle. Further, L&M "radicaliz[e] certain of Gramsci's concepts" (493) to redefine the revolutionary act. They believe that "the multiplication of political spaces and the preventing of the concentration of power in one point are ... preconditions of every truly democratic transformation of society" (493). This opens up the political process/space to a plurality of antagonisms (not just class). However, L&M caution that it is impossible to determine beforehand what form those antagonisms will take (494). They offer Wittgenstein's notion of family resemblances to illustrate this, offering examples such as feminist and class struggle. They conclude by insisting that it is impossible to establish a fixed and general theory of politics like the Marxists of yore because contemporary society is a dynamic and ever-changing series of antagonisms.

Because social reality does not exist separately from discourse about it, it is impossible to define a “content” of the Left, a key social cleavage or source of domination. Socioeconomic class is not the only basis of difference; the state is not the source of all domination; neither is civil society (where, for instance, the state may take helpful measures against sexism); neither are political parties. Solving problems of economic domination will not necessarily solve other forms of it. What is needed instead is to link the resistances to different forms of domination—“chains of equivalents between the different struggles against oppression” (492). The “task of the Left” is to “deepen and expand” liberal-democratic ideology “in the direction of a radical and plural democracy. “This requires the autonomization of the spheres of struggle and the multiplication of political spaces, which is incompatible with the concentration of power and knowledge that classic Jacobinism and its different social variants imply” (493). Important to recognize “the //process// character of every radical transformation” (493). “…the state is not a homogeneous medium, separated from civil society by a ditch, but an uneven set of branches and functions, only relatively integrated by the hegemonic practices which take place within it. Above all, it should not be forgotten that the state can be the seat of numerous democratic antagonisms, to the extent that a set of functions [page break] within it—professional or technical, for example—can enter into relations of antagonism with centres of power, within the state itself, which seek to restrict and deform them” (494-95). The main cleavage //can// be between state and civil society though, as in military dictatorships or totalitarian states (495). || Is this analysis still teleological insofar as there is a constant drive for social improvement, or is this more like a pendulum with shifting antagonisms? Does it matter? Given that we are reading this during Habermas week, do you think this is more relevant to the construction of the public sphere as envisioned by Habermas? Or, might this equally have fit in our readings from the last few weeks? || = = = = = = = = = = = =
 * Suzanne's summary:**
 * [I found it helpful to write my own summaries in preparation for writing my exam, so here's my rendition:**
 * =Discussion points= || [These are deRaismes'. --SG] Do you agree with L&M that revolution cannot merely be fixed at class struggle but must have room for multiple, equivalent antagonisms?

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