Hegemony & Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics

Laclau and Mouffe have developed a theory of hegemony, after Antonio Gramsci, that is more fluid and less determined by the ascendancy of one social or economic class; it is, in short, a postmodern reflection on Gramsci. They begin by positing that there are countless groups within a society, each with a series of perspectives and views. Because of this plurality of groups, it is not possible to know which groups will coalesce into a bloc and be able, through their agreed upon ideas also coming together, to exercise hegemony. Different groups have many possible bloc allies. In the United States, there have been times when Jews and African-Americans have united and worked together, for example, with the Civil Rights Act of 1964; there have been other times when these groups have not been able to work together politically in an harmonious fashion, as with the anti-Jewish slogans of some members of the Nation of Islam (Louis Farrakhan, for instance). What blocs form and produce a new hegemony depends upon a number of factors: the particular issues which become most salient and lead to groups "choosing up sides" on which position to take with respect to the emergent agenda, pre-existing interests and views characteristic of the group, and the extent to which segments of different groups' views can be articulated together in alliance with other groups to become a bloc. To use the language of post-structuralism, each potential antagonism of one group with another is a "floating signifier,". . .a 'wild' antagonism which does not predetermine the form in which it can be articulated [linked up] to other elements in a social system." Furthermore, rapid change is possible in a current hegemony. The groups bound together as a bloc may find their articulation coming apart at the seams; latent antagonisms may come to the fore and lead to a rearticulation of interests into a new bloc. Thus, hegemonies are unstable for Laclau and Mouffe--whereas they tend to be much more stable from Gramsci's perspective. The end result is that dominant views can change swiftly, and the ideas that have led to one set of leaders may disintegrate, precipitating new leaders and new political agendas. Most dramatically, consider the Soviet Union. Who can forget the rapid collapse of the old Bolshevik apparatus, after seventy years of hegemony. Seemingly, overnight the forces of openness put into motion by Mikhail Gorbachev tore apart the previous grand hegemony. However, there is plenty of potential for a new hegemony developing that will be much less supportive of democratic impulses. Witness events occurring in recent years under the presidency of Vladimir Putin. This is a difficult work to plow through. Nonetheless, it is a fascinating book and worth the effort to make sense of it.

I studied this text as a graduate student at York University. I must admit that I did not understand the terse theoretical language for a long time. However, I had the good fortune of finding a fellow graduate student in Political Thought who was so well versed in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy that he could extol the hidden meanings of the text for hours on end! I called his ranting, "bible thumping"! But in all seriousness, once you understand the conceptual relationships presented in the book, you find a whole new way of conceptualizing the social, not as an accomplished fact, but as an ongoing practice of articulation. The problem with orthodox forms of Marxism? The fixing of the meaning of the "working class" at the point of production. During the whole development of Marxism up to the theoretical work of Gramsci, we have witnessed the "undoing" of the essentialist meaning/construction of the working class as determined by pure economistic forces. The problem? The larger mediating role of politics and culture. Working class identity is not fixed at the point of production, but is fragmented across other discursive spaces, e.g. nationalism, sports fan, father, mother, reader, lover, etc. There is no neccessary articulation between any of these. The moral lesson behind all this is thus: The Right has been very successful in practicing articulation, providing a broad-based appeal in relation to identities; on the other hand, the left has been "left" with a worn-out, 19th century, industrial model of "working class" identity. The second half of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy takes the reader into a post-Gramscian theoretical muse on the subject of emerging social movements and the discursive (poststructuralist) construction of subject positions, which are always open to new articulations, (both to the left and right), and are never finally fixed. From this theoretical standpoint, the social is open to ongoing struggles over meanings. For the Left to revitalize itself and become a viable force in the new century, it must become more sophisticated in the area of cultural politics and begin to strategically articulate discursive equivalents across social movements--to find common ground in what seems to be a multiple and fragemented emergence of movements. My only criticism is that, by reifying social movements, we lose site of the very complexity and pluralism found within such movements. Does this mean that by its macro perspective it loses sight of the mirco, everyday? On the contrary, no! The model given by Laclau and Mouffe has an applicability well beyond the study of social movement discourses. I utilized the notion of articulation found in the text and the notion of the openness of the social in my critical ethnography of a non-federally recognized Native American group and their struggles over the meaning of their contested identity, (Book Title: Native Americans in the Carolina Borderlands: A Critical Ethnography, Carolinas Press, 2000)