Ernesto Laclau’s Oblivion of Political Economy: Capitalism and Institutions in Post-Marxist Discourse Theory

Abstract

Post-Marxist discourse theory, initially developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, has become a central node of contemporary critical theory. This essay explores how, in their attack against orthodox Marxism, Laclau and Mouffe self-consciously expelled political economy from the vast array of post-Marxism’s theoretical influences. While attempts have been offered to theorize capitalism while respecting discourse theory’s ontological postulates, most post-Marxist analyses, Laclau’s included, suffer from an insufficient account of institutions. Consequently, the complex cartography of political interactions these analyses provide is affected by the post-Marxists’ conceptual incapacity to grasp the strictly capitalist specificity of the societies they refer to. To substantiate this claim, three areas of Laclau’s work are scrutinized: the consequences derived from positing social demands as the primary unit of analysis; the effects of uniformly treating “class” as just one mode of political identification; and the understanding that results from theorizing temporal dynamics under capitalism in this particular way.

Key Words:

• Louis Althusser
• Hegemony
• Ernesto Laclau
• Political Economy
• Post-Marxism

Notes

1 Overdetermination “is a very precise type of fusion entailing a symbolic dimension and a plurality of meanings. The concept of overdetermination is constituted in the field of the symbolic, and has no meaning whatsoever outside it” (Laclau and Mouffe 2001, 97).

2 It is symptomatic that out of fifteen critical essays on Laclau’s work included in the collection edited by Critchley and Marchart (2004), none of them deals with the relation of the latter’s work to the tradition of political economy.

3 In order to refer to the specificity of the current configuration of the capitalist mode of production, Laclau employs various terms such as Aglietta’s (1979) “intensive regime of accumulation” (Laclau and Mouffe 2001, 160), Lash and Urry’s (1987) “disorganized capitalism” (Laclau 1990, 58), and “globalized capitalism” (Laclau 2005a, 150). However, no conceptual elaboration of those terms is provided, for their meaning is taken to be straightforward and commonsensical.

4 “It is completely untrue that we have ever stated that social practices occur in an institutional vacuum. Indeed, institutions are fully present in our approach: they are what we have called systems of differences” (Laclau 1990, 223).

5 Özselçuk and Madra (2005) argue that Laclau’s neglect of the contemporary relevance of the category of class is based upon rationalist (e.g., the impossibility of class to ever be a fully self-constituted entity) and empiricist (e.g., the gradual disappearance of the industrial working class in the West) arguments. These are lines of reasoning that, paradoxically, stand in stark contrast with the epistemological assumptions informing post-Marxist discourse theory.