Against Post-Marxism: How Post-Marxism Annuls Class-Based Historicism and the Possibility of Revolutionary Praxis

Abstract

This article provides a brief examination of the theory of Althusser, Mouffe, Laclau and Žižek. Specifically the writer endeavours to provide an account of the methodological categories which underpin the thought of these thinkers at the most fundamental level; an X-ray like snap shot which reveals the bare bones of the theoretical apparatus each thinker deploys. When stripped of all its external paraphernalia and specific idiosyncrasies, the thought of each of the thinkers considered here attains a fundamental identity; that is, one discovers at the methodological level, a reconfiguring of Marxism according to a post-Kantian paradigm. I will demonstrate how the neo-Kantian reconfiguration of Marxism by post-Marxists annuls its class-based historicism and the possibility of revolutionary praxis therein, and how a reversion to a pre-Hegelian form of methodology results inevitably in the annihilation of the living core of Marxism—its class driven historicism; consequently, I suggest some of the grievous political implications which flow from this. Althusser, Mouffe and Laclau were all heavily influenced by the great Italian revolutionary Antonio Gramsci. The manner in which they misrepresent his thought is integral to understanding the development of their own, so this article will also consider Gramsci in brief—specifically his approach to the base-superstructure problem which has bedevilled Marxist scholarship, on and off, since its inception.

Keywords:

• Marx
• Hegel
• Žižek
• Mouffe
• Laclau
• Althusser

Notes on Contributor

Tony McKenna is a Hegelian-Marxist philosopher, journalist and cultural commentator whose work has been featured by The Huffington Post, ABC Australia, The United Nations, New Statesman, The Progressive, Adbusters, New Internationalist, Counterpunch, Monthly Review, Z-net, The Philosopher's Magazine, New Humanist, Ceasefire, Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory, Socialism and Democracy, and Marx and Philosophy Review of Books.

Notes

¹I capitalise “Ideology” here in order to distinguish it from “particular ideologies” which Althusser discusses in terms of the conventional usage.

²I use “transcendental object” to signify “noumenal” in the Kantian sense. There is a debate within Kantian scholarship about whether Kant's phrase—“transcendental object” was used to refer to noumenal entities. I tend to favour the accounts which argue it was indeed used in this way (though not exclusively); accounts provided by Kantian scholars such as Friederick Paulsen, August Messer, H. W. Cassirer, B. Fuller, S. M. McMurrin, Eduard Zuermann, and Norman Kemp-Smith to name a few. Of course, this by no means should be confused with Kant's use of “transcendental deduction”—to denote the means by which he was able to derive the forms of time and space (transcendental aesthetic) and the categories of the understanding among others— things which clearly belong to the realm of phenomena as opposed to noumena.

³Perhaps the most fundamental characteristic of the Kantian noumenal is that it cannot be thought; in applying the forms and the categories of the understanding to it, its nature is instantaneously distorted; it is the unknown and unknowable basis for thought, therefore, and cannot be subjected to it (McKenna 2011). Likewise “the field of discursivity” is the precondition for the objects of thought “within a horizon,” but it can never be made into an object of thought in its own right—“only about objects with a horizon, not about the horizon itself.” In a similar vein, Althusserian Ideology is the precondition for subjectivity, but can never be apprehended or altered by that same subjectivity. Sometimes the thinkers in question make various claims about the noumenal entities they have postulated which do not accord with this, but that should only be understood as part of a happy-go-lucky propensity to violate any logical consistency in the theories they themselves have set up. So for example, as I point out in the body of this article, in one moment Althusser says “Ideology has no history,” which allows him to synthesise base and superstructure in a single ahistorical fusion, but elsewhere he is perfectly content to say “Human societies secrete ideology as the very element and atmosphere indispensable to their historical respiration and life” (Althusser 1969, 232).

⁴It is a credit to Hegel that he was clear-eyed enough to see that no such state in the present had realised this condition— certainly not the Prussian one—though this is a view many commentators still mistakenly attribute to him.

⁵The term “floating signifier” was originated by Claude Lévi-Strauss (1950).

⁶I have not included the divisions which spring up between these thinkers—for example, Žižek's heated debate with Laclau regarding the nature of populism—for such concerns fall outside the remit of this article which provides little more than a fundamental outline of core methodology.

⁷I think Lukács was mistaken in this, and his argument here should be understood in the context of a political demoralisation on his part which was a consequence of the Stalinification of the Soviet Union—with the important acceptation of a short burst of activity when he became a minister of the short lived government which opposed the Soviet Union during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution.

⁸Incidentally, the most effective struggles on the part of slum dwellers like those in El Alto, La Paz are often the product of combined communitarian and working class organisation.

⁹I mean schema in the everyday sense—rather than in the precise Kantian usage of transcendental schema/schemata.