Big Wrap Up

Ive been going on for awhile about Laclau and Mouffes thesis in their book from 1985, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, even though no one but me cares. It is long and dense, how I like it .What can I say?

Up to this point we've discarded a lot of dogmatic orthodoxy which may have been relevent for Marx's time or even Luxemburgs but isnt helping us think about resistance to advanced capitalism. So we are working on a project of radical democracy, way beyond representative, liberal democracy, which may be fine for resolving antagonism but is not enough to build something. It is a great logic for "the elimination of relations of subordination and inequalities" but is "incapable of founding a nodal point of any kind around which the social fabric can be reconstituted.This being the case ,no hegemonic project can be based exclusively on a democratic logic but must also consist of a set of proposals for the positive organization of the social." In other words ,we are developing a hegemonic project which is a way forward for the Left, countering the hegemony of both neo-liberal and classical liberal capitalism.

This means not allowing "the total expulsion of utopia from the field of the political", denying the possibility of "the construction of a radical imaginary." At the same time we are avoiding
the two extremes represented by the totalitarian myth of the 'The Ideal City' and the positivist pragmatism of reformists without a project." In other words a hegemonic construction of the Left somewhere between Leninism and liberal. This between, "this moment of tension which gives the social it's essentially incomplete and precarious character, is what every project for radical democracy should start to institutionalize."

As mentioned previously ,the authors argue against a "unified discourse of the Left" (the "essential","universal" character of the proletariat" ) in favor of an open-ended articulation reflecting the un-sutured nature of the social, a radical democracy which rejects a pre-destined hierarchy of agents. "Every project for radical democracy necessarily includes...the abolition of capitalist relations of production, but it rejects the idea that from this abolition there necessarily follows the elimination of other inequalities. The project for a radical democracy is a form of politics which is founded not upon dogmatic postulation of any 'essence of the social' but, on the contrary, on an affirmation of the contingency and ambiguity of every antagonism." This "plurality of spaces does not deny, but rather requires, the overdetermination of it's effects at certain levels and the consequent hegemonic articulation between them." Tension is where it's at and we who hope to organize need to embrace it like a Zen koan.