Ernest Laclau RIP

[blake 3:17]

A Radical Democrat: Ernesto Laclau, 1933-2014
By Michael Todd, Social Science Space editor | Published: April 17, 2014

Well-known leftist political theorist Ernesto Laclau, an Argentinian who made his home in the United Kingdom and with his partner Chantal Mouffe was the leading proponent of the Essex School of discourse analysis and his ideas of “radical democracy,” has died at the age of 78. According to the Argentinian news agency Télam, Laclau suffered a heart attack on April 13 while in the Spanish city of Seville to give a lecture.

“He was the author of landmark studies of Marxist theory and of populism as a political category and social movement,” sociologist Robin Blackburn wrote in a personal obituary. “In his highly original essays and books he demonstrated the far reaching implications of the thought of Antonio Gramsci, probed the assumptions of Marxism and illuminated the modern history of Latin America, rejecting simplistic schemas linked to notions of dependency and populism.”

Political scientist Juan Manuel Abal Medina called Laclau “one of the leading political thinkers of our time,” adding that the theorist’s writings, like New Reflection on the Revolution of our Time and Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, “are required reading in all universities the world.” Abal Medina is a former cabinet chief in Argentina’s Cristina Fernández de Kirchner administration; Laclau had long been a public defender of the various Kirchner regimes. Another politician, Secretary of State for Culture Jorge Coscia, said Laclau “masterfully combined academic rigor with a deep political commitment to noble causes such as equality and freedom.”

Laclau studied history at the Universidad Nacional de Buenos Aires in the early 1960s and made a name for himself as a Marxist thinker and social movement leader (although he insisted he was never a “dogmatic” Marxist). He left the political ferment of his homeland in 1969 for academic refuge at Oxford, where Eric Hobsbawm supported his entrance.

He earned a Ph.D. at the University of Essex, the institution where he would teach and research for more than 35 years beginning in 1973. From 1990 to 1997 he directed Essex’s Centre for Theoretical Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences, and he established the school’s Ideology and Discourse Analysis Research Programme. After assuming an emeritus role at Essex in 2008, he took posts at two U.S. universities, Northwestern and the SUNY Buffalo.

In 1985 he and Mouffe — personal as well as professional partners — published their defining work, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. While that book cemented their reputations, Laclau continued to produce influential works, such as New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time; 2008’s Contingency, Hegemony, Universality (with Judith Butler and Slavoj Zizek); Emancipation(s) and On Populist Reason. His newest book, The Rhetorical Foundations of Society is expected to come out in a few weeks.

As Blackburn wrote:

Ernesto and Chantal used the work of Antonio Gramsci to reject what they saw as the reductionism and teleology of much Marxist theory. Though sometimes calling himself a ‘post-Marxist’ and an advocate of ‘radical democracy’, Ernesto insisted that he remained a radical anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist. His criticisms of Marx and Marxism were made in a constructive spirit, and without a hint of rancour.

http://www.socialsciencespace.com/2014/04/a-radical-democrat-ernesto-laclau-1933-2014/

[Hit The North]

I studied at Essex in the 1980s but was never taught by Laclau. He was, however, a main target of my undergraduate dissertation, which I called 'Thatcherism and socialist strategy' and for which I received a rather poor grade.

In the end his work attempted to de-centre the working class from the revolutionary project through a kind of popular frontism.

[G-Dogg]

"Marxist thinker"? Lol

His "posmarxist" garbage was a complete distortion of marxism, which he stripped of all revolutionary content to adapt it to the postmodern nonsense which is so fashionable in academia nowadays.

He died at a time when the government he so staunchly defended is making peace with the IMF and taking austerity measures against the working class. It's too bad he didn't live to see it go into the dustbin of Argentine history where it belongs.

[blake 3:17]

Intellectum: In the last few years, developed and developing countries have been confronting the consequences of economic depression. Do you believe that this could lead to revolutionary action? In other words, could the worldwide economic depression stimulate people's revolutionary consciousness? If such a perspective seems utopian, what might inspire people to obtain a revolutionary consciousness?

EL: Revolutionary consciousness is the will of eruption with the whole existing system of affairs. Revolutionary consciousness is not something that is inherent in the consciousness of any given nation. People see that at some point they can no longer stand the existing situation and revolt against the existing situation. This is never the result of a single determination. Rather, it is always the result of a new determination of many forces. Althusser said that the Russian revolution was the result of many things, and that suddenly all these forces crystallized around some basic motifs, namely land and peace. In other words, a revolutionary consciousness is always a conjectural accumulation of things. It is not something inherent from the very beginning of the process, in a teleological way. There are many forms of revolutionary consciousness. Revolutionary consciousness has to do with total breakdown or with the necessity for a radical change.

Intellectum: The model of radical democracy maintains the idea of an expanded version of democracy, which involves more aspects of social life, and attempts to constitute and multiply new identities. Yet you have not developed a theory about justice, and it could be assumed that you accept the existence of constituted inequality in democracy. Why is there this absence in your work?

EL: The concept of justice is the typical concept of an empty signifier. What is justice or not in society is open to infinite debate. Justice as a notion is something that has no clear content. But in order to link some content under certain particular circumstances: imagine a debate between a fascist and a socialist around what is a just society. They are going to discuss many possible contents, but they are not going to discuss whether justice is just or not. Because that has to be accepted as the very terrain of the argument; in order for justice to play that semantic role, it should not have any particular content. And the content must be equal to the dialogical effort.

Intellectum: So you think that justice is contingent.

EL: Well, the content of justice is contingent. The category of justice, however, has to be present from the very beginning.

Intellectum: You have invented a new vocabulary (articulation, nodal point, elements etc). What led you to follow this verbal approach? Do you believe that this has contributed to the substance or success of your work?

EL: I think we have provided a new vocabulary of politics that is the result of the radicalization of a set of other innovations in vocabulary, which mainly come from the Gramscian tradition. My intellectual strategy has been the opposite of that of Slavok Zizek, for example. Zizek has not introduced a single theoretical category into political analysis. He has simply taken the categories of Lacanianism and elaborated them. By expanding the vocabulary of the Gramscian grammar, we are introducing a set of new categories to political analysis. The effect of this innovation at the level of vocabulary is at root of what people find interesting or attractive in our analysis.

Intellectum: It is widely believed that your thought belongs to a postmodern frame. Do you accept this characterization? Are you a postmodern intellectual?

EL: It depends on how one defines a category of postmodern. There is certain postmodernity one associates with Baudrillard, with which I don't identify myself in the least. On the other hand, if "postmodern" is understood not simply as a rejection of modernity, but as a diminution of the epistemological ambitions of the modern project, then yes, in substance you can say that we are postmodern. This distinction I am trying to make is crucial. We are not rejecting the whole project of modernity, but think that the project of modernity is something that should be less than the original formulators of the Enlightenment thought that project ought to consist of.

Intellectum: Someone would argue that the turn to discourse analysis is postmodern.

EL: But what is understood by postmodern? You can understand postmodernity as the rejection of modernity, a view with which I disagree. You can understand post-modernity through the demerit of the ambitions of the modern project, on the basis of contingency, a view with which I agree.

http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2010-02-02-laclau-en.html

[G-Dogg]

That's absolutely right. Fixation on discourse analysis is typically postmodern. The use of fancy words with vague meaning as a means to obfuscate discussion is also typically postmodern. And he may not like Baudrillard but he sure agrees with Derrida's bullshit that everything amounts to discourse.

What these intellectual imposters are doing has had political consequences in Argentina. The Kirchner government and their defenders have been obsessing over discourse analysis for years. They think the country's main issue is the private media's hegemonic discourse. Not poverty, not inequality, not capitalism. Discourse. So they have TV shows where they take that discourse apart, they pass laws to try to counter it, they've literally called this "the mother of all battles", the "cultural battle". And they try to impose their own discourse which is of course totally severed from reality, based on outright forgery of official data. The inflation and poverty figures are made up. But that doesn't matter. What matters is discourse.

It's a joke. And it has discreted much of the left.

[G-Dogg]

Ernesto Laclau and the collapse of nationalism

By Alejandro Guerrero (@guerrerodelPO)


In her homage to Ernesto Laclau, deceased April 14th, Cristina Kirchner said that those who criticise this Londoner professor from Essex —and ideological endorser of her government— reveal their "stupidity and ignorance". Often, in her decadence, the President resorts to a tautological mechanism: she looks at herself in the mirror and believes she's looking out the window.

By the way, Laclau's postmarxism was the system of ideas, to call it in some way, which better suited a government which sets its own "discourse" against its concrete policy, the discourse against "corporations" and "centers of cultural power", on the one hand, and for the agreements with the Paris Club, devaluations, public service price hikes, and attack against salary on the other. To Laclau these measures of practical politics mattered very little, since he was busy with inquiring, with that cryptic language which Open Letter [the kirchnerist group of intellectuals] so rudimentarily copies from him, into the "concatenation of fragmentary vindications in a leadership" and the "empty significants" (someone may remember what Juan Perón used to say to the workers: "if you don't understand it, surely you're being lied to"). Politics, in Laclau, is not class struggle for the means of productions, but for "hegemony" and the conquest of "significants", without it ever being known what such hegemony consists of or the signification the signifiers tried to represent.

Laclau's "postmarxism", extended and fragmented into a multitude of trends, eclectic jumble of Lacan, Foucault, Derrida and so many others with some eunuch dressing of Marx, was a direct product of the crisis that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the infamy of the Berlin Wall. In the 90s, Laclau came to maintain the proletariat no longer existed because a French worker could throw stones at a turkish immigrant. That is: social classes would no longer be defined by their place in the process of production but by the circumstancial political position that these classes, or part of them, assume in a certain particular moment. Other "postmarxists" became mystics and some even returned to catholicism. It was a moment of political, ideological and moral collapse for a whole group of this intellectual petty bourgeoisie. For this little academic scene the floor was sinking under their feet because stalinism had sunk.

And with good reason. In 1985, in collaboration with his wife, Chantal Mouffe, Laclau wrote his Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, in which he backs Moscow's already ruined bureaucracy and barely suggests the CPSU some minor corrections in their policies. Soon after, the USSR simply disappeared. In 2004, when that book was reprinted, Laclau, in the foreword of that new edition, was surprised by his own ideological poverty and pointed out "how little we had to put into question". The enormous political and economic changes of his time, a time of wars and revolutions, passed by his side while he, absorbed, dedicated himself to his "search for hegemony".

At this pont, it becomes interesting to look into the historical roots of this ideological collapse.

At the end of the 50s, Laclau directed the newspaper Worker's Struggle, which declared itself "national left" and resolved to fight "against imperialism and its native allies". In 1962, Worker's Struggle, a split of the old Socialist Vanguard Party, converged into other groups to found the Socialist Party of National Revolution, whose main leaders were Jorge Abelardo Ramos y Jorge Enea Spilimbergo. In their foundational document, the SPNR says that the radical government of Hipólito Yrigoyen (the butcher of the Tragical Week and the bloody Patagonia), had constituted a "national movement", the "attempt (...) to restrict the political and economic influence of agrarian oligarchy". That radicalism, said the declaration, had developed, or had meant to develop, a "progressive national bourgeois politics which verified only on paper". This exclusive attack on the "agrarian oligarchy" must be noted, because those leftist nationalists would systematically counter it against the industrial bourgeoisie, which represented progress against rural backwardness.

Peronism, starting from 1945, would bring, in the vision of the "national left", a decisive novelty: the integration into the "naional movement" of "the new working class", of "creole workers", who were no longer a product of external immigration but of internal migratory currents. In truth, the deformed process of accelerated industrialization which began at the beginning of 1930, in the preface of World War II, multiplied the number of industrial workers and build an all-new proletariat, alien to socialist, syndicalist and anarchist traditions of the past, from which, however, the most notable figures of the peronist syndical bureaucracy from those times would emerge. This working class that burst in with Perón would give peronism, according to the SPNR, its "revolutionary spirit".

The document says that peronism was a "national front", made up of workers, the army, parts of the national bourgeoisie, the church, fractions of the urban and rural middle class, and state bureaucracy. The foundational document of the SPNR ends with a question: "What class will direct the process?". The text doesn't concern itself with looking for the answer, which, actually, had already been given by the first governments of Perón, although peronism was still, for the workers, an unfinished experience.

It's unknown how Laclau would have acted from the crisis opened by the Cordobazo in 1969 onwards, because that same year he left for Europe out of simple personal convenience, thanks to a scholarship he got to study in Oxford with British historian Eric Hobsbawm, and never returned. However, before he left he criticized Ramos and Spilimbergo for the irrelevance of the SPNR, which he attributed to those who demanded from militants the support of "non-essential theoretical determinants", like, for example, the defence of the October Revolution, the figures of Lenin and Trotsky, the categorical rejection of Stalin, all of which, said Laclau, was of no importance at all.

What was of no importance, actually, were the differences Laclau had with Ramos and Spilimbergo. In 1973, the party of Ramos, the Popular Left Front (PLF), successor of the SPNR, put on their ballots the ticket Perón-Perón (the old general and his wife, Isabel). With the years, Ramos would enter the government of Menem (he was his ambassador in Mexico), dissolved the PLD and joined the Justicialist Party. Later, Laclau, would encounter in Essex the disappeareance of the proletariat because a French worker threw a stone at a Turk.

All in all, and although he backed the K government, it's a simplification to maintain, as almost everyone does, the Laclau was a kirchnerist. Laclau was not a paid civil servant of Open Letter, an intellectual who betrays what he thinks in exchange of a position or privilege. Laclau was more than that and more tragic: Laclau was the collapse of a system of ideas that traversed a good portion of the 20th century and the 21st thus far. And, if it were all about labels, Laclau was chavista, not kirchnerist, and he even scolded the K for not going as far as Chávez, even though he justified them because they have "limitants" which couldn't be known and would be surpassed in an undefined future. Chávez and his successor, it's true, have a "discourse" more according to the tastes of Laclau than the "cultural" babblings of kirchnerism. But the Essex philosopher didn't stop to analize the material bases of one "discourse" and the other. The chavismo could be what it was because it put under control of the state the heart of the Venezuelan economy: the oil, PDVSA. The difference in discourses is the difference between the expulsion of the pro-American leadership of PDVSA, and the fraudulent nationalization of YPF with a payment of 10 billion dollars in compensation to Repsol. Even now these differences remain, when chavismo has entered, since long ago, its final decline.

When the Media Law was discussed here, Laclau, who supported it with enthusiasm, said "If monopolies prevail, the war is lost". Yes, it's lost for this impotent government, which in its turn to make it to 2015 with canes if necessary, sells its body and soul to monopolies, to Chevron, to Repsol, to the Paris Club, to the Vulture Funds, to the IMF. This "war", "cultural battle" included, can only be won by the working class, by a government of workers. That's the historical perspective of the Workers' Left Front, called to replace peronism and nationalism in all its variants, in the direction of the workers' movement.

That's Argentina's revolutionary left's view of Laclau.

[L.A.P.]

Been a while since I've read any of my Continental-phi hobbyist stuff. Laclau had some interesting thoughts on populism, and the 'chain of equivalences' in political discourse. Had a p. obscure writing style too. He was more into postmodern identity politics than class struggle. I remember reading the discord between him and Zizek where Laclau basically accused him of "essentialism" (in regards to class antagonism) and "schizophrenically oscillating between sophisticated Lacanian theory and traditional Marxism". I think his first text Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory IIRC was better than his famed Hegemony and Socialist Strategy as he still had one foot in Marxism before he jumped head-first into postmodern identity politics.