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The Rhetoric of Post-Marxism: Discourse and Institutionality in Laclau and Mouffe, Resnickand WolffAuthor(s): Robert MiklitschSource: Social Text, No. 45, (Winter, 1995), pp. 167-196Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/466680Accessed: 16/06/2008 15:19

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The Rhetoric of Post-Marxism

DISCOURSE AND INSTITUTIONALITY IN LACLAU AND

MOUFFE, RESNICK AND WOLFF

Like the map of Africa before the great explorations, [the theory of the Robert Miklitsch

superstructure] remains a realm sketched in outline, with its great mountain chains and rivers, but often unknown in detail beyond a few well-known

regions. Who has really attempted to follow up the explorations of Marx and Engels? I can only think of Gramsci.

-Louis Althusser, "Contradiction and Overdetermination"

[If] error is serious in historiography, it becomes still more serious in the art of politics, when it is not reconstruction of past history but construction of

present and future history which is at stake. In this case . . . the snake bites

the snake-charmer ... -Antonio Gramsci, The Modern Prince

Preamble: Marxism in the New World Order

What can the above locution mean but, to invoke the apocalyptic Krokers, Marxism "in the age of Lenin in ruins,"' which is to say Marxism after the fall of communism, a brave new world where the mot d'ordre is capital. The May 1991 cover title of The Economist is appropriately economic: "From Marx to the Market."2 A rich legend.

Not from central planning or command economy to the market. Nor from Marx to Smith (Adam Smith, that is). But from Marx to the market, where the market is not only the last word in a long war of words, but a

concept-the market-that is the absolute Other of Marx the man and

myth, everything Marx the proper name signifies (that is, Marxism, socialism, communism).3 In fact, the concept of the market insinuates a neonarrative that abolishes, in a word, the master narrative of Marxism. The big story, then, is not from capitalism to socialism and beyond, but from socialism to capitalism, where capitalism, not communism, is the

omega of history. In sum, the banner "From Marx to the market" invites a double reading, at once rhetorical and historical.

In some sense, of course, all of this is very old news indeed. Both capitalism and socialism have been pronounced DOA more times than one cares to remember. ("Active forgetting," as Nietzsche knew so well, is the

Social Text 45, Vol. 14, No. 4, Winter 1995. Copyright ? 1995 by Duke University Press.

sine qua non of that abuse-intensive discipline which goes by the name of

"history.") Still, to give the champions of capitalism their due, there does appear to be something world-historical, something climacteric, some would even say grave, about this most recent of crises for socialism.

It is writ large in, among other things, the suddenly not-so-liberal elite print media. Though John Kenneth Galbraith is characteristically circumspect in his account for the New York Review of Books, even he

begins with the "common sense" sense of things: "In the common reference communism having failed, capitalism is triumphant."4 In the Times

Literary Supplement, David Selbourne enlists the grand disenchanting rhetoric of The Tempest: "profound changes in intellectual perspective are under way on the Left; but few, if any, will own up to them. These Pros- peros of ours have abjured their rough Marxist magic and buried their staffs in earth, but you would not know it."5

It is only a small step from the Selbourne-which would make a late capitalist of Caliban-to Morton Kondracke's indictment in the New York Times: "Now that communism is in disgrace and its systematic devastation of people, the environment and simple truth is being made plain, there

ought to be a political reckoning in the West. No one should be lined up against the wall, but. ..."6 The bad Orwell impersonation aside ("The simple truth being made plain"), Kondracke appears to have forgotten about the custom of civil rights in the West, though he eventually comes to his senses, reflexively affirming the First Amendment: "The First Amend- ment protects the right to rant" (his own included, of course).7 Yet not unlike that hackneyed moment which from time immemorial has been

indispensable to Hollywood courtroom dramaturgy, the damage has been done; the McCarthyist note has been struck and, presumably, the above insinuation has been registered by the reader, that jury of the last instance: the American demos.

So goes the case against Marxism, a trial straight out of Kafka. Which

brings me to the issue at hand: the relationship between the "political" post-Marxism of Laclau and Mouffe (hereafter abbreviated as L&M) and the "economic" Marxianism of Resnick and Wolff (hereafter abbreviated as R&W).

Laclau and Mouffe: Hegemony, Political Theory, and Radical Democracy

In "The Crisis of Marxism," Edward and Ronald Chilcote enumerate four "theoretical thrusts" (their words) that distinguish the "alternative Marxisms" emanating from the work of Marx and Engels: structuralism, analytical Marxism, critical philosophism, and materialist collectivism.8 As

Robert Miklitsch

both analytical Marxism and materialist collectivism are outside the scope of this paper, I want to focus here on the remaining two strains of Marx- ism: critical philosophism, which derives, according to the Chilcotes, from the early Marx and includes the Frankfurt School and, more recently, Habermas, Bowles and Gintis, and L&M; and Marxist structuralism, which might be called the "school of Althusser" and which comprises the work of Poulantzas and R&W. My working hypothesis is that the similar- ities between critical philosophism and structuralism-between, that is to

say, L&M and R&W-are at least as great as their differences. In order to determine the very real differences between L&M and R&W, though, it is first necessary to figure their relationship to political economy.

The opening sentence of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, which rec- ollects the Jena Hegel as well as the early Marx (especially if one registers Habermas's recollection of this trope in the Philosophical Discourse of Modernity9), asserts the critical character of L&M's intervention: "Left-

wing thought today stands at a crossroads."10 This crisis or conjuncture is, for L&M, a function of two "events" that have challenged the "'evi- dent truths' of the past" (HSS, 1). The first event is on the order of a

negative and corresponds to those "failures and disappointments" with which the Marxist Left is only too familiar. Indeed, this particular series of events constitutes that narrative of negativity for which the proper name "Marx" is the metaphor in the locution with which I began this

essay: "From Marx to the market." Hence L&M's via negativa: "from

Budapest to Prague and the Polish coup d'etat, from Kabul to the sequels of Communist victory in Vietnam and Cambodia" (HSS, 1). The second "event" that has necessitated a rethinking of Marxism and its "classical forms of analysis and calculation" (HSS, 1) is that "whole series of positive new phenomena" which, for the sake of convenience, I will refer to as the "new social movements" (though the latter term is even more hetero-

geneous, as L&M recognize, than its ostensible conceptual double, class).

The slow, very public, and very painful death of Marxism-Leninism and the sudden birth of the "new social movements" constitutes, then, the terrain of post-Marxism. Behind us is the dismal landscape of revolution, its "Jacobin Imaginary" scattered about the ruins like so many bloody body parts. Ahead is the future which, for all its enlightened post-Enlight- enment promise, nonetheless remains something of a "dark wood."

L&M's figure of choice is not, however, Dante but Descartes. "[W]hen one enters new territory," Descartes observes, one must follow the example of

travellers who, finding themselves lost in a forest, know that they ought not to wander first to one side and then to the other, nor, still less, to stop in one

The Rhetoric of Post-Marxism 169

place, but understand that they should continue to walk as straight as they can in one direction, not diverging for any slight reason, even though it was possibly chance alone that first determined them in their choice. By this means if they do not go exactly where they wish, they will at least arrive somewhere at the end, where probably they will be better off than in the middle of a forest. (HSS, 2)

At once classical and philosophical, this trope is meant to illustrate L&M's contention that in their "discourse on method," Hegemony and Socialist

Strategy, "[a]ll discursive eclecticism or wavering [has been] excluded from the very start" (HSS, 2).

Now, L&M's insistence in the preface that they have methodically eschewed "wavering" may come as news to those Marxists who maintain that their discursive-theoretical appropriation of deconstruction is a classic instance of eclecticism. But what, exactly, is this "straight" course that

Hegemony and Socialist Strategy putatively accomplishes? What sort of "place" do L&M "arrive" at in the "end," and is "somewhere" in fact a "better" position to be in than the "middle of a forest"?

In addition to the above peripatetic trope, L&M announce that their discourse is situated at the "middle point" between a "two-way movement": the theoretical and the political (HSS, 2). Yet given this self-deter- mination, it is perhaps more accurate to say that the discursive method of

Hegemony and Socialist Strategy is not critical philosophism but political theory. Indeed, this political-theoretical project derives, if only by way of inversion, from its discursive-methodological Other: political economy.

With respect to the latter, L&M suggest as much in "Hegemony: The Difficult Emergence of a New Political Logic," where they differentiate between two narratives of the Soviet revolutionary moment. In the "first narrative" (which corresponds to the classical-Marxist or, more precisely, Second International reading of Russian social democracy12), the "laws of

capitalist development are the plot, while the characters, with perfectly assigned roles, are the proletarian and capitalist classes" (HSS, 50). The "second narrative" (which can be metonymically represented by the

"Parvus-Trotsky thesis" of "permanent revolution"13) assumes-at least from the perspective of the first, dominant-evolutionist narrative-the character of an anomaly: "the bourgeois class cannot fulfill its role, and this has to be taken over by the other character" (HSS, 50). Question: what class will adopt that role which-at least according to the plot of

Capital-the nonexistent Russian bourgeoisie were supposed to play? Answer: the proletariat.14

According to L&M, the "structural" relationship between these two narratives is distinctly asymmetrical: while those "class relations" associated with the first, programmatic narrative are, in Saussure's terms, "facts

Robert Miklitsch

of langue," the "hegemonic relations" associated with the second, anom- alous narrative are "facts of parole" (HSS, 51). One might well want to

problematize L&M's recourse to Saussure here (where the political is

effortlessly translated into the linguistic), but according to Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, even Trotsky's storied reading of the Russian social- democratic problematic was ultimately dictated, like Lenin's (not to mention Pokrovsky's), by the synchronic master narrative of Capital:

There is no specificity, either for Trotsky or for Lenin, which can assure the survival of a Soviet state unless a socialist revolution breaks out in Europe, unless the victorious working classes of the advanced industrial countries come to the assistance of the Russian revolutionaries. Here the "abnormal- ity" of the dislocation of the stages in Russia links up with the "normal" development of the West: what we have called a "second narrative" is rein- tegrated into the "first narrative": "hegemony" rapidly finds its limits. (HSS, 54)

Though there are important political and theoretical differences between the Soviet instance and various Western European exceptions to the

orthodox, "stagist paradigm" (for example, the Austrian Social Democ- ratic Party [SPO]), I want to submit that L&M's rereading here of Russ- ian social democracy-a reading that owes not a little to "theoreticians of the Comintern" such as Plekhanov and Axelrod as well as later, more

original critics like Gramsci-can itself be read, en abime, as the "meta-" or master-narrative of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy.15

The real story of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy is not the first, economistic grand recit of Capital (exemplified by the minimal hegemonic discourse of Plekhanov) nor the second, social-democratic petit recit associated for L&M with Trotsky's discourse (where the hegemonic dimensions of indeterminacy are given maximum play), but that moment of the Soviet revolution in all its supplemental "specificity" which escapes these two narratives. In the interests of economy, so to speak, the "metanarra- tive" of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy can therefore be synopsized as follows: in lieu of political economism, which in the last instance assumes the primary role in that "saga" of hegemony (mis-)narrated by Lenin and Trotsky, Pokrovsky and Plekhanov, L&M substitute political theory.

How one reads this "role substitution"-of hegemony for economy and social or, more properly, radical democracy for the politics of the

proletariat-depends, of course, on one's perspective. Thus, one doesn't have to be an orthodox Marxist to argue that at the "end" of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (that is, "Hegemony and Radical Democracy"), L&M may have gotten where they wanted to go but that they are nonetheless still "lost in a forest" (HSS, 2), that this strategic "end" is a dead end, nowhere rather than "somewhere" (and, for that matter, not even the


"nowhere" of the utopian). In a phrase: they cannot see the forest for the trees.

But, however one reads Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, it is beginning to look, at least in retrospect, like the "inaugural manifesto" of the post- classical period of Marxism. Hence L&M's methodological double reac- centuation: post-Marxism (with the stress at once on the prefix "post-" and the substantive "Marxism" [HSS, 4]).

R&W: Class, Overdetermination, and the

Epistemology of Neo-Economics

In the postscript to the second chapter of Knowledge and Class (1987)- which, like Economics: Marxian versus Neo-Classical, appeared two years after Hegemony and Socialist Strategy-R&W offer a parable about Hin-

dess and Hirst (hereafter H&H)16 that remembers neither Dante nor Descartes but Homer. I mention this not simply because R&W's odyssey trope corresponds to L&M's "Cartesian" one17 but because their folksy story points up the common terrain of their respective projects: the discourse of poststructuralism.

The parable, not unlike L&M's master-narrative, has two parts. Part one: though H&H start out as vigorous critics of empiricism, with the

"changed political and theoretical conditions" of the 1960s, they begin to doubt the relevance of the "existing theoretical approaches," including their own reactive rationalism (KC, 107). As a result of this "politically healthy" skepticism, H&H embark in Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production on

a quest to find a theory that will be "relevant to current struggles," the so- called current situation, which theoretical embarkation ends the first part of the odyssey (KC, 107).

Part two: if, despite its criticality, Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production

does not effect a genuine break with Althusser-and H&H's initial rationalism therefore remains intact (since the above work's "empirical testing of alternate frameworks" constitutes a sort of theoretical reaction-formation), their second book, the post-Althusserian Mode of Production and Social Formation: An Autocritique of Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production, represents a definite turning point in the quest. The problem is neither rationalism nor empiricism but the "swinging back and forth" between the two

positions without, alas, ever being "able to escape the inevitable dogmatism of the swing" (KC, 107). For H&H (at least according to R&W), the answer is obvious: the "only way to 'socialism"' is to take the "true high road," to integrate, that is, "those economic and political and cultural struggles that characterize social life" (KC, 108).

Robert Miklitsch 172

However, if this last position is H&H's "affirmative answer" to that

question which is the "rapidly changing world" of the late 1960s and

early 1970s (which, in turn, constitutes the historical conditions of possibility for the New Left), this position is itself predicated on a dogmatic rejection of epistemology as such (KC, 108). This refusal, according to

Gregory Elliott, "is the 'anti-epistemological break' between the young rationalist-scientific Hirst and Hindess and their mature ideological-discursive selves."18 Hence, despite the fact that H&H have thought "long and hard, and more often than not rather brilliantly, about epistemology and its consequences" (to return to R&W's parable), they are ultimately unable to comprehend the truth and consequences of their post-epistemological odyssey. The moral of R&W's story about H&H is not so much Homeric as gnomic: "To seek the Truth is to find it; but beware of the

company for they are you" (KC, 108). What are "we" to make of this caveat: "beware of the company for

they are you"? Who is this "you"? Me? H&H? L&M? You? If the "lesson" of the H&H parable is, as R&W say, a "final" one, who in the end has the truth here?

In "Marxian Epistemology," the second chapter of Knowledge and Class, R&W take up the question of Russian social democracy in order to make a larger, more general point about political economy. Russian social

democracy is not only one "index" of the "unresolved status" of the debate over economism in classical Marxism (a position to which L&W would, I think, assent), but an instance par excellence of the epistemolog- ically defeatist habit in that tradition of historically linking specific economic debates to their "political contexts." The issue for R&W, though, is not so much what Lenin identified as the "errors and failures" of Russian social democracy-its theoretical tendency towards economism, or even the alleged link between its politics and economics-but the "common

epistemological terrain" that subtends these various positions and practices. In other words, the problem with political economy for R&W is neither the economy nor the polity, but epistemology.

Accordingly, in a quasi-confessional moment that is as unexpected as it is revelatory, R&W observe in passing that the impasse of political econ-

omy-or, more to the point, its ruinous ruling epistemologies, the Scylla of rationalism and the Charybdis of empiricism-is in fact what provoked them into the "oppositional act" of writing "Marxian Epistemology" (KC, 46). Hence R&W's definitive methodological move: if both empiricism and rationalism are forms of essentialism (where the essence of the Real is

"experience" and "reason" respectively), Marxian theory can, and must, be distinguished from other, non-Marxian theories such as rationalism and empiricism as well as from rationalist-empiricist strains within Marx-

The Rhetoric of Post-Marxism t73

ism itself by its "distinct epistemological standpoint": antiessentialism. Furthermore, since rationalism and empiricism open the door, unwit-

tingly or not, to non-Marxian concepts such as "sex, class, [and] race" (KC, 47), R&W's aim is to "eject" both empiricism and rationalism by "closing the door through which they arrived" (KC, 48).

So much, one might say, for L&M, the New Left, and the "new social movements." Still, R&W's project as it is developed in Knowledge and Class is not simply a negative, destructive one. If they close various, non- Marxian doors, they simultaneously open another, more properly Marx- ian one. Via an emphatically overdeterminist displacement (which can be said to constitute the affirmative moment of this particular deconstruc-

tion), the latter door opens, in turn, "onto a different terrain." Admittedly, this terrain is rather like that forest in which L&M found themselves at the

beginning of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, which is to say a terra incog- nita (since the signs that once showed the way have been swept away like so many hallucinatory landmarks). However, unlike the post-Marxist landscape of L&M's discourse (which has a certain aseptic "air," like

Mars), the "twin subsets" of R&W's theory of Marxianism, epistemology and social theory, retain an extremely classical aura or, to invoke one of their own words, "aroma" (KC, 49).

The twist, of course, is that neither dialectical materialism (whose critical concept is overdetermination) nor historical materialism (whose critical concept is class) is, for R&W, the "essence, cause, or final determinant of the other" (KC, 29). Given this diversion of, inter alia, the base-superstructure problem, it is clear (at least to R&W) that if the economic does not drive the political, the political does not drive the economic. All of which is to say that even as R&W's project in Knowledge and Class is a

species of economic theory, it is also, like L&M's political philosophy, a nonclassifiable or "abnormal" species (that is, neo-economics). For both L&M and R&W, then, there is no genus "Marxism," there are only species, "dialectical" and "historical" materialisms. Or post-Marxism and Marxianism, respectively.

And yet, if L&M's political and R&W's economic discourses share a common epistemological terrain (poststructuralism or, if you prefer, "discourse theory"), what is the difference between R&W and L&M? Are these yoked letters slightly different figures for the same poststructuralist project, or is the difference literal, that is to say, constitutive? More specifically, if the key figure for R&W is Althusser, and for L&M Gramsci, what door, if any, does this key open?


De-Tour: Gramsci/Althusser, or Gramsci after Althusser and Lacan

In Knowledge and Class, R&W articulate Gramsci/Althusser a number of times. For instance, in the subsection on "Althusser," R&W observe a la Gramsci and Althusser that Marxianism's recognition of a plurality of theories under construction is a "necessary precondition for effective criticism," that is to say, for the "achievement of theoretical hegemony" over the various truths under construction at any given moment (KC, 90). At the same time, R&W contend that Althusser, like Gramsci, was hesitant to break fully and finally "from the religious prehistory of epistemological guarantees of truth" (KC, 95), a radical epistemological step or conclusion that R&W are more than willing to take:

[T]his hesitancy left Althusser open to the charge of remaining an essentialist in epistemology, specifically a rationalist. Similarly, [Althusser's] hesitancy on last instance determinism left him open to the charge of being an essentialist in social theory, specifically a sophisticated economic determinist. Thus Althusser's hesitancy to take the next step and break unequivocally from essentialism of theory (rationalism) and essentialism in theory (economic determinism). (KC, 95)

Precisely because Gramsci, like Althusser, was unwilling to take the next

step-to make, that is, an absolute break with philosophies of essentialism (say, "absolute historicism")-his own "work was largely negative," aim- ing as it did to "distance" Marxism from its assimilation to bourgeois theory (KC, 78).

Though this critique of Gramsci/Althusser is, to say the least, moot (see, inter alia, Althusser's critique of Gramsci in Reading Capital19), R&W's reading of Gramsci is especially contrary, it seems to me, since that work was anything but "negative," whether this negativity is understood as a form of critical destruction or deconstruction. In fact, one "affirmative" direction of Gramsci's work devolves from his constructive engagement with the material institutions of civil society.20

Unfortunately, the concept of civil society was worse than beside the point for Althusser. The following passage from Reading Capital ("The Object of Political Economy") is symptomatic in the strict sense of the term:

The concept of "civil society," as found in Marx's mature writings and con- stantly repeated by Gramsci to designate the sphere of economic existence, is ambiguous and should be struck from Marxist theoretical vocabulary.21


R&W's almost

complete

reduction of the

political-economic

(hegemony) to

the theoretical

(epistemology)

suggests to me

that their

"negative"

reading of

Gramsci needs to

be stood on

its feet.

The extremity of the rhetoric here, which has unfortunate, if unintentional effects (I am thinking of Stalinist "historiography"), displays not only the

dogmatism of Althusser's notion of "epistemological break" (that is, the

"bourgeois" aspects of the "mature" Marx must be purged) but the

exegetical limits of the Althusserian text as well. Thus, with respect to the last point, readers of the Prison Notebooks will recall that Gramsci's triadic

understanding of civil society differs in many crucial aspects from Marx's dichotomous one. Where Marx in the preface to the Critique of Political

Economy reduces civil society to political economy, Gramsci distinguishes "civil society" from both the economy and "political society."

One can nevertheless appreciate the perversity of R&W's reading of Gramsci by situating it within the meta-epistemological narrative that fuels the first part of Knowledge and Class, a narrative that is itself inscribed within a certain post-Althusserian orbit. To tactically reduce and rewrite R&W: "Gramsci's particular theoretical development of

[hegemony] constitutes [merely] another step toward the formulation of the concept of overdetermination" (KC, 301 n. 123). When it comes to

epistemological matters, overdetermination is all. R&W's almost complete reduction of the political-economic (hege-

mony) to the theoretical (epistemology) suggests to me that their "negative" reading of Gramsci needs to be stood on its feet,22 so much so that one can speak of a Gramsci after Althusser or, more elaborately, after Althusser and Lacan. Which is to say, a Gramsci after R&W and L&M.

But first, L&M on Gramsci/Althusser. In Hegemony and Socialist

Strategy, L&M contend that the "most profound potential meaning of Althusser's statement that everything existing in the social is overdetermined, is the assertion that the social constitutes itself as a symbolic order" (HSS, 98). R&W would, I think, consent to this Lacanian-inflected

gloss of the meaning of overdetermination since L&M's rendition stresses its radically antiessentialist impulse: "Society and social agents lack any essence, and their regularities merely consist of the relative and precarious forms of fixation which accompany the establishment of a certain order"

(HSS, 98). In addition, L&M assert a la R&W that the concept of overdetermination was "unable to produce the totality of its deconstructive effects" within Marxism because of Althusser's economism (that is, deter- mination in the last instance) and, equally importantly, because of his residual rationalism (HSS, 98).

As for the "school of Althusser" (that is, H&H), L&M's critique mirrors R&W's: in order to avoid analytically regressing back to the "rationalism or empiricism" debate which H&H desperately, albeit

unsuccessfully, sought to resolve, "it is necessary to move to a different terrain" (HSS, 103). However, the concept that will simultaneously effect this displacement and mine the radicality of the "original


Althusserian formulation," according to L&M, is not overdetermination but articulation (where articulation is the precondition of that "struc- tured totality" which is discourse as such [HSS, 105]). The "specific

logic" of articulation reveals, in turn, not only a certain consonance

between Gramsci/Althusser-"the progressive affirmation . . . of the

material character of ideologies" (HSS, 109)-but the hegemonic limits of their projects as well. That is, once the essentialist assumption of an a

priori unity-whether it be the "unifying role of a class" (as in Gramsci) or the "functional requirements of the logic of reproduction" (as in

Althusser)-is abandoned, "the category of articulation acquires a dif-

ferent theoretical status" (HSS, 109). This status is, strictly speaking, the

hegemonic one.

Now, I invoke L&M's critique of Gramsci/Althusser here in order, first, to avoid a precipitate valorization of Gramsci over Althusser and, second, in order to perform a tactical displacement (via "Lacan"23) of

both a certain neo-Gramscianism and post-Althusserianism.24 But before I turn to the latter "proper name" (that is, Lacan), let me recapitulate those propositions with which I closed the second part of this chapter: if

L&M's project can be characterized as political theory where the critical

concepts are hegemony and radical democracy, R&W's project can be char-

acterized as an economic theory where the privileged "entry points" for

their epistemology and social theory are overdetermination and class

respectively. To turn, or return, to Lacan: in "Freud and Lacan," Althusser asserts

that without doubt the "most original aspect of Lacan's work, his discov-

ery," was his insistence on the Symbolic or what Althusser calls the "Law

of Culture."25 Paradoxically enough, what escapes both L&M and R&W's

discursive theories is the concept and practice of culture.

Though there are very few discussions, let alone illustrations, of cul-

ture per se in Knowledge and Class, the following passage is representative:

We may . . . extend Marx's theorization of what we term subsumed classes to

encompass social processes providing ideological or, more broadly, cultural conditions of existence for the capitalist fundamental class process. The subsumed class of directors of the state apparatus often provides, for example, for free public education and free public cultural programs. This involves the design and dissemination of concepts of justice, society, work, individu-

ality, and so forth. These concepts function in people's minds as means to construct and construe their life experiences. Belief in and thinking by means of specific conceptual frameworks are cultural conditions of existence of the capitalist fundamental class process. (KC, 130)

This description of the so-called cultural process not only draws labo-

riously on Althusser's statist conception of ideology (that is, "ideological


state apparatus"),26 but it is even less nuanced, which is to say more func- tionalist, than the latter. It therefore invites, in the absence of other, coun- terfactual textual evidence,27 the sort of "dominant ideology thesis" cri-

tique advanced by Abercrombie, Hill, and Turner.28 If R&W's understanding of culture in Knowledge and Class is, at best,

perfunctory and, at worst, instrumental, L&M's understanding of culture in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy isn't appreciably more complex, despite Gramsci's obvious influence.29 In fact, L&M's only real discussion of the cultural sphere occurs in the last chapter of Hegemony and Socialist Strat-

egy, where they draw on French regulation theory (in particular, the work of Michel Aglietta) to argue that the "intensive" regime of capital associated with the postwar period, so-called post-Fordism, resulted in a "commodification" of the socius, a process that "destroyed previous social relations" and replaced them with "commodity relations through which the

logic of capitalist accumulation penetrated into increasingly numerous

spheres" (HSS, 161). In addition to the bureaucratization of social life and the "reformulation" of liberal-democratic ideology, the hegemonic formation of post-Fordism also produced distinctly cultural effects: "the new cultural forms linked to the expansion of the means of communication" (HSS, 163).30

L&M, then, unlike R&W, do account, if only in passing, for the profound impact the sphere of culture has had on social life since the Second World War, particularly in the United States. Indeed, L&M's articulation of what I will call the "culture of capitalism" with political economy or, more properly, social and economic regulation is quite close to the concerns of this essay. This said, the problem with L&M's analysis of the cultural is that it all too typically remains at an Olympian level of generality. For if in our media-based culture new cultural forms such as video are in fact related to the expansion of the means of communication, it is imperative, it seems to me, to understand the specificity and materiality of this cultural-communicative relation, a relation that raises a number of critical

questions. What, exactly, are the "new cultural forms"? Equally importantly, what are their industrial-institutional or, more precisely yet, productive and distributive conditions of existence?

In sum, if in R&W culture is subtly reduced to either the class process or the "state apparatus," in L&M it is reduced-like almost everything else-to political theory, as if Habermas were the paradigm of "high culture."31 Recollecting Gramsci, I want to propose that the Law of Cul- ture-which, as we have seen, derives from Althusser by way of Lacan- only takes on its true value when and if it is reinscribed as the sphere or space of civil society. Though the concept of civil society has, it is true, an ambiguous status in Gramsci's work,32 I understand it here as that domain of social hegemony which mediates between the economy and political

Robert Miklitsch

society. (Hence the accent in Gramsci on the institutions of civil society as "cultural intermediations."33) As Gramsci puts it: "Between the economic structure and the State with its legislation and its coercion stands civil

society" (SPN, 208). In other words, while a determinate dialectical relation obtains among these various spheres or structures, civil society retains, true to Gramsci's double "declaration of independence," a semi-

autonomy from both the economy and political society. With respect to the former (the economic), Gramsci states that civil

society is "resistant to the catastrophic 'incursions' of the immediate economic element (crises, depressions, etc.)" (SPN, 235; italics mine). More

importantly, this civil-social resistance to the economic34 intimates that a

hegemonic revolution or "war of position" must be distinguished from that "immediate," "catastrophic" transformation of the economy associated in classical Marxism with the concept of Revolution or, for Gramsci, "war of manoeuvre."35 Again, though there is a perhaps irreconcilable

ambiguity in Gramsci between "war of position and "war of manoeuvre"

(for example, not only the genetic, "tactical" question of which moment comes first, but the larger, "strategic" question of whether both moments are necessary),36 I want to insist here on the historical specificity and sin-

gularity of the "war of position" which, for Gramsci, assumes its significance only after the "events of 1917" (SPN, 235).

As for political society, Gramsci's formula-"State = political society + civil society" (that is, "hegemony protected by the armour of coercion"

[SPN, 263])-reflects his position that, "in concrete reality, civil society and State are one and the same" (SPN, 208),37 a "general," "integral" position that is reflected in Althusser's distinction between the Repressive and Ideological State apparatuses (the ISAs and RSA respectively [LP, 141-48]). Against the latter, statist conflation of civil and political society, though, I want to argue that civil society is not only distinct from the

economy and political society but refers, explicitly, to the "'private' apparatus of 'hegemony"' (SPN, 261),38 which "private apparatus" refers in turn to the "ensemble of organisms" or, for Althusser, "body of institutions" ("religious apparatus," "educational apparatus," "communications

apparatus," et cetera. [LP, 150]). Yet if Althusser is clearly concerned to elaborate the material charac-

ter of ideologies ("Thesis II: Ideology has a material existence" [LP, 165]), the point is to attend not so much to ideology as to the body or

materiality of the above civil-social institutions, as Althusser himself does in the following passage from "Ideology and Ideological State Appara- tuses": "ideology always exists in an apparatus, and its practice, or practices. This existence is material" (LP, 166). As my recourse to the concept of the Law of Culture is intended to suggest, I also want to emphasize- against both L&M and R&W-the cultural as opposed to economic or


political character of these civil-social intitutions, an emphasis that is not inconsistent with a certain Marxism, since according to Gramsci, the

"philosophy of praxis" consists precisely "in the 'exploitation' of the cultural factor, of cultural activity, of a cultural front which is as necessary as the merely economic and the merely political one."39

In fact, with respect to the question of culture, the celebrated passage from the conclusion to Gramsci's "State and Civil Society"-"The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear" (SPN, 276)-this "pessimistic" passage must itself be read within the dialectical context of the final, affirmative sentence of the essay: the "reduction to economics and to politics means precisely a reduction of the

highest superstructures to the level of those which adhere more closely to the structure itself-in other words, the possibility and necessity of creat-

ing a new culture" (SPN, 276). About this Law of Culture (which is also, as Levi-Strauss reminds us,

the domain or terrain of language, and is not therefore antagonistic to a delimited, realist-strategic notion of discourse40), I want to say five things.

One: Marxianism after Marx. The Law of Culture is not synonymous with the "name of the father" (here Marx), however understood.41

From this post-Marxist perspective, R&W's Marxianism remains thor-

oughly ensnared in an Imaginary relation with Marx, or at least a certain

reading for which Marx himself constitutes the last, theoretical instance. R&W's misreading of the following, critical passage from the Grundrisse illustrates just how far they are willing to go to save Marx for Marxianism. First the Marx, then the R&W:

The conclusion we reach is not that production, distribution, exchange and consumption are identical, but they all form members of a totality, distinctions within a totality. Production predominates not only over itself, in the anti- thetical definition of production, but over the other moments as well. (KC, 61; italics mine)

[T]he first sentence indicates Marx's concept of the concrete-real as the totality of mutually overdetermining and overdetermined "members" or sites. The second sentence indicates which concepts Marx defines and deploys distinctively within his science-which concepts predominate in the specific sense of serving as the entry point . . . and the goal point of his

strictly nonessentialist theoretical process. (KC, 61)

While it is certainly possible to enlist the above, rich passage from the

Grundrisse, as I have elsewhere, as an instance of Marx at his most com-

plex (for example, consumption is not simply determined by production),42 I am unwilling as a reader to grant that Marx's formulation here

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ultimately breaks, as R&W claim it does, from a productivist problematic (this last in the strict, Althusserian sense of the term).43 Marx may, despite his own famous disclaimer, have been a Marxist, but whatever he was, he was no Marxian.

Unlike R&W's post-Althusserian or, more precisely, post-Hindess- Hirstian take on classical Marxism, L&M's post-Marxism problematizes the above patronymic lure as well as those quasi essentialisms, such as the

category of class, which continue to haunt R&W's discourse. That is, L&M's post-Marxism is not a "new interpretation of what Marx 'really wanted to say"' (NR, 203), which is not to say that post-Marxism is an "ex-Marxism."44 In fact, the political and intellectual tradition of Marxism is anything but irrelevant to Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, as Laclau notes in "Theory, Democracy, and Socialism":

the ambiguity of Marxism-which runs through its whole history-is not a deviation from an untainted source, but dominates the entire work of Marx himself.... It is because Marxism has been nothing but the historical locus of this ambivalence, because its history has largely been an attempt to resolve that ambivalence by a movement away from its essential features-a process that our book describes in detail-that a final settlement of scores with that essentialism must be termed post-Marxism, not simply Marxism. (NR, 236)

In this passage, the difference between L&M and R&W asserts itself since, despite a certain procedural sameness, L&M insist not so much on the antiessentialism of Marxianism (as in R&W) as on the history and

ambiguity, the ambivalent historicity, of the discourse of Marxism. Still, the insistence in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy on discourse rather than, say, the institutional is by no means unproblematic, which brings me to the second point.

Two: The point of le point de capiton. The impossibility of what L&M call an "ultimate fixity of meaning" presupposes the existence of partial fixations, since as L&M themselves observe, even in order "to differ, to subvert meaning, there has to be meaning" (HSS, 112). Unlike Deleuze and Guattari, then, L&M recognize the necessity of signification: "a discourse incapable of generating any fixity of meaning is the discourse of the psychotic" (HSS, 112). Hence the indispensability, for L&M, of Lacan's notion of the points de capiton,45 which constitute the "privileged discursive points" of the "partial fixations." But what is the status of these "nodal points" in L&M's discourse?

In Hegemony and Socialist Strategy at least, the emphasis is firmly on the fictional and differential "nature" of these "partial fixations." For instance: if the "practice of articulation . . . consists in the construction of nodal points which partially fix meaning," the "partial character of this fixa-


tion proceeds from the openness of the social, a result, in its turn, of the constant

overflowing of every discourse by the infinitude of the field of discursivity" (HSS, 113). The stress here, it is clear, is less on the structural, material- institutional limits of "dislocation" or dissemination as on the infinite force of this "spillage."46

As for the ontological status of the nodal points, L&M are equally emphatic: "All discourse of fixation becomes metaphorical: literality is, in actual fact, the first of metaphors" (HSS, 111; italics mine). Not unlike Derrida, L&M are fixated, as it were, on the concept of fixation, as if lit-

erality were somehow always already protofascist.47 The problem with this "fear" of fixation is that it not only "betrays an anarchistic suspicion of institutionality as such," ignoring, in Terry Eagleton's words, the "extent to which a certain provisional stability is essential ... for revolutionary politics" (IA, 198), it also seems to forget-and rather willfully at that-the degree to which post-Fordism and the electronic mass media in

particular are predicated on the infinite glissement of the signifier. Three: The discourse of institutionality. If, as L&M say, "the social

does not exist," the social nonetheless assumes certain institutional if not rational forms, of which "the market" is one, super-institutional instance. Here Gramsci meets Althusser on a path that neither L&M nor R&W really pursues. In "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," though, Althusser marks the following debt: "Gramsci is the only one who went

any distance on the road I am taking. He had the 'remarkable' idea that the State could not be reduced to the (Repressive) State Apparatus, but included, as he put it, a certain number of institutions from 'civil society"' (LP, 142).

With this important, albeit statist, passage from Althusser in mind (as well as L&M's appropriation of Lacan's notion of the points de capiton), I want to propose that the material-discursive institutions of civil society are the "nodal points" of the Law of Culture. More to the point, I want to

propose that this Law or Symbolic Order is not simply the "absolute precondition of any discourse" (as in Lacan as read by Althusser [LP, 212]) but the "culture of capitalism" or, more specifically yet, the capital-intensive colonization of the "private" sphere.48

Yet if this cultural-economic aspect of capitalism is arguably an

implicit part of L&M's radical-democratic project, the material specificity of institutionality remains as underdeveloped in Hegemony and Socialist

Strategy as the question of culture. Despite or perhaps because of L&M's reliance on Foucault,49 the problem of institutionality is merely one "element" among many in L&M's analysis of the discursive/non-discursive distinction: "if the so-called non-discursive complexes-institutions, tech- nologies, productive organizations, and so on-are analyzed, we will only


find more or less complex forms of differential positions among objects" (HSS, 107). Here, even as the specificity of institutions is erased via an indiscriminate seriality (not unlike R&W's mechanical invocation of culture in Knowledge and Class), the materiality of the institutional is reduced to the "complex" differentiality of the discursive.

Laclau's response in New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time to Nicos Mouzelis's critique of his and Mouffe's work does, it is true, pro- vide a more considered account of the problem of institutionality.50 Fol-

lowing in the footsteps of Foucault and Derrida, Laclau usefully observes that "social agents are partially internal to the institutions, thus forcing both the notion of 'agency' and 'institution' to be deconstructed" (NR, 223). However, Laclau's defensive reiteration of his and Mouffe's position on institutionality in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy in the very same

response speaks volumes:

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. (NR, 223)

Here, one might say, is the crux of the problem with respect to both the question of institutionality and L&M's project in general. While on one hand it may be productive to focus on the differential structure of

institutions, one really has to wonder about the theoretical, not to mention

political, use-value of describing institutions such as the market or trans- national corporations as "systems of differences."51 Such a hyperdiscur- sive description of institutionality evacuates, it seems to me, any and every "trace" of that materiality which distinguishes mass-media institutions

(say, Time Warner) from this or that art-commodity (say, a Madonna

video), since the latter text is also arguably a system of differences.52

Though the class-based analysis of "enterprise" in Knowledge and Class is problematic on a number of accounts-the analysis of advertising as a cultural process leans, for instance, on a simple notion of ideology as rationalization (KC, 169)53-R&W, unlike L&M, do produce a sustained and relatively integrated examination of the "fundamental" institution of

capitalism. In fact, R&W's critical disaggregation of the notion of profits from the problem of exploitation as such54 should be required reading for those Marxists who believe that there is a necessary rather than sufficient relation between capitalism and commodification. This last point-translated into the adjacent domains of media and cultural studies-could well have a salutary effect on the study of the complex relations between cultural and commodity production as well as the more general, and generally neglected, issue of institution vis-a-vis ideology critique.


Four: The fundamentality of neo-economics.55 In Hegemony and Socialist

Strategy, the lack of attention to culture and institutionality produces what

Eagleton calls an "overpoliticization" (IA, 213) that, paradoxically enough, undermines whatever strategic value L&M's radical democratic

project might have. Similarly, in Knowledge and Class a certain fundamental understanding of class and the state blocks any real engagement with the "culture of capitalism." Like Althusser who brackets the "repressive" function of the Ideological State Apparatuses even as the state remains the "precondition for any distinction between public and private" (LP, 144), R&W advance an equally qualified reading of the state in "Class Analysis: A Marxian Theory of the State" (the "state as the social site where certain conditions of existence of the capitalist fundamental class process are produced need not always be the site where they are

produced" [KC, 273]) only to smuggle a certain statism in through the back door. Indeed, for R&W, a certain neostatism seems to be inextricable from a certain neoclassism. I say "neo" because although R&W note the "relative position of the state in capitalist society" (KC, 273) as well as the various "processes" that comprise any particular social formation ("nat- ural, economic, political, and cultural" [KC, 19]), the emphasis in Knowl-

edge and Class is distinctly on the state (as opposed to, say, civil society) and class (as opposed to, say, race).

Thus, though R&W's discussion of class in "A Marxian Theory of Classes" (especially their distinction between "fundamental" and "subsumed" class positions/processes56) represents a genuine contribution to the topic, this innovation appears to come at the direct expense of any comparable discussion of race and sex-gender. In fact, R&W always only invoke the general category of "non-class" processes rather than any specific process such as "sexual oppression" (KC, 279), as if the latter cate-

gory might unduly burden the streamlined epistemological model that

graces Knowledge and Class. The following passage is indicative: "the conditions of existence of the class process are all the non-class processes in the social totality without whose particular characteristics and interac- tions the class process could and would not exist" (KC, 116).

Moreover, on those rare occasions when R&W do engage an extra- "economic" practice such as culture, their discussion tends to concentrate

exclusively on its class character: "the set of processes defining the rela-

tionship called working includes cultural processes involving, say, the manner in which the workers conceptualize the social significance of their work" (KC, 20; italics mine). If this reading of labor is legitimate within its own quite specific context, it is also hard to imagine a more restricted illustration of the process of culture, working-class or otherwise. In fact, the above passage, classist as it is, makes the most proletarian literature

appear positively expansive by comparison.

Robert Miklitsch

To be fair, in "This Book's Political Position," the final part of Knowl-

edge and Class, R&W bravely endeavor to respond to the question that lies like a fault beneath the prosaic, superexpository surface of their text:

"Why choose class as an entry point rather than racial or sexual oppression?" (KC, 279). The short answer to this question is, as I have sug- gested, Marx(ianism): "What Marx sought and we continue to seek to contribute to struggles for social change are not only our practical ener-

gies but also certain distinctive theoretical insights. The most important of these for us concerns class" (KC, 279). The longer and more persuasive answer to this question is that the concept of class was a "'repressed' element in the consciousness of [Marx's] time" and, as such, represented a "critical lapse in the knowledge of society" (KC, 279).

Now, inasmuch as class arguably remains the unconscious of Ameri- can society, one would think that R&W's valorization of class in Knowl-

edge and Class would have a certain theoretical, not to mention polemical, force. The irony, though, is that R&W's deployment of poststructuralist discourse in Knowledge and Class effectively re-represses or re-domesticates the issue of class by attempting to square it with Marxist discourse at its most classical and by failing to articulate it with those other discourses and practices which, however "minor," tend to dominate the national consciousness: race (the L.A. riots), sex-gender (the Clarence Thomas

hearings), et cetera. For all its surrealist epistemological allure, then, R&W's marriage of

Marxian economics and poststructuralist discourse theory-a conjunc- tion which sometimes seems like the critical equivalent of an "umbrella and sewing machine on a dissecting table"-looks, in the end, all too familiar. At the end of the odyssey that is Knowledge and Class, we are, like Odysseus himself, back home (oikos), back at the beginning.

Five: The embarrassment of "enriched" Gramscianism.57 If all roads for R&W lead back, despite the postmodern twists and turns, to Marx, L&M's Cartesian peregrination comes to something of the same dead end.

The irony of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy is that at the end, the "only path" left open to L&M is the one that they have been traveling all along (and, not so incidentally, which they reproach H&H for having pursued): "a logical pulverization of the social, coupled with a theoreti- cally agnostic descriptivism of the 'concrete situations"' (HSS, 104). In this passage, L&M subject themselves to an implicit, and devastating, self-critique. For what else is L&M's deconstruction or, more precisely, destruction58 of the socius-embodied in the concept of "post-society" (NR, 193)-than a "logical" and, ultimately, super-rationalist "pulverization of the social"? Furthermore, L&M's epistemology, sophisticated as it is, is ultimately as vulnerable to the charge of "cognitive agnosticism" as H&H or R&W's,59 since in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, the "concrete situa-


tion" is subjected to a relentless discursive processing that de-situates even as it describes the "concrete real." The result (in a nutshell) is an order of discourse that appears to be able to generate endless descriptions of the "social" order yet cannot explain how, or why, any one description might be more preferable than another.

Again, this dematerialization of the Real (in the Jamesonian sense60) is clearest in L&M's understanding of institutionality, as in the following post-Kantian passage:

To show the original sense of something ... is to question its obviousness, to refer it back to the absolute act of institution. And that act is absolutely institutional if the possibilities of other acts existed, if the institutional decision was ultimately arbitrary and contingent.... [T]he ground on which this absolute act of institution takes place is what we call politics, and the desedimentation of the social consists of revealing its political essence. (NR, 213)

Desedimentation or, to revert to another vocabulary, demystification is, it is clear, a necessary moment of any project that calls itself critical. How- ever, desedimentation rapidly reaches its practical-political limits, its pur- chase as a "socialist strategy," when it comes up against actually existing institutions, whose sedimentation is surprisingly resistant to the sort of radicalized notion of Husserlian "reactivation" that, for L&M, is the positive moment of desedimentation.61 In the final analysis, L&M's critique of the social in general and institutions in particular leaves things just as

they are-which is to say, untouched. Here, one might say, the ghost of Gramsci returns with something of

the force of the repressed. Or the snake bites the snake charmers. While the "radical historicity" of social relations-the fact that "there is no institutional structure which is not ultimately vulnerable" (NR, 224)-is, for Laclau, cause for "radical optimism," such intellectual optimism, tonic as it admittedly is on the Left today, is only viable if one has the necessary "will" to transform the actually existing, civil-social institutions of capitalism.

Such, at least, was Gramsci's lesson.

Postscript: Gramsci after Hegel/Lacan/Althusser, or Gramsci after Zizek

Unlike both L&M and R&W, Slavoj Zizek effects an explicit return to

Hegel by way of Lacan: "the only way to 'save Hegel' is through Lacan."62 Indeed, in The Sublime Object of Ideology, Zizek maintains that the Haber- mas-Foucault debate masks another, more originary couple: Lacan/

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Althusser.63 Accordingly, elaborating on the Lacanian-Althusserian axis in

the introduction to They Know Not What They Do, he defines the "three

centres of gravity" of his work as "Hegelian dialectics, Lacan's psychoan-

alytic theory, and contemporary criticism of ideology."64 Hence the rele-

vance, for me, of the following formula or reformulation: Gramsci after

Hegel/Lacan/Althusser. Or: Gramsci after Ziek. I rehearse this mini-genealogy of Zizek's work because in his critique

of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, "Beyond Discourse Analysis" (which is appended to Laclau's New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time), he

radically misreads the real lack at the heart of L&M's project and thereby threatens to deepen the already by no means negligible problems that

attend their project. Bluntly, the "beyond" of "discourse analysis" has

less to do, pace Zizek, with the "subject as an empty place correlative to

[social] antagonism" or with "social fantasy as the elementary ideological mode to mask the antagonism" (NR, 259) than with the "culture of capitalism," which Law of Culture, as I have argued above, refers to those civil-social institutions that have always already sutured the capitalist Imaginary.

In other words, it is time to return to the referent (where the institutional constitutes one, critical referent for that metadiscourse which is

Marxism).65

Along just these lines, Eagleton argues in "Discourse and Ideology" that the "semiotic model" that governs H&H's practice and, a fortiori, L&M's is the structural-linguistic one between signifier and signified (read

metadiscourse) rather than the one between sign and referent (read material discourse). The result is that two very different meanings of discourse are conflated in L&M's metadiscursive model:

those which are said to constitute our practices [material discourse] and those in which we talk about them [metadiscourse]. Ideology, in short, goes to work on the "real" situation in transformative ways .... [F]or if our discourses are constitutive of our practices, then there would seem to be no

enabling distance between the two in which this transformative labour could occur. And to speak of a transformative labour here implies that something pre-exists this process, some referent, something worked upon, which cannot be the case if the signifier simply conjures the "real" situation into being. (IA, 209)

Precisely because it allows one to distinguish analytically between material discourses such as institutions and metadiscourses like L&M and

R&W's, whether political-theoretical or economic-epistemological, Eagle- ton's distinction here between meta- and material discourse is, it seems to

me, indispensable for a post-Marxism that desires to refuse, both consis-

tently and conscientiously, the lure of discursivism.


The binary

of reform and

revolution-

or, as I have

strategically

reinscribed

it here,

"war of position"

versus "war of

movement"-

ultimately proves

counterproductive

as the antinomy

between

centralization

and marketization.

Not insignificantly, a working distinction between meta- and material discourse not only recognizes the discursive "nature" of institutions (a position that is not, needless to say, alien to Gramsci66) but preserves the

ontological distinction between the order of things and the order of discourse as well. The latter differentia, which neither R&W nor L&M appears willing to entertain,67 is in turn predicated on what Roy Bhaskar calls the "intransitive."68 With this in mind, one might say that to fall prey to the

"epistemic fallacy" (roughly, the reduction of things to discourse) is to surrender to the "politics" of discourse theory. And whether it is the

"political voluntarism" of H&H69 or the more moderate, "modified" critical Hindess-Hirstianism of R&W and L&M, the politics of the signifier will not, in the final analysis, do.

Though the rhetoric of post-Marx(ian)ism in L&M and R&W sometimes seems like a form of rhetorical Marxism, it is also important to remember that what Eagleton laments as the "long march from Saussure to social democracy" (IA, 213)-the fall, that is, from "revolutionism to reformism"-cannot simply be attributed to discourse theory. Indeed, such a sweeping gesture threatens to collapse into just the sort of carica- ture that Eagleton himself critiques. For if it is crucial to retain the con-

cept of the referent in order to engage, among other things, the material-

ity of civil society, this does not mean, at least as I read it, a return to revolutionism as such, whether Leninist or Gramscian. The binary of reform and revolution70-or, as I have strategically reinscribed it here, "war of position" versus "war of movement"-ultimately proves as coun-

terproductive as the antinomy between centralization and marketization. The experience of defeat under which the international Left is now labor-

ing encourages, it is true, just such blinkered thinking, so that even to broach the subject of the "market" in Marxist circles is to be guilty pure and simple of reformism, while by the same logic to advocate the unadul- terated good of "smashing the State" and of "planned allocation" remains the most revolutionary, albeit reflexive, of gestures.

Is this the historical lesson of the twentieth century? I submit that a rather different, if less radical, counterhegemonic strat-

egy is called for. In order to begin to activate this strategy, however, it is first necessary to begin entertaining some pretty unorthodox assump- tions: first and foremost perhaps, the argument that reform in the strong sense of the term71 may be on the agenda today for the Left in the advanced capitalist countries does not represent, at least not necessarily, some craven capitulation to the triumphalist rhetoric that has punctuated the "debate" about "the market" versus "the plan" since the "end of communism."72 As Laclau remarks in New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time: just because the days of centralized planning are gone "does not mean that we must give up on conscious regulation of the economic

process and trust entirely to market mechanisms" (NR, xii-xv).


And yet, if it is clear, as Laclau argues, that the exclusive alternative of "Marx or the market" must be rigorously deconstructed, this is only the first step. If we are to avoid repeating the historical mistakes of, inter alia, Russian and European social democracy, it is imperative not only "to go through the fantasy" of the social, as Zizek suggests, but to traverse and reclaim the "culture of capitalism," those all-too-real, material-discursive institutions that constitute the heart of civil society. That the institutional is a, perhaps even the, most laborious route toward a better, more equi- table world goes without saying. Still, if it is true that we stand today at a crossroads, the "cold war" finally behind us and some sort of "new world order" ahead, then the future depends, it seems to me, on whether or not we are willing to take this difficult step.

Notes

1. Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, Ideology and Power in the Age of Lenin in Ruins (New York: St. Martin's, 1991).

2. Editorial, "From Marx to the Market," Economist, 11 May 1990, 11-12. 3. Drawing on linguistics, Fredric Jameson notes that the "word market, with

its various dialect pronunciations and its etymological origins in the Latin for trade and merchandise, is printed as market; on the other hand, the concept, as it has been theorized by philosophers and ideologues down through the ages, from Aristotle to Milton Friedman, would be printed <<market>>" (See "Economics: Postmodernism and the Market," in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991], 260).

4. J. K. Galbraith, "The Rush to Capitalism," New York Review of Books, 25 October 1990, 51-52.

5. David Selbourne, "The Light that Failed," Times Literary Supplement, 10 May 1991, 7-8.

6. Morton Kondracke, "Leaning on the Left," New York Times Book Review, 15 March 1992, 16.

7. Ibid., 16. 8. Edward and Ronald Chilcote, "The Crisis of Marxism: An Appraisal of

New Directions," Rethinking Marxism 5 (summer 1992): 84-106. 9. Jirgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. F G.

Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), 74. 10. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy:

Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985); hereafter cited in the text as HSS. When discussing Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Laclau fre- quently speaks for his partner, Chantal Mouffe. I will adopt this convention, however problematic, unless otherwise indicated, in which case I will speak of Laclau in the singular.

For the Mouffe, see her "Radical Democracy: Modern or Postmodern?" in Universal Abandon: The Politics of Postmodernism, ed. Andrew Ross (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 31-45; and her "Democratic Politics Today" and "Democratic Citizenship and the Political Community," in Dimen- sions of Radical Democracy: Pluralism, Citizenship, Community, ed. Mouffe (Lon- don: Verso, 1992), 1-14 and 225-39 respectively.


11. For a more detailed discussion of the "new social movements" as well as a more "positive" evaluation of L&M's project, see Miklitsch, "News from Some- where: Reading Raymond Williams' Readers," in Cultural Materialism, ed. Christopher Prendergast (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).

12. The question of social democracy-both Russian and European-is of course a subject of intense debate from Marx and Engels through Kautsky, Lux- emburg, Hilferding, and beyond. It seems to me that the sorts of problems social democracy posed both in theory and practice (reform vs. revolution, "mixed" vs. "command economy," etc.), are back on the agenda-albeit in very changed cir- cumstances. In 1920, Otto Bauer queried, "Bolshevism or social democracy?" (Bolschewismus oder Sozial-democratie?) As I hope to make clear in the conclusion to this essay, this particular question, like the base-superstructure model, is not part of the answer but part of the problem.

On Austro-German as well as European social democracy both before and after 1945, see L&M, "Crisis and Degree Zero" and "Social Democracy: From Stagnation to 'Planism,"' in HSS, 45-54 and 70-75 respectively.

On Russian social democracy, which constitutes a locus classicus for L&M (vide infra n. 13-14), see "Combined Development and the Logic of the Contin- gent" (HSS, 14-19). I might add that although L&M's critique of social democracy is indispensable, the value of social democracy is that, however reformist, it engaged the actually existing institutional structures of the day (e.g., electoral representation). For all its theoretical resourcefulness, L&M's project for radical vis-a-vis social democracy remains, essentially, a theoretical program.

For an excellent historical overview of social democracy, see Adam Prze- worski, "Social Democracy as a Historical Phenomenon," in Capitalism and Social Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 7-46.

13. Alexander Klefland, under the pseudonym Parvus, composed the introduction to Trotsky's pamphlet, "Until the Ninth of January" (1905), where he introduced the notion of "permanent revolution." For Gramsci on Parvus-Trot- sky, see Prison Notebooks, vol. 1, trans. Joseph A. Buttigieg and Antonio Callari (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 441-42 n. 53.

For Laclau's take on Trotsky's position, see "Politics and the Limits of Modernity," in Universal Abandon? 74; and "New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time," in New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (London: Verso, 1990), 48-49; hereafter cited in the text as NR.

14. While Parvus-Trotsky argued for the proletariat as mediated by the Social-Democratic Party, the opposing tendency-the Bolsheviks and Bukharin in particular-petitioned for an alliance between the peasantry and the proletariat as well as, equally importantly, the possibility of "socialism in one country."

15. For Laclau's critique of "meta-narratives," see "Politics," 63-82, esp. 63-66.

16. Hindess and Hirst (H&H) are central figures, like Gramsci and Althusser (and, less directly, Lacan), for both L&M and R&W. H&H's critical texts in this regard are Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975) and Mode of Production and Social Formation: An Autocritique of Pre- Capitalist Modes of Production (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977).

For L&M's critique of H&H-including Marx's "Capital" and Capitalism Today with Cutler and Hussain (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977), see Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (100-5). For R&W's critique of H&H, see their "Postscript: Parable of Hindess and Hirst," in Knowledge and Class: A Marxian

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Critique of Political Economy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); hereafter cited in the text as KC. In addition to the postscript, see also R&W's "Read- ings of Althusser" (KC, 99-106) as well as the critical debate conducted in the footnotes (esp. 304-05 n. 165-172). For another take on H&H, see Terry Eagle- ton, "Discourse and Ideology," in Ideology: An Introduction (London: Verso, 1991), 203-18; hereafter cited in the text as IA.

17. For what I take to be the source of this trope, see Gregory Elliott, "The Odyssey of Paul Hirst," New Left Review, no. 159 (September-October 1986): 81-105.

18. Ibid., 94. 19. Louis Althusser, "Marxism Is Not a Historicism," in Althusser and Eti-

enne Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1970), 118-44, esp. 126-37.

20. See "On Education," in Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International, 1971), 26-43; hereafter cited in the text as SPN. Among many possible examples, I will limit myself to what I take in the context (i.e., academic journal) to be a particularly apposite one: Gramsci's response to the so-called Gentile Reform, which was instituted in 1923 under the sign of the Mussolini regime.

On this topic, see also "The People, Intellectuals, and Specialized Knowl- edge," the postscript to Anne Showstack Sassoon's Gramsci's Politics (Minneapo- lis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). See also n. 27 below.

21. Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital, 162. 22. Gramsci himself cites Marx's famous critical trope: "the mystification

which the dialectic suffers in Hegel's hands by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of motion in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head" (Sie steht bei ihm auf dem Kopf). For the Marx and Gramsci, see "Marx and Hegel," SPN, 231-32 and 518-19.

23. Lacan's influence on L&M and R&W appears to be a mediated one, especially in the latter case. For instance, L&M's invocation of the points de capiton-which they translate as "nodal points"-is a parenthetical one (HSS, 112). On L&M's employment of the concept of "suture," which derives from Jacques- Alain Miller and Stephen Heath, see the interview with Laclau, "Theory, Democracy and Socialism" (NR, 210-11).

For good or ill, whatever influence Lacan has had on the work of R&W appears to have been completely mediated by Althusser (see, for example, KC, 18 and 81).

24. For a trenchant critique of Gramscianism in, inter alia, British Cultural Studies, see David Harris, From Class Struggle to the Politics of Pleasure (London: Routledge, 1992).

25. Louis Althusser, "Freud and Lacan," in Lenin and Philosophy, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review, 1971), 209; hereafter cited in the text as LP.

26. Althusser, "Ideology," 127-86. For a brief but incisive critique of Althusser's statism that is especially relevant to the concerns of this essay (e.g., "civil society"), see Jean L. Cohen and Andrew Arato, "Excursus on Gramsci's Successors: Althusser, Anderson, and Bobbio," in Civil Society and Political Soci- ety (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992).

27. On the relation between the state and public education, see "A Marxian Theory of the State" (KC, 232, 235-236, and 254-255). For R&W's antistatist caveat, see KC, 312 n. 58.


28. Nicholas Abercrombie, Stephen Hill, and Bryan Turner, The Dominant Ideology Thesis (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1980).

29. The opening passage of "Politics and the Limits of Modernity" is typi- cal: "The theme of postmodernity, which first appeared in aesthetics, has been displaced to ever wider areas until it has become the new horizon of our cultural, philosophical, and political experience. In the latter realm, to which I shall here limit my analysis ...." (Universal Abandon? 63; italics mine).

30. For a critique of the rhetoric of post-Fordism, see, however, Michael Ruskin, "The Politics of Post-Fordism: or, the Trouble with 'New Times,"' New Left Review, no. 175 (May-June 1989): 54-77. See also Harris, "Post-Fordism: the Gramscianism of Postmodernism," in Class Struggle, 44-46.

31. In "Building a New Left" (1988), an interview conducted after the appearance of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Laclau has noted that with respect to contemporary culture, the only theme "relevant" to his and Mouffe's political- theoretical project is the "critique of the fundamentalism of the emancipatory projects of modernity" (NR, 188), or philosophical postmodernism. However, responding to the pointed observation that the "examples of democratic struggle" in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy tend to be "explicitly 'political,"' Laclau con- cedes that the "field of cultural struggles has a fundamental role in the construction of political identities" (NR, 189). Accordingly, hegemony for Laclau entails not only the "construction of a new culture" (as in Gramsci) but, more specifically, the construction of viable strategies for the mass media, which "play a capital role in the shaping of cultural identities" (NR, 190).

32. For the best, and most recent, discussion of the concept of "civil society" in Gramsci, see Cohen and Arato, "Gramsci and the Idea of Socialist Civil Soci- ety," in Civil Society, 142-59.

33. Cohen and Arato, "Theoretical Developments in the Twentieth Cen- tury," Civil Society, 117. I should note that the stress in this essay on the media- tive nature of the concept of civil society in Gramsci by no means implies a "harmonious" relation between the three spheres; instead, I subscribe, as in Cohen and Arato, to a "conflict-theoretical" sense of hegemony, which implies in turn a "positive normative attitude to the existing version of civil society or, rather, to some of its institutional dimensions" (Civil Society, 150; latter italics mine).

34. It is imperative to remember that Gramsci's noneconomistic conception of civil society was nonetheless developed within a determinate class context (i.e., "proletarian revolution"): "[Gramsci's entire analysis is framed within the general paradigm of the Marxian class theory and geared to the strategic questions flow-

ing from the revolutionary project, namely, how to develop working-class consciousness, a socialist counterhegemony and, ultimately, working-class power" (Civil Society, 641 n. 82).

35. For this distinction in Gramsci-a crucial and contested one-see, for instance, his "Political Struggle and Military War," SPN, 229-39. For L&M's discussion of Gramsci's martial tropes and their effects (e.g., "demilitarization of war"), see HSS, 69-70.

36. Gramsci himself writes of Trotsky's report to the Fourth World Congress of the Comintern, at which he was present: "The question . . . was whether civil society resists before or after the attempt to seize power" (SPN, 236). Moreover, as Sassoon observes, the "metaphor which Gramsci employs of hegemony as a system of fortifications" is presented both as a "system of trenches in front of the fortress of the state . . . and at times as the trenches behind it" (Gramsci's Politics,

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233 n. 14). The crucial passages in the Selected Prison Notebooks are, respectively, 193 and 204.

37. The question of the State vis-a-vis civil society in Gramsci is a particularly vexed one. The standard discussion in English is Perry Anderson, "Antino- mies of Antonio Gramsci," in New Left Review, no. 100 (November-January 1976-1977): 5-78. See, however, Cohen and Arato, who argue that despite Gramsci's critique of "statolatry," his "progressive version of statism" (where civil society absorbs the state, and not vice versa, as in fascism or Jacobinism) betrays a certain "left totalitarianism" (Civil Society, 154). That the last is not inconsistent with Leninism-or at least a certain reading of Lenin-is, I believe, very much to the point.

38. As Charles Taylor notes, civil society-as in Hegel (Sittlichkeit)-is not identical with the "private sphere" in general or the family in particular. This is a crucial reminder as it opens up the whole question of the relation between civil society and the "public sphere." See Taylor, "Modes of Civil Society," Public Culture 3 (fall 1990): 110-111.

39. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere (Turin: Einaudi, 1975), 1124. Cited in Sassoon, Gramsci's Politics, 111.

40. For my understanding of realism as a philosophical strategy as well as for an important critique of Althusser, see Ted Benton, "A Defence of Epistemol- ogy," in The Rise and Fall of Structural Marxism (New York: St. Martin's, 1984).

41. The question of the "name of the father" (nom-du-pere) in Lacan is a complicated one, though I think it is fair to say that the symbolic "father" I am invoking here (Marx) is, true to Lacan, mort-which does not of course imply a diminution of the former's discursive power (quite the opposite, in fact).

42. See Miklitsch, From Hegel to Madonna: Towards a General Economy of "Commodity Fetishism" (Albany: State University of New York Press, forthcom- ing [1996]).

43. In "Marxian Epistemology," R&W ask that the "reader consider the plausibility of [their] reading and reflect with [them] upon its implications in per- mitting an original resolution to the economic determinist debate within the Marxian theoretical tradition" (KC, 62). Though I believe critiques of Marx can help us resolve the above problem, I must insist here on the implausibility of R&W's reading of Marx, an insistence that is consonant with my argument in this essay for a post-poststructuralist epistemology and the sorts of truth/false claims and determinate reading protocols associated with the latter, critical-strategic realism.

44. Laclau, "Politics," 77. For a critique of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, see Norman Geras, "Post-Marxism without Apologies," New Left Review, no. 163 (May-June 1987): 40-82; see also L&M's response to this critique in "His- tory of Marxism," New Left Review, no. 166 (November-December 1987): 79-106, esp. 97-99. For by no means the last word in this debate, see Geras, "Ex-Marxism without Substance," New Left Review, no. 169 (May-June 1988): 40-82. For a reading of this "interchange" and, in particular, its rhetoric, see Harris, "Post-Marxism," Class Struggle, 32-36.

45. For a sense of this concept in Lacan, see his "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud," in Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 154.

Though the concept of le point de capiton is only alluded to in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, it is crucial to any understanding of "suture," as the work of


Slavoj Ziiek makes clear. On suture, see Zizek, "The 'Quilting Point,"' in For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (London: Verso, 1991) and, in particular, his "pointed" reading of L&M's "democratic invention" (276 n. 52). See also The Sublime Object of Ideology, where Zizek illustrates the point de capiton in terms of, among other things, the "classic" Marlboro adver- tisement, Coca-Cola, and the "Jew" ([London: Verso, 1989], 96, 99, and 101-2 respectively).

46. On "dislocation," see "Dislocation and Antagonism" and "Dislocation and Capitalism," in NR, 5-41 and 41-59. For the term spillage as well as, more generally, a critique of poststructuralism, see Richard Harland, "Derrida and Language as Writing," in Superstructuralism (New York: Routledge, 1991 [1987]), 140.

47. For L&M's "privileging of the moment of negativity" in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy in addition to a critique, en passant, of Adorno and the Frank- furt School in general, see "New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time," 17 and 51-53.

48. My use of the term culture of capitalism-which deliberately takes the risk of culturalism-is not only meant to understand capitalism as at once "cultural" and "economic" but to mark the increasing culturalization of the "life-world." It is also meant, as my allusion to Levi-Strauss suggests, to understand the cultural- economic together with the concept and practice of discourse. This last articulation is not, however, the conventional poststructuralist one, where the accent is "unequivocally" on the signifier. For a rather different sense of this notion, see Alan Macfarlane, The Culture of Capitalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1989).

I would only add that the early Gramsci's sense of revolutionary praxis as, in part, an "intense critical effort of cultural penetration" can, and should, be read as an anticapitalist counterhegemony. See "Socialism and Culture" (1916), in Selections from Political Writings, 1910-1920, ed. Quintin Hoare and trans. John Matthews (New York: International, 1977), 10-13.

49. Not surprisingly, the Foucault invoked in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy is the discursive-epistemic Foucault of the Order of Things (1966) and The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) rather than the "critical-institutional" Foucault of, say, Discipline and Punish (1975).

50. Nicos Mouzelis, "Marxism or Post-Marxism," New Left Review, no. 167 (January-February 1988): 107-123.

51. See, for example, Gramsci, Historical Materialism and International Rela- tions, ed. Stephen Gill (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

52. See my "Corpus Delicti: The Star Commodity-Body-Sign in Madonna Studies," in From Hegel to Madonna.

53. See Eagleton, Ideology, 51-54. 54. See, for example, "A Marxian Theory of the Enterprise": "What is

unique to capitalism is clearly not capital and profits, but rather the productive forces of capital, the capitalist form of the fundamental class process and its quantitative measure, the value profit rate" (KC, 229).

55. I employ the pleonasm neo here because R&W explicitly refuse in advance any reading of their work that claims that Knowledge and Class privileges any one "condition of existence" (e.g., class) over another: "Any assertion claim- ing to rank the relative importance of the book's determinants (i.e., its various conditions of existence) would violate the logic (overdetermination) of the Marx- ian theory that the book constructs" (KC, 276). My recourse to the formulation "neo-economics" is therefore intended as an ironic reinscription of the above

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relativist-epistemological stance. For R&W's position on this last, see "Every- thingism, or Better Still, Overdetermination," New Left Review, no. 195 (Septem- ber-October 1992): 124-26.

56. The "fundamental" class process refers, as in the Marx of the Grun- drisse, to the historical forms in which surplus value is performed and extracted (i.e., slave, feudal, ancient, capitalist, etc.). Unlike these fundamental processes, "the subsumed class process refers to the distribution of already appropriated labor or its products" (KC, 118). R&W also distinguish between class positions/processes (hence the virgule). For these distinctions, see "Classes: Funda- mental and Subsumed" (KC, 117-24).

57. For the term enriched Gramscianism, see David Forgacs, "Gramsci and Marxism in Britain," New Left Review, no. 176 (July-August 1989): 86.

58. I use the Heideggerian word destruction in the strict sense: "This new field is one which may be characterized as 'post-Marxist' and is the result of a multitude of theoretico-political interventions whose cumulative effect in relation to the categories of classical Marxism is similar to what Heidegger called a 'destruction of the history of ontology"' (Laclau, "Psychoanalysis and Marxism" [NR, 93]).

59. For my sense of "cognitive agnosticism," see Benton, "Epistemology and Relativism," in Rise and Fall, 180.

60. See Jameson, "Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan," in The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971-1986 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 1:75-115.

61. For Laclau's inflected sense of these Husserlian terms (i.e., "sedimentation" and "reactivation"), see "New Reflections," 33-36.

62. Ziiek, Sublime Object, 7. 63. Ibid., 1. 64. Zizek, For They Know Not What They Do, 2. 65. One might call this-pace Lacan, Althusser, and Zizek-a return not to

Freud, Marx, or Hegel, but to the "referent" (in quotations). Need I add that to invoke the referent is not to repeat some prediscursive, phenomenological gesture? As Jameson puts it in his reading of Lacan: "The study of the referent... is the study, not of the meaning of the text, but of the limits of its meanings and of their historical preconditions, and of what is and must remain incommensurable with individual expression" ("Imaginary and Symbolic," 108).

66. On a positive appraisal of the relation between Gramsci and discourse theory, see Sue Golding, "The Continuing Search," in Gramsci's Democratic The- ory: Contributions to a Post-Liberal Democracy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 132-4 and 186 n. 3.

67. For L&M and R&W on the issue of the referent, I would only cite, respectively, the following representative passages: "The structure of any decision has a discursive outside as its intrinsic point of reference" (NR, 244; initial italics mine); "We are not bothered by the nature of [the] infinite regress of meaning- production, by this complete rejection of a reference that is independepent of these 'interdependent terms' [Saussure] and that may serve as an ultimate ground of truth for these meanings" (KC, 28).

68. For my sense of realism, critical realism, and the notion of the "intransitive" in particular, see Roy Bhaskar's restatement of his position-developed in, most recently, Realism and Human Emancipation (1986) and Reclaiming Reality (1989)-in "For Critical Realism," in Philosophy and the Idea of Freedom (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 137-85. On Gramsci's epistemology, about which Bhaskar is


decidedly critical, see "Marxist Philosophy from Marx to Althusser," 162-85, esp. 170-75.

I might add that while R&W reject realism outright ("Marxian theory refuses to entertain the illusion that the 'realism' of one or another theory . . . determines its truth also for other theories-in that sense of absolute truth" [KC, 59; cf. also 88-89 n. 46]), L&M-whose epistemology is rather more sophisticated than R&W's-concede: "Hegel's idealism, far from being a denial of exter- nal reality, is the strongest affirmation of it; it not only exists but necessarily exists. If this is the question at issue our position is, therefore, unequivocally realist, but this has little to do with the question of materialism" ("Post-Marxism without Apologies," 87). If the passage from Knowledge and Class courts the charge of philosophical banality, as if all theories of realism determine the truth as absolute, the last clause of the L&M is, needless to say, symptomatic inasmuch as only an extremely restricted understanding of materialism (such as L&M's) would distinguish absolutely between the question of materialism and realism.

69. See Robert Resch, "Hindess and Hirst and the 'Post-Althusserian' Nega- tion of History," in Althusser and the Renewal of Marxist Theory (Berkeley: Uni- versity of California Press, 1992).

70. For an incisive analysis of the difference between reform and reformism as well as an absolutely sobering reading of both socialism and social democracy, see the postscript to Przeworksi's Capitalism and Social Democracy, 239-48.

71. For some sense of the complexity of this issue, see the ongoing debate conducted in the pages of New Left Review in the late 1980s between Alec Nove and Ernest Mandel: Nove, "Markets and Socialism," New Left Review, no. 161

(January-February 1987): 98-104; Mandel, "In Defense of Socialist Planning," New Left Review, no. 159 (September-October 1986): 5-38; and Mandel, "The Myth of Market Socialism," New Left Review, no. 169 (May-June 1988): 108-21. For a critique of both Nove and Mandel, see Diane Elson, "Market Socialism or Socialization of the Market?" New Left Review, no. 172 (November-December 1988): 3-44.

72. Noberto Bobbio writes: "it is ... necessary to recognize that by 'cultural leadership' Gramsci means the introduction of a 'reform' in the strong meaning which this term has when it refers to a transformation of customs and culture." See "Gramsci and the Conception of Civil Society," in Gramsci and Marxist The- ory, ed. Chantal Mouffe (London: Routledge, 1979), 39.

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