Page 21 - Contemporary Political Sociology Globalization Politics and Power

Changing Definitions of Politics and Power 7

Marxist, Gramsci was committed to the belief that ideological struggle is
grounded in class struggle; he, therefore, argued that there must always
be a single unifying principle in every hegemonic formation and that this
can only be given by a fundamental economic class. As Laclau and Mouffe
( 1985 : 69) point out, this is not just to say that, ultimately, the economy
determines politics, but also to see the economy itself as outside hege-
mony, as somehow naturally given and non - political. As they argue, this
means that there is nothing for Marxists to do but identify the direction
in which the economy is heading; there is no possibility of political inter-
vention, or even of effective class struggle, in the domain that really
matters to Marxists, the economy. In their view, Gramsci limited the
scope of politics in that it should be seen as fundamental to the founding
and contestation of any social order whatsoever. Gramsci ’ s model is also
limited in that, seeing politics as ultimately rooted in class struggle, it
cannot give suffi cient weight to social movements organized around
gender, race, sexual politics, the environment, and so on. However, to
reject economic determinism and the centrality of the class struggle is to
go beyond Marxism altogether.
Similar issues arise in the work of Althusser. Although his project was
to rescue Marxism from economism, insofar as it remains within the
Marxist framework, economism cannot be avoided. Althusser maintained
that the state should be seen as relatively autonomous of the economic
base. However, his theory of the state is better described as “ functional-
ist, ” rather than in terms of Dunleavy and O ’ Leary ’ s arbiter model.
Although he insists that political structures have their own laws of devel-
opment, there is no discussion of class confl ict at this level; the state is
fully implicated in the logic of capitalism, where it functions to reproduce
the mode of production (Dunleavy and O ’ Leary, 1987 : 255). As Althusser
sees it, the state is relatively autonomous of the economic base because,
although the economy determines “ in the last instance, ” it does so by
determining another level of the mode of production as dominant accord-

ing to the specificity of the mode of production: in feudalism, religion is
dominant; in capitalism, the state. Furthermore, since the capitalist mode
of production requires the state to reproduce its conditions of existence,
there is a reciprocal determination between the economic and political
levels; the last instance of economic determination never arrives since the
economy is itself formed by the political (Althusser, 1971 ).
Insofar as Althusser ’ s theory of the state is functionalist, it has been
criticized as involving a sophisticated form of economic reductionism. The
problem is that, if the economy is determining in the last instance, then
whatever the form and dynamic of contingent, actually existing capitalist