Page 178 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

POST-MARXISM

imply the superseding of the tenets of classical Marxism and suggests that Marxism
is no longer the primary explanatory narrative of our time. However, the
‘superseding’ involved here entails the selective retention and transformation of key
concepts drawn from Marxism rather than a complete jettisoning of them all. 155
Post-Marxism has involved the critique and reconstitution of Marxism through
the application and addition of poststructuralist theory to it. This is an aspect of the
wider rejection of grand narratives (including Marxism) and totalizing fields of
inquiry by postmodernism. Of particular importance to post-Marxism has been the
poststructuralist stress on the constitutive place of language and discourse within
culture and the anti-essentialist character of all social categories. Post-Marxism has
also adopted the poststructuralist view of the dispersed character of power and thus
given greater credence to the micro-fields of political power and resistance than
Marxism has traditionally done.
The project of post-Marxism has been particularly associated with Ernesto Laclau,
Chantal Mouffe and Stuart Hall, who are critical of the essentialism, foundationalism
and reductionism of Marxism. Thus, concepts such as class, history, mode of
production etc. are understood to be discursive constructs rather than essential,
universal concepts. Indeed, all the key cultural categories such as ‘women’, ‘class’,
‘society’, ‘identities’, ‘interests’ etc. are no longer conceived of as single unitary
objects with fixed meanings or single underlying structures and determinations.
Within Marxism the concept of class is conceived of as an essential unified
identity between a signifier and a specific group of people who share socio-
economic conditions. Here a class has an objective existence. By contrast, class is
understood by post-Marxism to be the effect of discourse rather than a simple
objective economic fact. That is, ‘class’ is constituted by how we speak about and
deploy the notion of class. Further, class consciousness is a discursively formed
collective subject position that is neither an inevitability nor a unified
phenomenon. Indeed, classes are cross-cut by conflicting interests, including those
of gender, race and age. Classes may share common economic conditions of
existence but do not automatically form a core, unified class consciousness.
For post-Marxist writers, discursive concepts are not to be reduced to or
explained solely in terms of the economic base as in reductionist forms of Marxism.
Thus, for post-Marxist writers any notion of the ‘final determination’ of cultural
phenomena by the mode of production or class relations has to be put aside.
Instead the field of the ‘social’ involves multiple points of power and antagonism
that do not cohere around class conflict as Marxism understands them to do.
Rather, post-Marxists argue that the multiple forms of power, subordination and
antagonism that occur within a society are not reducible to any single site or
contradiction.
It follows that post-Marxists regard the account of hegemony as read through
Gramsci as being mistakenly centred on class. Instead, they stress that history has
no prime agent of social change nor does ideology belong to particular classes.
Instead, hegemonic and counter-hegemonic blocs are formed through temporary
and strategic alliances of a range of discursively constructed subjects and groups of
interest. Consequently, any radical politics cannot be premised on the