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Post-Marxism, Discourse and Ideology
Several major considerations present themselves in thinking about the issues raised by Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. I have two reasons for taking its critique of Marxism very seriously, and both of them relate to longstanding difficulties with the arguments of Marxism: the first is the question of social class, in a political environment where it is increasingly obvious to everyone except the dogmatists of the far Right and far Left that social inequalities and political differences simply cannot plausibly be subsumed under or reduced to the question of class. Hence any attempt to advocate new ways of thinking about these different political struggles should be welcomed and considered.
Secondly, Laclau and Mouffe's argument addresses, although not in a predictable way (as I shall explain), the vexed question of how to theorize the concept of ideology. I say this is vexed, but its vexatiousness has a particular history and will be of more salience to some than to others. Within, roughly, 'socialist' versions of feminism there has been an attempt to use the concept of ideology to theorize the oppression of women in capitalist society, but this has remained problematic, since that theory is itself embedded in an analysis that not only argues/ assumes the primacy of class but also normally construes ideology in a determinist model such as the metaphor of 'base and superstructure'. The ensuing problem was raised by the arguments of an earlier book of mine in which, according to Johanna Brenner and Maria Ramas, 'ideology is Barrett's deus ex machina, her means of escape from the vexing dilemma of the Marxist-reductionist/dual systems idealist impasse of socialist-feminist thought'. What, they and other critics wanted to know, was the material basis -- in a capitalist society -- of this ideology that oppressed women? 46 Laclau and Mouffe, in rejecting the 'class-essentialist' logic of Marxism, in providing so many arguments against the automatic privileging of class in Marxist analysis, have, albeit very contentiously, struck at the heart of this problem.
In part this is a crisis of 'class politics' and, as Richard Wright has noted in a review of the divergent responses of Barry Hindess and Ellen Wood, it has produced polar reactions: a pragmatic approach to class that has been shorn of the theoretical pretension of the Marxist model, and a reaffirmation of classical class politics. 47 The reason the polarity has developed is because the position of arguing in detail for the complexities and specificities of gender in relation to class, against the ceaseless rehearsal of so-called received truths about class, is an unenviable one, and the 'centre' of the debate has, increasingly, been evacuated. It is not without interest that the theoretical models attempting to reconcile conflicts between the claims of class and
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