Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary

The democratic potential in Lenin’s theory of hegemony
In the development of his theory of hegemony, Lenin contends that in the
extraordinary conditions of Tsarist Russia, liberal-democratic reforms—political
campaigns that socialists had previously associated with the bourgeoisie—should
be taken up by the revolutionary proletariat. To understand why Laclau and Mouffe
find promise in this idea, we need to review some aspects of Marxist theory.
According to a very basic reading of Marx’s famous Preface to a Contribution to the
Critique of Political Economy, society as a whole is supposed to progress from lower
to higher stages. A new development in the productive forces—say, for example,
the introduction of a new technology or production method—tends to come into
conflict with the existing property relations. Marx believed, for example, that
feudal relations became increasingly obsolete as industrialization progressed. This
conflict blossoms into a full-scale social revolution in which a whole new set of
property relations become predominant, and, as this occurs, a corresponding
transformation in the superstructure—the state apparatus, socio-cultural life and
the legitimating ideologies—also takes place (Marx 1969a: 503–4). We will return
to this key text below and in Chapter 3. For my purposes here, it should be noted
that within the terms of this historical model, liberal democratic reforms in the
superstructural political sphere are supposed to be introduced once capitalism
displaces feudalism and the bourgeoisie displaces the aristocracy.
It is assumed, then, that the working class emerges as the transition from
feudalism to capitalism takes place, and that the revolutionary proletariat will
operate on a political stage in which liberal democratic institutions are already
fully established. Tsarist Russia, however, did not fit this model. Capitalist class
relations had developed but elements of feudalism persisted as well, and the
transition to a liberal democratic regime had not even begun. Plekhanov and
Axelrod advanced the extraordinary argument in 1883–4 that because the Russian
bourgeoisie was so weak, and the grip of the autocratic regime on the political
terrain was so restrictive, the working class would have to join in the battle for
liberal democratic reforms against the feudal Tsarist order (Anderson 1976–7:15;
de Giovanni 1979:261). Lenin extended their argument further, calling for the
proletariat not only to join in this battle, but to take the lead. Lenin, of course,
retained Marx’s critique of liberal democracy as a self-contradictory tradition.

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Although liberal democratic reforms were viewed by Lenin as a necessary condition
for the socialist revolution, they would eventually be replaced by socialist
institutions.
In the end, however, Lenin does not stray very far from traditional Marxism.
Even as the workers’ movement takes up the demands that are supposed to “belong”
to the bourgeoisie, and even as it enters into alliances with other social forces
such as the peasants or the anti-Tsarist democratic movements, the basic
constitution of the working class is supposed to remain absolutely the same. Leninist
theory suggests that class interests are constructed exclusively at the economic
level. The workers are supposed to become a subject—the working class—purely
through their positioning within the relations of production. They are supposed
to become “the working class” through their common structural positions as the
individuals who—because they do not own the means of production—are obliged
to sell their labor power to the capitalists. All other facets of their identity—their
nationality, ethnicity, race, gender and so on—are supposed to be secondary to
their “authentic” subjectivity. Further, the ways in which they interpret their
structural positions are supposed to follow directly from their structural positioning
itself. Any degree of deviation in this correspondence between structural
positioning and interpretation is wholly illegitimate and—to the extent that proper
leadership is exercised—corrigible.
According to Lenin, then, classes are defined in terms of their pre-discursive
objective interests. Their political relations with other subjects are supposed to
be purely superficial; they are supposed to have no effect whatsoever on their
constitution as a subject. A workers’ organization, for example, might form
coalitions with a peasant movement, or a peace movement, or an anti-censorship
bloc of students and intellectuals, but it is supposed to retain the same
fundamental identity throughout this entire process. Lenin depicts the political
and the economic as separate spheres, with the economic as foundational and
the political as the mere stage upon which the prefabricated interests of the
classes are played out.
In other words, Lenin posits class as the “essence” of identity: class is the element
that makes a subject what it truly is, the element that gives the subject its
“authentic” interest. A person who is structurally positioned as a worker is supposed
to have an “authentic” interest in the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, while
her bourgeois counterpart is supposed to have an “authentic” interest in the
perpetuation of capitalist exploitation. From this perspective, subjects who may
appear to be radically different—such as workers who differ in terms of race,
nationality or gender—but who share the same class “core” by virtue of their
common structural positions vis-à-vis property relations, ought to have their shared
class interests as the principle of their being. Non-class elements are, in
metaphysical terms, “accidents”: they are supposed to remain strictly external to
the formation of the subject’s “authentic” interests.
Lenin’s essentialist approach to class has its origins in Marx’s own writings. In
the Communist Manifesto, for example, Marx and Engels argue that capitalism

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would eventually lead to the polarization of the social into two great classes. Each
class would become so homogeneous that age and gender differences between
various members of the same class would become irrelevant (Marx and Engels
1969:115). The experience of exploitation for the workers from different nation-
states would become increasingly uniform; workers in different countries would
gradually develop similar interests such that they could be united in a single global
movement. The bifurcation of the social along class lines would be so far-reaching
that even the worker’s relationship with his or her sexual partner, children and
family would become a specifically worker-identified relationship which would
“no longer [have] anything in common with the bourgeois family-relations.” The
worker is ultimately supposed to reject any cross-class solidarities based on “law,
morality, religion” for the latter are but “so many bourgeois prejudices, behind
which lurk in ambush just so many bourgeois interests” (Marx and Engels
1969:118). Marx and Engels conclude that the workers have “nothing of their
own to secure and to fortify; their mission is to destroy all previous securities for,
and insurances of, individual property” (1969:118).
Furthermore, Marxist theory privileges the revolutionary proletariat: the
liberation of all of humanity from domination is supposed to be a necessary
consequence of the proletariat’s overthrowing of capitalism. The revolt of the
workers necessarily entails the abolition of private property and the transition to
the utopian society in which all power relations would be canceled out and
overcome. Marx himself later questioned the polarization thesis, introduced a
much more complex conception of subjectivity, and offered contradictory remarks
on the relation between the economic and the political (Harrington 1993:21).
Some contemporary theorists such as Cohen (1978:73) have nevertheless returned
to Marx’s essentialist formulations.
Laclau and Mouffe demonstrate that in certain moments, Lenin’s text strains
against its own essentialist limitations. Lenin departed from a narrow conception
of the role of the Social Democratic Party to insist that the Party ought to work
with the wide range of forces that stood opposed to the Tsarist regime. For Laclau
and Mouffe, this moment of Lenin’s theory of hegemony “entails a conception of
politics which is potentially more democratic than anything found within the
tradition of the Second International” (Laclau and Mouffe 1985:55).
1
Because of
the peculiar historical circumstances in Russia, Lenin decided that the Party ought
to fight religious persecution, to denounce the Tsarist regime’s treatment of the
students and intellectuals, and to support the peasants (Kolakowski 1978:388).
Lenin’s reassessment of socialist strategy begins with an analysis of the contingent
historical conditions in Russia at the turn of the century (Lenin 1989). If it were
developed fully (and here we depart from Lenin altogether), this pragmatic and
contextually specific approach would become a political theory that would reject
essentialist dogma and would grasp the complexity of power relations and the
plurality of the social. Instead of imposing teleological or “stagist” theories of history,
the historical specificities of a given formation would be recognized. The essentialist
conception that the subject is fully constituted in the economic sphere and merely

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plays out a predestined role in the political sphere would be abandoned. While
Marxist theory positions the working class as the sole agent of revolution, this
new theory would recognize that “revolutionary legitimacy is no longer exclusively
concentrated in the working class,” such that the democratizing potential of other
subjects would be recognized (Laclau and Mouffe 1985:56). With the weakening
of class essentialism, the ground would be prepared for a complex negotiation of
differences—between theory and practice, between the leaders and the led, and
between the different democratic struggles themselves.
In the terms introduced in Chapter 1, Lenin’s conception of the type of unity
between the different elements in the struggle against the Tsarist regime is closer
to that of a coalition, rather than a hegemonic bloc. Again, the identities between
the members of a coalition are not altered by their interactions with other coalition
members; the renegotiation of their identities and interests does not take place.
The transformative character of the linkages between the different elements in a
hegemonic bloc is absolutely crucial to the advance of radical democratic pluralism,
for it is only when these linkages work in this way that democratic forces can be
circulated, extended and deepened. With reference to multiculturalism, for
example, the issue is not simply the inclusion of minorities; it also entails the
structure of their inclusion. Will the minority groups merely be added to the
coalition, or will their inclusion entail a radical reconstruction of the majority
identity? A thoroughly colonized fragment of a minority group can always be found
that would create the appearance of diversity in the form of tokenistic inclusion.
What is needed is the release, circulation and expansion of radical democratic
pluralist forces, and that can only occur where unity does not mean that the least
powerful members of a bloc will be subjected to assimilation, neutralization and
dogmatic discipline.