Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary

to a contradiction between them and the relations of production…and the
intensification of this contradiction leads to the breakdown of the existing mode
of production and its superstructure” (Harris 1983:179). Cohen agrees that Marx
believed that the productive forces were primary, and further argues that the
productive forces actually remain primary to this day in determining the actual
course of human history (Cohen 1978).
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Laclau and Mouffe take an entirely different approach. First, they question the
logic of Marx’s argument based on his own conceptualization of the productive
forces. Second, they consider whether the development of the productive forces
does actually obey an endogenous set of laws. The key point here is that the
productive forces include both the means of production and labor power. Labor
power is a peculiar commodity in two senses: it produces more value as its own
use-value is being consumed, and it does not passively yield its use-value to the
person who purchases it. If the capitalist purchases a piece of machinery, she may
have to go to great lengths to make that commodity yield its use-value. In the case
of her purchase of a unit of labor power, however, she has to deal with the fact that
the labor unit remains attached to a social agent who has the capacity to perform
political acts of resistance. There is, in short, a huge qualitative difference between
attempting to extract use-value out of a machine, and attempting to extract use-
value in the form of a labor unit from a worker who has the capacity to engage in
an entire range of complex practices. In organizing the productive process, the
capitalist has to anticipate the workers’ potential for political resistance.

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According to the primacy of the productive forces thesis in Marxist theory, the
productive forces become more and more efficient in a purely non-political,
technical, and “spontaneously progressive” manner. Historically, however, the
capitalist effort to extract use-value from labor has necessarily introduced a political
aspect into the heart of the production process. The development of production
technologies has always been deeply intertwined with the development of social
control technologies. In some contexts, production technologies that divide up
workers according to different specializations or replace workers through
automation have not been driven by economic considerations alone, for they
have also been deployed to block the workers’ attempts to organize collectively
and to engage in industrial action. Indeed, workers are sometimes segregated
according to race, gender, nationality or religion in order to promote a “divide
and rule” discipline, and production processes are shaped accordingly. At various
moments, workers’ resistances have brought about entire shifts in the application
of new technologies and in regimes of capitalist accumulation. The “post-Fordist”
trend towards the decentralization of production, for example, has been pursued
not only to improve the sensitivity of the production process to various shifts in
demand, but also to break up organized masses of workers. The capitalists’
anticipation of workers’ resistance is so thoroughly integrated into production
planning that the very conception of “efficient” technology always includes a
disciplining dimension (Laclau and Mouffe 1985:78–80).
Where, according to Marxist theory, we are supposed to have a purely non-
political development of economic efficiency and technical progress at the level
of the productive forces, we have instead a “politics of production.” In this sense,
the political is necessarily interwoven into the economic at its very founding
moment; the political is a constitutive supplement, rather than a determined effect,
of the economic. That which is supposed to be in the determined “outside”
superstructural sphere, namely political struggle, can be found at the heart of the
supposedly determining “inside” sphere, the development of the productive forces
in the economic base. Given the necessarily inextricable relation between the
economic and the political in the very origins of the productive forces, the
economic cannot satisfy the condition of originary autonomy.
Unlike many other critics of economism, Laclau and Mouffe do not undermine
the primacy of the productive forces thesis in order to make way for yet another
autonomy thesis, namely the argument that economic relations and class
antagonisms have virtually no effect on the political sphere and the state. As
Balibar points out, the latter argument merely reintroduces the liberal dualisms,
state/civil society and politics/economics (Balibar 1991c:3). Marx’s critique of
these dualisms constitutes one of the most important contributions from the Marxist
tradition for radical democratic pluralism; that critique is preserved in Laclau and
Mouffe’s deconstruction of economism.
Laclau and Mouffe’s theory also does not completely reject class analysis and
economic theory altogether. Radical democratic pluralist theory cannot abandon
the Marxist critique of capitalist exploitation precisely because capitalist relations,

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in all their hybrid forms, continue to block the genuine democratization of
contemporary societies. Instead of discarding the Marxist critique of capitalism,
Laclau and Mouffe are calling for the decentering of class, and for the recognition
of the fact that the economic never exists as an autonomous and self-regulating
sphere. In some cases, solidarities based primarily on class-oriented subject positions
may indeed operate like a nodal point, as precarious micro-centers within a social
formation. Even in those cases, however, their predominance would be partial
and temporary, structural relations of class exploitation would remain articulated
with other structures, and the subject positions through which exploitation is
lived would be overdetermined as well.

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S E L F - D E T E R M I N AT I O N ,
C O M M U N I T Y A N D C I T I Z E N S H I P
The debate between the liberals and communitarians has waxed and waned over
the last few years. Some theorists such as Rawls and Sandel have changed their
positions somewhat in response to their critics, while others such as Walzer, Young
and Kymlicka have attempted to offer a fresh perspective. The questions that
have been raised in the course of this debate concerning the relations between
the individual and her communities, the dominant group and minority groups,
and traditionalists and dissenters, remain central concerns. I will argue that Laclau
and Mouffe’s position does not fit into either the liberal or communitarian camp.
While it is true that their intervention is fashioned out of concepts that are
borrowed from both the liberals and communitarians, Laclau and Mouffe’s theory
of radical democratic pluralism breaks new ground.