Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary

Neo-conservatism and its socialist critics
In the Western media’s coverage of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the
Eastern bloc, the political terrain was reduced to a simple choice between two
caricatures: the “good” choice, “democracy”—meaning a neo-conservative free
market system à la Thatcher, Reagan and Friedman—or the “bad” choice,
“socialism”—meaning planned centralism, a Stalinist totalitarian state and an
imperialist military strategy. The devastating effects of the Thatcherite and
Reaganite policies for much of the working class and the poor were forgotten.
Alternative definitions of socialism and democracy were also erased during the
transitions in the former Soviet bloc; indeed a socialist theory of democracy became
oxymoronic. In Friedman’s words,
Fundamentally, there are only two ways of coordinating the economic
activities of millions. One is central direction involving the use of
coercion—the technique of the army and the modern totalitarian state.
The other is voluntary cooperation of individuals—the technique of the
marketplace.
(1993:147)

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For the neo-conservatives, an individual’s freedom is maximized insofar as the
capitalist market in which she competes is freed from government intervention
(Green 1993b:10). However, the capitalist market only “liberates” the individual
in a very narrow historical sense. In those cases in which capitalist labor contracts
displace feudal arrangements, the worker becomes “free” to participate in the
capitalist labor market. In any event, this “liberation” always gives rise to a new
loss of freedom. In the capitalist wage-labor contract, those who do not own the
means of production are obliged to sell their labor in market conditions that they
do not control in order to survive. Because they are systematically subjected to
these conditions, workers in the capitalist market are not really “free” agents at all
(Marx 1977:279–80; Macpherson 1962:48; 1973:143–56).
The wage-labor contract only appears to be a fair exchange between two freely
self-determining, rights-bearing parties who are equal before the eyes of the law.
The capitalist effectively forces the worker to labor on the capitalist’s terms. Under
these conditions, the worker is actually compensated only for a fraction of the
value that she produces. Her total earnings for a day’s work are, generally speaking,
much less than the value that she adds to the product in question during that day.
This unpaid value, the surplus value, is concealed by the fact that the worker is
paid on an hourly basis. The capitalist does not pay the worker for the surplus
value, and—thanks to her exclusive ownership of the means of production—retains
control over the surplus (Buchanan 1982:44). Formal equality in market society
is therefore only a mask that conceals the exploitative nature of the relation
between the capitalist and the worker. Liberal democratic rights and freedoms are
supposed to be universal, but, in actual practice, they may either conceal or—in
the case of the unlimited right to private property—actively contribute to class-
based exploitation. Further, the political sphere in a liberal society is strategically
depicted as if it did not include the economic sphere. When many of our life
chances are actually shaped by the ways in which we are positioned within socio-
economic structures, we are encouraged in liberal democratic regimes to act as if
our lives were determined by our own individual choices (Femia 1993:32). The
“common good” is reduced in a utilitarian manner to the mere sum of individualistic
market decisions. Liberal principles can therefore operate as a legitimating
discourse: “the ‘heavenly’ equality of equal political rights [serves] to mask the
‘earthly’ inequality of the social classes” (Harrington 1981:14). Finally, the
development of capitalism also entails the encroachment of capitalist instrumental
rationality into other spheres of the social. Political, social, cultural, economic
and familial questions that ought to be considered in ethical terms are settled
with reference to market efficiency and individualistic utility (Buchanan 1982:36–
49; Marx and Engels 1976:433–4; Habermas 1970, 1984, 1987).
Marx’s dream of a global workers’ revolution has not, of course, been realized.
Over the long term, Western economies have become highly resilient in the face
of crises. Even though the institutions that once softened the impact of capitalist
exploitation (labor legislation, the welfare state, trade unions, redistributive
programs and so on) have been weakened, an all-out class war remains highly

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unlikely. The expansion of globalization has accelerated the already deep divisions
between workers. Capitalism has proven that it can endure or even foster
connections with authoritarian forms of gender, racial and national hierarchies; it
has exacerbated or even invented these differences in order to find new ways to
extract super-profits and to keep workers divided and disciplined. As classes have
fragmented, non-class socio-political identities—racial, ethnic, sexual, gendered,
national, and so on—have proliferated and have sometimes become more
prominent than class identities. While the moment of class war becomes more
remote, the natural environment has been devastated by the modern technologies
that have been developed under capitalism (Braidotti et al. 1994).
Where full-scale socialist revolutions have occurred, they have remained isolated
in countries with “backward” economies that have proven vulnerable to hostile
Western policies. The socialist revolutions faced the internal pressures of scarcities
and the external pressures of diplomatic and military aggression from the developed
West as the global expansion of advanced capitalism was buttressed by specifically
anti-communist foreign policies. Under these conditions, the socialist revolutions
gave way to the establishment of perpetual war economies and national-security
states (Ahmad 1992:22–3).
Ahmad lists the key features of Soviet-style authoritarianism: the disciplining
of dissent in the name of national security, the military distortions of the domestic
economies, the expansion of anti-democratic bureaucratism and the intensification
of corruption and nepotism. He estimates, however, that at least some aspects of
the Stalinist degeneration of the 1917 Revolution were determined not by Leninist
principles, but by the intensive economic and strategic pressures on the regime
from foreign powers (Ahmad 1992:23). Lefort, by contrast, would place greater
emphasis on the role of Leninist discourse. For Lefort, Soviet totalitarianism was
not produced by a bureaucratic elite that corrupted an otherwise sound political
regime. The Bolsheviks’ implementation of the Leninist approach to political
leadership set the stage for the subsequent exclusion of popular participation in
decision-making in post-revolutionary Soviet society. Like Kolakowski (1978),
Lefort sees strong continuities between the writings of Lenin and the political
practices of the Bolshevik revolutionaries, the rise of a bureaucratic class as a
dominant power after the revolution, the abolition of the distinctions between
state and civil society, the suppression of popular dissent under Soviet rule, and
full-scale Stalinism itself (Lefort 1986).
I will return to the question of Leninist-Stalinist continuities in Chapter 2. For
our purposes here, however, it should be noted that Lefort would nevertheless
concur with one of Ahmad’s conclusions. Ahmad argues that as socialism became
equated with Stalinism, the anti-democratic closures thwarted further
democratization in two ways. There was no opportunity for the reassertion of
democratic forms of socialism within the Soviet bloc. Meanwhile, the anti-
democratic reputation of the Stalinist regimes was such that it became extremely
difficult to inspire workers in Western countries to engage in the socialist struggle,
for Stalinism appeared to be the only viable form of socialism (Ahmad 1992:24).

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Today, the Stalinist legacy continues to thwart genuine democratization. Since
feminist principles were embraced as state policy and yet badly corrupted under
Soviet rule,
5
the current backlash against women’s rights in the former Soviet
Union can be defended in the name of women’s “democratic” “liberation” from
“compulsory equality” (Eisenstein 1994:24–5). Women currently organizing against
neo-conservative patriarchal policies and misogynist violence in Eastern Europe
and the former Soviet Union tend to distance themselves from the feminist
tradition altogether, and to pursue their struggles in the name of “human rights”
(Eisenstein 1996:161).
The socialist revolutions did of course lead to a dramatic improvement in the
standard of living for many, and the contribution of the Soviet Union was crucial
to the defeat of fascism. Further, the fact that Western countries faced the threat
of Soviet expansionism and domestic socialist organizing was certainly an important
factor in the Western elites’ decision to embrace Keynesian fiscal policies, welfare
state programs and civil rights reforms (Hobsbawm 1991:118–20, 122; Cockburn
1991:168–9). Indeed, it is no coincidence that the attacks on the democratic
gains of the post-war period have been accelerated since 1989. With the
disintegration of the Soviet system, neo-conservative capitalist policies have
become the “only game in town.” Western elites no longer have to consider the
relative attractiveness of a socialist alternative for the marginalized populations
in the global economy.
6
It is nevertheless true that the Stalinist socialist regimes wholly betrayed the
democratic moments within the Marxist tradition (C.Gould 1981:49; Harrington
1993:60–90). While Laclau and Mouffe contend that socialism is a necessary
moment within radical democracy, they also insist that socialism in itself can be
either democratic or anti-democratic; clearly it is only the democratic moment
within the socialist tradition that holds promise for radical democracy (1990:132,
229–30). The retrieval project, then, has to make distinctions between democratic
and anti-democratic moments in both the liberal and socialist traditions. Political
activists have to engage in what Laclau and Mouffe call a hegemonic struggle to
bring the more democratic moments in these traditions to the fore (1990:132).
7
At the height of the welfare state, the social democratic parties in Western
countries have tended to assume that democracy would be automatically
strengthened wherever they gained greater control over the state’s bureaucratic
institutions and extended the state’s networks of power. Social democratic policies
sometimes impoverished the concept of democracy as they intensified state control
over more and more areas of the social, promoted corporatist solutions to the
tensions between capital and labor, and replaced popular democratic mobilizations
and civil liberties with eviscerated rituals of representation (Keane 1984; Hall
1988a:126). In the United States, welfare programs have all too often reduced
male recipients to passive consumers and female recipients to pathological clients,
disempowered single women with children, institutionalized the feminization of
poverty, and left single mothers exposed to the right’s moralistic demonizations
(Fraser 1989:132, 144–60).

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While socialist revolutions and the social democratic parties generally failed
to produce the conditions necessary for the advance of the democratic revolution,
the answer certainly does not lie in an unregulated capitalist “free” market. The
common equation of the capitalist “free market” with “democratic rights and
freedoms” is groundless. The liberal state that emerged in tandem with the shift
from feudalism to the capitalist market was originally undemocratic; decision-
making authority was vested only in freeborn male property owners. Entire
imperialist and colonial systems were shaped by the elites in the emerging liberal
democratic Western states. As capitalism developed in the West, liberalism was
democratized, but democracy was also liberalized; democracy was neutralized such
that it tended to serve capitalist interests (Macpherson 1965:10; 1977:65–6).
Although the franchise has been formally extended to non-property-owners,
women, and racial minorities, the so-called democratic institutions have failed to
empower “the people.” Market-oriented decision-making in Western countries
now takes precedence in more and more areas of human interaction in a manner
that is fundamentally at odds with democratic principles (Habermas 1970, 1984,
1987; Buchanan 1982:40). Throughout capitalist societies, political discourse is
profoundly shaped by corporate interests, while dissenting voices are muted,
distorted or excluded altogether (Chomsky 1988; Parenti 1993, 1995:165–78).
Capitalist development therefore tends to promote the dilution of democratic
principles and institutions. Capitalism can also be fully compatible with an
undemocratic society. Capitalist formations depend upon, perpetuate and
sometimes even invent complicated networks of exploitation and oppression that
are organized in terms of class, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality and global
location. The juxtaposition of “successful” capitalist development with military
governments in Latin America and authoritarian regimes in Taiwan, South Korea
and Singapore is further historical evidence that the advance of capitalism does
not guarantee democratization. Insofar as development in Latin America continues
to reflect the interests of capital, these countries will remain marked by colonialism,
dependence, social fragmentation, exclusions and violence even where
dictatorships have been replaced by liberal democratic governments (Escobar
1992). Deng’s free market reforms in China have been twinned with sharply anti-
democratic policies. It is also remarkable that many of the leading corporate
executives in Hong Kong give their full support to the Beijing government. The
shift to capitalist systems in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union is currently
coinciding with a sharp reduction in women’s rights and with a rise in income
disparities, poverty, racism, sexism, ethnic hatred, chauvinist nationalism, anti-
Semitism, organized crime, corruption, militarism and imperialism.
Meanwhile, there is every sign that inequality in the distribution of wealth in
Western societies is increasing on a massive scale. Virtually all income groups
enjoyed rising standards of living in the developed countries during the post-war
period. With global restructuration, the transnational mobility of capital,
specialization in the Western countries according to comparative advantage in
high-technology and capital services sectors, niche marketing, automation,

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downsizing, de-industrialization, de-skilling, the attack on unions, regressive
taxation and welfare program “reforms,” the rich are getting richer and the poor
are getting poorer at an unprecedented rate.
In the United States, for example, the real incomes of the poorest 20 percent
have decreased 17 percent while those of the wealthiest 20 percent have increased
18 percent between 1978 and 1994 (Corn 1995). The richest 1 percent of American
households own almost 40 percent of the total national wealth. The top 20 percent
of American households own more than 80 percent of the national wealth (Herbert
1995). During the 1980s, 75 percent of the income gains and 100 percent of the
increased wealth went to the top 20 percent of American households (New York
Times 1995). The United States now has the most unequal distribution of income
and wealth, and the fastest growing gap between the rich and poor, in all of the
developed countries. The American child poverty rate is four times greater than
the average for the Western European countries (Bradsher 1995a). One out of
every five children in the United States now lives in poverty. Half of the Americans
who live below the poverty line are elderly. Between 250,000 and 3,000,000
Americans are homeless, and families with children make up as much as one-
third of the homeless (Parenti 1995:28–9).
All of this data on the distribution of income and wealth in the United States
was compiled before the massive reduction in welfare rights took place in 1996–7.
Under the new welfare regulations, poor people will be cut off welfare programs in
a country whose Federal Reserve is deliberately controlling interest rates to
maintain high unemployment. Seven million Americans were already seeking
work in 1996, a year in which there were fourteen applicants for every unskilled
minimum wage job in an inner city fast food restaurant (Justice For All 1996).
The new welfare laws will remove three and a half million children from public
assistance by 2001, and will add a million more children to the vast numbers of
those already under the poverty line (The Nation 1996:3). This will take place in
a country in which over 4,200 babies below twelve months in age already die each
year because of low birthweight and other problems directly related to the poverty
of their mothers (Cockburn 1996:9).
Although some middle-class women and blacks have fared relatively well,
women, blacks and Latinos remain highly overrepresented among the unemployed
and poor. The differentials in median incomes partly reveal these inequalities.
The median annual income for black women in 1993 is $19,820, as compared to
$22,020 for white women, $23,020 for black men and $31,090 for white men.
Family income differentials are even more striking. The median household income
for blacks is 58 percent of the median white household income, and this gap has
remained constant between 1972 and 1992 (Holmes 1995a). The black and
Hispanic workers who had found secure and relatively well-paying jobs were
concentrated, for historical reasons, in the unionized industrial manufacturing
and government sectors. They were particularly hard hit, then, by the automation,
global relocation, downsizing and privatization that transformed these sectors in
the 1980s and 1990s (Marable 1983; R.M.Williams 1993; Harrington 1993:257;

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Barrett 1988). Racial disparities are even greater when we look at total family
wealth instead of income. In 1991, the typical white household was ten times
more wealthy than the typical black household (Eisenstein 1994:183). Compared
to whites, African-Americans have a 100 percent greater infant mortality rate, a
176 percent greater unemployment rate, and a 300 percent greater poverty rate
(Parenti 1995:27).
Hispanics are also enormously over-concentrated among the poor in the United
States. While median household income rose for every other American ethnic
and racial group in 1995, it dropped 5.1 percent for Hispanics. This average decline
was experienced by both the new immigrant and the American-born Hispanic
groups. Although the median household income for blacks actually rose between
1989 and 1995, it dropped 14 percent for Hispanics. Between 1992 and 1995,
white median family income increased by 2.2 percent to $35,766; black median
family income increased by 9.9 percent to $22,393; while Hispanic median family
income decreased by 6.9 percent to $22,860 (all figures are expressed in 1995
dollars.) The poverty rate among Hispanics surpassed that of blacks for the first
time in the mid-1990s. While Hispanics represented 16 percent of the total
American population living in poverty in 1985, this figure increased to 24 percent
by 1995. Almost one out of three Hispanics was considered poor in 1995;
8
the
poverty rate for the Hispanic population was therefore three times greater than
that for non-Hispanic whites (Goldberg 1997).
The increase in the prevalence of female-headed households is related to the
sharp decline in earnings for young men with an educational level of a high school
diploma or less (Holmes 1995b). As men with low levels of education are now
much more likely to be holding jobs that pay poverty wages than they were in the
1970s (R.M.Williams 1993:85–6), they are much more reluctant to form stable
households with the mothers of their children. As a result, female-headed
households are highly overrepresented among all households that fall below the
poverty line (Eisenstein 1994:183). Forty-four percent of single mothers remain
below the poverty line and two out of three adults living in poverty are women
(Parenti 1995:27).
9
Although neo-conservatives equate the growth of the capitalist “free” market
with freedom, equality and democracy, the evidence suggests that capitalist
formations depend on exploitation and coercion, foster inequality, and either
neutralize democracy or tolerate fundamentally anti-democratic conditions. Again,
at its most promising moment, liberal democratic theory suggests that every
individual has an inalienable right to engage freely in the development of her own
unique human capacities. Socialists, however, are correct in their assertion that
fundamental rights and freedoms cannot be secured in a society that is structured
according to the dictates of capitalist relations of exploitation. With Macpherson,
Laclau and Mouffe contend that we should appropriate these insights from liberal
democratic and socialist thought and combine them together to construct a new
approach to democracy.

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