Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary

The constitution of the subject through ideological struggle
Gramsci’s displacement of Lenin’s scientific rationality with his conception of
historical specificity allows his theory to attend to many political dimensions that
have been neglected in Marxist theory. He firmly rejected the reductionist
conception that the superstructural sphere—the sphere of social relations, cultural
practices, state structures, ideologies and so on—was thoroughly determined by
the economic base. Kautsky, by contrast, viewed political relations and ideological
discourses as “epiphenomena,” or mere reflections of the underlying economic
structure (Mouffe 1979b:174). With his rejection of Kautsky’s epiphenomenalism,
Gramsci concluded that we cannot dogmatically determine the meaning of
democratic struggles with reference to their relations to the class struggle. The

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workers’ movement should instead enter into ideological struggle to redefine the
democratic movements and to win them over to its side (Mouffe 1979a:17).
Gramsci did maintain that ultimately the political terrain would take the form of
two great historical blocs standing in opposition to one another, and that these
two blocs would be defined in terms of their class-based leadership, namely the
leadership of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. He nevertheless regarded the
two blocs as complex unities or collective wills; he even saw class struggle itself as
“complex relations of forces” (Mouffe 1979b:180). Above all, Gramsci maintained
that the socialist struggle would not succeed in its counter-hegemonic strategy
merely by relying on the dictates of scientific theory. It would have to engage in
the complex game of redefining democratic struggles and the most promising
popular elements, and then integrating them into a hegemonic socialist bloc.
Gramsci’s strategic approach remains relevant today. Radical democratic
activists in the United States, for example, are constantly attempting to counteract
the right’s appropriation of the American democratic tradition with alternative
constructions. When the neo-conservatives suggest that affirmative action
contradicts the Fourteenth Amendment, or the religious right invokes the mythical
constitutional right of American employers to discriminate against lesbian and
gay workers, democratic activists do not remain silent; they enter the fray and
offer oppositional constructions of these American political values. When the
anti-immigrant forces depict America as a white-English-only space, radical
activists respond with a vision of a multicultural and hybrid America. This is not
to endorse a full-scale “alternative patriotism”; the historical sedimentations of
American nationalism are such that a radical democratic pluralist American
patriotism has become almost an oxymoron. This is only to note that wherever
authoritarianism advances its agenda by appropriating traditions and symbols,
radical democratic activists respond by attempting to rescue the progressive
elements that can be found in those institutions and to transform that potential
into concrete political tools.
In the development of his theory of hegemony, Gramsci drew inspiration from
the same text that reductionist Marxists cite in defense of their epiphenomenalism,
namely Marx’s Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Gramsci
1971:365; Texier 1979:56–7). Marx argues that the economic structure of society
constitutes the “real foundation on which rises a legal and political superstructure
and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness,” and that “it is
not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary,
their social being that determines their consciousness” (Marx 1969a:503). This
passage has, with some justification, been widely interpreted as an endorsement of
the view that the political is merely a reflection of the economic base.
In a later passage, however, Marx offers an epistemological comment.
A distinction should be made between the material transformation of
the natural economic conditions of production, which can be determined
with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious,

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aesthetic or philosophic—in short, ideological forms in which men
become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.
(Marx 1969a:504)
The “conflict” to which Marx refers is the contradiction between the forces of
production and the relations of production, the contradiction that in this text
operates as the “motor of history” (Marx 1969a:504). The text is profoundly
ambiguous. It could be read as an affirmation of the negative meaning of “ideology”
as that which is not scientific and as that which conceals social contradictions.
Further, the passage could be made compatible with the argument that although
some philosophical, legal and political discourses are ideological insofar as they
are opposed to science, not all of these discourses are necessarily ideological. Finally,
it is asserted here that individuals become conscious of the “conflict” through the
work of “ideological forms”; it is not stated that only ideological forms can play
this role. It remains possible, then, that non-ideological discourses could also
contribute to this process (Larrain 1981:9–10).
Marx’s main argument, namely that ideology should be understood negatively
as that which is unscientific and conceals social contradictions, is therefore barely
interrupted by this methodological aside. In any event, this fragment inspired
Gramsci as he asserted that humans can only have a mediated relation to the
movement of great historical forces. Although Gramsci had to reconstruct Marx’s
text by memory during his imprisonment, he seized on this passage and concluded
that “‘man acquires consciousness of social relations in the field of ideology’”
(Gramsci 1971:138; Texier 1979:57). For Gramsci, then, “ideology” is not a simple
tactical tool that can be used by the bourgeoisie to delude the workers. “Ideology”
plays a constitutive and epistemological role: it is through ideological struggle
that the terms that define the political terrain are constructed (Gramsci 1971:365).
“Ideology” also has ontological effects, for where an ideology resonates with the
masses, it takes on a “psychological” validity: it organizes humans into groups,
constructs group members’ concrete sense of shared interests, and stages the groups’
struggles (Gramsci 1971:377). “Ideology” not only provides the mediating element
through which basic conflicts are grasped; it also sets up the defining framework
for political battles (Przeworski 1985:69). Although Laclau and Mouffe abandon
the concept of “ideology” because of its residual connections to the reductionist
base/superstructure model (Laclau 1990a: 89–92), they nevertheless appropriate
Gramsci’s argument about the positive role of ideology in their constructivist
conception of identity formation.