Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary
Neo-conservatism and its socialist critics
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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) R E T R I E V I N G D E M O C R A C Y 13 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 R E T R I E V I N G D E M O C R A C Y 14 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). R E T R I E V I N G D E M O C R A C Y 15 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). R E T R I E V I N G D E M O C R A C Y 16 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, R E T R I E V I N G D E M O C R A C Y 17 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; R E T R I E V I N G D E M O C R A C Y 18 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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