Laclau and Mouffe are seen as the most influential post-Marxists, claiming to deconstruct Marx' categories, above all in their book "Hegemony and Socialist Strategy". Now, they are quite influential and well-known, but their writing could be called "opaque" - as a sociologist, I have a hard time following their arguments. Maybe you could help me putting in clear terms how exactly Laclau's postmarxism is different from other Marxist theories? In what way do Laclau and Mouffe succeed in deconstructing Marx - beyond this nice talk on "radical democracy"?
And, to add to the points made so far, Laclau and Mouffes analysis is not only analytical, but political itself. It is situated in the hjstorical period at the end of the 1980s when discussions in the political left were felt by many to be stuck. Thus, they do not mean to say that Marx' analysis in the 19th century was wrong or that his understanding of capitalism was faulty, but that in the given social situation, political struggles could neither theoretically nor politically be understood as a single, essentialist opposition. Instead, social struggles are fragmented and dispersed, and one goal of the left has to be to actively construct new "chains of equivalence", i.e. discursice coalitions.
Centrally, I think that Laclau makes a critique of a deterministic view of Marxism, which he assigns to Marx, but that has more to do with Marxism of the Second and Third International. That said, I believe that the central proposition of Laclau attempts to discuss the logic of the political constitution of the subjects ex-ante, ie at the level of economic position. From their point of view, this is an essentialist reading that ignores the discursive character of all social practices and at the same time, the impossibility of a complete "social closure".
I agree with everything said thus far. I might say it a little differently though. First, structural or objective positions such as "working class" are political constructions; they are the outcomes of struggles to fix otherwise free-floating and heterogeneous actors. (Incidentally, economic "change" or "crisis" is also a discursive construct). Second, to add to Amanda's point, working class can be strung together in the course of political struggle with no less salient positions in "chains of equivalence," so that a party might array white-petit bourgeois-gun-toting-suburban-men against another party, representing working class-gun violence victim-urban-women of color.
And, to add to the points made so far, Laclau and Mouffes analysis is not only analytical, but political itself. It is situated in the hjstorical period at the end of the 1980s when discussions in the political left were felt by many to be stuck. Thus, they do not mean to say that Marx' analysis in the 19th century was wrong or that his understanding of capitalism was faulty, but that in the given social situation, political struggles could neither theoretically nor politically be understood as a single, essentialist opposition. Instead, social struggles are fragmented and dispersed, and one goal of the left has to be to actively construct new "chains of equivalence", i.e. discursice coalitions.
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