The postmodernism-post-Marxism nexus: Laclau, Mouffe, Lyotard and Foucault's discourses on discourse (Ernesto Laclau, Michel Foucault, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Chantale Mouffe)

This work is a marxist engagement with the theoretical tendencies of post-marxism and postmodernism as they are represented by Ernesto Laclau, Chantale Mouffe, Jean-François Lyotard and Michel Foucault respectively. There are three main tasks to by achieved by this engagement; first, to deal with the representation and misrepresentation of marxist theory in post-marxist and postmodern thought; second, to evaluate the usefulness of post-marxist and Postmodern approaches to problems in marxist thought in particular and modern thought in general; third, to absorb the most useful elements contained in the “posts” while avoiding their excesses.; I argue that post-marxism, as a theoretical project that defines itself against marxism, incorporates the most anti-marxist excesses of postmodern thought while missing some of its most useful theoretical insights. Where Laclau and Mouffe view marxism as a form of vulgar economic-determinism which has fettered the brilliant superstructural analyses of Luxemburg, Gramsci and Althusser by tying their symbolic readings of politics to the predetermined categories of the base (Chapter 2), I view marxism as a critique of the categories of bourgeois political economy that allows the polyphonic voices of the proletariat to disrupt surplus extraction (Chapters 3 and 4). Here my reading of Marx draws upon the neo-Wittgensteinian interpretation of the “differend” between capital and labour that is developed by Lyotard. Where Laclau and Mouffe view social struggles as the result of the articulation of symbolic elements in a system of mutually related signs—a social ensemble—with no necessary class character (Chapter 3), I view social struggles as the result of the more or less authoritarian organization of our everyday lives in (hetero) sexist and racist matrices (Chapters 3 and 4), and in the micro-technologies of prison, asylum and workplace (Chapter 5) whose continual reproduction also means the reproduction of a proletariat with interests that are fundamentally opposed to the authoritarian organization of our quotidian discursive and non-discursive practices. This marxist alternative to post-marxism is influenced by Foucault's theorization of micro-technologies of power.