Politics as construction of the unthinkable

This article is the English translation of a text originally published by Ernesto Laclau in French in 1981 as part of the proceedings of the colloquium Materialités Discursives held in Nanterre on 24–26 April 1980. In this text, Ernesto Laclau reflects on the subject of hegemony as a discursively constructed phenomenon. Building on research on the discursive construction of the acceptability of popular front politics in 1935 during the Seventh Congress of the Komintern, the author proposes a number of broader arguments on the notion of antagonism and on some of the problems related to the Marxist conception of totality.

The antinomies of the modern imaginary and the double dialectic of control

Cornelius Castoriadis made a significant and distinctive contribution to the development of the notion of the dialectic of control. In the first instance, Castoriadis formulated an important reconceptualization and restatement of the Marxist conception of the central contradiction of capitalism. He argued that capitalism depended on the creativity of workers while excluding them from effective control. Similarly, Castoriadis sought to extend the Marxist analysis of those tendencies present within the structuration of the labour process that may prefigure a socialist reorganization of production. Castoriadis’s analyses of capitalism during the phase of his involvement with Socialism or Barbarism are likewise informed by his assessment of state socialist regimes. In particular, this assessment provided important insights into the modalities of control in modern society and the complications of transcending forms of institutional domination in modernity. It will be argued that some of the distinctive intentions of Castoriadis’s later elucidation of the social imaginary can be traced to his interpretation of bureaucratic capitalism and that this is evident in his subsequent accounts of the capitalist imaginary. In his later theory, Castoriadis interprets the problem of the dialectic of control in terms of the relationship between instituting and instituted society. Castoriadis’s analysis of capitalism during the period of Socialism or Barbarism will be situated in the wider debates over capitalism at that time. Similarly, Castoriadis’s departure from some of the philosophical sources that influenced the development of the notion of the dialectic of control will be explored.

Asia and the Shift in Marx’s Conception of Revolution and History

Through a revisit of the evolution of Marx’s ideas about Oriental society and the village community, this chapter explores the methodological meaning of Asia for the Marxist conception of history and demonstrates its contemporary relevance. Following Marx’s original cases of India, China, and Russia, the chapter traces how eventually in his analysis national liberation and class struggle became mutually indispensable and why the oldest forms of social organization could be transformed into the newest as the communist project. This textual study of a remarkable intellectual trajectory begins with a critical examination of Marx’s Asiatic mode of production and then looks into the major twists and leaps in his later reflections, and concludes with a tentative appraisal of the significance of his eastward turn. Marx’s non-deterministic history with a strong agential as well as ecological consciousness is shown to be an indispensable source for contemporary Marxist rethinking of historical and global transformations.

Russia

Class structure, class inequality, and class analysis are central to understanding contemporary Russian politics and society. And yet Russians themselves—from social scientists, to political leaders, to everyday Russians—have struggled to come to grips with the concept of class, which became a taboo topic following the collapse of communism. In recent years, that has started to change. Russian social scientists have placed great emphasis on defining the Russian “middle class,” in a search both for a non-Marxist conception of class and for a social group with the potential to lead Russia toward a more liberal future. Yet the middle class concept remains fuzzy, and the political aspirations for the group have been only partially realized. Meanwhile, much of the rest of Russian society retains a more traditional view of class and class conflict, as reflected in various political struggles and even in popular culture, such as Russian film.

Life-Times in Fate Playing

Examining the recent post-Marxist conception of labor in the contemporary context of financialization and global crisis, this essay contests prevailing ideas about the contemporary eradication of the distinction between production and reproduction, between labor and life, encapsulated in the notion of “real subsumption.” Departing from these ideas I argue that the extraction of value from “life” takes place through multiple and contradictory modalities, and propose the concept of “life-times” as a way to foreground important differences in the social uses, practices, understanding, valorization, and inhabitation of the times of life and their relations in a global economy in which the “production time” of capital has encompassed all of life. Drawing on the social contexts of undocumented immigrants, guest workers, refugees, and displaced persons, I elaborate on differential life-times from the side of life destined for disposable superfluity. I look at acts of “fate playing” in the contexts of migrant Filipina workers and the urban lumpenproletariat to view those dimensions of social reproductive work on the part of disposable peoples that persist beyond and despite capitalist subsumption and exceed most theoretical accounts of labor. An attention to such remaindered life-times raises questions about the limits of our political imagination and of our vision of the time line of global capitalism’s duration and end.