Geras vs Laclau

["Ricardo Duchesne" <rduchesn@xxxxxxxx>]

Justin:

> I haven't read the debate for a long time, and I can't recall the
> details. But I did read the _whole_ debate, and L&M's book, too, quite
> carefully. However, this isn't going anywhere unless someone starts
> posting arguments rather that confessio fidei about which arguments
> they liked. I take it, first, that you think that L&M can avoid a
> radical antirealism that makes the existence of soccer balls or rocks
> to be mind-dependent. Please explain, and explain why the scope and
> limits of their antirealism is. I was impressed by Geras' argument
> that L&M caricature the sort of determinations that historical
> materialism involves in its explanations, making it out to be a flat,
> monocausal economic reductionism. G's explanation of relative autonomy
> is pretty good, in my view. I was also impressed by his argument that,
> in going through actual Marxist thinkers, L&M, whenever faced with
> textual counterexamples, conclude that therefore Luxemburg, Gramsci,
> whoever, had simply contradicted themselves.

You're right this will go nowhere unless we explain their respective
positions. I was afraid to be locked-in elaborating the little I know. If
I recall Laclau's point is that there are different, even conflicting
ways to 'see' a soccer ball, no one view being all-inclusive or
capable of telling you what the ball is really like - a common
argument which is consistent with the realist claim that the ball
exists outside the interpreter.

The complaint that L&M offer a simplistic, straw man version of
historical materialism is one that no marxist will ever fail to make.
Marxists  have outdone Ptolemy in their deployment of epycycles,
eccentrics, and equants, in all sorts of contradictory combinations,
to reconcile their theories with observed phenomena. But this
accusation is a red herring. *Hegemony* is exactly an examination
of the many, yes, creative strategies marxist have employed to
overcome monocausal explanations. L&M's conclusion, after
detailing many such strategies - by Plekhanov, Kautsky, Lenin,
Luxemburg, Althusser, Gramsci, and others - is the correct one
that, "whatever the level of complexity in the system of mediations"
achieved, everyone retained the metaphysical idea that there was a
"single underlying principle fixing - and hence constituting - the
whole field of differences".

Geras, I might add, has changed his views since that debate. On
two occasions,  at a conference and as an invited speaker at York,
I noted that in his presentation he seemed to be trying to get away
from the idea of a 'single principle underlying the differences'. I
asked, in a roundabout way, if he no longer stood by the position
he had adopted in that debate, and he answered he no longer
thought marxism could be the rallying point of a radical politics - a
conclusion reached earlier by L&M with their idea of "radical
democracy".