ABSTRACT
Hegemony and Socialist Strategy is a landmark socialist text which was intended to demonstrate conclusively the theoretical irrelevance and political undesirability of monolithic and economistic Marxism. Describing their theoretical project as its scaling down, rather than abandonment, Laclau and Mouffe set out to recover and nurture a plural Marxism supportive of, and compatible with, the inherent and desirable plurality of the ‘social’ (Laclau and Mouffe 2001: 5). This project is laudable in principle, but it has, in practice, been less than satisfactory, for two kinds of reasons. First, in evaluating what is living and what is dead in ‘classical Marxism’, the authors decided, rather oddly, not to return to the source of the tradition, and, second, having retrieved what conceptual resources they deemed valuable, they proceeded to articulate these to discourse analysis. In deciding to leave Marx out of their account,1 the authors did a disservice to their own argument which contains the kernel of a very interesting and timely elaboration of Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism. That kernel is the concept of overdetermination, an Althusserian usage which Laclau and Mouffe considered worthy of rescue from its supposedly monolithic Marxist framework. While Althusser’s appropriation of the Freudian concept was intended for the development of a non-reductive theory of causality at the level of social formations or totalities (Althusser 1990a), Laclau and Mouffe reactivated the concept’s psychic dimension which he had left in abeyance.2
