Rethinking the Left

Brit

As I was reading the last chapter, I found myself thinking back to Stewart Hall’s essay when he discussed the left’s position.  For him, in order for change to occur, the left would have to accept a new strategy.  He said, “It is not because it is impossible, or utopian, but because the left is not convinced that it cannot continue in the old way” (11).  I found this pertinent to Laclau and Mouffe in the section “Radical Democracy: Alternative for a New Left” when they discussed how the left would have to reassess itself.  They said,

“It is not in the abandonment of the democratic terrain but, on the contrary, in the extension of the field of democratic struggles to the whole of civil society and the state, that the possibility resides for a hegemonic strategy of the Left.  It is nevertheless important to understand the radical extent of the changes which are necessary in the political imaginary of the Left, if it wishes to succeed in founding a political practice fully located in the field of the democratic revolution and conscious of the depth and variety of the hegemonic articulations which the present conjuncture requires” (177). 

I like how they find a solution that doesn’t scrap everything and demands a new order, but rather they think change can be possible if the “whole civil society and the state” are included.  They also acknowledge that despite not completely changing the way the Left thinks, their ideas for change are still radical.  I just wonder, as Hall did, if these ideas will ever be put into practice.  Laclau and Mouffe go onto discuss what limits the left, and I think they did a good job of discussing the obstacles of classism, statism, and economism, which helped lead into the overall issue of revolution.  At the end, they bring hegemony back and basically say everything in some way or another (if I read that correctly) comes back to hegemony.  It is the “name of the game,” which again makes me think of Hall when he said, “The only way of genuinely contesting a hegemonic form of politics is to develop a counter-hegemonic strategy” (11).