Dringende Aufgaben

Das Vorwort zur zweiten Auflage von Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, dass Ernesto Laclau und Chantal Mouffe im November 2000 geschrieben haben, ist eine sehr schöne Zusammenfassung der Hegemonietheorie und radikal-pluralistischen Demokratie, in dem das theoretisches Projekt in sein politischen und theoriepolitischen Kontext eingeordnet wird.

Es ist ja nun nicht so, als seien Sexismus, Rassismus oder sexuelle Diskriminierung reine Mittelklasseprobleme, und als seine Arbeiter_innen davon nicht betroffen. Aber davon abgesehen, dass hier die Differenz zwischen sogenannten kulturellen und ökonomischen Themen wieder aufgerufen wird, finde ich folgendes Zitat besonders schön:

A final word about the way we envisage the most urgent tasks for the Left. Several voices haven been heard recently calling: ‘Back to the class struggle’. The claim that the Left has become too closley identified with ‘cultural’ issuses, and that it has abandoned the struggle against economic inequalities. It is time, they say, to leave aside the obsession with ‘identity politics’, ant to listen again to the demands of the working class. What should we make of such critiques? Are we, today, in an opposite conjuncture to that which provided the background of our reflection, based as it was in criticizing the Left for not taking the struggles of the ‘new movements’ into consideration? It is true that the evolution of the parties of the Left has been such that they have become concerned mainly with the middle classes, to the detriment of the workers. But this is due to their incapacity to envisage an alternative to neo-liberalism and their uncritical acceptance of the imperatives of ‘flexibility’, not to a supposed infatuation with issues of ‘identity’. The solution is not to abandon the ‘cultural’ struggle to go back to ‘real’ politics. One of the central tenets of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy is the need to create a chain of equivalence among the various democratic struggles against different forms of subordination. We argued that struggles against sexism, racism, sexual discrimination, and in the defence of the environment needed to be articulated with those of the workers in a new left-wing hegemonic project. To put it in terminology which has recently become fashionable, we insisted that the Left needed to tackle issues of both ‘redistribution’ and ‘recognition’. This is what we meant by ‘radical and plural democracy’. (xviii)

Laclau/Mouffe (2001/1985): Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Zweite Auflage. London, New York (Verso).

One comment

  1. Blogmama says:

    das ist ja ein ganz toller Blog! Leider jetzt erst entdeckt. bitte dringend weitermachen. LG aus dem Karo/4!

Comments are closed.