Their framework precludes political engagement --- cedes institutions to the right

Mouffe 9 (Chantal Mouffe, Professor of Political Theory at the Centre for the Study of Democracy,
University of Westminster, “The Importance of Engaging the State”, What is Radical Politics Today?,
Edited by Jonathan Pugh, pp. 233-7)

In both Hardt and Negri, and Virno, there is therefore emphasis upon ‘ critique as withdrawal’ . They all call for the
development of a non-state public sphere. They call for self-organisation, experimentation, non-representative and extra-parliamentary
politics. They see forms of traditional representative politics as inherently oppressive. So they do not
seek to engage with them , in order to challenge them. They seek to get rid of them altogether. This
disengagement is, for such influential personalities in radical politics today, the key to every political position in the world. The Multitude
must recognise imperial sovereignty itself as the enemy and discover adequate means of subverting its power. Whereas in the disciplinary
era I spoke about earlier, sabotage was the fundamental form of political resistance, these authors claim that, today, it should be
desertion. It is indeed through desertion, through the evacuation of the places of power, that they think that battles against Empire might
be won. Desertion and exodus are, for these important thinkers, a powerful form of class struggle against imperial postmodernity.
According to Hardt and Negri, and Virno, radical politics in the past was dominated by the notion of ‘the people’. This was, according to
them, a unity, acting with one will. And this unity is linked to the existence of the state. The Multitude, on the contrary, shuns political
unity. It is not representable because it is an active self-organising agent that can never achieve the status of a juridical personage. It can
never converge in a general will, because the present globalisation of capital and workers’ struggles will not permit this. It is anti-state and
anti-popular. Hardt and Negri claim that the Multitude cannot be conceived any more in terms of a sovereign authority that is
representative of the people. They therefore argue that new forms of politics, which are non-representative, are needed. They
advocate a withdrawal from existing institutions. This is something which characterises much of radical
politics today. The emphasis is not upon challenging the state. Radical politics today is often
characterised by a mood, a sense and a feeling, that the state itself is inherently the problem. Critique as
engagement I will now turn to presenting the way I envisage the form of social criticism best suited to radical
politics today. I agree with Hardt and Negri that it is important to understand the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism. But I
consider that the dynamics of this transition is better apprehended within the framework of the approach outlined in the book Hegemony
and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001). What I want to stress is that many factors have
contributed to this transition from Fordism to post-Fordism, and that it is necessary to recognise its complex nature. My problem with
Hardt and Negri’s view is that, by putting so much emphasis on the workers’ struggles, they tend to see this transition as if it was driven by
one single logic: the workers’ resistance to the forces of capitalism in the post-Fordist era. They put too much emphasis upon immaterial
labour. In their view, capitalism can only be reactive and they refuse to accept the creative role played both by capital and by labour. To
put it another way, they deny the positive role of political struggle . In Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a
Radical Democratic Politics we use the word ‘hegemony’ to describe the way in which meaning is given to
institutions or practices: for example, the way in which a given institution or practice is defined as
‘oppressive to women’, ‘racist’ or ‘environmentally destructive’. We also point out that every hegemonic
order is therefore susceptible to being challenged by counter-hegemonic practices – feminist,
anti-racist, environmentalist, for example. This is illustrated by the plethora of new social movements which
presently exist in radical politics today (Christian, anti-war, counter-globalisation, Muslim, and so on). Clearly not all of these
are workers’ struggles. In their various ways they have nevertheless attempted to influence and have
influenced a new hegemonic order. This means that when we talk about ‘the political’, we do not
lose sight of the ever present possibility of heterogeneity and antagonism within society. There are
many different ways of being antagonistic to a dominant order in a heterogeneous society – it need not only refer to the workers’
struggles. I submit that it
is necessary to introduce this hegemonic dimension when one envisages the
transition from Fordism to post-Fordism. This means abandoning the view that a single logic (workers’ struggles) is at work
in the evolution of the work process; as well as acknowledging the pro-active role played by capital. In order to do this we can find
interesting insights in the work of Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello who, in their book The New Spirit of Capitalism (2005), bring to light the
way in which capitalists manage to use the demands for autonomy of the new movements that
developed in the 1960s, harnessing them in the development of the post-Fordist networked
economy and transforming them into new forms of control. They use the term ‘artistic critique’ to refer to how the
strategies of the counter-culture (the search for authenticity, the ideal of selfmanagement and the anti-hierarchical exigency) were used to
promote the conditions required by the new mode of capitalist regulation, replacing the disciplinary framework characteristic of the Fordist
period. From my point of view, what is interesting in this approach is that it shows how an important dimension of the transition from
Fordism to post- Fordism involves rearticulating existing discourses and practices in new ways. It allows us to visualise the transition from
Fordism to post- Fordism in terms of a hegemonic intervention. To be sure, Boltanski and Chiapello never use this vocabulary, but their
analysis is a clear example of what Gramsci called ‘hegemony through neutralisation’ or ‘passive revolution’. This refers to a situation
where demands which challenge the hegemonic order are recuperated by the existing system, which is achieved by satisfying them in a
way that neutralises their subversive potential. When we apprehend the transition from Fordism to post-
Fordism within such a framework, we can understand it as a hegemonic move by capital to re-
establish its leading role and restore its challenged legitimacy. We did not witness a revolution, in
Marx’s sense of the term. Rather, there have been many different interventions, challenging dominant hegemonic practices. It is clear
that, once we envisage social reality in terms of ‘hegemonic’ and ‘counter-hegemonic’ practices,
radical politics is not about withdrawing completely from existing institutions . Rather, we have no
other choice but to engage with hegemonic practices, in order to challenge them . This is crucial;
otherwise we will be faced with a chaotic situation. Moreover, if we do not engage with and challenge the existing
order, if we instead choose to simply escape the state completely, we leave the door open for others
to take control of systems of authority and regulation. Indeed there are many historical (and not so historical)

examples of this. When the Left shows little interest, Right-wing and authoritarian groups are only too
happy to take over the state. The strategy of exodus could be seen as the reformulation of the idea of communism, as it was
found in Marx. There are many points in common between the two perspectives. To be sure, for Hardt and Negri it is no longer the
proletariat, but the Multitude which is the privileged political subject. But in both cases the
state is seen as a monolithic
apparatus of domination that cannot be transformed. It has to ‘wither away’ in order to leave room for a
reconciled society beyond law, power and sovereignty. In reality, as I’ve already noted, others are often perfectly willing
to take control. If my approach – supporting new social movements and counterhegemonic practices – has been called ‘post-Marxist’
by many, it is precisely because I have challenged the very possibility of such a reconciled society. To acknowledge the ever present
possibility of antagonism to the existing order implies recognising that heterogeneity cannot be eliminated. As far as politics is
concerned, this means the need to envisage it in terms of a hegemonic struggle between conflicting
hegemonic projects attempting to incarnate the universal and to define the symbolic parameters of social life. A
successful hegemony fixes the meaning of institutions and social practices and defines the ‘common sense’ through which a given
conception of reality is established. However, such a result is always contingent , precarious and susceptible to
being challenged by counter-hegemonic interventions . Politics always takes place in a field criss-
crossed by antagonisms . A properly political intervention is always one that engages with a certain
aspect of the existing hegemony . It can never be merely oppositional or conceived as desertion,
because it aims to challenge the existing order, so that it may reidentify and feel more comfortable with that order.
Another important aspect of a hegemonic politics lies in establishing linkages between various
demands (such as environmentalists , feminists , anti-racist groups ), so as to transform them into
claims that will challenge the existing structure of power relations . This is a further reason why
critique involves engagement , rather than disengagement. It is clear that the different demands that
exist in our societies are often in conflict with each other. This is why they need to be articulated
politically, which obviously involves the creation of a collective will, a ‘we’. This, in turn, requires the
determination of a ‘them’. This obvious and simple point is missed by the various advocates of the Multitude. For they seem to believe that
the Multitude possesses a natural unity which does not need political articulation. Hardt and Negri see ‘the People’ as homogeneous and
expressed in a unitary general will, rather than divided by different political conflicts. Counter-hegemonic
practices, by contrast,
do not eliminate differences. Rather, they are what could be called an ‘ensemble of differences’, all
coming together, only at a given moment, against a common adversary . Such as when different groups from
many backgrounds come together to protest against a war perpetuated by a state, or when environmentalists, feminists, anti-racists and
others come together to challenge dominant models of development and progress. In
these cases, the adversary cannot be
defined in broad general terms like ‘Empire’, or for that matter ‘Capitalism’. It is instead contingent upon
the particular circumstances in question – the specific states, international institutions or governmental
practices that are to be challenged. Put another way, the construction of political demands is
dependent upon the specific relations of power that need to be targeted and transformed, in order to
create the conditions for a new hegemony. This is clearly not an exodus from politics. It is not ‘critique as

withdrawal’, but ‘critique as engagement’. It is a ‘ war of position’ that needs to be launched, often
across a range of sites, involving the coming together of a range of interests . This can only be done by
establishing links between social movements, political parties and trade unions, for example. The
aim is to create a common bond and collective will , engaging with a wide range of sites, and often
institutions, with the aim of transforming them . This, in my view, is how we should conceive the
nature of radical politics.