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From Marxist to Post-Marxist Populism: Ernesto Laclau’s Trajectory within

the National Left and Beyond
Article in Historical Materialism · November 2019

DOI: 10.1163/1569206X-00001311
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Historical Materialism (2019) 1–32
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From Marxist to Post-Marxist Populism: Ernesto

Laclau’s Trajectory within the National Left and
Beyond
Omar Acha
University of Buenos Aires
omaracha@gmail.com
Abstract
Ernesto Laclau’s Marxist and post-Marxist works are best understood when they are
embedded in the history of Argentina’s National Left. This socialist-populist current
underpinned his strategic horizons onward of at least 1963. While purely theoretical
interpretations of Laclau can sometimes be enlightening, they tend to lose sight of
the historical density of the Argentine’s thought. Over the course of his working life,
Laclau’s theories presented the Argentinean Left with a challenge concerning how to
engage with Peronism: specifically, how to develop a leftist hegemonic project in an
era when the working class remained stubbornly linked to a Peronist political identity.
Laclau’s political trajectory and his understanding of Marxism are analysed here in
order to explain the nature of his post-Marxism.
Keywords
Ernesto Laclau – National Left – Marxism – post-Marxism – political theory
Introduction
Ernesto Laclau (1935–2014) was a prominent social and political theoretician

whose position within the contemporary intellectual panorama is frequently
identified with post-Marxism and the development of a formalist model of
populism. His perspective has been described as original and innovative, and
rightly so. While taking this into account, I will show how during his trajectory,
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/1569206X-00001311

2 Acha
lasting over half a century, his conceptual agenda remained tied to a populist
critique of Marxist socialism understood in terms of class politics.
Laclau’s political theory can be separated into three periods: first, an initial
conception of a national-progressive political front within revolutionary poli-
tics; second, an Althusserian, populist Marxism; and a third period character-
ised by a discursive and populist post-Marxism. Thus, one of the outstanding
features in Laclau’s political theory has been the continuity of problems for po-
litically committed thought. As far as discontinuity is concerned, this could be
attributed to the answers that were on offer in a given historical conjuncture.
Laclau’s theoretical tour de force consisted in his effort to maintain a notion of
a national-anti-imperialist alliance among progressive classes within a leftist
politics peculiar to revolutionary political strategy in ‘semi-colonial countries’.
Readings of Gramsci, Wittgenstein and Lacan were summoned by Laclau
to answer to the same political challenge that found its definitive formulation
in the politico-intellectual essays written by the Argentine Trotskyist Jorge
Abelardo Ramos: in an effort to counter the limitations of what was known as
the ‘anti-National Left’, the Argentine ‘National Left’ struggled with a politics
of transformation that was trapped in the short-term by its subordination to a
national-capitalist hegemony, embodied by Peronism, and in the long-term by
an aspiration to ‘overcome’ that hegemony through socialist transformation.
Hence this perspective persisted at not only a conceptual but also a political
level, wherein any form of support for Peronism became the yardstick for a
critique of ‘ultra-leftist’ revolutionary practice.
Certainly, Laclau’s intellectual biography could be read from a different
point of view than the one proposed here. I recognise that this perspective
could be accused of interpretational ‘parochialism’, as well as risk implying
a continuity of ideas that Michel Foucault and Quentin Skinner, in different
ways, had already criticised a half-century ago. I maintain that we must ‘pro-
vincialise’ the biases displayed by the theoretical studies of Laclau, which tend
to overlook his political positions. Similar to Gadamer’s ‘effectual history’ or
Wirkungsgeschichte, Laclau’s political militancy during the sixties remained
connected to an enduring conceptual memory that accompanied his reflec-
tions on the limits of the Left in its quest to become a popular/populist force.
Even if Laclau’s writings after 1970 often refer to realities external to Argentina,
they never broke conceptually with the National Left’s teachings; that is, the
same ideological family that Laclau never renounced, albeit distancing himself
from its organisational forms. In that sense, I propose to integrate the tension
between the ‘internal history’ of theory and that history which appears exter-
nal to it, namely practice, a dimension frequently forgotten in most theoretical
evaluations produced in the Global North.
10.1163/1569206X-00001311 | Historical Materialism (2019) 1–32

From Marxist to Post-Marxist Populism 3
One noteworthy difference between the mature Laclau and the earliest
ideas of the National Left is his posterior abandonment of a systemic analysis,
and, along with it, any radical critique of capitalist society. Late Laclau rejected
such a critique because of the constitutive ‘impossibility’ of attributing to ‘so-
ciety’ any general pre-discursive and ‘totalising’ logic. In that way, throughout
the 1970s and ’80s Laclau’s trajectory resembled much of his intellectual gen-
eration in its shift from revolution to reform, from Marxism to post-Marxism,
and from economy to politics, albeit conserving the basic core of populist
strategy: the critique of workerist, class-centred politics, on account of its in-
ability to generate a political option capable of nurturing a hegemonic anti-
capitalist working class and create a social movement from within the heart of
the ‘national-popular’ sphere.
The first section of this article reviews the first decades of Laclau’s political
life – from his joining the National Left in 1963 until the publication of Politics
and Ideology in Marxist Theory (1977) – and provides an overview of the effects
this early political experience would have on his mature intellectual develop-
ment. The second section analyses the conceptual shifts leading to his post-
Marxist programme, through a reading of his Hegemony and Socialist Strategy
(1985) and, above all, the New Reflections on the Revolution of our Time (1990),
which provides a detailed account of the Laclausian critique of Marx and
Marxism. The third section is dedicated to the study of Laclau’s use of post-
structuralism as a means for theoretical edification in his On Populist Reason
(2005), confirming a subaltern current running through the different variants
of populism and reformism. In the conclusion, I foreground the derivations of
Laclau’s trajectory as an intellectual of the Argentine National Left, which is
relevant for a non-platonic archaeology of post-Marxism.
From the National Left to a Marxist Theory of Populism
Ernesto Laclau was born in 1935 into a family that strongly identified, through
his father, with the popular political movement connected to the figure of
Hipólito Yrigoyen.1 In 1954, the young Laclau began to study History at the
University of Buenos Aires. Sympathising with Reformismo Universitario,
1 Hipólito Yrigoyen was twice elected president of Argentina: from 1916 to 1922, and from 1928
to 1930. He is known for having championed the democratisation of the political system and
for turning the Radical Civic Party into one of Argentina’s most powerful mainstream par-
ties. (This section summarises the political and biographical reference points for the young
Laclau in order to focus on the conceptual dimensions of his initial orientation. For further
information, see Acha 2013.)
Historical Materialism (2019) 1–32 | 10.1163/1569206X-00001311

4 Acha
the university student-union organisation that opposed Juan D. Perón’s gov-

ernment, Laclau looked favourably on the coup d’état – the self-proclaimed
‘Liberating Revolution’ – that removed Peronism from power in September 1955.
Following the military coup, Laclau became involved in socialist and re-
formist currents. Along with many of his classmates, he championed the so-
cialist historian José Luis Romero as candidate for the position of rector of the
University of Buenos Aires. Together with Romero and his circle of young aco-
lytes, he took part in 1958 in a split within the traditional Argentine Socialist
Party (1896). Leftist culture was steeped at that time in intense debate. The
enduring hold of the Peronist identity on the working class and a growing
awareness of the repressive character of the ‘Liberating Revolution’ had led to
a re-evaluation of Peronism on the Left. In the case of the Socialist Party, those
debates produced a division between an intransigent anti-Peronist sector and
another current that celebrated the social achievements of Peronism, albeit
criticising its political authoritarianism. The latter sector considered anti-
Peronism to be problematic, since such a position would eliminate all possi-
bility for the Left to engage in dialogue with the working class. Meanwhile,
the post-coup civilian government under Arturo Frondizi had embarked on
a mission in 1958 to bring about a democratic, developmentalist project that
would exclude Perón from the political system; however, by 1960 the political
failure of the Frondizi government had become apparent. In that context, the
aforementioned sector of the Socialist Party began to explore a possible con-
vergence between the anti-capitalist Left and left-wing Peronist sectors.
Still a young student, in 1958 Laclau was appointed as a research assistant
at the Institute of Sociology, which had recently been created by the liberal-
socialist sociologist Gino Germani.2 In 1959, Laclau was incorporated as a
teaching assistant into the Department of Social History under Romero’s in-
novative chairmanship. One year later, Laclau published his first significant
text in Situación, the journal of the Socialist Party Youth organisation, wherein
he analysed the importance of mass migration to Argentina between 1870 and
1930. Laclau’s perspective closely followed that of Germani, who held that mi-
gratory processes interacted with the dynamism of ‘modernisation’. Laclau
reproduced Germani’s distinction between the vigorous transatlantic migra-
tion of an ‘old’ working class, with its own organisations and ideologies, and
the internal migrations of a ‘new’ working class that lacked in cultural and or-
ganisational independence. The Socialist Party’s problem in the 1950s, Laclau
wrote, was that it was guided by a political vision based on the ‘old’ rather
2 The information on Laclau’s academic career in Argentina is taken from his personal file at
the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras de la Universidad de Buenos Aires, number 4332-20.

than the ‘new’ working class, where the latter had conditioned the emergence
of Peronism.3 However, Laclau also employed concepts absent in Germani’s
work, such as ‘dependency’ and ‘imperialism’. On the other hand, there appear
notions such as ‘economic system’ and ‘element’, which would later be recon-
figured in his historical studies. By that point, Laclau already defined himself
as a Marxist, although he lamented the traditional Left’s oversimplification of
Marxism. Socialism, concluded Laclau, should offer a ‘plan for national libera-
tion’ based on the contradictions of ‘imperialist capitalism’ in Latin America.4
The disagreements within the socialist sector in which Laclau was active,
by that point radicalised by the events of the Cuban Revolution, led to a new
split. By 1961 Laclau had left the small world of internal debates and instead
invested his efforts in university activism. He became a leader of the Frente
de Acción Universitaria (University Action Front), an organisation with an in-
teresting strategy targeting institutional academic policies. Differing from that
part of the Left which held that the university was useful for the recruitment of
young political cadre, the Frente argued for a politics that would tackle the real
needs of students, and that a long-term socialist strategy should be built both
by running student unions and through intellectual training. It could even be
argued, retrospectively, that in the Frente Laclau had already intuited a vision
of a Gramscian-style ‘hegemony’. Whatever the case, his point of view was not
entirely workerist at that point. This was understandable given that the politi-
cal goal of the Frente was to reach the working class through student activism,
in what many labelled a ‘worker-student alliance’, a notion indebted to the tra-
dition of the Reformismo Universitario.
With the creation of the new Socialist Party of the National Left (PSIN, also
known simply as the ‘National Left’) led by Jorge Abelardo Ramos (1921–94),
Laclau and his supporters in the Student Front began to gain prominence. At
the end of 1963, Laclau’s group joined the National Left party, founded a year
earlier. Although the origins of the National Left movement can be traced back
to 1943, its political characteristics became more defined around 1947 with the
recent consolidation of the Peronist government.
Based on Trotsky’s writings on Lázaro Cárdenas in Mexico, the National
Left argued that in a ‘semi-colonial’ country under imperialism, Marxists must
support those national bourgeois governments that resist colonial oppression
in favour of the working-class and peasantry, and that they should promote
industrial development. Thus, one Argentine Trotskyist fraction arrived at
the conclusion that Peronism deserved ‘critical support’. The National Left,
3 For more on the Socialist Party’s dilemmas regarding Peronism, see Herrera 2016.
4 Laclau 1960, p. 24.

6 Acha
however, also sought to preserve its organisational and ideological indepen-

dence in order to edify a ‘working-class party’. Since it was believed that the
decisive contradiction was the opposition between national independence
and imperialism, ultra-leftist positions emphasising the class struggle between
bourgeoisie and proletariat were regarded as splitting the ‘national front’,
applying abstract recipes and favouring foreign imperialism as well as the
local oligarchy.
This did not mean surrendering all influence over workers and popular bases
to the bourgeois leadership of Peronism. At some point, the theory went, the
contradictions would reveal the limits of the Peronist reformist programme.
The workers’ party of the National Left, which had avoided the anti-Peronist
stance of the ultra-Left while maintaining its independence and political ca-
pacity, would then lead the ‘permanent’ passage from the crisis of the national
revolution to the socialist revolution. Thus, in the early 1960s the National
Left added to the traditional slogans of Peronism – social justice, economic
independence and political sovereignty – a ‘fourth flag’: the popular, workers’
government.5 In effect, Laclau was seduced by the National Left’s reconcilia-
tion of, on the one hand, support for Peronism (prohibited at that time) and,
on the other, a long-term socialist perspective.
Laclau’s most active period in the PSIN spanned from 1964 to 1968. Assuming
the role of editor of the party newspaper Lucha Obrera (Workers’ Struggle),
which mostly targeted university students, Laclau embraced the new demands
of that responsibility while also pursuing a promising academic career. In the
final months of 1963, Laclau published a short historiographical essay on the
‘history of mentalities’ that also provides a glimpse into his understanding of
Marxism at the time. The article reveals the full scope of the young Laclau’s
ambition, wherein he implicitly opposes José Luis Romero’s historical-cultural
project with a Marxist perspective that would be better equipped to capture
societal changes. Romero, a decisive figure in the ‘historiographical renova-
tion’ of the second half of twentieth century in Argentina, had developed a
longue durée history of the ‘bourgeois revolution’ dating from 1000 CE until the
present, approaching the bourgeoisie primarily in cultural terms. By proposing
an alternative view, Laclau was guided by a particular historical-philosophical
inclination according to which Marxism could provide a critique of capital-
ist society and reveal its inner workings. It could shed light on the whole of
human history:
5 Spilimbergo 1962; Ramos 1964.

It is impossible to recreate an image of the human past that does not

begin by postulating a future. In essence, the conceptual crisis of histo-
ricity arose out of the paralysed capacity for projection, and only a resur-
gence of this capacity can engender a reunion with history. In this sense,
Marxism represents the only valid attempt, up to the present, to link the
peculiar significance of a moment in time with the totality of human
history.6
Following the line set by the PSIN, Laclau challenged the entire strategy of the
particularist Left, which was workerist and immediately revolutionary. This
puerile idea of politics, Laclau argued, would lead to isolation and, in some
cases, reactionary positions such as those adopted by leftist anti-Peronism.
The challenge, then, was to build a bridge between the democratic tasks of
the national revolution and the socialist struggle, which in turn demanded the
guidance of an ‘autonomous working class’ or ‘autonomous popular sectors’.7
Such guidance required that an alliance be built between the working class
and the petite bourgeoisie, especially its student segment.8 According to that
vision, the passage from the democratic moment to the national moment is
structured through the confrontation between the ‘principal classes’. The prin-
cipal classes, Laclau insisted, were not the proletariat and the bourgeoisie – a
common misconception of the ‘sepoy left’ (izquierda cipaya), subordinated as
that current was to imperialist intellectual categories, oblivious to the ‘national
question’ in an allegedly semi-colonial country – but the working class and the
local oligarchy.9
It is important here to provide an overview of the political principles de-
fended by Laclau in his Workers’ Struggle.10 While I admit to a small dose of
retrospective stylising, I believe that the political matrix for a ‘Marxist popu-
lism’ can be recognised therein. While weighing up the alternatives offered by
workerist trade-unionism, Laclau also applied a criterion for uniting demands
in terms of ‘popular struggles’. Whereas before Peronist trade-unionism had
fluctuated between negotiation and insurrectionary tactics, that movement’s
‘consciousness’ and political effectiveness surged in May 1963, and again in
1964. On that point, Laclau pointed out:
6 Laclau 1963, p. 312.

7 Laclau 1964b; Laclau 1964e.
8 Laclau 1964a; Laclau 1964d.
9 Laclau 1965b.
10 See also Kraniauskas 2014.

8 Acha
Through these experiences, the union movement that emerged as an au-

tonomous political force became the historical axis for the struggle of all
sectors linked to the domestic market and national development on the
one hand, and objectively confronting imperialism and the oligarchy on
the other. Without a doubt, new plans for an increasingly radical struggle
will signpost the way to future popular struggles.11
However, the mechanics of the conflict had a transcendental goal:
Thus a long series of struggles has opened up through which the work-
ers’ movement acquires its autonomous political consciousness and ad-
equate instruments to serve its ends. This trajectory’s port of call will be
the socialist revolutionary party.12
The strategic imagination of the editor of Workers’ Struggle was firmly focused
on the dangers of fragmentation among the ‘popular forces’.13 He repeatedly
agitated against particular acts of disunion. By way of contrast, he contended
that if the working class was to be the ‘vanguard’ of the ‘popular classes’, then
it must carry out a double task: ‘at the same time as it conquers its autonomy,
[it must] overcome its isolation as a class and develop a programme and or-
ganisational forms that enable it to acquire a hegemonic role in a future
class front’.14 Once more, this space – which the Peronist movement could
not occupy – was, for historical reasons, reserved for the working class: ‘in a
semi-colonial country such as Argentina, leadership of the struggles related
to national tasks, which the bourgeoisie is too impotent to tackle, falls to the
workers’ movement’.15 But this path was by no means automatic. Those ‘tasks’
necessitated a ‘workers’ party’ which ‘at once attests to the political indepen-
dence of the working class while at the same time integrates the democratic
tasks within a revolutionary strategy’.16 The antagonistic side of this perspec-
tive included the need to attack the ‘system’ and hasten its internal divisions, a
requirement indispensable for enhancing popular strength:
The popular forces’ main tactic is to accelerate this process of disintegra-

tion to its maximum, without which the seizure of power is inconceivable.
11 Laclau 1964a, p. 1.
12 Ibid.
13 Laclau 1965a, p. 1.
14 Laclau 1964g, p. 1.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid.

If taking power by the popular sectors can’t be resolved without armed

struggle, the entire period prior to it should be channelled towards a re-
lentless fight to break the system and accelerate its crisis.17
How can the two classes – working class and petite bourgeoisie – be politi-
cally linked with the two social forces whose union was postulated by Laclau
as being decisive for any transformative project? Let us look closely at one of
Laclau’s articles from early 1966. The desired political unity sat uneasily with a
method that treated workers and students in isolation, as in an ‘artificial envi-
ronment’. Such was the mistake of the ‘Left sects’, who would never be able to
consolidate a party but rather only ‘a clique of saviours’.18 Instead, Laclau ar-
gued, one ought to start from specific experiences, whereby it is revealed that
‘partial’ struggles alone are insufficient. As earlier cited texts indicate, workers
and students found themselves ‘objectively in confrontation’ with the system;
hence, they would acquire a ‘historical consciousness’ through this confronta-
tion. Yet, while the workers possessed an ‘acute realism’ through their posi-
tion within the productive system, the vanguardist petite bourgeoisie inclined
towards ‘abstract speculation’. Here we find the obstacle to any ‘historical
synthesis’ – the objective of the PSIN – which was to build ‘practical bridges’
between the middle class and the working class. Nor did Laclau forego this
challenge by turning to an eschatological hope of necessity: ‘History is work-
ing in this direction, in our favour, making the emergence of revolutionary so-
cialism both necessary and bringing it within reach’.19 This sentence is telling
about one aspect of Laclau’s Marxism, which was not entirely self-evident at
that point in his development.
Like many other young intellectuals of his generation at the University of
Buenos Aires, between 1968 and 1969 Laclau wrote in the popular haute divul-
gation series published by the Centro Editor de América Latina. In one popular
work published by the Centro, Laclau distinguished between ‘the [two] great
totalising schemes of the nineteenth century: positivism and Marxism’.20 While
positivism was the ‘ideological expression of the self-confidence of a bourgeoi-
sie at the zenith of its expansion’,21 ‘dialectical materialism’ was the ‘expres-
sion of the newly developing industrial proletariat’.22 There too he adopted the
philosophical framework of a universal history: just as in the previously cited
17 Ibid.
18 Laclau 1966, p. 1.
19 Ibid.
20 Laclau 1968a, p. 21.
21 Laclau 1968a, p. 23.
22 Laclau 1968a, p. 24.

10 Acha
article from 1963, five years later Laclau still understood Marxism to be ‘a con-
ception of the history of humanity as a product of the successive prevalence of
diverse modes of production’.23 Laclau here displayed a line of thought at odds
with the trans-historical Marxism so common at the time of his writing, which
centred on the ‘class struggle’.
However, Laclau also expressed a basic conviction that questioned the phi-
losophy of history attributed to Marxism: a conviction rooted in a tactical his-
toricism, that is, the belief that abstract political definitions, or those lacking a
causal explanation, should be avoided. In his opinion, abstraction in politics,
which by definition short-circuits any explanation of objective conditions,
constituted a ‘petit-bourgeois distortion of Marxism and was a consequence of
the ‘alienated’ character of its peculiar class situation.24
Laclau’s academic career would not be affected by his political activism until
later in 1966. He graduated in History in 1964 and in that same year obtained
a doctoral scholarship from the National Board of Scientific and Technical
Research. In early 1966 he was appointed as Lecturer in History at the National
University of Tucuman, a post he abandoned a few months later in order to
join the research staff of the avant-gardist Di Tella Institute.25 As was the case
for many academics, the infamous ‘Argentine Revolution’ of June 1966, led by
General Onganía, meant that Laclau was forced to resign from his university
post. Between 1967 and 1969, together with other Argentine adherents of some
versions of Marxism, Laclau participated in the Ford Foundation-funded
Marginality Project. His participation there drew harsh criticisms from the
PSIN, who regarded the Project as an attempt by North-American imperialists
to advance into Latin America.26
As occurred within all organisations of the Argentine Left during the 1960s,
by 1968 a conflict erupted between the National Left’s youth group and its old
guard. This tension continued into November 1968, at which point the youth
sector was excluded from the PSIN on grounds of ‘ideological divergences’.
That allegation obscured what was in fact a confrontation over bureaucratic
asymmetries between the old and new generations. Laclau together with other
young members responded by circulating a letter in which they questioned the
party’s ‘sectarianism’ and its lack of any concrete political action. That lack,
they argued, was responsible for condemning the organisation to the outer
23 Ibid.
24 Laclau 1964f, p. 18.
25 Bergel, Canavese and Tossounian 2004–5.
26 Petra 2008. Under the supervision of sociologist José Nun, the project included Laclau,
Juan Carlos Marín and Miguel Murmis, among others.

fringes of the workers’ and student movements. In Laclau’s memoirs, he recalls

the main disagreement being with Ramos and the latter’s unflagging adher-
ence to a Leninist party model.27
By that point, Laclau’s Marxism still featured one particular element that
recalled his earlier use of Marxism as a general theory of history: the defini-
tion of a dominant mode of production for determining the ‘tasks’ of a given
epoch. The National Left had inherited the same inter-Trotskyist debates
from the 1930s and ’40s related to the ‘agrarian question’. In the contemporary
language of that epoch a society could be ‘characterised’ and a correspond-
ing strategy extracted. While these concepts had not been fully and precisely
formulated, the National Left had at its disposal specific formulations related
to Latin American and Argentine society. In the first of those formulations,
there were two phases that followed Latin America’s colonial rupture in the
early nineteenth century: the ‘Balkanisation’ of the ‘Latin American nation’
and the ‘semi-colonial’ submission to ‘imperialism’. In that context, the most
sophisticated justification for a ‘national front’ politics drew on the theory of
differential rent, which Jorge E. Spilimbergo had spelled out on various occa-
sions before Laclau eventually grafted it onto the debate about the ‘modes of
production’ in the second half of the 1960s.28
Without a doubt, the most important argument along those lines was laid
out in the document ‘Working Class and Power’, which was approved by the
PSIN conference in August 1964. There, Spilimbergo explained that while the
insertion of Argentina into the imperialist world order kept the country sub-
ordinated, a segment of the surplus-value extracted from the working class in
the dominant core was transferred back to the dependent countries. This went
into the coffers of the local landowning bourgeoisie, which benefitted from
the extraordinary fertility of the ‘humid Pampa’. As a consequence, local in-
dustrialisation stagnated due to the international division of labour and the
oligarchy’s complicity with imperialism.29 At the same time, the transfer of
surplus-value generated the conditions for the emergence of a liberal and ab-
stract Left. Laclau took up this argument again in a text he wrote following his
participation in the Marginality Project, introducing new elements and extend-
ing that argument to broaden the debate about Latin America.
27 Laclau 2012.
28 The PSIN’s theoretical journal, Izquierda Nacional [National Left], reproduced in 1966 a
debate that had taken place a year prior in Mexico, between Rodolfo Puiggrós and André
Gunder Frank on the modes of production.
29 Spilimbergo 2010.

12 Acha
Laclau rejected both the thesis according to which Latin America consti-
tuted a subcontinent full of feudal ‘remnants’, and the opposite notion that the
region was simply another capitalist space; examining both interpretations, he
criticised their shared ‘circulationist’ reasoning and instead offered a holistic
analysis that would not lose sight of the productive process. He distinguished
between the abstract concept of ‘mode of production’ and the more-concrete,
Althusserian notion of ‘economic system’, whereby a variety of productive
modes can be identified from within a diversity of interrelations. His analy-
sis contributed to later debates in the 1970s, although there, while advancing
on an empirical plane, similar alternatives to those which Laclau had origi-
nally objected reappeared: the national-democratic industrialist revolution
or the anti-capitalist socialist revolution.30 Laclau was developing at the time
the still-embryonic question of the autonomy of politics, a question absent in
Spilimbergo’s treatment despite the fact that the appropriation of differential
rent had cleared the way for such an issue to posed.
Laclau met Eric J. Hobsbawm when the British historian joined the advisory
board of the Marginality Project. Invited by Hobsbawm to pursue his doctoral
studies in England, Laclau abandoned his academic pursuits in Argentina,
with the objective of carrying out empirical research on the evolution of local
nineteenth-century capitalism, as funded by St Anthony College, Oxford (1969–
72). In 1973, he obtained a fellowship in Political Theory in the Department of
Government at the University of Essex. Less enthused by laboured, long-form
historiographies, Laclau opted for a doctorate sur travaux, which he obtained
in 1977, and began to consolidate the theoretical corpus for which he became
celebrated in the Western academic world.
In the early 1970s, Laclau tried to intervene in the political processes unfold-
ing in Argentina. Together with his former comrades from the youth groups
of the 1960s, he wrote an essay in the Cuadernos del Socialismo Nacional
Latinoamericano Revolucionario [Notebooks of Revolutionary Latin American
Socialism]. The Cuadernos understood nationalism as a prologue to anti-capi-
talism, and by implication the Peronist nationalism associated with the work-
ing class would become conscious of its ‘socialist ends’.31 He insisted in 1973,
even against the ‘vanguardist’ postures of the National Left, that Peronism was
a pathway to the ‘revolution’.32 His positions were contested by the National
Left in a text entitled ‘Towards an Oxfordian Socialism’, wherein his position
30 Laclau 1969a; Laclau 1971.

31 See ‘Editorial. Algunas definiciones para una caracterización del peronismo’, in Cuadernos
del Socialismo Nacional Latinoamericano Revolucionario, 1 October 1972, p. 4.
32 Laclau 1973, p. 126.

was characterised as subordinated to Peronism.33 Meanwhile, the National

Left in Argentina continued to decline, failing to take root among workers or
popular layers. This is particularly significant, since the period between 1969
and 1975 was also marked by heightened social and cultural grass-roots mil-
itancy, which some studies consider, perhaps too enthusiastically, as a ‘pre-
revolutionary’ phase. Following the vicissitudes of its initial formation, the
Popular Left Front led by J.A. Ramos emerged at the other end of the tumul-
tuous 1973–6 period by lending its support to Isabel Perón’s ‘popular’ govern-
ment, which was in fact a right-wing version of Peronism. Paradoxically, the
National Left’s short political life was only possible so long as Peronism was
not in power. When Peronism again took power, the discourse of the National
Left fell on deaf ears, was rendered irrelevant or, worse, was functional to the
Peronist elites. The organisation’s fragile dynamism proved to be exclusively
propagandistic and intellectual.
In Essex, far removed from the Argentinian scenario that he would only ever
visit intermittently, Laclau persevered in his fundamental convictions, albeit
using a different vocabulary and intellectual sources. His thought did so, how-
ever, while undergoing decisive mutations.
His Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory, published in 1977, was an exer-
cise in compromise whereby he could remain within the orbit of Marxism. The
fourth essay in the volume, ‘Towards a Theory of Populism’, is the one that is
most often analysed, where commentators typically acknowledge that the dis-
cursive dimension of subjective construction remained linked to a class order.
That is, the essentialist nexus that was definitively broken in Hegemony and
Socialist Strategy still remained in place. However, the second essay on ‘The
Specificity of the Political’ is of equal significance, since it highlights a decisive
turn in Laclau’s thought whereby themes only timidly present in the fourth
study are now openly advanced. By questioning the validity of Althusserian
structural overdetermination, which coexists with the economic ‘last instance’,
Laclau had begun to explore the possibility of thinking the political as some-
thing other than a ‘superstructure’.
Laclau’s debt to Althusser is decisive in terms of understanding the
Argentine’s anti-Hegelianism. In the passage from Marxism to post-Marxism
taking place in Latin America in the 1980s, Laclau’s contribution was compa-
rable to that of Italian philosopher Lucio Colletti, who was also working in a di-
rection contrary to the dialectic. Laclau’s rejection of the dialectic and the logic
of social forms was evidenced in his critique of the ‘state-derivation debates’ of
the 1970s, which sought to derive the concept of State from the deployment of
33
Izquierda Nacional, 24 June 1973, p. 45.

14 Acha
the commodity form. For Laclau, who aspired to found a theoretical-political

alternative for a ‘democratic Left’, the demand for state autonomy was con-
ceptually central yet had never been extensively developed.34 Among those
on the intellectual Left in exile, Juan Carlos Portantiero and Emilio De Ípola
also sought to create a leftist discourse that went beyond the revolutionary
strategy. In those discussion, the great disagreement arose around populism
and the centrality of the state. Portantiero and De Ípola criticised Laclau for his
adherence to a populism incompatible with pluralism and for advocating for a
state that annulled the autonomy of civil society.35 Laclau never issued a clear
response to their concerns about the authoritarian derivations of populist and
statist dynamics. This was part of an internal debate around possible strategies
for a reformist socialism.
These discussions typical of the early eighties were expressed in a Marxist
discourse with a fundamentally theoretical approach. Laclau’s concern with
the concept of the modes of production confirms that he had the Althusserian
incognita in mind, a theoretical approach that is neither Hegelian, nor a uni-
causal approach to the Marxian metaphor in the ‘Preface’ to 1859’s Critique of
Political Economy. In the third essay of Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory,
‘Fascism and Ideology’, Laclau criticised Nicos Poulantzas’s theory of politics
for its ‘class reductionism’ and the weak foundation of the ‘last instance’ that,
again per Althusser, ‘never arrives’. It seems that neither Althusser himself
nor his followers would have dared to extract all these conclusions from the
Freudian concept of ‘overdetermination’, insisting as they did on grounding
the explanation in an economic and class base. The deficit in Poulantzas’s
study of fascism, Laclau argued, was that he could not grasp ‘the non-class
character of popular interpellations’ of fascism within a continuum of identifi-
able practices that could even include socialism.36 Laclau limited his response
to noting that the difference between fascism and socialism is that the latter
tended to direct the aforementioned ‘popular’ interpellation toward workers’
revolution. This feature, left unexplained by the author, was what led to his
post-Marxism. I do not claim, however, that the book published in 1985 with
Chantal Mouffe was contained in nuce in that essay. Rather, I contend that the
theoretical problem of breaking the causal link between politics and econom-
ics was already present in 1978. The same argumentative structure reappears in
the essay on ‘populism’. There, Laclau affirmed that insofar as the dominated
bloc antagonises the dominant bloc, socialism raises the interpellation of the
34 Against the ‘Staatsableitungsdebatte’, Laclau 1981.

35 De Ípola and Portantiero 1981.
36 Laclau 1977, p. 142.

‘people’ to ‘the highest and most radical form of “populism” ’.37 Laclau, like the
National Left, hoped that a ‘popular interpellation’ of populism would become
antagonistic to the ‘power bloc’; in other words, it would become susceptible
to ‘radicalisation’.
Meanwhile, debates about Euro-communism, the new ‘crisis of Marxism’, the
exhaustion of the Althusserian proposition to reconcile the ‘last economic in-
stance’ with the relative autonomy of ‘levels’, the advance of postmodernism –
all these elements had changed the ‘spirit of the epoch’, and not only for
Laclau. A whole generation of left-wing intellectuals felt – in Latin America
and abroad – that not only a theoretical but also a political overhaul was nec-
essary. Laclau was not alone in those years in his interest in turning Antonio
Gramsci – presumably misunderstood by Marxist class-reductionism – into a
post-Marxist champion of ‘democracy’.38 According to a statement he made in
an interview from 1979: ‘When […] democracy is proposed not as a class ideol-
ogy but as a common good of the popular forces, the path is being cleared for
a new conception of politics’.39
Post-Marxism and the Subversion of Metaphysics
Post-Marxism has several theoretical origins. One of its defining features is

that it detects in Marx a conceptual shortcoming, wherein the realm of experi-
ence is reduced to a foundation, and as such must be unique, irrefutable, and
ultimately metaphysical. Generally, the ‘post’ tends to emanate from a multi-
plicity of instances where practices are born.40 This was the case, for example,
for Jürgen Habermas in Erkenntnis und Interesse (1968), wherein he opposed
the interactional-communicative dimensions to the paradigm of work, or for
Cornelius Castoriadis in L’Institution imaginaire de la société (1975), wherein
he insisted upon a duality in which thought and speech gather at one pole
(legein), and action and production at the other (teukein).
Laclau’s post-Marxism also owes a debt to the theoretical developments
of Claude Lefort, whose book L’Invention démocratique (1981) links the de-
mise of the principle of politics with the breakdown of the sovereign state
of the Ancien Régime. Democracy lacks a centre or scaffolding that is not a
contingent – and empty – invocation of ‘the people’. Any effort to define a
37 Laclau 1977, p. 231.

38 Portantiero 1983; Mouffe (ed.) 1979.
39 Laclau 1979, p. 120.
40 For a good history of post-Marxism, see Sim 2000; Therborn 2008.

16 Acha
substantive subject of ‘modern’ politics would amount to the rejection of the

post-foundational character of democracy. Politics operates without founda-
tions; it emerges from the contingent proceedings of a precarious and conflict-
ridden institution.41 Laclausian post-Marxism shared with Lefort the ‘grand
narrative’ on whose account the new epoch inaugurated by ‘democracy’ meant
the fall of metaphysics (of substance or guarantee) and the possibility for a
‘radical’ opening.42 Nevertheless, there are substantial differences between
Laclau’s post-Marxism and that of other post-Marxist figures, which for lack of
space cannot be discussed here.
The battle against foundations is what structured the debates of the original
post-Marxist book, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy.43 First appearing in Verso,
the publishing house of the New Left Review, it unleashed an intense debate.44
The book’s strongpoint consisted in removing the foundations of a socialist
politics attributed to ‘classical’ Marxism (the term is Laclau’s), as well as any
foundation for a social, economic or class ‘positivity’. Politics emerges instead
as a negotiation of a ‘negativity’ that cannot be dialectical, insofar as it is not a
movement ‘congealed’ by a speculative totality (for Laclau, this is where both
the Hegelian Spirit and Marxist History converged). On a philosophical plane,
Laclau’s Hegemony exemplified the ‘linguistic turn’ in political theory which
was so characteristic of that epoch.
It is worth highlighting here the cognitive stature of the Laclausian theory
of the ‘impossible society’, that is, its critique of the social as a closed and
self-sufficient totality in its determinations. Although Laclau was very clear
in stating that his challenge to the notion of society affirmed a constructiv-
ism that was always provisional and perpetually socially re-enacted, in the end
his ‘discourse analysis’ fell into two separate tendencies. Here, I am referring
specifically to the reception of Laclau’s work. The first of those tendencies
was ‘cultural studies’, where Laclau was read alongside deconstruction and a
discursive reading of Lacanian psychoanalysis. The second tendency centred
on ‘political discourse’ in a manner that promoted a simplified understand-
ing of ‘discourse’: a set of statements that establish ‘hegemonic borders’ and
‘demands’ amongst others. Both theoretical forms of Laclausian post-Marxism
were plagued by the avoidance of a more complex engagement with discursive
41 Marchart 2007.
42 Boucher 2008, Chapter 2; on the democratic-liberal aspects of the 1985 book, see Smith
1998; for similar attitudes in the later Laclau, see Laclau 1990, p. 144; Laclau 2002, pp. 98–9.
43 Laclau and Mouffe 1985.
44 Geras 1987; Geras 1988; Laclau and Mouffe 1987; Mouzelis 1988; Meiksins Wood 1986; from
Latin America: Borón 1996.

tasks, practices irreducible to linguistics, and structural movements, which

could have produced formulas less susceptible to a new reductionism.
Laclau’s relationship to Marxism is crucially important, because as he, with
Chantal Mouffe, had rightly stated, their theorisation was in some ways also a
form of post-Marxism.45 No doubt, Laclau’s Marx was primarily drawn from the
‘Preface’ to the Critique of Political Economy of 1859, which sketched a general
theory of history through different forms of the ‘social production of existence’.
Objective relations between human beings are transformed by the pressure of
the development of the productive forces on the social relations of production.
Together, they constitute the ‘real’ foundation from which a legal and political
‘edifice’ rises that corresponds with ‘forms of social consciousness’. It is well
known that Marxists from different backgrounds accepted or even praised
the Preface as the most rigorous statement of a ‘historical materialism’.46 As
I have shown previously, Laclau’s early Marxism endorsed that historical-
philosophical interpretation of Marx while advocating for a historicist under-
standing of socialist politics in a ‘semi-colonial’ country.
Laclau’s references in his 1985 book to the ‘Preface’ certainly did not receive
the attention they deserved, although it would reappear when the Argentine
felt obligated to question the separation (and even relative autonomy) of the
economic base and the ‘superstructure’.47 It also reappeared in an exemplary
manner when Laclau responded to Norman Geras’s critique, and again in his
reworking of New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, the text that signi-
fied his definitive departure from Marxism.48 Laclau’s hegemonic ‘articulation’,
leading to ‘subject positions’ and ‘the people’, required subversion as a precon-
dition of univocal causal determination, irrespective of whether that determi-
nation was conceived in a Humean or Althusserian mode.49
45 Efforts to bracket the importance of all post-Marxisms from Marxism (I am thinking of

such cases as Cornelius Castoriadis, Claude Lefort, Jürgen Habermas, Alain Badiou and, of
course, Laclau) and emphasise the preponderance of the ‘linguistic turn’ are not entirely
convincing. See, for instance, Breckman 2013.
46 Cohen 1978; Hobsbawm 2011.
47 Laclau and Mouffe 1985, pp. 100, 109, 174.
48 Laclau 1990.
49 I take the notion of subversion from Laclau and Mouffe’s vocabulary. By ‘subversion’ they
understand the overdetermination that deconstructs the allegedly systematic coherence
of a theoretical framework. Mouffe and Laclau subvert Marx’s ‘determinism’ by proposing
an alternative social ontology that preserves its tension with the challenged order. That is
why what a few years before had been announced as a ‘Copernican revolution’ of Marxist
theory (Laclau and Mouffe 1981) led to a renunciation of Marxian problems in defining a
different social ontology from the subversion of the 1859 Preface.

18 Acha
For Laclau, the critique of the Marxian metaphor of base and superstruc-
ture would settle Marxism’s fate as a philosophy of history and determine its
ability to substantiate a political strategy. Moreover, according to Laclau, its
determinism is incompatible with the Communist Manifesto’s formula of his-
tory as ‘the history of class struggle’. Faced with joining Marx’s thought in the
1859 text with the Manifesto’s contrary passage (since classes lacked any ex-
planatory relevance in the ‘Preface’), the Laclausian appeal to construct a
completely different conception gathered argumentative force. In his essay
from 1990, ‘Beyond Emancipation’, where Laclau similarly rejected revolution-
ary politics and the goal of total liberation, the ‘Preface’ once again bore the
responsibility of expressing Marxism’s debt to ‘essentialism’.50 In a 1987 letter
he wrote:
any advance in the understanding of present-day social struggles de-

pends on inverting the relations of priority which the last century and a
half’s social thought had established between the social and the political.
[…] The political became either a superstructure, or a regional sector of
the social, dominated and explained according to the objective laws of
the latter. Nowadays, we have started to move in the opposite direction
towards a growing understanding of the eminently political character of
any social identity […] showing its political essence.51
This quotation demonstrates the significance of the subversion of the 1859

‘Preface’ for the political and discursive causality in Laclausian post-Marxist
ontology. It is important to underline the extent of the subversion in Laclau’s
new political and discursive ontology, as Laclau did not identify the autobio-
graphic nature of much of the ‘Preface’, wherein its author referred to all that
Marx and Engels had learned during the eventful years of activism and study in
Paris and Brussels (1844–8), summed up in the ‘materialist conception of his-
tory’ of The German Ideology. Marx, as the founder of a transhistorical theory of
historical change known as ‘historical materialism’, was very useful in terms of
Laclau’s subversion of economic determinism and ‘class reductionism’. He did
not state that those sketches were abandoned to the ‘rodent critique of mice’.52
Nor did he note that the ‘Preface’ of 1859 follows from the ‘methodological’ re-
sults developed in Grundrisse in 1857–8, which questions the whole notion of a
transhistorical history. And regarding the Manifesto, Laclau failed to recognise
50 Laclau 1996a, pp. 10–11.

51 Laclau 1990, p. 160.
52 Gunn 1992. On the intellectual and political context of the ‘Preface’, see Prinz 1969.

the ambiguity behind the ‘classist’ history, given, as Theodor Adorno pointed
out, the assertion of history as a history of class struggle was not an affirmative
statement – reduced to describing a general vision of the social human past –
but was rather a critique of history.53
This is not the place to develop an exegesis of Marx’s thought. I mention the
Laclausian reconstruction of Marx for no other reason than to make explicit its
hermeneutical difficulties, difficulties reaching back to the way that the young
Laclau of the 1960s understood Marxism. This is important insofar as Laclau
subverted concepts that were attributed to a certain version of Marx. Being
that it is one point of origin for his post-Marxism, he challenged that which
he had subverted. In this way, Laclau’s post-Marxism stood in opposition to
the ‘Preface’: multi-causal rather than dialectical, formal rather than histori-
cal, and descriptive rather than critical. Laclau read the intellectual history of
Marxism through the lens of these convictions, for it is true that Laclau was not
so much an erudite reader of Marx as a critical historian of Marxism.
One particular strength of the Laclausian rebuttal of Marxism was the im-
pact it would have on determinist explanations of socialist politics, wherein the
revolutionary horizon descends from a specific position of the working class in
the relations of production. It was an easy target for Laclau, who had little dif-
ficulty revealing in it a naïve objectivism, an absence of specificity for political
practice, and class essentialism. Faced with this impoverished Marxism, post-
Marxism was able to showcase its analytical acumen.
Laclau questioned the metaphysics of the economy as the origin of politics,
social class as ‘presence’, and socialism as a teleology inherent to capitalism.
He owed this theoretical outlook to his mode of reading Marx and Marxism.
The metaphysical abandonment of a subversion of metaphysics becomes
crystal-clear in Laclau’s subsequent work and in his fullest proposition: the gen-
eral theory of populism. His essays from the 1990s, especially Emancipation(s),
posited Laclausian formalism as a formalistic theory with a strong scholastic
framework.54 This has been the view adopted by cultural deconstructionism.55
At the same time, as a reflection of this complexity, the political became on
this view constituent of the social, albeit along anti-foundationalist lines, as
a consequence of the endless language games grasped in rhetorical terms.56
Such a perspective inherently eliminated any notion of system, as, for
53 Adorno 1996.
54 Laclau 1996a.
55 Bowman 2007.
56 Kaplan 2010.

20 Acha
example, that which connects ‘the popular’ with state dynamics or the capital-
ist world-market.
I recognise that the conceptual movement in Hegemony and Socialist
Strategy can – in contrast to his 1977 book – be read without substantial refer-
ence to his former activism in the National Left. And it does not suffice to insist
that the constructionism of a contingent hegemony as proposed in Workers’
Struggle can provide the practical background for the theoretical positions
that Laclau (and Mouffe) would take up. Rather, the 1985 book emerged during
the biographical phase wherein Laclau experienced the crisis of leftist politics,
including that of the National Left. To his surprise, twenty years later the his-
torical situation was again undergoing profound changes.
Populism and the Ahistorical Culmination of Post-Marxism
Published in 2005, On Populist Reason diverged from Laclau’s conceptual con-

stellations as laid out in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy and Emancipation(s).
In his essays from the late 1990s, Laclau’s concerns kept him wedded to an
equivalential-popular framework and the production of a differential political
frontier, to the play between universality and the ‘empty signifier’ within the
horizon of a radical-democratic pluralism.57
The populist book of 2005 touched on diverse debates: from Slavoj Žižek’s
peculiar ‘Marxism’, which fought to reintroduce notions of class and econo-
my, to the multitude/people duality offered by Antonio Negri and Michael
Hardt in Empire, to Judith Butler’s queer redeployment of Foucault, or Jacques
Rancière’s political philosophy in Disagreement and Lacanian interpretations
of democratic politics, which discussed the absence of ‘affect’ in previous
elaborations.58 Moreover, what prompted the collection of theoretical con-
troversies gathered in On Populist Reason was the appearance of Venezuela’s
Chavism on the horizon of a renewed ‘Latin American Populism’.
The ‘populist’ interpretation of Kirchnerism, which the Kirchneristas them-
selves were not always comfortable with, was a secondary phenomenon.
Having revived the populist theme, it is unnecessary to classify Laclau’s analy-
sis as somehow being an auxiliary to Chavez or the Kirchners, and yet that is
57 In the writings included in Emancipation(s) and in the debates with Butler and Žižek
(Laclau, Butler and Žižek 2000), or even articles by Laclau’s disciples published in The
Making of Political Identities (Laclau (ed.) 1994), the populist object is not itself a problem
except in the case of right-populism in the former Yugoslavia.
58 Laclau, Butler and Žižek 2000; Laclau 2008b; Stavrakakis 2007.

precisely what has occurred through the historical revival of old political-theo-
retical problems inherited from the National Left, whose reappearance comes
without a worker teleology, party vanguardism or socialist perspective.
This does not mean that Laclau abandoned his earlier conceptual reflec-
tions. In his new book, Laclau expanded on his attempt to destabilise the di-
chotomy between particularity and universality, discursive figures in which
he dissolved the what-is-to-be-done with the political. On Populist Reason dis-
carded, once more, the controversies around the systematic affinity between
populism and specific social groups. The minimum unity for populism’s devel-
opment are demands of any kind, which do not rely on any type of substantial
social priority. Laclau proposed that demands directed at a state nucleus oper-
ate horizontally, either in competition or by merging together, according to
what might be required for the nucleus to satisfy (or not) any of the demands.
Its articulation enables the emergence of a galvanising demand from within a
heterogeneous assemblage of claims, which establishes, a posteriori, a ‘people’
in line with the creation of a new internal frontier with the state or a separate
set of demands. One of those demands retroactively configures a previously
non-existent popular ‘us’, which delimits a separate anti-popular field.
According to Laclau’s argument, there are contingent relations between:
1) specific demands with no equivalent relation of their own, since the logic
of difference (between demands) and the logic of equivalence are heteroge-
neous; and 2) the appearance of a coalescing demand around a frontier with
respect to another, which requires a qualitative – or hegemonic – and not so-
cial but political, leap.
The node tying together this reasoning is that the political leap consti-
tutes the ‘people’ as an effect of a discursive hegemonic institution. Just as in
Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Laclau specified ‘discourse’ as a conflictive
coexistence between a horizontal (differential/equivalential) and a vertical
logic (elevation of a specific demand to the privileged demand-of-the-people,
which tends to presuppose the passionate identification with a leader).
Laclau argued that the logic of the construction of collective populist
identities regulates political logic. And if such a populist logic was ‘vague’ or
‘rhetorical’, that was because all identities are socially vague and constitute
themselves in a rhetorical melting pot.
Populism is not unique in elevating a partial demand to the status of a node
that articulates collective formation. All political configurations feed off this
basic rhetorical relation, which by assigning to a demand a representative qual-
ity lends consistency to all democratic demands, which thus become popular.59
59 Laclau 2005, p. 78.

22 Acha
In On Populist Reason, Laclau sought to develop a rigorous transcendental and

transhistorical theoretical vision. The apparent multiplicity of political forms
underlies a relentlessness, namely that of the multiple ways of composing the
‘people’ and their representation. The peculiarity of populism is that it anoints
the ‘people’, and not the citizen or the class, as political subject. Instead of del-
egating to a representative entity, in populism there is the (rhetorically) direct
presence of the leader. Seen in this light, liberalism, fascism or socialism are
not essentially different, since they all deal with the representation of the con-
stitutive heterogeneity of the social. Their distinctions are based on the way
the dynamics of difference and equivalence intersect. Populism, by obeying
a pure articulatory morphology between these poles, that is, as a relation be-
tween signifiers, lacks a concrete political identity. There may be progressive or
reactionary populisms.
Laclau’s book did not aim to offer any theoretical criteria for political judge-
ment. Its conceptual modelling lacks an ability to differentiate between the
diversity of populisms, but that is precisely what a theory of populism should
offer. If only, in addition to the modelling, it aspired to say something about
the world. However, it would be incorrect to infer that the author was indiffer-
ent to political alternatives in the world. Laclau in his later life was a progres-
sive populist who belonged to an anti-imperialist Left that was sympathetic to
nationalist regimes with redistributive policies. The point is, these positions
were disconnected from the conceptual framework of his theory. Laclau even
supressed his Kantian inclinations toward a regulative idea, which can only be
answered affirmatively through Simon Critchley’s rhetorical question: ‘Is there
a normative deficit in the theory of hegemony?’60
Laclau’s political philosophy lacked a historical definition of the Right and
the Left (which are constructed discursively and relationally). The consequence
of that position, in my view unconvincing, is that any assessment of a political
regime can only be resolved by way of a sort of Schmittian decisionism. The
significance of this reality was already foreseeable before populism’s resuscita-
tion in the dialogue between the theory of hegemony and deconstruction.61
As a counterpart to the formalism and ahistoricity of Laclausian concepts, a
metaphysical position was simultaneously advanced. By becoming transhis-
torical, the ‘populist discourse’ had departed from historicity, abandoning all
60 Critchley and Marchart (eds.) 2004, Chapter 6. The same is valid, I believe, in terms of the
recent attempt by Chantal Mouffe to advocate for a ‘left populism’. The defence of ‘demo-
cratic struggle’ against ‘post-democracy’ and for ‘more egalitarian objectives’ than ‘right
populism’ seems too weak a criterion to sustain the leftist character of a specific type of
populism. See Mouffe 2018.
61 Laclau 1996b.

determination other than that of its own logic. In this transhistorical drift, it
merged, albeit with noteworthy differences, with post-Marxist authors such as
Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière.
Laclau proposed that the ahistoricity of ‘hegemony’ is in fact a modern
projection onto other eras, just as Marx had argued in Grundrisse that the
degree of abstraction achieved by capitalist categories sheds light on other
periods.62 However, whereas this assertion did not lead Marx into a transhis-
torical ‘Marxism’, it had the effect in Laclau of creating a generalised theory
of populism where historical cases merely served as mundane examples of
an idea.
The Ghost of the National Left: Intellectuals and Politics
By following Ernesto Laclau’s political and intellectual trajectory, I have at-

tempted to show how much of his path was both social and collective in na-
ture. Along that path, the transition to post-Marxism was experienced in the
context of a resurgent capitalist democracy – transformed, in Laclau and so
many others of his generation, into simple democracy – that engulfed leftist
strategy as its insurmountable horizon. In effect, the ‘radicalisation’ of de-
mocracy consists in the contingent deployment of possibilities inherent to
its very concept. Nevertheless, I have also identified continuities in terms of
Laclau’s fundamental proposition: a politicist critique of Marxism, and a cer-
tain reading of Marx that was ambiguously present in the programme of the
National Left.
Ernesto Laclau’s ‘historical’ belonging is inconceivable without taking on
board his formative experience as a militant in the National Left. Significantly,
he never disavowed his formative youthful experiences. Separating Laclau’s
party activity from his post-party writings, as if the potentiality of his thought
had finally been unleashed after having been freed from the organisational
yoke, amounts to a speculative and untenable assertion. Indeed, precisely the
opposite took place, as half a century later the elderly Laclau continued to
draw on the ideological microclimate of his youth, albeit undergoing strong
argumentative mutations. He never ceased to reiterate how much his post-
Marxism owed to his formative years. When asked about the motivations be-
hind his ‘hesitant first steps’ towards his later post-Marxism, Laclau responded
that he did not see any discontinuity within his own trajectory.
62 Laclau 2004, p. 323.

24 Acha
He added that upon his return to Buenos Aires in 1984 he was surprised
to read his own editorial leads in Workers’ Struggle from twenty years earlier,
which stated that ‘the socialist struggle was proposed in terms of the hege-
monisation of the democratic tasks by the working class’.63 Certainly, Laclau’s
retrospective vision was not entirely accurate. In the 1960s the central topic
was the workers’ party as well as the object of revolutionary transformation.
And his youthful foresight was not so much a ‘Gramscian’ political concep-
tion as it was a persistent search to transform the Peronist identification of
workers and petite bourgeoisie into a socialist one. On the other hand, in the
context of the questionable legitimacy of the Illia government (1963 to 1966)
and then the wholehearted rejection of the Onganía dictatorship, the reform-
ist strategy of the 1950s had been outright rejected.64 Worth highlighting here
is that, while the alleged continuity is debatable, discontinuity is even more so.
On the one hand, the continuity thesis is perfectly compatible in terms of the
nuances developed on the theoretical plane, from the ‘Gramscian’ seventies,
the ‘post-Gramscian’ eighties, and the ‘Lacanian’ inclinations of the last several
decades.65 But the perseverance of theoretical concerns is less decisive – as
I have emphasised, Laclau’s Marxism was unstable and changing – compared
to the enduring problems related to the strategy of the National Left. Laclau
believed he had cut the Gordian knot of the National Left’s political failure in
the form of transcendental populism.
Laclau’s theoretical-political journey mirrored a variant of the twentieth-
century Left. To understand their efforts, we must respect the conviction guid-
ing their attempts to clarify the unfeasibility of taking the reins of ‘progressive’
forces and influencing their orientation. For three decades the politics of the
National Left tried to forge a closer, ‘critical’, relationship with Peronism with
the aim of ‘hegemonising’ its plural social constituency; however, at its most
successful it was little more than an appendage attached to the polymorphic
movement led by the anti-communist General Perón.
Unable to influence the working class and its immediate leadership, the
effective tendency of the National Left was to seek influence with the political
elites of Peronism. This created a difficult situation that ultimately conspired
towards a feeling of impotence that undermined any fighting spirit. Ramos,
the historical leader of the National Left, had by the 1980s thrown himself
with nationalist fury behind the cause of the military corporation. Others, like
Spilimbergo and Norberto Galasso, attempted to maintain ‘critical support’
63 Laclau 1990, pp. 187–8.

64 Laclau 1965a; Laclau 1966.
65 Torfing 1999.

for the ‘national movement’, with little to show for their efforts as a marginal
propaganda group. In the mid-1960s, Laclau had perceived the non-viability of
the position and distanced himself from organised political life. However, he
did not abandon his deepest convictions and deplored even in his final years
the ‘ultra-leftist’ arguments that called for revolution, a political term Laclau
regarded as useless for its utopian connotations, external to any hegemonic
constitution. As an outward sign of his enduring enrolment in the National
Left, Laclau never considered himself Peronist. His support for Kirchnerism
was in keeping with a strain of intellectual condescension, highlighting that
the government of Cristina Fernández had exceeded the ‘historical experience’
of Peronism, while still being insufficiently populist.66
Theoretical Political Conclusions
Two admirers of the mature Laclau have summarised his conceptual thrust:
‘Ernesto Laclau’s work is one of the most innovative and influential contempo-
rary efforts at reviving and rearticulating political thought at a time when the
latter’s grounds have become increasingly uncertain.’67 I would add only two
points to that formula.
Firstly, I believe that Laclau tried to reconstruct the political thought of the
Left. Laclau cannot be held responsible for the proliferation of ‘the uses of
Laclau’, where the creation of a Left position is rendered completely irrelevant.
Peronists, generally populists, socialist reformers, and even moderate liberals
and other varieties of lightweight eclecticisms tend to make a non-political use
of Laclau. Even if in the university industry of Laclausian studies the necrosis
of Marxism is often taken for granted (given the point of departure is ‘post-
Marxist’), the author has entered into an academic market where his name and
writings circulate among other names and equally prestigious texts that are
similarly useful for ‘grounding’ papers. Among his disciples too, there is marked
lack of concern for maintaining a socialist orientation.68 From a strictly theo-
retical point of view, Laclau is much more important for Marxist debates than
what is generally supposed by poststructuralist readings, where heterogene-
ity and difference are emphasised. Indeed, in Laclau we find a thinker of the
‘logic of the social’ and an ‘ontology of the political’ that lends debates a greater
66 Laclau 2011a.
67 Critchley and Marchart (eds.) 2004, p. 1.
68 For instance, Critchley and Marchart (eds.) 2004; Stavrakakis 1999; Stavrakakis 2007.

26 Acha
conceptual depth, providing the stimulus to rethink an anti-systemic Marxism,

rather than the superficial empiricisms leading to poststructuralism.
Secondly, I believe that for Laclau, talk of a lack of foundations does not
mean that those foundations are so much uncertain as they are discursively
articulable, precisely because of their contingency. Hence, the collapse of
foundations does not imply for Laclau a pessimistic conviction but rather a
celebration of the opening of the political, a peculiarity of democracy. Laclau
had even forecast a book on the subject, The Elusive Universality, in which he
was to discuss with Alain Badiou how a rupture with a ‘situation’ can be pro-
duced ‘hegemonically’.
In that same sense, Laclau’s relation to Argentina’s Kirchnerist circles
does not offer anything like conclusive testimony to the breadth of his work.
Laclau’s relevance in the international arena, from Podemos in Spain to
SYRIZA in Greece, among others, suggests the scope and potential of many of
his concepts. But it is necessary to bring to bear on this debate Laclau’s con-
crete actions, because he himself has insisted on the practical vocation of his
theoretical work. By his own admission he intended ‘to do things with words’,
and among those ‘things’ was political action against the status quo, even if
since the late eighties such action was no longer anti-capitalist.
Laclau is a theoretical and practical enigma. It is not evident how he could
travel from Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, a clarion call of the ‘New Left’
and for the ‘radicalisation of democracy’, to his twilight years as a ‘traditional
intellectual’ supporting of populist neo-developmentalism. In a sense, he re-
peated the drama enacted by his mentor: just as Ramos sought to become the
brain of Perón, Laclau intended to be the theoretician of Cristina Fernández de
Kirchner. For Laclau, Kirchnerism was the ‘real Left’ in Argentina, from which
he demanded only that it be more decidedly populist. However, I would in-
sist that it is unhelpful to overly focus on personal decisions, since it could
well be the case that Laclau’s political deficiencies were also biographical, and
not stemming from his theoretical work. In fact, by way of conclusion, there
is a more substantive foundation for this analysis: the intellectual stature of
post-Marxism. Certainly, Marxism requires revisions and reinterpretations,
and new analyses and concepts to enhance the unshakeable critique of the
logic of capital. I would not oppose Laclau’s discursive post-foundationalism in
the name of validating Marxism as a socio-economic metaphysics of politics.
However, precisely because his thought is conceptually tied to a subversive
critique of Marx, advanced with vigour from Hegemony and Socialist Strategy
onward, the Wirkungsgeschichte of his political and cultural background has
never been exhausted.

The young Laclau’s Marxism was traditional, torn between the ‘historical
materialism’ of the modes of production and the understanding of history as
a sequence of class struggles. Both aspects needed to be adapted to a ‘semi-
colonial’ country: not as a ‘Latin American Marxism’ but rather as a histori-
cist interpretation of Marxism as a universal theory of history. In that sense
he did not depart from the positive understanding of Marxism, that is, the un-
derstanding of Marxism as an objectivist theory that enjoyed prevalence in
Argentina in the 1960s. Laclau’s problem then, and it remained so until the
end, was that his pessimistic diagnosis of Marxism always took traditional
Marxism as its target; he sought to correct that version of Marxism, first with
Althusser and Gramsci, and later, following his departure from Marxism, by
substituting it with an original vision of poststructuralism in dialogue with
Derrida and Lacan.
A theory grounded in the subversion of an inadequate interpretation of
Marx can only ever lead to unsatisfactory results, because such a theory re-
mains imprisoned in the equivocal terms from which it springs. This is the
foundational failure of the Laclausian cunning in inventing one of the most
influential versions of post-Marxism: it continued to simultaneously adhere to
and reject a deficient understanding of Marx. This, however, does not neces-
sarily imply that a ‘correct’ interpretation of Marx would have allowed Laclau
to overcome the difficulties of his own theoretical constructions.
My intention in reviewing Laclau’s trajectory is to underscore the value in
the perseverance of his theoretical programme, although it is regrettable that
by subverting a traditional metaphysical interpretation, attributed to Marx, he
remained himself within the field of metaphysics, albeit a metaphysics recon-
figured through formalisation. From that operation stem the ahistorical con-
sequences of his thought and the flawed aspirations that underpin the subtitle
of a recent text: ‘For a New Horizon of Politics’.69 We should not feel any type
of schadenfreude with the eclipse of the theoretical-political horizon of a
National Left, whose strategic future was annulled forty years ago. However, it
is more than evident that the Laclausian project for a discursivist subversion
of Marxism did not yield the promised fruits. It did not reorganise socialist
strategy, nor did it make a ‘Gramscian’ practice of transformative hegemonisa-
tion into a truly viable option. It did not neutralise the essentialist drifts to-
wards positivisation in Marxism, nor did it envisage any other convincing way
for radicalising democracy. Its enduring interest would lie in its consequences
for ‘discourse analysis’, in a strictly academic setting. But in that same sense it
69 Laclau 2008a.

28 Acha
deviated from the emancipatory aspirations that had first inspired it, as well as
its original historical and political experience, from the ruins out of which it
emerged and persisted.
This drift was not exclusive to Laclau. He participated in the systematic dif-
ficulties of the National Left, a strategy Laclau never dared to rethink except
by eliminating the unthinkable: the socialist revolution. That is why, belatedly,
the theoretician of the empty signifier had good reason to consecrate Ramos as
‘the greatest Argentine political thinker that the country has produced in the
second half of the twentieth century’.70 Laclau’s historical destiny was united
with the ideological current to which he belonged. On that path, subordinated
to a version of Peronism, he insisted on the ‘Real’ of an ill-fated strategy: the
earnest desire to champion greater theoretical insights in the service of a re-
formist political will upon which he depended, but also sought to enlighten, in
a form of subjection that no mockery of the ‘ultra-left’ could mask.
The last stop on Laclau’s intellectual path, the crux of his theoretical Real,
is the final point of devastation for the National Left. His death in April 2014
gave way to a series of reflections on the significance of his work, stimulating
theoretical debate on the Left in Argentina and Latin America, as well as in
Europe and across the globe. Applications of Laclau’s thought tend to cast it in
overly theoretical terms, losing sight of the dramatic and passionate contexts
in which it was constructed. Such ‘uses’ speak at once to the power of his work
and to an enduring interest in achieving a better understanding of his politico-
intellectual biography, to which I hope this article has contributed.
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From Marxist to Post-Marxist Populism: Ernesto Laclau’s Trajectory within

Article in Historical Materialism · November 2019

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From Marxist to Post-Marxist Populism: Ernesto

Ernesto Laclau – National Left – Marxism – post-Marxism – political theory

Ernesto Laclau (1935–2014) was a prominent social and political theoretician

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/1569206X-00001311

10.1163/1569206X-00001311 | Historical Materialism (2019) 1–32

From the National Left to a Marxist Theory of Populism

Historical Materialism (2019) 1–32 | 10.1163/1569206X-00001311

the university student-union organisation that opposed Juan D. Perón’s gov-

10.1163/1569206X-00001311 | Historical Materialism (2019) 1–32

Historical Materialism (2019) 1–32 | 10.1163/1569206X-00001311

however, also sought to preserve its organisational and ideological indepen-

5 Spilimbergo 1962; Ramos 1964.

10.1163/1569206X-00001311 | Historical Materialism (2019) 1–32

It is impossible to recreate an image of the human past that does not

6 Laclau 1963, p. 312.

Historical Materialism (2019) 1–32 | 10.1163/1569206X-00001311

Through these experiences, the union movement that emerged as an au-

However, the mechanics of the conflict had a transcendental goal:

The popular forces’ main tactic is to accelerate this process of disintegra-

10.1163/1569206X-00001311 | Historical Materialism (2019) 1–32

If taking power by the popular sectors can’t be resolved without armed

Historical Materialism (2019) 1–32 | 10.1163/1569206X-00001311

10.1163/1569206X-00001311 | Historical Materialism (2019) 1–32

fringes of the workers’ and student movements. In Laclau’s memoirs, he recalls

Historical Materialism (2019) 1–32 | 10.1163/1569206X-00001311

30 Laclau 1969a; Laclau 1971.

10.1163/1569206X-00001311 | Historical Materialism (2019) 1–32

was characterised as subordinated to Peronism.33 Meanwhile, the National

Historical Materialism (2019) 1–32 | 10.1163/1569206X-00001311

the commodity form. For Laclau, who aspired to found a theoretical-political

34 Against the ‘Staatsableitungsdebatte’, Laclau 1981.

10.1163/1569206X-00001311 | Historical Materialism (2019) 1–32

Post-Marxism and the Subversion of Metaphysics

Post-Marxism has several theoretical origins. One of its defining features is

37 Laclau 1977, p. 231.

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substantive subject of ‘modern’ politics would amount to the rejection of the

10.1163/1569206X-00001311 | Historical Materialism (2019) 1–32

tasks, practices irreducible to linguistics, and structural movements, which

45 Efforts to bracket the importance of all post-Marxisms from Marxism (I am thinking of

Historical Materialism (2019) 1–32 | 10.1163/1569206X-00001311

any advance in the understanding of present-day social struggles de-

This quotation demonstrates the significance of the subversion of the 1859

50 Laclau 1996a, pp. 10–11.

10.1163/1569206X-00001311 | Historical Materialism (2019) 1–32

Historical Materialism (2019) 1–32 | 10.1163/1569206X-00001311

Populism and the Ahistorical Culmination of Post-Marxism

Published in 2005, On Populist Reason diverged from Laclau’s conceptual con-

10.1163/1569206X-00001311 | Historical Materialism (2019) 1–32

59 Laclau 2005, p. 78.

Historical Materialism (2019) 1–32 | 10.1163/1569206X-00001311

In On Populist Reason, Laclau sought to develop a rigorous transcendental and

10.1163/1569206X-00001311 | Historical Materialism (2019) 1–32

The Ghost of the National Left: Intellectuals and Politics

By following Ernesto Laclau’s political and intellectual trajectory, I have at-

62 Laclau 2004, p. 323.

Historical Materialism (2019) 1–32 | 10.1163/1569206X-00001311

63 Laclau 1990, pp. 187–8.

10.1163/1569206X-00001311 | Historical Materialism (2019) 1–32

5 Spilimbergo 1962; Ramos 1964.

6 Laclau 1963, p. 312.

30 Laclau 1969a; Laclau 1971.

34 Against the ‘Staatsableitungsdebatte’, Laclau 1981.

37 Laclau 1977, p. 231.

45 Efforts to bracket the importance of all post-Marxisms from Marxism (I am thinking of

50 Laclau 1996a, pp. 10–11.

59 Laclau 2005, p. 78.

62 Laclau 2004, p. 323.

63 Laclau 1990, pp. 187–8.