It would cause confusion to speak of post-Marxism, at least in the Laclau-Mouffe version, as historical materialism, given the identification of that term with Marxism, but post-Marxism of this variety certainly is both historical and materialist. Far from the account you supply, no one -- not Laclau, Mouffe or I -- has ever put forward the position that different social formations of different relations of production [feudal, capitalist, etc.] appear spontaneously, without reference to the historical conditions of their emergence. To the contrary, they emerge out of very particular historical dynamics at discrete moments in history, as one of a limited range of possibilities at that moment. But the limits are internal to the specific moment of history, not to the unfolding of a transcendent logic. If you want to talk at the very high level of abstraction which Marx would call a mode of production, feudalism arose in Europe out of the specific historical conditions the followed the collapse of the Roman empire and ancient world. European feudalism was not the next stage in a necessary, progressive development toward an historical telos, with no other possible avenues of historical development.
So what post-Marxists dispute is the existence of an immanent historical logic, pre-given before the start of human history. Certainly, struggle -- not simply class struggle, but all sorts of struggles over power -- is part of what determines the direction of human history within the limits prescribed by a given social formation. What is trans-historical about the Marxian formulation is the insistence that human history is the history of _class_ struggle, as a consequence of the special status it accords to production and the conception of human beings as laboring beings by nature. While Frederick Douglass' abolitionism and feminism were, in part, a class struggle, they were also a great deal more.
>CB: I agree with Leo that Marx and Engels afforded transhistorical primacy
>to the class struggle in _The Manifesto of the Communist Party_. I note
>that the post-Marxist and other position of denying transhistorical
>processes and contrast on contingent ( accidental) and socalled historical
>( that is , I guess, not TRANShistorical ) processes reduces to an
>idealist/religious/magical epistemology. It posits that social formations
>arise spontaneously , like Athena birthed fully formed from the head of
>Zeus. Poof ! we have feudalism with no relation to anything that came
>before. Presto ! Capitalism, a complete accident with respect to what went
>on before. Radical contingencism is radical anti-explanation.
>What of Leo's favorite quote from Frederick Douglass ? Is it struggle that
>"causes" the accidents that are progress ? Wasn't Frederick Douglass
>making a transhistorical generalization about the efficacy of struggle and
>progress, very much like that of Engels and Marx, ?
Leo Casey United Federation of Teachers 260 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010-7272 212-98-6869
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. -- Frederick Douglass --
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