Re-articulating Dissent: Representing the Working Class from Third Way to New Right in Britain and Chile
| Date | 01 December 2013 |
| Published date | 01 December 2013 |
| Author | Sara C. Motta,Jon Mansell |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-9248.2012.00992.x |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Re-articulating Dissent: Representing the Working
Class from Third Way to New Right in Britain
and Chile
Jon Mansell
University of Nottingham
Sara C. Motta
University of Newcastle, New SouthWales
This article takes the 2010 electoral defeats of the Chilean Concertación and British New Labour governments as a
point of departure to analyse the crisis of representation in Third Way politics and how this crisis has allowedthe r ight
to articulate a successful project of subaltern dissent. The article develops a critical reading of Gramsci through an
engagement with Spivak to analyse the complex and contested relations of representation through which subaltern
subjectivities are constituted politically.In applying this cr itical deconstruction to Britain and Chile we discuss the ways
in which the Third Way discursively, materially and institutionally acted to re-present a demobilised working-class
subject as part of a model of a consensual (elite-led) and de-antagonised politics.We argue that this depoliticisation and
demobilisation of popular activity has served to disembed Third Way parties from their core constituencies in civil
society,allowing room for the political right to re-articulate subaltern dissent.We thus analyse howthe r ight has sought
to articulate subaltern good sense in terms of (1) nostalgia, (2) anti-politics and (3) disciplinality.We conclude by
suggesting some of the potential tensions and contradictions involved in this re-articulation of dissent,particularly in
the re-emergence of popular mobilisation in both the UK and Chile.
Keywords: Third Way; Gramsci; subalter n; political r ight; Spivak
In the spring of 2010 the world’s two most long-standing and influential Third Way
governments,1the Concertación in Chile and New Labour in Great Britain, suffered
historic electoral defeats to coalitions of a reinvigorated political right. Media analyses of
these defeats focused on internal acrimony and moments of campaign farce, while party
elites retreated into bouts of soul-searching and bitter recrimination. In this context there
has as yet been little interest in asking more profound questions, in particular: how these
twin defeats can help us understand the contradictory relations of ThirdWay governments
with the subaltern; what they can tell us about the possibilities and limitations for subaltern
political articulation in such a context; and more specifically, whether they mark the
exhaustion of the Third Way in both countries as a hegemonic form of governance within
neo-liberalism.
In this article we contribute to the work of answering these questions through the
development of a neo-Gramscian analysis of the ways in which Third Way politics of
popular class disarticulation have opened space for a re-articulation of subaltern dissent by
new projects of the political right. Following Gayatri Spivak, however, we argue that this
analysis cannot proceed from the positive projection of any abstract essential subaltern
subject (such as the working class). Rather we argue for an analysis developed through the
negative critique of the social relations of representation involved in the complex and
contested processes of subaltern subjectivities in construction.2This theoretical strategy we
suggest is fundamental to Gramsci’s own critical method developed through the key
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doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9248.2012.00992.x
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2013 VOL 61, 748–766
© 2012The Authors. Political Studies © 2012 Political StudiesAssociation
conceptual tools of hegemony, common sense and good sense, which we utilise to
conceptualise processes of subject formation in a manner that is relational and immanent,
rather than static.
With this we build a theoretical framework with which to analyse the disarticulation of
subaltern social and political subjectivities by Third Way parties and governments, and the
contradictions in such processes. These contradictions, we argue, pave the way for the
political right’s re-articulation of subaltern dissent as a strategy of continued subalter n
disciplining, demonstrating how this represents a continuation as opposed to a radical
rupture with their Third Way predecessors.
On this basis we analyse the ways in which the Chilean Socialist party (PSCh), as the
popular class face of the Concertación coalition, and the British Labour party (BLP) have
acted to re-present their subaltern constituents as post-antagonistic – developing discursive
(at the level of ideas and discourse), institutional (between state/party and society, and party
and base) and material (socio-economic and socio-political) relationships that demobilised,
disarticulated and delegitimised the politicised subjectivities of the 1970s and 1980s.This act
of re-presentation enabled a relatively stable period of governance grounded in the articu-
lation of a neo-liberal common sense of highly individualised and commodified social
relations.Yet we suggest that these very same strategies of disarticulation have also eroded
institutional, cultural and ideological connections between the parties and their popular
bases. These processes of disarticulation have therefore undercut the ability of Third Way
politicians to ‘speak for’their constituents, creating space for a new politics of the right to
articulate the growing dissent among those sectors that have become alienated from the
ThirdWay project.Developing this analysis we draw attention to three axes along which the
right has sought to articulate subaltern dissent: (1) nostalgia for a lost sense of community;
(2) disciplining of social deviance; and (3) anti-politics rejection of an‘out of touch’ political
elite.We conclude however by suggesting that while this re-articulated dissent has proved
initially successful, it is itself beset by acute tensions and contradictions.These arise from the
fact that the right’s representation of the subaltern remains essentially passive and demo-
bilised and as such dissent continues to be re-presented rather than organically expressed.
Gramsci and the Negativity of Critical Theory
In a seminal article of contemporary critical theor y, Spivak (1988) asks the question, ‘Can
the Subaltern Speak?’ – is it possible to recover historical subaltern subjectivities written
over by elite discourses? For Gramsci the term ‘subaltern’ signifies the problematic of
subject formation in the social and spatial complexities of capitalist development in Italy;
as such the subaltern ‘by definition are not united and cannot unite until they become a
“state” ’ (Gramsci, 1971,p. 52).The adoption of the subaltern for Spivak however signals a
more fundamental project,relating to the difficulties of reconstructing subaltern subjectivity
through dominant discourses, particularly in the context of colonial epistemological
domination.3
In elaborating her arguments Spivak examines a key passage from the Eighteenth
Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte in which Marx, she argues, crafts a consistent model of
negative critique. In this piece Marx analyses the ambiguous process of class formation
among the French small peasantry in the nineteenth century. Spivak suggests that Marx
FROM THIRD WAY TO NEW RIGHT 749
© 2012The Authors. Political Studies © 2012 Political StudiesAssociation
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2013, 61(4)
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