Since the mid-60s there has been a lot of interest in the work of Jacques Derrida and deconstruction, but recently there have also been attempts to wed the radical philosophy of Derrida with the radical politics of Marxism. This article outlines the work of Michael Ryan, author of "Marxism and Deconstruction", Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, authors of "Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics", and Jean Baudrillard, author of "In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities". Taken together, these works show an entirely new practise of radical politics.

One way to explain deconstruction is by analogy with a feminist analysis of language. Feminism shows how the language we are brought up to use contains within it judgements about gender, power and position. The moment we step in to language we take on board numerous presuppositions and assumptions that we are entirely unconscious of, and only later begin to question and analyse. In a similar way deconstructionists are careful with the language they use, but not primarily because of the ethical or political values contained in language but because they see language as containing philosophical fallacies; when we use language we not only take on ethical assumptions but metaphysical ones. This philosophy implicit in language is called "logocentrism" or "phallocentrism", and its themes are the understanding of language as essentially representational; the identification of being (or what exists) with what is present, what can be brought to light, what can be signified; the narrative structure of explanation, where we have a few "major actors" fulfilling a certain role and every other part of the phenomena secondary and incidental.

Against the representational theory of language deconstructionists point out that a non-metaphorical language is impossible, we do not speak by a series of namings but in sentences, and so every attempt to directly "hold" something in language slips away. On identifying "what is" with "what is present" deconstructionists point out that any attempt to explain what is present presupposes what it is different to, ie what is not present, and so meaning is the play of difference between the present and the absent. On the narration of explanation, the beginning, middle and end, deconstructionists say that although every explanation produces a certain meaning, it can never be said to be the only meaning, there are always other explanations, other stories, for every narration "closes off" certain aspects of the phenomena.

Superficially deconstruction would seem to be compatible with Marxism because of the radical claims it makes. It uses political terms, the "violence of metaphysics", peaceful co-existence, subversion; it is apocalyptic - it speaks about the end of Western Metaphysics, the end of philosophy; further, it might even be seen as a development of certain aspects of Marxism, as Derrida was taught by Michael Foucault who was himself taught by the great French Marxist Louis Althusser. However, this is too easy. The classic deconstructionist texts never broach the problems of the party, the state, agitation, organisation; any political statements are vague and general; the practise of deconstructionists has been in soft politics: liberalisation, education. Further, for deconstructionists Marxism is just as guilty of phallocentrism and logocentrism as any other part of western thought, its unspoken assumptions need to be analysed and deconstructed too. How then can any union of Marxism and deconstruction occur without one distorting the other ?

For Mouffe and Laclau deconstruction has made large holes in Marxism. They prefer the label post-Marxists, indicating where they have come from, but acknowledging that their current position is not Marxist. They see the crux of the deconstructionist implications for Marxism as the loss of any pivotal point for social change, neither the working class, nor the lumpenproletariat, nor the party. Neither is an alliance of progressive forces acceptable, as this implies a collection of distinct groups; rather than a separation of socialists, feminists, animal liberationists, nuclear disarmers etc who may form an alliance towards some common goal, the arguments of each need to be taken on board by the other groups, each group will change the others. Similarly there is the loss of any essential determinant in society - no base/ superstructure, or determination in the last instance, nor structural determinantion. Hence we cannot clearly distinguish (except as points on a silding scale) between a captialist and socialist society, in the sense that we could say, the economic base has changed, this must be socialism. Mouffe and Laclau argue that as institutions and structures change, their new formations either become more open and democratic or centralised and totalitatian. They summarise their political position thus:

"By locating socialism in the wider field of the democratic revolution, we have indicated that the political transformations which will eventually enable us to transcend capitalist society are founded on the plurality of social agents and of their struggles. Thus the field of social conflict is extended, rather than being concentrated in a 'privilaged agent' of socialist change. This also means that the extension and radicalization of democratic struggles does not have a final point of arrival in the achievement of a fully liberated society. There will always be antagonisms, struggles, and partial opaqueness of the social; there will always be history. The myth of the transparent and homogeneous society - which implies the end of politics - must be resolutely abandoned." (NLR, no. 166).

Michael Ryan's "Marxism and Deconstruction" contains a lot of details over how deconstructionists have approached Marxism, and analyses the similarities and differences between the two. He argues that Lenin produced a massive distortion of Marxism and that the authoritian Marxism inhereted from him must be absolutely abandoned. He believes that while deconstruction has no social theory, and that this is no accident but a necessary consequence for deconstruction, it continues a lot that was present in Marx, and that for this reason it can be used to construct an Antiauthoritian socialism. He traces Derrida's early suspicion of Marxism to a rethinking in the mid-70s, which led to him describing himself as a Marxist for the first time in print in a 1979 interview. Ryan's political strategy is concerned mainly with his native United States, in which he advovates a strategy of enclaves, a pocket within the body of capitalism which works against the principles of the whole.

"An enclave would be the immediacy of socialism, as much as it can possibly be made. Without any delusions about the possibility of extracting oneself from the capitalist market, the makers of an enclave nonetheless attempt to create as much as they can the reality of socialist productive and social relations. The point would be to make an enclave work materially in a way that answers needs better than under capitalism. Like a parasite, the enclave would live off capitalism, being outside it yet within it, exploiting capitalist property in order to put capitalist property right in question. An enclave would be a political-economic equivalent to a socialist-feminist self-help group, both a space of resistance and a prefiguration of future social forms. And the place where such a thing is likely to succeed is the north central and northeastern states."

Jean Baudrillard is another post-Marxist, who sees the increase in the production of images, signs, signifiers (simulacra) as a replacement of the fetishism of the commodity by a fetishism of the sign. This has led to a new type of society not in the sense that the political structure has changed but the people in it have changed, we live in an advanced techno-culture where 'hyperreality' has dissolved the social:

"We are... even deeper in pure excrement, in the fantastic congestion of dead labour, of dead and institutionalized relations within terrorist bureaucracies, of dead languages and dead grammars. Then of course it can no longer be said that the social is dying, since it is already the accumulation of death. In effect we are in a civilization of the supersocial, and simultaneously in a civilization of non-degradable, indestructible residue, piling up as the social spreads."

For Baudrillard neither capital nor labour can save us, any action is 'in vain' and it is the new wave political theorist who realises that movements of liberation and emancipation are acting fully in accordance with the political logic of the system, their is an "omnious emptiness of all discourse" between "those who have nothing to say, and the masses who do not speak... the mass is what remains when the social has been completely removed." We live in a phase of panic boredom, a cycle of disintegration, exhaustion and decadence, 'viciousness for fun', we live with the terrible knowledge that the real does not exist anymore.