Mid Sweden University

This article contributes to a form-genetic critique of post-Marxist discourse theory. We argue that the concepts of sign value, equivalence and the empty signifier project the logic of the value-form onto social reality in general. We trace the roots of the concept of sign value in structural linguistics to the Lausanne school of marginalism and reconstruct its permutation in post-Marxist discourse theory as developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. We argue that the projection of the value-form through the key concepts of discourse theory relates to how discourse theory inherits the marginalist premises of structural linguistics. Drawing on Genevieve Vaughan’s theory of commodity exchange as a one-word language, we suggest that the empty signifier reflects the objective conceptuality of the money form of value, not a universal aspect of social and political reality. This projection of the value-form eternalises capitalist social forms and promotes a politics which discounts proletarian and ‘popular’ self-activity.

The opposition of form and content haunts both the theories of populism and the practice of populists themselves. This paper explores an attempt to mediate this contradiction in Markus och Malcom, a podcast tied to the Swedish local populist party Örebropartiet. I show how Markus och Malcom consider politics both as purely formal, as a narrative practice which gives a common identity to a multitude of different subjects, and as irreducibly defined by its producerist class content in their contradictory but original account of the transferiat class. I argue that their conception of politics as narration and class are mediated through the populist leader whose labor produces the people itself.