non-deterministic theory of ideology. Stuart Hall's article on 'base and superstructure' has, definitively, laid out the terms of the debate on determinism within the Marxist theory of ideology. Hall reads Gramsci as delivering a 'polemic against a reductionist account of the superstructure', and he argues that Gramsci has shown us how capitalism is not just a system of production, but a whole form of social life. The superstructures, in Hall's reading of Gramsci, are vital in that they draw culture and civil society into increasing conformity with the needs of capital. They enlarge capitalism's sway, creating new types of individual and civilization, working through the various institutions of civil society such as the family, law, education, cultural institutions, Church, and political parties. This is not a matter of economic interest alone, for Gramsci opposes economic reductionism and conceptualizes hegemony as political, cultural and social authority. Yet, concludes Stuart Hall, in Gramsci's view 'the superstructures do all this for capital'. ⁸

There is, however, an issue that was never entirely articulated within the classical Marxist tradition but on which some aspects of Gramsci's ideas have recently been brought to bear with striking consequences: this is the question of whether or not ideologies should be described as 'class belonging'. As we shall see, the exploration of this issue has brought about a major challenge to Marxism, which Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe argue has now been superseded. It is an issue that was never raised within the Marxist tradition because it was taken for granted that whatever your theory of ideology it would be organized around social class as the essential and formative category of an analysis of capitalism. Hence it would not really matter if you saw ideologies as expressions of the consciousness of particular social classes (the most common, if 'historicist', variant of the positive approach), or if you saw ideology as mystification serving class interest. It would in either case, and with other definitions too, be axiomatic that in an analysis of capitalism the role and function of ideology was construed in terms of social class. It is precisely this that has now been problematized at a very fundamental level, with consequences that are of obvious interest to feminists and others who have been questioning the status of class analysis with reference to the competing theoretical and political claims that arise from other salient social divisions.

Let us begin by looking at the formulations of Ernesto Laclau's Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory ( 1977), noting at the outset that the

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