Laclau means that the ideology addressed, and therefore constituted, its subjects as 'the people' rather than as 'the working class'. Laclau justifiably claimed that his rethinking of Fascism gave 'a perfect demonstration of the non-class character of popular interpellations'. ¹²

Interestingly, then, Laclau was at pains in Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory not to depart too radically from the received wisdom of Marxism. At one point he explicitly rehearses the doxa 'We do not intend to cast doubt on the priority of production relations in the ultimate determination of historical processes': ¹³ a formulation that he would now reject entirely. Even more interesting, perhaps, is the formulation he arrived at to express the relationship between the non-class ideological elements that he had so illuminatingly uncovered and the traditional ground of class struggle. In a passage that reveals the extent to which, in that period, he had not as yet emancipated himself from the logic of Marxism's theoretical closure, he veers himself towards a perverse form of reductionism:

The popular-democratic interpellation not only has no precise class content, but is the domain of ideological class struggle par excellence. Every class struggles at the ideological level simultaneously as class and as the people, or rather, tries to give coherence to its ideological discourse by presenting its class objectives as the consummation of popular objectives.' ¹⁴

This is interesting precisely because it takes away what, with the other hand, Laclau had just given us: instead of allowing us to savour the full independence of the non-class elements of political ideology that he so eloquently explained, we are enjoined here to restore 'class objectives' as the striven-for, if hidden, agenda of popular-democratic appearances. We shall return to these ambivalences in discussing Laclau's later work.

Meanwhile, it must be emphasized that Laclau's book -- although highly contentious -- had a terrific impact on work in the field of political ideology. Colin Mercer's study on Italian Fascism would be one example. Mercer discusses the fascinating material, brought to light by Maria Macciocchi among others, about Mussolini's operatic events where women swapped their gold wedding rings (in the interests of the production of armaments) for iron bands symbolizing their marriage to Il Duce. Mercer theorizes this and many other instances as a 'sexualization' of the social sphere and an 'aestheticization' of politics, seeing these as strategies that enabled populardemocratic discourses to circulate freely within Fascist political ideology. This he regards as a 'testament to Gramsci's assertion that in regimes of this nature, the terrains of the people and of culture are of key strategic importance and are foregrounded', and he concludes by

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