its images of class themselves but the role it should occupy in 'left' politics more generally, where it is in competition with the claims of environmentalism, gay rights, feminism, anti-racism, and so on. As we no doubt all know, dispute on this question has concerned the Left very deeply in recent years. The 'coalition politics' to emerge from some of these political interactions, of which perhaps the most notable example in recent years has been the Jesse Jackson campaign for the US presidency in 1988, are exactly what the book addresses at a theoretical level. Given, however, that it has been the Right and centre (certainly in Britain and the USA) that have articulated some of these new connections and meanings, we should not suppose at all that the phenomenon is restricted to the politics of the Left.

Laclau and Mouffe, presumably sensitive to the predicted charge that they are moving rightwards, suggest that their iconoclasm about social class paves the way for a new political radicalism:

The rejection of privileged points of rupture and the confluence of struggles into a unified political space, and the acceptance, on the contrary, of the plurality and indeterminacy of the social, seem to us the two fundamental bases from which a new political imaginary can be constructed, radically libertarian and infinitely more ambitious in its objectives than the classic left. ³⁸

At the most elementary level the term 'new social movements' is unsatisfactory, to Laclau and Mouffe among others, in that it encodes its own historic marginality. These are, precisely, 'new' movements in that they are not class movements, and this reference back to class will remain there as long as we use that style of nomination. What is being referred to is the phenomenon, which Laclau and Mouffe try to locate historically in the web of post-1945 changes in labour process, state and cultural diffusion, of new antagonisms being articulated, in a novel way, in relation to increasingly numerous social relations. In practice, the term groups together struggles as diverse as 'urban, ecological, anti-authoritarian, anti-institutional, feminist, anti-racist, ethnic, regional or that of sexual minorities'. ³⁹ Laclau and Mouffe see in these struggles the articulation of antagonisms in a wide range of sites beyond the traditional workplace in which class conflict has been situated by Marxism, and they point, for example, to consumption, services and habitat as terrains for these new conflicts.

As well as extending such antagonisms far beyond the limits conventionally operating in Marxist analyses, they suggest that the bureaucratization of postwar (Western, industrial capitalist) society has given rise to new forms of regulation of social relations. They thus recast the arguments of Foucault and Donzelot by seeing as 'consequences' of postwar bureaucratization the process of 'the imposition of

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