positioned, to a social order in which the democratic project can articulate itself in a political discourse which takes those differential positionings as an object of struggle. So the democratic revolution brings about a logic of equivalence, a logic of the comparison of subjects that are, essentially, construed as equals, through its new discourse of 'rights', 'liberty' and 'equality'.

There are ambiguities at the heart of Laclau and Mouffe's use of the idea of 'equivalence'. For one thing, it is not clear how the 'anti-natural' element of the democratic imaginary could ever operate without lapsing into the humanism and essentialism that they consistently deplore. Secondly, there is a more confusing ambiguity as to whether 'equivalence' is being construed as similar to 'equality', which is at times implied, or whether Laclau and Mouffe's logic of equivalence is more appropriately captured with reference to the chemical use of equivalence to denote the proportional weights of substances equal in their chemical value. This would emphasize a notion of equal value, but introducing the tension between equality and -- precisely -- difference is difficult to square with the 'one man one vote' [sic] logic of democratic equality.

There is, however, no ambiguity on one central point of the logic of equivalence, and this is the secondary place that class occupies with regard to the prior category of the democratic imaginary. Laclau and Mouffe write that socialist demands are not only 'a moment internal to the democratic revolution' but are 'only intelligible on the basis of the equivalential logic which the latter establishes'. ⁴⁴ They write earlier of Marx that he had sought to rethink social division on a new principle -that of class -- but that this was undermined from the start by 'a radical insufficiency, arising from the fact that class opposition is incapable of dividing the totality of the social body into two antagonistic camps', and they comment that Marx's sociological predictions (about capitalist society becoming increasingly polarized) were an effort to project a future simplification on a social world that in Marx's own time did not fit a crude class-reduced model. ⁴⁵ Thus, in general, we have an account of Marxism's preoccupation with class as an articulation of political demands whose preconditions lay in the democratic revolution of the century before. Hence Laclau and Mouffe see no need for subsequent antagonisms, and the 'new' social movements articulating the demands of those oppressed by them, to cede place to class on the basis that social class is a founding principle. It is only, in their analysis, one of numerous contradictions that may by articulated within the parameters of democratic political discourse.

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