kind of historical qualifier: the fundamental level on which political struggle is waged is that of the legitimacy of concepts like planning or the market -- at least -- right now and in our current situation. At future times, politics will take more activist forms from that, just as it has done in the past.

It must finally be added, on this methodological point, that the conceptual framework of discourse analysis -- although allowing us conveniently, in a postmodern age, to practise ideological analysis without calling it that -- is no more satisfactory than the reveries of the Proudhonists: autonomizing the dimension of the /concept/ and calling it 'discourse' suggests that this dimension is potentially unrelated to reality and can be left to float off on its own, to found its own subdiscipline and develop its own specialists. I still prefer to call /market/ what it is, namely, an ideologeme, and to premise about it what one must premise about all ideologies: that, unfortunately, we have to talk about the realities fully as much as the concepts. Is market discourse merely a rhetoric? It is and isn't (to rehearse the great formal logic of the identity of identity and non-identity); and to get it right, you have to talk about real markets just as much as about metaphysics, psychology, advertising, culture, representations, and libidinal apparatuses.

But this means somehow skirting the vast continent of political philosophy as such, itself a kind of ideological 'market' in its own right, in which, as in some gigantic combinational system, all possible variants and combinations of political 'values', options and 'solutions' are available, on condition you think you are free to choose among them. In this great emporium, for example, we may combine the ratio of freedom to equality according to our individual temperament, as when state intervention is opposed because of its damage to this or that fantasy of individual or personal freedom: or equality is deplored because its values lead to demands for the correction of market mechanisms and the intervention of other kinds of 'values' and priorities. The theory of ideology excludes this optionality of political theories, not merely because 'values' as such have deeper class and unconscious sources than those of the conscious mind but also because theory is itself a kind of form determined by social content, and it reflects social reality in more complicated ways than a solution 'reflects' its problem. What can be observed at work here is the fundamental dialectical law of the determination of a form by its content -something not active in theories or disciplines in which there is no differentiation between a level of 'appearance' and a level of 'essence', and in which phenomena like ethics or sheer political opinion as such are modifiable by conscious decision or rational persuasion. Indeed, an

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