On should not forget that in spite of some occasional ‘objectivist’ formulations, the reduction of individuals to embodied economic categories (terms of the relation of production) is for Marx not a simple fact, but the result of the process of ‘reification’, that is, an aspect of the ideological ‘mystification’ inherent to capitalism. As for Laclau’s second point about class struggle being ‘just one species of identity politics, one which is becoming less and less important in the world in which we live’, one should counter it by the already-mentioned paradox of ‘oppositional determination’, of the part of the chain that sustains its horizon itself; class antagonism certainly appears as one in the series of social antagonisms, but it is simultaneously the specific antagonism which ‘predominates over the rest whose relations thus assign rank and influence to the others. It is a general illumination which bathes all the other colours and modifies their particularity‘.
[M]y point of contention with Laclau here is that I do not accept that all elements which enter into hegemonic struggle are in principle equal: in the series of struggles (economic, political, feminist, ecological, ethnic, etc.) there is always ONE which, while it is part of the chain, secretly overdetermines its very horizon (320).