In Hegemony and Socialist Strategy Laclau and Mouffe reject Marx’s account of equivalence. They argue that there is no underlying positive content (for Marx socially necessary labour time) to equivalential relations. Instead any common reference for equivalent political struggles is contingent. They do not, however, carry through this critique to analyse the equivalential role of money. I contend that discourse theory should rethink the money form as one possible mode of hegemonic articulation. In doing so we emphasise the contingency of value, the contingency of the relation between abstract labour and the expression of value, and the retroactive causality necessary to the realisation of value. This discourse theoretical framing of political economy opens up the possibile analysis of competing modes of equivalential articulation, (financial and populist) and establishes new ways of theorising the hegemonic role of finance capital and debt in neoliberal society.
