In fact, I myself am advocating for taking the living wage campaign out to the regions (as indicated by the title of my post…), not for the regionalisation of the minimum wage…

Pity you dislike all things Compass, I guess I should have put my post on another website, you may have reacted differently to it!

I have read Wood’s book – she makes an excellent case. Before reading it, I had not come across Poulantzas. After reading it, I found myself loaded up with a burning dislike for Compass.

Unfortunately, although Laclau and Mouffe may have receded from the scene, their successors are very definitely still around…

The other main point Wood makes regards the democratic pretensions of L&M’s piece. As was/is fashionable, they make clear their opposition to “vanguardism”. And yet their alternative is to build up a hegemonic bloc of numerous subject positions, which is, if memory serves, is held together by a dialogue “articulated” by the intellectuals. In other words, the role the party occupied in Gramscian hegemony has come to be occupied by … academics like themselves. It’s unsurprising both subsequently disappeared up their arses – Laclau who knows where, and Mouffe into the exciting world of “post-Heideggerian hermeneutics”.

Another thing I remember from reading the book was how angry it made me. Not because it was overly pretentious (though there is that annoying tendency to slip into entirely avoidable Lacanian digressions), but that the ‘Marxism’ they were critiquing was the most clunky and mechanical load of cobblers they could find. Their understanding of dialectics and materialism was so glaring that it made the Marxism I learned by rote at A Level look sublime. It was obvious they had little acquaintance with Marx’s primary texts. But what it did do was establish a trend among left leaning PoMo academics to write Marxism off as a mechanistic embarrassment on the basis of received opinion. Arrrgh!