Hegemony And Socialist Strategy: Towards A Radical Democratic Politics by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe
Reading dates: 30 July–18 September 2015
Ian chose this book for our Dialectical Materialism book group. It is an excruciatingly difficult book. I did not finish it and what I read, I am not sure I understood. Yet, the discussion was fascinating. We talked about classical marxism, labour power as commodity, surplus value, the point de caption, Trostky-ism, Podemos, Siriza, Corbyn, the referendum and imagination and, of course, Hegemony. It reminded me of the time when I saw the worst film I have ever seen (Outlaw) and had a fascinating conversation with Neil about cinema. Why do we go to our book group? It is certainly not to read easy, pleasurable works. I think we do it to disentangle knots, and, despite the fact that I don’t know what chapters two and three of Laclau and Mouffe’s book are about (I only read chapter one and half of four), I feel a few of my knots were made loser.

