Various types of criticisms have been expressed, but what they share overall is a dislike of McKay's approach to his subject matter.
Recuperation is a constant danger for anti-capitalist practice.
However, we don't think that this book is a particularly powerful example of this, because it is too flawed even within its own terms. From a marketing point of view, this is obviously the best of both worlds. From our point of view, however, McKay's attempt to commentate simultaneously as both insider and outsider has serious problems. In the first place, surely if anything is of value in an academic work, it is its systematicity and scholarship. Cultural studies, however, while breaking down interdisciplinary boundaries, has little of the empirical rigour, of say, sociology.