by
Stuart Hall
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Film was already one of my abiding passions. It seemed to me the most innovative of the modern arts. I had always had a passionate addiction to the movies, and as a youth in Kingston I saw on Saturday afternoon matinees at the Carib Theatre everything from Hollywood that found its way to Jamaica: westerns, melodramas, thrillers, musicals and film noir; Bogart and Bacall, Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, Henry Fonda, John Garfield, the lot. This passion continued in Oxford. We went to the cinema two or three times a week. My first experiences of Continental cinema included Eisenstein and Pudovkin, Italian neo-realism and the French New Wave. They were a revelation. I realize now that this combination of arguing about literary criticism, reading modern literature, especially with the Americans, following the Caribbean novel and poetry, going to the movies, listening to and playing jazz meant that I began to construct a sort of intellectual counter-life to Oxford, more appropriate to my growing sense of being a radical outsider, a feeling which deepened as I came to the end of my time as an undergraduate.
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From 1956 until I made the move to Birmingham in 1964, ‘normal’ life was suspended by my political activity: by my editing ULR and, from 1960, New Left Review (NLR); by the larger attempts to build around these publications social movements, eventually organized by the creation of the New Left Clubs; by the long and arduous struggle to get the ideas we were generating mobilized, and by our attempt to activate them inside the Labour Party. At the same time, as we experienced what felt to us as a thaw in the Cold War, we invested great energies in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), which represented a strategic social movement in its own right. Suez and Hungary had fractured the old politics, and the carapace of the Cold War had been – temporarily, as it turned out – shattered. Out of this emerged our ‘between/against both camps’ position and the hope for the creation of an independent, popular Left politics.
I am in the middle of my discussion about politics and I’m having to explain my shifting relations to the concept of culture. I make no apology for this. This journey took me to an understanding of culture as the signifying dimension of human practice. In Althusser’s terms, culture exists as one of the founding instances of every social formation, without which societies cannot exist as such.
From the vantage of today, for a different generation, our investments in ULR and then the founding of the NLR might seem parochial. But it didn’t feel like that at the time. We laboured long and hard to seize the moment, as it were, and to recast the Left so that we weren’t left behind by history. We endeavoured to keep our eyes on the prize.
By then I knew the traditions of socialist politics in England. But I hadn’t been formed in them, like Raymond Williams or Edward Thompson. I was a neophyte among them. Can anyone imagine what it must have been like being alongside these luminaries? Editorial boards were a nightmare for me. I’d indicate the possible contents of the next issue and then hold up my hands before the storm broke and the fathers spoke!
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Gramsci argued that, though the economic must never be forgotten, conjunctural crises are never solely economic, or economically-determined ‘in the last instance’. They arise when a number of contradictions at work in different key practices and sites come together - or ‘con-join’ - in the same moment and political space and, as Althusser said, ‘fuse in a ruptural unity’. Analysis here focuses on crises and breaks, and the distinctive character of the ‘historic settlements’ which follow. The condensation of forces during a period of crisis, and the new social configurations which result, mark a new ‘conjuncture’.
[...] However anachronistic it may seem, neoliberalism is grounded in the ‘free, possessive individual’, with the state cast as tyrannical and oppressive. The welfare state, in particular, is the arch enemy of freedom. The state must never govern society, dictate to free individuals how to dispose of their private property, regulate a free-market economy or interfere with the God-given right to make profits and amass personal wealth. State-led ‘social engineering’ must never prevail over corporate and private interests. It must not intervene in the ‘natural’ mechanisms of the free market, or take as its objective the amelioration of free-market capitalism’s propensity to create inequality [...]
According to the neoliberal narrative, the welfare state (propelled by workingclass reaction to the Depression of the 1930s and the popular mobilisation of World War Two) mistakenly saw its task as intervening in the economy, redistributing wealth, universalising life-chances, attacking unemployment, protecting the socially vulnerable, ameliorating the condition of oppressed or marginalised groups and addressing social injustice. It tried to break the ‘natural’ (sic) link between social needs and the individual’s capacity to pay. But its dogooding, utopian sentimentality enervated the nation’s moral fibre, and eroded personal responsibility and the over-riding duty of the poor to work. It imposed social purposes on an economy rooted in individual greed and self interest. State intervention must never compromise the right of private capital to ‘grow the business’, improve share value, pay dividends and reward its agents with enormous salaries, benefits and bonuses. The function of the liberal state should be limited to safeguarding the conditions in which profitable competition can be pursued without engendering Hobbes’s ‘war of all against all’.
It should be noted, of course, that neoliberalism has many variants. There are critical differences, for example, between American, British and European ‘social market’ versions; South East Asian state-supported growth and Chinese ‘state capitalism’; Russia’s oligarchic/kleptomanic state and the monetarist ‘experiments’ in Latin America. Neoliberalism is not one thing. It evolves and diversifies. Nevertheless, geopolitically, neoliberal ideas, policies and strategies are incrementally gaining ground, re-defining the political, social and economic model, governing the strategies and setting the pace.
Still, the old had to be destroyed before the new could take its place. Margaret Thatcher conspired in a ruthless war against the cabinet ‘wets’ and simultaneously plotted to break trade union power - ‘the enemy within’. She impelled people towards new, individualised, competitive solutions: ‘get on your bike’, become self-employed or a share-holder, buy your council house, invest in the property-owning democracy. She coined a homespun equivalent for the key neoliberal ideas behind the sea-change she was imposing on society: value for money, managing your own budget, fiscal restraint, the money supply and the virtues of competition. There was anger, protest, resistance - but also a surge of populist support for the ruthless exercise of strong leadership.
Thatcherism mobilised widespread but unfocused anxiety about social change,
engineering populist calls from ‘below’ to the state ‘above’ to save the country by
imposing social order. [...]
Ideology is always contradictory. There is no single, integrated ‘ruling ideology’ - a mistake we repeat again now in failing to distinguish between conservative and neoliberal repertoires. Ideology works best by suturing together contradictory lines of argument and emotional investments - finding what Laclau called ‘systems of equivalence’ between them. Contradiction is its metier. Andrew Gamble characterised Thatcherism as combining ‘free market’/‘strong state’. Many believed this contradiction would be Thatcherism’s undoing. But, though not logical, few strategies are so successful at winning consent as those which root themselves in the contradictory elements of common sense, popular life and consciousness. Even today, the market/free enterprise/private property discourse persists cheek by jowl with older conservative attachments to nation, racial homogeneity, Empire, tradition. ‘Market forces’ is good for restoring the power of capital and destroying the redistributivist illusion. But in moments of difficulty one can trust ‘the Empire’ to strike back. [...]