Page 33 - Culture Society and Economy

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CULTURE, SOCIETY AND ECONOMY

introduces flexibility into Marxism is a viable and promising one, yielding
the results which many want. Does Hall’s critique work? My argument
is that it does not. I argue that, notwithstanding numerous qualifications,
Hall ends up by draining politics of economics and by reducing all politics
to cultural politics.
On the basis of the above, it follows then that any understanding of
Hall’s thought must proceed from a recognition of its grounding in mate-
rialism. This is particularly obvious in his essay on the problem of ideol-
ogy published in 1983. Here Hall takes up the questions which we are
discussing and resolves them along lines very similar to which are
offered here. Very similar but, as we shall see, not the same.
The question that Hall posed in this essay is that of the relationship
between consciousness and the economy and the sense in which false con-
sciousness can be said to exist. It is important to appreciate why such an
issue should have attained importance at all – the context in which the
essay was written. The context was the post-1968 one – both the aftermath
of the student rebellion in Paris and the Soviet crushing of reform in
Czechoslovakia. This was a context in which a privileged dogmatism of the
Stalinist variety was confronted with an equally vanguardist Trotskyism.
Both groups – locked in mortal ideological struggle – had this much in
common: contempt for the consciousness of ‘ordinary folks’ (Hall’s term)
and an overweening sense of possessing the ‘truth’ of radical politics to
which all progressive persons should defer. Part of this contempt for ordi-
nary people was a disregard in particular for the life of ordinary black
people and the popular cultural forms which they had developed. Hall’s
project is to retain the profound insights which Marxism offers into
capitalism while rejecting this Stalinist and Trotskyite dogma.
All this was conducted with a central political problem in view. This
was the problem of ‘the consent of the mass of the working class to the
system in the advanced capitalist societies of Europe and thus their
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partial stabilization, against all expectations’. Both Stalinist and Trotskyist
Marxism – indeed, Marxism as a whole – found itself impotent and inef-
fectual face-to-face with this popular consent. This issue of the failure of
revolution in the West was seen as raising mainly the issue of the char-
acter of class consciousness versus false consciousness, where and how
this consciousness of consent arose and what was the role of the political
intellectual in relation to the masses, in the development of conscious-
ness beyond the level of the popular. In other words, the failure of revo-
lution was seen as posing a problem in consciousness and in what one
could call the politics of consciousness, not a problem in politics and
economics more broadly speaking. The issue was therefore posed as one

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