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POLITICS AS CULTURE: STUART HALL

of how this popular mass consciousness of consent was to be understood
and, where necessary, critiqued. These were some of the central ques-
tions which arose in the context of the time, which Hall felt it necessary
to attempt to answer, within the Marxist framework.
Basing himself on Marx, Hall argued that spontaneous forms of con-
sciousness, popular as well as scholarly, arise from the surface of economic
life which is what people actually experience. In the case of capitalist
society what this ‘surface’ amounts to, is the market and exchange relations,
be these in consumption, production, finance or the labor market. This
reaction to the surface of life as it necessarily appears in consciousness
therefore has a material base – conditioned by how and where one is posi-
tioned in the marketplace. This is the reason why consumerism, hedonism,
narcissism, exhibitionism, self-centeredness – reflexivity if you will – the
spontaneous forms of consciousness in developed capitalist societies which,
as Weber was at pains to point out, have long relieved themselves of their
Protestant ethic. All the efforts of neo-conservatives to revive such an
ethic collapse in hopeless failure amidst the consumerist plenty of the
developed capitalist economy. The refinements of consumerist luxury
prove simply too much to resist, first and foremost for the members of
the conservative elite itself. As Weber long ago pointed out, all attempts
to give an ethical foundation to modern monopoly capitalist civilization in
its present state, are simply non-starters, likely to collapse either in hypo-
critical farce, or worse, to degenerate into a ‘blood and soil’ atavism of the
worst anti-human kind.
This spontaneous consciousness is therefore ‘true’ in the sense that it
does arise from particular material experiences. However, this is only a
partial and one-sided truth and therefore no truth at all. This is because
experience based on the market actually conceals more than it reveals
about the deeper and more far-reaching economic and social processes at
work. These processes are to be found in the sphere of production. Even
in the sphere of production they are by no means immediately obvious.
Only a profound analysis of the ‘hidden abode’ of production – in other
words, intense intellectual effort which critiques the shallowness and
one-sided nature of ‘experience’ – can overcome the false consciousness
generated by the capitalist system itself.
False consciousness therefore is a reality and it springs from reality. It
is a reality in its popular form as much as in its scholarly and expert form.
Indeed, it may be more widespread in academia and among elites than it
is among the mass of ordinary people. It is not necessarily superficial,
even though it derives from experience. Experience is not disconnected
from reality but is an expression of it. Therefore, at crucial moments and

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