Page 41 - Culture Society and Economy

Robotham-02.qxd 1/31/2005 6:21 PM Page 34

CULTURE, SOCIETY AND ECONOMY

to resolve the economic and social problems of our time, especially after
the decline of Keynesianism and the Bretton Woods system in the 1970s
and the failure of the market reforms in Eastern Europe during the same
period. The thought that Thatcherism was in reality superior to the
approaches of the Left and social democracy, primarily in its grasp of the
crisis facing the global capitalist economy, and, barring this decisive fact,
Thatcherite neo-Victorian and neo-colonial rhetoric would have been in
vain – such thoughts simply do not arise anywhere in his analysis. As
Sparks pointed out, ‘the material basis of Thatcher’s political success is
17
never investigated’ by Hall. This lack of concern for economics contin-
ues to this day and is a serious source of theoretical as well as political
weakness. What it leads to is a politics long on denunciation and outrage,
but short on the presentation of convincing alternatives to the present
global capitalist order. 18
Thus, this line of thinking leads to the conclusion that it is psycholog-
ical, cultural and semiotic shrewdness which matters most in politics. On
this basis, it may not be out of place for an exponent of cultural studies
to conclude that Marxism failed not because of its failures in theoretical
and applied economics which is simply the obverse side of its failure in
politics. The problem was the inadequacy of Marxist ‘spin’. The failure of
Marxism was a cultural failure – a failure to adapt itself sufficiently
shrewdly to specific national idioms – essentially a failure of cultural pro-
paganda. Marxism needs to go back to the drawing board and to repackage
itself more idiomatically and metonymically, root itself more effectively
in popular culture and organize mass cultural manifestations. As Hall wrote,
‘It is only through the way in which we represent and imagine ourselves
that we come to know how we are constituted and who we are.’ This is
19
psychological and semiotic reductionism and in the end, is irreconcilable
with materialism as well as with rationalism.
This argument leads to the view that the process of the development
of culture is at its core a self-subsistent psychological and linguistic
process. It is mainly a mental process at the mass and individual level
governed by its own inner logics and not mainly determined by the eco-
nomic or political real-life effectiveness of these thoughts. To Hall, while
‘meaning’ – not ‘thought’! – initially arises rationalistically from material
experience, having once arisen, thereafter it is free. Indeed, from this
point of view, it becomes very difficult to maintain any distinction between
the economic, the ideological and the political. Such is the primacy given
to culture that economic and political agency – rationalistic agencies of
any kind – are themselves treated as expressions of cultural outlooks. The
idea of other forms of experience and activity, of ‘experience outside of

34