Page 43 - Culture Society and Economy

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CULTURE, SOCIETY AND ECONOMY

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but this is primarily a cultural politics. A politics of the powerful gesture:
mass mobilizations, marches, street theatre, powerful speeches, well-crafted
essays. This approach to the problems of modern capitalist society has
shown time and again its inadequacy: it can oppose and denounce, but
cannot propose.
This takes us to Hall’s treatment of Gramsci. For Hall is aware of the
problems posed by his confinement of the economic to only being deter-
mining in ‘the first instance’. After all, he asks, if the first, why not ‘the
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first, middle and last’? Why not continuously? Sensitive to this issue, he
remarked elsewhere that ‘Of course, “consent” is not maintained through
the mechanisms of ideology alone’. 25 Apart from the fact that this is an
aside, at issue is not whether ideology acts ‘alone’. The issue is whether
it is the main force. Hall’s formulations foster the view that it is.
Gramsci is important to Hall because of his concept of hegemony and
the tendency in Gramsci to assign an elevated role to the ‘organic’ intel-
lectual – a notion which has its roots in early nineteenth-century German
anti-capitalist Romantic thought. Hall regards the concept of hegemony
as the key to unraveling the riddle of the consent of the contemporary
working class to advanced capitalist society. Following Grasmci, this is
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characterized as due to the process of ‘hegemonic domination’. What is
at stake here is the basis of consent. The issue is whether the consent of
the disadvantaged in contemporary capitalist society is maintained pri-
marily by cultural mechanisms or primarily by a rationalistic political
economy and ideology. Hall interprets Gramsci as arguing that this is pri-
marily a cultural process in the non-rationalistic sense – the power of reli-
gion and the mass media are held to be decisive.
But this may be an unduly culturalist interpretation which downplays
Gramsci’s rationalistic materialism, especially the vital importance which
Gramsci attaches to the economic and social interventions of the state as
a means of maintaining the hegemony of the ruling groups and of stabi-
lizing their rule. 27 This was particularly important for Gramsci in his
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analysis of the effectiveness of the corporatist policies of Mussolini. Of
course, brazen demagogy was and is necessarily endemic to fascism. But,
in Gramsci’s view, what made Italian fascist ideology effective and able
to ‘grip the masses’ was not its ‘metonymy’. The point is that fascist ideas
were embodied in concrete economic and social projects which incorpo-
rated and made material concessions to broad masses of people. Fascism
was shrewd and in its own way, highly rationalistic at the level of means-
rationality. In other words, it was the combination of ideology with effec-
tive practice which was decisive. Needless to say, a decisive part of this
‘effective practice’ was the ability to take a sober view of the economy

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