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POLITICS AS CULTURE: STUART HALL

Yet the proletariat cannot become the dominant class if it does not
overcome this contradiction through the sacrifice of its corporate interests.
It cannot maintain its hegemony and its dictatorship if, even when it has
become dominant, it does not sacrifice these immediate interests for the
general and permanent interests of the class. 35

The point that Gramsci is making here is that the maintenance of the
alliance between the proletariat and the peasantry in the context of the
Russian Revolution required a profound grasp of the economic situation.
The sacrifice of the immediate interests of the proletariat for the peas-
ant’s interests in the market – in buying and selling and in capitalism –
was a strategic requirement. According to Gramsci, this approach to the
economy was a fundamental condition for the maintenance of the hege-
mony of the proletariat. Apart from shedding light on Gramsci’s post-
revolution attitude to economic policies, this represents a profoundly
materialist not culturalist understanding of the necessary foundations for
hegemony. But Gramsci was even more explicit, writing in 1926 before
Stalinist extremism took hold:

Today, at nine years distance from October 1917, it is no longer the fact of
the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks which can revolutionize the Western
masses, because this has already been allowed for and has produced its
effects. What is active today, ideologically and politically, is the conviction
(if it exists) that the proletariat, once power has been taken, can construct
socialism 36

This observation speaks directly to the issues which we have been dis-
cussing and to the vital importance which practical economic achieve-
ments have for the ideas of socialism to ‘grip the masses’. Indeed, there
can be little doubt that both the economic and political failures of ‘real
socialism’ have exerted a decisive effect on the passive consent of work-
ing people to the continued dominance of the capitalist system.
One final word on Hall’s ideas having to do with the issue of hybrid-
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ity and ‘black essentialism’. As mentioned earlier, the concept of hybrid-
ity, as currently put forward, is an inadequate attempt to capture a far
more thorough-going process unfolding as a result of the international
scope of the division of labour. In his short paper on ‘What is this “black”
in black popular culture?’, Hall is concerned to combat essentialist notions
of blackness in black popular culture. He wrote that ‘the essentializing
moment is weak because it naturalizes and de-historicizes difference,
mistaking what is historical for what is natural, biological, and genetic’. 38
Following his usual line of argument, Hall argues that identification with

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