Page 89 - Culture Society and the Media

CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA 79
subtlety and persistence by the radical Right. The theory that the working class
was permanently and inevitably attached to democratic socialism, the Labour
Party and the trade-union movement, for example, could not survive a period in
which the intensity of the Thatcher campaigns preceding the General Election of
1979 made strategic and decisive inroads, precisely into major sectors of the
working-class vote (Hall, 1979; Hall, 1980b). And one of the key turning-points
in the ideological struggle was the way the revolt of the lower-paid public-
service workers against inflation, in the ‘Winter of Discontent’ of 1978–9, was
successfully signified, not as a defence of eroded living standards and
differentials, but as a callous and inhuman exercise of overweening ‘trade-union
power’, directed against the defenceless sick, aged, dying and indeed the dead but
unburied ‘members of the ordinary public’.

Ideology in the social formation

This may be a convenient point in the argument to turn, briefly, to the second
strand: concerning the way ideology was conceived in relation to other practices
in a social formation. Many of the points in this part of the argument have
already been sketched in. Complex social formations had to be analysed in terms
of the economic, political and ideological institutions and practices through
which they were elaborated. Each of these elements had to be accorded a specific
weight in determining the outcomes of particular conjunctures. The question of
ideology could not be extrapolated from some other level—the economic, for
example—as some versions of classical Marxism proposed. But nor could the
question of value-consensus be assumed, or treated as a dependent process
merely reflecting in practice that consensus already achieved at the level of
ideas, as pluralism supposed. Economic, political and ideological conditions had
to be identified and analysed before any single event could be explained.
Further, as we have already shown, the presupposition that the reflection of
economic reality at the level of ideas could be replaced by a straightforward
‘classdetermination’, also proved to be a false and misleading trail. It did not
sufficiently recognize the relative autonomy of ideological processes, or the real
effects of ideology on other practices. It treated classes as ‘historical givens’—
their ideological ‘unity’ already given by their position in the economic structure
—whereas, in the new perspective, classes had to be understood only as the
complex result of the successful prosecution of different forms of social struggle
at all the levels of social practice, including the ideological. This gave to the
struggle around and over the media—the dominant means of social signification
in modern societies—a specificity and a centrality which, in previous theories,
they had altogether lacked. It raised them to a central, relatively independent,
position in any analysis of the question of the ‘politics of signification’.
Though these arguments were cast within a materialist framework, they clearly
departed radically from certain conventional ways of putting the Marxist
question. In their most extended text on the question, The German Ideology,