Page 263 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

ANGELA MCROBBIE 251

THE PROBLEM OF IDEOLOGY
In one rather narrow respect the Capital and Class theorists present a
convincing analysis of what it is that capital is doing as it shifts into a
mode which is less centralized, less homogenized and more highly
computerized, thus dispensing with substantial sectors of the workforce on
the way. This is, they argue, managed through the successful deployment
of a huge ideological offensive which was held together in Britain through
the figure of Thatcher and through the ideas which came to be associated
with Thatcherism. In this way the class struggle continues unabated as
the workforce is beaten from pillar to post. The problem is, however, that
there is little talk of the workers and the struggles they are engaged in
throughout the Capital and Class writing. There is a large silence here. And
the only assumption that can be drawn is that in the light of this offensive
the working classes have been, temporarily perhaps, quietened. But this
silence also means that the analysis itself is weakened because we have
absolutely no sense of what this totalizing model of economic restructuring
and ideological attack comes up against, or of what it encounters in its
journey from factory floor, to dole office, to home, street and family.
In short there is no sense of what the social field itself looks like, how it
is occupied, what forms of social and cultural activity accompany changes
in the workplace. The only conclusion that can be drawn is that the
working class in whatever form it continues to exist (and this is also a
question not raised by the Capital and Class writers) is won over by
ideology, it is in effect made passive, it is the victim of capital. It is precisely
against this kind of manipulation thesis that New Times writers make a
clear attempt to rethink ideology. From their point of view the lofty
correctness of the left in relation to how the masses are simply duped,
tricked or conned by the gloss and the glow of Thatcherism has a tinge of
arrogance and elitism. In what is perhaps an urgent piece of pleading Hall
asks that the left stops for a moment and thinks about what it is that
makes the language of the new radical right sufficiently attractive to the
electorate to keep the Conservatives in government for so long that the idea
of Labour in office is now a hazy memory.
This is to return to those aspects of ordinary everyday life which connect
people to the ideas of the right rather than those of the left, it is to show
how questions of choice, how the ‘right to buy’, how the address to
parents, and to citizens, had a resonance which the left were not able to
match, even when they were able to demonstrate the shallowness and the
dishonesty of many of these ‘promises’. Partly of course this had to do with
the simultaneous negating of all ideas associated with the left which the
Thatcher government also embarked upon and maintained through the
heady days of gold cards and huge mortgages. It is ironic to say the least
that Stuart Hall’s account in Policing the Crisis (Hall et al., 1978) of the