Page 36 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

Chapter 1
The problem of ideology
Marxism without guarantees

Stuart Hall

In the past two or three decades, marxist theory has been going through a
remarkable, but lop-sided and uneven revival. On the one hand, it has
come once again to provide the principal pole of opposition to ‘bourgeois’
social thought. On the other hand, many young intellectuals have passed
through the revival and, after a heady and rapid apprenticeship, gone right
out the other side again. They have ‘settled their accounts’ with marxism
and moved on to fresh intellectual fields and pastures: but not quite. Post-
marxism remains one of our largest and most flourishing contemporary
theoretical schools. The post-marxists use marxist concepts while
constantly demonstrating their inadequacy. They seem, in fact, to continue
to stand on the shoulders of the very theories they have just definitely
destroyed. Had marxism not existed, ‘post-marxism’ would have had to
invent it, so that ‘deconstructing’ it once more would give the
‘deconstructionists’ something further to do. All this gives marxism a
curious life-after-death quality. It is constantly being ‘transcended’ and
‘preserved’. There is no more instructive site from which to observe this
process than that of ideology itself.
I do not intend to trace through once again the precise twists and turns of
these recent disputes, nor to try to follow the intricate theorizing which has
attended them. Instead, I want to place the debates about ideology in the
wider context of marxist theory as a whole. I also want to pose it as a
general problem—a problem of theory, because it is also a problem of
politics and strategy. I want to identify the most telling weaknesses and
limitations in the classical marxist formulations about ideology; and to
assess what has been gained, what deserves to be lost, and what needs to be
retained—and perhaps rethought—in the light of the critiques.

Reprinted from the Journal of Communication Inquiry (1986), 10(2), 28–44. This
essay originally appeared in Marx: 100 Years On, B.Matthews, (ed.) London:
Lawrence & Wishart, 1983, 57–84. We wish to thank the publisher for permission
to reprint it here.