Page 79 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

STUART HALL AND THE MARXIST CONCEPT OF IDEOLOGY 67

market. So, the new ideological values can no longer be the idea of science,
full employment and welfare. Now, once more, as in Marx’s time, it is
freedom, equality, property and self-interest.
Why has this happened? Basically, because capitalism itself has changed
and entered into a crisis of accumulation and profitability which Mrs
Thatcher has tried to solve by a return to the market forces. From 1945 to
the end of the 1960s capitalism enjoyed a long period of expansion which
some call the post-war settlement or the Fordist-Keynesian period. Since
the beginning of the 1970s this system has been breaking up, the
conditions of accumulation have radically changed and consequently a
serious crisis of hegemony has developed which precipitated the political
realignment which brought Mrs Thatcher to power. The new conditions
for capitalist accumulation entailed an exacerbation of the traditional
confrontation between capital and labour, both politically and
economically. On the political front, the need for a new form of flexible
accumulation required the dismantling of the traditional sources of trade-
union power after years of corporatist co-operation with the system. On
the economic front, flexible accumulation required a new shift towards the
extraction of absolute surplus value: longer working hours, erosion of real
wages and the formation of a new underclass without work. But the return
to many of the harsh conditions which existed before 1945 must be
ideologically compensated for and here is where the values of the market—
freedom, equality, property and self-interest—return with a new lease of
life. These are the conditions which helped crystallize Thatcherism as an
ideological phenomenon which feeds from the traditional capitalist
ideology Marx already knew.
However, as could be expected, there is no question of simply going back
to the time of pre-welfare competitive capitalism which Marx knew.
Because flexible accumulation, economic insecurity and the re-imposition of
the market rules are bound to exacerbate contradictions and their
manifestations such as unemployment, poverty, discrimination, criminality,
national and regional divisions, new forms of violence, and so on, the
ideology of freedom and equality is not enough. At times of insecurity and
fragmentation the longing for stable values leads to a heightened emphasis
on the authority of basic institutions (Harvey, 1989:171). Hence the new
ideological forms which emphasize the sense of authority, hard work, law
and order, family and tradition, Victorian values, patriotism: a strong
nation which defeats the enemy within (trade unions) and the enemy
without (Argentinians). These forms serve as devices to misunderstand and
displace the real origin of those conflictive manifestations and to justify the
way in which they are dealt with.
Thus unemployment is treated as laziness and pricing yourself out of a
job, workers’ strikes are transformed into a problem of public order.
Criminality and new forms of violence are treated as the result of lack of