Page 80 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

68 JORGE LARRAIN

authority in the family, not enough law and order, lack of Victorian
values, and so on. Terrorism is successful because of the free press and the
excessive leniency of the law. Divisions and forms of discrimination are
partly blamed on immigration and partly conjured away by patriotism and
jingoism. Thatcherite ideology thus tries systematically to displace and
conceal the real origin of British problems. It totally transfers or confines
the principles of freedom, equality and self-interest to the economic sphere
of the market while it attacks them in the political sphere. It erodes the
political rights of the trade unions, strongly attacks civil liberties, tries to
gag the press, expands the police force, etc. The authoritarian features of
Thatcherite ideology are not arbitrary and contingent, they are necessitated
to deal with the results of the operation of the free market. It is now
necessary to ‘protect’ the newly acquired economic freedoms which are
threatened by class struggles, criminality and racial discord.
Marx’s theory of ideology does allow, then, some critical understanding
of Thatcherism. This it does not only through the traditional analysis of the
principles and values which inform bourgeois ideology, but also through
showing how those principles, brought back into the economic sphere, are
articulated with other authoritarian values which are introduced in the
political sphere. In either case these principles and values perform the
classic role of ideology explained by Marx: they attempt to mask, explain
away or justify the greater unfreedom and inequality which the
Thatcherite government has brought about. Some may think that if this is
all, then the contribution of Marx’s concept of ideology to the
understanding of Thatcherism is pretty skimpy and adds very little that we
did not know before. This may be so, but it never was my point to
maintain that Marx’s concept would provide radically new insights into
Thatcherism. What it does is to balance and complement the analysis made
with the Gramscian concept: whereas the latter highlights the successful
hegemonic and articulatory qualities of Thatcherism the former underlines
the reality of unfreedom and inequality it has created but tries to conceal.
Both are necessary aspects of the same complex phenomenon.

NOTES

1 Holding at present Stuart Hall’s old position as Head of Cultural Studies at
Birmingham University and counting myself as one of his friends, I write
about his conception of ideology with some trepidation. With such a prolific
and distinguished author there is always the danger of unwittingly omitting
an important idea or misrepresenting his true position. Be that as it may, I
must state in advance my admiration and respect for Hall’s enormous
intellectual contribution to social sciences.
2 I mean the Laclau of Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory (1977) prior to
his most recent work on Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985) with