Page 85 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

STUART HALL, CULTURAL STUDIES AND MARXISM 73

close study of the question (Hoggart, 1951:156). In The Uses of Literacy,
the ‘middle-class Marxist’ is dismissed out of hand and the working-class
marxist, then by far the majority of those claiming such an intellectual
allegiance, is not even mentioned (Hoggart, 1957:16). Unlike Williams,
Hoggart did not form his view of working class culture with reference to
either the Communist Party or any other variant of marxism. His own
socialism, in its early phase at least, ‘was not theoretic and to have called it
ideological would have been a misuse of language’ (Hoggart, 1988:130).
Williams, on the other hand, had a much longer and personally more
important engagement. Marxism was a formative influence on his
intellectual development. Not only had he been briefly an active member of
the Communist Party, but that encounter with this version of marxism
continued to mark his thought (Williams, 1958:8; Williams, 1979:39–51;
O’Connor, 1989:7). This influence survived the Cold War and 1956, and
he explicitly acknowledged its continuing influence even during the period
when he was most critical of marxism:

When I got to Cambridge I encountered two serious influences which
have left a very deep impression on my mind. The first was Marxism,
the second the teaching of Leavis. Through all subsequent
disagreements I retain my respect for both.
(Williams, 1958:7)
The intellectual framework within which Culture and Society was
conceived and written was one in which marxism was a central point of
reference.
In Culture and Society, Williams made two major criticisms of Marx and
of his British adherents. In the case of Marx’s own writings, Williams
detected a confusion on the question of ‘structure and superstructure’. He
argued that Marx and his immediate followers provided little more than a
stress upon the importance of the economic structure in understanding
culture, which was ‘still an emphasis rather than a substantial theory’
(Williams, 1963:259–62). Twentieth-century followers of Marx in England
had not clarified matters. In their stress upon the incompatibility of
capitalism and cultural life, they had been heirs to the tradition of romantic
protest against capitalism. They took from that tradition a quite
‘unmarxist’ stress upon the active and transformatory nature of culture
(Williams, 1963:265–7). In the marxist writings that Williams then had
available to him he claimed to detect an oscillation between a ‘mechanical
materialism’ which attempted to derive art directly from economics at one
pole and a stress upon the transformative and prefigurative elements of art
which would have been more at home in the closing passage of A Defence
of Poetry at the other pole. The force of Williams’ critique of the
marxists was not that they had devoted themselves to the mistaken study