Page 88 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

76 COLIN SPARKS

creative aspects of human activity lead him to put forward a distinctive
position on the political practice of the intellectual:
The intellectual must work within a narrow ridge between academic
hubris on the one hand; and on the other hand false humility, the
abasement of the intellect before working-class experience, which
compromises not only our own intellectual integrity, but also our
own ideas.
(Thompson, 1957:35)

While Thompson may well have intended his intervention as a tactical
response intended to prevent talented young people pursuing the ruinous
course of joining the Socialist Labour League, his formulations had, in
practice, a strategic impact. The attempt to fulfil the difficult task of
working ‘a narrow ridge’ of a political practice which was neither
‘workerist’ nor ‘elitist’ became one of the recurrent preoccupations of first
the New Left and then of cultural studies.
Another direct consequence of the stress upon human activity as the
engine of social change was that the ideas and beliefs which human beings
hold about the world became much more central to socialist politics. If the
theoretical crime of stalinism was that it: ‘forgets the creative sparks
without which man would not be man’ (1957:125), then the new vision of
socialism must be one in which creativity was both the goal of
emancipation and a major site of struggle itself:

These ‘cultural’ questions are not only questions of value; they are
also, in the strictest sense, questions of political power. As even the
giants of publishing vanish from the scene, as Hultons and Nearnes
give way to Odhams, it becomes ever more clear that the fight to
control and breakup the mass media, and to preserve and extend the
minority media, is as central in political significance as, for example,
the fight against the Taxes on Knowledge in the 1830’s; it is the latest
phase of the long contest for democratic rights—a struggle not only
for the right of the minority to be heard, but for the right of the
majority not to be subject to massive influences of misinformation
and human depreciation.
(Thompson, 1959b:11–12)

The stress upon culture and the mass media was not in itself a radically new
departure either for marxism generally or for its stalinist deformation, but
in most versions of the tradition the emphasis of the political programme
lay in the class struggle understood as centrally located in workplaces.
Thompson theorized a position, which was to become central to cultural
studies, in which cultural questions were regarded as at least as important