Page 89 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

STUART HALL, CULTURAL STUDIES AND MARXISM 77

as, if not much more central than, the subjects of orthodox concern like
strikes.
Thompson, while continuing to consider himself in important ways a
marxist, had arrived in the course of his critique of the stalinist version of
marxism at a number of positions which were very close to those of
the other Founding Fathers. Of the three, he was also by far the most
directly politically active, and this brought him into contact with a group
of younger intellectuals of very diverse origins whose relationship to the
marxism represented by the Communist Parties was mostly much more
distant.
Stuart Hall, then the editor of Universities and Left Review, was one of
the central figures of this group and it was through a dialogue with
Thompson and others that his first public encounter with marxism took
place. Hall has argued that left intellectual life in the late 1950s was
dominated by two quite distinct currents, associated respectively with the
New Reasoner and Universities and Left Review. It was these two currents
which merged, briefly, in the ‘first’ New Left Review (Hall, 1989a:19–21).
The major figures of what was to become ‘cultural studies’, particularly Hall
and Williams, were most closely associated with the Universities and Left
Review element. The New Reasoner, as we have shown, both in its leading
personalities and in its concerns was a ‘marxist’ and a ‘high cultural’
journal. Universities and Left Review could make out a much stronger case
to be a precursor of cultural studies. The general editorial position was far
more eclectic and much more open to explicitly antimarxist positions.
While Thompson was a regular contributor, so were marxists of other
persuasions, like Deutscher and Hobsbawm, not to mention anti-marxists
like G.D.H.Cole and John Strachey.
Universities and Left Review identified itself as a journal whose brief
included ‘a rapportage and critique of the “culture” of post-Welfare
Britain’ (Anon, 1958b:3), and it published a considerable body of material
which is recognizably concerned with the same issues as cultural studies.
Issue 5, for example, was identified as focusing on ‘the common theme of
culture and community’ and included a twenty-page supplement on ‘Mass
communication’ which included articles by Hoggart, Williams and
Birnbaum (Anon, 1958a:3).
The same issue saw a major article by Hall which criticized marxism,
and particularly the ‘base and superstructure’ metaphor, as obsolete and
inadequate. He argued that the development of capitalism itself had led to
a transformation of the control of industry, which now lay in the hands of
salaried managers, and to a recomposition of the working class away from
the unskilled towards more widespread and highly differentiated skills.
These changes were part of a major shift in the nature of the system
unanticipated by Marx. The old ‘sense of class’ was breaking up,
particularly under the impact of consumerism: The worker knows himself