<nettime> Stuart Hall: Stalinist in theory and Blairite in politics

[Richard Barbrook <richard@imaginaryfutures.net>]

I suppose those who make their living out of teaching Cultural Studies have to mourn 
the demise of Stuart Hall. However, the airbrushing of Hall's unpleasant politics in his 
obituaries cannot be allowed to pass without some attempt at correcting the historical 
record. Here are my thoughts which come from someone who - in more than one period 
of his life - was on the opposite side of the barricades to this high priest of philosophical 
confusion.

Stuart Hall joined the CPGB (British Stalinist party) after the Russian army crushed the 1956 
Hungarian revolution and remained a member through the 1968 suppression of the Prague 
Spring, the breaking of the 1970 Gdansk strikes, the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan, the 1981 
Polish military coup and was still there when this shameful outfit finally dissolved itself in 
1991 because the Soviet Union had imploded. During these three decades, he never took 
any public stand against the Russian occupation of Eastern Europe or the vicious repression 
of workers' struggles by the Stalinist system. Silence = complicity.

In the various fawning obituaries of Hall, he has been described as a great 'Marxist' thinker. 
Yet, if you read his publications, there is no evidence that he ever seriously studied Marx's 
writings. The only references in them are to:-
* The CPGB's bowdlerised version of 'The German Ideology' which carefully removed all of 
the passages where Marx and Engels gleefully mock the 1840s equivalents of Hall;
* The chapter on commodity fetishism in 'Capital Volume 1' which Hall bizarrely mistook for 
a theory of ideology;
* The most well-known quotes from 'The Communist Manifesto'; '18th Brumaire' and 'The 
Civil War in France' which every CPGB member was supposed to know. 

As far as I can make out, Hall never read the rest of 'Capital', 'Grundrisse', 'Theories of Surplus 
Value' or any of Marx's wonderful journalistic articles. I have taught undergraduate students 
who've read more of Marx's writings than Hall ever did!

Instead of Marx, Hall devoted himself to promoting Louis Althusser's remix of Stalin's socio-linguistics 
in the English-speaking world. During the late-1970s and early-1980s, his disciples were the 
most sectarian of any group on the English Left which - given our long history of Protestant 
sectarianism - is saying something. If you still need to understand why Hall's obsession with 
Althusser was elitist and reactionary, please read Edward Thompson's and Simon Clarke's excellent 
articles which demolish the idiocies of this Stalinist philosophy.

Since then, we've had two generations of academic leftists brought up on Hall who have wasted their 
energies on the spawn of Althusser: Foucault; Derrida; Deleuze & Guattari; Badiou; Zizek and so on. In 
this fifth year of the Great Recession, they have nothing sensible to say because they lack the basic 
theoretical knowledge to refute the propagandists of neo-liberalism. For, as Stalin and Hall argued, 
Marx's critique of political economy was only for 'textualists and Talmudists' ... 

In 1978, Hall and his BCCCS colleagues published 'Policing the Crisis' which claimed that the rise of 
neo-liberalism was an entirely ideological offensive by the Tory party. Amazingly, this book never 
discussed Hayek, Mises, Friedman or any of the other bourgeois economists who Thatcher and her 
allies were loudly proclaiming as their gurus at the time. Then as now, refusing to study value theory 
was a big mistake. Even worse, Hall's book splenetically denounced all English Situationists as 
'terrorists' which - given how many of their ideas he'd stolen for the BCCCS' work on youth subcultures 
- was most ungrateful. A year later, Dick Hebdige proved himself a diligent pupil of Hall when he 
published a book on the punk movement which never mentioned that its founders were English 
Situationists. Stalin would have been proud of both of them!

In the early-1980s, Hall rose to prominence as the intellectual maestro of the Eurocommunist faction of 
the CPGB which controlled the party's misnamed theoretical journal: 'Marxism Today'. In issue after issue, 
he and his associates denounced the Labour Left's struggles against the Thatcher monster as extremist 
and deranged. We just didn't understand that the English proletariat was irredeemably racist, sexist and 
homophobic. It was Thatcher who knew how to appeal to these reactionary impulses - and our attempts 
to mobilise the working class in all of its diversity against her oppressive regime were doomed to failure. 
At first, Hall's faction of the CPGB kept the Althusserian faith by analysing Tory rule solely as a ideological 
project. After a few years, even they eventually realised that neo-liberalism might have something to do 
with the despised discipline of political economy. However, instead of reading some value theory, Hall's 
faction now proclaimed Thatcher's regime as the future in the present. Neo-liberalism was the New Times 
to come which - most conveniently for them - meant that the Labour Left's resistance to Tory hegemony 
was futile. Delighted that the local franchise of the Cold War enemy had switched sides in the class struggle, 
the right-wing press enthusiastically promoted the new party line of (anti-)'Marxism Today'. They knew that 
they could rely on the Althusserians to purge the 'Trotskyist wreckers' who threatened the bourgeoisie's 
wealth and privileges. 

In the late-1980s, I was told by a member of Hall's faction of the CPGB that they were very pleased that 
Thatcher had defeated the miners' strike and crushed the local government Left because the Labour party 
would now be forced to adopt their centrist political programme. Within a decade, this prognosis was realised 
when Blair was elected prime minister on a manifesto which assured the bankers that New Labour had no 
intention of breaking with Thatcher's neo-liberal settlement. In the early reforming years of this administration, 
Hall made not one word of complaint about its failure to repeal anti-trade union laws, its attacks on welfare 
claimants and various other dubious policies. However, when New Labour eventually got old and discredited, 
he suddenly reappeared as a critic of the neo-liberal government which his faction of the CPGB had helped 
into power! Of course, we should always welcome someone who recants their past errors. Yet, Hall was still 
incapable of providing any intelligent analysis of the failings of neo-liberalism because this would have 
required the one thing that he'd always refused to do: studying Marx's critique of political economy. 

If there is one lesson to be learnt from this sad tale of political failure and theoretical chicanery, we must not 
make the same mistake as Hall and his disciples. Comrades - let us become Marxists who've read some Marx! 


#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org