05.12.2013

Stuart Hall: Left’s great ‘moving right’ show

Daniel Harvey reviews: Stuart Hall, Doreen Massey, Michael Rustin (eds) 'After neoliberalism? The Kilburn manifesto', Soundings, 2013

After reading After neoliberalism? The Kilburn manifesto, which is currently being released in chapter instalments on the internet, I felt as though I had just had afternoon tea with my local vicar. Prominent Eurocommunist Stuart Hall might well have been filling the teacups, whilst speaking in that peculiarly ingratiating intonation of the Anglican clergy: What about all this inequality business these days then? Isn’t it all getting a bit out of hand? I remember when banks used to be “beacons of probity”!¹

Doreen Massey also bemoans how things have changed for the worst: “At an art exhibition last summer I engaged in a very interesting conversation with one of the young people employed by the gallery. As she turned away, I saw she had on the back of her T-shirt ‘Customer liaison’. I felt flat. Our whole conversation seemed somehow reduced, my experience of it belittled into a commercial transaction.” She complains: “Now individual interests are all that matters, and those interests are monetary”.² And Doreen continues: “Even David Cameron mused a while ago that there was more to life than GDP. The moment has been lost …”³ The vicar comes back: 'Whatever hap­pened to Cameron’s motto, “Common idea for the common good”? He has completely lost his way.'⁴

The text is permeated with this kind of bemused outrage, which seems now to be the starting point even for sec­tions of the ‘Marxist’ left. Perhaps you can imagine Richard Seymour as a child in the corner in a boy scout’s uniform taking all the points on board. He has certainly cited Stuart Hall as one of his political and intellectual inspirations. But what is striking in the accounts here is the absolute lack of any critical analysis of capitalism. The only appearances Marx has made in the series so far is, firstly, in con­nection to his admiration for some paintings in the British Library perti­nent to British feminism, according to Beatrix Campbell; and in a reference from Michael Rustin that he might have had something to say about ex­ploitation of workers, and that it was bad apparently.

Having abandoned any real attempt at political economy then, The Kilburn manifesto presents neoliberalism as some purely ideological construct. It just appears as a sort of miasma over society, causing the prevailing ‘com­mon sense’ to shift to the right, with­out much sense of whence it came. Banishing it has something to do with the vague left - reasserting the meaning of ‘fairness’, according to Stuart Hall, in a new framework, be­yond those nasty Tories, and The Sun newspaper. Apparently, Tories suc­ceed in winning people to their con­ception of ‘fairness’ by proclaiming it in terms no person can disagree with: asserting agreement in order to cre­ate agreement. So Hall hopes that the left will do the same, in a manner that is supposed to be related to the usual Gramscian notions of ‘hegemony’.

Between Stalinism and Blairism

How can even the likes of Hall, Massey, Campbell, etc possibly arrive at such a desiccated, sub-Miliband level of political analysis? The first thing to realise is that despite the fact that they are adamant about the nov­elty of their thinking, they have been spouting the same rubbish for dec­ades. Except in the days of Marxism Today, the revisionist political jour­nal controlled by the Eurocommunist faction of the ‘official’ CPGB, there was some debate about the economic changes driving the shift in the pre­vailing political wind. Hall’s ‘The great moving right show’ (January 1979), proudly shown alongside Eric Hobsbawm’s ‘The forward march of labour halted?’ (September 1978) on the Marxism Today internet archive,⁵ lays out an analysis of a political cul­ture that was moving to the right and was rooted partly in changes in the economic base.

In this sense, they are obviously prescient; they did in fact trace some­thing like the modern neoliberal con­sensus right at the beginning of that era. The analysis presented by Hall is heterogeneous, locating failures in con­tradictions within social democracy, the instability and contradictory com­position of classes - he only mentions the economic underpinnings of this in passing. Thatcherism was a response to Britain’s economic situation after the post-war boom began to falter in the 60s, which meant that the corporat­ist political settlement with the unions and social democracy could no longer be afforded if profitability was to be maintained.

What is significant is that at this early point Hall identifies two respons­es to the new environment, which he presents as “revolutionary optimism” in opposition to “revolutionary pessi­mism”. The latter is seen as the hard left continuing to fight the class strug­gle in the same way as before, so as not to demoralise the scattered forces of the left. The former, on the other hand, asserts the need to acclimatise to the new conditions, which are seen as permanent, and developing new, more ‘appropriate’ ways of intervening, as opposed to ‘whistling in the dark’.

A similar debate continues today in the distinction between, for in­stance, the Cliffite response to the ‘downturn’ - Leninists being forced to retreat into a bureaucratic-centralist organisation, so they can be ready to emerge when a new upturn arrives; and, on the other side, a group like Socialist Resistance, which sees itself as opening up to embrace new forces in a broad party. This obviously means watering down Marxism quite a bit. Previously, of course, that distinction was manifested in the divide between the Stalinist ‘tankies’, who stood by the ‘socialist camp’, regardless of the realities behind the ‘iron curtain’, and the Euros, who welcomed what they saw as the decomposition of the economic and class underpinnings of traditional Marxism.

The communist vision of the Soviet defencists became more and more hollowed out, as they paid the price for hitching their political fortunes to the dying bureaucratic regime in Moscow. The Euros, for their part, took the 1930s popular front model to the logical extreme, attempting to organise the broadest possible alliance against the 1980s new right.

Prominent Eurocommunist Mark Perryman takes great pride in pointing out his own enthusiasm for the popular front model, as he sells his T-shirts: “We certainly don’t disguise our ideals and the causes we support, but in true popular frontist style we don’t make sharing these with us as a condition of purchase either.”⁶

For Hall and his followers by 1990, the old “bone of contention”⁷ on the left - reform or revolution - was deci­sively settled in favour of reform, but at the same time he held out the pos­sibility of a “revolutionary reformism” based on expanding forms of pluralis­tic democracy. For him any leftwing agenda would have to be based on a mixed economy.

Following the liquidation of the ‘of­ficial’ CPGB by the Eurocommunist-dominated leadership in 1991 and the collapse of its Euro successor, Democratic Left, a few years later, many went on to find a home within New Labour and the ‘flexibility’ of Blairism. As for Perryman, he saw his own political trajectory as part of the original ‘third way’, with new hori­zontalist forms of organisation break­ing free of the limits of hierarchical institutions based on ‘strong power’, Leninism and Labourism.⁸

Decomposition

You might be forgiven for having thought this movement was dead af­ter its utter failure to make any kind of dent in the 90s except to cheer-lead the collapse of ‘real existing’ Marxism in Britain and abroad. Campaigns such as Stop the War Coalition and the Respect ‘unity coalition’ were dominated by the Socialist Workers Party, which still likes to peddle a bit of revolutionary rhetoric when it suits. But though that is like garlic to vampires for Eurocommunists StWC and Respect can be seen as a kind of vindication of their ideas.

After all, just as the likes of Hall, Campbell and Perryman were a prod­uct of the decay of Stalinism in Britain in the 1980s, the delayed but now present decay of Trotskyism is creat­ing something like it again in a new form. A new dichotomy has emerged between bureaucratic centrists in the decaying organisations and spin-offs such as Permanent Revolution, the Anti-Capitalist Initiative, International Socialist Network and so on. In the forefront of this march into oblivion is the Fourth Internationalist Socialist Resistance and its project of ‘recom­position’. This liquidationist milieu makes up an important component of Left Unity, which appears as a re­sult to be much less viable even than Respect.

This manifests itself in bizarre re­ports of branch meetings, as described by Perryman in Lewes, for instance. They seem more like a form of group therapy, in which members avoid talk­ing about anything political, have no objectives, minimum or maximum, and take part in no local activity, but instead focus on how the left has failed them in the past. The fetishisation of ‘not knowing the outcome’, treating politics purely as an open-ended ‘pro­cess’, is particularly prevalent in the ACI and ISN as well, where it is used as a means of preventing the left with­in them getting their act together and nailing down the political basis for the organisation - that would make them unpalatable to Socialist Resistance, after all.

This view of politics has become ‘hegemonic’ on the left, as evidenced by the Left Unity conference this weekend, where Tom Walker, a for­mer Socialist Worker journalist, for in­stance, passionately spoke of the need to organise in the same party with eve­ryone from anarchists to reformists - a sentiment which is the heir of the old popular-frontist slogan, “From bish­ops to brickies”.⁹ Even the popularity of the word ‘hegemony’ itself evokes the Gramscian terminology sprayed through the pages of Marxism Today.

For instance, when asked by a re­porter from a student newspaper about the strategy behind Left Unity, ‘Matt’ stated “If we can keep it quite open, then we can create a hegemonic space in which people are being politicised and start to come to their own conclu­sions, as opposed to the old Trotskyist parties” (my emphasis).¹⁰ Quite how an empty space is supposed to be ‘hegemonic’ is unclear, but this em­phasises the sense of the organisation as a vessel in which open-ended dis­course, in the new therapeutic mould of politics, can overturn the prevailing capitalist ideology as ‘common sense’.

This politics of ‘empty space’ is as­serted as agreement, in order to create agreement, exactly in the Kilburn for­mula, and that of mainstream politics. Democracy as sharp debate between competing ideas is now ‘divisive’ and to be tolerated at best, but to be gotten out of the way as quickly as possible. Bianca Todd’s intervention from the floor at the Left Unity conference was instructive, as apparently the majority would vote for the Left Party Platform “because you just know it makes sense”. But the idea that this deraci­nated mumbo-jumbo is the answer to neoliberalism is strange. Doesn’t this replicate capitalist ‘common sense’?

Clearly, despite the founding of LU, the left is in a lot of trouble, con­tinuing to disintegrate ideologically, as its theoretical and political legacy is thrown overboard like ballast from a sinking hot air balloon - except that now we have practically run out of ballast. But the truly radical move today must be in the struggle to re­member our history as a movement, in opposition to the amnesiac dementia creeping into the left - the compul­sion now being to repeat over and over the practices of reformism, Labourism and popular frontism under the guise of supposedly new thinking.

The establishment of the CPGB in 1920 on a revolutionary programme was, despite its subsequent political degeneration, the highest political achievement of the British working class. Its liquidation resulted from a shabby, corrupt manoeuvre on the part of bankrupt elements, whose followers are today attempting to repeat those manoeuvres on a much lower level.

Notes

1 . S Hall and A O’Shea, ‘Common-sense neo­liberalism’, p15: www.lwbooks.co.uk/journals/ soundings/pdfs/Manifesto_commonsense_neolib­eralism.pdf.

2. D Massey, ‘Vocabularies of the economy’, p9: www.lwbooks.co.uk/journals/soundings/pdfs/Vo­cabularies%20of%20the%20economy.pdf.

3. Ibid p10.

4. S Hall and A O’Shea, ‘Common-sense neo­liberalism’, p1: www.lwbooks.co.uk/journals/ soundings/pdfs/Manifesto_commonsense_neolib­eralism.pdf.

5. www.amielandmelburn.org.uk/collections/mt/ index_frame.htm.

6. M Perryman After the party: www.lwbooks.co.uk/books/extracts/AftertheParty_Perryman.pdf.

7. ‘Coming up for air’ Marxism Today March 1990: www.amielandmelburn.org.uk/collections/ mt/pdf/90_03_22.pdf.

8. A Coddington and M Perryman, ‘A deeper sense of politics’, in The moderniser’s dilemma London 1998.

9. See ‘Open the fight against liquidationism on all fronts’ The Leninist August 1983.

10. www.epigram.org.uk/features/item/1923-left-unity-it-s-do-or-die-for-the-left.