Selected Political Writings

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Selected Political Writings
The Great Moving Right Show
and Other Essays

Stuart Hall

Edited by Sally Davison, David Featherstone,

Michael Rustin and Bill Schwarz

Duke University Press

Durham 2017
Published in the United States by Duke University Press, 2017
Published in Great Britain by Lawrence and Wishart Limited, 2017
All essays © Stuart Hall estate
Introduction and Afterword © the editors
Printed in the United States on acid-free paper
Cover designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hall, Stuart, 1932–2014, author. | Davison, Sally, editor. |
Featherstone, David, 1974– editor. | Rustin, Michael, editor. |
Schwarz, Bill, 1951– editor. | Hall, Stuart, 1932–2014. Works.
Selections. 2016.
Title: Selected political writings : The great moving right show and
other essays / Stuart Hall ; edited by Sally Davison, David Featherstone,
Michael Rustin and Bill Schwarz.
Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2017. | Series: Stuart Hall,
selected writings | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers:
LCCN 2016050276 (print) | LCCN 2016051400 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780822363866 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 9780822369066 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN 9780822372943 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Political sociology. | Political science.
Classification: LCC JA76 .H345 2017 (print) | LCC JA76 (ebook) |
DDC 320.94109/045—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016050276

Cover art: Stuart Hall speaking at a Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament

(CND) demonstration, Trafalgar Square, 1958. Photographer unknown.
 Contents

Introduction
Sally Davison, David Featherstone and Bill Schwarz 1
Note on texts 16

Part 1: The New Left and after

1. The new Conservatism and the old 18
1957
2. A sense of classlessness 28
1958
3. The supply of demand 47
1960
4. The Cuban crisis: trial-run or steps towards peace? 70
1963
5. Political commitment 85
1966
6. A world at one with itself 107
1970
7. The first New Left: life and times 117
1990

Part 2: Thatcherism
8. Racism and reaction 142
1978
9. 1970: Birth of the law and order society 158
1978
10. The great moving right show 172
1979

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11. The ‘Little Caesars’ of social democracy 187
1981
12. The empire strikes back 200
1982
13. The crisis of Labourism 207
1984
14. The state: socialism’s old caretaker 223
1984
15. Blue election, election blues 238
1987
16. The meaning of new times 248
1989
17. And not a shot fired: the end of Thatcherism? 266
1991
18. Our mongrel selves 275
1992

Part 3: Neoliberalism
19. The great moving nowhere show 283
1998
20. New Labour’s double-shuffle 301
2003
21. The neoliberal revolution 317
2011

Af terword Michael Rustin 336

Notes on historical figures 354
Index 361
 INTRODUCTION:

Redefi ning the political

he political essay has a long and honourable history: indeed

T the essay as a literary form is peculiarly suited to politics. The
essay is for-the-moment, composed to address a particular historical
configuration, capturing emergent histories as they come into sight.
Or, as Stuart Hall was fond of conceiving of his own essays, they are
interventions, often with foes to be dispatched to the left and to the
right. The political essay is seldom dispassionate. The essay-form is
not an innocent medium. It is combative, working to organise intel-
lectually its constituency of readers.
Th is is certainly true of the political essays in this collection.
But the essay form was also ideally suited to Hall’s more theoretical
preoccupations, since one of his abiding concerns was to tease out
the complex contours of significant political moments and to get a
sense of what was shaping them. In most of the essays gathered here
we can see him trying to identify the nature of the specific shifts
and currents that have coalesced into the moment he is analysing.
Th is is a clearly discernible characteristic of even his earliest essays,
but, as we outline below, Hall later theorised this way of writing
as ‘conjunctural’ analysis. The wide range of elements he draws on
in his writing is central to Hall’s unique contribution as a political
theorist.
Hall’s essays also embody a more philosophical or abstract purpose,
which nevertheless remains focused on real-world concerns: they
continually return to the question of what politics is and where it
happens. This abstract question is worked into the interstices of his
concrete political analyses. His work thus represents a striking refusal
of the prevailing codifications of what politics entails and where it is
to be located; his appropriation of Gramsci’s conception of hegemony
enlarged the conception of what constitutes class politics;1 and he also
contended that emergent political forces did not always look ‘political’

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2 selected politicaL WRITINGS

in the orthodox manner. They might not traverse the landscape of

conventional politics at all. Think of the dynamics of feminism, for
example, with its insistence on the personal as political. From such a
viewpoint the domain of what counts as ‘politics’ expands radically.
It has been suggested that Hall could be regarded as a Gramscian
before he had ever read Gramsci. Many elements of what we think
of as a Gramscian approach are present in some form in his work
before his encounter with Gramsci ever took place: Hall wrote on the
educative functions of the state (on ‘moral and intellectual leadership’);
on the complexity of the networks that bind political society to civil
society; on the material force of ‘philosophies’ (of various sorts) on
the political stage, and on the embodiment of specific ideologies in
the disparate figures of the intellectual (again of various sorts); on the
political conception of the idea of the people as a necessarily contingent
formation; and on his methodological commitment to a politics of the
‘concrete’. It is clear, though, that when – belatedly – Gramsci arrived,
he was to prove a revelation.

Gramsci and conjunctural analysis

Hall’s encounter with Gramsci did much to crystallise his notion

of conjunctural analysis. The promise of such an approach lay in its
potential for identifying key elements in the movement of political
forces, and for isolating the properties of emergent social forms. This
engagement with the dynamics of particular conjunctures was strik-
ingly apparent in his writing in Policing the Crisis and ‘The great
moving right show’. In these texts he was seeking to identify the forces
that were driving the unravelling of the social democratic settlement
and its replacement by a populist authoritarianism.2 Hall’s under-
standing of an emerging conjuncture was central to his analysis of the
complexities of a political moment, which he saw as composed of, and
constituted by, the complex interaction of condensed elements from
competing historical times.
Hall arrived conceptually at the idea of conjuncture through
Louis Althusser’s 1962 essay ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’,
which itself drew on Lenin and Gramsci.3 Althusser’s reading of
Lenin alerted Hall to the theoretical usefulness of apprehending
the displacements that lie at the heart of politics. It was Lenin’s

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 INTRODUCTION 3

contention that the revolutionary situation in Russia had occurred

not because the contending forces fell neatly into two opposing
camps, in which the underlying class interests, immediately and
transparently, determined the domain of politics. On the contrary,
the revolutionary moment had only come about, in Lenin’s
mesmerising formulation because:

as a result of an extremely unique historical situation, absolutely

dissimilar currents, absolutely heterogeneous class interests, absolutely
contrary political and social strivings have merged, and in a strik-
ingly ‘harmonious’ manner.4

Althusser, in his interpretation of this passage, named such a conjunc-

tural situation as ‘overdetermined’. Time and again Hall returned to
Lenin’s words and to Althusser’s concept.
Gramsci saw the political as a live, decentred, disorderly domain,
composed of myths and passions as much as of rational doctrines. For
him, Machiavelli’s gift was his ability to craft a formal philosophy
that could grasp these dimensions of political reality. According to
Gramsci, Machiavelli’s philosophy ‘gives political passions a more
concrete form’. Neither formally systematised nor made up of ‘pedantic
classification’, it sees politics as an arena for the making of a ‘concrete
phantasy’.5 To think in these terms adds a further layer of meaning
to the idea of ‘the concrete’, for it alerts us to the relations between
politics and the subjective forces of human passion. It endeavours to
hold together, in a single moment, the objective and the subjective
in their mutual constitution of ‘the political’.6 This, too, marked a
necessary component of conjunctural analysis.
Hall was convinced that any social analysis of value would recognise
the centrality of difference in the making of social life. This is what
underlies the deconstructive drive in his political essays. In order to grasp
the endless movements of difference in the social world, the overarching
meta-theories that have been devised to bring societies within the orbit of
human thought need themselves to be deconstructed, to ensure that they
do not also – in the very instant that they set out to explain the world –
override and obliterate difference. A principle of deconstructive thought,
for Hall, was precisely the need to recognise difference and to provide
difference with the analytical weight it requires. In this sense Lenin’s
formulations cited above – ‘absolutely dissimilar currents, absolutely

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heterogeneous class interests, absolutely contrary political and social

strivings’ – are of the greatest significance.
Yet in order to think politically there is an inevitable moment when
the practice of deconstruction has to be halted, at least temporarily.
This was not, for Hall, a matter of formal logic, or of a paramount
conceptual consistency. It was, rather, the moment when politics
intruded onto the terrain of theory, driven by the need to mobilise
abstraction in order to grasp the unpredictabilities of the historical
world. For Hall politics was never only a question of contingency or
of a chaos of spiralling indeterminacy. Emergent historical forces,
even when radically unpredictable, were never without their social
determinations. Indeed they gave them shape, and enabled them to
enter the historical stage. It was in this sense that Hall never finally
vacated the theoretical terrain of Marxism.
It was through Gramsci that Hall was able to alight upon this theo-
retical movement that enables an understanding (and deconstruction)
of the ways in which contrary social forces could, through political
practice, ‘merge’. Conjuncture provided a methodological means to
hold deconstruction at bay. (In a different dimension of his theoretical
vocabulary, articulation plays this same role.) Deconstruction is
intrinsic to the work of theory, but politics has to pause and inquire
how the ‘absolutely dissimilar’ can be brought into a provisional, prac-
tical unity.7

Combating orthodoxy

From the 1950s onwards Hall’s work had broadly two orthodoxies in
his sights, and they remained with him, in varying forms, throughout
his life.
The first masqueraded – and still masquerades – as no orthodoxy
at all: it presents itself, sotto voce, as the reasonable, sensible
acknowledgement of how in Britain politics just is. This is a mentality
disciplined by the institutional horizons of Westminster, as if these
provide all that needs to be known about how politics operates.
Such sentiments can be heard from representatives of the political
parties; from accredited figures in the academy; and, often in most
concentrated form, in the utterances of the media commentators.
For Hall the fundamental fault-line was between a politics that

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 INTRODUCTION 5

was constrained by the norms of Westminster and one capable

of embracing the breadth and complexities of human life as it was
lived day by day. The dominating concern was with the deeper forms
and presuppositions of politics rather than its institutional content;
with how the field of politics was to operate rather than with the
instrumental objectives enshrined in the party manifestos; with
ensuring that the relation between state and citizen was perpetually
regarded as a contingent, open-ended question, rather than focused on
the choices dictated by the constitutional-electoral system – placing
your cross against candidate X or Y. This is not to say that it did not
matter to Hall who voted for whom. It did of course. But the problem
that continually remained in the foreground of his field of political
vision was the broader question of the terms on which the relations
between people and state were organised.
The second orthodoxy Hall held in his sights was a redundant and
lost version of Marxism. In Britain in the years before 1956 this cut
deeper in political life than is, in our own times, easily recognised.
There were always dazzlingly talented intellectuals working inside
the political world of Marxism, and it is these thinkers that register
most readily in the collective memory. But the reflexes of a mechanical
orthodoxy ran deep in some sections of the pre-1956 left. From the
very beginning Hall understood his encounters with Marxism to be
conducted in the slipstream of a necessary but unprogrammed, and yet-
to-be worked out, revisionism: in a bid, in other words, to rejuvenate
Marxism in order that it could work for the historical imperatives of
the mid-twentieth century. 1956 brought Khrushchev’s denunciations
of Stalinism, followed by the Soviet invasion of Hungary. These events
generated a momentous fracture in the international Communist
movement and there followed substantial collateral damage for the
authority of official, state-sanctioned Marxisms. From this point
on Hall located himself historically as of the political generation of
’56: as a principled, self-styled, unapologetic revisionist. In this story
Marxism had a constant if uneasy role to play, as it continued to do
until the end of his life. Hall’s engagement with politics cannot be
fathomed without acknowledging this long presence of Marxism in
his thought.8
But such affiliations proved anything but straightforward. As he was
later to explain, he found himself ‘dragged backwards into Marxism,
against the tanks in Budapest’.9 He embraced a (contrary) version of

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6 selected politicaL WRITINGS

Marxism just as the dominant, most conspicuously visible codifications

were being universally vilified – properly so – for transmogrifying into
a vehicle for the justification of Soviet colonialism. So, to imagine
himself as having been ‘dragged backwards into Marxism’ depended
on a vision of history in which political events were formed by their own
– chaotic, unpredictable, asymmetrical, multiple – determinations.
Abstract categorisations, such as the relations of production, the class
struggle, the falling rate of profit, while they might be potentially
appropriate conceptual tools, could not in themselves begin to explain
the complex, contradictory and contingent terrain of politics, which
was always the consequence of many determinations.
The limitations of both the forms of orthodoxy outlined above were
apparent in their response to Hall’s reading of Margaret Thatcher’s
Conservatism: the leading commentators of the day derided the
thought that Thatcherism was in the business of pursuing an ideological
or cultural programme, with its own underlying philosophies, let
alone that it could be construed as a historic bid for hegemony. It
was therefore revealing that in the run of obituaries which followed
Hall’s death in 2014 such views had silently disappeared from the
media landscape. The notion that there had once existed a Thatcherite
project, driven by a new generation of Tory philosophes, had emerged
– by default – as uncontroversial. It had become, belatedly, the new
common sense.

An expanded view of politics

This collection reflects Hall’s engagement with shifting political

conjunctures over a long period of time, from the ‘First New Left’ of
the post-1956 period to the contemporary epoch of the ascendancy
and ‘crisis’ of the neoliberal project. The essays collected here give a
sense of the extraordinary range of political interventions made by
Hall, but also point to some of the important continuities in his work
– in analytical approach, political commitment, sensibility and tone.
His attention to diverse articulations of the political is a central
feature of these essays. But committing himself to an expanded
idea of what politics comprises did not mean that he supposed that
‘everything is politics’, always and in perpetuity. This would be to
signal an unwarranted inflation of the domain, whereby any social

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 INTRODUCTION 7

act could be deemed ‘political’, allowing for the invocation of too

easy an alibi for radical political activity. It is not that everything
always is politics. The ground keeps shifting. That is the point. The
crucial issue is that any site in the social formation, in any particular
moment, can become the condensation of political antagonisms; the
site of evolving, potential political forces; and the terrain on which
political allegiances are made or unmade. How this occurs, or where
the terrain is to be located, is a contingent matter that no formal
theory of politics can stipulate or anticipate. In this sense, the place
of politics is frequently displaced, meaning that what is significant
politically may not inhabit, or only partially inhabit, the institutional
arrangements of formal politics.
It is of course apparent, as Michael Rustin points out in his
afterword to this collection, that if any social practice, in any sphere of
social life, has the potential for becoming the site for political rupture,
to segregate a portion of Hall’s writings under the rubric ‘political’
may at first sight seem a perilous endeavour. Our aim, however, is
to showcase the richness and diversity of Hall’s articulations of the
political in his interventions on key issues within the public arena
of politics – and his constant endeavours to expand what we might
think of as belonging in this arena.10 This means that the writings
collected here are primarily rooted in engagements with British
political contexts, developments and relations, but, as with the work
of other major intellectuals, for example Gramsci’s writings on Italy,
they speak to broader political issues and problematics. They were
intended as, and should be read as, part of an ongoing intellectual
endeavour to expand our notions of what constitutes the political, in
which studying a specific context produces insights that in turn feed
back into new forms of theoretical understanding.
Hall’s work was characterised by an ever increasing attention to
the displacements which operated in the field of politics. A reading of
politics emerged in which the ‘subjects’ addressed by political forces
were seen as operating through an unsteady amalgam of psychic
investments, which conventional politics was unsuited to explain. This
is an interpretation which locates the displaced elements of political
life at the centre of things. This approach is perhaps most directly
expressed in this collection by a 1966 essay on ‘Political commitment’,
which is a less well-known essay and works at a relatively higher level
of abstraction than the other articles collected here. It is in this essay

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8 selected politicaL WRITINGS

that Hall was most explicit in his critique of the reduction of politics
to its technological and institutional practices and to its attendant
discursive forms: the absolutism of opinion polls, for example, or of
the more elaborate intellectual apparatus of psephology. This is what
he had in mind when he invoked politics ‘in the narrow sense’.
As he shows in an extraordinarily prescient aside, in 1960s Britain
the privatisation of politics was already underway and could be named
as such. Connected to this was his apprehension that a peculiar quality
of the established political system was its capacity to depoliticize politics
itself, an argument which has striking resonances with contemporary
debates about ‘post-politics’. Hall writes of a constitutional arrangement
which sought to elevate, in place of ‘the people’, an electoral calculus in
which ‘the electorate’, as a malleable and passive force, subsumed the
forces of the unruly, unpredictable multitude.
In order to counter and to recast such conceptions of politics Hall
was persuaded that the relations of political representation should
be understood as ‘active and transformative’. They were of the first
importance. For significant structural change to occur, mass popular
support was the precondition. ‘The people’ needed to be mobilised.
‘Political consciousness’, wrote Hall, ‘is closely linked with the sense
which a society makes of its own life, actions, experiences, history:
with social consciousness, and with the dominant structure of feeling
and attitude which prevails at any particular time.’ The dynamic by
which latent human needs were expressed in political terms had to
be brought out into the open and integrated in the daily practices of
political struggle.
Hall indicates two instances from his own experience when such
moments of ‘political creativity’ had been realised: the launch of the
New Left in 1956 and – connected but distinct – the early years of
the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). Underwriting each
was not only the making of a new radicalism, but the expansion of the
domain of politics: of what counts as ‘politics’. As Hall writes in his
reflections on ‘The First New Left’ (the only non-contemporaneous
piece in this collection), ‘the New Left’ itself had a project to broaden
the politics of CND: ‘to “educate”, in Gramsci’s sense, the moral
impulse which brought most people to the peace movement into a
wider politics of the left’.
A distinctive element in Hall’s political disposition was his
commitment to a radical populism. This was a practice informed by,

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 INTRODUCTION 9

but not reducible to, class politics. It is a way of imagining politics

that is instinctively suspicious of the imperatives of class reductionism,
in which every dimension of political life was perceived through the
exclusive optic of class.11 Thinking in terms of populism – in terms of
the people rather than in terms of a class – gave scope for the emergence
of a broader, more expansive conception of the range of social groups
which could act as agents for democratic change.
It was an unwelcome ruse of history that, from Hall’s view, in the
1970s and 1980s it was the Thatcherites who moved most confidently
onto the terrain of ‘the popular’ and actively sought to create a popular
dimension to the pre-existing norms of constitutional politics.
This is Hall reflecting on the populist elements of Thatcherism, in
‘The empire strikes back’ (see p203):

By ‘populism’ I mean something more than the ability to secure

electoral support for a political programme, a quality all politicians
in formal democracies must possess. I mean the project, central to
the politics of Thatcherism, to ground neo-liberal policies directly in
an appeal to ‘the people’; to root them in the essentialist categories
of commonsense experience and practical moralism – and thus to
construct, not simply awaken, classes, groups and interests into a
particular definition of ‘the people’.

The passage makes explicit Hall’s deepening allegiance to a discursive

understanding of political struggle. It presupposes that on the political
terrain ‘the people’ – or indeed, the working class, or women, or any
number of such social groupings – has no prescribed collective identity,
ready and waiting to be summoned into action. ‘The people’ is not
an already-existing, integral and unified social entity. It is a discursive
construct, coming into being in the process of political activity itself.12
‘The political’, as a noun, increasingly came to assume a greater
analytical presence for Hall. The term conveyed the expansive arena
of political practice, as opposed to a narrow focus on the dominant
institutions of political society. ‘The political’ is the arena where
collective identifications are made, or not; where they accrue political
leverage, or not; where political forces are made and unmade. The
discursive work of politics is to discover a means by which such shared
identifications can come into conscious political life, and sustain social
agents in embarking upon the pursuit of the historic tasks which have

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befallen them. Or, as Hall has it, the strategic objective of politics is
not to ‘awaken’ social actors, as if they are dormant and only awaiting
the summons from on high, but to create the contexts in which they
can discursively ‘construct’ themselves as a collective political force – in
which they can become political agents of their own making. In Hall’s
reading this long and complex process, often working at some remove
from the conventional terrains of political life, is how politics happens.
Hall saw the time of CND’s first surge of radicalism, from 1958
to 1964, as one such significant point of political rupture. In his own
political life there occurred a further two movements that required
a wholesale reconsideration of how politics was constituted. These
were the mobilisations which exploded around feminism, and sexual
politics more generally, and around ‘race’.
Hall frequently despaired of mainstream politics: he was puzzled
by the depth of the insulation of the bulk of professional politicians,
even those of radical temperaments, from what was new or emergent
in British life. What was especially striking for him was the profound
incomprehension of the nation’s leaders at what was happening before
their very eyes in terms of sexual and black politics from the late
1960s onwards. For Hall, however, the speed with which the inherited
practices of everyday life were in the process of being turned inside
out, and exposed to incessant scrutiny, was something to applaud,
take solace from, and marvel at.
The seriousness of these interventions as politics derived in part
from their insistence that difficult, exacting questions – uncomfortable
questions about the deepest dynamics of one’s own selfhood – should
be placed on the political agenda.
We publish here the lecture which took for its title ‘Racism and
reaction’, and we include also an extract from Policing the Crisis, that
extraordinary account of the deepening reflexes of authoritarianism
which from the 1970s came to infiltrate both political and civil
society.13 What remains remarkable about both these texts is the degree
to which ‘race’ works as the decisive explanatory concept that gives
form and meaning to Hall’s readings of authoritarian populism and
the exceptional state. Without Policing the Crisis there could have been
no analysis of Thatcherism in ‘The great moving right show’. There
was virtually no other figure at the time who was centrally reading the
crisis of the British state, in its most general manifestations, through
the lens of ‘race’. It is instructive to remember that Policing the Crisis

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 INTRODUCTION 11

began life in the backstreets of Handsworth in Birmingham, a place

radically removed from the established locales of British political
business. It is in this sense a vindication of the decision to read the
transformations in the state at an angle and at some distance from the
dominant institutions where power was most concentrated.

Mapping the shifts

Hall’s ‘The great moving right show’, which develops the arguments
about authoritarian populism first made in Policing the Crisis, stands
as a model of conjunctural analysis. It was an interpretation of the
making of the new conjuncture as it was happening. That this was
so underwrites the degree of uncertainty which occurs at one point
in the essay. ‘There is still some debate’, he noted, ‘as to whether
[Thatcherism] is likely to be short-lived or long-term, a movement of
the surface or something more deeply lodged in the body politic’. At
the start of 1979 he couldn’t be sure. By the time he died, in 2014, he
was in a position to see more clearly the deeper reach of the historical
movements. By then it was apparent that Thatcherism had marked the
first stirrings of something larger, and more deeply globalised, than
had been visible at the end of the 1970s. In retrospect it could be seen
as signalling the making of a new political order which was to have
epochal consequences. In it were the lineaments of what can now be
named as the neoliberal revolution. It is this globalised order which
inescapably defines our own historical present.
The essays from the 1980s are unflinching in their assessment of the
Thatcherite facility for moulding popular conceptions of politics and
common sense, but they are equally as tough-minded in their engage-
ment with the deficits of left strategy. Essays such as ‘The crisis of
Labourism’, for example, reflect on the longstanding limitations of the
Labour Party’s conception of politics. Hall argues, for example, that
Neil Kinnock, the UK Labour Party’s leader from 1983 to 1992, had
‘no feel for the language and concerns of the new social movements’,
and that was dangerous for the party. The failure of the Labour leader-
ship during the 1984-85 miners’ strike to generalise at the national
level the issues of class that the party claimed to represent significantly
contributed to the failure of the strike, and doomed it ‘to be fought
and lost as an old rather than as a new form of politics’.

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12 selected politicaL WRITINGS

This was ‘doubly unbearable’ because, in ‘the solidarity it displayed,

the gigantic levels of support it engendered, the unparalleled
involvement of the women in the mining communities, the feminist
presence in the strike [and] the breaking down of different social
interests which it presaged’, the miners’ strike ‘was instinctually
with the politics of the new’. Hall lamented Labour’s failure to adopt
the strategy of a ‘war of position’ – the struggle ‘for leadership and
mastery over a whole number of different fronts in the course of
making itself the focal point of popular aspirations, the leading
popular political force’.
The expansive imagination of the left envisioned by Hall here
should caution against a reading of Hall’s writings as in any sense
responsible for the way his insights were taken up by New Labour and
Blairism.14 The New Times project, as it was elaborated by Hall and
other colleagues at Marxism Today, sought to engage with a terrain
that had been changed by the fundamental political, economic and
cultural restructuring of the 1980s, including Hall’s essay on ‘The
meaning of new times’. In this the project was undeniably influential
on New Labour trajectory. But Hall himself drew very different
conclusions from this analysis. He was committed to a ‘modernising’
project for the Labour Party and the wider left, but on very different
terms from those adopted by Blair and New Labour.
In ‘The state: socialism’s old caretaker’, he sees how Ken Livingstone’s
Greater London Council (GLC) is ‘so exciting, so prefigurative for
the left’: ‘one begins to see here and there a glimmer of a local state
transforming the ways in which it “represents” society politically;
being more dependent on the passage of power into the state from
constituencies outside it than on monopolising power’. He welcomed
this pluralism – a phenomenon that was very different from the party
management of New Labour – and hoped that it would become a
permanent feature of the socialist scene. But, as Doreen Massey recalls,
the ‘sneering’ attitude towards this left project, which was ‘feminist,
anti-racist and anti-homophobic as well as challenging to capital’,
came as much from traditional elements within the Parliamentary
Labour Party as from the Conservatives.15
One of Hall’s enduring contributions was his engagement with
the political articulations of multiculturalism(s). Rather than seeing
multiculturalism as a state strategy, operating from above, he adopted
a more open understanding of how multiculturalism worked, and

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 INTRODUCTION 13

how it was reconfiguring political and social relations. But he was also
keenly aware of political efforts to mobilise opposition to pluralism
and difference. As he argues in ‘Our mongrel selves’: ‘In the face of the
proliferation of cultural difference, and the multi-ethnic character of
the new Britain, and threatened on the other side by … an emerging
European identity, we have seen over the past decade a particularly
defensive, closed and exclusive definition of “Englishness” being
advanced as a way of warding off or refusing to live with difference’. He
engaged consistently with such exclusivism and later what he termed
the ‘multi-cultural drift’ that characterised New Labour.16
Hall’s antipathy to Blairism and the New Labour project is made
clear in the final essays collected here. ‘The great moving nowhere
show’, published in 1998, argued that the Blair project was still
‘essentially framed by and moving on terrain defined by Thatcherism’.
As Michael Rustin notes in his afterword here, Hall regarded the
1997 election victory for Labour as a huge missed opportunity, and
was profoundly critical of the intellectual underpinning of the Blair
project, especially its notion of the ‘Third Way’, which he saw as ‘hot
on the responsibilities of individuals’, while ‘those of business are
passed over with a slippery evasiveness’.
The final two essays in the collection come from Soundings, the
journal which Hall co-founded with Doreen Massey and Michael
Rustin in 1995, with the aim of continuing the analysis and
questioning of left politics that had been associated with Marxism
Today. Its positioning statement, ‘Uncomfortable times’, made clear
that the project sought to continue the expansive understanding of
the political that had shaped Hall’s work; it argued that ‘change can
be achieved in many social spaces besides that which is normally
designated as political’.17
‘New Labour’s double shuffle’ takes as its problematic the failure of
New Labour to offer a radical alternative to Thatcherism despite the
huge electoral mandate it had received in 1997. Hall traces the way
that New Labour had adapted to rather than challenged the neoliberal
terrain, as well as analysing the significant and distinctive terms on
which it made this adaption. ‘The neoliberal revolution’ offers an
assessment of the 2010-15 Coalition project, and the dynamics of the
post financial crisis conjuncture more generally, and engages with
the mutations and articulations of neoliberalism as they had been
negotiated and refracted through political debate. Hall contended

13
14 selected politicaL WRITINGS

that this was ‘arguably the best prepared, most wide-ranging, radical
and ambitious of the three regimes which since the 1970s have been
maturing the neoliberal project’. He laments neoliberalism’s ability to
reproduce itself in the wake of the 2008 crisis, noting that ‘in terms of
laying foundations and staging the future on favourable ground, the
neoliberal project is several stages further on’.
These essays represent the final instalments of Hall’s charting of the
shifting formations of neoliberalism, to be read alongside the Soundings
Kilburn Manifesto project, which he co-edited and contributed to,
though he died before it was completed.18 The way this Manifesto
has inspired and engaged new audiences demonstrates the continued
relevance of the style of political engagement and analysis that Hall
developed.
***
The publisher and editors are grateful to the estate of Stuart Hall for
permission to republish the essays contained here. We would like to
thank for Nick Beech for allowing us to consult his invaluable biblio-
graphy of Stuart Hall’s writings. We are particularly grateful to
Catherine Hall.
Sally Davison, David Featherstone and Bill Schwarz

Notes

1. Gramsci’s work was very important to Hall. For an introduction to

Gramsci’s work, including the concept of hegemony, see Roger Simon,
Gramsci’s Political Thought: An Introduction, third edition, Lawrence &
Wishart 2015.
2. See in particular chapter 9 in this book, ‘1970: Birth of the law and order
society’, which is an extract from Hall et al, Policing the Crisis: ‘Mugging’,
the State and Law and Order, Macmillan 1978; and chapter 10, ‘The great
moving right show’.
3. See Louis Althusser, ‘Contradiction and Over-determination’, in For
Marx, Penguin 1969. See also, in this book, pp257–8 in ‘The Meaning of
New Times’, and p346–7 in Afterword.
4. V.I. Lenin, ‘Letters from Afar’ in Lenin, Collected Works, Vol 23, Progress
Publishers 1964, p306.
5. Antonio Gramsci, Selections From the Prison Notebooks, Lawrence and
Wishart 1971, p126.

14
 INTRODUCTION 15

6. In his final labours Hall was much preoccupied with the question of how
the objective and the subjective played out within the domain of politics.
He returned to Freud and Foucault in order establish a degree of clarifica-
tion on the issue of subjectivity. For earlier formulations, see particularly
Stuart Hall, ‘Fantasy, Identity, Politics’, in Erica Carter, James Donald
and Judith Squires (eds), Cultural Remix. Theories of Politics and the
Popular, Lawrence and Wishart 1995. And a text crucial for him in these
matters was Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection,
Stanford University Press 1997.
7. We draw here from observations by Wendy Brown at a roundtable on
Stuart Hall at the Townsend Center for the Humanities at Berkeley in
March 2016.
8. See also Afterword, p342–7.
9. Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural Studies and its theoretical legacies’, in David
Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (eds), Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in
Cultural Studies, Routledge 1996, p264.
10. Other collections of Hall’s work are planned in the near future that are
organised around other themes.
11. Important for Hall here was the publication of Ernesto Laclau, Politics
and Ideology in Marxist Theory: Capitalism, Fascism, Populism, Verso 1977.
12. These sentences are based on an unpublished manuscript of Hall’s.
13. See chapter 9, ‘1970: Birth of the law and order society’, extracted from
Policing the Crisis, and chapter 8, ‘Racism and reaction’.
14. For Hall as critic of New Labour, see chapter 19, ‘The great moving
nowhere show’ and chapter 20, ‘New Labour’s double-shuffle’.
15. Doreen Massey, World City, Polity 2007.
16. Stuart Hall, ‘Conclusion: the multi-cultural question’, in B. Hesse (ed),
Un/settled Multiculturalisms: Diasporas, Entanglements, Transruptions,
Zed Books 2000, p231.
17. Stuart Hall, Doreen Massey and Michael Rustin, ‘Uncomfortable times’,
Soundings 1, November 1995.
18. Stuart Hall, Doreen Massey and Michael Rustin (ed), After neoliberalism:
The Kilburn manifesto, Lawrence & Wishart 2015 (download for free at
https://www.lwbooks.co.uk/book/after-neoliberalism-kilburn-manifesto).

15
 Note on the text

The language in some of the earlier essays has been occasionally

modernised, and most essays have been very lightly copy-edited. For
reasons of space, four essays have been also been slightly abridged –
this is indicated with an asterisk in the list below and on the title page.
A few explanatory footnotes have been added to give context, but
there is also information on historical figures on p354, which is linked
to the index. For the purposes of ease of reading, no distinction has
been made between references from the original texts and additional
notes for this book. Similarly, we have not added in ellipses to show
where abridgements have been made. Our aim has been to produce a
book that is easy to read rather than a heavily annotated scholarly
edition.

Places of first publication

‘The new Conservatism and the old’, Universities & Left Review, Vol 1,
No 1, spring 1957, pp21-4
‘A sense of classlessness’, Universities & Left Review, No 5, winter 1958,
26-32
‘The supply of demand’, in E.P. Thompson (ed), Out of Apathy: New
Left Books/Stevens and Sons, London 1960, 56-97*
‘The Cuban crisis: Trial-run or steps towards peace?’, War & Peace:
The CND Quarterly, Vol 1 No 1 January-March 1963, 2-16*
‘Political commitment’, in Lawrence Bright and Simon Clements
(eds), The Committed Church, Darton, Longman and Todd, London
1966, 3-25
‘A world at one with itself’, New Society, No 403, 1970, 1056-8
‘Racism and reaction: A public talk arranged by the British Sociological
Association and given in London on 2 May 1978’, in Five Views of

16
 note on the text 17

Multi-Racial Britain Commission for Racial Equality, London 1978,

23-35
‘1970: Selsdon man: birth of the law and order society’, 273-282,
from Chapter 9 of Policing the Crisis: ‘Mugging’, the State and Law and
Order, Macmillan, London 1978 (with Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson,
John Clarke and Brian Roberts)
‘The great moving right show’, Marxism Today, Vol 23 No 1 January
1979, 14-20
‘The “Little Caesars” of social democracy’, Marxism Today, Vol 25 No
4, April 1981, 11-15
‘The empire strikes back’, New Socialist, July-August 1982
‘The crisis of Labourism’, in James Curran (ed.), The Future of the Left,
Polity Press/Basil Blackwell, Cambridge/Oxford 1984 (text for this
book is based on revisions Hall made in 1988)*
‘The State: socialism’s old caretaker’, Marxism Today, Vol 28 No 11,
November 1984, 24-29
‘Blue election, election blues’, Marxism Today, Vol 38 No 7, July 1987,
30-35
‘The meaning of new times’, in Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques (eds)
New Times, Lawrence & Wishart, London 1989
‘The first New Left: life and times’, in Oxford University Socialist
Discussion Group (eds), Out of Apathy: Voices of the New Left Thirty
Years On, Verso 1989*
‘And not a shot fired: the end of Thatcherism?’, Marxism Today, Vol 42
No 12, December 1991, 10-15
‘Our mongrel selves’, New Statesman, June 1992 (based on the 1992
Raymond Williams Memorial Lecture)
‘The great moving nowhere show’, Marxism Today (special issue),
November-December 1998, 9-14
‘New Labour’s double-shuffle’, Soundings, No 24, summer 2003, 10-24
‘The neoliberal revolution’, Soundings, No 48, summer 2011, 9-28
* indicates essay has been abridged in this edition

17
 PART 1: THE NEW LEFT AND AFTER

The new Conservatism and the old

1957

he disorderly thrust of political events disturbs the sym-

T metry of political analysis. Before Suez, one would have been
tempted to speak of contemporary British Conservatism as a brand-
new thing.1 Fashioned by tough-minded political savants and
intellectuals for the new world that is post-welfare Britain – thriving,
lively, realistic, with its feet firmly planted in the political middle
ground, its fingers on the pulse of the expanding middle classes, its
winning smile on the faces of the ‘new men of power’ and future safe
behind the glass doors of the giant oligopolies – the ‘new Conservatism’
offered itself as a going concern with a gilt-edged future, a safe invest-
ment for the politically uncommitted. Forced to re-examine the ‘new’
Conservatism in the light of recent events, most socialists would be
tempted to say that it is merely the ‘old Toryism’ writ large. They
could certainly muster an impressive case. One would have to go back
to the heyday of imperialism – to plunge back several decades, behind
two world wars – to discover the sources of the assumptions which
appear to have governed the Conservative government’s policy in the
Middle East. If this is the ‘new Conservatism’ in action, it is not merely
‘old’ – it is prehistoric, dislocated from and insensitive to its environ-
ment, ranging abroad like a mastodon in Kensington Park.
But it seems closer to the truth to say that contemporary
Conservatism is an unstable blend of the new and the old. The
process by which it remained in business – the process of public theft
and private accommodation by which the new Tories snatched up
the welfare state and roped in the middle classes – is an unfinished
process, and precisely because it is unfinished, it has had a disastrous
effect on the party and its public philosophy. The scope of the party

18
 THE NEW CONSERVATISM AND THE OLD 19

has expanded, but its character has not radically altered. Within its
structure, conflicting tendencies are held together in a state of comparative
disequilibrium.
The left and the right of the party are not two distinct groups. Each
assuages its prejudices by selecting symbols in the other’s camp. The new
middle-class recruits to the party are the most aggressively nationalist: the
defenders of capital punishment promote defence cuts; the advocates of
bipartisanship, turn out, under pressure, to be militantly anti-American.
Mr Angus Maude, whose The English Middle Classes (with Roy Lewis)
is one of the classic defences of ‘enlightened’ Toryism, is discovered as
one of the ordering minds behind the Suez Group.2 The party is held
together, not by a coherent social philosophy, but by an unquestioning
allegiance to the most rootless archetypal images. It subscribes to a
confused rhetoric: ‘Britain’s prestige abroad’ is a phrase which covers
the Suez debacle; ‘the incentives of free enterprise’ appear compatible
with a widening dollar-gap and shrinking markets; a ‘property-owning
democracy’ supports the plea for ‘realistic rents’; our ‘responsibilities to
the Commonwealth’ covers our wilful disregard for the imperatives
of Commonwealth opinion. Party policy is consequently the pawn of
irrational forces and the prey to disguised and muted pressures. Behind
the facade of Butskellism and bipartisanship, the old prejudices wax, the
old interests play, the old neuroses govern.
‘Liberal conservatives’, who distrust Mr Butler’s ambivalences, like
to think that he was not necessary to them. This view is factually
incorrect. Between 1945 and 1954, it was the rhetoric and the persona
of Mr Butler which worked such wonders for the party. His success was
due in large measure to the skill with which he assessed the electoral
consequences of Labour’s ‘peaceful revolution’. But the party has, for
the moment at least, taken his measure: his ‘philosophy’ still provides
the party with its public front, but in a moment of crisis, it seeks its
leadership elsewhere.
It is necessary to summarise briefly the main trends in that ‘peaceful
revolution’, in order to comprehend the altering shape of latter-day
Conservatism, and the shifts in popular opinion which sustain it.
The period 1945 to 1951 can be regarded as the focal point in a
challenging new-style middle-class revolution. It was a revolution with
two distinct phases, and the Labour Party was responsible for only one
of these, and even there it could not or did not wholly assess its social
and political implications.

19
20 selected politicaL WRITINGS

The limited revolution

The welfare state – with its three main planks, social security, income
redistribution and nationalisation – had valid but limited objectives.
It sought to redistribute wealth towards the middle, and buttress the
structure of ‘opportunity’ from below. It tried to redress the balance of
social forces in the community – but not to alter the relationship of
one group to another, within the still hierarchical structure of British
society. The social pivot of the revolution of ‘welfare’ was consequently
located somewhere about the middle of the social scale. The conse-
quences of increased assistance were to swell the ranks of the middle
classes, and to validate what may be called ‘middle’ virtues in British
society. As Angus Maude and Roy Lewis put it:

A great part of the strength and of the value of the middle classes
in English political life has been their ability to set off, within them-
selves, intellect against money, common sense against intellect, and a
tradition of gentility against all three (p72).

And later, perhaps more revealingly:

They are what they are by virtue not of trade but of organization,
not of property but of independence; not by virtue of government;
not solely because they wanted to have but because of what they
wanted to be … ‘What shall we do to be received?’ the new middle
classes have cried, and in every generation the retort has come –
from above and below – ‘Learn to behave like gentlemen! (p69)

As Alistair Cook observed, at the time of the 1955 general e lection,

the result would depend on how many working-class men, looking into
their mirrors, saw middle-class faces. The Conservative victory was
reply enough.
It is difficult to see what else could have been expected. So long as the
general pattern of the society remained inegalitarian, social mobility
implied the gradual assumption of middle-class ways of life and
middle-class values by the promoted. The economy remained, at base,
capitalist in character: and because of the manner in which a capitalist
economy functions and grows, an unequal structure of wealth – and
hence of social power and position – was a necessary feature. Over

20
 THE NEW CONSERVATISM AND THE OLD 21

and above the cost of social welfare, the imperatives of growth in a

capitalist economy had to be obeyed. The welfare state consequently
established its own norms: given the logic of the economic structure,
there were ‘natural’ levels beyond which redistributive taxation could
not go, ‘realistic’ costs below which health and housing could not be
permitted to fall. These were the unspoken checks and balances of the
mixed economy with a massive private sector. And although that two-
headed monster was spawned in the no-man’s-land between the two
parties, the cumulative pressure from the private sector tailored Mr
Butler, rather than Mr Gaitskell, to the job.
It was reasonable to assume, therefore, that the Conservative Party,
refurbished from the left, would continue to govern innocuously on
the basis of a negative vote of confidence from those whom mobility
had dislodged from their natural political allegiance. But the climate
of post-war Britain, and the character of the support behind the
Conservative Party in the country, was considerably affected by other,
deeper changes in the society, with their roots not so much in the
welfare state as in the capitalist sector of the economy.

Logic of social change

The most important of these changes reflect mutations in the capi-

talist system itself. The growth of management – the proliferation of
supervisory jobs in industry – marked the expanding scale of capitalist
production itself. It was a witness to the growth in the scope of the
service, distributive and supervisory functions in large-scale produc-
tion, which had been taking place since the turn of the century. The
private sector consequently offered the most attractive opportunities,
guaranteeing wealth, power and prestige. The young men of talent,
particularly from the lower-middle class, promoted by the mechanism of
the state, found themselves drawn into positions of power, demanding
loyalty and responsibility, in private industry. This was another stage
in the logic of social change in a mixed economy.
To find the legitimate satisfaction of their ambitions in the upper
ranks of management implied the gradual – if difficult – acceptance
of the whole philosophy of a private economy. In a limited sense at
least, this assumption of new status undermined their allegiance to
several of the cardinal principles of the welfare state. Taxation became

21
22 selected politicaL WRITINGS

a public enemy: the guarantee of full employment, limited controls,

the cost of state assistance – these were re-interpreted as restraints
and hindrances to growth and prosperity. When the authoritative
voices of the Economist and the Financial Times called for ‘the removal
of restraints’, for an imaginative release from ‘the rigid state’, for a
‘modest dash for freedom’, they spoke as much for the new as for the
old industrial elites.
The pressure for the removal of restraints was buttressed from
below by the general sense, pervading the middle classes, that
further redistribution of wealth could proceed only at the expense of
their own social and economic prospects. These fears found release
through a profound sense of irritation against the whole panoply of
state assistance, and particularly against the encumbrances of the
bureaucracy in government circles. No doubt these attitudes were
to be found in their most aggressive form in the small but articulate
group which had benefited most. But they had become in a sense the
thrusting spearhead of the middle-class revolution, and their responses
to the conditions of post-war Britain had very soon eaten back into
and undermined the whole morale of the society.
These various phases of the ‘peaceful revolution’ must be seen in the
context of the cold war, and in the light of Britain’s declining prestige
abroad. A world of divided, hostile camps placed intolerable strains on
a society undergoing profound social change. While the very fabric of
the society was being rewoven, the dictates of foreign policy grew more
rigid and insistent. Because of the role which Britain had chosen – as
the pivot of the North Atlantic alliance – it was committed to defence
expenditure far beyond its means, and implicated in policies in Asia
and the Middle East totally beyond its capacities. Its failures to adjust
to the dramatic changes in the world beyond Europe witnessed, not
merely to the disintegration of the ‘morality’ of the welfare state, but –
more simply – to a failure of nerve and realism. The pursuit of prestige
by a second-rate power in a nuclear age is a disturbing phenomenon
to observe. Caught up by virtue of its weakness and dependence in
the web of American diplomacy, Britain worked consistently against
its best interests. It took such steps as the re-armament of Germany,
calculated to intensify the cold war, ignoring the more difficult but
more rewarding path towards a military detente.
The logic of cold war politics was rigid, implacable and inhibiting.
It forced restraints upon Britain in a period in which it should have

22
 THE NEW CONSERVATISM AND THE OLD 23

been seeking a greater freedom of range and movement. Instead it

conspired merely to maintain the polarity of power in the world. Its
desire to retain – if not restore – its crumbling imperial heritage fettered
its freedom. And this reckless, half-hearted pursuit of prestige abroad
was conducted under the compelling shadow of nuclear weapons, in
a world in which fear itself has become the prime factor in stability.

Ethos of discontent

The consequence of these pressures, exerted upon the society from

several quarters, was a state of muted, but at times extreme, moral
confusion. The society was an open arena, in which conflicting forces
from without and within had free play. The political apathy which
characterised the period between 1951 and 1955 had its source, not
in disinterest, but in bewilderment. The economy had to reconcile
within itself the opposing claims of the welfare state and a refurbished
capitalism: it had to balance off the cost of social security against the
driving and persistent pressure for private capital accumulation. The
widening dollar-gap, the prospect of shrinking markets, increased
international competition, the burden of defence and of ‘diplomatic’
assistance to the ‘uncommitted’ world, were constant irritants. At
home, the society tried to accommodate a profound social revolution
within the constraining limits of a mixed economy and a hierarchical
social structure. It sought to satisfy the stimulated ambitions of the
middle classes within the traditional social framework, and to estab-
lish an arbitrary community of interests between the groups whose
power derived from consumer power and those whose power depended
directly or indirectly on increasing profits. The morale of the society
was beset by the play of unsatisfied ambitions, unfocused irritation,
spurious dissatisfactions and uncertainties. For the ‘peaceful revolu-
tion’ appeared to have brought only the encroachment of bureaucracy,
with its distancing effects upon intelligent and spontaneous participa-
tion in the life of the community: and the end of the war had brought
only a self-perpetuating state of armed peace.

But the most common reward today for success achieved through
the legitimate, taxable channels is to find a boot crunching firmly
on one’s presumptuous head; and the boot belongs not to a

23
24 selected politicaL WRITINGS

member of the aristocracy, keeping presumption in its place, but

to the Socialist state, the revolutionaries’ state, the state of blessed
opportunity.
And so here we are, with our degrees and our posh education,
our prideful positions in the public service, our ambitious names in
print, trying to get on with the work brought home in the bulging
brief-case, while the baby cries in the next room or even in the
same room, or while the mortgage slowly and respectfully strangles
the life, the love, the adventure and the talent out of us.3

Mr George Scott’s Time and Place, from which this passage is taken,
is an unpleasant but representative document of this period. It catches
in an authentic form the suffocated, thwarted ambition, the explosively
inverted class prejudice, the rooted self-interest of the new men of power
manqué. It is through the ‘salon poujadism’ of Time and Place, the
disabled romanticism of Look Back In Anger, or the conspicuously anti-
romantic amorality of the Lucky Jim ‘archetype’, that the temper and
tone of the post-welfare generation found their legitimate expression.

‘Democracy v. Liberty’

In the end, it is the informing spirit of the ‘peaceful revolution’ which,

despite the remarkable achievements of social security, has not been
satisfied. It is this spirit, in repressed forms, which is the source of
the strange motions that disturb the ordered universe of post-welfare
Britain, and which has urged the Conservative Party into irrational and
dangerous paths.
Through its attempt to capture the ‘revolution’, the Conservative
Party made itself the guardian of a state which had preserved only
the external forms of stability and ordered growth.

… this vast and elaborate structure, which has come into existence
as the end product of the activities of myriads of men seeking secu-
rity as well as truth, may produce in single individuals feelings of
powerlessness, loneliness, ultimately of revolt and destructiveness.4

It was, surprisingly enough, two ‘new Conservatives’ who glimpsed

this prospect: and the same observation was given a more pointedly

24
 THE NEW CONSERVATISM AND THE OLD 25

personal validation in George Scott’s autobiography: ‘Whether they

know it or not, and I fancy they do not, the revolutionaries have bred a
generation of counter-revolutionaries’. Mr Butler, it is true, seemed to
believe that he was grooming merely a generation of realists. But there
was evidence enough of an alien and irrational spirit abroad – not least
of all in the ranks of the so-called ‘moderates’. It is they, for example,
who helped to fashion the ideology of presumption and prescription
which assumed the status, during the party’s first term of office, of a
new official philosophy. Professor Oakeshott – the party’s latter-day
Bagehot – reminded them that ‘political activity comes first and a
political ideology comes after’. And in fact, the new ideology was in no
sense a social or moral philosophy: it was a kind of academic mythology.
It was hostile to the study of politics by reason and intelligence; it
was sceptical of the moral basis of political action: ‘government by
the people’, literally interpreted, was a form of ‘democratic tyranny’,
because it was ‘contrary to our political tradition and principles’,
and part of a dangerous tradition of thought which was purported
to run ‘through the mystical clap-trap of Robespierre, St Just, Lenin
and Stalin’.5 (Mr Worsthorne, the source of these quotations, is a
leader writer for the influential organ of establishment opinion, The
Daily Telegraph: indeed, it is fascinating to watch the ideas in Professor
Oakeshott’s Inaugural Lecture gain wider and wider currency, as they
filter through the ‘higher’ journalism of the weeklies and monthlies
to the ‘daily newspaper world’.) This ideology was significant precisely
because – in its popularised and degenerated forms – it prepared the
ground for a disorderly retreat from reason. How the old prejudices
must have flared and flourished when Mr Utley – who is one of the
liveliest and most intelligent minds on the right today – could go so
far as to whoop, ‘Democracy is out’, in the first sentence of a Spectator
leader (January 1955). This kind of language persistently undermined
democratic sentiments in the community: it eroded the foundations
for the just and responsible conduct of public affairs; it created the
ethos within which irresponsibility could thrive. The image of Britain’s
prestige abroad was hoisted as the unifying factor – and perhaps the
only one – in the conflicting amalgam of political forces: and this
image was pursued with remarkable ‘flair’ and ‘vigour’, quite beyond
the reasonable limits by which policy must necessarily be constrained
in the contemporary world.

25
26 selected politicaL WRITINGS

Suez: the moment of truth

It would be wrong to see Suez in isolation. It is part of the pattern of

six years of disastrous and misguided government. But it takes an
event as traumatic as Suez to strip away the masks of rhetoric, and to
expose the repressed sources of Britain’s policy and its consequences.
It is clear now that we have connived against both the welfare of the
Arab peoples and the stability of the state of Israel, for the sake of the
‘national interest’: and that we have used the obsolete weapons of
power and intrigue to secure it. While the British and French troops
remained in Port Said, we were, on an even calculation, about twelve
hours away from a third world war. It is clear, too, that Britain has
identified itself everywhere with policies calculated to thwart the colo-
nial and national revolutions. It should be clear, for example, that, in
Cyprus, Britain has been waging what amounts to an imperialist war,
and that – through Suez – it came perilously close to involving the
British people with the hysteria of French reaction. It should be clear
– with Hungary and Poland to point the moral – that Britain’s cold
war policy represented a dramatic failure of responsibility to Eastern
as well as Western Europe: and that nothing can redeem these blun-
ders, except patient and persistent work towards a military detente and
a settlement in Europe. It is clear above all that the future of Britain
depends upon the strengthening of a sense of responsibility to inter-
national organisations: that the ‘prestige’ of Britain is a phantom,
which can only be pursued at the expense of the fate of the world itself.
The Suez debacle mirrors, as well, the moral failure of the left. The
shortcomings of the ‘peaceful revolution’ on the one hand, and the
deformations of socialism in Eastern Europe on the other, should serve
to convince us that the socialist reconstruction of society demands
an imaginative experimentation with forms of democratic control
and responsibility hitherto undreamt of in ‘welfare’ philosophy. The
events of recent months should be enough to persuade the left that
the whole raison d’être of British foreign policy – and particularly
the role of Britain between East and West – deserves complete re-
examination. The whole philosophy of ‘strategic containment and
military alignment’ – which are the keystones of American diplomacy
– is bankrupt and dangerous to continue. The problem of a European
settlement is pressing and immediate, but it must be solved on other
moral and political grounds than these.

26
 THE NEW CONSERVATISM AND THE OLD 27

When we take recent trends in domestic politics into consideration,

it is clear that the Labour Party should see itself not merely as the
passive agent of the parliamentary system, but – in a genuine sense – as
the bulwark of democratic practice and the defenders of the tradition
of reason, responsibility and patience in politics. It is the tradition of
reason which has suffered extreme pressure during the past decade,
from the reactionary right and the reactionary left alike. There is,
when all is said and done, too much, rather than too little, left for
the Labour Party to do. The fact is that Britain can no longer afford
the irresponsibility and instability which has become a characteristic
feature of contemporary Conservatism. The whole ideology is obsolete
and dangerous. Conservatism has disappeared into the wilderness of
unreason, and it should be left there to sing among the nightingales.

Notes

1. The Tories returned to power in 1951, apparently now modernised and

accepting the broad outlines of the postwar settlement. Butskellism, an
amalgamation of the names of leading Tory R.A.B. Butler and Labour’s
Hugh Gaitskell, referred to this apparent consensus across the two main
parties. But in 1956 the Conservatives apparently reverted to type when
they invaded Suez, after Egypt’s President Nasser announced the nationali-
sation of the Suez Canal. This was seen by the British government, already
hostile to the Nasser regime, as a serious threat to its interests in the region.
2. Angus Maude and Roy Lewis, The English Middle Classes, Penguin 1950.
3. Time and Place, George Scott, Staples 1956, p191.
4. English Middle Classes, p66.
5. The quotations are from Peregrine Worsthorne, ‘Democracy v. Liberty’,
Encounter, January 1956.

27
 A sense of classlessness
1958

… the more that distinctions are broken down, the more exquisite
they become.
William Whyte, The Organization Man

learly, there has been a major shift in the patterns of social

C life in this country. How deep they go, and whether they alter our
older notions of ‘class’ is difficult to tell (see endnote 1: The post-war
boom). The drawing of distinctions is made more difficult by the fact
that such changes are taking place at a remarkably uneven pace – the
old crowding in upon the new and blurring the points of transition.
The focal centres of this process are the large cities – and the new
urban concentrations we are making: though the spread of these pat-
terns of life into smaller cities and throughout the country may be
swifter than we suppose. (Given the predominance of the London
metropolis over other centres in our cultural life, and its concentration
of the channels of communication, the pace of change should not
surprise us.) But even in large urban centres, the unevenness of devel-
opment makes analysis difficult. In the area of south London where I
live, old and new physical environments coexist within a single
borough. Here are the old two-storey brick dwellings of a working-
class suburb, row after row in a dark street butting straight into the
warehouse, lumber yard or factory gate: there are the new eight-storey
flats of an LCC housing estate, enclosed in a grass-and-concrete
jigsaw, offering the beginnings of a ‘contemporary’ urban facade.
Along the Brixton Road, the barrow boys are hawking goods outside
a ‘utility’ style British version of the supermarket. Some of the local
children go to school at a Dickensian brick building constructed – and
hardly retouched – since the 1880s: but not far away is the glass-and-
steel compound of the local comprehensive, not yet completed.

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 A SENSE OF CLASSLESSNESS 29

It is not only a matter of new physical surroundings. The post-

war prosperity and the high levels of employment have made possible
new spending habits amongst working people. A local housewife in
a new town whom we talked to said, apologetically, ‘Yes, we’ve got
a small car – if that’s what you can call it’. Fifteen years ago a car
would have been considered a luxury: today, she is looking forward
to the day when she can exchange the second-hand model for a small
new family car. This attitude towards a whole range of consumer
goods has altered, of course, even within the interiors of older-style
working-class districts: but the change is to be seen most sharply
where exteriors have changed as well – where ‘home- making’ and
‘interior decoration’ are newly acquired interests, part of the shift
into new housing estates and new towns – part of a new style of
urban life. The recent induced spread of hire-purchase is, of course,
one way of stimulating a semi-stagnant economy: it is also, however,
an attempt – on the part of the banks and finance houses who are
best equipped to do so – to catch up with and sustain a current of
domestic spending on furniture, household goods and appliances,
and TV sets, which has been growing, with certain lapses, since
the war. At the same time, the older working-class homes survive,
much as Hoggart described in The Uses of Literacy – warm, cluttered
living rooms, impervious to House and Garden.1 Bits and pieces of
chain-store furniture have penetrated, but not sufficiently to upset
the pattern of life or to destroy the sense of familiar congestion.
Where does the old end, and where does the new – the real not the
superficially new – begin, in this maze of gradual accommodations?
The third and perhaps most crucial change can be observed in
the rhythm and nature of industrial work. Here again, the pace of
development offers a picture of extraordinary imbalance. In certain
kinds of work, and, consequently, in certain regions of the country,
things are much as they were. I am thinking particularly of the heavy
industries and of mining. Even here, there have been technological
innovations: but these offer themselves very much as modifications of
traditional skills in the life of a working man. He is still engaged in
labouring directly upon the means of production, in factories where
safety regulations may have been improved by legislation, but where
factory layout and the work processes have altered little since the last
century. Yet side by side with this pattern of industrial labour as Engels
and Marx wrote of it, have grown up the ‘technological’ industries

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30 selected politicaL WRITINGS

– the manufacturing industries based upon chemical and automative

processes. Here the very nature of work itself, the rhythm and skills
involved, have changed out of all recognition.
Of course, the growth in volume of consumer goods or the
council house do not – in themselves – transform a working class
into a bourgeoisie. ‘The working class does not become bourgeois by
owning the new products, any more than the bourgeois ceases to be
bourgeois as the objects he owns change in kind’.2 It is a matter of a
whole way of life, of an attitude towards things and people, within
which new possessions – even a new car, a new house or a TV set –
find meaning through use. The drive towards a higher standard of
living is a legitimate materialism, born out of centuries of physical
deprivation and want. It becomes a form of social envy – a desire
to become ‘middle-class’ in style of life – only in certain peculiar
circumstances. The central distinction between working-class and
middle-class styles of life has always been, as Raymond Williams
points out, a distinction ‘between alternative ideas of the nature of
social relationship’, embodied, as it were, in typical working-class
institutions (the trade union, the friendly and co-operative societies)
as well as in a hundred shared habits, and local, particular responses
to life (see endnote 2: Low life and high theory). The crucial difference
is that between the bourgeois notion of society as a stage upon which
each individual tries to ‘realise’ himself through personal effort and
competitiveness; and the working-class notion of society as a co-
operative entity – where ‘the primary affections and allegiances, first
to family, then to neighbourhood, can in fact be directly extended
into social relationships as a whole, so that the idea of a collective
democratic society is at once based on direct experience, and is
available, as an idea, to others who wish to subscribe to it’.3 This serves
as a broad generalisation about bourgeois and working-class attitudes
to life – in spite of the fact that, in the late nineteenth century, the
bourgeois classes tempered the drive to individualism by a certain
liberal and paternal ideal of duty and service; and in the twentieth
century, the notion of ‘collective service’ in the trade unions has been
blunted by a bureaucratic structure of leadership.
Nevertheless, a way of life cannot be sustained without a certain
pattern of social relationships, and outside of certain physical,
economic and environmental pressures. Working-class culture, as
we have experienced it, grew up as a series of defences against the

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 A SENSE OF CLASSLESSNESS 31

encroachments – economic and social – of bourgeois society. The sense

of solidarity which developed through work, in the family and the older
communities, and which sustained men and women through the terrors
of a period of industrialisation – liberating as it was for many – was
also, for many, harsh and oppressive. It remained, for all its strengths,
a ‘class’ life, a pattern of – in some cases – hastily erected personal and
collective barricades. Solid as the old working-class communities were,
they were often, of necessity, defensive or aggressive towards other
communities, other national and racial groups, towards the ‘queer’
fellow and the ‘odd man out’, towards the ‘scholarship boy’, or even,
sometimes, the militant. This is not a matter of praise or blame. It is a
matter of the economic and social system within which an industrial
proletariat, with its own values and attitudes, matured and grew. Marx
understood this. He saw the new social relationships growing within
the womb of the old society, he saw them transforming society itself, as
men forced themselves out of the constraints which the old industrial
ghettos and factories imposed, until the separate communities became
a single community, and – in this sense at least – the bourgeois world
was ‘proletarianised’. (I am not thinking of enforced collectivisation!)
Marx saw an industrial working class not merely surviving into, but
itself creating, conditions of prosperity and abundance.

Class consciousness

The central problem concerns the different objective factors which

shaped and were in turn shaped and humanised by an industrial
working class; the subjective ways in which these factors grew to
consciousness within the minds and lives of working people: and the
degree to which these shaping factors have changed or are in process
of changing. To lump these together as ‘the economic base’ is not
enough, though that formulation is broadly true as a proposition,
understood over a comparatively long period of history. But we need
to break the ‘economic base’ down into constituent factors, permitting
a much freer play in our interpretation between ‘base’ and ‘superstruc-
ture’ (see endnote 3: Consciousness and the heavy industrial base).
This is necessary because we are concerned with a changing pattern of
life, attitudes and values – particular responses to a particular situa-
tion – many of which can best be seen and isolated in what has so far

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32 selected politicaL WRITINGS

been considered, in vulgar-Marxist interpretations (rather patronis-

ingly), as the ‘ideological superstructure’.
Though Marx himself became more deeply involved with objective
factors as he elaborated the labour theory of value (an emphasis which
Engels was at pains to modify – cf the well-known letter to Bloch,
Selected Works, Vol. 2, pp443-4, but also the letters to C. Schmidt,
pp441, 448-50, and to H. Starkenburg, pp457-9), a reading of Capital
will not reveal the clean separation of subjective from objective factors in
the growth of the working class. (The early chapters on ‘Commodities’,
for example, must be seen in relation to the earlier work on alienation
in the Economic & Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 and the German
Ideology.) The early industrial working class matured within early
entrepreneur capitalism. The key points in this system, for our purposes,
were the nature of private property, the accumulation of capital and
the exploitation of labour (profits and wages), the alienation of the
worker from his labour in the ‘working day’, and his alienation from
the products which he made (the ‘commodity’ relationship, where; ‘the
more the worker expends himself in work, the more powerful become
the world of objects which he creates in fact of himself, the poorer he
becomes in his inner life, the less he belongs to himself’.4

New factors
These were the primary factors which shaped the ‘consciousness of
class’ amongst working people, and which made it possible for an
industrial proletariat to become the base for an active and conscious
political movement. Now it is clear that these primary factors have
changed radically with the development of capitalism, at least in those
sectors of the system which have expanded and been most susceptible
to technological and institutional change. They have also changed
‘subjectively’ – i.e. as they present themselves to the consciousness of
working people. With the growth of the joint stock firm or corporation,
the whole nature of private property has been revolutionised. It can no
longer be identified or personalised in the shape of the single industrial
magnate, the ‘robber baron’ or even the entrepreneur family. This does
not mean to say that there are no rich men left. But their riches – their
pieces of property – are held largely in the form of pieces of corporate
property, shares in the anonymous, complex, modern industrial firms
which spawn their way across the face of modern business. ‘Property’

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 A SENSE OF CLASSLESSNESS 33

has gone underground, it has been institutionalised and incorporated,

vested nominally in the person of an abstract company or firm. The
maximisation of profit has passed from the personal responsibility of
the businessman or financier, and is now established as the institu-
tional motive of the firm. Further, as the spread of different jobs and
functions within a modern firm multiplies, it is difficult for anyone
outside to see exactly who is responsible for what. Where do decisions
(e.g. to raise prices, alter models, lay off redundant labour, fix salaries
and wages) now originate? In the drawing office? In the boardroom?
With the advertising agent or the salesman? At the Ministry of Labour
or the Board of Trade? Responsibility is difficult to localise. And many
young men, drawn into the lower ranks of management, feel that part
of the responsibility, at least, is theirs: they ‘discover’ a responsibility
to the firm itself, and, eventually, are drawn into the whole ideology
of big corporation business. The spirit which prevails in the multi-
product firms, like ICI, Unilever, Tube Investments, United Steel,
Vickers, London Tin, etc, has been justly described as the spirit of
‘organised irresponsibility’.
Secondly, where profits and wages are concerned (‘the rate of
exploitation’), there have been some significant changes, though here
the uneven development of which I spoke earlier is more noticeable.
Certainly in times of prosperity, wages and living standards have been
seen to rise – if not continuously, and in many particular spots – as a
general trend throughout the society. That is at least the general feeling
in the minds of many working people: as such, it gives rise to a different
set of emotional responses to ‘big business’ and to ‘wage disputes’ – it is
part of the new ‘class consciousness’. It makes people more responsive
to managerial patter about ‘productivity’ and ‘the responsibility of the
firm’, and thus leads even the organised trade union movement to a
greater involvement with ‘keeping the firm competitive’, with business
unionism as practised in the United States, than would have been
possible under the conditions which Marx foresaw – an increase in the
rate of exploitation, a continual decline in real wages, longer working
hours, and the proletarianisation of the middle class.

People’s capitalism
The accumulation of capital and the maximising of profits are
still, of course, the organising principle of the modern large firm.

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34 selected politicaL WRITINGS

Accumulation, however, is performed in an altogether new way,

progressively less through the open money market and more through
retained profits (except for large share issues): and although the banks,
finance houses and insurance companies are deeply involved in the
funding of expansion, this is done more through the ‘anonymous’
structure of interlocking directorships rather than in the open market.
The maximisation of profit is still the driving motive behind the
system: but because of the stability of the large firm, it can be consid-
ered to take place over a much longer period of ‘growth’: further, it has
been tempered by the post-Marx recognition on the part of manage-
ment that if goods are to be sold, effective domestic demand must be
kept up, and the domestic market remain buoyant, provided profit
levels can also be maintained. At the present time, for example, where
lower and lower prices are being paid to the primary producing coun-
tries for raw materials, so that the overseas demand for our goods is
falling off, the large firms will be seen to indulge in more ‘give-away’
schemes, and the banks in ‘cloth-cap’ accounts, and the finance
houses in ‘bonus’ hire purchase offers. These are the mechanisms of a
‘people’s capitalism’.
Marx described the alienation of labour thus:

the work is external to the worker … it is not a part of his nature

… consequently he does not fulfil himself in his work but denies
himself, has a feeling of misery, not of well-being, does not develop
freely a physical and mental energy, but is physically exhausted and
mentally debased. The worker therefore feels himself at home only
during his leisure, whereas at work he feels homeless.

Now I am sure that, for many kinds of industrial work still

performed, this feeling is still true. This would hold, for example,
for the steel worker and the miner. But a subtle change of attitude
is engendered in those industries where mechanisation and auto-
mation can and have been applied. In the first place, the work is
not necessarily physically arduous, though it is probably mentally
exhausting and repetitive. In many automation processes, even the
repetitiveness has gone. The line between the skilled worker and
the minor technologist is breaking down, particularly in industries
based on chemical processes. Here the work is of a higher order,
demanding skills of comparison of readings, compiling of data

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 A SENSE OF CLASSLESSNESS 35

for ‘programmes’, etc; though machines take over the skills which
used to depend on personal craft and individual judgement. This
is what J.M. Domenach describes as ‘work on work’ (see Esprit
November 1957), employing new technological skills. The gross
‘means of production’ – I mean the physical landscape of wheels and
machines and exposed conveyor belts which provide the visual and
psychological background of a fi lm like Eisenstein’s Strike – have
disappeared in the technological industries. It is not that ‘work’ is
any less external, but that the externality of work may itself, because
of the ‘higher’ skills demanded, and the higher order of human
cooperation involved, be accepted as a part of the necessary tech-
nical development of the means and skills of industrial labour. It
may have been just possible to ‘humanise’ a nineteenth-century
textile shop: it is impossible to ‘humanise’ a computing machine.
The transformation of the technical base itself has done its work. Of
course, automated work demands a higher level of culture, education
and consciousness on the part of a skilled labour force: in this sense
the development of the means of production must in turn raise the
level of human consciousness, and may make possible, and in turn
create, the demand for greater participation in all the human activi-
ties – the ‘social relations of production’ – associated with work. Th is
is the shift which Reisman remarks on as a shift ‘from the hardness
of materials to the softness of men’. This change is itself beginning
to take place in industry. But whereas Marx saw the ‘humanisation’
of work coming through direct participation and control, including
control over ownership, from below, the development in capitalism is
towards the ‘personalisation’ of work, through guided participation,
excluding ownership, from above. Thus the spread of the ideology
of ‘human relations’ and ‘personnel management’ in industry – a
conception of worker-management relations which has invaded the
more advanced points of British industry (cf the ICI schemes, and
their persistent advertising campaign on this subject, which soften
up public and workers as well). In the circumstances of which Marx
wrote, a brutalised working class within a severe work-discipline
were unconscious of the nature of their alienation: today, alienation
of labour has been built-in to the structure of the firm itself. ‘Joint
consultation’ and ‘personnel relations’ is a form of false conscious-
ness, part of the ideology of consumer capitalism, and the rhetoric of
scientific management.

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36 selected politicaL WRITINGS

The habit of consumption

Marx also spoke of the relationship between the worker and the objects
which he produces – the ‘fetishism of commodities’, where ‘the more
powerful becomes the world of objects which he creates in fact of
himself’. Iris Murdoch has remarked that Marx’s economic theory was
the last one which was based on labour and production: since then we
have had economic theories based on consumption (see ‘A House of
Theory’, Conviction). Now this is true, but the reasons for this develop-
ment are to be found, not in the independent development of a body
of economic theory, but in the way in which the capitalist system itself,
which bourgeois economics had perforce to explain, had itself developed.
The factor which Marx fixed upon was the creation of alien objects –
commodities – which took on an independent life of their own, apart
from their usefulness – in the commodity market. The worker, because
of his low spending power, had little to do with these commodities apart
from their production. Today, because of increased purchasing power,
the commodities which the worker as producer makes at the factory, he
purchases back as a consumer in the shops. Indeed, consumption has
been so built into capitalism that it has become the most significant rela-
tionship between the working class and the employing class.5 The worker
knows himself much more as consumer than as producer: prices now
appear a cleaner form of exploitation than wages. This is the role in which
the capitalist system has annexed an entire class to itself: so much so that
it appears to the working class now enjoying a higher level of consump-
tion than ever before, that to break the system at the point of production
(e.g. to reintroduce the concept of production for usefulness) would be
to cut off his nose to spoil his face – as a consumer. The purpose of a
great deal of advertising, for example, is to condition the worker to the
new possibilities for consumption, to break down the class resistances to
consumer-purchase, which became part of working class consciousness
at an earlier period. This is known in the world of advertising as ‘sales
resistance’. (‘When you buy your second car, make sure it’s a Morris’.)

Status value

Further, in an era of expanded consumer demand, the alienation of

commodities has gone a stage further than Marx foresaw. Not only

36
 A SENSE OF CLASSLESSNESS 37

have objects produced taken on an existence independent from

their production as economic things in the market; not only has the
working class been built into the market itself: but commodities –
things-in-themselves – have accumulated a social value as well. They
have become insignias of class and status. Through the purchase and
display of certain kinds of consumer goods, which have gathered for
themselves status value, a working-class family can define its social
standing in relation to other families (if they live in a neighbourhood
where such things matter): they can even – so the advertisers suggest
– raise their class position by buying the right kinds of goods. Of
course, in relation to the new managerial groups which have grown up
in industry (see Peter Shore’s ‘In The Room At The Top’, Conviction),
or the owners of industrial property, the gap between exploited and
exploiters may well be the same – or at least not substantially altered.
But the sense of difference has been blunted – partly because there
are now more opportunities for people to work within big business in
positions of limited responsibility (what is now referred to as ‘middle
management’). Thus in their lives and their work, working-class and
lower middle-class people can realise themselves through the posses-
sion (on hire purchase perhaps) of ‘alien things’. Capitalism as a social
system is now based upon consumption. Both in consumption and
production, the working class is gradually becoming a factor in its
own permanent alienation.
Whilst it may have been true, in the past, as Raymond Williams
argues, that ‘the working class does not become bourgeois by owning
the new products’, that working-class culture is a ‘whole way of life’, not
reducible to its artefacts, it may now be less and less true, because the ‘new
things’ in themselves suggest and imply a way of life which has become
objectified through them, and may even become desirable because of
their social value. In those places in welfare Britain where the working
class has been put directly in touch with ‘the new opportunities’, the
‘whole way of life’ is breaking down into several styles of living (this
is the language of the furnishing advertisements), each imperceptibly,
but, as William Whyte says, ‘exquisitely’, differentiated one from
another. The very fact that it is sometimes difficult to disentangle one
‘style’ from another (e.g. what ‘style’ is one purchasing when one buys,
for example, Times Furnishings, C&A styles, or Marks & Spencer’s,
where the prices are comparatively low but the fashions are up-to-the-
minute?) adds to the general sense of class-confusion.

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38 selected politicaL WRITINGS

The more clearly we grasp the particular ways in which the sense
of solidarity and community sustained life in the older working-
class localities, the more sharply will we see the degree of anxiety
and confusion which attends the new ‘classlessness’. When the old
sense of class begins to break up, and while a new pattern of class
emerges, the society is not merely fluid – it can be made to appear
more free and ‘open’. The working-class boy must find his way
through a maze of strange signals. For example, the ‘scholarship boy’
who retains some sense of allegiance to his family and community
has constantly to draw the distinction within himself between the
just motive of self-improvement (which took him to university in
the first place) and the false motive of self-advancement (‘room at
the top’). Th is is because culture, education and learning, like the
other ‘commodities’ of our society, have accreted to themselves a
social value in a hierarchy of status symbols. To learn or to read
is no longer a process through which the individual broadens and
deepens his experience for its own sake (processes which, when
they grow out of a genuine community, a ‘whole way of life’, are
perfectly compatible with a working-class way of life): they are,
in themselves, modes of propulsion up the status ladder. Books
imply different – and ‘exquisitely’ differentiated – styles of living.
Thus, instead of the continuous broadening out of culture, as living
standards improve and the means of production are technically
developed, there is a cultural discontinuity in the community – a
gap between an increasingly skilled working class and the riches of
culture, which now properly belong to that class – which the creep
of social opportunity cannot bridge.

Creeping up the ladder

For once the working class has set tentative feet on the status ladder,
once the notion of the ladder itself has entered its consciousness as
a necessary part of life, there is nothing left but perpetual forms
of striving – not the open, brutal struggle of the period of primary
accumulation – a Morgan against a Rockefeller – but the blander,
more inner, nervous inconspicuous struggle of a period of public
consumption – a Smith against a Jones. The ladder sorts out the
community into a series of separate, competing individuals: for a

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 A SENSE OF CLASSLESSNESS 39

class as a class cannot advance by means of it. We must each go it

alone. And, even when there are more opportunities for self-advance-
ment around, they can only be seized at the expense of someone
else. By means of the image of a social ladder, the other images of
bourgeois life – individualism, privacy, ‘the spirit of healthy compe-
tition’, ‘cultivating one’s own garden’ (Mr Crosland’s metaphor for
happiness), ‘a property owning democracy’ – finally enter working-
class consciousness. As many working-class men and women said
to us, when we enquired about the growth of community life in
the new towns – ‘What do you have a home for, if you don’t stay in
it?’. Or, as a skilled maintenance operative who had moved to a new
town from South London remarked – ‘I wanted a house and a bit
of space around it: after all, that’s what we came for. People are too
close to you – breathing down your necks …’. And we thought of
Bethnal Green. The image of a ‘property owning democracy’, and
the complex of emotions contained in that contradictory phrase, is
now the point of deepest conflict today within the working class
(individual opportunity against the concept of the improvement of
the whole community).
When, in his extraordinarily perceptive chapter at the end of
Culture and Society (in the section ‘The Development of a Common
Culture’), Raymond Williams speaks of ‘the conversion of the
defensive element of solidarity into the wider and more positive
practice of neighbourhood’, he is thinking of a genuine broadening
out of the idea of working-class solidarity, and its development in
an ever widening ‘community’ which would eventually embrace the
whole society. Nevertheless, one should be careful about the concept
of ‘neighbourhood’ as it is customarily projected in a consumer
capitalist society. For intense personal rivalries over status and ‘style of
life’ can flourish and bloom within the ‘neighbourhood’ idea as it has
grown up in the United States: where there may be ‘neighbourhood’
facilities to be ‘consumed’ by all, where there is no sharp sense of
class, but where there are ‘exquisite’ distinctions of status. Something
of this kind appears to be happening where the shift in consciousness
from production to consumption is heightened by a change or
improvement in neighbourhood; for example, in new towns, in the
expanding suburbs and dormitory towns, and on the large housing
estates in welfare Britain. ‘Homemaking’ and ‘gardening’ are not
community skills, but subtle modes of status differentiation and

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40 selected politicaL WRITINGS

striving, a new kind of individualism which enters working-class

lives, so to speak, ‘with the new furniture, Woman’s Realm and The
Practical Householder’. In the subtlest and more complicated ways, the
new capitalism recognises and tries to cater for, at least in form, the
human problems of industrial society, which in substance socialism
first named. But these are only falsely attended to, resulting in a false
consciousness in working-class people, making the real problems not
only more difficult to solve but more difficult to see. Thus, while
the large corporations have not replaced competition by cooperation,
they are preoccupied with the ‘spirit of collectiveness’. The human
need for participation and control in industry has been sublimated
into the practice of ‘human relations’. And since a common culture
and a genuine community has not been permitted to develop,
the genuine human needs which have hitherto been expressed
through these terms have been watered down into ‘the need for
neighbourliness’ (what Riesman calls ‘the glad hand’ – but what, in
an English new town was described as ‘a cheery good morning’), ‘the
sense of belonging’ (to whom? for what?), ‘togetherness’. This is part
of the same process of cultural degeneration which Hoggart describes
in the Uses of Literacy (‘Unbending the Springs of Action’ ): from a
genuine sense of tolerance to a false sense of ‘freedom’ (from ‘live and
let live’ to ‘anything goes’), from a genuine sense of community to
a false identification with the group (from ‘everybody mucks in’ to
‘the gang’s all here’), from a true sense of the present to a false sense
of the ‘contemporary’ (from ‘enjoy y’self while y’can’ to ‘we’ve never
had it so good’). The process is far advanced in Britain: and what I
have been trying to argue is that, since its roots are only in part to
be discovered in changes in working-class culture, and can also be
seen in the social and economic system within which culture grows,
this process of degeneration has deeper sources than has so far been
discovered.
Of course the sense of class confusion which I have been
describing does not mean that there are no classes left. But where the
subjective factors determining ‘class consciousness’ alter radically,
a working class can develop a false sense of ‘classlessness’. The true
class picture, which so skilfully conceals itself behind the bland
face of contemporary capitalism, is broadly speaking that which C.
Wright Mills describes in The Power Elite.6 It consists, on the one
hand, of a number of interpenetrating elites or narrow oligarchies,

40
 A SENSE OF CLASSLESSNESS 41

whose functions within capitalism are different, but who share a

common ‘style of life’, a common ideology and a common economic
interest through the ‘mutual care’ of corporate private property: and,
on the other hand, a permanently exploited, permanently alienated
‘mass’ of consumers (consuming goods and culture equally). Th is
‘mass’ has been, if you like, ‘proletarianised’ – not, as Marx thought
downwards towards minimum wage levels, but upwards towards
roughly middle-class styles of living. In the process, however, the old
middle class and the old industrial proletariat are, gradually, ceasing
to exist. (There are important distinctions, both in structure and
habits, between the British and the American ‘power elites’, which
deserve studies of their own.)

A series of life styles

Both Hoggart and Williams rightly protest against the use of the
terms ‘mass’ and ‘masses’ (see Culture & Society, pp297-312).
‘Masses’, as Williams argues, is a kind of formula for progressive
manipulation of anonymous groups of people – ‘our listeners’, ‘our
readers’, ‘viewers’. ‘There are in fact no masses: there are only ways
of seeing people as masses’ (p300). But what we need to ask is not
‘who are the masses?’ but ‘why is it necessary in our society for
people to be seen, and be persuaded to see themselves as ‘the masses’?
It is necessary because this sense of classlessness, which can only be
engendered by the persuasive use of a formula, must exist before
people will accept their own cultural and economic exploitation.
They have to be made accessories after the fact. Th is is the context
in which we should understand the discussion about ‘the mass
media’, about advertising and culture. Every form of communica-
tion which is concerned with altering attitudes, which changes or
confirms opinions, which instils new images of the self, is playing
its part. They are not peripheral to the ‘economic base’: they are
part of it. (It is significant that some of the most important recent
technological advances have been made in what is now called ‘the
communications industry’, and that this side of big business is
where the labour force is expanding most rapidly.) Th at fact in itself
should make us seriously rework our ideas of the ways in which
(as Engels, that arch-revisionist, put it) the superstructures ‘exercise

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their influence upon the course of the historical struggles’ and the
conditions within which ‘the economic movement fi nally asserts
itself as necessary’ (Letter to Bloch, see above).
The break-up of a ‘whole way of life’ into a series of life-styles
(so-called ‘lower-middle class’ unfolding into ‘middle-middle class’,
and so on, upwards) means that life is now a series of fragmented
patterns for living for many working-class people. One cannot
organise militantly to keep up with the Joneses. Moreover, many must
feel a personal repugnance against involving themselves with a series
of interlocking rat-races. But what else can they do? Self-improvement
and self-advancement are now parts of the same process. That is the
message of the capitalism of the proletariat. That is the tragic conflict
within a working class which has freed itself only for new and more
subtle forms of enslavement.
The fact that these forms of enslavement are mental and moral as
well as material: the fact that they are taking shape at a period when
greater leisure and comparative improvements in living standards are
becoming possible – these point to the central paradox of contemporary
capitalism with which socialists have now to deal. Marx suggested
that complete alienation of man would not take place until the means
of complete freedom themselves existed within the womb of society.
In my view – and I would reiterate the discontinuity in the experience
of classlessness between different regions and different industries of
which I spoke at the very beginning – we are on the edge of some such
moment in history. (The gap between some countries and the rest in
this matter is, of course, the greatest human challenge of the age: but it
deserves detailed treatment of its own.) Within the industrial countries,
the material and technological means for complete human freedom –
a freedom within which man could develop a true individuality and
a true consciousness of himself and his possibilities – are almost to
hand. But the structure of human, social and moral relationships are
in complete contradiction and have to be set over against our material
advances, when we are reckoning them up. Until we can throw over
the system within which these relationships take place, and the kind
of consciousness which feeds the system and upon which it feeds,
the working class will be men as things for other people, but they can
never be men for themselves.

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 A SENSE OF CLASSLESSNESS 43

Endnotes
1: The post-war boom
It is often said that the phenomena I am discussing are part of a false
period of prosperity connected with the post-war boom: that it will fall
off, and be overtaken by a series of economic crises of the old kind. I
have heard ‘the coming slump’ predicted on four occasions by so-called
militants since coming to England (1951). I am not impressed. I do not
mean by that that I consider contemporary capitalism to be completely
insulated against economic crisis. But I think it is time that we learned
to reckon with the remarkable growth of stability and concentration
within the system: the fact that it can and has changed in the light
of periodic slumps in the past – the reasons for which, paradoxically
enough, were most effectively pointed out by socialists: and the fact
that the new power elites in Britain and the United States are probably
the smartest and most far-seeing that have ever been in the business.
Furthermore, the attitudes and changes which I discuss here are struc-
tural and institutional changes within capitalism: they have been
running parallel to, they have been fed by – but they are different from
– the ‘welfare state’ itself, considered as a system of social security – a
structure which could admittedly, and indeed has already begun to,
break up either through political malice on the part of a ruling class,
or in response to a downturn in economic activity. Contemporary capi-
talism may disappear if the welfare state disappeared: at least, people’s
consciousness of economic matters would certainly be affected by a
long period of hardship. But if what I have been arguing is true, if the
working class has itself, to some degree, been seduced into playing a
complementary role to capitalism, then the changes in social attitudes
run deeper than talk about a ‘temporary period of prosperity’ would
suggest. One is not any less against the system because one suggests
that, in many important respects, it has changed. That smear is a form
of subtle political blackmail.

2. Low life and high theory

To my mind, there has always been this kind of connection – under-
stressed by Marx – between the life which working-class people made
for themselves in an industrial society, and the body of socialist theory
which grew out of it. This interpenetration of experience and theory is

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what really lies behind much of the talk about ‘theory and practice’. It
can best be seen in the somewhat cloudy but centrally important realm
of ‘humanist values’. There is no space at this point to trace out in detail
what the connection has been: it is to be found, at least in part, in those
sections of The Uses of Literacy which many socialists have discounted as
‘not political enough’. The important point is this: that socialism cannot
develop as a set of ideas or as a programme without a matrix of values,
a set of assumptions, a base in experience, which gives them validity.
There have to be some points of ‘recognition’ – where the abstract plan-
ning meets sharply with human needs as people experience them in the
here and now. That is why it is not possible to postpone the problem of
socialism until after the revolution. Socialism has always existed within
capitalist society – at least in so far as working-class life offered itself
as a set of alternate values, as a different image of the community, as
a critique, to bourgeois life. We are making the socialism of tomorrow
today: it is potential in the lives of ordinary people – working-class and
others – who resist and reject, both intellectually and in experience,
the values of a capitalist society. Unless the values of working-class
experience can find new forms and thrive in the new conditions of
consumption and prosperity which we have been discussing, socialist
ideas will eventually dry up and disappear. Every day, in our own lives,
in our personal relations with people, and our impersonal relations to
things, we are making and destroying socialism itself.

3. Consciousness and the heavy industrial base

The model of ‘base and superstructure’ is – or ought to be – at the heart
of every ‘rethinking’ and ‘revisionist’ controversy. It seems clear to me,
on the one hand, that the simplistic economic-determinist reading of
this formula has now to be discarded: it means that too much of impor-
tance has to be left out of our analysis. It is too blunt and imprecise an
instrument. On the other hand, it is clear that some such organic rela-
tionship exists between ‘the way we make our life’ and ‘the way we see
ourselves’ – and that, without such a framework of understanding, we
may get a series of brilliant socialist programmes (perhaps), but no kind
of socialist humanism. This article is, in part, an attempt to use the
interpenetration of base and superstructure as an analytic framework
for a discussion of some tendencies in contemporary capitalism. But
the ideological discussion needs to go much further. Clearly, there are

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 A SENSE OF CLASSLESSNESS 45

points at which ‘ideas’, or ‘a structure of assumptions’, directly impinge

upon and affect, if not the nature of the ‘economic base’, then certainly
the way it behaves, and even its development over fairly long periods
of history. Furthermore, there are periods when cultural alienation
and exploitation become so ramified and complex that they take on
an independent life of their own, and need to be seen and analysed as
such. What is more, there is a large area of personal choice, of conscious
moral decisions made in certain moral situations – questions which
E.P. Thompson refers to as concerning ‘agency and choice’ (See New
Reasoner 5) – which we cannot slip or slide over by means of some
convenient theory of economic inevitability.
I think the confusion is, in part, due to certain ambiguities which
attend Marx’s use of this analytic tool, in different parts of his work
and at different periods of his life. The concept certainly took on,
in the later years, a rigidity – due, in part, to the fact that he
was dealing specifically with economic facts and causes – which is not
to be found in his earlier work. Certainly there is no simplicity of
analysis in The Eighteenth Brumaire or the History of the Class Struggles
in France. It would be of immense value if the whole body of the
earlier studies – particularly the untranslated and, one suspects,
unfashionable Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts – were restored
to their proper place. At least in the earlier writings on ‘alienation’ we
need to give a different weight or emphasis to ‘superstructure’ than we
would imagine simply from a study of Capital.
My plea is, at least, that ‘revisionism’ should begin with this
concept, and that it should start in Marx’s work itself, which is a
body of analytic concepts and not a sealed house of theory. Engels
plays, in the development of the base-superstructure controversy, a
most significant ‘revisionist’ role. E.g. ‘… According to the materialist
conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history
is the production and reproduction of real life. More than this neither
Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence, if somebody twists this into
saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he
transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless
phrase’ … ‘We make our history ourselves, but, in the first place, under
very definite assumptions and conditions’ (Letter to Bloch, passim).
The letter ends – a timely warning – ‘Marx and I are ourselves partly
to blame for the fact that the younger people sometimes lay more
stress on the economic side than is due to it. We had to emphasise the

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main principle vis-a-vis our adversaries … Unfortunately, however, it

happens only too often that people think they have fully understood
a new theory and can apply it without more ado from the moment
they have mastered its main principles, and even those not correctly.
And I cannot exempt many of the more recent “Marxists” from this
reproach, for the most amazing rubbish has been produced in this
quarter too’ (Selected Works, Vol. 2, p 443-4).

Notes

1. Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy, Chatto and Windus 1957.

2. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, Chatto & Windus 1958, p324.
3. Raymond Williams, ‘Working Class Culture’, ULR 2 summer 1957.
4. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts 1844, translated in Karl Marx,
Selections, Bottomore & Rubel (eds), London 1961, p70.
5. This involves the working class capitulating to the root self-image of man
in capitalist society. See Charles Taylor, ‘Alienation and Community’,
ULR 5, Autumn 1958.
6. C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite, Oxford University Press 1958. See the
chapter on The Mass Society.

46
 The supply of demand
1960*

The old-fashioned Conservative is one who looks out at the

comforts made achievable by rising incomes and the hire-purchase
revolution, and who feels vaguely that the workers are unfairly
luckier than he was as a boy – that they are getting above their
station. The modern Conservative should be one who looks up at
the television aerials sprouting above the working-class homes of
England, who looks down on the housewives’ tight slacks on the
back of the motor-bicycle and family sidecars on the summer road
to Brighton, and who sees a great poetry in them. For this is what
the deproletarianisation of British society means; and the changes
in social and industrial attitudes of mind which it could bring with
it are immense.

‘The Unproletarian Society’, Th e Economist, 16 May 1959

Thus The Economist.

I do not, of course, mean that the whole of the working class can
now afford these luxuries – far from it. So far this is only a trend –
we are still only at the threshold of the new era of abundance; and
there are many workers on £7 or £8 a week, and even more social
service beneficiaries, who are still acutely worried by the problem of
subsistence. But the trend is now quite definite; and it is significant
that even these poorer workers are themselves peering across the
threshold; they have accepted the new standards as the social norm,
and are already thinking of the day when they too will acquire
these goods. All this must have a profound effect on psychology
of the working class … There are clear political implications here
for the Labour Party, which would be ill advised to continue
making a largely proletarian class appeal when a majority of the

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population is gradually attaining a middle-class standard of life,

and distinct symptoms even of a middle-class psychology.

‘The Search for Equality’, The Future of Socialism, A. Crosland

Thus the ‘new thinking’.

These passages plunge us deep into the sludge and confusion and
cross-fire of the no-man’s-land of British politics today. Who could
have imagined that the leader-writers of The Economist – those sour-
faced Bagehots of yesterday – would have become the popularisers
and myth-makers of the 1960s? And yet here they are, remarking in
a voice choked with emotion, the ‘revolution of the deproletarianised
consumer’. Outside the homestead, television aerials flourish like
weeds, motor-bicycles and family sidecars slither into place; around
the working-class housewife, ‘mechanical slaves on the hire-purchase
have sprung up … as she works in the non-telly hours’; average
workers have overcome the enormous technical problems of ‘getting
their own families on to wheels’. Then, ‘in the middle of this roaring
decade, something began to happen in the field of consumer goods
that can only be called a breakthrough’. As the journal brushed away
the cobwebs of the 1950s from before its eyes, it looked out across the
vast plain of capitalism, beheld the sheep, each in his station, grazing
comfortably, and was satisfied. We have nothing to fear, save smugness
itself! (The quotes are from ‘Farewell To The Fifties’, The Economist,
26 December 1959.)
And what is happening in the back garden of the most impressive
Labour ideologue of them all? Mr Crosland’s workers, too, are ‘peering
across thresholds’ and accepting new standards as the social norm.
Prosperity! Capitalism, by an infinite dialectic of its own, works
silently towards its own reform. We have only to watch, amazed, as the
economy, with the skill of an acrobat, doubles itself: and then, before
you can say ‘Heathcoat Amory!’ we shall have sailed into the
calm waters of the Second American Age.
Mr Crosland’s picture of mid-century Britain rests upon the
assumption that the class basis of the society has at last been worn
down. Over the decades, the beetles of reform have been at work,
eating away the scaffolding. The ‘income revolution’, the social wage
of welfare, the growth in consumer power, the breaking up of the old

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working-class communities, state intervention, the humanisation of

the system by the managerial revolution and the withering away of
ownership: these have been the agencies of change. Mr Crosland
himself admits that, subjectively, strong class feelings survive:
that, objectively, there are wide gaps in income, power and style of
life. But he takes comfort from the fact that ‘greater equanimity
of class relations does not necessarily lead to a pro-rata diminu-
tion in class consciousness, or even a blurring of class lines’. His
emphasis remains that class distinctions are breaking down, and
will continue to do so with another round of prosperity.

Public and private priorities

In what sense are we prosperous? We spend, as a society, nearly two-

thirds as much on advertising as we spend on education: as much on
packaging as on industrial research. We have undertaken, over the next
two years, a greater expansion programme in the motor-car industry
than ever before (including direct loans from the government to the
motor firms) – although the roads are choked, and the accident rate for
pedestrians higher than it has ever been. For the purposes of prestige,
it is true, we have driven one or two ‘clearways’ across fields: other than
that the road programme is a series of stupid squiggles on a map. In the
centres of cities the private developers and land speculators throw up one
office slab after another: typists and clerks are herded into these dense,
overcrowded urban canyons – yet there has been only one new hospital
built since the war. The out-patients departments, the waiting-rooms,
the mental hospitals, are often squalid and ill equipped: many railway
waiting rooms and labour exchanges are still peeling and dismal.
This is the age, we are told, of the ‘teenage revolution’. Very well.
In 1944, the McNair Committee recommended that the permanent
body of trained youth leaders ought to be between 5000 and 6000,
with an intake of 300 per year: recent surveys show that in 1956
the total was closer to 1000, and the Labour Party Report on The
Younger Generation suggests that, by 1959, it had declined to 700.
Public expenditure on the Youth Service has never passed beyond
the £3,000,000 mark.
Yet, with a flick of the wrist at the last Budget, the Chancellor
turned back £63,000,000 to industry by way of cuts in the income

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tax rate: that is a sum which exceeds, by about £13,000,000, the total
spent on all building projects for primary and secondary education in
the same year. The Financial Times reported (12 December 1958) that
Sir Frank Spriggs had been paid £75,000 in compensation for loss of
office as a managing director of the Hawker-Siddeley Group: that sum
is about equal to the annual national budget of the Workers’ Educa-
tional Association. In their essays in Conviction, Peter Townsend and
Brian Abel-Smith documented the ‘double standards’ which prevail
in welfare throughout the ‘welfare state’. These contrasts are not
incidental: they run right through the economy. They are almost the
defining principles of the welfare state in its mid-century form.
Even when we look at these contrasts, we find ourselves often
imprisoned within the existing framework. We rarely throw
ourselves beyond the limits of what exists, and ask questions (now
labelled ‘Utopian’) about what could exist. If we find an old people’s
home where there are carpets on the floor, we think – ‘Good: this
is what it should be like’. But is it? Suppose we stopped and asked:
‘Is this good enough: is that what old age is like for the thousands
in our institutions?’ ‘Why are they still so miserably furnished, so
institutional, in the bad sense?’ And, beyond the proportion of the
population who are genuinely on the poverty line – the 5 million
retirement pensioners, the 500,000 widows on special benefit, the
250,000 receiving industrial injuries and disablement allowances,
the 2 million men and women dependent on unemployment benefit
– what about the average skilled working-class family? Where is
the expansion in community provision here to match the surge in
consumer goods? The play centres for the kids, the new youth clubs
(not the hastily converted schoolroom with desks) for the teenagers,
the crèches for the children of the increasing number of working
mothers, the new ante-natal centres and baby clinics, the special
schools for the mentally and physically disabled? Where is the great
advance in the period of post-war prosperity?
The expansion has not come. In the midst of plenty, the government
has convinced us that ‘we simply cannot afford’ many of these things.
Perhaps we are moving towards prosperity in these fields? But
that is not true either. The recipient is paying more for health and
dental care, for school meals and spectacles – not less. The number
of council-built dwellings has fallen from 244,916 at the peak period
(1953) to 143,283 (in 1958). Yet in 1956, the LCC were obliged to

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 THE SUPPLY OF DEMAND 51

tell the 165,000 families on its waiting list (53,000 of whom were in
the urgent’ A’ category) that only 2000 would be rehoused by 1959
(Labour Research, March 1959). At the same time, as a result of the
government withdrawal of subsidies and the increase in the interest
rates to municipal authorities, the cost of a £2000 council house is
now £7,148, of which £5,148 is in interest repayments over sixty years
(as of July 1959). This is another way of saying that an extra £1 a week
has been added to the rent of a new council house.
As a result of the Block Grant system, expenditure on local health
services will rise by only 3.6 per cent in 1960 (as compared with an
average rise of 7 per cent between 1950 and 1959). Local expenditure on
child care will rise by only 1.8 per cent – a rate which will be more than
offset by the rise in prices over the same period. Any expenditure by local
councils above these estimates will have to come from the ratepayers.
The government has cut back public transport and extended
the modernisation period of the railways. But the government has
allowed (and helped) the motor manufacturers to expand, and
protected privately owned road transport. Yet we cannot ‘afford’ to
pay railwaymen a living wage. It is coal which has subsidised private
industry (by selling fuel at absurdly low prices to manufacturers) and
steel which has failed the nation (by failing to expand and keeping
the economy in short supply):1 yet the pits are closing in many areas,
the NUM is signing redundancy agreements, and the profits of the
steel companies continue to expand. What are these absurd priorities
to which we appear, in spite of ourselves, to be harnessed? How can
we say, on the one hand, that there are so many things ‘which we
cannot afford’, and yet assert that ‘we have never had it so good’? It
does not make sense.
Yet Mr Crosland and Mr Gaitskell seem to accept, with little
qualification, the Conservative claim that ‘Tory Freedom Works!’
(Works for whom?) If it does work, then Mr Gaitskell should accept, as
well, the current apathy of the electorate. If the situation is good, the
trends healthy, the auguries auspicious, then ‘apathy’ is no problem,
and there is very little left for the Labour Party to do. We should
therefore extend a warm welcome to apathy – the outward and visible
sign of an inward spiritual and material grace. The only problem, as
Tory freedom wipes out one black spot after another, will be to get
the electorate to vote at all. Th ink of Mr Macmillan and Mr Amory,
going on and on in the House, lacerated each week by Bernard Levin

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52 selected politicaL WRITINGS

in the Spectator, unable to get back to their directorships, unable to

move on the overcrowded roads, as the electorate busily travels from
one seaside pier to the next!

Faults in the structure

Of course, the problems sketched above are not simply capitalism’s

‘little local difficulties’. They are central to the system itself: they are
structural faults and weaknesses which have survived the managerial
and corporate ‘revolution’ in capitalism, and come out on the other
side, unresolved. They remain, because the new managers who shape
and balance the policies of the large firms, the heirs and beneficiaries of
‘stability’ and ‘expansion’ and ‘growth’, are the subalterns and NCOs
of the system of private appropriation and accumulation. They have
altered the techniques of the capitalist system: they have not changed
its function.
If the new capitalists do not ‘own’ it all personally, as the nine-
teenth-century captains of industry did, it is because the size of the
territory is now too great. Even a small corner of an industrial empire
like Unilever is enough to bring enormous wealth (through capital
gains as much as dividends) to the new large shareholder. The most
lucrative source of wealth in the economy is industrial property: and,
in spite of the development of management, the owners of large pieces
of corporate property are still in control of the policies of the firm.2
They are the generals of the system, relying on the efficiency and devo-
tion of the managers, who serve it also, share in its benefits and reap
rewards through salaries and perks on the firm. And the system is still
driven by the need – over longer periods, it is true, but taking one year
with another – to generate as much surplus wealth as it can. Regardless
of the personal feelings of the new capitalists and their lieutenants, the
system, moved by profit, establishes the priorities: and the priorities
give rise to the myths.
And so the ritual of prosperity begins to unfold in quite new ways.
To explain the power of these myths we need to understand – not why
we have so much, but why we feel satisfied with what we have. We have
only to take a slightly different position from Mr Crosland’s – as Mr
Strachey does in Contemporary Capitalism – to come up with a signifi-
cantly different picture of what is going on in the economy: the growth

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 THE SUPPLY OF DEMAND 53

of the large corporations; the stability of the managerial and propertied

classes, whose social power is now equidistant with any of the prov-
inces of the market which they command; the increasing obsolescence
of the market in conditions of oligopolistic competition; the concentra-
tion of power; the two or three commanding giants in each sector,
fixing prices, quietly salting away to reserves, watching the needle of
capital gains shudder and leap, deciding the annual pay-off to the scat-
tered small shareholders, carving up, amalgamating, buying out,
taking over.3 Here is ‘last stage capitalism’, with reluctant Labour
pitted against the power of corporate Capital: the sand in the machine,
the Past in front of the Future of Socialism.
It is capitalism in stalemate with which we are dealing: inflation
without balanced growth, investment sprees (1954-55) followed by
widespread industrial stagnation (1956-58).4 It is also a capitalism of
startling contrasts: the Shell tower watching you from the South Bank
and the empty space where the National Theatre ought (surely by
now!) to be: the white settlers of capitalism in the Surrey hills and the
worried ‘savages’ of Preston and South Shields: the new look of
industry at Dagenham and the old feel of the coal face at Barnsley:
North and South. Pockets of prosperity, where the consumer goods
industries have blossomed: patches of stagnation in Lancashire, where
the last threads of the cotton industry are spinning out. If some pits
are closing, it is not because we have finally admitted that coal mining
is an inhuman form of labour in an age of technological advance; but
because the miners are to be allowed to bear the brunt of the unplanned
advance of other industries (oil and atomic energy), and we cannot yet
plan the use of fuel or cope with the major human readjustments
which would be created by planned change on this scale.
The car industry in the Midlands is booming: but the motor firms
can scarcely get their lorries through to the ports, because the roads
are crowded, and the harbours full and unreconstructed; the ship-
building industry is in semi-stagnation, and the railway system is
obsolete, with its modernisation plans in cold storage. Certainly there
is prosperity: but we are often so mesmerised by it that we cannot get
far enough away to take an overall look – a look at the unplanned
chaos of it all, and the false targets to which we subscribe.
Contemporary capitalism has two distinct faces, but they belong
to the same coin. In the economic sphere, where the economy has
life, capitalism goes ahead (the car and consumer goods industries),

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leaving behind the whole question of balanced growth (enough

steel? modern railways? decent roads?) and the human needs which
stem from that advance (what do the miners do now?). In the social
sphere, we suffer public squalor (in welfare, education, urban devel-
opment and so on) for the sake of private splendour (the new TV set,
the washing machine, the small car): whereas the real question
should be how we can manage as a society to provide every house-
wife with a washing machine without at the same time starving the
children of a decent education; how we can provide for everyone
adequate transport for living and for leisure without having the chil-
dren or the old folk run down on the narrow streets.
Capitalism – even where it is ‘delivering the goods’ – appears unable
to make the transition from one century to another human or bear-
able. Industrial technology, automation and so on, under a system of
unplanned private enterprise, are going to take the same toll from
society – in terms of misery, unemployment, the interruption of
secure patterns of life, the loss of skills – as the first industrial revolu-
tion did. In terms of human and social priorities, we are no further
forward. The public sector lives in retirement, like a gentlewoman in
‘straitened circumstances’ to whom the ‘affluent’ uncle sends the
occasional grudging cheque. The society is not going to pass smoothly
into a genuine, balanced and lasting prosperity for all: it is going to
jerk, spasmodically, towards prosperity for some – the devils of ‘effi-
ciency’ and profit, all the time, lopping off the hindmost.

The limits of reform

Even if we allow for Mr Strachey’s bleak optimisms – the ‘counter-

vailing’ power of the unions and the inter vention of the state, he
suggests, will keep the welfare state intact and employment ‘full’ – we
are still left with an economy which, at best, is able to hold things
together, its back to the wall. The idea of a labour movement strong
enough to make demands, to set the standards, to pitch forward the
aspirations of a new skilled working class, to re-order the priorities,
is (has to be) absent from his picture. It is capitalism which sets the
priorities: and the priorities accurately reflect the inner contradictions
of capitalism itself: the contradiction between production for profit
and production for use. From Mr Strachey’s point of view, a strong

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 THE SUPPLY OF DEMAND 55

labour movement may prevent the development of classic crises of

production such as we had in the past: but can it force capitalism
to tackle crisis in its new form – inflation and recession? Labour can
perform a defensive role in the economy – and increasingly appears to
do so, as simply one more vested interest: it cannot go ahead to set new
priorities for the community. The contradiction between production
for use and production for profit remains.
In the post-1950 period, that contradiction has been resolved in
favour of profit. After the Butskell honey moon, the mixed economy
has unmixed itself, and the private sector has once again taken the
lead. And now, as profits in some sectors drive the economy forward,
the contradictions unfold into politics and popular mythology: a
revival of confidence in the business class, the spread of the busi-
ness ethos in the shadow of the large firms, and three successive
Tory victories. Capitalism has created a new context of social power.
Can Mr Strachey’s ‘countervailing power of Labour’ graft public
and human priorities on to a profit-dominated system of production?
There are no signs that this is happening. Labour itself has capitu-
lated before some of the powerful myths of the system. Suppose that
we wanted to assert that education was more important than adver-
tising – indeed, that the £400,000,000 which is spent on advertising
undermines the very educational purposes for which we spend
£670,000,000 – how would we go about it? Haven’t we been told
that ‘advertising has helped to raise our standard of living and
brought us the good things of life’? Can we touch advertising, which,
by creating wants, keeps the economy ticking over, without
endangering the economy itself?
If we tax the rich more, we shall damage the circuit of energy –
accumulation, profits and investment – which keeps the wheels of
capitalism turning: yet if we tax them less, we shall have to cut back
the welfare state. If we tried to dismantle our armoury of dangerous
weapons – on the grounds that £1,514,000,000 is too much to spend
on a nuclear defence policy which provides no defence – we would
induce a serious disequilibrium in our whole economy: yet if we
continue to make them, we shall increase the probability that they
will be used.
Suppose that we were to decide to assist the ‘underdeveloped’
countries in a serious way. We should be obliged to guarantee, over
long periods, stable markets for their primary products with period-

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ical review of prices: but then we should have to plan industry in a

more rational way.5 ‘We should also have to prevent capital from
seeking, as it has done over the last decade, its ‘natural’ and ‘quick’
return on profits: we should have to insist that capital should be
available at low rates of interest and over long periods. We should
have to prevent private capital flowing, as it has done, to the already
developing countries (Australia, Canada, South Africa), and direct it
to the needy areas (India, Malaya, Central Africa, Burma and
Ceylon). But that would be to strike at the heart of capitalism itself.
Labour, brought to these frontiers of control after 1945, lost its
nerve and turned back without trying to cross. Since then, it has been
obliged to work within the framework, accepting the capitalist hier-
archy of priorities as ‘given’, learning to put up with the imbalance
and jerkiness of the economy, with a society of startling contrasts.
In place of its own order of priorities, Labour has followed along the
trail which consumer capitalism opened up, making do as it went
along. So that today, it is Labour – trapped into a defensive posture
– which has to try to make the system work, careful not to ask for
too much, nodding when the newspapers say that ‘taxation is too
high’ – even to the point of trying to fight an election on this plat-
form! The vision of community responsibility and common
ownership has been abandoned. The new aspirations of a skilled
working class have been diverted into the satisfaction of personal
wants: they have never been given social or political urgency. The
‘dream’ is broken up. As Mr Gaitskell said, in his speech to the
Blackpool Conference:

We have long ago come to accept, we know very well, for the foresee-
able future, at least in some form, a mixed economy; in which case,
if this is our view – as I believe it to be of 90 per cent of the Party
– had we better not say so instead of going out of the way to court
misrepresentation?

The ‘foreseeable future’ is a long, long vista. So far as the Labour Party
is concerned, it might as well get used to the idea of living inside capi-
talism for ever.
Is it any wonder that the whole movement of politics has become
increasingly sluggish, shuttling between half-believed platitudes and
contrasting ‘images’? It is because deep down we know the true state

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 THE SUPPLY OF DEMAND 57

of the nation, but cannot see a political way forward, that we have
drifted into an acceptance of the disquieting mythologies of pros-
perity. It is because this stalemate has been lost sight of in the
‘revolution in consumer goods’, that the thing is tolerable at all – that
‘breakthrough’ in the middle of ‘this roaring decade’ about which the
Economist, Mr Crosland, Mr Gaitskell and Mr Macmillan all rejoice
to concur.

Consumer versus taxpayer

At the heart of the rituals of affluence lies the ‘consumer’. He is the

folk-hero of corporate capitalism, and the god in the works. A bland,
half-thing of a man, peering nervously at the frontiers of consumption
and taste. That he makes with his skill, masters the machine with his
craft, learns and adapts to the applied techniques of science, manages
with his mind, experiences with his senses, and suffers with the rest
of us, is incidental to the routines of consumer capitalism. He buys:
he has the feel of the packaged goods: his choices are ‘free’. Before the
bargain counter, we are all equal.
Of course, he is not free. If he were, capitalism would not spend
£400,000,000 a year persuading him to buy, jogging his spending
arm, and another £400,000,000 wrapping it all up with ‘impact’
and ‘sales appeal’, employing the salesmen and the ad-men, greasing
the palm of the hard hand behind the soft sell. If the consumer
were free, an irrational phrase like ‘whiter than white’ would never
have entered our vocabulary. If he were all-powerful, the corpora-
tions could not fi x and maintain prices behind his back. If he were
sovereign, there would be one usable detergent on the market, not
fifteen with (almost) the same ingredients.
But the primacy of the consumer is supported in several other
significant ways. In the first place, the very structure of the mixed
economy counterposes the private possession of consumer goods to
the public services of welfare and community spending. You cannot
go shopping for a better education (unless to the public schools) or a
better hospital, or an adequate transport system. You cannot choose
– via the market – to spend less on advertising and more on hospitals,
to delay the office block in the centre for the sake of the council
housing estate round the corner. These ‘social’ decisions are fi xed

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elsewhere, beyond the reach of the ‘consumer’. They have been taken
right away from the direct intervention and control of the ordinary
citizen, into those secluded places where the market in fact operates:
in the boardroom and the bank manager’s suite of offices. Community
services do not appear to belong to the same category – to come from
the same source, to be social capital in the same sense, to be governed
by targets publicly established. Eventually the consumer does begin
to feel ‘free’ to decide about detergents in a way in which he is not
‘free’ to decide the education of his children. Education, health,
welfare, housing and so on, therefore, assume the status of ‘unneces-
sary and wasteful spending’.
What is more, we begin to feel that our interests as ‘consumers’, as
‘taxpayers’, are being jeopardised by too much public spending; we
start to reckon the cost of every new school in terms of the number of
TV sets of which it has deprived us: even though, in another capacity
(it sometimes seems, in another life) we too shall need medical care,
and our children will go to the schools, and we shall live in the
council house, and we shall travel on public transport. Indeed, when
people do encounter public squalor they feel immediately the human
irritations of the system, the absurdity of the priorities, without quite
knowing who is to blame, or in what direction to project their frus-
tration, their complaints. Hence the paradox: it is often the man who
is the most aggressive defender of his status as a consumer who is
most bitter about the state of the public services. ‘The trains are late!
The tubes are full!’ ‘They’ are getting at us again … (as indeed they
are: but do we see it?). As the vision of a socialist community
disappeared, as cheeseparing became the hallmark of public services
in the last days of Labour and the early years of Tory rule, the labour
movement began to lose its sense of how working people could (and
had to) provide for themselves, as a community. The society was
forced, by the very driving pressure from the consumer industries
themselves, as they began to be the providers of life and the givers of
good things, to think of prosperity almost entirely in terms of the
things which it could purchase, possess, and enjoy as private indi-
viduals. We had entered, as separate consumers, directly into the
mythology of prosperity. ‘Prosperity’ had become much more a ques-
tion of how people could be made to see themselves (in terms of their
generalised feelings about how things worked) and much less a solid
affair of genuine wealth and well-being.

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 THE SUPPLY OF DEMAND 59

In that sense, consumer capitalism did genuinely – about the

middle of the roaring fifties – break through some kind of sound
barrier in public consciousness. Not, as has been supposed, into the
‘American’ pattern (or what we imagine it to be like: Galbraith gives
quite a different picture in The Affluent Society), where working
people genuinely began to savour the joys of personal display and
status through the possession of goods; but rather, into a more muted,
more confusing pattern, where we defined our interests as human
beings in terms of the things we might – or others might – conceiv-
ably possess, although we did not seem to have very many of them
yet. And for those people who were genuinely worried about the vast
tracts of our life which were being seriously neglected, there was also
the comforting subsidiary myth, that we had only to let prosperity
take its course. That, in the next wave, capitalism would suddenly
begin to sweep the streets, build working-class flats, reform the
secondary modern nightmares, limit the growth of office blocks, of
its own sweet accord.6 Indeed, this is a view still popularly held and
successfully put about. It too is part of the religion of the rise of the
consumer goods industries.
The drive of the consumer goods industries, coupled with the
mythologies of affluence, corrupted our sense of the usefulness of
things. The second-hand car, the washing machine or the telly did
not become ‘status symbols’ in the American sense – providing the
working class with the insignias of social position, and smoothing
out the way into the middle class. But they acquired, in conscious-
ness, a social importance out of all proportion to their use, or our
needs. The ‘sovereign consumer’ blotted out the man who was also a
father, a lorry driver, a pedestrian, a pensioner, a victim in a car crash
wanting urgent attention at the out-patient’s, a miner whose pit is to
be closed, a family man on the ‘short list’ for a council flat, a near-
sighted bank clerk, an underpaid teacher with a mother-in-law to
keep, or a building worker with bad teeth. The consumer goods
industry did not, to any significant extent, give us the goods: instead,
it gave us a definition of the Good Life.
And all this, as the welfare state began to shrink in influence (also
in the roaring fifties) and the umbrella of the firm began to open out
in its place. It is one of the paradoxes of prosperity that the very
‘humanisation’ of capitalism and the firm, of which Crosland and
others speak so glowingly, is one of the root causes of the decline in

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community responsibility in the last decade. It may be that ICI is a

good firm to work for. But this process places a limit to our social
thinking. The responsibility of the firm – no matter how well
discharged – ends at the frontier of the firm. There are many things
which the most humane private corporation cannot do. It can look
after its own workers, but only partly and paternalistically – setting
them off as favoured citizens against their less well-off fellows. The
welfare-minded firm can ‘afford’ substantial grants to public schools
and private schemes for the education of managerial children: what it
cannot do is to reduce the average size of the classes from forty to
thirty for all children. That is because ‘looking after its own’ may well
be one of the firm’s priorities: giving managerial children an elite
education, or increasing the science-training capacity of the public
schools is something from which, in the short run, the corporation
can expect to benefit directly. Beyond that frontier, the most respon-
sible firm (to its employees) becomes irresponsible (when seen from the
point of view of the community).
Gradually, throughout the 1950s, these barriers to social thinking
have become higher, the citadel of private responses and private inter-
ests and tastes more and more impregnable. As much as anything, this
was due to the fact that the Labour Party had ceased to be alive, in any
active sense, to the human and revolutionary priorities which a proper
understanding of the words ‘welfare’ and ‘community’ would have
given. For sooner or later, if the party had understood why these things
were the essence of socialism, what had to be done to get the priorities
right, they would have had to confront directly the revival of capitalism
and the refurbishing of capitalist ideology and culture. This would have
brought us back to common ownership, to the participation of indi-
viduals in determining the priorities of the society and how they work
out, to control over our economic and social environment. Instead of
which ‘community responsibility’ and ‘welfare’ and ‘common owner-
ship’ have become the current platitudes of political thinking: they
have been reduced to the status of careful accounting and social admin-
istration, forced to subscribe to the criterion of economic ‘efficiency’.
There has not been, so far, a thrusting, confident celebration of the
new capitalism on the part of the majority of people in this country.
There has been, rather, a slow, sullen, suspicious acquiescence in a
future in which no one quite believed – a mood of cautious watchful-
ness. It is one of the attitudes which the merchants of ‘prosperity’

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cannot forgive the British working class. ‘Don’t they know when they
are well off ?’ ‘Don’t they know they haven’t had it so good?’ But the
majority of working people maintained a silence of disbelief.’ All that
good? Well. In a prosperity state, could the old age pensioners live on
£3 a week? In the leisure age, could the unions still be reluctant to
fight for the 40-hour week? Occasionally, a specific case gives them a
whiff of capitalism at work, a look in at the back-stairs deals, the
private washing of bonds, the capital gains, the conferences at the
Bank of England, the cryptic telegrams to Hong Kong, the ‘working
parties’ on the grouse-moors in Scotland, night and day, the tasks of
capitalism being attended to. One of the things which Mr Macmillan
will never understand about working people in Britain is that they are
still just that bit defensive when they say, ‘I’m all right Jack’.

Producing the consumer

I do not think of my relatives, friends, neighbours, colleagues as

masses; we none of us can or do. The masses are always the others,
whom we don’t know, and can’t know.

Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, p299

Nevertheless, in ‘consumer capitalism’, communication increasingly

takes the form of the persuasive manipulation of one (unknown)
group by another.

There are, in fact, no masses, there are only ways of seeing people as
masses … The fact is, surely, that a way of seeing other people which
has become characteristic of our kind of society has been capital-
ised for the purposes of political or cultural exploitation. What we
see, naturally, is other people, many others, people unknown to us.
In practice, we mass them and interpret them according to some
convenient formula.

Culture and Society, p300

Think of the consumer again, the folk-figure of the tale. Seen as such.
Thought of as such, and catered for. Restricted within a certain frame-

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work to the circle of his private grudges and dreams, wishes, longings,
his stifled aspirations, his desire to get on a little, to know a little. Of
course, people are not like that at all. But the relationship between the
‘consumer’ and the ‘provider of all good things’, the universal bread-
basket, is essentially a limiting, distorting one, reducing the individual
from a complex and contradictory human being to the sum of his
private urges and aggressions. And, where this ‘consumer’ relationship
obtains, the different forms of social communication are increas-
ingly closed to public and social appeals of any kind; more dependent
upon persuasive formulations (to counter the ‘sales resistance’ of the
customer); less and less open to reasoned thinking and stubborn criti-
cism (what is the reasoning behind ‘whiter than white?’); and – for
that very reason – less and less a rational form of discourse at all
(advertising is a debased art of this kind of society – half way between
degraded salesmanship and bastard poetry).
People, then, have to be massed in some way to become ‘available’.
‘The masses’. ‘Readers’. ‘Viewers’. ‘The Floating Vote’. ‘Four-and-a-half
homes out of every five in the country have …’ ‘Six million house-
wives!’ ‘Seven million teenagers!’ And so on. The relationship is not a
static, but a moving one – moving towards persuasion. Audiences are
‘won’, readers ‘captured’, the electorate ‘convinced’, the floating vote
‘brought round to our way of thinking’, teenagers ‘civilised’. The cate-
gories, like animated packages, begin to move. The Labour Party gives
up on policy and begins to concentrate on its ‘image’. Mr Macmillan,
explaining away the Devlin Report, has at least (cold comfort) ‘a
pleasing television personality’.7 The content of the thing falls away:
the formal, impersonal approach is everything. It is the form of Michael
Foot’s radicalism, the shape and sound of Gilbert Harding’s institu-
tionalised bellyache that get us – not what they are radical or
bellyaching about. (Mr Harding is on about his dyspepsia again.) So
that even politics ceases to be the open clash of opposing views and
interests, smoothed down into a depressing grey of accommodating
half-agreements and washed by the ‘charm of politics’ itself. At such a
time the ‘floating vote’ holds the pass between the political parties and
the seat of government only because we are living through the age of
floating politicians.
This debased art of persuasion also makes use of ‘projection’ of the
marketable side of our character – our ‘personality’. The key concepts
are ‘impact’ and ‘drive’ and ‘the hard sell’. Television reaches through

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the screen into the homes of millions … ‘You can become the woman
in the frame … Take True Romances into your life’. Your life. You. It is
almost as if the screen were already almost two-way, as if, behind a
thin film, the persuader could almost see you folks out there, with
your little wishes in your little homes beside your little fires. He is
willing to come in and get you … On the other hand, you might just
like to step outside and meet him!
When we speak of ‘communications’ in a consumer society, we
have to think less of how we speak to one another, and more of how
other people speak at us. This process is by no means limited to adver-
tising. Persuasion is not simply persuasion to spend: it is often, also,
invitations to live – in an odd, limited sort of way. And here we are on
different ground. Think how rapidly the language of advertising breaks
into the language of common speech (the language with which we
communicate, among other things, pleasure, pain, love and distress).
Where does the advertising copy end and the ‘Woman’s Column’
begin? What is the frontier between the ‘Cunard way of life’ advert,
and the ‘exclusive’ interview, or the glamorised, quick-Cook’s-tour of
the pick of the high spots with Group-Captain Townsend? Life begins
to fade into the picture … In these constantly circulating images and
suggestions, we are beginning to indulge in a secular dream-life: a
half-life into which we are invited to project, not ourselves, but little
bits of ourselves – mostly that nasty little bit that wants just to see how
other people get on and up. Not much more, but that is enough.
‘Living in the picture’ is never possible, for the gap between fantasy
and life is too sharp. But ‘living near the picture’ becomes a habit
which makes constant calls on the attention and emotions.
The culture, in its many forms, throws out perpetually a bewil-
dering plethora of suggestions and invitations – ‘Get On, Get Up, Get
Out, Climb In, Look at That, Feel Sorry! Feel Tempted? Come over
here where it’s warm …’. The victim is dazzled by a maze of popular
distractions, just close enough to life to be ‘real’, just enough out of
reach to be ‘far out’. But where does the circle begin and end? Who
does what to whom? Who is responsible? We are not to blame, says
Unilever, we are just protecting our interests: besides we are giving
people what they want. We are not to blame, says the Daily Mirror,
our job is to run a newspaper: besides aren’t we giving the people what
they want? THIS IS A DEMOCRACY. ‘Success for us’, writes Mr
Cecil King of the Mirror and Sunday Pictorial, ‘involves the closest

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contact with our readers and a sensitivity to atmosphere as it changes’.

What follows, he goes on, arises ‘from the appetite of the reader, not
from any lack of virtue on the part of the proprietor’.

The home-centred society

The media of information are constantly using up the direct senti-

ments and emotions of people, projecting into our lives normative and
desirable values, often with a commercial twist. And even when these
attitudes are rejected in their more blatant forms, they often leave a
scatter of doubts in their trail – with important political results. It
is true that the swing away from Labour in the last election, serious
though it was as part of a continuing trend, was not a landslide,
reflecting a major and irreversible social trend. On the other hand,
the celebration of ‘prosperity’ and capitalism has only just begun: and
Labour shows no signs of comprehending exactly what is taking place,
and appears to lack the will to meet the challenge. If that trend does
develop, ‘prosperity’ will have gathered, by 1964, a head of steam that
will be capable of blowing Mr Gaitskell and his band of men right
through into the wild blue yonder. That is because, in the absence of
a real political alternative, the dissenting Labour vote could become a
reckless, burn-the-controls, all-out-for-Jack rout, capable of sustaining
a permanent Tory majority.
Why? Because the straight play for ambition and status which the
press and the mass media make reflects certain real elements in the
social pattern of post-war Britain. This reality, which the media distort,
is less a matter of consumer goods than we think, and more a matter
of our social thinking, our attitude towards ourselves and our society.
The working-class teenage generation which has an annual spending
power today of £900,000,000 has not become middle-class: they dress
differently, they are more sophisticated and casual – but they are still
resolutely, unchallengeably ‘working-class’. Why should that be so?
Isn’t it because they are still, as a social group, wage-earners rather
than salary-drawers? Their social consciousness still affected by the
place of work (though less so than before), where the relationship
between employer and employee remains a stubborn fact of life? They
have used their independence to become less conformist in an adult
sense, less servile to authority, liking to be petted and pushed and fed

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and fixed less rather than more? They would like to get on: money
assumes a central place in their thinking: the radiogram or the motor-
cycle is as important a key in their lives as the motor-car or the telly
has become in the working-class home. But few of them identify them-
selves with middle-class youngsters of the same age, or share their
tastes, or talk in the same way, or feel they have access to the same
ends of our culture. Social attitudes in a class-stratified culture are
more firmly placed, and cannot be blurred simply by a plethora of
‘good things’. Similarly, the new skilled working class in the new town
is still a working class. The new house may absorb more time and
energy, holidays may be more frequent, more regular, take the family
farther afield: but the central pattern of life holds together through
these major changes in income and environment.
It seems ridiculous, then, to speak of the working class as if it was
becoming ‘bourgeois’, without qualifying that judgment. But the
qualifications are substantial, and lead us in a different direction.
If it is true that the skilled worker is becoming part of what Mark
Abrams recently called ‘The Home-centred Society’, the loss is not a
loss of a good man ‘to the other side’, but a loss in the quality of the
new working-class community itself. A pride in the home is a just and
proper human value, and one, incidentally, central to working-class
culture: but a home-centred society will be one driven in upon itself to
a dangerous degree, and involving a general loss to the community life
as a whole. It depends upon the emphasis, and we must be careful how
we reckon up gain and loss in this process. The working-class ‘commu-
nity’ was a warm, friendly place, familiar, with concrete relationships
between the home and the neighbourhood: it was also, often, a clut-
tered, cramped, inconvenient slum, without light or change, a limiting
and narrowing place in which to bring up one’s children. There have
been gains as well as losses.
The urgent question – cultural in form but, ultimately, political in
implication – is whether the values and virtues of the old communi-
ties can be transposed into the new physical environments. The
prospects are, rather, that, as the sharper divisions of class disappear,
the society will grade itself out into a series of status groups, involving
the loss of the old community sense without anything more satisfying
or rewarding to take its place. And where these changes are going
through, what should be taking our attention is not the smooth shift
to middle-class attitudes, but the coarsening and loss of working-

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class values when faced with the appeals to individualism and

selfishness of a revived, status-conscious capitalism. What is there is
not ‘the distinct symptoms even of a middle-class psychology’ – but
a loss of any social psychology at all – any coherent picture of where
people are and so what values they can affirm: a crisis in the psychology
of the working class itself, and therefore, in extension of that, a crisis
in the labour movement.

The politics of life

It is important to get this right, because this is the changing social

background to politics today. It is also important because there has
always been a deep, if complex, relationship between working-class
attitudes and the conscious movement towards socialism. The central
subjective distinction between the two ‘interests’ in society has been
the distinction, beginning in experience and extending into political
action, between the working-class attitude to sharing and community,
and the bourgeois attitude to competition: the one fed into and gave
meaning to such political concepts as co-operation and common
ownership: the other gave rise to the veneration of the market, indi-
vidualism and ‘equality of opportunity’.
In so far, then, as the ‘ladders of success’ and the notion of ‘getting
on’ in its bourgeois form do reach into working-class life, and we use
education and other social processes to clamber over one another, so
the ‘springs of action’ in the working-class communities, new or old,
are weakened. If education is simply, as The Sunday Times puts it, a
series of ‘Ladders Of Opportunity’, then we shall have yielded up one
of our central values – the concept that education is to enlarge our
capacities as people – and taken over a more meretricious attitude
towards education, as a process for personal advancement, another
form of status-striving.
It has always been politics in this largest sense, which was able to
convert ‘ways of life’ into forms of social living. In this sense, the
labour movement – for all its weaknesses – has in the past stood in
place of the finest of these attitudes, caught up and carried through all
that was best in the worst of the working-class communities, giving
‘the best in all of us’ a consciously worked-out vision of how the society
as a whole could be better, and what we would have to do to make it

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so. In that sense, socialism has always been a vision which began in
experience, and politics has been the form of the link between the two.

The real business of Socialists is to impress on the workers the fact

that they are a class, whereas they ought to be Society.

William Morris, Commonweal, July 1885

Once again, as the society adjusts to changing, shaping forces, the

task for socialism is to take up, in a concrete way, and give political
expression to the ‘best that is in us’. In that sense, the changes in
working-class life and attitudes are gains, not losses, in the main: and
where there has been loss, in quality, in direction, in emphasis, the
task of the labour movement is to challenge and confront at the source
the substitutes and blandishment which we are offered. The labour
movement ought to be open now to the expanding horizons which
working people have fought for by their own struggle, speaking in the
name of those changes, standing in their place. But instead what we
have is this:

In short, the changing character of labour, full employment, new

housing, the new way of life based on the telly, the fridge, the car and
the glossy magazines – all have their effect on our political strength.

Mr Gaitskell, Blackpool Conference

The way of life based on the telly and the glossy magazines? Life? Has
the labour movement, through the fire and brimstone of the last fifty
years, to lie down and die before the glossy magazines? Has Labour no
sense of the capacities, the potential of a society, more various, more
skilled, more literate, less cramped and confined, less beaten down
and frustrated? So that now, we are going to fade away in front of the
telly and the fridge?
What we have before us in Mr Gaitskell’s speech is nothing short of
a tragic failure in political imagination. For without the movement of
politics to give the new aspirations of the new groups in society direc-
tion and clarity, the danger is that the society, unable to cross the
social barriers raised before it by capitalism, will harden into a medi-
ocre meritocracy. Gradually, the elites will draw more and more from

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within their own ranks: the ways to the top will sift and separate us
according to our talents, helping to develop the acquisitive, self-
aggrandising instincts, shutting off the generosities of our culture, our
social responses to life. The whole notion of community responsibility
one for another could, with another round of this kind of prosperity,
disappear from politics as a force. We should be left, then, with
competing political firms, shuffling out the same goods, expending
vast sums of money to achieve what the detergent manufacturers call
‘marginal differentiation in the product’. That is not where we are: but
it is certainly where we are going.

Only in projecting a new kind of community, a new kind of social

consciousness, can the Labour Party offer anything distinctive and
positive. It may take a long time, and some may be impatient for
power and therefore restive. But, short of ruin or folly, this is the
only way in which the Labour Party can now ever win, and it is not
after all anything out of the tradition that is being offered: Labour
came into existence, not as an alternative party to run this society,
but as a means of making a different society. Experience teaches,
and we may have to wait some time, though the present balance is in
fact quite delicate and could easily be disturbed. But, short or long,
the use of the future is evident: basic analysis, basic education, basic
democratic organisation.8

The only question is whether we can do it in time.

Notes
1. See John Hughes, ‘Steel Nationalisation and Political Power’, New
Reasoner, 1958.
2. See K. Alexander, ‘Power at the base’, in E.P. Thompson (ed), Out of
Apathy [the book in which this essay also first appeared]; see also ‘The
Insiders: Michael Barratt Brown on “The Controllers”’, in ULR 5, 6, 7;
and Peter Shore’s ‘Room at the Top’ in Conviction.
3. John Strachey Contemporary Capitalism, Gollancz 1956.
4. See K. Alexander and J. Hughes, A Socialist Wages Plan, New Left Booklet
1959, Chaps. 1 and 2.
5. See Peter Worsley, ‘Outside the whale’, also in E.P. Thompson (ed), Out
of Apathy.
6. Secondary-modern schools were the schools attended by students (the

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 THE SUPPLY OF DEMAND 69

great majority) who had not passed the selection test for grammar schools
(the ‘11-plus’ examination). These schools were less well funded than the
grammar schools and students attending them were regarded as ‘not
academic’.
7. The Devlin Commission was set up by the Macmillan government to
inquire into events in Nyasaland (now Malawi) in 1958, after heavy
repression by the colonial authorities against those opposed to the
imposed federation with Rhodesia. The report was very critical of the
government, and, in turn, the government rejected its findings.
8. Raymond Williams, ‘Class and Voting in Britain’, Monthly Review,
January 1980.

69
 The Cuban crisis: trial run or
steps towards peace?
1963*

as the Cuban crisis the trial-run for a thermonuclear war, or the

W sort of war-by-other-means which leaves the two contestants
more anxious to reach a settlement?1 Now that the crisis has receded
somewhat, and the missiles are dismantled and the bombers on their
way home, that is the most serious question of all – how will the crisis
be read?
In itself, the crisis was disastrous – a naked confrontation of power,
directly involving the nuclear deterrent, which moved twice within
the space of a week towards the unthinkable. Neither the retrospective
nonchalance of Mr Khrushchev nor the coolness of the Kennedy ‘high
command’ is enough to convince one that the crisis was wholly under
control. Yet the most significant thing about Cuba may turn out to be
its timing. For Cuba occurred at a time when basic, profound revisions
of strategy are being undertaken by both the Americans and the Soviet
Union. In the summer, the US formally adopted the ‘counterforce
strategy’; after a protracted debate, we appear to be moving rapidly
now towards the creation of a third nuclear force in Europe.2 The
Soviet Union must soon decide what its response to this rapidly
changing strategy is to be. Meanwhile, Berlin, East Germany and the
India-China dispute hang fire. These decisions will shape the whole
conduct of the Cold War for the next five years. The Cuban shadow
has lengthened over them. Either something yields – or we are heading
for a showdown in the mid-1960s.
The Cuban crisis was not, in essence, a military, but a political
confrontation. As seen from Washington, the Castro regime was
‘unacceptable’ long before the Soviet missiles arrived. Latin America
is, after all, traditionally regarded as the ‘back garden’ of the US. It has
intervened more than once in the last decade to preserve its special

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 THE CUBAN CRISIS 71

interests in the hemisphere. The Cuban revolution was a break in the

chain, a challenge to American prestige in the continent, a potential
threat to ‘stability’. Indeed, ever since the break between Castro and
the US, and months before Castro discovered that he was a Marxist,
or Soviet technicians arrived in Havana, the US has pursued two
objectives in relation to Cuba: (1) to bring down the Castro regime,
and (2) to ward off the threat to the other Latin American states.
The US has pursued this line with considerable consistency. It
survived a change in Administration – the first invasion was planned
under Eisenhower and executed under Kennedy. The construction of
Soviet missile sites was predated by a new Cuban ‘scare’, which began to
develop again at the beginning of the summer. As early as September,
Time magazine suggested that the US ‘could support military action
against Cuba by anti-Communist nations in Latin America … Or –
and it may come to this – it could get the job done itself, once and for
all’. In this it was rehearsing a theme which had already become respect-
able in certain American circles. Precisely the same estimates of
American policy were made to me when I was in Cuba at the beginning
of the year. When we consider why the Cubans should have requested
military assistance from the Soviet Union on such a massive scale, we
are apt to forget the disastrous invasion at the Bay of Pigs, and the stated
American intention to achieve the same end by more effective means.
Soviet missiles added a nuclear dimension to an already simmering
political crisis. American objectives were then reversed: the aims
became (1) to remove the missile threat, and (2) to bring down Castro.
The guarantees against invasion which the US was obliged to give in
order to get the missiles dismantled have therefore only masked the
true nature of the crisis. As Time put it again to the President in the
week following the crisis, ‘as long as he (Castro) is in power, there will
be a Caribbean crisis’. Any real solution to the Cuban affair, then,
must deal with both the short-run and the long-term aspects.
From the Soviet point of view, Cuba is both an opportunity and a
challenge. Until the break between Castro and the US, Soviet pene-
tration of the hemisphere had not made much progress. Cuba provided
a point of entry into Latin America. But it also offered a dramatic
challenge to the strategy of the Khrushchev leadership.
The Chinese ‘line’ on countries like Cuba is that the Communist
powers must take every means, including war if necessary, to extend
their influence, and undermine the position of the ‘imperialist’ powers,

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via the worldwide nationalist revolutions. Support for these movements,

the Chinese argue, should be massive, direct and military. There is no
point supporting ‘bourgeois nationalists’ like Nehru. The strategy is to
forward revolutionary movements in the ‘Chinese’ way – by wars of
liberation. Mr Khrushchev argues, however (and he won his point at the
meeting of eighty-one Communist Parties in Moscow), that the
Communist bloc is now so strong that it can throw its protective nuclear
shield across any country struggling to be free. While the Soviet deter-
rent holds the imperialist challenge at bay, country after country will be
detached from Western influence, and the West will be progressively
undermined. But Mr Khrushchev is also convinced that nuclear war is
too risky to use directly as part of his strategy – though he is willing to
match the United States in the use of it as a political threat.
In Cuba, Mr Khrushchev was forced to show how his strategy
would work in practice. (At the same moment, the Chinese were
giving a cool demonstration of their line in action – the deliberately
limited military probe in the Indian highlands.) If the Americans
invaded Cuba again, as has seemed inevitable since the reversal at the
Bay of Pigs, which policy would be most effective?
Everything turned on Mr Khrushchev’s ability to deliver the goods.
But could he? At this point, the Cuban crisis ‘escalated’ into the
nuclear sphere, and the question of the ‘balance of nuclear power’
between East and West played a vital role.
The fact is that, at the moment, Khrushchev does not have the
goods. No true nuclear ‘balance’ exists. It seems quite certain now that
the Soviet Union adopted, sometime in the late 1950s, the ‘minimum
deterrent’ position – a purely retaliatory nuclear role, based on a limited
strike force, and bolstered by a gigantic space programme. Mr Kennedy,
however, rode to power partly on the crest of the widespread fear that a
‘missile gap’ had been allowed to develop under President Eisenhower.
The missile gap, like the bomber gap before it, turned out to be a manu-
factured illusion. In both delivery and destructive capability, the
Americans are well ahead, and have been since the arms race began in
earnest. Yet, partly under pressure from the ‘military-industrial’
complex, Mr Kennedy increased his military budget in 1961-2 (an
increase of $3000 million, and, later in the year, another $4000
million), and the 1963 appropriations reveal yet a new leap forward.
In global terms, the Soviet limited deterrent is now under severe
pressure. It is small in comparison with the US capacity. Most of its

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 THE CUBAN CRISIS 73

sites are ‘soft’ – i.e. exposed to military intelligence and U2 overflights.

No invulnerable second strike weapon, such as the Polaris sub, has
been developed. Faced with what must now seem like a determined
American crash programme to keep the lead, the Soviet Union has
taken several steps to correct the imbalance, short of creating a huge
Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles force. Thus it brought the U2
flights to a halt, expanded its space programme, rigidly opposed
inspection of a Test Ban for fear of espionage, and recently tested
weapons in a very high megaton range. But these do not add up to
anything remotely approaching nuclear parity.
Locally in the Caribbean, the only way to make good Soviet claims
was to bring in to play the only missile weapons which it has in any
numbers – Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles (IRBMs) – and to
site them as close to their targets as it could get – in Cuba itself.
Hence the hasty construction of missile sites, the clumsy lying of Mr
Gromyko to President Kennedy. Hence also the military panic in
Washington: the US was at last face to face with a Soviet deterrent
threat which, in military terms, really meant something. And so to
the crisis itself – quarantine and blockade, threat of invasion and
bombing, flash-point.
As well as its political and military significance, the Cuban crisis
also had global importance. Its repercussions were general and world-
wide, as all nuclear crises are. Such a crisis travels like an electrical
impulse through the entire circuit of the Cold War. At precisely the
same moment as Soviet and American fleets were steaming towards a
confrontation on the high seas, Chinese troops were probing the
Indian border. Had Mr Khrushchev succeeded in restoring the balance
by slipping 40 IRBMs under the net of the Early Warning System, to
within striking distance of Washington, Omaha or Cape Canaveral,
there is no doubt that this lever would have been used to bring back
into the arena of negotiation Berlin and the status of East Germany.
From another point of view, the Cuban crisis had direct reper-
cussions throughout the NATO alliance. In spite of Cabinet pique at
the fact that the quarantine decision had been taken without consulta-
tion, Proteus [a US nuclear submarine] sailed from its Holy Loch
berth ‘for an unknown destination’, and Strategic Air Command
(SAC) bases in Europe were put on first alert. Within the terms of the
Alliance, European NATO powers like Britain were directly impli-
cated in the President’s actions.

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74 selected politicaL WRITINGS

The involvement of the NATO allies in the Cuban crisis was defined
by the letter of the North Atlantic Treaty; but it was also a necessary
extension of the nuclear logic. Had the interception of the Russian
fleet on the high seas developed into a general war, every country with
nuclear bases would have been high on Mr Khrushchev’s target list.
An attempt to forestall attack by a first strike would have involved a
Soviet strike at bases in Britain, Turkey, Spain and Morocco simply
because they exist.
The Cuban crisis had direct repercussions in the Caribbean, but it
also, it is clear, enveloped the whole globe. It demonstrated the precise
nature of Britain’s commitment in its role as a base for the American
deterrent and as a junior partner in the Alliance. That commitment, in
turn, implied British support for a logically tendentious American
policy. For, as the Economist pointed out, the US seemed to be arguing
that ‘a ground-to-ground missile sited with Soviet connivance in the
Western hemisphere is “offensive” … whereas an American-controlled
missile sited in the Eastern hemisphere is a normal defensive precau-
tion, which the Russians must live with’. Walter Lippman pointed out
that America was defending its right to maintain both the Monroe
Doctrine (which excluded European intervention in the Western
hemisphere) and the Truman Doctrine (the right to contain Soviet
power along the periphery of the Communist world). Britain, and the
NATO allies, were, as Lippman remarked, upholding America’s right
to enforce both doctrines at once, one in each hemisphere.

II

What are the signs that either Mr Kennedy or Mr Khrushchev are

taking such steps, in the light of the Cuban affair, as would severely
limit the world’s exposure to nuclear war?
There are none. Indeed, the pointers are all the other way. After their
much-publicised ‘baptism of fire’, the Kennedy team seem to have
adopted a stance of tough-minded realism. The President is still
speaking critically of the ‘synthetic hard line’ which some sections of
the press are pushing; but his own outlook, and that of his high
command, appears to be (to use his own phrase) ‘sombre’. Undoubtedly
Mr Gromyko’s prevarication did much to destroy what basis of mutual
trust might have existed. But the psychological climate is not encour-

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 THE CUBAN CRISIS 75

aging. In Europe, the pace seems to have been stepped up. There is a
general air of ‘business as usual’, and a sense of bustle and haste: every
day brings a new pronunciation on some aspect of Western strategy, the
latest being the Polaris deal.
Last summer, after a protracted debate, the Secretary for Defence,
Mr McNamara, announced the adoption of the ‘counterforce’ strategy.
This means that, in the weapons field, not only is Cuba to be followed
by a development in the scale and instability of the deterrent (a first-
strike strategy), but also by the spread of weapons and the creation of
a third nuclear force. Meanwhile nothing whatsoever has moved in
relation to the proposed Draft Disarmament Treaty (the only hope of
scaling down the deterrent), and the positions of the two sides in rela-
tion to a Test Ban appear, after Cuba, unchanged.
Nor has there been any approach made to the points of political
tension. The idea of Disengagement in Central Europe – the only way
of lifting the pressure from Europe without European nuclear rearma-
ment – has been dropped. Indeed, for the first time since the Rapacki
Plan was proposed, the British Government has come out openly
against the proposal.3 No further approach has been made on the
question of Berlin since the President’s meeting with Dr Adenauer.
Now that the Kennedy policy of ‘negotiation from strength’ seems, in
Washington, to have paid off, no move on Berlin will be made – until
Mr Khrushchev begins to worry at the problem, like a dentist with a
loose tooth, some time next year.
The post-Cuba situation, then, gives absolutely no sign of an
opening towards a detente, in either the political or military sphere.
What we face instead this winter is a series of decisions which will
harden the position all round – the prospect of a new splurge in the
arms race, the spread of nuclear weapons to Europe, a possible resump-
tion of the crisis in the Caribbean, a certain confrontation in Central
Europe next year, with the two adversaries geared up for an exchange
on the basis of first-strike strategies. An exceedingly bleak outlook.

III

The conflict between East and West seems to move with a certain
established rhythm. Each crisis is followed by basic revisions of policy
and strategy – and each time the intensity of the struggle is revised

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upwards. After the Berlin Air-Lift, the American ‘crash programme’

on the hydrogen bomb; after Korea, the doctrine of ‘massive retalia-
tion’; now, after Cuba, the era of ‘counterforce’. The problem is that
those who are opposed to this consistent escalation of the level of
danger are never precise enough about their proposals, do not direct
their challenge to the particular decisions which are about to be taken.
Suppose, then, we were to pose a precise alternative route which might
take us away from a nuclear show-down in the mid-1960s. What
would our demands be?
The advantage of this kind of programmatic approach is that it
enables public opinion generally, and the peace movements in partic-
ular, to confront directly the decisions which political and military
establishments make. The precondition of such an approach, however,
is that we see it as a process – slow, perhaps, and dangerous at each
stage: but less dangerous as the process gathers momentum, rather
than more dangerous, which is the actual prospect which we face now.
I. The first priority is to prevent a new spiral in the arms race, and
to get instead some immediate reduction in the level at which the
nuclear ‘balance’ is maintained. The only prospect of doing this seems
to be through a First Stage Disarmament agreement, with proper
inspection and control guarantees. This seems a good way off, but it
will be even more difficult once the counterforce strategy has been
adopted in full by both sides. Thus what we need is an enforced pause
in the build-up, a postponement of the counterforce crash programme,
and the maintenance by both sides of a limited deterrent posture, at
least until the chances of a Disarmament Agreement can be further
explored. The object here is not to stabilise the deterrent, but to bring
the two sides into line, at a fairly low deterrent level, so that agreed
disarmament is easier to reach and quicker to begin. It would be excel-
lent if U Thant, as Secretary General of the body to which the
Disarmament Subcommittee is directly responsible, could point out
the way in which the counterforce strategy is likely to sabotage the
chances at Geneva: and if he could mobilise, for this purpose, a precise
expression of world opinion.
2. The most important corollary of the adoption of a limited deter-
rent position by the two sides is that a strict embargo must be placed on
the spread of weapons to Europe, in either a NATO or European deter-
rent form. Thus the President should be strengthened in his opposition
to the spread of weapons to Europe. Here, the role of the European

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allies is crucial – especially Britain. A measure of unilateral disarma-

ment by Britain – the abandonment of its militarily inconsequential
national deterrent – would be one step which could be taken unilater-
ally against spread. The strong and active opposition by Britain to the
creation of a third nuclear force in Europe would be another. The
French are less likely to play, but they will not have a delivery system of
any scale until the late 1960s, by which time an agreed Disarmament
Treaty might be in force: and France cannot create a credible deterrent
by itself, or with West Germany, without American assistance, or
British know-how, though General De Gaulle seems to think he can.
3. The two proposals made so far would have the effect of enforcing
a pause in the nuclear build-up; reducing the level of weapons; and
confining, in the first stage, nuclear weapons to the two major powers.
To complete the confinement of weapons on a minimum deterrent
basis, and to deal with what, from the point of view of the Soviet
Union, must be one of the essential bargaining points, it would be
necessary to begin to phase out overseas strategic nuclear bases. A
minimum deterrent force does not require the scatter of nuclear bases
which the US at present maintains: it has enough inter-continental
range delivery capacity to maintain the limited deterrent from the
American heartland. Further, if we have learned anything from the
Cuban episode, it is that foreign nuclear bases, whether strategic (such
as SAC bases in Britain and Jupiter missiles in Turkey), intermediate
(such as Soviet missiles in Cuba) or tactical (such as the tactical nuclear
equipment of Soviet troops stationed in East Germany), constitute a
real and present threat to peace. If strategic nuclear bases were phased
out, it would mean a withdrawal of the retaliatory strike capacity of
both sides to the heartland of America and the Soviet Union, pending
disarmament measures. One of the problems involved in such a move
is that the two strategies of the major powers involved are asymmetric
– the Soviet Union is strong on the ground in Europe, but weak in
inter-continental hardware; for the Americans the situation is precisely
the reverse. But a rational quid-pro-quo system could be worked out
– with an American conventional strength maintained in Europe for a
time while strategic bases go, in return for the withdrawal of tactical
nuclear weapons from the Soviet forces which remain outside of the
territory of Russia itself.
4. This would leave unresolved the problem of the defence of
Western Europe. But this is where the question of Disengagement in

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Central Europe comes in. From the Soviet viewpoint, the threat in
Europe arises from the strategic bases on its periphery. But if these are
to go progressively, then, from the American and European point of
view, the Russians will be left with an overwhelming conventional
strength in Europe. The only way, then, to complete the pause, would
be to establish, along the lines of the Eden, Gaitskell or Rapacki Plans,
a Zone of Controlled Disengagement, with effective United Nations
inspection and guarantees, in Central Europe. From both a political
and a military point of view, Disengagement is the pivot of the whole
scheme. This Zone would be both non-nuclear and demilitarised – i.e.
involving the withdrawal of Soviet ground forces to the heartland of
the Soviet Union.
If the price for this is the maintenance, for a time, of a conventional
American force in, say, France or Britain, to match Soviet strength
confined to Russia, then we should be willing to pay it. In fact, the
Russians might well be willing to consider, at the same time as mili-
tary withdrawal from Central Europe is being undertaken, a cut in
conventional strength in return for an American limited deterrent
posture: its proposals for the reduction of conventional armies in the
First Stage of its Draft Disarmament Treaty is higher than that
proposed by the US – a reduction to 1.7 million, as against 2.1 million
– in spite of its acknowledged strength in this field.
5. The major outstanding problem in the way of an agreement to
disengage in Central Europe is, of course, Berlin. Any such settlement
must, inevitably, involve a new approach to the Berlin problem. With
the withdrawal of American and Soviet forces from Central Europe,
certain precise guarantees must be given in relation to Berlin. This can
only be by way of a UN guarantee for the freedom of West Berlin,
perhaps by a UN presence in the city, with the right of access to the
city guaranteed by four power-plus-UN-plus East and West German
agreement. This would involve not only the de facto recognition of the
East German Government, as a party to the agreement, but, more
sensibly, the admission of the two Germanies to full member status of
the guaranteeing authority, the UN.
6. If we could move towards some such a pause in the political and
military build-up, it would then be possible, in more gradual stages, to
keep nuclear weapons out of the rest of the world. Here again, the
approach would have to be two-fold. Primarily, there is the question of
China’s nuclear capability. There may be no way now of stopping the

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creation of a Chinese nuclear force, but it will take some time for it to
develop a delivery capability. What we have been envisaging here is a
gradual approach towards a detente in Europe and a First Stage
Disarmament Treaty agreement. There is certainly no way of making
such a Disarmament agreement hold, unless it is global in its effect:
and no way of making it global, and subject to UN inspection and
control, unless China can be a party to it – i.e. unless and until it is a
full member of the UN. It is not perhaps cynical to comment that we
can judge the seriousness of American intentions in the disarmament
field by its maintained opposition to the entry of China to the UN.
While the US opposes this, it cannot believe that ‘general and complete’
disarmament is anything but a propaganda phrase.
More generally, there is the question of keeping the rest of the world
– much of it facing the task of industrialisation – free from the nuclear
burden. Here the general climate would be considerably improved if,
within the framework of the UN, the denuclearisation of those parts
of the globe not directly implicated in the East-West conflict could be
negotiated. Proposals already exist in relation to some areas: Latin
America (the Brazil proposal); Scandinavia (the Unden Plan); the
Balkans (the Yugoslavs have made suggestions here); the Southern
Hemisphere (the Australian Labour Party once proposed a compre-
hensive plan); and Africa (see the Accra Assembly proposals). Both
Draft Treaties propose the neutralisation of Outer Space. Other areas
– the Middle East, South-East Asia – could be considered. This would
be a more gradual extension of the terms of a detente, but vital for
those areas which are now threatened with nuclear penetration.

IV

What we have done so far is to sketch, in relation to the existing

contingencies of the global conflict after Cuba, the areas in which
negotiations are vital, and the kinds of steps which would limit
rather than extend the nuclear conflict. We have tried to relate these
proposals to the actual decisions which, if we read the signs correctly,
are about to be taken in the pursuit of the Cold War. We have tried
to make those demands as precise as possible, since this is, in our
view, the only effective way to ‘speak truth to power’, the only kind
of opposition to the military thinking of the two camps which makes

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sense. We have envisaged them as steps in a process. They represent

less than we could hope for, but more than we can reasonably expect,
given the post-Cuba climate. We point again and again to the crucial
fact – that winter and spring 1962-3 is a period of basic revision and
decision, and that what matters most now is which alternative we can
force governments to choose: the path, via ‘counterforce’, the arms race
and Berlin, towards nuclear holocaust, or the alternative route towards
agreed disarmament. This is a fateful transition period in the Cold
War: only the force of popular opinion, and the most intensive study
and analysis, can sway the balance. What is most urgently needed is
the general mobilisation of public opinion behind the second alterna-
tive, and a direct engagement between the peace movements and the
military-political establishments of both the Soviet and the Western
Alliances. Our job is to enforce a pause, and to turn the tide. The
demands must be concrete, specific and precise. The mobilisation
of opinion and pressure must be international. The opportunity is
limited, and the time for action is now.
Specifically, how does this proposal relate to Britain? What are the
chances, for example, of action on some of these steps from the British
government? The answer seems to be – very little. The government
accepted its subordinate role in Cuba with ill grace: but it followed
blindly along the path laid down by the terms of the NATO Alliance.
The British deterrent, which was designed to ‘prevent us from going
into the conference chamber naked’ was not a strong enough weapon
of diplomacy during the Cuban crisis, as Mr Grimmond remarked,
even to get us into the conference chamber. Yet the British government
seems wedded to the deterrent – in fact, willing, as the price of entry
into Europe, to consider merging the British effort with the French
and the West Germans in a European nuclear force.
What of the Labour Party? Here the situation is different, and the
balance is changing. The Common Market dispute has placed on the
agenda several questions of foreign and defence policy which the party
hoped it had ditched for ever with the defeat of the unilateralists at
Scarborough. Thus, in his Common Market speech, Mr Gaitskell
again and again used the phrase ‘independent foreign policy’ – though
he has nowhere made that term precise in its application. Apparently,
the Labour Party is still opposed to the British national deterrent. They
seem now, after the NATO Parliamentarians meeting, also opposed to
a third European nuclear force. In his exchange with Mr Heath, Mr

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Gaitskell expressed great concern at the hardening of the government’s

attitude towards Disengagement in Europe. The feeling in the party
leadership seems to have crystallised against a close European political
and military alignment. All these are straws in the wind. The leader-
ship is woolly in relation to each of them, perhaps for electoral reasons:
they have never been gathered together into a programme of related
demands, a programme around which support could be actively mobi-
lised. That is certainly a task for those within the party who are seriously
concerned about the post-Cuba turn of events. It is not necessary for
CND, as it did four years ago, to become embroiled in an inner-Labour-
Party fight. But it would be nothing short of a disaster if, because of its
experience at Scarborough, CND should abdicate the political struggle
for a more marginal role, at precisely the time when such crucial polit-
ical decisions are being taken.
The fragmentary and hesitant approach of the Opposition to
these questions is matched in public opinion generally. But Cuba
undoubtedly gave the more complacent or the less rigid a severe jolt.
Thus, to judge simply from the press response, some of the steps
outlined above would meet with moderate support from certain
sections of the public, if only CND were willing to make common
cause, from its own independent and non-aligned position, with
them. For the first time, during the crisis, the Sunday Times accepted
CND’s pessimistic interpretation of a policy based on the deterrent.
In that same week, the Observer called, in an extended editorial, for
several of the ‘steps towards peace’ which we have outlined above.
The Times, surprisingly, responded critically towards the idea of a
European deterrent. Again, these are straws in the wind; the serious
British press is notoriously cautious – the only really critical
comment on the new counterforce strategy came from James
Cameron in the Herald. The other papers sanctimoniously recorded
Mr McNamara’s views, including the incredible welcome which he
gave to another round of Soviet rearmament. Yet the very uncer-
tainty of press comment reflects, in our view, an increasing awareness
of the present nuclear dangers, and, in the light of Cuba, a break-up
of the traditionally hostile attitude towards the Campaign. We
must go out to meet this body of opinion, and seek to mobilise
support within it for the limited steps which we propose to counter
the race towards the brink.
What, specifically, are we asking Britain to do, to ensure that steps

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are made towards peace along the lines of our proposals? In certain
cases, there are unilateral measures which Britain could take to facili-
tate and hasten the detente. In other cases, British pressure could be
vital. In any event, it is essential to clarify the imprecise phrase, ‘an
independent foreign policy’.
Unilaterally, Britain could (1) abandon its independent national
deterrent, as a step towards the limitation of nuclear weapons to the
US and the USSR and as a move to prevent the spread of weapons to
Europe; (2) oppose the creation of a third nuclear force, either in a
European or a NATO form; (3) oppose the maintenance of strategic
nuclear bases and installations in Britain, as a way of enforcing upon
the US a more limited nuclear posture. By way of direct pressure,
Britain could (1) give every support to the idea of Disengagement in
Central Europe, including precise proposals; (2) strongly oppose the
full adoption of a counterforce policy by the United States; (3) support
a solution to the Berlin problem along the lines suggested above.
These, at any rate, are concrete objectives to work for – objectives
which the peace movement and CND must take the initiative in
popularising. But active British support for such steps implies a degree
of independence which, the Cuban crisis suggests, does not at the
moment obtain. The crisis revealed once again the conflict between
our obligations to the UN under the Charter, and our obligations
under the NATO alliance. Many of us believe that conflict to be both
ineradicable and dangerous, and would choose the UN even if it
meant withdrawal from the Alliance. Many others, who go with us
some of the way, would not go so far. But what is necessary is agree-
ment on certain limited steps which can be taken now. What we can
surely all agree upon is that, in any given case, our obligations to the
UN take precedence over our commitments to our alliances, pacts or
treaties. We must define much more precisely what the area of inde-
pendent action is, given our Treaty obligations: and take steps to
ensure that the Alliance, which asks of us simply a sleeping role during
a crisis, does not prevent us taking an active and independent role in
creating the conditions for peace. Thus, if we must choose between
supporting Disengagement and maintaining the harmony of the alli-
ance with West Germany, Disengagement has first priority. If we are
implicated in a crisis at the behest of the American President, we will
act, as the 42 neutral nations did during Cuba, to strengthen the hand
of the Secretary General of the UN, not tacitly support rash action on

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the high seas. This reordering of priorities is the precondition of an

independent foreign policy.
An independent initiative for peace is what is most needed, not
simply in general terms, but to counteract the particular trend which
shows active life since the Cuban crisis. Such an initiative is not a
matter for political leaders, but for the whole community of publics
which constitute the nation. To mobilise such an over whelming pres-
sure of public opinion, the case must be understood, the fateful
procession of events precisely prejudged, the support for particular
measures clear and sharp. We must build bridges to every support in
the country – taking them step by step with us as far as they are
willing to go. If The Times cold-shoulders every proposal we make
except the opposition to a European deterrent, then even such limited
support is to be welcomed. On the basis of these precise points, and
the logic which lies behind them, we have to challenge and confront
every group, organisation and individual in the country. On the basis
of these proposals, we can make common cause with the other non-
aligned peace movements which have begun to grow – with the
American peace movement in our opposition to counterforce, with
the German Easter marchers in our support for a solution to Berlin,
with the Poles on Disengagement, with the Africans and the
Scandinavians on Denuclearised Zones. That is what ‘government by
default’ means today. The danger is that, while we stand on the side-
lines waving our slogans hopefully, with the best will in the world, the
nuclear parade is passing us by.

Notes

1. The US government were hostile to the leadership of Cuba after the revo-
lution of 1959, and this pushed the Cuban government towards alliance
with the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union saw an opportunity to base
nuclear missiles within striking distance of the US, as tit-for-tat for US
missiles based near its own borders in Europe. When the US government
realised that missiles were being based in Cuba they imposed a naval
blockade on Cuba, in October 1962, to enforce a ‘quarantine’ on all
offensive military equipment under shipment to Cuba. At this point there
were global fears of a nuclear war breaking out, but in the end Kennedy
and Khrushchev came to an agreement based on the missiles being
removed and Kennedy promising not to invade Cuba.

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2. A counterforce strategy is one that is based on targeting the enemy’s mili-

tary capacity rather than its population. Previously deterrence had been
centred wholly on Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). One implica-
tion of counterforce strategy was a willingness to engage in a first strike.
Robert McNamara was the pioneer of this strategy, and it was also linked
to the idea of a European deterrent, either within NATO or based on
French and British nuclear weapons.
3. The Rapacki Plan was for a denuclearised zone in parts of Eastern Europe.

84
 Political commitment
1966

am not going to make a case for political commitment. There is

I no simple ‘case’ of this kind to make. To formulate the question in
this way is to suggest that arguments can be advanced in favour of one
political party within an already clearly-defined pattern of political
interests. But what is at issue just now is not so much the clash of
clearly defined political positions but, rather, the formation of polit-
ical consciousness itself. ‘Political man’ in the old sense is a
fast-disappearing species. This is not a matter of politics in the narrow
sense. Political consciousness is closely linked with the sense which a
society makes of its own life, actions, experiences, history: with social
consciousness, and with the dominant structure of feeling and atti-
tude which prevails at any particular time. It is with this relationship,
primarily, that this paper will be concerned.
There is no point in trying to answer the question about com-
mitment by reference to the policies adopted by political parties,
since the role of political parties in the formation of consciousness
(as opposed to the struggle for electoral succession) has itself become
one of the problematic issues of our time. Nor will it do to take refuge
in some unrevised ideology, since this is the age of the reversal of the
great ideologies, the transvaluation of political world-views. On the
other hand, there is no point in trying to get behind the issues by
speaking in personal terms, without allowing for the fact that a giving
of the whole self to politics, the harnessing and orchestrating of one’s
life around a political commitment, is a stance adopted by fewer and
fewer people – least of all by full-time politicians: it is a personal style
which runs against the grain of contemporary feeling and attitudes.
We have to start by trying to define the political sensibility of the
period. Or rather, the absence of a political sensibility. There seems to
me several good reasons why political consciousness should prove so
elusive at this time.

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First, there is the rapidly changing social and economic background

of society. About this, contradictory things can be said, and
contradictory inferences drawn. But, undeniably, changes in social
life have unhinged the older forms of political consciousness, while
illusions about what has actually happened as a result of those changes
have as yet prevented the formation of a new political awareness.
The second factor I have mentioned already: namely the
transformation of the great ideologies of the past, and the conditions
within which they flourished. One has only to think of the contortions
which ideologists of ‘the west’ go through in order to make the
realities of welfare capitalism fit the old rhetoric of liberalism to
understand how powerfully events have transformed the great
bourgeois ideologies of the past. The development of ‘polycentrism’
in the east, the Sino-Soviet dispute, and – on a more ideological plane
– the separation which has been taking place between ‘marxism’
and ‘Soviet society’, point to the same phenomenon in communist
societies. And the revival of nationalism in the third world has upset
most ideological calculations.
The third factor is, undoubtedly, the dominance in recent history of
two major camps east and west of the iron curtain: and, more precisely,
the fact that these camps have constituted groupings in the politico-
economic, the military and the ideological senses. In the old world,
ideas followed trade and trade followed the flag. In the new world, it
could be said that political ideas have clustered around the weapons
systems. All the factors which, until the impact of the revolutions in
the third world, kept these military-economic groupings together have
also served to keep the politics of the two blocs in straitjackets.
The fourth factor is the transformation of the nature of politics
itself in the advanced capitalist societies. Th is is sometimes defined in
terms of the maturing of mass political parties – though it could also
be interpreted as their decline. It is also sometimes defined in terms of
the collapse or the breakdown of the recognised agencies of change.
The fifth factor is related to this change in the character of politics
in the ‘advanced’ world: it might be called the rise of the ‘new issues’ in
politics – issues which are ‘new’ in the sense that they appear, falsely,
as ‘non-political’; or cannot be interpreted as arising directly from the
clash of traditional social interests. Such an issue is the issue of race
in advanced societies; such a new interest group is the group loosely
designated as ‘youth’.

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The sixth factor is what has been described as the ideology of the
end-of-ideologies. This is different from the very real sense which
people might have that none of the old ideological pictures now offer an
acceptable image of how modern societies work. It is, rather, the belief
that there is something inherently wrong in seeking ideological models
and explanations at all: that modern technological society renders all
ideology obsolescent. Within this framework of thinking, ideologies are
always described as holistic, millenarian, violent, apocalyptic: whereas
politics is practical, pragmatic, middle-ranged, the art of the possible.
In some ways, this attempt to drive a wedge between politics and
political theory, between piecemeal engineering and social revolution,
is the most dynamic ideology we have in ‘the west’.
One of the most striking developments of the end-of-ideology
ideology in recent years is the attempt to sociologise out of existence
the political sensibility. I do not mean the fact that in the journals, the
press, and the media of comment, it is now de rigeur to refer political
events to their sociological background. Provided this does not become
an intellectual fetish, it is a perfectly proper procedure. I mean the
process by which politics is degutted and neutered by always being
presented as a form of social inquiry. Nowadays, for example, university
students, who are often chary of overt political commitment, are only
too willing to run a survey instead. I am not despising facts, or the
discovery of facts. Provided they are selected with a sense of relevance,
facts can be revolutionary things. But they are seldom revolutionary
in a vacuum. And although one can understand why young people
who find themselves in a confused social situation will want to learn
to describe their society more accurately, there isn’t much to be said for
continually throwing up descriptions of the society which never lead
into social or political action. What is more, the social inquiry approach
has a strong tendency to make people the objects rather than the agents
of change. By demoting the role of human agency, it robs the situation
of its historical dimensions and of its potential for change. To use the
distinction drawn in a recent article by David Cooper (‘Violence In
Psychiatry,’ Views, Summer 1965), this approach is characteristic of
a whole group of disciplines in the field of social explanation, which
make human behaviour ‘explicable’, but not ‘intelligible in terms of
what people are actually doing to each other’. Consequently, for all the
refinement of measurement involved, the descriptions of our society
accumulated in this way lack agency, historical perspective, existential

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meaning, or a proper subjectivity. Instead what seems to reign as a

dominant mood in the whole intellectual climate just at present is
a spurious search for ‘objectivity’, a bogus pseudo-scientism. Such
an intellectual climate – especially when mediated to an even wider
public by the press and the journals – is one covertly hostile to politics.
A more direct expression of the same trend is the reduction of
political issues to the psephological equation. Again, we are told that
this represents a sophistication of method – and so it does. But every
methodological advance has its ideological content. It is one thing to
be able to test more accurately the balance of political forces at any one
time. It is quite another thing to allow this technique so to dominate
the scene that politics itself becomes a question of ‘sampling’ the state
of public opinion as it exists, an elaborate process of echoing back to
the electorate what it already knows – sugared, of course, by effective
methods of presentation, and the right party ‘image’. The point about
this model of politics is that it omits the praxis of politics – the whole
dynamic by which latent human needs are expressed in political
terms and, by being formulated, become the conscious demands of
a section of the society, around whom a political agitation can be
built, maintained, and carried. Of course this is the radical model of
politics: it is the conservative model which, on principle, believes that
politics means manoeuvring the status quo. But it is precisely because
this conserving model of politics has come, in the last decade, to be
the dominant model of political action, among both conservative and
radical groupings in society (and especially in the political parties),
that potential agitations continually wind their way harmlessly out
into the sands, and the Labour Party, especially, finds itself confined
and constrained by the whole framework of assumptions. Psephology
itself is not responsible for this change in the character of politics. But
it is part of a mosaic of influences, all of which appear to have the
effect of legitimising the change – of making it seem inevitable, and,
because inevitable, right.
The phrase ‘the absence of political sensibility’ is not intended
just as a descriptive comment. It is part of the logic of the model of
politics which both sides in the party political game have decided to
work. I am trying to indicate something more active than merely a
general withdrawal from political engagement. After all, people do
still support and work for good causes, and most of the good causes
are, in the long run, good political causes. But it is not their political

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character which attracts the support. Quite the reverse. The politics of
what I have called the ‘new issues’ is the politics of the unpoliticised.
It is not unfair to cite the Oxfam campaign (since the organisation
itself is acutely aware of the problem) as an example of a good cause
which has won significant support, both in terms of money and of
mobilised energies (and voluntary service overseas and Freedom From
Hunger are parts of the same structure of feeling), but which attracts
support partly because it treats a political issue (the gap between the
rich and poor nations) in a non-political way. Objectively this kind of
campaign has done a great deal of good. It has also helped, in a subtle
way, to de-politicise for some part of the British people the issue of
poverty in the third world.
It is the de-politicisation, the defusing, of hot issues which is so
striking. Take an instance of the same process in a different sphere.
Radicals are always trying to define the ‘establishment’ bias of the
media, especially BBC television, in terms of partiality to Conserva-
tive as against Labour spokesmen. In most cases this version of the
argument is hard to substantiate. The fact is that the bias of the
media is in favour of ‘the system’ – to which both political parties
now belong. It operates most effectively against any manifestation
or development which cannot be contained within this framework
of organised neutrality. One instance of this is the reporting in the
press (with the notable exception, on occasions, of the Guardian)
of the activities of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. These
are presented either as an aspect of ‘Easter madness’ or in terms of
the number of Labour MPs who have spoken from CND platforms
(that is with reference to the existing modus vivendi). Operating on
the basis of this bias, it isn’t unfair to suggest that the British press
would have missed such events as the formation of the Labour Party
in the 1890s, on the grounds that nothing of real political significance
could possibly be happening outside the Tory-Liberal seesaw. An even
better – because subtler – example is the BBC television programme
Gallery. Here is an excellent programme of its kind, serious, informed,
purposeful, under Ian Trethowan’s capable chairmanship. It is only in
relation to issues outside the formalised political game that his touch
is less sure: the most notorious example being his crude partisanship
over the matter of the Vietnam ‘teach-ins’.
The rigidity with which the existing body of ‘workable’ assumptions
controls the flow and formation of opinion, and hence the formation

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of consciousness, is peculiarly an aspect of politics in the industrialised

world. In the emergent societies every issue is a political issue, and all
sections of the community – revolutionaries and reactionaries alike –
are aware of how immediately every opinion, attitude, every nuance
of class, status and economic interest, can be cashed in the political
arena. These are societies of instant politics. This is not to say that there
is always a true and meaningful disclosure of the political interests at
play. But one problem these societies do not seem to have is how to
keep the political instinct alive.
Not infrequently, at this point, people tend to fall back on an easy
romanticisation of the past. They speak as if we have left behind a
golden age when the majority of people were fully and continuously
politicised. In fact, in the nineteenth century, from which so much
of this imagery is drawn, political consciousness was neither stable
nor ‘given’. It was made – made, changed, remade – from one period
to another, and in the praxis of men. True, it is in this period that
we can for the first time speak of the formation of the working
class: but we cannot speak of the formation of the working-class
consciousness. That consciousness changed as industrialisation and
the social system of industrial society itself changed; it changed in
line with its own human traditions, its own kinds of organisation,
its own culture. We can see particular historical moments when
a certain kind of consciousness was achieved, partly in the lived
experience of men, partly because of the active minority. We can see
the confrontations between this and the hostile consciousness of the
opposing classes and interests – confrontations when the issue could
have gone either way. We can see the conflicts fought through. And,
the ‘moment’ having passed, we can see the apparent disengagement
of the forces of struggle, and the dissolving of that form of conscious-
ness, its surpassing by the ‘real movement of history’. Such forms of
consciousness are never permanent – now it is with the Jacobins
of the clubs and the corresponding societies, now with the men of
the charter, now with the utopians and co-operators, now with the
militants of the sects, now with the new unionists. Such forms of
consciousness did not ‘happen’. They were achieved, carried at great
personal cost, sometimes lost amidst great personal distress, in the
active lives of men and women. The record of one such historical
‘moment’ has recently been given in E.P. Thompson’s The Making
of The English Working Class.1 That moving account alone should

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do something to dissolve the mechanistic manner in which forms

of consciousness and of struggle are commonly discussed today, on
every side of the political fence (not excluding the far left). It should
do something to correct the perspective we bring to bear on our own
period.
I think there is a strong case to be made that we are now, in the
strict sense of the word, in a transitional period between two stages in
political consciousness: a transition marked not so much by the break-
up of all the forces which constitute the basis of politics in British life,
but rather by the break-up and fragmentation of one stage or epoch in
consciousness and the formation of another. We need to understand
the nature of this transition better than we do.
A good deal of work has been going on in the last decade which
represents an effort to describe and to evaluate what has been
happening to the society since the war. These changes concern the
whole range of social and economic relationships in the society.
Much of this work is predicated upon the assumption that Britain
has entered a ‘post-capitalist’ phase where – as a result of post-war
affluence, the progressive separation of ownership from control in
industry, the regulation of economic life by state intervention, the
countervailing power of labour, and the redistribution of income
via the welfare revolution – sharp disparities of power, wealth, and
opportunity endemic in earlier stages in capitalist society have been
markedly levelled. Secondly, the break-up of the old pattern of life
and culture associated with working-class experience, and the shift in
the occupational structure, are said to have brought about a decisive
change in the political outlook and aspirations the mass of working
people, and especially of the manual working class. Thirdly, the spread
of middle-class patterns of life, the penetration of the mass media and
the taking on of consumption values has led to a cultural dilution,
which has seriously disturbed the values, the pattern of aspirations,
and hence the basis of radical consciousness in society. Fourthly, that
as a result of the large-scale organisation characteristic of this stage of
economic development, patterns of conflict are becoming less those
which can be attributed to conflicts of class interest, and increasingly
are conflicts between individual and the bureaucratic machines.
Economically, then, society is in its post-capitalist or at the very least
its welfare capitalist stage: politically and culturally, it is entering its
‘mass-society’ phase.

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It would take too long to resume this material here. In many cases,
the controversial element in the argument has less to do with the facts
than with what to make of them.2 In fact the evidence we have does not
support the notion of basic social and structural change in the society.
On the other hand, the society seems to have changed sufficiently to
present a significantly different image of itself those who live in it.
J.H. Westergaard, speaking of what he calls ‘the more sophisticated
versions of the post-capitalist thesis’, says: ‘they point, not so much
to a transformation of the economic structure of class as such, as
to a transformation of the conditions relevant to the formation and
direction of class consciousness: it is not the inequalities of class that
have been reduced but their “transparency”’ (‘The Withering Away Of
Class’, p85 (see note 2). Mr Westergaard does not, however, seem to
be convinced by this account. He argues correctly that, as heightened
material aspirations and ‘middle-class’ expectations are assumed by a
wider section of the working class, the level of political demand, so to
speak, will be raised. And since, by definition, these levels of material
achievement are beyond the reach of the bulk of the population,
what we should expect is not a diminution in class consciousness, but
instead a sharpening in political discontent. Thus he accepts that ‘the
nature of the class structure is certainly changing’, but not that this is
in the direction of a reduction in social conflict.
So far, I agree. But Mr Westergaard has not distinguished sharply
enough between the potential for conflict and the actual state of political
consciousness as we find it. True, the social and material achievements
which people are led to expect as part of the inheritance of ‘affluence’
simply are not widely available. True, the tensions arising from the
gap between expectation and achievement will be expressed in some
way. It is also true that, though these tensions obviously exist, they
have not – in Mr Westergaard’s terms – been ‘translated into political
radicalism’. Why not? It must have something to do with how the
issues are seen: that is to say, with their ‘transparency’. And there must
be factors at work in the formation of political consciousness which
have so shaped the issues that they fail to take the configuration of a
radical consciousness. What we have instead is the false consciousness
of a transitional period, and the political conditions which have helped
to make that consciousness so far prevail.
We can test the transitional nature of the period simply by taking
paradoxical descriptions which can be made of it. For example, we

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could multiply the evidence to hand of the break-up of the older

working-class communities and their supporting culture, and of
the loosening of the hold, especially among younger people, of the
traditional bonds of social class in the society. Yet one would have
to put side by side with this the persistent fact that Britain remains a
deeply entrenched class society. The strength of the establishment has
become, if anything, more vivid: in part because of those elements in
it which have survived, but also because of the new strengths which
have been annexed to it. Its social composition may have altered,
but its social distance from the rest of society has not diminished. If
ownership and management are separate in function, they have come
together at the pinnacle of the society to compose a new social elite,
a complex and socially heterogeneous echelon of power, surrounded
by its own intellectual, cultural, and symbolic supports. This
phenomenon is sometimes taken to mean that the older aristocratic
class enclosed the bourgeois industrial classes within its own orbit;3
but, in fact, though many of the symbols of power in British life retain
their feudal aura, the centre of British values represents the triumph of
one distinctive kind of bourgeois culture – now so deeply inlaid in the
society that it is felt only as a cultural presence, as a habit, an inflection
of thought and feeling. (Marx called Britain ‘the most bourgeois of
bourgeois societies’.)
Thus Britain is neither a class society in the old sense, nor is it
a classless society: paradoxically, it is closer to the truth to say that
Britain is a society which, while remaining rigidly class-bound,
gives the distinct impression that it is growing more classless. The
Polish sociologist Ossowski calls this the phenomenon ‘inegalitarian
classlessness’ (see endnote 1). The paradox of ‘inegalitarian classlessness’
remains closer to the heart of the truth because, in the absence of any
political development which would serve to disclose – make transparent
– the real movement and alignment of social classes in the society, it
has at least the merit that it describes the movement of ‘combined and
uneven development’ through which the society is passing.
These paradoxes of perception about our social situation could be
extended over a very wide field. The period since the 1944 Education
Act has seen a widening in educational opportunity; education has
become one of the main mechanisms of social mobility in the society.
Yet social class remains the strongest single factor in determining the
pattern of educational chances. And even where the new system is

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able to promote (and in real terms, the extension of the educational

franchise is a much more limited affair than is assumed), some
conversion process is needed when the new elements in the system
(brains, merit, awards) meet the old (blood, school, breeding, money,
class) if the benefits of social mobility are truly to be cashed. In the
same paradoxical way, the spread in the systems of communication has
led to an increased sense of remoteness among the majority of people
from the decisions which affect their lives – the false community of the
media appears to atomise the audience in the very process of massing
it for more effective penetration. The building of new communities,
with their stress on the planned environment, has produced, if
anything, a diminution in community involvement. And where the
society is said to be changing most rapidly – in the occupational
structure – it continues to yield a highly contradictory aspect. White
collar occupations are growing: yet Britain is a pervasively working-
class society. In the south-eastern conurbation one might get a sense
of newer kinds of occupational groups and new patterns of life. North
of the Midlands, one is struck by the stubborn perseverance, the
unbroken continuity, of the old industrial civilisation of the past two
centuries. Everywhere social experiences seem wildly discontinuous,
incapable of being converted into generalisations which, allowing for
the variety of local conditions, could be said to be broadly true both
sides of the Humber.
A society in transition creates, epiphenomenally, a transitional
consciousness of itself: provided the politics of the situation, or
external stress, do not dissolve the paradoxes, and render the situation
politically intelligible. Affluence, equality, classlessness may be myths
and illusions. But we need to take account of the political conditions
which have enabled the mystifications to flourish and thrive. It
matters vastly what are the political conditions within which one
kind of false consciousness comes to hold sway, because politics is
the form in which the connexions are made between lived experience
and the demands made upon the system. Certain kinds of politics
will connect experience with demands in a meaningful relationship,
will connect awareness of the nature of the system to aspiration, and
aspiration for change to the agencies of change. But there are also false
ways of connecting lived experience to the agency of change. And in
the absence of the right kind of politics, the false connexions become
the stabilising myths of the society.

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One of the prime mechanisms of this false consciousness is the

privatisation of politics. I mean something more than the home-centred
stress which is supposed to be part of the progressive ‘embourgeoisement’
of the working class. I mean the experiencing of issues which are
public in character as an unrelated series of private grouses. We can
take a concrete example of how the manner and sequence in which
‘issues’ are ‘experienced’ can help to convert those issues, negatively,
into private troubles. Take the health service. Legislated into being by
a Labour government, and one of its most radical social measures, the
health service was not only the opening of an era of welfare legislation,
but the completion of an old agitation. It drew for its political support
not on the existing social consciousness of 1945 alone, but on the
accumulated experience of slump and depression and insecurity in the
1930s, and the sharing of limited resources during the war. But it was
a bold stroke to bring that social agitation to political completion. At
the beginning of the period of Tory rule, the concept of free medical
provision for all had been so built in to the public consensus that it
provided a common ‘floor’ to the expectations of the whole society.
The Conservatives could only make the bid for power on the basis
of a conversion to the welfare state. That was the purpose of the
Butskell era in politics. Then the health service is subject to attack,
both directly and indirectly. It is exposed to raiding and nibbling.
It is hit directly by the general squeeze on the public sector and by
stop-go economic policies. But it is also assailed, indirectly (and in
a manner too subtle for Labour politicians to grasp), by the whole
climate of ‘affluence’ which unwinds the welfare revolution in the
direction of private provision and private consumption. Labour fights
the battle defensively: not in terms of extending the inroads made,
and of creating in the experience of public provision a counterweight
to the experience of private ‘affluence’, but in terms of ‘look what we
did for you’. By the time we approach the end of the thirteen lean
years of Tory rule, the health service is in need of a major general
overhaul, impossible to achieve without a thorough modernisation of
the service and an extension of its scope. But feeling and attitudes
towards and about the service have crystallised in a period dominated
by Tory individualism.
The ‘demand’ is thus shaped up, not in terms of a general
expansion and development of community provision (in which the
needs of patients, doctors, nurses and hospital staff proceed together),

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but in a series of structurally disconnected grouses. Among the

public, the stories of inefficiency multiply. In the service, discontent
with conditions of work increases. But the political opportunity to
weld these two sets of pressure together in such a way as to create a
mandate in the country for radical expansion is fatally missed. The
Labour Party subordinates the creation of this social consciousness
to the more limited aim of achieving the succession to power. False
dichotomies are made between the two – as if, without a popular
mandate carefully made, nurtured, and kept alive in the periods out
of office, succession to power is anything more than a formal swing
of the political pendulum. The moment passes. The confrontation
does not take place. The issues fragment, disengage, dissipate. The
general discontent becomes sectional discontents, and sectional
discontents are by their nature conservative in temper, in that they
seek to advance one section against another within the model of
the scramble, the affluent free-for-all. What we have instead of
an agitation for the expansion of the health service is a series of
discontinuous and serialised interest groups: nurses – for more pay
– against the public; public – for better health care – against the
hospitals; doctors – for private sector salaries and conditions of
work – against public, the service, government; indeed, given time,
against the whole principle of free medical care. Thus we are brought
to the paradoxical situation of a Labour Minister of Health facing
the massed ranks of the doctors’ lobby, with the public as detached
spectators to the confrontation. In this way a major discontent is so
shaped and distorted by the political situation that it provides the
fuel, not for another instalment of social reform, but rather for the
deeply reactionary notions of Mr Enoch Powell.
It matters profoundly what the political circumstances are in which
the issues and conflicts arising from the society develop: whether they
take on the political complexion of widening solid ties and shared
burdens, or the complexion of competitive private provision, sectional
interest groups and lop-sided individualism And this question is
especially important now because, with the loosening of the older
forms of social solidarity which were associated with working-class
life and culture in previous stages of the industrial revolution, there
is less of a ‘natural’ base in the life experience of working people for
the first, rather than the second, alternative. I am not arguing that
the break-up of the traditional solidarities is ipso facto a bad thing:

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based as they were upon close communities, close affective ties, shared
deprivation, and traditions of resistance and deference, they provided
the support for working-class institutions such as the co-operatives
and the trade unions – but they also helped to circumscribe and
enclose. In their most important work in this field, the sociologists
Lockwood and Goldthorpe suggest that what is happening now is
a movement away from the old kind of collective culture – solidary,
based on instinctual social ties and shared traditional values – and
towards new kind of collectivism, ‘based on rationalist calculation of
interest’.4 Commenting on this thesis of ‘instrumental collectivism’,
Perry Anderson has recently written:

Now clearly, this development can involve a loss of class conscious-

ness and combativity, and its replacement by a narrower, sectional
self-interest. But there is no reason why it must do so. On the
contrary, ‘solidary collectivism’ is itself in many ways a narrow form
of social consciousness … The advent of ‘instrumental collectivism’
means for the first time the penetration of reason, of rationality, into
this closed, affective universe. Of course, the form of this rationality
may initially be that of the surrounding environment, the egoistic
market rationality of neo-capitalism.5

Precisely. And the final sentence is the crucial one. The opening up
of the society to new patterns of life, new patterns of expectation, new
normative values and attitudes could under certain political conditions
represent a major access of strength to the cause of radicalism in the
society. But such have certainly not been the prevailing circumstances
of the past decade. It is the ‘egoistic market rationality of neo-
capitalism’ which has been the shaping ‘spirit of the times’. Thus
social advance, in the context of thirteen years of Tory affluence, is
inevitably identified with what the sectional lobbies can squeeze for
their ‘members’ out of the society, rather than with what the society
as a whole can collectively make of its human and technical resources:
the period presents the aspect of a peculiarly one-eyed materialism, a
specially British kind of ‘carnival’ (see endnote 2). (This is one side to
it. The other side is the way in which, paradoxically, the society seems
to find its most potent imagery in the language of mental disorder,
disorientation and breakdown, in the metaphors of disturbed personal
relationships and neurosis. The two belong together. Bohemianism

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is the hip, the off-beat bedfellow of suburban affluence, and though

much of it is fashionable fellow-travelling, some of it is the most serious
negative note sounded in the whole literary culture in recent years.)
Now the situation would have been serious enough had it been
possible to identify the phase of ‘the egoistic market rationality of neo-
capitalism’ with Conservative politics and culture. But the fact is that
this is now the predominant ideology in the Labour Party as well, and
that, under certain disguises, it appears to have its far-left supporters
too. The most pervasive version is the ‘doctrine of modernisation’.
Modernisation is the presiding theme of British politics today, the
cause which unites all men of goodwill in the search for the future.
Under its ambiguous shadow the most curious birds of passage now
congregate. Mr Heath, of course, is a moderniser. So is the Chairman
of ICI. Lord Snow is a moderniser. So is Mr Woodcock. Mr George
Brown is the governor of modernising rhetoric. But the moderniser
par excellence is Mr Wilson.
This is no freak development. It is important to understand that this
slogan has deep roots in the society, in its problems. Even if the political
circumstances did not press men into its fold, the long decline in Britain’s
economic fortunes, its inability to enter the period of automation and
efficient competitive production with any confidence, the restrictive
structure of British industry, its resistance to technical innovation, its
outmoded and unreconstructed industrial capital – all these represent
real problems for the society which cannot be overcome without
structural change. Modernisation is one formula for drawing attention
to this complex of issues. Further, the pressure for modernisation has
some real basis in the structure of post-war society. The trend towards
technocracy – by which I mean not technological education but
technocratic attitudes – both in education and in the occupational
structure, imposes, as a major element in the mosaic of attitudes in con-
temporary Britain, the view that the only revolution now worth making
is the technological one. Modernisation in this form has become a
powerful idea in all advanced neo-capitalist societies. The view is that
all that has happened in these societies so far can be summed up in the
phrase ‘traditional society’. And the only ideology capable of breaking
up the social and cultural forms of traditional society, letting technology
and its transforming power through, is the ideology of modernisation.
It is, of course, an instrumental ideology – an ideology of means rather
than ends. Its stresses fall upon technocratic innovation, bureaucratic

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structures and the criteria of efficiency. Its model of social relations is

that of the ‘experts’ and the ‘laymen’, the ‘elite’ and the ‘mass’. And so far
as massing support for its programmes – programmes of ‘the technical
assistance’ variety – is concerned, it seeks to mobilise men not according
to their class, status or wealth, their interests, aspirations, goals, needs
or ambitions, but simply according to whether or not they belong to the
‘tradition of the new’.
Important as are the problems highlighted by this ideology, it is
necessary to point out how much support for it means complicity with
‘egoistic rationality’ and the status quo.
First, the ideology of modernisation fatally short-circuits the
formulation of goals, since the discussion about ‘modernised’ Britain
is not about what sort of society it will be, qualitatively, but about the
means to get to it – whatever ‘it’ is. All discussions about ‘programme’
and ‘perspective’ become discussions about instrumentalities. It was
in this context that Mr Wilson, giving his most far-reaching statement
about the scientific revolution to the party conference before the
1964 election, seriously suggested that there was no reason for the
party to continue to tear itself to pieces in a fruitless discussion about
socialism, since the scientific revolution would redefine socialism for
the twentieth century. This is the apogee of technical determinism.
Secondly, the ideology of modernisation is a truncated ideology
since it crudely foreshortens the historical development of the society.
After all, though it is true that socialism was always, inter alia, about
the ‘modernisation of social life’, it is about modernisation in some
concrete social and historical setting. As Michael Walzer has pointed
out, ‘socialism was thought to involve significant transformations
precisely of modern, that is, bourgeois life’.6 And the transition from
bourgeois to socialist society, though conceived in different ways in
the different socialist traditions, involved the transformation of social
relations, the reordering of priorities, the restructuring of power and
privilege in the society. In other words modernisation was a means, or
one part of the means, not the end. It had content. The current version
foreshortens this whole perspective, so that the bourgeois phase – in
which precisely industrial society was made and ‘traditional’ feudal
society broken – becomes assimilated into ‘traditional society’, and
all that follows is a matter of techniques rather than of structures,
involving no transformations, no confrontations either of power or of
values, no clash of interests. Thus Mr Wilson may modernise Britain.

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But if he fails, Mr Heath might do it. Or Mr Grimond. Technology,

so it is supposed, is beyond politics, beyond ideology. It is neutral.
Apparently, either socialism or capitalism could ‘electrify’ the society.
Thirdly, the politics of modernisation is supposed to operate within
the model of conflict-free bargaining. This evades or suppresses all the
decisive moments politically when men might have to choose between
competing and irreconcilable interests, between different versions of
society and the social good. The politics of such an ideology is above all
the manipulation of consensus – since it is assumed that all men of good
will, modernisers to a man, combine together to defeat the traditionalists.
It is according this model that old trade unionists and old entrepreneurs
who take the highly old-fashioned view that capital and labour have
conflicting interests in a free enterprise economy are both assimilated,
rhetorically, into the same camp. They become the target of attack from
the modernisers on both sides. They are outside the consensus. It was in
this spirit of technical rationality that Mr Wilson made his bid for power
in 1964, calling all men of the centre to his support. It is to maintain
this consensus that trade unionists, businessmen, management,
consumers and government – each with their own maintained and
serialised positions of power – sign declarations of intent and aim their
multi-pronged ‘nickies’ and ‘neddies’ at an incomes policy.7 It is to this
consensus that Mr Brown is continually speaking – belabouring the
recalcitrant militants with one hand (the left) and the men of goodwill
of the British Federation of Industries with the other. What dominates
government activity, when it is not actually trying to master, without a
popular mandate to do so, the structural problems of the system, is the
manipulation of consensus and the politics of ‘the bargain’. This three-
cornered bargain is the basis of British politics today.
Of course, by seeking the support of men of goodwill everywhere,
the Labour government ends up by having real political support
nowhere: for since the society is pregnant with conflict but the model
of politics the government is attempting to work is ‘conflict-free’, the
whole geological structure of politics in the society is fragmented; and
we move, inevitably, towards the politics of the floating vote, which is
also the politics of psephology. It is simply not possible, given Britain’s
economic and social structure, and human and technical resources,
to square, within one political programme, both unskilled manual
workers and top management, both the defence of the pound sterling
and the city, both industrial expansion and restraint, both the car

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manufacturers and the transport needs of the society, both the mark-
up rate and the cost of living, both low-income housing and the
land speculators, both Etonians and Scunthorpe Grammar, both the
doctors’ lobby and the health service, both private insurance and the
old age pensioners. These conflicts, structural to the society, cannot all
be absorbed and resolved in the drive for ‘the new’. Particularly if the
trajectory attempted is a ‘radical’ one, a transforming one. The conflict-
free, modernising model of politics is a sure stabiliser of the status
quo, since all roads lead to the kind of society we already have, social
relations as they already exist, the share of the cake as it is at present
divided: only ‘modernised’. As Walzer comments, ‘all processes arrive
and are always arriving at the modern, but this is always a particular
modern, determined by its history. Not even the spread of a single
technology or the increasing inter-relatedness of the various divisions
of mankind seems likely to produce in the near future a single history
and a single modernity. We will continue to live in significantly
different societies.’ And so long as we do, politics – however masked –
will remain the crucial choice between those differences.
It is now possible to speak directly of political commitment. The
commitment of the socialist in this period is to the making of socialist
consciousness, rather than the accession to political power. The weakness
of the Labour government in office is a clear demonstration that the
‘practical, pragmatic imperatives’ which have dominated official party
thinking and strategy, in both the Gaitskell and Wilson eras, were the
wrong priorities. Not only have they led the party to the wrong tactic,
they have also haltered and mystified loyal party workers and supporters.
To take office in the name of structural change and reform without an
accompanying consciousness and a popular mandate is to become the
prisoner of the system (see endnote 3 on immigration). In the event the
modernising flair of Mr Wilson, especially in his election campaigns,
has proved a fatal gift, since it creates the illusion of radicalism and a
radical response without the substance. Labour entered office in 1964
without a mandate to reconstruct social relations in British society,
without a mandate to break the power of the vested interests which
kept stop-go economic policies in being, without a mandate to reshape
British foreign policy and commitments. It therefore finds itself having
to play for reform within an unreconstructed social system, and to
energise British industry and exports while placating the vested interests;
while it is forced into a neo-imperialist stance in world affairs, and has

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become the initiator of one of the most formidable periods of ‘stop’ in

the stop-go cycle. It is not expertise, technical sophistication, or the will
to modernise that Labour lacks. It is politics.
The commitment to this kind of politics, is, of course, a complex
matter, for consciousness – as we have been arguing – is not a matter
of skilfully written party programmes but of a totalising political
strategy, a strategy both of theory and praxis, both of programme
and of organisation. It is a matter of setting out the tasks. The task
begins with an understanding of the changing structure and culture
of British society, and of the basic sub-structures – economic, social,
technical, political, and cultural – which are typical to the society.
It must take account of the environmental and economic resources
which can be mobilised by a political strategy – for, as a comparison of
Britain and the United States suggests, neo-capitalist societies can be
either dynamic or atrophied, either resilient and aggressive or torpid
and stagnant (just as socialist societies can be either rich or poor). The
assessment of what we have to work with, and what structure of social
relations we have to work within, is the basis for the dispersal of myths
and illusions and the beginning of true political realism.
Then comes the unmasking of structural tensions and contradictions
in the system, the demands which are likely to provide the dynamic
for social transformation. These issues may be ‘political’ ones: but they
may not. They may lie, first of all, in the points at which the system is
encountered and confronted in the experience of men and women, the
conflicts which, properly developed, may lead to a movement in which
the whole system as a system is confronted on the political stage. We
are dealing not with a set of abstract economic relations but with
a whole social and cultural system. And the only political strategy
which has the least hope of transforming such a system is that which
makes a totalising confrontation with its every feature and part. But
it is the inter-relatedness of the issues which is alone able to make the
démarche from the existing society to any other a political possibility.
To the building of this systematic confrontation with neo-capitalism
as a social system, all men in all professions and all personal situations
can contribute: for I have tried to show that the system has intellectual,
cultural, technical and ideological ‘sub-systems’, as well as economic
and social and organisational ones, and that it is the connexion of
these parts, rather than the predominance of any determining one,
which has displaced and emasculated progressive developments in the

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post-war period. This may seem highly theoretical, yet I believe that
socialism in this decade has been crucially defeated in the realm of
theory and ideology, and that the undertow to narrow pragmatism and
technical criteria of efficiency, while seeming suitably tough-minded
and realistic in the short run, is just what, in the long run, has led the
politics of the left up the garden path to No 10 Downing Street.
But then, side by side with the development of a ‘house of theory’,
and a strategy, is the question of organisation, the building of the
movement. The most fashionable slogan among the modernising wing
of the labour movement is that we are at the end of the ‘building of
the socialist movement’: the task now is to take, keep, hold and wield
political power. This too is part of the trap of pragmatism. Social
change cannot come about without its human agencies: and the
quality, character, structure, historical experience and organisation of
the agencies of change is one of the determining factors in the ‘real
movement of history’. The experience and organisation of the trade
union movement in Britain represents, at one and the same time, the
conserving and stabilising strength of working-class politics, and a
complex form of complicity with the ongoing system of society. It has
placed its indelible stamp on the nature of the struggle for socialism
in Britain. This is true of every movement of social revolution in every
society. The form and circumstances of the Leninist party stamped
the Russian revolution, as certainly as the Long March of the Chinese
army of liberation and the character of the struggle in the Sierra
Maestra marked the Chinese and the Cuban revolutions. Revolutions
of different kinds transform and transpose – but they do not transform
and transpose out of nothing: historical continuity is always preserved,
and the means and methods of change which are adopted become in
a sense the content of the transformation. The test of the movement
to surpass neo-capitalism will be the ability of that movement, within
its own organisation, to develop forms, structures, and relationships
which represent real alternatives to those which belong, typically, to
the dominant social system. A movement organised along bureaucratic
lines, in which the ‘experts/rank and file’ or full-time politicians/
political consumers’ dichotomies of the society are tragically mirrored,
will never be the agent of a democratic, egalitarian revolution.
I have had some experience of two ‘moments’ in the past decade in
which – partially, it is true, but significantly – a break has been made
with the ongoing system. The first can be described as the ‘moment of

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1956’, the year of Suez and Hungary, in which by a kind of double-

reflex people were liberated mentally and politically from the ‘fix’ of
Stalinism and Butskellism. Out of that liberation there emerged a
period of political creativity in the widest sense – the involvement of
young people in politics, the re-engagement of older people rendered
inactive by the cramp of Stalinism abroad and by the ‘apathy’ of
cold war politics at home, the first break in the ethos of east-west
politics, the first demystification of the illusions of ‘affluence’ and the
‘permanent welfare revolution’. The ‘new left’ – as a movement of ideas
rather than as an organisation – was only a part of that break, but
it was an important part: and within the ideas, the kinds of social
criticism and of historical analysis which for a time moved in the orbit
of the ‘new left’, there were to be found, I still believe, the elements for
‘the house of theory’.
The other ‘break’ was in the anti-nuclear movement, a development
related to the complex issues and feelings stirred to life in 1956, but
which focused on the problems of war and peace, the nuclear threat,
and Britain’s relations with the world. However short this movement
may have fallen of offering a fully developed ideology appropriate to
the problems of nuclear war, it did more than any other to mark the
period off politically from the earlier cold war consensus. And it threw
up, in a maelstrom of conflicting ideas and policies, some crucial lessons
for us in terms of the character of movements of dissent, especially in
the area of democratic participation, and of the connexions between
war, morality and social change in the modern world.
Both these ‘moments’ in the last decade touched the majority of
people in the society in intangible ways, but fleetingly: and their
impact may seem at the present time to have receded. But they
represented, then and now, the few available styles of dissent from the
post-war consensus, two related forms of political commitment. The
only political commitments worth taking up in the next period are
commitments which follow within their perspectives.

Endnotes

1. From Ossowski, Class Structure in the Social Consciousness, Land

1963, p97: ‘Experience has shown that the term “classless society” has
acquired another meaning than that involved in the Marxian ideal

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type. The abolition of the class system can be understood as the wiping
out only of those inequalities which result from class divisions. In this
sense the abolition of social classes does not necessarily mean the aboli-
tion of the status hierarchy or of economic inequalities. The liquidation
of levels in the social structure does not necessarily involve the destruc-
tion of the social ladder. The abolition of the system of class privileges
does not entail the abolition of all the privileges whereby individuals
differ from one another. The point is – which of these privileges are
regarded as not being associated with the class system. The conception
of the classless society, wherein classlessness by no means presupposes
economic egalitarianism, appeared, it would seem, simultaneously
with the triumph of the idea of modern democracy founded upon free
competition, after the fall of the estate order and wiping out of estate
privileges … Today we meet this conception – the conception of a
classless society which economically is not egalitarian on both sides of
the line that divides the world into two camps.’
2. The term ‘carnival’ is used by Erikson in Young Man Luther,
London, 1959, p71: ‘Men, especially in periods of change, are swayed
by alternating world moods which seem to be artificially created by
the monopolists and manipulators of an era’s opinions, and yet could
not exist without the highly exploitable mood cycles inherent in man’s
psychological structure. The two most basic alternating moods are those
of carnival and atonement. The first gives licence and leeway to sensual
enjoyment, to relief and release at all costs; the second surrenders to the
negative conscience which constricts, depresses and enjoins man for
what he has left unsolved, uncared for, unatoned.’ Raymond Williams
points to this problem of alternatives between culture and affluence
in class consciousness in an essay on Thomas Hardy in The Critical
Quarterly, Winter 1964, pp343-4.
3. Immigration
The problem of immigration into Britain is a good illustration of the
Labour Party’s failure to recognise the need to create social conscious-
ness before legislation. Despite liberal intentions they failed, in the ten
years previous to office (the ten years of concentrated migration), either
to confront the issue or to build in the country the kind of radical social
platform which would permit them to legislate in a liberal manner. There
were no Labour migration policies; no attempt to link social issues such
as housing and land speculation with the problems of immigrant housing

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in the twilight zones of the cities (the Rachman scandal over housing,
which the Profumo crisis highlighted, was precisely such an opportu-
nity); no attempt to confront creeping racialist attitudes within the party
itself, particularly at local and constituency levels; no effort to create a
mandate for giving coloured immigrants preferred treatment in the social
services so as to level opportunities upwards. Then, at the general election
of 1964, when race had been permitted to take its place in the centre of
the political stage, shocked by electoral defeat at Smethwick and finding
itself, in panic, constrained by racialist attitudes it had done nothing
to combat, the Labour government ‘had to’ publish its illiberal white
paper – a document which placed a ceiling on immigration at a figure
(8500) arrived at in the most technically accomplished way (no doubt
with a flurry of computers), but bearing no relation whatever to anything:
simply plucked out of the air in an exercise of highly rational irration-
alism. The notion that political action creates the conditions within
which legislation takes place seemed, on this issue, as foreign to the new
Labour ideology as it would have been to Burke or Bagehot.

Notes

1. E.P. Thompson, The Making of The English Working Class, Gollancz 1963.
2. Since this paper was first delivered, a very useful article has appeared
which discusses these changes critically in much the way I would have
wanted to do here. I am now able to make direct reference to it: see ‘The
Withering Away Of Class’, by J.H. Westergaard, in Anderson and
Blackburn (eds), Towards Socialism, Collins 1965.
3. See for example Perry Anderson’s ‘Origins Of The Present Crisis’, in
Towards Socialism: but also E.P. Thompson’s reply, ‘The Peculiarities of
The English’, in Socialist Register, No 3.
4. J.K. Goldthorpe, D. Lockwood, F. Bechofer, and J. Platt, The Affluent
Worker in the Class Structure, Cambridge University Press 1969.
5. Perry Anderson, ‘Problems of Socialist Strategy’, in Towards Socialism,
pp264-5.
6. Michael Walzer, Dissent, Autumn 1964.
7. The National Economic Development Council (NEDC) and the National
Economic Development Office (NEDO) – both known as Neddy – and
National Incomes Commission (NIC, Nicky) were set up towards the
end of the Macmillan administration, and continued by the Wilson
administration.

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 A world at one with itself
1970

he issue of violence in the mass media has been posed in the

T familiar terms of the fantasy or fictional portrayal of violence
there. But if the media are playing a role in the alleged escalation of
social violence, it is almost certainly not Z Cars, The Virginian, Callan
or Codename which are ‘responsible’. What is at issue is not the fantasy
role of fictional violence, but the alleged real effects of real violence.
The area of broadcasting in question is that traditionally defined as
‘news/current affairs/features/documentaries’. It is, for example, the
only too real bodies of only too real Vietnamese, floating down an all
too real Cambodian river, which some as yet unstated informal theory
of cause and effect links in the minds of television’s critics with the
question of ‘law and order’. Thus it is to the question of news that we
must turn.
As it happens, news has just undergone an enormous expansion in
the new radio schedules. In the philosophy of streamed radio which
underpins the BBC’s Broadcasting in the Seventies, news got a priv-
ileged place. Under the new dispensation, the avid listener is never
more than half an hour away from the next news bulletin. But the
really striking development is the growth of the news-magazine style
of programme, on the World At One model.1
What constitutes the definition of news currently employed on
radio programmes of this new type? I put the point in this way, and not
in the more familiar terms of ‘coverage’ or ‘bias/objectivity’, because
this constitutes the heart of the matter. Journalists throughout the
media are notoriously slippery and defensive when thus confronted.
‘The news’, they assume, is clearly what it is: newsworthy people and
events, happening ‘out there’ in the real world, at home and abroad.
The relevant questions are always technical ones: ‘How adequately
can we cover these events?’, ‘Is the coverage biased or objective?’.
This view is legitimated by a body of journalistic folklore, with its

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ritual references to copy, deadlines and news angles. These sanction

professional practice and keep non-professional busybodies at bay.
Of course, newsmen agree, the news can be either ‘hard’ or ‘soft’,
graphically or neutrally presented (sensationalism/objectivity), a
report from the front or a background analysis (actuality/depth).
But these are matters of treatment – of form and ‘flavour’ – not of
content or substance. It is worth observing that all these routine ways
of setting up the problem are drawn from the press, reflecting both
the common background of media newsmen in Fleet Street, and,
more important, the powerful hold of models borrowed for radio or
television from the press.
The notion that the news somehow discovers itself may be of service
to the harassed newsgatherers and editors. Such professional ‘common-
sense constructs’, such ad hoc routines, are employed in most large-
scale organisations. They enable hard-pressed professionals to execute
their tasks with the minimum of stress and role-conflict.
These idiomatic short-hands give the professional a map of the
social system, just as the categories of classification in mental hospitals
(see Erving Goffman), the clinical records of hospitals (see Harold
Garfinkel), and the notebooks and case records of police and probation
officers (see Aaron Cicourel), witness to the moral order and the system
of meanings which other professionals use to give sense to their tasks.2
But, against this defensive strategy, it needs to be asserted that the
news is a product, a human construction: a staple of that system of
‘cultural production’ (to use Theodor Adorno’s phrase) we call the mass
media. Journalists and editors select from the mass of potential news
items the events which constitute ‘news’ for any day. In part, this is
done by implicit reference to some unstated and unstatable criteria of
the significant. News selection thus rests on inferred knowledge about
the audience, inferred assumptions about society, and a professional
code or ideology. The news is not a set of unrelated items: news stories
are coded and classified, referred to their relevant contexts, assigned to
different (and differently graded) spaces in the media, and ranked in
terms presentation, status and meaning.
The process of news production has its own structure. News items
which infringe social norms, break the pattern of expectations and
contrast with our sense of the everyday, or are dramatic, or have
‘numerous and intimate contacts with the life of the recipients’, have
greater news salience for journalists than others. As a highly reputable

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reporter observed to an irate group of student militants, who were

questioning her as to why her paper reported every vote cast during the
period of a university occupation, but nothing of the weekend teach-in:
‘Votes represent decisions: decisions are news: discussion is not’.
The role of the news journalist is to mediate – or act as the
‘gatekeeper’ – between different publics – between institutions and
the individual, between the spheres of the public and the private,
between the new and the old. News production is often a self-fulfilling
activity. Categories of news, consistently produced over time, create
public spaces in the media which have to be filled. The presence of the
media at the birth of new events can affect their course and outcome.
The news is not only a cultural product: it is the product of a set
of institutional definitions and meanings, which, in the professional
shorthand, is commonly referred to as news values.
Statistics of crime represent not only the real movement of the
crime rate, but the changing definition of what constitutes crime, how
it is recognised, labelled and dealt with. To label as ‘violent’ every
incident from skinhead attacks on Pakistanis, to Ulster, to protests
against the South African tour, is to establish a certain way of seeing
and understanding a complex set of public events.
Once the category of ‘law and order’ has come into existence as
a legitimate news category, whole different orders of meaning and
association can be made to cluster together. Terms of understanding
– such as the criminal categories reserved for acts of collective social
delinquency (‘hooligans’, say, or ‘layabouts’) – become transferred
to new events like the clashes between citizens and the army in
Ulster. It may be that there has been some objective increase in real-
world violence; but the effect on news values is even greater than
that would justify.
This shift is difficult to pinpoint in the brief radio or television news
bulletin, though if we take a long enough stretch of time we can observe
changes both in the profile and in the style of news reports. But in the
format of the radio news magazine, which approximates more closely
to the profile and treatment of a daily newspaper, the amplifying and
interpretative function of the media comes into its own.
News magazines include studio interviews, reports from
correspondents, replies to attacks, features and ‘human interest’ stories.
This is where background classifying and interpretative schemes
register most forcefully. In terms of direct bias, there seems less cause

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for concern. Within its limits, radio shows little direct evidence of
intentional bias. It treats the spokesmen of the two major political
parties with scrupulous fairness – more, in fact, than they deserve.
But the troublesome question is the matter of unwitting bias: the
institutional slanting, built in not by the devious inclination of editors
to the political right or left, but by the steady and unexamined play of
attitudes which, via the mediating structure of professionally defined
news values, inclines all the media towards the status quo.
The operation of unwitting bias is difficult either to locate or
prove. Its manifestations are always indirect. It comes through in
terms of who is or who is not accorded the status of an accredited
witness; in tones of voice; in the set-up of studio confrontations; in
the assumptions which underlie the questions asked or not asked; in
terms of the analytical concepts which serve informally to link events
to causes in what passes for explanation.
Its incidence can be mapped by plotting the areas of consensus
(where there is a mutual agreement about the terms in which a topic
is to be treated), the areas of toleration (where the overlap is less great,
and the terms have to be negotiated as between competing definitions)
and the areas of dissensus or conflict (where competing definitions are
in play).
Unwitting bias has nothing directly to do with the style of
‘tough’ interviewing, since, even in the areas of consensus issues,
the professional ethic sanctions a quite aggressive, probing style
(Hardcastle with Heath, Robin Day with Wilson) – though the probe
does not penetrate to underlying assumptions.
Areas of consensus cover the central issues of politics and power, the
fundamental sanctions of society and the sacred British values. To this
area belong the accredited witnesses – politicians of both parties, local
councillors, experts, institutional spokesmen.
Areas of toleration cover what might be called ‘Home Office issues’
– social questions, prisoners who can’t get employment after discharge,
little men or women against the bureaucrats, unmarried mothers, and
so on. The more maverick witnesses who turn up in this group get, on
the whole, an off-beat but sympathetic ‘human interest’ – even at lines
a crusading – kind of treatment. Guidelines in this sector are less clear-
cut. When such topics edge over into the ‘permissive’ category, they
can arouse strong sectional disapproval. But here even the scrupulously
objective news editor can presume (again, a matter of negotiation and

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 A WORLD AT ONE WITH ITSELF 111

judgment, not of objective fact) on a greater background of public

sympathy, more room for manoeuvre.
Areas of conflict have their un-accredited cast of witnesses too:
protesters of all varieties; shop stewards, especially if militant, more
especially if on unethical strike; squatters; civil rights activists; hippies;
students; hijackers; Stop the Seventy Tourers; and so on. In dealing
with these issues and actors, interviewers are noticeably sharper,
touchier, defending their flanks against any predisposition to softness.
One could plot the hidden constraints of this informal ideology
in the media simply by noting the characteristic argument advanced
against each of these groups. Unofficial strikers are always confronted
with ‘the national interest’, squatters with ‘the rights of private
property’, civil rights militants in Ulster with the need for Protestant
and Catholic to ‘work together’, Stop the Seventy Tourers with the
way their minority actions ‘limit the right of the majority to enjoy
themselves as they wish’.
I am not arguing here that these arguments should not be accorded
some weight. I am remarking how, in the handling of certain issues,
the assumptions which shape an interview item are coincident with
official ideologies of the status quo. I recall numerous instances when
Ulster civil rights militants were confronted with the consequences
of violence. But I cannot recall a single instance when an Ulster
magistrate or politician was confronted with the equally tenable
view, succinctly expressed by Conor Cruise O’Brien, that since Ulster
society has for long been based on the dominance of a minority over
a majority, no fundamental change in that structure can be expected
without its accompanying release of the ‘frozen violence’ inherent in
the situation.
I know that Ulster is a particularly sensitive matter, that the BBC’s
impartiality came under direct fire during the events of September
1969, and that in this period a close executive watch was maintained
over the news output. But then, my criticism is not of the wilful,
intentional bias of editors and newscasters, but of the institutionalised
ethos of the news media as a whole. The influence exerted by this ethos
over actual broadcast programmes is precisely to be found on those
occasions when men of quite varying temperaments and political
views are systematically constrained in a certain direction.
I recall William Hardcastle’s phrase, when reporting the American
Anti-Vietnam demonstrations last year: ‘the so-called Vietnam

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Moratorium Committee’. William Hardcastle’s objectivity is not in

question. But I await, without much confidence, the day when The
World at One will refer to ‘the so-called Confederation of British
Industries’ or the ‘so-called Trades Union Congress’ or even the ‘so-
called Central Intelligence Agency’.
The sources for this hidden consensus must be located outside
the broadcasting media proper, at the heart of the political culture
itself. It is a view of politics based on the relative absence of violence
in British political life, the relative degree of integration between the
powerful corporate interest groups within the state. Th is negotiated
consensus is both a historical fact and a source of ideological comfort.
The sociologist Paul Hirst, in a recent paper on ‘Some problems of
explaining student militancy’, gave a succinct sketch of this political
style:

What is the nature of this consensus? It is that parliamentary

democracy is founded upon legitimate procedures of political
action, and … that parliament is the mode of pursuit and accom-
modating interests within the society. It provides legitimate means
for the pursuance of interests without resort to open conflict …
British democracy raises the means of political action to the level of
ends: the primary values of British political culture are specified by
a body of existing institutions. These institutions and their mainte-
nance have become the primary political goals.

We can only understand the limits and constraints within which

‘objectivity’ functions in the media when we have grasped the true
sources of legitimation in the political culture itself.
We are now at the crunch. For the groups and events upon which,
increasingly, the media are required to comment and report, are the
groups in conflict with this consensual style of politics. But these are
precisely the forms of political and civil action which the media, by
virtue of their submission to the consensus, are consistently unable to
deal with, comprehend or interpret. The nervousness one has observed
in the treatment of these issues reflects the basic contradiction
between the manifestations which the media are called on to explain
and interpret, and the conceptual/evaluative/interpretative framework
which they have available to them.
Whereas the core value of the political consensus is the adherence

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 A WORLD AT ONE WITH ITSELF 113

to ‘legitimate means for the pursuance of interests without resort to

open conflict’, the highly heterogeneous groups I have mentioned
are characterised either by political militancy, leading through extra-
parliamentary politics to the varying types of ‘confrontation’, or by
social disaffiliation, leading through collective and expressive acts
of rebellion to the various types of civil disturbance. Civil righters,
students, Black Power militants, political hijackers and kidnappers,
shop stewards, fall into the political militancy category. Skinheads,
hippies, squatters, soccer hooligans, psychedelic freak-outs, fall into
the social disaffiliation category.
The collective label of ‘violence’ – and its twin metaphor ‘law and
order’ – is at one and the same time both a staggering confusion of new
and old meanings and a penetrating insight. As symbolic categories
they only make sense when the issues they refer to are shifted from the
explanatory context of media to the content of politics.
The effective question about the role of the media, then, is not
Callaghan’s –‘Do the media cause violence?’ – nor Wedgwood Benn’s
‘Is politics too important to be left to the broadcasters?’ (with its
obvious retort); but, rather, ‘Do/can the media help us to understand
these significant real events in the real world?’ ‘Do the media clarify
them or mystify us about them?’
Actuality versus depth is not a simple technical choice. The
distinction is already built into the structure of the national press.
In the arena of news and foreign affairs, popular journalism does not
permit systematic exploration in depth. In the ‘quality’ press, some
measure of background interpretation and analysis is more regularly
provided. Both these things are legitimated by the professional folk-
wisdom. Thus, for the populars: ‘The Great British Public is not
interested in foreign news’ – though how the regular reader of the
Mirror, the Express or the News of the World, our circulation front-
runners, could develop an intelligent interest in foreign affairs is a
matter for speculation. And for the quality press there is ‘the rigid
separation of “hard” news from comment’.
Distinctions of format and depth of treatment flow, via the grooves
of class and education, into the papers we get, and they are hardened
and institutionalised in the social structure of the national press. But
the relevance of this fragmented universe of press communication for a
medium like radio at this time is highly questionable. The audience for
news through the day is far less stratified by class and education than

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the readership of newspapers. Radio must operate as if its potential

audience is the whole nation.
It follows that radio must find ways of making both the foreground
event and the background context core aspects of its working
definition of the news. Otherwise, the radio audience, whatever its
range of interests, will be consigned effectively to getting a perpetual
foreground.
This becomes a critical issue when the coverage is of groups and
events which consistently challenge the built-in definitions and values
enshrined in the political culture of broadcasters and audiences alike.
This position redefines the concept of ‘public ser vice’, in relation to
radio, in a way which runs diametrically counter to the philosophy of
rationalisation which infected Broadcasting in the Seventies. The press
has little to contribute to the development of appropriate models.
Judged in these terms, the manifest tendencies in radio are not
encouraging. A heady, breathless immediacy now infects all of the
news-magazine programmes. In terms of their profile of items,
these programmes progressively affiliate to the model of the daily
newspaper. As events like political confrontation and civil disturbance
escalate, so the coverage is doubled, quadrupled. As coverage expands,
so we become even more alive to the actual ‘violent’ events and
overwhelmed by their vivid sound and image. But as this coverage
takes the characteristic form of actuality without context, it directly
feeds our general sense of a meaningless explosion of meaningless and
violent acts – ‘out there’ somewhere, in an unintelligible world where
‘no legitimate means’ have been devised ‘for the pursuance of interests
without resort to open conflict’.
‘Out there’, let us note, is a rapidly expanding area, covering most
of the rest of the globe – IndoChina, Latin America, the Middle East,
Africa, the Caribbean, Berkeley, Chicago, Tokyo – as well as some
growing enclaves closer to home. Events of this order play straight into
an ideological gap in the media – and in public consciousness. That
gap is not filled by the media – or, rather, it is now being filled in a
systematically distorted way.
Let me conclude with two examples. Take the spate of kidnappings
of foreign diplomats in Latin America. These events were endlessly
covered on radio and television, usually by reporters on the spot.
There was some studio discussion; but the thrust was consistently
towards actuality coverage; has he been shot? will the government

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 A WORLD AT ONE WITH ITSELF 115

pay the ransom? Will West Germany break off diplomatic relations?
The model? Essentially: the front page of the Daily Express. What this
coverage lacked was some framework which would make this bizarre
series of events meaningful or intelligible.
I have been told that this kind of ‘background piece’ would
be provided by the longer reports at the weekend by BBC foreign
correspondents. But this is like telling a man whose regular and
only newspaper is the Mirror, ‘If you want to understand politics of
Guatemala, read the Sunday Times.’ The example is not fortuitous.
For during the kidnapping the Sunday Times did print a fairly
full background article on Guatemala – and a hair-raising, all too
intelligible, story it turned out to be.
An even better example, and one where the press performed as
badly as radio and television (with the exception of 24 Hours) was the
recent Black Power rioting in Trinidad. The most generally agreed
judgment among intelligent West Indians about Trinidad and Jamaica
is that the political situation there is highly explosive. Indeed, the real
question is why either society has not, before now, gone down in a
wave of riots by underprivileged blacks against the privileged coloured
middle class. The answer is not unconnected with the presence both
of Cuba and of the American fleet within easy striking distance of
Kingston and Port of Spain.
The background to the foreground-problem of riots in Trinidad is
the persistent grinding poverty of the mass of the people, intensified by
basic conflicts of interest between the coloured middle class inheritors
of the ‘end of colonial rule’ (one of the most conspicuous-consumption
classes anywhere in the Third World) and the mass of peasants, workers
and urban unemployed, who also happen to be black. Without this
knowledge, the large-scale migration from the Caribbean to Britain,
which has occupied so much ‘foreground’ space in recent months,
is literally, unintelligible. It is another of those meaningless events,
leading to the expected confrontations, and ultimately to ‘violence’.
This gap between the urban and rural masses and a native
bourgeoisie, grown flush in the hectic, post-colonial years of neo-
imperialism, is the political fact about vast tracts of the Caribbean and
Latin America. Yet radio discussions in studio uniformity expressed
puzzlement at how Black Power could become an organising slogan
in a country where the government is ‘black’. The fact which needs
clarification, of course, is that in the West Indies (unlike the United

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States, where the permanent presence of a white power structure creates

solidarity between all ‘black brothers’), the emergent lines of social
conflict are laid down precisely by the over-determined coalescence of
class, power and gradations of colour.
Unfortunately, neither of the two accredited witnesses – Sir Learie
Constantine, who regarded the riots as inexplicable, and Alva Clarke,
who regarded them as ‘a tragedy’ – contributed to this process of
conceptual clarification. When faced with this sudden eruption of
yet another incidence of political violence, the explanatory concepts
of ‘neo-colonialism’ and ‘native bourgeoisie’ were not available – nor
anything else which could do duty for them – in the world of radio.
Instead, the ingredients of the consensual view were quickly wheeled
into place: ‘The Prime Minister’ … ‘resignations from the government’
… ‘state of emergency’ … ‘small groups of vandals roaming the streets’
… ‘disaffection in the army’ … ‘detachment of marines from nearby
Puerto Rico’ … violence/law and order.
In one event after another, now, the same informal theories –
supported by the same ideological commitments, and functioning as
an ‘objective’ set of technical-professional routines – produce the same
mysterious product with systematic regularity.

Notes

1 The World at One radio programme started broadcasting in 1965, and

was seen as breaking new ground in news broadcasting. It was presented
by journalists with Fleet Street experience and combined news and
current affairs reporting. At the time this was regarded as controversial.
2. Erving Goffman, Harold Garfinkel and Aaron Cicourel were all writers
who looked at meaning construction through social interaction, and at
the ways in which rules and norms give meanings to actions in different
social fields.

116
 The ‘first’ New Left: life and times
1990*

he ‘first’ New Left was born in ‘1956’, a conjuncture (not just

T a year) bounded on one side by the suppression of the Hungarian
Revolution by Soviet tanks in November and on the other by the
British and French invasion of the Suez Canal zone. These two events,
whose dramatic impact was heightened by the fact that they occurred
within days of each other, unmasked the underlying violence and
aggression latent in the two systems which dominated political life at
that time – Western imperialism and Stalinism – and sent a shock
wave through the political world. In a deeper sense, they defined for
people of my generation the boundaries and limits of the tolerable in
politics. Socialists after ‘Hungary’, it seemed to us, must carry in their
hearts the sense of tragedy which the degeneration of the Russian rev-
olution into Stalinism represents for the left in the twentieth century.
‘Hungary’ brought to an end a certain kind of socialist ‘innocence’.
On the other hand, ‘Suez’ underlined the enormity of the error in
believing that lowering the Union Jack in a few ex-colonies necessarily
signalled the ‘end of imperialism’ or that the real gains of the welfare
state and the widening of material affluence meant the end of ine-
quality and exploitation.
‘Hungary’ and ‘Suez’ were thus boundary-marking experiences.
They symbolised the break-up of the political Ice Age.
The New Left came into existence in the aftermath of these two
events. It attempted to define a ‘third’ political space somewhere
between these two metaphors. Its rise signified for people on the left
in my generation the end of the tyranny, the imposed silences and
political impasses, of the Cold War in politics, and the possibility of a
breakthrough into a new socialist project.
The term ‘New Left’ is commonly associated these days with ‘1968’,
but to the ‘1956’ New Left generation, ‘1968’ was already a second, even
perhaps a third, ‘mutation’. We had borrowed the phrase in the 1950s

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from the movement known as the ‘nouvelle gauche’, an independent

tendency in French politics associated with the weekly newspaper
France Observateur and its editor, Claude Bourdet. Bourdet, a leading
figure in the French Resistance, personified the attempt, after the war,
to open a ‘third way’ in European politics, independent of the two
dominant left positions of Stalinism and social democracy, ‘beyond’
the military power blocs of NATO and the Warsaw Pact, and opposed
to both the American and Soviet presences in Europe. This ‘third
position’ paralleled the political aspirations of many of the people who
came together to form the early British New Left.
The New Left represented the coming together of two related but
different traditions – also of two political experiences or ‘generations’.
One was the tradition I would call, for want of a better term, communist
humanism, symbolised by The New Reasoner and its founders, John
Saville and Dorothy and Edward Thompson. The second is perhaps
best described as an ‘independent socialist’ tradition. Many of the
people in this second group were influenced by Marxism and some
were, for a time, Communists. Nevertheless the majority were not, and
its centre of gravity, in my reading, lay in that left student generation
of the 1950s which maintained some distance from ‘party’ affiliations,
and, in the disintegration of those orthodoxies in ‘1956’, first produced
Universities and Left Review. I belong to this second tradition.
It may help to understand that moment better if I speak personally.
I was sympathetic to the left, had read Marx and been influenced by
him while at school, but I would not, at the time, have called myself
a Marxist in the European sense. In any event, I was troubled by the
failure of orthodox Marxism to deal adequately with either ‘Third
World’ issues of race and ethnicity or with the questions of racism
or of literature and culture which preoccupied me intellectually as an
undergraduate. Retrospectively, I would identify myself as one of those
described by Raymond Williams in Culture and Society who, following,
as a student of literature, the engagement between the Leavisites and
the Marxist critics, was obliged to acknowledge that ‘Scrutiny won’ –
not because it was right, but because the alternative Marxist models
were far too mechanical and reductive. (We did not yet have access to
Lukacs, Benjamin, Gramsci or Adorno.) On the wider political front,
I was strongly critical of everything I knew about Stalinism, either
as a political system or as a form of politics. I opposed it as a model
for a democratic socialism and could not fathom the reluctance of

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 THE ‘ FIRST ’ NEW LEFT 119

the few Communists I met to acknowledge the truth of what was by

then common knowledge about its disastrous consequences for Soviet
society and Eastern Europe.
Like the rest of the small number of ‘Third World’ students at
Oxford, my principal political concerns were with ‘colonial’ questions.
I became very involved in West Indian student politics. We debated and
discussed, mainly, what was going on ‘back home’ in the expectation
that before long we would all be there and involved in it; we argued
about the West Indian Federation and the prospects for a new Carib-
bean economic order, the expulsion of the left from Manley’s PNP
Party in Jamaica under the pressures of the Cold War, the overthrow
of the Jagan government in British Guiana with the suspension of the
constitution and the moving in of British troops. There was no ‘black
politics’ in Britain at that time; post-war migration had only just begun.
Later, as I began to take a wider interest in British politics, I came
more into contact with the ‘Oxford left’. There was no ‘mass’ British
political movement of the left or major popular political issue to which
one could attach oneself. The choice seemed to be between a Labour
Party which, at that moment, was deeply committed to an Atlanticist
world-view, and the outer darkness of the ‘far left’. The first time I
ventured into a Communist Group discussion meeting was to debate
with the CP the application of Marx’s concept of class to contemporary
capitalist society. At the time, I felt that this was an extremely bold
move – such was the climate of fear and suspicion which prevailed.
After 1954, this climate began to change. There was a slow, hesitant
revival of debate on the left, and a group began to emerge around these
discussions. Many of us attended the ‘Cole Group’ (as G.D.H. Cole’s
seminar in politics was known), which, though formally an occasion
for graduate students, doubled up as a wide-ranging discussion group
of the broad left. Some of the earliest contacts and friendships that
were later to be cemented by the formation of the New Left were
first forged there. The student house where a number of us lived, in
Richmond Road (in the old Jewish quarter, ‘Jericho’, behind Ruskin
College), was another, more informal focal point of these discussions.
It is difficult, now, to conjure up the political climate of Oxford in
the 1950s. Even for people like Alan Hall and myself, who debated
political and theoretical questions with Communists but never had
any intention of joining the party, the ‘Cold War’ dominated the
political horizon, positioning everyone and polarising every topic by

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its remorseless binary logic. Its atmosphere was accurately caught in

the first ULR editorial:

The post-war decade was one in which declining political ortho-

doxies held sway. Every political concept became a weapon in the
cold war of ideas, every idea had its label, every person had his
[sic] place in the political spectrum, every form of political action
appeared – in someone’s eyes – a polite treason. To recommend
the admission of China to the UN was to invite the opprobrium
of ‘fellow-traveller’; to say that the character of contemporary
capitalism had changed was to be ranked as a ‘Keynesian liberal’.
Between the high citadel of Stalinist Russia and the ‘welfare state
– no further’ jungle of the mixed economy, there seemed nothing
but an arid waste. [Caught between] these tightly compartmental-
ised worlds … British socialism suffered a moral and intellectual
eclipse … Nevertheless, the age of orthodoxies has once again been
outstripped by historical events … The thaw is on …

This ‘thaw’ began as a slow, hesitant debate about a range of contem-

porary issues: the future of Labour and the left in the wake of the
Conservative revival; the nature of the welfare state and post-war
capitalism; the impact of cultural change on British society in the
early ‘affluent’ years of the decade. The pace of this debate was accel-
erated by the Khrushchev revelations at the Twentieth Congress of
the CPSU. The response to ‘1956’ and the formation of a New Left
could not have occurred without this prior period of ‘preparation’,
in which a number of people slowly gained the confidence to engage
in a dialogue which questioned the terms of the orthodox political
argument and cut across existing organisational boundaries. Just as a
way of characterising the range of this debate, Alan Hall and I spent
the summer before Suez and Hungary trying to sketch out a book on
the new contours of cultural change in ‘Contemporary Capitalism’
which would reflect this debate. We took away with us, among many
other books, the following key texts: Crosland’s Future of Socialism;
Strachey’s End of Empire; two chapters of what was to become
Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society; F.R. Leavis’s Culture and
Environment; Angus Maude’s smug little book on The English Middle
Classes; Osborne’s Look Back In Anger and George Scott’s ‘angry young
man’s’ autobiography, Time And Place.

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 THE ‘ FIRST ’ NEW LEFT 121

Whether we knew it or not, we were struggling with a difficult act

of description, trying to find a language in which to map an emergent
‘new world’ and its cultural transformations, which defied analysis
within the conventional terms of the left while at the same time
deeply undermining them. These reference points had all emerged in
the discussion in the left circles we inhabited in the two years before
Suez. The issue of the Oxford Labour Club magazine, Clarion, which
our group edited in summer 1957, presented as its central political
document a discussion of Richard Hoggart’s Uses of Literacy. Noting
that we had been criticised by both the orthodox Labourist wing
and the student organiser of the CP for not having enough about
politics and being too preoccupied with ‘new and novel definitions’,
we replied that

confusion and uncertainty are the perils of rethinking … we may

appear, for a time, to have left behind ‘serious thoughts about the
next Labour government’. But if it is true that ‘the bottom has
fallen out of politics’ … we must discover where it lies. You cannot
construct a political programme over a vacuum.

These strands were dramatically condensed by the events of ‘1956’.

Soviet tanks in Budapest terminated any hope that a more human
and democratic brand of communism would evolve in Eastern Europe
without prolonged trauma and social convulsion. Suez punctured
the cosy illusion that (to adapt Tawney’s phrase) ‘you could skin
the capitalist-imperialist tiger stripe by stripe’. The Trafalgar Square
Suez demonstration was the first mass political rally of its kind in the
1950s, and the first time I encountered police horses face to face, or
heard Hugh Gaitskell and Nye Bevan speak in public. Bevan’s fierce
denunciation of Eden, I remember, scattered the startled pigeons into
flight … One outcome of the ferment of ‘1956’ was the publication of
the two journals, Universities and Left Review and The New Reasoner,
which, when they subsequently merged (in 1960), formed the ‘first’
New Left Review.
The Oxford left at that time was very diverse. There was a small
number of CP members, who were somewhat embattled because
of their association with an unpopular and, in Cold War terms,
‘subversive’ organisation, although actually they knew and were known
and liked by ‘everybody’ in Oxford at the time. Next, there was the

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great body of ‘Labour Club’ supporters, the majority firmly attached

to Fabian, Labourist and reformist positions, and a few with their eyes
fixed unswervingly on their coming parliamentary careers. Then there
were a small number of ‘independents’, including some serious Labour
people, intellectually aligned with neither of these two camps, who
shuttled somewhat uneasily between them. The latter group attracted
more than its fair share of exiles and migrants, which reinforced its
cosmopolitanism. ‘Chuck’ Taylor was a French-Canadian Rhodes
scholar; Dodd Alleyne was Trinidadian; I was Jamaican; Sadiq al
Mahdi was later to play a significant role in the Sudan; Clovis Maksoud
was a founder member of the Syrian Ba’ath Party.
As it became clear that similar debates were developing in other
universities we thought there ought to be some common platform for
this emerging student ‘left’. This explains the word ‘Universities’ in the
title of the journal we eventually produced. 1956, however, destroyed
the student-bound confines of this debate and catapulted us into the
maelstrom of national and international left politics.
The Oxford part is, of course, only half the story. The New Left had
equally important, though very different, roots in another tradition,
represented by The New Reasoner. This tendency had a quite different
formation in Communist and Popular Front politics in Britain. The
revelations of the Twentieth Congress stimulated inside the party
a painful reassessment of the whole Stalinist experience, and The
Reasoner first appeared, in this context, as an internal opposition
bulletin insisting on an open and public ‘calling to accounts’. It
was only after they lost their struggle for the right to express what
were officially defined as ‘factional’ opinions, and the disciplines of
democratic centralism were mobilised against them, that the majority
of the ‘Reasoners’ either left the Party or were expelled and The New
Reasoner appeared as an independent journal of the left. The final issue
of The Reasoner was planned and produced before Suez and Hungary
but, for it, these events were ‘epochal’. In the aftermath of Hungary
large numbers of people left the Communist Party, and The New
Reasoner and subsequently the New Left provided some of them with
a political rallying point without which many would doubtless have
abandoned politics for good.
The New Left therefore represented the coming together of two
different political traditions. How did this occur, and how well did
it work? The organisational details of the amalgamation between the

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two journals can be quickly summarised. They continued to publish

in tandem for a while, advertising and promoting each other. After
a time the two editorial boards began to meet regularly around a
broader political agenda, to appoint editorial board members in
common and to recruit new ones, like John Rex, Peter Worsley,
Alasdair MacIntyre, Norman Birnbaum, Michael Barratt Brown,
Ralph Miliband, Paddy Whannel and Raymond Williams, who did
not originally belong to either.
Both boards were increasingly preoccupied with the struggle to
sustain the financial and commercial viability of two journals. Even
more pressing was the cost in human capital. For many of us, normal
life had more or less been suspended in 1956. Some had not stopped
running round in circles since – to borrow Lady Eden’s graphic phrase
– ‘the Suez Canal flowed through the drawing room’, and were by
then in a state of extreme political exhaustion. There were also, more
positively, the opportunities we were missing to create a much wider,
united political platform for our position. While we were aware of our
differences, our perspectives had come closer together in the months
of collaboration. Out of this variety of factors came the decision to
merge and, with more suitable candidates like E.P. Thompson and
others being unwilling to serve, I rashly agreed to become the first
editor of New Left Review, with John Saville acting as chairman of the
editorial board.
New Left Review in this form lasted two years. It was never, I think,
as successful or distinctive a journal as either of its predecessors – a
failure which clearly reflected my own editorial inexperience. The
bimonthly rhythm and the pressures to connect with immediate
political issues pushed us into becoming more of a left ‘magazine’ than
a ‘journal’. This required a shift of journalistic and editorial style which
did not square with the original political intention and for which the
board was unprepared. There were differences of emphasis and style of
work between the board, which carried the main political weight and
authority of the movement, and the small working editorial group that
began to assemble around Carlisle Street.
The ‘New Reasoners’ belonged to a political generation formed by
the politics of the Popular Front and the anti-fascist movements of
the 1930s, the European Resistance movements during the war, the
‘Second Front’ campaigns for ‘friendship with the Soviet Union’ and the
popular turn to the left reflected in the 1945 Labour victory. Although

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some younger Communists in the ULR tendency also belonged to this

tradition, their relation to it was always different. In its overwhelming
majority, the ULR generation’s centre of gravity was irrevocably ‘post-
war’. This was a difference not of age but of formation – a question
of political generations, within which the war constituted the symbolic
dividing line. These differences did produce subtle tensions which
surfaced around the new journal. Although these differences never
threatened our underlying solidarities and sense of common purpose,
they made close working collaboration difficult at times.
These differences of formation and political style of work were
magnified by the location of the two tendencies in two quite distinct
social and cultural milieux. The New Reasoner’s base was in Yorkshire
and the industrial North. Although it had many readers elsewhere, it
was organically rooted in a provincial political culture – not just that
of the labour movement but also of organisations like the Yorkshire
Peace Committee – and was intensely suspicious of ‘London’. ULR also
attracted support from many parts of the country; but it very much
belonged to what the ‘Reasoners’ thought of as the ‘cosmopolitan’ or
‘Oxford/London’ axis. Although we did not consciously understand
it at the time, the ‘ULR-ers’ were ‘Modernists’, if not actually ‘rootless
cosmopolitans’. As a colonial, I certainly felt instinctively more at
home in the more socially anonymous metropolitan culture, though
I regretted ULR’s lack of organic connections to non-metropolitan
working-class life.
It should by now be clear that even within the editorial boards of
the original journals, the New Left was far from politically monolithic
and certainly never became culturally or politically homogeneous. The
tensions were, for the most part, humanely and generously handled.
But any careful reader of the different journals will quickly be able to
identify real points of difference and, on occasion, fiercely contended
debates surfacing in their pages. It would therefore be quite wrong
to attempt to reconstruct, retrospectively, some essential ‘New Left’,
and to impose on it a political unity it never possessed. Nevertheless,
although no two members would offer the same list, there was a set of
linked themes – a ‘thematics’, if you like – which commanded wide
enough assent to make it distinctive as a political formation.
In my reading, this centred on the argument that any prospect
for the renewal of the left had to begin with a new conception of
socialism and a radically new analysis of the social relations, dynamics

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and culture of post-war capitalism. Far from constituting a modest

updating exercise, this was a far-reaching, ambitious and multifaceted
intellectual project. So far as socialism was concerned, it meant coming
to terms with the depressing experiences of both ‘actual existing
socialism’ and ‘actual existing social democracy’ and transforming,
in the light of those experiences, the very conception of ‘the political’.
So far as the latter was concerned, what we called modern ‘corporate
capitalism’ had very different economic, organisational, social and
cultural forms. It functioned according to a different ‘logic’ from that
of entrepreneurial capitalism, described in Marx’s classic theses or
embedded in the language and theory of the left and inscribed in its
agendas, its institutions and its revolutionary scenarios. For many of
us (though not for everyone) this struggle to ground socialism in a new
analysis of ‘our times’ was primary and originating – where the whole
New Left project began. This was both a theoretical and a political
question, since from the mid-1950s onwards, Labour – having lost
the 1951 and 1955, and shortly thereafter the 1959, elections – started
to tear itself apart in the first post-war ‘revisionist’ debate which had
these questions at its centre.
The dominant account offered was that we were entering a ‘post-
capitalist’ society in which the principal problems of social distribution
had been solved by the post-war boom coupled to the expansion of the
welfare state, Keynesian macroeconomic regulation and the ‘human
face’ of the managerial revolution. All these were elements of what
later came to be known as ‘corporatism’ – big capital, big state – or,
from another point of view, the ‘post-war consensus’. They had led to
an erosion of traditional class cultures and the ‘embourgeoisement’ of
the working class.
Opposed to this scenario was the ‘Old Left’ argument that, since
the system was still patently capitalist, nothing of any significance
had changed. The classes and the class struggle were exactly what
and where they had always been, and to question this was to betray
the revolutionary cause. The majority of the New Left, however,
refused this binary logic, arguing that post-war capitalism had
changed. The new forms of property, corporate organisation and
the dynamics of modern accumulation and consumption required
a new analysis. These processes had had effects on social structure
and political consciousness. More broadly, the spread of consumerism
had disarticulated many traditional cultural attitudes and social

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hierarchies, and this had consequences for politics, the constituencies

for change and the institutions and agendas of the left, with which
socialism must come to terms. Lacking much indigenous material to
go on, the American analysts – Riesman, Galbraith, Wright Mills –
who were at the cutting edge of these developments provided us with
our main purchase on these arguments.
Closely linked to this was the argument about the contradictory
and politically indeterminate ‘drift’ of social and cultural change.
These changes fell short of a transformation of society, yet clearly but
ambiguously dismantled many of the old relations and formations on
which the whole edifice of the left and the project of socialism had
historically been constructed. Again, there were at least two competing
versions of this. One was that, since the fundamental class structure
of British society remained intact, ‘change’ could be only of the most
superficial ‘sociological’ kind. It picked up incidental and mainly
stylistic differences in such marginal areas as new attitudes and life-
styles amongst young people, new patterns of urban life, the movement
out of the inner cities, the growing importance of consumption
in everyday life, the ‘weakening’ of older social identities, and so
on, which did not touch ‘the fundamentals’. This fundamentalist
account was matched, on the other side, by a relentless celebration of
change for its own sake in which the new mass media had acquired
a massive investment. With the expansion of the new journalism, the
spread of mass culture and the rise of commercial television, society
seemed bewitched by images of itself in motion, reflecting off its
shiny consumer surfaces. Life was increasingly described here in the
mindlessly trendy imagery of the absolute divide between ‘then’ – that
is, ‘before the war’ – and ‘now’, after free orange juice, school meals,
the Labour government and Rock Around the Clock …
Again, the New Left insisted on occupying neither of these simple
alternatives, choosing instead a more complex ‘third’ description. We
were not necessarily at one in terms of how we understood these shifts
(the debate between Edward Thompson, Raphael Samuel and myself
on my speculative piece ‘A Sense of Classlessness’ (see Chapter 2 in
this book), in the pages of ULR is one locus classicus of this debate),
but we were agreed about their significance. In my view, much that
was creative, albeit chaotic and impressionistic, about the ‘picture
of the world’ which came from the pages of New Left writing owed
its freshness and vitality (as well as its utopianism) to the effort to

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sketch the meanings of these rapidly shifting contours of change.

That is indeed one place where the New Left investment in the debate
about culture first arose. First, because it was in the cultural and
ideological domain that social change appeared to be making itself
most dramatically visible. Second, because the cultural dimension
seemed to us not a secondary, but a constitutive dimension of society.
(This reflects part of the New Left’s long-standing quarrel with the
reductionism and economism of the base-superstructure metaphor.)
Third, because the discourse of culture seemed to us fundamentally
necessary to any language in which socialism could be redescribed. The
New Left therefore took the first faltering steps of putting questions of
cultural analysis and cultural politics at the centre of its politics.
In these different ways, the New Left launched an assault on the
narrow definition of ‘politics’ and tried to project in its place an
‘expanded conception of the political’. If it did not move so far as the
feminist principle that ‘the personal is political’, it certainly opened
itself up to the critical dialectic between ‘private troubles’ and ‘public
issues’, which blew the conventional conception of politics apart. The
logic implied by our position was that these ‘hidden dimensions’
had to be represented within the discourses of ‘the political’ and
that ordinary people could and should organise where they were,
around issues of immediate experience, begin to articulate their
dissatisfactions in an existential language and build an agitation
from that point. (This was the source of our much-debated ‘socialist
humanism’.) The expanded definition of the political also entailed a
recognition of the proliferation of the potential sites of social conflict
and the constituencies for change. Although we were in favour of a
strong trade unionism, we contested the idea that only those at the
‘point of production’ could make the revolution.
In our report in NLR 1 on the London Club’s work in Notting
Hill, for example, we spoke of racial oppression, housing, property
deterioration and short-sighted urban planning alongside the more
traditional themes of poverty and unemployment; we spoke of young
Blacks on the street while youth clubs were closed, working mothers
without crèches and children without playgrounds, as equally central
to any modern conception of the ‘degradations’ of modern capitalism
– though we remained blind to the ways in which even this expanded
conception of politics was still inscribed in gendered categories.
Doubtless this over-expanded definition traced the connections

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between different domains very weakly and blurred the cutting edge
of our strategy, but it was the inevitable outcome of a powerful belief
that the language of socialism must address the question of ‘how we
live now and how we ought to live’.
The critique of reformism and its singularly British representative,
‘Labourism’, was entailed in this enlarged discourse of ‘the political’.
In the light of Stalinism and the Cold War, reformism appeared the
obvious, rational alternative for anyone who wished to redistribute
wealth more evenly and have a more socially just society, but who was
also committed to the ‘civilised values’ of the Western world. Edward
Thompson described this Hobson’s choice, in his article in Out of
Apathy, as an Orwellian dilemma. We looked for a more radical
and structural transformation of society: partly because we were
committed to many of the fundamental perspectives of the classical
socialist programme; partly because we saw in modern capitalism a
greater, not a lesser, concentration of social power, and could trace
the impact of ‘commodification’ in areas of life far removed from the
immediate sites of wage-labour exploitation – but above all because
of the much broader critique we had of ‘capitalist civilisation and
culture’. Questions of alienation, the breakdown of community, the
weakness of democracy in civil society and what the early American
New Left, in its Port Huron statement, called ‘quality of life’ issues,
constituted for us as significant an indictment of the present regime
of capital as any other – an indictment we thought irremediable
within an unreformed and untransformed society and culture.
No one expressed the fundamental and constitutive character of
this argument for and within the New Left more profoundly than
Raymond Williams.
It was in this sense that we remained ‘revolutionaries’, though few
retained any faith in a vanguardist seizure of state power by a small
minority unaccompanied by any broader democratic and cultural
‘long revolution’, or a shift in the ‘mode of production’ achieved by
bureaucratic state control. Both seemed implausible scenarios under
conditions of modern class democracies, and unlikely to produce those
automatic transformations which the traditional left anticipated. The
opposition between ‘reform’ and ‘revolution’ seemed to many of us
outdated: more a way of swearing at and anathematising others than
having any real analytic-historical value in its own right. We sought,
in different ways, to bypass it.

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In these and other significant ways, the dominant tendency of

the New Left was ‘revisionist’ (then not such a dirty word as now)
with respect both to Labourism and to Marxism. We had come
into existence and now lived in the age of ‘many Marxisms’. We
confronted the ‘freezing’ of Marxism in Eastern Europe into a sterile
state dogma. We watched ‘Marxist’ tanks overthrowing the ‘Marxist’
provisional government of Imre Nagy and Georg Lukacs in Hungary.
The ‘Reasoners’ occupied this revisionist space in one way – as
Communist dissidents. The ‘ULR-ers’ occupied it in another way, for
most of our generation had entered politics through the debate with
orthodox and doctrinal versions of Marxism. Few, if any, of us could
have been described, after 1956, as ‘orthodox’ – principally because,
though we held different positions about how much of Marxism could
be transposed without ‘revision’ to the second half of the twentieth
century, all of us refused to regard it as a fixed and finished doctrine
or sacred text. For example, of considerable importance to some of us
was the rediscovery, through Chuck Taylor, of Marx’s early Economic
and Philosophical Manuscripts, with its themes of alienation, species
being and ‘new needs’, which he brought over from Paris in 1958 in
French, and which only shortly thereafter became available to us in an
English translation.
There were many other ‘themes’ which any comprehensive account
would be obliged to discuss: for example, the debate around ‘socialist
humanism’, the analyses of the Third World and, in connection with
CND, ‘neutralism’, NATO and disarmament; the debates about
popular culture and the media. However, since the New Left is so
often ‘tagged’ as mainly an intellectual formation, it may be more
appropriate to remind readers that the ‘first’ New Left, however
mistakenly, thought of itself as a ‘movement’ rather than simply a
‘journal’, and that only with the passage to the ‘second’ generation in
the early 1960s was this project abandoned.
Shortly after the publication of the first issue, ULR called its first
‘readers’ meeting’ on an inauspicious Sunday afternoon, which was
followed by the foundation of the London ULR Club. For its first
meetings, the four editors invited the distinguished contributors to
the first issue to address their readers. The first speaker was Isaac
Deutscher, whose title, ‘The Red Sixties’, proved not quite as prophetic
as it sounds, since Deutscher predicted, not ‘1968’, but the dramatic
changes in the Soviet Union which he was convinced would quickly

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follow the Khrushchev revelations. This was a huge, exciting occasion,

and large beyond all expectations. The four editors rearranged the
room in the Royal Hotel in what Raphael Samuel assured us was
the intimate manner of the Berlin political cafés of the 1930s and
went off to have a meal. When we returned, there were seven hundred
people waiting outside the building, and one or two (including Suzy
Benghiat, later to be a leading figure in the London New Left Club)
had drafted themselves to set an entrance price and take the money.
In the early years the ULR Club (later the London New Left Club)
attracted to its weekly meetings audiences of three and four hundred
drawn from across the whole spectrum of the left. For a time it
provided an extremely important, lively, often contentious focal point
for people with no other formal political commitment. It differed
from the typical ‘left’ organisation or sect in that its purpose was not
to recruit members but to engage with the political culture of the
left on a very broad front through argument, debate, discussion and
education. It became an important independent centre for left politics
in London, particularly after it found a permanent home, through
another of Raphael Samuel’s nerve-rackingly risky but brilliantly
innovative ventures, in the Partisan coffee bar in Carlisle Street. This
was the first left ‘coffee bar’ in London, with a club house and library
on the floors above, which had been lovingly redesigned by Ernest
Rodker, a fine carpenter and one of the most active and committed
club members. On the fourth floor it housed the offices of ULR with its
one full-time employee: Janet Hase, the Australian business manager.
After the merger, they became the offices of NLR. However, weekly
club meetings continued to take place in larger venues around central
London, since the Partisan was too small to house them. Following the
merger, a number of ‘New Left clubs’ sprang up around the country.
(The last issue of NLR which I edited, no. 12, listed thirty-nine in
various stages of political health.)
A brief description of the activities of the London Left Club will
give some indication of what this ‘movement’ around New Left ideas
was like. There were well-publicised and large weekly public meetings
with a very wide range of speakers. Gaitskell, Crosland, Crossman and
others from the Labour leadership came to debate with us. A range
of smaller discussion groups flourished around the Club, including
an Education, a Literature, a Teachers’ and a Schools group. The
cultural debates and activities were considered as important as the

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more ‘political’ ones. Arnold Wesker and John Arden connected us to

the ‘new drama’ and its home at the Royal Court; Lindsay Anderson,
Karel Reisz and Alex Jacobs to Free Cinema, the British Film Institute
and the National Film Theatre; Paddy Whannel and others to the
London jazz scene; Roger Mayne to new movements in documentary
photography; Germano Facetti and Robin Fior to new ideas in design
and typography. There were visits to and discussions at new venues
like the Whitechapel Gallery.
The position of the Club in central London, the fact that many
of us were secondary-modern teachers – coupled with pressures from
‘friends’ of the Club, like Colin MacInnes, about the failure of the
left to put down roots in this emerging post-war culture or to recruit
‘modern’ young people to its cause – gave the New Left Club an
uncertain ‘stake’ in the emerging youth culture of the period. (Under
the influence of MacInnes, I wrote about this aspect of the New
Left in ‘Absolute Beginnings’ in the final issue of ULR.) Inevitably
the London Club became part of the wider metropolitan culture and
the Partisan was, for a time, a key point in the subterranean culture
of Soho life. Other clubs reflected, in programme and composition,
the cultural and political character of their localities: the Manchester
and Hull Left Clubs were close to the local labour movement; the
Fife Socialist League was linked, through Lawrence Daly, to an
independent socialist movement amongst Fife miners in Scotland,
the Croydon and Hemel Hempstead Clubs had a more ‘cross-class’ or
even ‘déclassé-new-town’ feel to them.
Very early on, the London New Left Club pioneered in central
London the propaganda and leafleting for the first CND Aldermaston
March, which the club membership supported en masse. This was the
beginning of close links between the New Left, the modern peace move-
ment in Britain and the birth of CND as a mass political organisation.
The clubs also mounted a sustained propaganda campaign in relation to
the policy debates in the Labour Party about the ‘revision of Clause 4’.
Gaitskell himself had inserted the cultural question into this political
agenda when he argued after the 1959 defeat that Labour’s social
base had been permanently eroded by ‘the telly, the fridge and the
second-hand motorcar’. Pessimists might like to know that we spoke
quite openly at the time of ‘Fifteen years of Tory rule? Mr Selwyn
Lloyd’s finger on the trigger? Mr Lennox Boyd’s rifles over Africa?
Mr Macmillan’s face on TV? Again?’. The Club engaged with the full

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range of these themes. We published replies to Labour Party discussion

documents, debated the Crosland theses on which they were based,
set up exhibitions on cultural issues at Labour Party conferences. We
mounted, for example, the first – and only? – exhibition at an annual
Labour Party Conference offering a political critique of commercial
advertising. We also produced a free, cyclostyled daily broadsheet for
delegates, This Week. I am proud to say that it was in its pages that I
first described Harold Wilson as ‘Mr Facing-Both-Ways’.
Among its other activities, the New Left Club in London became
deeply involved in 1958 with the race riots in Notting Hill and with
the anti-racist struggles of the period around North Kensington. We
participated in the efforts to establish tenants’ associations in the area,
helped to protect black people who, at the height of the ‘troubles’,
were molested and harassed by white crowds in an ugly mood between
Notting Hill station and their homes, and picketed the Mosley and
National Front meetings. George Clark, who later pioneered an early
form of ‘community politics’ in North Kensington, first cut his teeth
on this experience. Michael de Freitas – later to have another career
as ‘Michael X’ – was one of the ‘street hustlers’ who, as a result of this
intervention, came over to the side of the tenants he had been hired to
hassle. In the course of this work we first stumbled across the powerful
traces of racism inside the local Labour Party itself, and Rachel Powell,
an active club member, unearthed the scandal of ‘Rachmanism’ and
white landlord exploitation in Notting Hill, but failed to persuade the
media to take it seriously until it later surfaced as a side-show to the
Profumo Affair.
Peter Sedgwick once acutely observed that the New Left was less a
movement than a ‘milieu’. He was noting the lack of tight organisational
structure, the loose conception of leadership, the flat hierarchies,
the absence of membership, rules, regulations, party programme or
‘line’ which characterised the New Left, in sharp contrast with other
political tendencies and sects on the far left. These organisational
features were the product of our critique of Leninist and democratic
centralist forms of organisation and the emphasis on self-organisation
and participatory politics, which we can now see retrospectively as
‘prefigurative’ of so much that was to come afterwards. He may also
have been obliquely commenting on the low level of working-class
participation – or, to be more accurate, the ‘cross-class composition’
of many, though by no means all, of the New Left clubs. This could

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be seen as – and indeed was – a serious weakness, but oddly enough,

it also had some compensations. Where the clubs were particularly
strong was in those social strata emerging within and across the rapidly
shifting, recomposing-decomposing class landscapes of post-war
Britain. This separated us, not from ordinary working people, for we
had many of those as active supporters, but from the political cultures
of the traditional labour movement and the revolutionary cadres of
the sects. Nevertheless, it gave the New Left a privileged access to the
grinding, grating processes of contradictory social change.
With all their weaknesses, the clubs signified the project of the New
Left to be a new kind of socialist entity: not a party but a ‘movement
of ideas’. We aimed to constitute an intervention in British political
life and to develop a self-organising and participatory political practice
which would be prefigurative of socialism itself – and an effective
critique of the political practices typical of either the major parties
or the left sects. It was said that by 1962-63 many Left clubs were
in decline – and so they were. But that is not the point. The clubs
and other ‘movement’ aspects of the ‘first’ New Left were not only
symptomatic of our politics but a sign that, for us and for the left, the
‘question of agency’ had become deeply problematic. The ‘second’ New
Left – which began, after a brief, brilliant interlude of ‘troika’ rule,
with Perry Anderson’s accession to the editorship, the restructuring
of the editorial board and the exodus of many of the ‘old’ New Left
members – was a much more rigorous theoretical project, committed
to a more orthodox, less ‘revisionist’, reading of Marxism, and was
pursued with remarkable flair and single-mindedness. But it was not
a project which constituted the question of political agency as in any
way problematic, either theoretically or strategically.
These questions of political organisation, strategy and style are best
exemplified in relation to certain concrete political questions of the
time, though they may be thought to have wider implications. CND
and the Labour Party are perhaps the most useful examples. Peggy
Duff, General Secretary of CND and the outstanding organiser of the
antinuclear movement in that period, subsequently wrote, in her book
Left, Left, Left, that in the end, CND swallowed up the New Left. I
do not agree with this judgement, but I understand what lay behind it.
Once involved, the New Left gave CND its sustained and unqualified
support. Their fates became closely intertwined, and, indeed, both
experienced a related decline in the mid-1960s. Nevertheless, the New

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Left also had a project in relation to CND: to broaden its politics; to

‘educate’, in Gramsci’s sense, the moral impulses which brought most
people to the peace movement into a wider politics of the left; and to
make explicit the connections between ‘the bomb’, capitalism, NATO,
Stalinism, the Warsaw Pact. But we pursued that project through an
‘open’ rather than a sectarian strategy. We were committed to working
alongside CND, rather than operating parasitically on it.
This was in sharp contrast to the ‘hard’ left and Trotskyist sects,
who by and large adopted a cynical but classically sectarian practice
towards CND. They treated the peace movement as a ‘soft’ recruiting
ground: to them, it was a movement dominated by misguided moral
and religious enthusiasts, a few of whom could, however, be picked
off for a more ‘serious’ enterprise and parachuted into the nitty-gritty
of ‘real politics’ somewhere else. In this conception, ‘real politics’ is so
often not where everybody else is, but always ‘somewhere else’. The
Trotskyists were to do exactly the same thing again with young people
and students in 1968, picking off recruits from the student movement
for a few heady months of selling ‘the paper’ outside the factory gates
before, brutalised by this entirely gestural mimicry of revolutionary
politics, the young recruits made good their escape, once and for all,
from left politics of any kind.
We adopted this approach partly out of conviction, partly because
we thought the movement of ordinary people into politics – breaking
with the crust of conventional opinions and orthodox alignments in
their own lives, on a concrete issue, and beginning to ‘take action for
themselves’ – was more politically significant than the most correct
of ‘correct lines’. Those foxed by such references to ‘correctness’ may
like to recall that one had to debate as a serious issue the question of
whether or not the Soviet bomb was a ‘Workers’ Bomb’ and therefore
more worth keeping than the capitalist one. Another reason was that we
saw in embryo in CND a new kind of political mobilisation – beyond,
so to speak, the big party battalions – which reflected certain emergent
social forces and aspirations characteristic of their time, in relation to
which it was necessary for the left to develop a new political practice.
CND was one of the first of this type of ‘social movement’ to
appear in post-war British politics – a popular movement with a clear
radical thrust and an implicit ‘anti-capitalist’ content, formed through
self-activity in civil society around a concrete issue, but lacking a clear
class composition and appealing to people across the clear-cut lines

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of traditional class identity or organisational loyalties. It was already

possible to recognise in these new movements features of modern
society, and points of social antagonism which – like the civil-rights
movement at the time, and feminist and sexual questions, ecological
and environmental issues, community politics, welfare rights and
anti-racist struggles in the 1970s and 1980s – have proved difficult
to construct within the organisational agendas of the traditional left.
Without these social movements, however, no contemporary mass
political mobilisation or movement for radical change in modern
times is now conceivable.
Moreover, the New Left itself belonged to the same conjuncture
as CND. It was the product of the same decay in the ‘relations of
representation’ between the people, the classes and the parties which
has become so much more pronounced in the 1970s and 1980s and
mobilised similar social forces. As we wrote in the last issue of ULR:

Here is a movement of people drawn from very different backgrounds,

tired of the two-way shuffle of the political party bureaucracies, fed
up with the Cold War slogans of ‘massive retaliation’ and the ‘Two
Camps’ cast of mind, terrified by what C. Wright Mills calls ‘the
drift and thrust’ to World War III. We cannot claim credit for the
vigour and success of this movement, but we have been proud to
contribute to it, and, through the journals and the clubs, to develop
some of its socialist implications. Similarly with the movements of
protest against the Hola Camp atrocities and the Nyasaland ‘crisis’.
Such groups of people find a common cause with us, not merely
because of the individual issues but because, by doing so, they are
helping to establish the only basis upon which socialism can be built:
the principle that, whatever kind of world we want, we are going to
have to make it for ourselves and the sooner we stand up, say what it
is, and fight for it, the quicker it will be in coming. If the New Left
Review has any political roots, they will be there. Without CND
supporters, Anti-Ugly protesters [a protest movement against the
banality and conformism of post-war British architecture], African
demonstrators, Free Cinema and the Society for the Abolition of The
Death Penalty, we would be nowhere.

Ultimately, what CND posed for the New Left – as new social move-
ments always do – was the problem of how to articulate these new

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impulses and social forces with the more traditional class politics of the
left; and how, through this articulation, the project of the left could be
transformed. The fact that we had no greater success than the left has
had since in trying to construct a ‘historical bloc’ out of such hetero-
geneous social interests, political movements and agendas, in building
a hegemonic political practice out of, and with, these differences, does
not negate the urgency of the task. What we can ‘learn’ from the ‘first’
New Left here is what questions to ask, not which answers work. (Two
decades later feminism found itself log-jammed in the same place,
caught between the ‘Vanguards’ and the ‘Fragments’.) On the other
hand, the failure to resolve it had – and has – consequences. There is no
question that the ‘first’ New Left was weakened by its failure to find a
strategic way through this dilemma and remained somewhat disaggre-
gated between its very different constituencies.
Many people in and around the New Left were members of the
Labour Party. Many were not. As a movement, our attitude to the
Labour Party was quite clear. Our independence from organisational
links, controls, party routines and discipline was essential for our
political project. The majority vote for unilateralism at the Labour
Party Conference, for which many of us campaigned, was a clear
example to us of ‘defeat-in-victory’, as a result of mistaking a platform
victory for the winning of new popular political positions. Inside
the machine, CND withered and shrivelled into a talisman, a fetish
of party conference resolutions, plaything of the manoeuvres of the
block vote, without touching ground in the political consciousness or
activity of many actual people. It is still being defended by the left in
this fetishised form.
At the same time we recognised that the fate of socialism in
Britain was inextricably bound up with the fate and fortunes of
Labour. We recognised Labour as, for good or ill, the party which
had hegemonised the vast majority of the organised working class
with a reformist politics. We honoured its historic links to the trade
union movement. We acknowledged it as the engine of the ‘welfare
state’ revolution of 1945, which we never underestimated because it
represented a reform, rather than an overthrow, of the system. We
remained deeply critical of the Fabian and Labourist cultures of the
Labour Party, of its ‘statism’, its lack of popular roots in the political
and cultural life of ordinary people, its bureaucratic suspicion of any
independent action or ‘movement’ outside its limits, and its profound

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anti-intellectualism. We opposed the deeply undemocratic procedures

of the block vote and the party’s empty ‘constitutionalism’. Yet we
knew that the Labour Party represented, whether we liked it or not,
the strategic stake in British politics, which no one could ignore.
We therefore developed an open and polemical politics in relation
to the Gaitskell leadership, on the one hand, and the ‘nothing-has-
changed-reaffirm-Clause-4’ perspective of the traditional left on the
other; taking up – here as elsewhere – a third position, opening a
‘third front’. In the revisionist debates of the 1950s and 1960s we
opposed the post-capitalist ‘human face of corporate capitalism’ theses
proposed in Crosland’s The Future of Socialism, while recognising him
as a formidable and intelligent opponent. In relation to the left, we
insisted against the doctrinal immobilism of much of the Labour and
trade-union left – on the necessity of grounding the perspectives of
the left in a new analysis of the novel conditions of post-war capitalism
and social change. Some people would continue to work for this
inside the Labour Party; others worked outside. We did not see how
there could be a ‘correct’ line on this issue when there was so little
relationship between what people wanted politically and the vehicle
for achieving it. Our strategy was therefore to sidestep it and instead
to involve people, whatever their affiliations, in independent political
activity and debate. As we wrote in ULR 6, ‘for the first time since the
war, there is, particularly among young people, a left movement which
is not the prisoner of any sect, and yet which is not to be automatically
won to the Labour Party, even as an opposition within it.’
This ‘parallel’ strategy required, as its necessary condition, the
maintenance of journals and clubs, a network of contacts, forms of
demonstration, argument and propaganda which articulated this
‘third position’, which were not subject to the routines of Transport
House but were nevertheless designed to break back into and have
an effect on the internal politics of the Labour Party and the labour
movement. We called this strategy (subsequently treated with scathing
irony by some enragés of the New Left Mark 2 during the High Noon
of 1968, but in hindsight not so simple or foolish a ‘war of position’ as
they made it appear) the strategy of ‘one foot in, one foot out’.
What type of organisational leadership did these strategies pre-
suppose? The metaphor to which we constantly returned was that of
‘socialist propaganda’. As Edward Thompson put it in the final issue
of The New Reasoner:

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The New Left does not propose itself as an alternative organisation to

those already in the field; rather, it offers two things to those within
and without the existing organisations – a specific propaganda of
ideas, and certain practical services (journals, clubs, schools, etc).

The notion of a ‘socialist propaganda of ideas’ was, of course, borrowed

directly and explicitly from William Morris and the relationships
forged in the Socialist League between intellectuals, struggling to
make themselves what Gramsci called ‘organic’, and the working class.
We had all read and been inspired by the ‘Making Socialists’ chapter
of Edward Thompson’s William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary.
Indeed, the first editorial of NLR was framed at either end by a
quote from Morris’s Commonweal article of July 1885: ‘The Labour
Movement is not in its insurrectionary phase’. I added: ‘we are in our
missionary phase’.
Although it was not, as they say these days, ‘fully theorised’, this
conception of leadership was based on certain clear presuppositions.
The first was the necessity of challenging the conventional anti-
intellectualism of the British labour movement and overcoming the
traditional division between intellectuals and the working class. The
second was the repudiation of three alternative models: ‘vanguardist’
and ‘democratic centralist’ conceptions of revolutionary leadership;
Fabian notions of the middle-class ‘experts’ giving socialism from
within the state machine to the working classes; and the traditional
Labour left faith in constitutional mechanisms, conference resolutions,
winning the block votes and ‘electoral contests with slightly more
“left” candidates’. Third, our view was that changes in British society
had brought a large number of the new, post-war social strata within
reach of socialist education and propaganda. Fourth, we had a deep
conviction that, against the ‘economism’ of the Stalinist, Trotskyist and
Labourist left alike, socialism was a conscious democratic movement
and socialists were made, not born or ‘given’ by the inevitable laws of
history or the objective processes of the mode of production alone.
We also challenged the prevailing view that social change as such,
even the so-called ‘affluent society’, would objectively and of itself erode
the appeal of socialist propaganda and that socialism could arise only
out of immiseration and degradation. Our emphasis on people taking
action for themselves, ‘building socialism from below’ and ‘in the
here and now’, not waiting for some abstract Revolution to transform

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everything in the twinkling of an eye, proved, in the light of the re-

emergence of these themes after 1968, strikingly prefigurative (despite
all the other differences between the New Lefts of ‘1956’ and ‘1968’).

We have to go into towns and cities, universities and technical

colleges, youth clubs and Trade Union branches and – as Morris
said – make socialists there. We have come through 200 years of
capitalism and 100 years of imperialism. Why should people – natu-
rally – turn to socialism? There is no law which says that the Labour
Movement, like a great inhuman engine, is going to throb its way
into socialism or that we can, any longer … rely upon poverty and
exploitation to drive people, like blind animals, towards socialism.
Socialism is, and will remain, an active faith in a new society, to
which we turn as conscious, thinking human beings. People have to
be confronted with experience, called to the ‘society of equals’, not
because they have never had it so bad, but because the ‘society of
equals’ is better than the best soft-selling consumer capitalist society,
and life is something lived, not something one passes through like
tea through a strainer.

This position may seem naive and has certainly been dubbed ‘utopian’
and ‘populist’ since. But it was populist in the ‘Narodnik’ sense of
‘going to the people’ and in terms of what they/we might become, rather
than in the Thatcherite sense of massaging popular consent by cynical
appeals to what the people are said by their betters to want. We had an
instinctive, if not well formulated, notion that the socialist project had
to be rooted in the ‘here and now’ and connect with lived experience:
with what we have since learned to call ‘the national-popular’. ‘The
people’ is, of course, always a discursive construction and the blurring
of a precise social referent in the populism of the early New Left was
certainly significant. But there is more than one kind of ‘populism’ and
it can, despite all its problems, be articulated either to the right or the
left, and serve either to short-circuit or to develop popular antagonisms.
The ‘populism’ of the early New Left was certainly of the latter sort,
as Edward Thompson, its main architect, put it in The New Reasoner:

What will distinguish the New Left will be its rupture with the tradi-
tion of inner party factionalism, and its renewal of the tradition of
open association, socialist education, and activity, directed towards

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the people as a whole … It will insist that the Labour Movement

is not a thing but an association of men and women; that working
people are not the passive recipients of economic and cultural condi-
tioning, but are intellectual and moral beings … it will appeal to
people by rational argument and moral challenge. It will counter the
philistine materialism and anti-intellectualism of the Old Left by
appealing to the totality of human interests and potentialities, and
by constructing new channels of communication between industrial
workers and experts in the sciences and arts. It will cease to post-
pone the satisfactions of Socialism to an hypothetic period ‘after the
Revolution’, but will seek to promote in the present and in particular
in great centres of working-class life, a richer sense of community.

Needless to say, the tensions and contradictions implicit in this

‘populism’ were never wholly resolved. The rapid shifts in social struc-
ture of the post-war period, which we constantly tried to characterise
without pinning them down precisely, cut unevenly into the New
Left and we failed to build these differences into a new ‘historical
bloc’, though that was our implicit aim. The tensions already alluded
to between the provincial ‘North’ and cosmopolitan ‘London’, like
later versions of the ‘North/South’ divide, were much more complex
than this simple opposition suggests. Nevertheless, they shadowed
some critical differences in the pace and character of class recomposi-
tion and social decomposition in post-war British society and came to
stand metonymically for the diversifying ground of politics, without
providing any principle of articulation. The tensions between ‘intellec-
tuals’ and ‘activists’ were a continuing, if largely unspoken, problem
connected to the much wider issue of the uncertain status of intellec-
tuals in English cultural life generally and the disabling philistinism
of the left. Cutting across all these tensions from another direction was
the almost totally hidden question of gender – the fact that the great
majority of the editorial-board leadership were men and that many
of those on whom the actual ‘labour’ of keeping the whole enterprise
going fell were women: the usual sexual division of labour, reproduced
so often in the left. About this last question the New Left preserved –
as did the rest of the left – a profound unconsciousness.
We hoped that the clubs would develop their own independent
organisation, leadership and channels of communication (perhaps
their own newssheet or bulletin), leaving the journal free to develop

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its own project. But we lacked the resources to bring this about, which
exacerbated in the clubs feelings that they had no control over the
journal, and in the editorial board the fear that a journal of ideas could
not be effectively run by committees. It was, in effect, this last issue
and the cross-pressures associated with it which finally precipitated
my own resignation from the editorship of New Left Review in 1961.
It is not for me to attempt any overall assessment of the ‘first’
New Left, which I see as only a first stage in the constitution of a
new kind of left politics. It seems absurd to attempt to defend its
record in detail or to impose, retrospectively, a consistency it did not
possess. Its strengths and weaknesses, errors and mistakes, remain
and are unanswerable – to be learned from rather than repudiated.
Nevertheless I would make the sharpest distinction between what we
did and how we did it, and the wider project. I remain as committed
to the latter, thirty years later, as I was then. The ‘third space’ which
the ‘first’ New Left defined and tried to prise open still seems to me
the only hope for the renewal of the democratic and socialist project
in our new and bewildering times.

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 PART 2: THATCHERISM

Racism and reaction

1978

n his book Black and White, which is a study of the negro in

I English society 1555 to 1945 – a book worth reading – James Walvin
recounts how in the last decade of the sixteenth century, England was
troubled by an expanding population and a shortage of food: ‘as
hunger swept the land, England was faced by a problem which taxed
the resources of government to the limits’.1 He adds that immigrants
were seen as adding to the problem, since ‘no group was so immedi-
ately visible as the blacks’ – which, it may surprise you to know, by
then had been distributed already in their thousands in English cities
as a result of the growing involvement of England in the slave trade.
Queen Elizabeth I accordingly wrote to the Lord Mayors of the coun-
try’s major cities: ‘there are of late divers blackamores brought into the
realm, of which kind of people there are alreadie here to manie, con-
sideryng howe God hath blessed this land with a great increase of
people’. She recommended that ‘those kind of people be sent forth of
the land’. And indeed, in January 1601, she repeated her advice in the
rather more official form of a Royal Proclamation allowing a Lubeck
merchant to take ‘such Negroes and blackamores which are carried
into this realm, to the great annoyance of her own liege people’.
Walvin doesn’t record whether this is the first British ‘moral panic’
about race. But the incident does give us a little bit of historical
perspective on the theme of this lecture, which is about the English
reaction to race in the post war period. It also suggests something
about the mechanism involved: that it isn’t quite of such recent origin
as we might suppose. I mean, specifically, the mechanism by which
problems which are internal to British society, not ones which are
visited on it from the outside, come to be projected on to, or exported

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into, an excessive preoccupation with the problem of ‘race’. This

decade is not the first time that the English official mind, when forced
to contemplate a ‘crisis’, has turned the conversation in the direction
of ‘the blacks’.
This is, in a way, the first and perhaps the most important point
that I want to make. Let me put it rather more generally. There is, it
seems to me, an overwhelming tendency to abstract questions of race
from what one might call their internal social and political basis and
contexts in British society – that is to say, to deal with ‘race’ as if it has
nothing intrinsically to do with the present ‘condition of England’.
It’s viewed rather as an ‘external’ problem, which has been foisted to
some extent on English society from the outside: it’s been visited on
us, as it were, from the skies. To hear problems of race discussed in
England today, you would sometimes believe that relations between
British people and the peoples of the Caribbean or the Indian sub-
continent began with the wave of black immigrants in the late 1940s
and 1950s. ‘The English and race’ is frequently debated as if it is a
brief and indeed temporary interlude, which will shortly be brought
to an end. These poor, benighted people, for reasons which the British
sometimes find it hard to bring to mind, picked themselves up out of
their villages and plantations and, quite uninvited, made this long,
strange and apparently unpredictable journey to the doors of British
industry – which, as you know, out of the goodness of their hearts,
gave them jobs. Now the ‘good times’ are over, the kissing has to stop.
The national patience is exhausted. The fund of goodwill has been
used up. It’s time the problem ‘went back where it came from’. The
British people, I am told, require to be assured that the problem of
race will have a definite and conclusive end.
It seems to me that the tendency to pull race out from the internal
dynamic of British society, and to repress its history, is not, as might
be supposed, confined to the political ‘right’ of the spectrum. It is
also, in my opinion, to be found on the liberal ‘left’. For the ‘right’,
immigration and race has become a problem of the control of an
external flow, or, as the popular press is fond of saying, ‘a tidal wave’:
cut off the flow and racism will subside. The liberal ‘left’, on the other
hand, have long treated race and immigration as a problem in the
exercise of ‘good conscience’: be kind to ‘our friends from overseas’
– then racism will disappear. Neither side can nowadays bring
themselves to refer to Britain’s imperial and colonial past, even as a

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contributory factor to the present situation. The slate has been wiped
clean. Racism is not endemic to the British social formation. It has
nothing intrinsically to do with the dynamic of British politics, or
with the economic crisis. It is not part of the English culture, which
now has to be indeed protected against pollution – it does not belong
to the ‘English ideology’. It’s an external virus somehow injected into
the body politic and it’s a matter of policy whether we can deal with it
or not – it’s not a matter of politics.
I hope to persuade you that this view cannot be true. It is not true of
the historical past. And it is certainly not true of the decades since the
1950s, the ‘high tide’ of post-war black migration to Britain. We can’t
account for the emergence of a specifically indigenous British racism
in this way. This last phase, the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, is of course
the main subject I want to come on to in a moment. But something
first must be said about the historical aspects. Britain’s relations with
the peoples of the Caribbean and the Indian sub-continent do not,
of course, belong to and begin in the 1940s. British attitudes to the
ex-colonial subject peoples of a former time cannot be accurately
charted from the appearance of a black proletariat in Birmingham or
Bradford in the 1950s. These relations have been central features in
the formation of Britain’s material prosperity and dominance, as they
are now central themes in English culture and in popular and official
ideologies. That story should not indeed require to be rehearsed.
Britain’s rise to mercantile dominance, and the process of generating
the surpluses of wealth which set economic development in motion,
were founded on the slave trade and the plantation system in the
Americas in the seventeenth century. India provided the basis for the
foundation of Britain’s Asian empire in the eighteenth; the penetration
by trade of Latin America and of the Far East was the centre-piece
of Britain’s industrial and imperial hegemony in the nineteenth. In
each of these phases, an economic and cultural chain – in short, to
be brutal, the imperialist chain – has bound the fate of millions of
workers and peasants in the colonial hinterlands to the destiny of rich
and poor in the heartland of English society. The wealth – drawn
off through conquest, colonisation and trade – has slightly enriched
one English class after another. It has supported the foundation of
one flourishing urban culture after another. It has led to one phase
of economic development after another. It is, in a sense, geography
and distance which has rendered this long historical connection

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invisible. It’s only in the very last phase of British imperialism that the
labouring classes of the satellite countries and the labouring classes of
the metropolis have had to confront one another directly ‘on native
ground’ in large numbers. But that is not the same thing as saying that
their fates have not long been indissolubly connected.
I want to make the proposition that the very definition in the 1970s
of what it is to be English has been articulated around this. If the blood
of the colonial workers has not mingled extensively with the English,
then their labour-power has long entered the economic blood-stream
of British society. It is in the sugar you stir; it is in the sinews of the
famous British ‘sweet tooth’; it is in the tea-leaves at the bottom of the
next ‘British’ cuppa.
I want to turn on that point and argue that the development of
an indigenous British racism in the post-war period begins with the
profound historical forgetfulness – what I want to call the loss of
historical memory, a kind of historical amnesia, a decisive mental
repression – which has overtaken the British people about race and
empire since the 1950s. Paradoxically, it seems to me, the native,
home-grown variety of racism begins with this attempt to wipe out
and efface every trace of the colonial and imperial past. Clearly,
that is one effect of the traumatic adjustment to the very process of
bringing Empire to an end. But, undoubtedly, it has left an enormous
reservoir of guilt and a deep, historical, resentment. It’s not possible
to operate surgically so directly on popular memory without leaving
scars and traces. And, undoubtedly, this reservoir of resentment and
guilt, which does not find easy expression any longer in, for instance,
the forms of popular imperialism in which it did at the end of the
nineteenth century, but which is nevertheless there, has undoubtedly
nourished and provides something of a reservoir for the indigenous
racism of the 1950s and 1960s. Its lingering legacy may in fact account
for something of racism’s popular appeal in the last twenty years.
Thus, that history has to be reckoned with, by one way or another.
But it cannot alone explain the growth of a home-grown racism in
Britain in the last twenty years.
To do this, we have to turn to the factors which are more internal to
British society, factors which have made racism a growing and dynamic
political force in Britain since the 1950s. And here perhaps I should
say that it’s not helpful to define racism as a ‘natural’ and permanent
feature – either of all societies or indeed of a sort of universal ‘human

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nature’. It’s not a permanent human or social deposit which is simply

waiting there to be triggered off when the circumstances are right. It
has no natural and universal law of development. It does not always
assume the same shape. There have been many significantly different
racisms – each historically specific and articulated in a different way
with the societies in which they appear. Racism is always historically
specific in this way, whatever common features it may appear to share
with other similar social phenomena. Though it may draw on the
cultural and ideological traces which are deposited in a society by
previous historical phases, it always assumes specific forms which arise
out of present – not past – conditions and organisation of society. It
may matter less that Britain has, over four centuries, been involved in
modes of economic exploitation and political dominance, on a world
scale, which frequently operated through the mechanism of race. This
only signals the potential – perhaps, the propensity – of the society to
travel that route again. But the indigenous racism of the 1960s and
1970s is significantly different, in form and effect, from the racism of
the ‘high’ colonial period. It is a racism ‘at home’, not abroad; it is the
racism, not of a dominant but of a declining social formation. It is to
the construction of this home grown variety that I want now to turn.
First, it’s necessary to establish some kind of rough periodisation.
But in doing this, I ask you to hold two different perspectives in mind
at the same time. I think we must look, what I call sequentially, at the
way in which racism has been constructed and developed through
the three decades; at its development as a process; at its forms and its
deepening impact from one stage to another. Here we are interested in
what the turning points have been. But at the same time, I think it’s
important to look laterally at what are the other things with which this
developing racism has been connected.
We start at the period of the late 1940s and 1950s, the period of
initial settlement. Here, we find the build up of black workers in the
labour-hungry centres of British production. It’s a period when industry
is, of course, swinging over from war-time to peace-time production.
It leads in to the great productive ‘boom’ of the mid-1950s. The main
outlines of the pattern of black settlement are established in this phase:
the inner-city black concentrations, multiple-occupancy, the density
of black labour in certain specific occupational sectors. In this period,
accommodation and adjustment between blacks and whites is on the
agenda. The black population, on the whole, maintain what I would

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call a ‘low profile’. They draw their curtains both against the cold and
against the ‘outsider’. They efface themselves as an intrusive presence.
They are tiptoeing through the tulips. It’s a period of muted optimism
about the hope and dream of long-term black and white assimilation.
The real environment where this proposition is to be tested is,
of course, in the jobs and localities where black and white workers
meet and live. There are, indeed, even in this early phase, problems
of adjustment between blacks and whites. What is not present are
the strictly defined lines of informal segregation between blacks and
whites which has come to be the prevailing social pattern in such areas.
The whole period is one which Sivanandan has called the ‘laissez-faire’
period in British immigration politics. It’s the period of the ‘open
door’. Remember that it’s lubricated by the economic boom. The need
in British industry to draw heavily on this new reserve army of labour
weakens both any official resistance to the introduction of a black
proletariat and the sense of competition for jobs between blacks and
whites. The segmentation of blacks and Asian workers in particular
occupational sectors helps in this shielding process. But above all,
rising living standards in this period provide just that economic space,
just that room for economic manoeuvre, especially in the urban areas,
which gives people from different ethnic backgrounds a little room to
settle and move in, to put it crudely. The modest ‘optimism’ about race
in this period is closely dependent on a general climate of economic
optimism and the one is an expression of the other.
The real history of that early phase remains to be written. But
the first signs of an open and emergent racism of a specifically
indigenous type appears, of course, in the race riots of Notting Hill
and Nottingham in 1958. These riots cannot be directly attributed to
the early warning signs of a developing economic crisis, though those
are undoubtedly on stage. Notting Hill is a classic scenario for the
appearance of indigenous racism: it’s one of those ‘traditional urban
zones’ where, for the first time, the incipient ‘colony’ life of blacks
begins for the first time to flourish and expand at the very heart of the
British city.
In the race riots of 1958, there are three constituent elements. The
first is the appearance, for the first time in real terms since the 1940s,
of an active fascist political element: the Unionist movement and
the dissident League of Empire Loyalists. They saw, quite correctly,
that the uneven development of culture in an area like this, with its

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incipient but growing urban problems, provided a more favourable

terrain for the construction of a native racism than, for example, the
more traditional structures of an older area of settlement, like Brixton.
They introduced the syntax of racism into street-corner politics for the
first time openly in the post-war period. But, in effect, they were at
that stage more symptom than cause.
The second element, however, is more important. It is the structured
antagonism between ‘colony’ blacks and sections of the indigenous
white working class and petty-bourgeoisie of this decaying ‘royal’
suburb. It is against this fulcrum – which marks the interconnection
between the politics of race and the politics of the inner city – that the
wheel of British racism first begins to turn.
The third, and active element – that which attracted the publicity and
the talk – was white teenagers. Here, looking laterally, it is worthwhile
reminding you that Notting Hill race riots have two histories, not one.
It has a history in the development and the emergence of British racism
and also in the panics about youth and affluence and permissiveness in
the 1950s. It is part of that double structure. If the presence of blacks
within the area touched sources of public anxiety about competition
over scarce resources and coming competition over jobs and so on, the
spectacle of black and white youths, locked in confrontation around
the tube station and the back streets of North Kensington, fed directly
into a deep and troubled anxiety about the whole process of post-war
social change – a process, incidentally, for which the term ‘Youth’
had by then become a vivid social metaphor. In its famous editorial
‘Hooliganism is Hooliganism’, The Times mapped the Notting Hill
events directly, not into the problem of race or of urban poverty,
but into the problem of hooliganism, teenage violence, lawlessness,
anarchy, together with the football spectator – an ancient ring that
term has – and the railway carriage breaker – an even more ancient
formulation. ‘All’, The Times said, ‘are manifestations of a strand of
our social behaviour that an adult society can do without’. As the
economic downturn begins and youth culture surges forward, Britain
introduces, in 1962, the first Commonwealth Immigration Act, which
imposes controls on the ‘flow of black people into the society’.
The second turning point is 1964. For, by now, the economic boom
has tapered off, and the classes which have to be addressed about the
growing material problems – which in the 1950s you will remember
were defined as never to appear again – are no longer composed

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of runaway Teddy Boys or football hooligans, but adult white

workers, and their families. The location of the new turning point
in the emergence of post-war racism therefore takes place not in the
decaying transitional zone of Notting Hill but in the very heartland of
traditional and conservative Britain: Smethwick, the Midlands. Peter
Griffiths’s successful campaign which centred on black immigration in
the 1964 election marks the first moment when racism is appropriated
into the official policy and programme of a major political party and
legitimated as the basis of an electoral appeal, specifically addressed
to the popular white classes. Here is the beginning of racism as an
element in the official politics of British populism – racism in a
structured and ‘legitimate’ form. The defeat of a Labour minister on
the issues proved the penetration of this ideology into the organised
working class and to the labour institutions themselves. It revealed the
degree to which, as a consequence, of everything that had happened to
the labour movement in the 1950s and 1960s, sectors of the working
class were by now clearly exposed and vulnerable to the construction
of a popular racism. The Smethwick victory is a turning point in the
history of British racism. It is followed by the 1965 White Paper on
Immigration from the Commonwealth, which, as Robert Moore has
recently observed, ‘laid the ideological basis for subsequent policy in
this area and as a result, the argument that the numbers of immigrants
was the essence of the problem’.
Between 1964 and 1968, the date of our third ‘turning point’, it
seems that the world itself, not just Smethwick, turned. It turned, of
course, specifically about race. The dream of assimilation of black people
to white culture is laid low and interned in the mid-1960s. The black
population draws back into its defensive enclaves and, much affected
in the 1960s by the rise of black struggles, especially in the United
States, begins to develop a different, distinct and more actively engaged
political ideology. But 1968 is also, of course, a cataclysmic year, not
only in Britain but elsewhere: in the US, France, Italy, Germany, Japan
and Czechoslovakia. It is the period of growing protests against the
Vietnam War. It’s the year of the student revolutions, of black power
and black separatism, of the cultural underground; of ‘hot’ summers
followed by ‘hot’ autumns. It inaugurates, in Britain and elsewhere, a
period of profound social, cultural and political polarisation. It is when
the great consensus of the 1950s and early 1960s comes apart, when the
‘politics of the centre’ dissolves and reveals the contradictions and social

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antagonisms which are gathering beneath. It is, more specifically, a

period in which the state and the dominant classes perceive, not simply
what had tended to transfix them in the 1950s, that is to say the plague
of ‘permissiveness’, the loss of traditional standards and landmarks, but
something much worse than that – something close to an organised
and active conspiracy against the social order itself. It is the year in
which President Nixon wins an infamous victory by summoning up
the ‘silent majority’ in the service of ‘law and order’.
‘Powellism’ is formed in this moment, in this crucible. By ‘Powellism’
I mean something larger and more significant than the enunciation of
a specifically defiant policy about race and the black population by a
single person. I mean the formation of an ‘official’ racist policy at the
heart of British political culture. Mr Powell’s personal pronouncements
on race in 1968 and 1969 have since become justly famous. It is not so
frequently remarked that ‘Powellism’, though it undoubtedly derived
its cutting edge from the resonance of its racial themes, was indeed
directed more widely at the general crisis of the social order itself;
at the conspiracy of radical and alien forces threatening the society,
at what Mr Powell himself called the ‘Enemy Within’. Nor can the
articulation of this talk of ‘conspiracy’ and ‘threats to the social
order’ be laid exclusively at his door. A range of politicians and public
spokesmen in the press and the media in this period are mesmerised
by the spectacle of a society which is careering into a social crisis.

A crisis of authority

It is this whole crisis, not race alone, which is the subject and object
of the law and order campaigns of the period and the increasingly
vigorous appeal to ‘tough measures’. But, undoubtedly, as far as what
one might call the ‘crisis’ talk in British society is concerned, it is
largely thematised through race. Race is the prism through which
the British people are called upon to live through, then to under-
stand, and then to deal with, the growing crisis. The ‘Enemy’ is
‘within the gates’. ‘He’ is nameless: ‘he’ is protean: ‘he’ is every-
where. He may even, we’re told at the one point, be inside the
Foreign Office, cooking the immigration figures. But someone will
name him. He is ‘the Other’, he is the stranger in the midst, he is the
cuckoo in the nest, he is the excrement in the letterbox. ‘He’ is – the

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blacks. This ideology, which is formed in response to a crisis, must

of course, to become a real and historical political force, connect
with the lived experiences of the ‘silent majorities’. It must be given
a concrete purchase on the lives of citizens, on their everyday going
and comings, on their conditions of existence, if they are to feel
that the ‘threat to society’ is palpable and real. When the ‘silent’
and beleaguered majorities – the great underclasses, the great, silent
‘British public’ – are made to ‘speak’ through the ventriloquism of
its public articulators, it is not surprising that it ‘speaks’ with the
unmistakeable accent of a thoroughly home-grown racism. In this
period ‘Powellism’ may be kept out of political power. But in this
period it dominated and defined the ideological terrain. Both the
Act of 1968 with its explicit use of racial categories, and the 1971
Act, which succeeded in bearing down on dependents and families
of black and Asian workers, are tributes to its profound and long
term success, that is to say, its popular, mobilising appeal.
It is on the back of that moment that the great backlash of the
1970s comes to be constructed. It moves on each of the fronts at
once: political, industrial, economic, racial, ideological. As the true
depths of the British economic recession begin to be revealed and
as the state girds up its loins to confront directly what is called the
hidden materialism of the working class, we witness the construction
of what I have come to call a ‘soft law and order’ society. The law itself
becomes, in this period, in part the engine of this social regression.
On the industrial front, it is indeed the law which is recruited
directly into the confrontation with the working class. On the
political front, it is the law which is mobilised against radicals and
demonstrators and ‘extremists’. It is in this period that the syntax was
formed of extremists versus moderates, without which at one stage it
seemed impossible for the media to comment on politics at all. The
legal harassment of the black colony populations, the overt racist
homilies against the whole black population by judges in courts, the
imposition of tough policing and arrest on suspicion in the colony
areas, the rising hysteria about black crime and the identification of
black crime with ‘mugging’, must all be seen the context of what, in
the early 1970s, is a decisive turn in the whole society into a form
of popular authoritarianism. Here what we had defined earlier as a
set of discrete panics about race can no longer be identified in that
way. It is impossible to separate them out. The lulls between them

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now are only temporary: the running warfare between unemployed

black youth and the police; the swamping tactics of the Special Patrol
Groups in the colony areas; the arrests of black political activists ‘on
suspicion’; the scare, fanned by sections of the press, against Ugandan
and then Malawi Asians – the great, prophesied ‘tidal wave’ at last.
Here are the ‘scandalous’ stories of Asian families ‘living in luxury
off the Council’ – which is only the black counterpart of that general
assault on the welfare state which has produced its white counterpart
in stories of welfare scroungers drawing their dole on the Costa Brava.
There are the beginnings of attacks on black centres and black book
shops, the murder of Asian youths, the confrontations in Brockwell
Park and other scenes of set warfare, the fining and focussing down
of the problem of race into its concrete conditions in the inner-city.
In these areas, the programmes of urban aid have failed to stem the
tide of poverty and decay. The cycles of unemployment and the fears
of recession are beginning to bite. Young blacks are increasingly
unemployed – drifting, as every unemployed section of the working
class historically has, into petty crime and pilfering. The colony
areas are the incipient basis for an increasingly restless and alienated
population. This is where the crisis bites. Practically, these areas
have to be policed with increasing strictness. But, also, the crisis has
to be explained. Ideologically it has to be dealt with, contained and
managed. Blacks become the bearers, the signifiers, of the crisis of
British society in the 1970s: racism is its ‘final solution’. The class
which is called upon to bear the brunt of a deepening economic crisis
is divided and segmented – along racial lines. If racism had not existed
as a plausible way in which the underclasses of society could have
‘lived through’ the crisis of the British social formation in the 1970s,
it would surely have had to be invented then.
This is not a crisis of race. But race punctuates and periodises the
crisis. Race is the lens through which people come to perceive that
a crisis is developing. It is the framework through which the crisis
is experienced. It is the means by which the crisis is to be resolved –
‘send it away’. It is the means through which the movement, at the
level of politics and the state, is ‘pioneered’ towards what we must
now regard as a quite exceptional movement and form: a movement
which comes to rely much less than it had in the previous two decades
on the construction of consensus, and much more on the law and on
coercion. Race is the sound in the working of the society, or a social

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order, which is girding itself up to iron times, preparing to take tough

measures for tough circumstances. It is, above all, the language of
racism which has the effect of connecting the ‘crisis of the state’ above
with the state of the streets, and little old ladies hustled off pavements
in the depths down below. That is to say, it makes the ‘crisis’ real for
ordinary people. It’s like hanging, it ‘wonderfully concentrates the
popular mind’.
In his famous speech at Northfield during the 1970 election, Mr
Powell had warned of what he called the ‘invisible enemy within’ –
students ‘destroying’ universities and ‘terrorising’ cities, ‘bringing
down’ governments; of the power of the form of the modern mob
– the demonstration – making ‘governments tremble’; the success of
disorder, ‘deliberately fomented for its own sake’, the near-destruction
of civil government in Northern Ireland; and the accumulation of
what he called ‘further combustible material’ of ‘another kind’. The
problem, however, he asserted, has been ‘miscalled race’. Race is being
used, he suggested, to mystify and confuse the people. The real target
is not race. It is the great liberal conspiracy, inside government and
the media, which has held ordinary people up to ransom, making
them fearful to speak the truth for the fear of being called ‘racialist’
and ‘literally made to say that black is white’. It is race – but now as
the pivot of this ‘process of brainwashing by repetition of manifest
absurdities’; it is race as a ‘secret weapon’, ‘depriving them of their
wits and convincing them that what they thought right was wrong’; in
short, it’s race as the conspiracy of silence against the silent and long-
suffering majorities – the white majorities. This is the language of an
authentic, regressive, national populism. It is articulated, of course,
through the potent metaphors of race. Its echo, of course, lives on,
expanded and amplified in the panic climate of 1978 – even if the
terms are different, the rhetoric less compelling, and the accent more
‘refined’. Populist racism is no longer the preserve and prerogative
of a minority which is prophesying in the wilderness. It has become
‘naturalised’ – the normal currency of exchange at the heart of the
political culture about this question, and it can be read, any day, on
the front page of the Daily Mail.
I have said that the emergence of an ideology of indigenous racism
has often assumed what I called the form of a ‘moral panic’. I want
now to say a word about what a moral panic is and how I think it
operates. Moral panics have been defined as follows, in a quotation

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from Stan Cohen’s book Folk Devils and Moral Panics, which is a study
of mods and rockers in the 1960s:

Societies appear every now and then to be subject to periods of moral

panic. A condition, an episode, person or group of persons emerges
to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests; its
nature is presented in a stylized and stereotypical fashion by the
mass media; the moral barricades are manned by editors and bishops
and politicians and other right-thinking people; socially accredited
experts pronounce their diagnoses and solutions; ways of coping are
evolved, or more often resorted to; the condition then disappears or
submerges or deteriorates and becomes more visible. Sometimes the
panic is passed over and forgotten, but at other times it has more
serious and long-term repercussions and it might produce changes
in legal and social policy or even in the way in which the societies
conceive themselves.2

That definition, which is about youth and the way in which society
has reacted to the problems of youth in the 1950s and 1960s, could,
I think, with very little alteration, be extended to the emergence in
Britain of an indigenous racism. The important features of the ‘moral
panic’ as an ideological process are these: it represents a way of dealing
with what are diff use and often unorganised social fears and anxie-
ties. It deals with those fears and anxieties, not by addressing the real
problems and conditions which underlie them, but by projecting and
displacing them on to the identified social group. That is to say, the
moral panic crystallises popular fears and anxieties which have a real
basis, and, by providing them with a simple, concrete, identifiable,
simple, social object, seeks to resolve them. Around these stigmatised
groups or events, a powerful and popular groundswell of opinion can
often be mustered. It is a groundswell which calls, in popular accents,
on the ‘authorities’ to take controlling action. ‘Moral panics’, therefore,
frequently serve as ways of pioneering practices by the state which, in
the end, increase effective social control, but with this difference: it is
the movement towards a closing of a society which has the popular
legitimacy, which has been able to win popular consent. That is to say,
the moral panic is one of the forms in which a largely voiceless and
essentially powerless section of the community can draw attention
and give expression to their concrete problems and call for remedies

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and solutions. Thus, the language of moral panics, whether they’re

about race or youth, provide a set of simple explanatory terms. They
provide a popular vocabulary of discontent and are the way in which
the people address themselves to their problems and address those
problems to those in power. They consequently also provide vocabu-
laries and motive and action through which the people themselves can
be addressed. And in formal democracies, where policies, especially
when they are tough and constraining, have to be given popular legiti-
macy and consent, ‘moral panics’ can also sometimes provide the basis
by which a kind of authoritarianism can be constructed.
We have, undoubtedly, in the late 1960s and 1970s, seen both parts
of this process in operation. We have seen a distinctive movement
towards a movement of closure and of control in the state, and the
complementary construction of popular authoritarian ideologies, of
which racism is, in my view, only one. Both have operated, of course,
in the condition of a deepening economic recession. Though they are
not reducible to the economic level, they are quite specific ideological
processes. They need to be understood as such. Indeed, whichever
political party has been in power and in control of the management
of the crisis, the ideological terrain has undoubtedly been defined and
colonised through this shift into authoritarianism.
So we can find it in the general assault on the concept of welfare,
the militant advocacy of the virtues of social competition and of
what are now called ‘social market values’. We find it in the assault
on ‘progressive’ and ‘comprehensive’ trends in education, in the call
for a ‘return’ to standards and to the traditional curriculum, and to
discipline and authority in the classroom and, if necessary, to corporal
punishment and the cane. We can find it in the aggressive defence of
traditional moral standards and values and the traditional family, and
the opposition to every tentative movement of liberalisation in the
moral and sexual area and, above all, in the position of women. We
find it in the ‘moral backlash’ itself, in the summons to worship at the
traditional shrines and pieties.
Race is only one of the elements in this wider ideological crusade
to ‘clean up’ Britain, to roll up the map of progressive liberalism and
to turn the clock of history back to the times when the world was
‘safe for ordinary Englishmen’. And parties in power, of whatever
political complexion, which fondly imagine that they are in command
of the forces and tendencies which are moving and shaping popular

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consciousness, and do not remotely appear to understand the degree

to which they are not riding, but ridden, well, they too are driven
and directed by this wave. The historical stage, the political agenda,
has been set, quite often, in the 1970s, in the ideological terrain
specifically, and the political and economic forces have followed in the
channels which they have opened up.
I want to insist that race is one element of this crisis which belongs
to the British social formation as a whole, and that it has been a
leading, indeed a key, element in the process. It is grounded in natural,
obvious, visible, biological facts. It is a way of drawing distinctions
and of making differences in practices which are perfectly ‘natural’,
which are given, which are universal, which we are told all of us house
a trace of. It has, for instance, become an acceptable explanation of
some features of racism in the British police, in their interactions with
the black population, that, after all, they are only a cross-section of
the ‘great British public’. That is to say, there is bound ‘naturally’ to be
a due proportion of ‘racists’ among them. Race provides precisely the
set of simplifications which makes it possible to deal with and explain
troubling developments of that kind. After all, who now wants to begin
to explore and unravel the complex tissue of political and economic
forces which have created and sustained the poverty of inner-urban
working-class districts? Who has time for that complicated exercise,
especially if it requires us to trace and make connections between
things which it is better to keep apart? Above all, if there is a simple,
obvious and more natural explanation at hand? Of course they are
‘poor’ because the blacks are here. That is not a logical proposition,
but ideologies do not function by logic – they have logic of their own.
Race has provided, in periods of crisis and upheaval, precisely such a
self-justifying circle of explanations.
I want to end by insisting on that. I want to insist that racism is
not a set of false pleas which swim around in the head. They’re not
a set of mistaken perceptions. They have their basis in real material
conditions of existence. They arise because of the concrete problems
of different classes and groups in the society. Racism represents the
attempt ideologically to construct those conditions, contradictions
and problems in such a way that they can be dealt with and deflected
in the same moment. That instead of confronting the conditions and
problems which indeed do face white and black in the urban areas,
in an economy in recession, they can be projected away through race.

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Until the specificity of a British racism which has those real authentic
material conditions at its roots, which does indeed address the real
problems of the people, which is not a set of phoney conspiracies
generated in the heads of the ruling class, which has a real life at the
base of the society – until we can confront a racism which is specific in
that sense, we haven’t a hope, in my view, of turning the tide.

Notes

1. James Walvin, Black and White: Negro and English Society, 1555-1945,
Allen Lane 1973.
2. Stan Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: Creation of Mods and Rockers,
MacGibbon and Kee 1972.

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 1970: Birth of the law and order society
1978

As soon as the dominant social group has exhausted its function,

the ideological bloc tends to crumble away; then ‘spontaneity’ may
be replaced by ‘constraint’ in even less disguised and indirect forms,
culminating in outright police measures and coups d’etat.

Gramsci1

The crisis is permanent. The Government is provisional.

Marx 2

n the 4 January 1970, the Sunday Times noted: ‘Among the

O incipient ghettos in Britain today, Handsworth, Birmingham
displays the classic symptoms: poor housing, a strained education
system, households struggling to make ends meet, and few social
amenities. It also has the usual hustlers, prostitutes and ponces. Second
generation blacks are beginning to show a resistance to all authority.’
This prophetic sketch was based on Gus John’s report to the Runny-
mede Trust, subsequently to form the basis of his book, Because They’re
Black, written with Derek Humphry.3 The article was headed –
making the by-now required link – ‘Must Harlem Come to
Birmingham?’ Within a fortnight, Mr Powell had taken it upon
himself to reply, as it were, to the question. In a challenge to the Tory
Party leadership to bring the race question out ‘into the open …
without prevarication or excuse’, Mr Powell warned that, ‘through its
own past sins of omission’, Britain was ‘menaced by a problem which
at the present rate will by the end of the century be similar in magni-
tude to that of the United States’. Except as part of a vigorous
repatriation campaign, Mr Powell added, measures of special aid to
high immigrant areas were ‘positively harmful in their net effect’. He
referred to his prophecy, twenty months earlier, of racial bloodshed to

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 1970 : BIRTH OF LAW AND ORDER SOCIETY 159

come. He made no new predictions. Instead, he quoted a Leeds solic-

itor, an Under-Secretary at the Home Office and the Newsletter of the
Manchester Community Relations Council to show that other respon-
sible spokesmen shared his view that ‘racial violence could flare up
anywhere in Britain’.4 A week or so earlier the Spring offensive against
the South African Springboks tour opened. The Liberal MP David
Steel, who had helped to organise a peaceful demonstration, was sud-
denly confronted by ‘a small, chanting, banner-waving band of about
40 souls’, who ‘took up positions opposite the turnstiles … and pro-
ceeded to hurl abuse of a fairly virulent kind at both intending
spectators and the four-deep line of stationary policemen’. When he
asked one of the group who was in charge, he received the reply,
‘Nobody in charge of us’. ‘Irrational processes’, Mr Steel observed,
‘will produce irrational reactions’.5
In this sharpening climate, the Tory Shadow Cabinet met in secret
conclave at Selsdon Park. There was no mistaking the mood and spirit
in which this preparation for power took place, nor the vigorous, pre-
election crusading themes which emerged from their deliberations.
The Sunday Times correspondent, Ronald Butt, entitled the emerging
platform, ‘A Soft Sell on Law and Order’.6 Here, the American
comparisons – this time with the Nixon-Agnew campaign – were
no longer indirect and implicit. The law-and-order theme ‘enables
the Party to reassure the silent majority of the public that it shares
their concern’. The keynote was widely deployed. It referred to ‘inter-
ference with the liberty of people going about their ordinary business
by demonstrating minorities’. Threatening noises – soon to become a
scandalous and widespread real practice – were made about the use
of the conspiracy charge, a toughening of the law of trespass and the
power of the magistracy. The demonstration theme was connected
directly, by Butt, with ‘vandalism and the rise of organized crime’.
Selsdon Man, however, had another, equally important face. This was
the side turned in the direction of industrial and economic policy,
where abrasive measures, tied to the strict discipline of the market
mechanism, were proposed for the shake-up and shake-out of British
industry – coupled, of course, with a promise of tough action to curb
the power of the unions and to bring the unofficial strike to a dead
halt. Buoyed up on a wave of popular and populist enthusiasms, the
Shadow Cabinet turned to the electorate, and took to the towns and
cities of Britain in its pre-election barnstorm.

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The impact of the law-and-order theme was immediate. True, as

the Guardian remarked, Mr Heath’s ‘law and order’ was not quite
President Nixon’s – ‘the right of the citizens to walk their own streets,
free of the fear of mugging, robbery or rape’. True, the Selsdon version
was pointed at a nebulous package of popular fears and stereotypes –
what the Guardian called ‘a gallimaufry of subjects – student unrest,
political demonstrations, the Permissive Society, long hair, short hair
and perhaps in time medium-length hair as well’.7 True, ‘to introduce
conspiracy charges for demonstrators, as some have suggested, would
be a shameful abuse of the law … Tolerance is a two-way traffic’. But
the law-and-order themes orchestrated together in the dim, moral
twilight of Selsdon Park were not intended for the comfort of the
Guardian’s undoubtedly liberal, undoubtedly minority, readers. There
was no silent majority to be won there. The Sunday Express, on the
other hand, thought the theme powerful enough to give it the front-
page headline on the Sunday following the Selsdon Park conclave:
‘DEMO CLAMP-DOWN IF TORIES GET BACK’.8 The crusade
in the country was gaining momentum. Lord Hailsham, whom
Selsdon Park had released into a renewed burst of moral energy, linked
the interruption of High Court proceedings by ‘a group of young
hooligans’, the beating to death of Michael de Gruchy by ‘a group of
youths’, the rise in the proportion of offences in which firearms were
used, and the fact that ‘an increasing part of the life of every policeman
consists of incidents of abuse, insults and provocation nightly hurled
… by street-corner hooligans’ with the law-and-order theme. This
colourful scenario was entitled ‘The Menace Of The Wild Ones’.
These fears, he reassured his audience, were not limited to ‘imaginary
women in flowered hats and prominent teeth’. Organised crime and
violence, he suggested, ‘cannot be separated from private dishonesty or
public demonstration in defiance of law’. Geoff Hammond, sentenced
to life for ‘queer-bashing’, Peter Hain, who endorsed the digging up
of cricket pitches, ‘the Welsh Language Society and all those who are
willing to put their own opinions … above the law … undermine the
whole fabric of society by challenging the system of law itself on which
all of us in the end depend’.9 The construction of nightmares had
commenced in earnest. Within a week, the future Lord Chancellor
made a savage attack on Labour for ‘presiding complacently’ over the
biggest crime wave of the century. He invited the Home Secretary
to declare that ‘he would not parole deliberate killers or assailants

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 1970 : BIRTH OF LAW AND ORDER SOCIETY 161

of police, warders, innocent witnesses and bystanders’. ‘The per-

missive and lawless society’, he added for good measure, effecting yet
another startling convergence, ‘is a by-product of Socialism’.10 ‘These
questions of law and order’, Mr Heath told his Panorama audience,
‘are of immense concern to … almost every man and woman in this
country’.11 Or soon would be, with a little help from their friends.
Lord Hailsham added: ‘The theme is the safety of the citizen as he
lives in his own home with his wife and children, as he goes about
the streets, as he attends his places of amusement … as he tries to ac-
cumulate property for his family and his old age free from fraud, as he
works, plays and votes’.12
In this atmosphere, which the most measured commentators
could only describe as one of mounting, often carefully organised,
public hysteria, the students at Warwick University occupied the
administration buildings and began to consult the personal and
political files which this ‘community of scholars’ had been keeping
on them; and a group of Cambridge students noisily interrupted a
private dinner being held to celebrate the success of the Greek colonels
at the Garden House Hotel. This renewal of student protest moved
Mr Heath to contribute another brick or two to the construction of
the populist crusade. He traversed in his speech the whole terrain of
authority (unions, universities, government) versus disorder (strikes,
sit-ins) in a powerful coupling of the two great thematics of Selsdon
Man: ‘Great factories, railways, airports are brought to a standstill by
strike action … Great seats of learning … are disrupted by rebellious
students’. Both, however, descanted towards a political, indeed, an
electoral conclusion: ‘We [i.e. the Conservatives] are not going to
become a nation of pushovers’.13 It was a threat he intended to honour.
Earlier in the year Mr Powell had re-emerged as another of the
key signifiers of the crisis. In April he called the teachers, on strike
for higher pay, ‘Highwaymen’ who ‘threatened the fabric of law and
order’.14 A week before the election, at Northfield in Birmingham,
he warned of ‘the invisible enemy within’ – students ‘destroying’
universities and ‘terrorising’ cities, ‘bringing down’ governments; of
the power of the ‘modern form’ of the mob – the demonstration – in
making governments ‘tremble’; the success of ‘disorder, deliberately
fomented for its own sake’ in the near-destruction of civil government
in Northern Ireland; and the accumulation of ‘combustible material’
of ‘another kind’ (i.e. race) in this country, ‘not without deliberate

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intention in some quarters’. The government’s capitulation to the anti-

apartheid movement’s campaign against the South African cricket tour
was pinpointed: ‘It may have been a happy chance that this particular
triumph of organised disorder and anarchist brain-washing coincided
with the commencement of the General Election campaign. For many
people it lifted the veil; for the first time, they caught a glimpse of
the enemy and his power’.15 Earlier that week, in Wolverhampton, he
had implied that the immigration figures had been so consistently
underestimated that ‘one begins to wonder if the Foreign Office was
the only department of state into which enemies of this country were
infiltrated’. There is little need to reiterate here how discordant themes
are being plotted together, how the motifs of organised disorder and
an ‘enemy within’, with its ambiguous hint of subversion and treason,
are serving to raise the nemesis of anarchy to the level of the state
itself. It is important, however, to observe how the race question had
been thematised at a higher level in Mr Powell’s new scenario. The
problem, he asserted at Northfield, had been deliberately ‘miscalled
race’. Race was being used to mystify and confuse the people. The
real target was the great liberal conspiracy, inside government and the
media, which held ordinary people to ransom, making them fearful
to speak the truth for fear of being called ‘racialist’, and ‘literally
made to say black is white’. It was race – but now as the pivot of ‘this
process of brain-washing by repetition of manifest absurdities’, race
as a secret weapon ‘depriving them of their wits and convincing them
that what they thought was right is wrong’: in short, race as part of
the conspiracy of silence and blackmail against the silent majority. The
intense populism of this line of attack fell on eager ears, especially in
Mr Powell’s stamping-ground in the West Midlands.
It was ‘the enemy and his power’ – The Enemy, and his accomplice,
the ‘conspiracy of Liberal Causes’; the hard conspiratorial centre and
its soft, woolly-headed, deluded periphery – around which Mr Powell’s
penetrating rhetoric in these two speeches circled. It was useless to
enquire precisely the shape of this ‘enemy’. The point precisely was
his protean quality: everywhere and, seemingly, nowhere. The nation’s
existence was threatened, the country ‘under attack by forces which
aim at the actual destruction of our nation and society’, as surely as
when Imperial Germany was building dreadnoughts; but the nation
continued, mistakenly, to ‘visualise him in the shape of armoured
divisions, or squadrons of aircraft’. They failed to see his common

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presence, now ‘in his student manifestation’, now in ‘disorder,

deliberately fomented for its own sake as an instrument of power’
in the province of Ulster, perhaps in the very heart of government
itself.16 In dispersing the ‘enemy’ to every corner and aspect of national
life, and simultaneously concentrating and crystallising his protean
appearances in the single spectre of ‘the conspiracy within’, Mr Powell,
in his usual extraordinary way, distilled the essence of that movement
by which the generalised panic of a nation and the organised crusade of
the populists issue at one crucial moment of time, into the ideological
figure of a ‘law-and-order crusade’. It is quite critical, however, to
bear in mind that, though few other speakers in the first half of 1970
achieved so all-inclusive a range and power of reference as Mr Powell
did on these occasions, he was only bringing to a conclusion a process
to which many, in and outside the Conser vative Shadow leadership,
had contributed, articulating what many rank-and-file members of
the ‘silent majority’ were thinking, feeling and calling for in those
terrifying months. It would be altogether mistaken to attribute the
birth of a ‘law-and-order’ society to Mr Powell. Its midwives were
more numerous and varied. Mr Powell simply saluted its appearance
with an astonishing display of rhetorical fireworks, sealed its existence
with fire and brimstone.
It was the weekend before the Election; and Mr Wilson, whose
unflappability on these occasions knows no bounds, still harboured
the illusion that Labour could win …
The June election in 1970 marks the official tip of the pendulum,
the passage of positions, the formal appearance on the stage of the
‘theatre of politics’, of a profound shift in the relations of force between
the contending classes, and thus in the balance between consent and
coercion in the state, which had been initiated at a deeper level in the
previous years. This shift in the character of ‘hegemonic domination’,
or, better, the deepening in the crisis of hegemony, which assumes a
qualitatively new shape after 1970, must not be missed, nor its specific
features misread or oversimplified.
Labour had preserved the parliamentary illusion that, governing
with the consent of the trade union movement in its pocket, it could
carry off discipline ‘by voluntary consent’ where the Tories could not.
The Tories knew better, partly because this option was not open to
them. But this important difference in political perspective and in the
composition of the social alliances favoured by each party should not

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conceal the fact that, from about 1967 onwards, the state – whichever
political colouration it assumed, and in either a soft-sell or hard-sell
disguise – was, structurally on a collision path with the labour move-
ment and the working class.
This brings us to what may seem a paradoxical feature of the
passage which the June election marks. Almost to the edge of the
election itself, the pace of the Tory return to power was set by the
law-and-order campaign. In the days immediately before, however,
the traditional issues of British electoral politics, inflation, prices,
the economy, wages, etc – come roaring back into prominence; and
the election itself seems to be decided, after all, on more sensible,
calm, rational and reasonable criteria. It is not the first, and by no
means the last time that a ‘scare’ pre-election mood suddenly gives
way to more stable electoral issues and, once the poll is over, the
‘panic’ seems to have been inconsequential. Was the whole law-and-
order build-up, then, merely ‘sound and fury, signifying nothing’?
It is true, as Hugo Young in the Sunday Times noted, that though
the Tory manifesto offered ‘a general deliverance’ from all manner
of threat, it also marked ‘a clear retreat from the trumpetings out of
Selsdon Park’.17 Such discrepancies between the reality of the danger
posed, the generality of the way it is perceived and the remedies
proposed are a feature of moral panic, which, precisely feeds on such
gaps in credibility. However, it is true that no swift and sweeping
‘law-and-order’ measures were taken by the returning government.
As righteous indignants like Mr Heath assumed the mantle of First
Minister, apostles of fundamentalism like Mr Powell retired to the
back benches, and moral re-armers like Lord Hailsham donned
wig and robe and approached the Woolsack, it was easy to imagine
that the whole hairy episode had been nothing more than a Spring
divertissement to keep the Party supporters in good heart.
This may be deceptive. First, we must remember a ‘peculiarity’ of the
English route: the English tendency to do softly softly, pragmatically
and piece-meal, what other countries do in one fell, dramatic swoop;
just as Britain rather sidled up to its ‘1968’, so it edged, bit by bit,
towards a law-and-order mood, now advancing, now retreating,
moving in a crab-like way, sideways into Armageddon. Second, the
tempo of reaction does not slacken; it quickens – more significantly, it
changes direction and character. In this second period there begins the
regular, immediate escalation of every conflictful issue up the hierarchy

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 1970 : BIRTH OF LAW AND ORDER SOCIETY 165

of control to the level of the state machine – each issue is instantly

appropriated by the apparatuses of politics, government, the courts,
the police or the law. What, before January, was a spiralling-upwards
movement – local crusading pushing the authorities towards increased
repression – becomes, after the mid-1970 tip-over, an automatic and
immediate pincer movement: popular moral pressure from below and
the thrust of restraint and control from above happen together. The
state itself has become mobilised, sensitised to the emergence of the
‘enemy’ in any of his manifold disguises; the repressive response is at
the ready, quick to move in, moving formally, through the law, the
police, administrative regulation, public censure, and at a develop-
ing speed. This is what we mean by the slow ‘shift to control’, the
move towards a kind of closure in the apparatuses of state control and
repression. The decisive mechanisms in the management of hegemonic
control in the period after June 1970 are regularly and routinely based
in the apparatuses of constraint. This qualitative shift in the balance
and relations of force is a deep change, which all the token signs of
moderation and retreat, responsibility and reasonableness, in the
councils of government should not, for a moment, obscure.
Above all (and besides facilitating the routinisation of repression),
the law-and-order campaign of 1970 had the overwhelming single
consequence of legitimating the recourse to the law, to constraint and
statutory power, as the main, indeed the only, effective means left of
defending hegemony in conditions of severe crisis. It toned up and
groomed the society for the extensive exercise of the repressive side of
state power. It made this routinisation of control normal, natural, and
thus right and inevitable. It legitimated the duty of the state itself, in
the crucial areas of conflict, to ‘go campaigning’. The first target was
Mr Powell’s forces of ‘organised disorder and anarchist brainwashing’.
In the ensuing months the full force of the repressive side of the state
is openly and systematically turned against this anarchist disorderly
flank. But, less obviously, the licensing of the state to campaign had
a pay-off in areas which at first sight seemed distant from the enemy
of anarchist disorder: namely, in the attempt, now gathering steam,
to discipline, restrain and coerce, to bring also within the framework
of law and order, not only demonstrators, criminals, squatters and
dope addicts, but the solid ranks of the working class itself. This
recalcitrant class – or at least its disorderly minorities – had also
to be harnessed to ‘order’. If what concerns us here is not a simple

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unmasking of a temporary ‘conspiracy of the state’ but its deeper

and more structural movements, then it is of critical importance to
understand just precisely what it is which connects, behind all the
appearances, the opening of an official law-and-order campaign in
January 1970, and the publication of the Industrial Relations Bill in
the closing weeks of December.
What had really united the Conservative Party in the pre-election
period was less the rhetoric of disorder, but rather a more traditionally
phrased emphasis on ‘the need to stand firm’, not to give in, to restore
authority to government. This theme of national unity and authority
provided the all-important positive face to the more negative themes of
‘law and order’. Shortly before the election, Mr Heath had approached
the electorate with the affirmation that ‘The Conser vative Party is the
party of one nation … the next Conservative Government will …
safeguard the unity of the nation through honest government and
sound policies.’ The aim was to reaffirm the Nation as unified around
a common – and moderate – set of goals, which the Heath government
best embodied and expressed. All those who stood outside this ‘trade
union of the nation’ were stigmatised as ‘extremists’. The minority
activities of squatters and demonstrators most vividly embodied this
tendency. But the growing ‘extremism’ of working-class militancy
– strikingly borne in upon the new government by a succession of
new wage demands from dockers, miners, local authority manual
workers, electricity-supply workers and dustmen – was undoubtedly
the larger and more deep-seated trend. It directly threatened the new
Heath economic strategy. It posed a direct challenge to the authority
of government; and – with the spectre of May 1968 not yet banished
from the collective Cabinet mind – it awakened fears of the possibility
of the deadly ‘student-worker’ alliance. It was against this flank that,
in the event, the government turned its ‘law-and-order’ campaign.
Within six weeks of taking office, the new Minister for Employment,
Mr Carr, told the CBI that the government would support employers
who faced strike action over wage demands. The Chancellor, Mr
Barber, told the TUC in no uncertain terms that ‘there has got to
be a steady and progressive cooling down. From now on employers
have got to stand firm’.18 Then Mr Carr sketched out the elements of
the Industrial Relations Bill, with soothing thoughts that, after all
the trade unions were responsible institutions, would not willingly act
against the law of the land, that legal sanctions were envisaged as being

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 1970 : BIRTH OF LAW AND ORDER SOCIETY 167

used only in rare cases, and that personal liability would only arise
where individuals acted outside their union’s control and authority.
This application to the class struggle of the thin edge of the legal
wedge was overwhelmingly supported by the media – for example (to
take the two papers we watched most closely) by both the Sunday
Express and the Sunday Times: the former in its hysterical and instinctive
way, the latter in its more sober and rational voice. Both accepted the
government’s paradigm ‘explanation’ for industrial unrest: while the
Sunday Express hysterically saw red militants at the bottom of every
strike – in the docks, at Pilkingtons, at the pitheads – and the arrival
of the ‘suitcase militant’, the Sunday Times, following the publication
of the Industrial Relations Bill, quietly, but decisively, put its editorial
weight behind the legislation, and in a manner wholly in line with the
conspiratorial version fast becoming received political doctrine: ‘The
identification of militants as both prime movers of inflation and the
prime targets of the Bill has now been clearly spelled out’.19
It is difficult, in the calculus of coercion, to measure precisely
the combined effect of the ‘law-and-order’ lead from on high, the
sharpening of the legal engine against the working class from within
the heart of the Cabinet itself, the steady percolation of a conspiratorial
reading of Britain’s ‘troubles’ through the media, and the slow but
sure escalation of control against potentially disorderly targets on the
ground. There is no evidence of a concerted campaign; but the over-all
trajectory is unmistakable.
In July, Mr Justice Melford Stevenson handed down jail terms of
nine to eighteen months on six, and borstal sentences on two, of the
Cambridge students accused in the Garden House demonstration
in Cambridge against the Greek colonels. Th is was the first post-
election occasion in which the full force of the law was seen in
operation against political demonstrations, one of the focal points
of the ‘law-and-order’ campaign. The indications it gave were not
propitious. Of the 400 participating, sixty were identified (with the
help of the proctors), but only a representative, exemplary fifteen
were charged. The charges against them were made, progressively,
more serious in the period before trial. And though the jury only
convicted those against whom some specific unlawful act could be
proven, the convicted first offenders were, smartly and summarily,
put away.20 Stephen Sedley, one of the defence lawyers, wrote, after
the failure of the appeal:

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The police and the DPP have been encouraged by this trend to strike
increasingly hard through the court at those they believe to represent
a threat to law and order – demonstrators, Black Power activists,
squatters, students. This trend towards politically motivated pros-
ecutions has shown a distinct upswing. 1970 has seen the high point
so far, but there is probably worse to come.21

Sedley’s reference to ‘Black Power activists’ and the law was no

casual aside. Black-power militancy was no doubt advanced in
Britain by the steady punctuation of news from the United States.
But the rising temperature of race did not require any transfusions
of energy from across the water, and it was no process of simple
imitation which brought the serious erosion of black-white relations
thundering back into the headlines in the second half of 1970. Th is
deterioration was nothing new, as we have seen; what was new was
the fact that the general race-relations crisis now assumed, almost
without exception, the particular form of a confrontation between
the black community and the police. John Lambert’s judicious survey
of this declining situation was published in 1970.22 It was followed
by Derek Humphry’s careful but well-documented and damning
account, Police Power and Black People, which clearly demonstrated
the sudden, sharp rise to confrontation which came to a head in the
summer of 1970, and extended, on an ever-rising curve into 1971
and 1972.23 The Liverpool Community Relations Council, estab-
lished in June 1970, was almost immediately overwhelmed by black
complaints of harassment by the police. An hour-long programme
on this topic by Radio Merseyside, which referred to the fact that ‘in
certain police stations, particularly in the city centre, brutality and
drug planting and the harassing of minority groups takes place regu-
larly’ passed without considered defence by the local police.24 There
were clashes between blacks and the police, in August, in Leeds,
in Maida Vale, and at the Caledonian Road station, among others.
Notting Hill became the scene of a running battle. The police made
raid after raid on the Mangrove Restaurant, which – one constable
told the court – ‘as far as I am concerned’ was the headquarters of
‘the Black Power Movement’. (Asked in court if he knew what black
power was, he replied: ‘I know roughly what black power is – it is a
movement planned to be very militant in this country.’ That seemed
to be enough.)

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 1970 : BIRTH OF LAW AND ORDER SOCIETY 169

In October, the British Black Panthers called a conference to complain

of what they believed to be a conscious campaign to ‘“pick off ” Black
militants’ and to ‘intimidate, harass and imprison black people prepared
to go out on the streets and demonstrate’. The charge was repudiated
by Scotland Yard; but, as Humphry remarks, ‘the commendable high-
mindedness of the Yard’s Press Bureau does not accord with the reality
of the situation’.25 There was no let up of the pressure.
Equally ominous moves were afoot in the areas of legislation and
the courts. The Tory concern with civil disturbance had led the
Shadow Cabinet to invite Sir Peter Rawlinson, the Shadow Attorney
General, to frame new ‘trespass’ legislation ‘to combat the excesses of
demonstrators’.26 Few lawyers envied him his task; but some at least
– had they been able to foresee the outcome of his failure – might
have wished him better luck. For the failure to improve on the law
of trespass, clearly, in this case, intended as a legal deterrent against
such exploits as the activities of Peter Hain and his anti-South African
demonstrators, and the rapid spread of the squatting campaign to
Southwark and other parts of south-east London – did not in the least
deter the government’s resolve.27 Instead, it strengthened and widened
it. The subsequent reactivation of the ancient law of conspiracy, the
principal form in which legal coercion came finally to be impressed
upon the protest movements and industrial militancy in the following
two or three years, was the direct consequence of the relative failure
of this first stage in the moulding of an alternative legal ‘engine of
government’. During 1970, it was the giving of a new lease of life to
the ancient common law charges of ‘unlawful and riotous assembly’
which provided the ‘law-and-order’ campaign with its first political
scapegoats – the Cambridge students gaoled at the Garden House
trial.
Yet, if the ‘Garden House’ was, from this point of view, the most
ominous trial of the year, ‘law and order’ also had another, less political,
meaning in the courtroom, as the following report demonstrates:

‘A DETERRENT sentence is not meant to fit the offender, it is

meant to fit the offence,’ said Mr. Justice Ashworth in the Appeal
Court on Monday. ‘When meting out a deterrent sentence it is idle
to go into the background of each individual’, echoed the Lord Chief
Justice, Lord Parker. With these words their Lordships confirmed
uniform sentences of three years on eighteen Birmingham youths

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who had been involved in gang fights. There was no regard for the
fact that three of them had no previous conviction, that none of
them had been found with an offensive weapon and that the police
had admitted they had failed to round-up the ringleaders. Most
important, perhaps, one of the youths had been receiving psychiatric
treatment for a month before the fight.28

If everything in 1970 moves up to the threshold of ‘law’, some

commentators were already pointing forward to the threshold which
was increasingly to dominate the 1970s: the threshold of violence.
Asking ‘who is safe in this world of violence?’, Angus Maude listed
examples from right around the world to demonstrate his thesis that
we now inhabited a ‘new world of violence’: the throwing of two CS
gas canisters in the House of Commons; the ‘cutting loose’ with a
tommy gun by Puerto Ricans in the US Congress; the Garden House
riot; Bernadette Devlin in Ulster; the banning of the South African
cricket tour; and ‘the series of airline outrages and kidnappings of
Western Ambassadors in South America’.29 Violence, he added, was
a self-perpetuating mindless disease, used ‘only too often’ by ‘weak
minorities’ to ‘blackmail the majorities’. In 1970, in the name of the
majority – still unfortunately too silent – the state organised itself to
strike back.

Notes

1. Gramsci, ‘Notes on Italian History’ in Selections from the Prison Notebooks,

Lawrence & Wishart 1971, p61.
2. Marx, ‘The Crisis in England and the British Constitution’, in Marx and
Engels On Britain, Progress 1953, p424.
3. D. Humphry and G. John, Because They’re Black, Penguin 1971.
4. Manchester CRC letter in the Sunday Times, 18 January 1970.
5. Guardian, 7 February 1970.
6. Sunday Times, 8 February 1970.
7. Guardian, 7 February 1970.
8. Sunday Express, 1 February 1970.
9. Sunday Express, 8 February 1970.
10. Sunday Express, 22 February 1970.
11. Quoted in Sunday Times, 8 February 1970.
12. Lord Hailsham, quoted in Guardian, 12 February 1970.
13. Sunday Express, 8 March 1970.

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 1970 : BIRTH OF LAW AND ORDER SOCIETY 171

14. Sunday Times, 5 April 1970.

15. Sunday Times, 14 June 1970.
16. Ibid.
17. Sunday Times, 7 June 1970.
18. Sunday Times, 11 August 1970.
19. Sunday Times, 6 December 1970.
20. See Sunday Times, 12 July 1970.
21. The Listener, 8 October 1970.
22. John Lambert, Crime, Police and Race Relations: A study in Birmingham,
Oxford University Press 1970.
23. D. Humphry, Police Power and Black People, Panther 1972.
24. Ibid.
25. Quotes from ibid.
26. Sunday Times, 1 February 1970.
27. See R. Bailey, The Squatter, Penguin 1973.
28. Sunday Times, 18 October 1970.
29. Sunday Express, 26 July 1970.

171
 The great moving right show
1979

o one seriously concerned with political strategies in the

N current situation can now afford to ignore the ‘swing to the
right’. We may not yet understand its extent and its limits, its specific
character, its causes and effects. We have so far – with one or two
notable exceptions – failed to find strategies capable of mobilising
social forces strong enough in depth to turn its flank. But the ten-
dency is hard to deny. It no longer looks like a temporary swing in the
political fortunes, a short-term shift in the balance of forces. It has
been well installed – a going concern – since the latter part of the
1960s. And, though it has developed through a series of different
stages, its dynamic and momentum appears to be sustained. We need
to discuss its parameters more fully and openly on the left, without
inhibition or built-in guarantees.
Certain aspects have won attention from the left: the present
government’s tough industrial and economic strategy in face of
the recession and crisis in capital accumulation; the emergence of
‘Thatcherism’ and the anti-left campaigns; the rise of the National
Front as an open political force. But the full dimensions of the
precipitation to the right continues to evade a proper analysis. This
may be because the crisis continues to be ‘read’ by the left from within
certain well-entrenched and respectable ‘common sense’ positions.
Many of these no longer provide an adequate analytic or theoretical
framework: the politics which flows from them thus continues to fall
far short of its aim.
Thus there are some who would still argue that ‘worse means better’
– i.e. a sharpening of the contradictions. Such a position is often based
on a belief in the inevitable rising tempo of class struggle and the
guaranteed victory of ‘progressive forces everywhere’. Those who hold
it have short political memories. They forget how frequently in recent
history a sharpening of the contradictions has led to ‘settlements’ and

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 THE GREAT MOVING RIGHT SHOW 173

solutions which favoured capital and the right, rather than the reverse.
The commonest response on the left is probably to interpret the
‘swing to the right’ as a simple expression of the economic crisis. Thus
‘Thatcherism’ is – give or take one or two elements – the corresponding
political bedfellow of a period of capitalist recession: the significant
differences between this and other variants of Tory ‘philosophy’ being
conceived as without any specific pertinent political or ideological
effects. And the National Front is the long-anticipated irrational face
of capitalism – the class enemy in familiar fascist disguise.

Specific features

This position neglects everything particular and specific to this histor-

ical conjuncture. It views history as a series of repeats. It is predicated on
a notion of a social formation as a simple structure in which economic
factors will be immediately and transparently translated to the polit-
ical and ideological levels. It falls under the sign of all ‘economisms’ in
supposing that, if you operate on the ‘determining level’ – the economic
front – all the other pieces of the puzzle will fall neatly into place. It
thus prevents itself, theoretically and politically, from working on those
related but distinct contradictions, moving according to very different
tempos, whose condensation, in any particular historical moment, is
what defines a conjuncture. It neglects Lenin’s reminder of ‘an extremely
unique historical situation’ in which ‘absolutely dissimilar currents,
absolutely heterogeneous class interests, absolutely contrary political
and social strivings have merged … in a strikingly “harmonious”
manner …’.1 It takes for granted what needs to be explained: how a capi-
talist economic recession is presided over by a social democratic party
in power (politically) with mass working-class support and organised
depth in the trade unions, but ‘lived’, for increasing numbers of people,
through the themes and representations (ideologically) of a virulent,
emergent ‘petty-bourgeois’ ideology. These features of the current situa-
tion are not so much expressions of the economic crisis (its political and
ideological reflection) as they are factors which have effects – including
effects on the economic crisis itself and its possible solutions.
One also encounters in this discussion variants of ‘revolutionary
optimism’ and ‘revolutionary pessimism’. The pessimists argue that
we mustn’t rock the boat, or demoralise the already dispersed forces

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of the left. To them one can only reply with Gramsci’s injunction: to
address ourselves ‘violently’ towards the present as it is, if we are serious
about transforming it. The optimists cast doubt on the doubters:
look for the points of resistance – the class struggle continues. Of
course, in one sense, they are right. We must look behind the surface
phenomena, we must find the points of intervention, we mustn’t
underestimate the capacity for resistance and struggle. But, if we are
correct about the depth of the rightward turn, then our interventions
need to be pertinent, decisive and effective. Whistling in the dark is
an occupational hazard not altogether unknown to the British left.
‘Pessimism of the intelligence: optimism of the will’.

Fascism

Finally, there is ‘fascism’. There is a sense in which the appearance

of organised fascism on the political stage seems to solve everything
for the left. It confirms our best-worst suspicions, awakening familiar
ghosts and spectres. Fascism and economic recession together seem
to render transparent those connections which most of the time are
opaque, hidden and displaced. Away with all those time-wasting theo-
retical speculations! The Marxist guarantees are all in place after all,
standing to attention. Let us take to the streets. This is not an argu-
ment against taking to the streets. Indeed, the direct interventions
against the rising fortunes of the National Front – local campaigns,
anti-fascist work in the unions, trades councils, women’s groups, the
mobilisation behind the Anti-Nazi League, the counter-demonstra-
tions, above all Rock Against Racism (one of the timeliest and best
constructed of cultural interventions, repaying serious and extended
analysis) – constitute one of the few success stories of the conjuncture.
But it is an argument against the satisfactions which sometimes flow
from applying simplifying analytic schemes to complex events. What
we have to explain is a move towards ‘authoritarian populism’ – an
exceptional form of the capitalist state – which, unlike classical fascism,
has retained most (though not all) of the formal representative institu-
tions in place, and which at the same time has been able to construct
around itself an active popular consent. This undoubtedly represents a
decisive shift in the balance of hegemony, and the National Front has
played a ‘walk-on’ part in this drama. It has entailed a striking weak-

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 THE GREAT MOVING RIGHT SHOW 175

ening of democratic forms and initiatives, but not their suspension.

We may miss precisely what is specific to this exceptional form of the
crisis of the capitalist state by mere name-calling.
The swing to the right is part of what Gramsci called an ‘organic’
phenomenon:

A crisis occurs, sometimes lasting for decades. This exceptional dura-

tion means that uncurable structural contradictions have revealed
themselves … and that, despite this, the political forces which are
struggling to conserve and defend the existing structure itself are
making efforts to cure them within certain limits, and to overcome
them. These incessant and persistent efforts … form the terrain of
the conjunctural and it is upon this terrain that the forces of opposi-
tion organise.2

Gramsci insisted that we get the ‘organic’ and ‘conjunctural’ aspects of

the crisis into a proper relationship. What defines the ‘conjunctural’ –
the immediate terrains of struggle – is not simply the given economic
conditions, but precisely the ‘incessant and persistent’ efforts which are
being made to defend and conserve the position. If the crisis is deep
– ‘organic’ – these efforts cannot be merely defensive. They will be
formative: a new balance of forces; the emergence of new elements; the
attempt to put together a new ‘historical bloc’; new political configu-
rations and ‘philosophies’; a profound restructuring of the state and
the ideological discourses which construct the crisis and represent it
as it is ‘lived’ as a practical reality; new programmes and policies,
pointing to a new result, a new sort of ‘settlement’ – ‘within certain
limits’. These do not ‘emerge’: they have to be constructed. Political
and ideological work is required to disarticulate old formations, and
to rework their elements into new configurations. The ‘swing to the
right’ is not a reflection of the crisis: it is itself a response to the crisis.
I want to examine certain features of this response, concentrating on
some neglected political-ideological aspects.

Economic crisis

We must examine first the precipitating conditions. This is a matter

of a set of discontinuous but related histories, rather than neat,

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corresponding movements. In economic terms, Britain’s structural

industrial and economic weakness emerges in the immediate after-
math of the post-war boom. The 1960s are marked by the oscillations
between recession and recovery, with a steady underlying dete-
rioration. These effectively destroy the last remnants of the ‘radical
programme’ on the basis of which Wilson won power in 1964, and
to which he tried to harness a new social bloc. By the end of the
1960s, the economy has dipped into full-scale recession – slumpfla-
tion – which sustains the exceptional ‘Heath course’ of 1971-4, with
its head-on collisions with organised labour. By the mid-1970s, the
economic parameters are dictated by a synchronisation between capi-
talist recession on a global scale, and the crisis of capital accumulation
specific to Britain – the weak link in the chain. Domestic politics
has thus been dominated by crisis-management and containment
strategies: dove-tailed through an increasingly interventionist state,
intervening to secure the conditions of both capitalist production
and reproduction. The strategy has a distinctively corporatist char-
acter – incorporating sections of the working class and unions into
the bargain between state, capital and labour, the three ‘interests’.
Crisis management has drawn successively on the different variants
of the same basic repertoire: incomes policy, first by consent, then by
imposition; wage restraint; social contracting. The ‘natural’ governor
of this crisis has been the party of social democracy in power. This
last factor has had profound effects in disorganising and fragmenting
working-class responses to the crisis itself.
At the ideological level, however, things have moved at a rather
different tempo, and in certain respects predate the economic aspects.
Many of the key themes of the radical right – law and order, the need
for social discipline and authority in the face of a conspiracy by the
enemies of the state, the onset of social anarchy, the ‘enemy within’, the
dilution of British stock by alien black elements – are well articulated
before the full dimensions of the recession are revealed. They emerge
in relation to the radical movements and political polarisations of the
1960s, for which ‘1968’ must stand as a convenient, though inadequate,
notation. Some of these themes get progressively translated to other
fronts as the confrontation within organised labour, and the militant
resistance it meets, develops during the Heath interregnum. For the
constitution of the principal thematics of the radical right, this must
be seen as a formative moment.3

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 THE GREAT MOVING RIGHT SHOW 177

The radical right

The radical right does not appear out of thin air. It has to be under-
stood in direct relation to alternative political formations attempting
to occupy and command the same space. It is engaged in a struggle
for hegemony, within the dominant bloc, against both social demo-
cracy and the moderate wing of its own party. Not only is it operating
in the same space: it is working directly on the contradictions within
these competing positions. The strength of its intervention lies partly
in the radicalism of its commitment to break the mould, not simply
to rework the elements of the prevailing ‘philosophies’. In doing so,
it nevertheless takes the elements which are already constructed into
place, dismantles them, reconstitutes them into a new logic, and artic-
ulates the space in a new way, polarising it to the right.
This can be seen with respect to both positions. The Heath position
was destroyed in the confrontation with organised labour. But it was
also undermined by its internal contradictions. It failed to win the
showdown with labour; it could not enlist popular support for this
decisive encounter; in defeat, it returned to its ‘natural’ position in
the political spectrum, engaging in its own version of bargaining.
‘Thatcherism’ succeeds in this space by directly engaging the ‘creeping
socialism’ and apologetic ‘state collectivism’ of the Heath wing. It thus
centres on the very nerve of consensus politics, which dominated and
stabilised the political scene for over a decade. To sustain its possible
credibility as a party of government in a crisis of capital, ‘Thatcherism’
retains some lingering and ambivalent connections to this centre
territory: Mr Prior is its voice – but sotto voce. On other grounds, it has
won considerable space by the active destruction of consensus politics
from the right. Of course, it aims for a construction of a national
consensus of its own. What it destroys is that form of consensus in
which social democracy was the principal tendency. This evacuation
of centrist territory has unleased political forces on the right kept in
reign for most of the post-war period.

The contradiction within social democracy

But the contradiction within social democracy is the principal key to

the whole rightward shift of the political spectrum. For if the destruc-

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tion of the Heath ‘party’ secures hegemony for ‘Thatcherism’ over the
right, it is the contradictory form of social democracy which has effec-
tively disorganised the left and the working-class response to the crisis.
This contradiction can be put in stark and simple terms; and
considerable strategic conclusions flow from it. As follows: To win
electoral power social democracy must maximise its claims as the
political representative of the interests of the working class and
organised labour. It is the party capable of (a) mastering the crisis,
while (b) defending – within the constraints imposed by recession
– working-class interests. It is important here to remember that
social democracy is not a homogeneous political entity but a complex
political formation. It is not the expression of the working class ‘in
government’, but the principal means of representation of the class.
Representation here has to be understood as an active and formative
relationship. It organises the class, constituting it as a political force
– a social democratic political force – in the same moment as it is
constituted. Everything depends on the ways, the apparatuses and
the ‘philosophies’ – the means – by which the often dispersed and
contradictory interests of a class are welded together into a coherent
position which can be articulated and represented in the political and
ideological theatres of struggle.
The expression of this representative relationship of class-to-party,
in the present period, has depended decisively on the extensive set of
bargains negotiated between Labour and the trade union representatives
of the class. This ‘indissoluble link’ is the practical basis for the claim
to be the natural governing party of the crisis. This is the contract it
delivers. But, once in government, social democracy is committed to
finding solutions to the crisis which are capable of winning support
from key sections of capital, since its solutions are framed within
those limits. But this requires that the indissoluble link be used, not
to advance but to discipline the class and organisations it represents.
This is only possible if the link – class-to-party – is dismantled and if
there can be substituted for it an alternative articulation: government-
to-people. The rhetoric of ‘national interest’, which is the principal
ideological form in which a succession of defeats have been imposed
on the working class by social democracy in power, are exactly the
sites where this contradiction shows through – and is being constantly
reworked. But government-to-people dissects the field of struggle
differently from class-to-party. It sets Labour, at key moments of

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 THE GREAT MOVING RIGHT SHOW 179

struggle – from the strikes of 1966 right through to the present 5 per
cent norm – by definition ‘on the side of the nation’ against ‘sectional
interests’, ‘irresponsible trade union power’, etc.
This is the terrain on which Mr Heath played such destructive games
in the lead-through to the Industrial Relations Act and its aftermath,
with his invocation of ‘the great trade union of the nation’, and the
spectre of ‘holding the nation up to ransom’. ‘Thatcherism’, deploying
the discourses of ‘nation’ and ‘people’ against ‘class’ and ‘unions’
with far greater vigour and popular appeal, has homed in on the
same objective contradiction. Within this space is being constructed
an assault, not on this or that piece of ‘irresponsible bargaining’ by
a particular union, but on the very foundation and raison d’ être of
organised labour. Considerable numbers of people – including many
trade unionists – find themselves reflected and set in place through this
interpellation of ‘nation’ and ‘people’ at the centre of this mounting
attack on the defensive organisations of the working class.

Anti-collectivism

A closely related strand in the new philosophy of the radical right

is the theme of anti-collectivism and anti-statism. ‘Thatcherism’ has
given this traditional arena of conservative ‘philosophy’ expansive
play. At the level of organising theoretical ideologies, anti-statism
has been refurbished by the advance of monetarism as the most
fashionable economic credo. Keynesianism was the lynch-pin of the
theoretical ideologies of state intervention throughout the post-war
period, assuming almost the status of a sacred orthodoxy or doxa. To
have replaced it in some of the most powerful and influential appa-
ratuses of government, research and the universities, and restored
in its place Friedman and Hayek, is, in itself, a remarkable reversal.
Neither Keynesianism nor monetarism win votes in the electoral
marketplace. But in the doctrines and discourses of ‘social market
values’ – the restoration of competition and personal responsibility
for effort and reward, the image of the over-taxed individual, ener-
vated by welfare coddling, his initiative sapped by handouts by the
state – ‘Thatcherism’ has found a powerful means of popularising the
principles of a monetarist philosophy: and, in the image of the welfare
‘scavenger’, a well-designed folk-devil. The elaboration of this populist

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doctrine – to which Sir Keith Joseph and Mr Boyson, leader writers

in the Telegraph, the Economist and the Spectator, opinion leaders in
the Mail and Express and many others have given their undivided
attention – represents the critical ideological work of constructing
for ‘Thatcherism’ a populist common sense. It is a particularly rich
mix because of the resonant traditional themes – nation, family,
duty, authority, standards, self-reliance – which have been effectively
condensed into it. Here elements from many traditional ideologies –
some already secured at earlier times to the grand themes of popular
Conservatism, many others with a wider popular connotation – have
been inserted into and woven together to make a set of discourses
which are then harnessed to the practices of the radical right and the
class forces they now aspire to represent.

Aspects of the repertoire

Two aspects of this rich repertoire of anti-collectivism only should be

remarked on here. The first is the way these discourses operate directly
on popular elements in the traditional philosophies and practical
ideologies of the dominated classes. These elements – as Laclau among
others has recently argued – always express a contradiction between
popular interests and the power bloc. But, since they have no intrinsic,
necessary and historically fixed class meaning, but can be effectively
composed as elements within very different discourses, themselves
articulated to and by different class positions and practices, it marks
the neutralisation of that contradiction to have successfully colonised
them, for the right.
The second point is a related one. For what is represented here
(again, in an active sense) is indeed the materiality of the contradiction
between ‘the people’, popular needs, feelings and aspirations on the
one hand, and the imposed structures of an interventionist capitalist
state – the state of the monopoly phase of capitalist development –
on the other. In the absence of any fuller mobilisation of democratic
initiatives, the state is increasingly encountered and experienced by
ordinary working people as, indeed, not a beneficiary but a powerful,
bureaucratic imposition. And this ‘experience’ is not misguided since,
in its effective operations with respect to the popular classes, the state
is less and less present as a welfare institution and more and more

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 THE GREAT MOVING RIGHT SHOW 181

present as the state of ‘state monopoly capital’. Social democracy

cannot, of course, exploit any of this terrain to its advantage. First,
it holds to a neutral and benevolent interpretation of the role of the
state as incarnator of the national interest above the class struggle.
Second, in the representations of social democracy (and not only
there, but also on the left) the expansion of the state is understood
as, in itself, and without reference to the mobilisation of effective
democratic power at the popular level, virtually synonymous with
‘socialism’. Third, the enlarged interventionist state is the principal
instrument through which the party of social democracy attempts to
manage the capitalist crisis on behalf of capital. Fourth, in this phase,
the state is inscribed through every feature and aspect of social life.
Social democracy has no alternative viable strategy, especially for ‘big’
capital (and ‘big’ capital has no viable alternative strategy for itself),
which does not involve massive state support. Thus in any polarisation
along this fissure, Labour is undividedly ‘with’ the state and the power
bloc – and Mrs Thatcher is, undividedly, out there ‘with the people’. It
can now be seen that the anti-statist elements in the discourses of the
radical right are key supports for the new populism. It is no rhetorical
flourish. To add that it then does some service in making respectable
the radical right assault on the whole structure of welfare and social
benefits is only to say that the work of ideological excavation, if well
done, delivers considerable political and economic effects.

Education

We might turn to another area of successful colonisation by the

radical right: the sphere of education. Until very recently, the social
democratic goals of ‘equality of opportunity’ and ‘remedying educa-
tional advantage’ were dominant throughout the world of secondary
education. The struggle over comprehensivisation was its political
signature. Contestation in this area has only gradually developed,
through a series of strategic interventions. The ‘Black Paper’ group
– at first no more than a rump – has moved from very modest begin-
nings to the point where it could justly be claimed (and was) that
their preoccupations set the agenda for the ‘Great Debate’ which
the Labour government initiated last year. In the 1960s ‘progressive’
and ‘community’ education made considerable advances within state

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schools. Today, ‘progressivism’ is thoroughly discredited: the bodies of

a whole series of well-publicised schools – William Tyndale and after,
so to speak – lie strewn in its path. The panic over falling standards
and working-class illiteracy, the fears concerning politically-motivated
teachers in the classroom, the scare stories about the ‘violent’ urban
school, about the adulteration of standards through the immigrant
intake, and so on, have successfully turned the tide in the education
sphere towards themes and goals being established for it by the forces
of the right. The press – especially those three popular ventriloquist
voices of the radical right, the Mail, the Sun and the Express – have
played here a quite pivotal role. They have publicised the ‘examples’
in a highly sensational form – and they have drawn the connections.
These connections and couplings are the key mechanisms of the
process by which education as a field of struggle has been articulated
to the right. There are long, deep-seated resistances within the
philosophy of state education to any attempt to measure schooling
directly in terms of the needs and requirements of industry. That these
were resistances often shot through with ambiguity is not so important
for our purposes. However it arose, this reluctance to cash the school
in terms of its immediate value to capital was one on which campaigns
could be based with some hope of professional and administrative
support. These defences have now been dismantled. Clear evidence is
supposed to exist that standards are falling: the principal witnesses to
this alarming trend are employers who complain about the quality of
job applicants: this, in turn, must be having an effect on the efficiency
and productivity of the nation – at a time when recession puts a
premium on improving both. Once the often ill-founded elements
can be stitched together into this chain of ‘logic’, policies can begin to
be changed by leading educationists of the political right, indirectly,
even before they take charge.
And why? First, because the terrain on which the debate is being
conducted has been so thoroughly reconstructed around this new
‘logic’ that the groundswell for change is proving hard to resist.
Second, because Labour itself has always been caught between
competing goals in schooling: to improve the chances of working-class
children and the worse-off in education, and to harness education to
the economic and efficiency needs of the productive system. We can
see now that this contradiction, even within the social democratic
educational programme, is a reworking of what earlier we called

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 THE GREAT MOVING RIGHT SHOW 183

the principal contradiction of social democracy in this period. The

educational experts and spokesmen, the educational press, sections
of the profession, the media, many educational interest groups and
organisations, have been operating exactly on the site of this dilemma
and – in conditions of recession – have convinced the government. It
in turn has now taken up the lead in promoting debates and policies
designed to make this equation – success in education=requirements
of industry – come true.

The ‘Great Debate’

Thus the agenda for the ‘Great Debate’ was indeed set for social
democracy by the social forces of the right; and the government,
which initiated it, is almost certainly convinced that this is a largely
‘non-political debate’ – ‘like debates about education ought to be’.
Yet, in order to bring this about, a major restructuring of the state
apparatuses themselves has had to be executed. The DES has been
set aside, and new state apparatuses, capable of realising the equation
in more immediate and practical forms, have moved into a central
position in the field – the Manpower Services Commission, the new
TSA re-training programmes in further and technical education, and
its ancillary supports, etc. Here, training and retraining programmes
directly geared into the demands and movements of industry and the
silent de-skilling and reskilling of the unemployed can proceed.
Again, this is no merely imposed or rhetorical strategy. The
recomposition of the educational state apparatuses and the redirection
of resources and programmes is the site of a very real and profound
construction of a field of the state, from above. But many aspects of the
strategy also seem to win consent and support from parents. Perhaps
because, in a period of scarce jobs, working-class parents are glad to
see their children undergoing the process of being skilled – even if it is
for particular places in routine manual labour or, in many instances,
for places which are unlikely to exist at all when and if industrial
production revives. Perhaps it is because, if comprehensivisation, in
the form in which it was implemented, and other radical education
programmes, are not going after all to deliver the goods for working-
class children, then they may have to be content to be ‘skilled’ and
‘classed’ in a way that seems appropriate.

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The shift in educational strategy thus says, in effect, to such parents:

you are in the educational subordinate class; the way out is by moving
up, through increased educational competition; what counts in this
competition is a standard training, acceptable social skills, respect
for authority and traditional values and discipline. In the face of the
massive failures of social democratic policies on schooling to turn the
tide of educational disadvantage, the positive aspirations of working
people for the education of their children can be redirected towards
the support for a traditional education, programmes of discipline and
‘relevance to industrial experience’. In the 1960s, parental involvement
belonged to ‘de-schooling’ and Ivan Illich: in the 1970s, it is one of the
strongest cards in the educational pack being shuffled by Mr St John
Stevas, shadow spokesman for education.

Law and order

If education is an area where the right has won territory without

having to win power, two other areas in the repertoire of the radical
right – race and law and order – are ones where the right has tradition-
ally assumed a leading role. We can be brief about them since they
have gained considerable attention on the left in recent months. They
are chosen as examples here only to make a general point. On law and
order, the theme – more policing, tougher sentencing, better family
discipline, the rising crime rate as an index of social disintegration,
the threat to ‘ordinary people going about their private business’ from
thieves, muggers, etc, the wave of lawlessness and the loss of law-abid-
ingness – are perennials of Conservative Party Conferences, and the
sources of many a popular campaign by moral entrepreneur groups
and quoting editors. But if the work of the right in some areas has
won support over into its camp, the law and order issues have scared
people over. In some versions of the discourse of the radical right,
moral interpellations play an important role. But the language of law
and order is sustained by moralisms. It is where the great syntax of
‘good’ versus ‘evil’, of civilised and uncivilised standards, of the choice
between anarchy and order, constantly divides the world up and clas-
sifies into its appointed stations. The play on ‘values’ and on moral
issues in this area is what gives to the law and order crusade much
of its grasp on popular morality and common sense conscience. Yet

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 THE GREAT MOVING RIGHT SHOW 185

despite this, it touches concretely the experiences of crime and theft,

of loss of scarce property and fears of unexpected attack in working-
class areas and neighbourhoods; and, since it promulgates no other
remedies for their underlying causes, it welds people to that ‘need for
authority’ which has been so significant for the right in the construc-
tion of consent to its authoritarian programme.
Race constitutes another variant, since in recent months questions
of race, racism and relations between the races, as well as immigration,
have been dominated by the dialectic between the radical-respectable
and the radical-rough forces of the right. It was said about the 1960s
and early 1970s that, after all, Mr Powell lost. This is true only if the
shape of a whole conjuncture is to be measured by the career of a single
individual. In another sense, there is an argument that ‘Powellism’
won: not only because his official eclipse was followed by legislating
into effect much of what he proposed, but because of the magical
connections and short-circuits which Powellism was able to establish
between the themes of race and immigration control and the images
of the nation, the British people and the destruction of ‘our culture,
our way of life’. I would be happier about the temporary decline in
the fortunes of the National Front if so many of their themes had not
been so swiftly reworked into a more respectable discourse on race by
Conservative politicians in the first months of this year.
I have looked exclusively at some political-ideological dimensions of
the emergence of the radical right, not to evoke wonder at its extent,
but to try to identify some things which are specific to it, which mark
its difference from other variants which have flourished since the war.
The first is the complex but interlocked relationship of the right to the
fortunes and fate of social democracy when the latter takes power in
a period of economic recession, and tries to provide a solution ‘within
certain limits’. It is always the case that the right is what it is partly
because of what the left is: here we are dealing with the effects of
a lengthy period of social democratic leadership. The second is its
popular success in neutralising the contradiction between people and
the state/power bloc and winning popular interpellations so decisively
for the right. In short, the nature of its populism. But now it must be
added that this is no rhetorical device or trick, for this populism is
operating on genuine contradictions, and it has a rational and material
core. Its success and effectivity does not lie in its capacity to dupe
unsuspecting folk but in the way it addresses real problems, real and

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lived experiences, real contradictions – and yet is able to represent

them within a logic of discourse which pulls them systematically into
line with policies and class strategies of the right. Finally – and this is
not limited to this analysis, though it seems especially relevant – there
is the evidence of just how ideological transformations and political
restructuring of this order is actually accomplished. It works on the
ground of already constituted social practices and lived ideologies.
It wins space there by constantly drawing on these elements which
have secured over time a traditional resonance and left their traces
in popular inventories. At the same time, it changes the field of
struggle by changing the place, the position, the relative weight, of
the condensations within any one discourse and constructing them
according to an alternative logic. What shifts them is not ‘thoughts’
but a particular practice of class struggle: ideological and political
class struggle. What makes these representations popular is that they
have a purchase on practice, they shape it, they are written into its
materiality. What constitutes them as a danger is that they change
the nature of the terrain itself on which struggles of different kinds
are taking place; and they have pertinent effects on these struggles.
Currently, they are gaining ground in defining the ‘conjunctural’.
That is exactly the terrain on which the forces of opposition must
organise, if we are to transform it.

Notes

1. V.I. Lenin, ‘Letters from Afar’ in Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 23, Progress
Publishers 1964, p306.
2. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, Lawrence and Wishart,
London 1971, p179.
3. We have attempted a fuller analysis of this moment elsewhere, in the
chapters on the ‘Exhaustion of Consent’ and ‘Towards the Exceptional
State’ in Hall, Clarke, Critcher, Jefferson and Roberts, Policing The Crisis,
Macmillan 1978. [A section of ‘Towards the Exceptional State’ is repro-
duced in this book, as ‘1970: Birth of the law and order society’.]

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 The ‘Little Caesars’ of social democracy
1981

he left is clearly in some difficulty as to how to explain or

T respond to the new Social Democratic/Liberal regrouping in the
‘centre’. The formation of the Council for Social Democracy (CSD)
and of a Social-Democratic bloc in parliament, is, at one level, such a
media-inspired and stimulated phenomenon that it is hard to know
how to make a realistic assessment of its electoral and political pros-
pects. Its pragmatism, soul-searching ‘good sense’, the eminent
‘reasonableness’ of its leading figures, the agony of their hesitations,
the renunciation of ‘doctrinaire extremes’, the rhetoric of ‘novelty’, are
all calculated to project just that illusion of a viable centre, free of
monetarist and Marxist ‘dogma’, dear to the centrist instincts of many
sections of the press.
Commentators like Peter Jenkins of the Guardian have been
hoping and praying so long for this deliverance from the burden of
socialism that it is impossible to know any longer whether columns
like his represent sober political analyses or just more self-fulfilling
prophecies. Pollsters and political analysts have been predicting the
‘swing to moderation’ for so long that they might well have simply
created Social Democracy themselves, if Dr Owen and Mr Rodgers
had hesitated much longer. Rarely in recent memory has a political
grouping looked forward with such confidence to becoming the
decisive element in a hung Parliament on the basis of so sketchy and
gestural a programme. The argument is that there is a vacuum in the
centre which has to be filled. The CSD has so far responded to this
challenge by being as vacuous as they could possibly be.
Journals like the Economist, which abhors a vacuum, have rushed in
to provide the CSD with a programme which they so conspicuously
lacked.1 The economic part of the programme included, inter alia, a
commitment to ‘the pursuit of equality’ (a ‘fundamental ambition of
social democracy’) and a wealth tax. Clearly too extreme for Dr Owen,

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whose own recent writings have avoided the theme of equality like
the plague. The polls had to construct a hypothetical set of policies to
provide their interviewees with some credible basis for responding to
the question ‘Would you vote for a Social Democratic party – and, if so,
why?’ The results have simply compounded the confusion. One Sunday
Times poll suggested that the Social Democrats would attract support
for (among others) the following reasons: they supported (a) more public
spending on welfare, and (b) wider worker participation in industry.
Neither immediately distinguishes them from their Labour and Liberal
rivals. Is Social Democracy, then, just a nine day’s wonder, which is not
worth discussing seriously? Not necessarily. Though this doesn’t mean,
either, that we should take it at its own, highly-inflated self-evaluation.

A deeper process of realignment?

For one thing, it now represents a significant re-grouping of parliamen-

tary forces. Post-war parliamentary politics have been marked by many
contradictory cross-currents. But the big parliamentary formations, and
the two-party system, have, despite several flutters, remained remark-
ably stable and durable. There have been few significant regroupings.
Open splits and group defections from the Labour Party are even rarer,
despite prolonged internecine warfare. It is fifty years since the last one.
The left has more often looked like splitting off than the right, which,
until recently, has maintained its dominance. Moreover, the depar-
ture of the doctrinaire right (for the CSD is nothing if not militant in
its ‘moderation’) marks the isolating out of certain political elements
which, up to now, have co-existed with other currents in the unholy mix
of ‘Labour Socialism’. For years Mr Crosland was the spiritual leader of
the group which has now formed the CSD. But Croslandism retained
links with more traditional Labour themes (e.g. the strong commit-
ment to equality of opportunity), even though he regarded them as
old-fashioned. Mr Hattersley is the last representative of this current.
The rest have given up on the labour movement. This represents the
breaking of certain historic ties. Their appearance as an independent
force thus signals a crisis and break in the system of parliamentary
representation. And though such breaks do not always mark significant
movements (the ‘Lib-Lab’ pact was more or less pure parliamentary
opportunism, marking only the deep degeneration of the Callaghan

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 THE ‘ LITTLE CAESARS ’ OF SOCIAL DEMOCRACY 189

government in the squalid evening of its rule), they sometimes do – as

the break-up of Liberalism at the turn of the century undoubtedly did.
It is hard to know, sometimes, just which conjuncture one is in. But,
as Gramsci once reminded us, ‘crises of representation’, when ‘social
classes become detached from their traditional parties’, and organisa-
tional forms and leaderships ‘who constitute, represent and lead them
are no longer recognised … as their expression’ can form part of a more
general crisis of ruling-class hegemony. The question, then, is whether
Social Democracy is simply a new allocation of seating arrangements
in the House of Commons, or part of a deeper process of the realign-
ment of political forces. This possibility should not be dismissed as
easily as it has been by the left in recent months.

Thatcherism in difficulties

Gramsci offered two reasons why such crises of authority might arise,
the most relevant being that ‘the ruling class has failed in some major
political undertaking for which it has requested or forcibly extracted
the consent of the broad masses’. In those terms, the ‘objective condi-
tions’ look remarkably favourable. For such a historic failure – to wit,
the task of stemming the precipitate decline of British capitalism – is
precisely what is now before us. Both the major variants within the
governing political repertoire are in various stages of collapse. The
social-democratic version, Mark I – the management of capitalist
crisis by neo-Keynesian demand management, corporatist politics and
the disciplining of working-class demands through incomes policy
– is deeply discredited. Its viability seeped away through two long,
disheartening Labour regimes. And now the ‘radical alternative’ – the
restoration of capitalist imperatives through the application of unmod-
ified social market principles – is also coming apart at the seams. The
monetarist, free-enterprise credentials, economic strategies and capi-
talist revivalism of the Thatcher government are in deep disarray. The
Great Reversal, on which everything was staked, has failed to appear.
The government is losing its struggle with public spending and money
supply at approximately the same rate as it is losing its most powerful
allies. The CBI is as close to open revolt as so weak-kneed and suppliant
a body can ever come. The Treasury Select Committee, led by one of the
most powerful independents in the Tory Party, Mr Du Cann (maker

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and destroyer of leaders before now), has delivered the new doctrines
a near-mortal blow. The apostle of anti-statism, Sir Keith Joseph, has
given away more public money to prop up failing or near-bankrupt
state industries than the last three or four Chancellors put together.
Faced with the long awaited showdown with the unions, the govern-
ment looked into the face of the NUM, and withdrew. Mrs Thatcher’s
bellicose adventurism on the world scene – exceedingly dangerous as it
is in its own terms – cannot be relied on to divert attention forever from
the harsh economic realities at home.
‘Thatcherism’ has certainly already succeeded in shifting the
balance of social forces in the country decisively to the right. But it
has failed in the second task of the great populist adventure – to flush
out the social democratic vestiges within the power bloc and then
reconstruct it, so as thereby to restructure society and the economy.
‘Thatcherism’ may have already fulfilled its ‘historic mission’.
But neither of the major electoral machines now offer themselves as
a credible occupant of power at another turn of the electoral wheel.
Not only is Thatcher clearly in difficulties but the Tory Party is very
divided. Labour is no longer what it was: but what it is, and, even more,
what it will become as a result of the internal crisis which Thatcherism
has provoked within its ranks, is not yet clear. Its political character is
highly indeterminate. The signs are therefore well set for the ‘recovery’
of more centrist ground. If the Social Democrats were prepared,
selectively, to reflate; to restore some version of incomes policy; and to
mastermind a modest revival by ditching the struggle against inflation
and ruthlessly backing private industry against the state sector, they
still might not attract popular support; and there is no evidence that
they would succeed in the ‘historic task’ any better than their rivals.
But they could look like another – the last? – viable political alternative.
And they could secure powerful support ‘from above’, amongst all
those forces currently detaching themselves from the Thatcher path to
the brink. They are British capitalism’s last political ditch.

Growing volatility

This makes Social Democracy a powerful pole of attraction of a cross-

party coalitionist type – the ‘exceptional’ alternative towards which,
since the Lloyd George coalition, the British political system has

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 THE ‘ LITTLE CAESARS ’ OF SOCIAL DEMOCRACY 191

tended to veer in moments of severe crisis (remember Macdonald, and

Mr Heath’s ‘Grand National Coalition’?). This does not guarantee it
popular support. But here there may be other trends which strengthen
its case. There is what political scientists have been calling the ‘growing
electoral volatility’ of the British voters. Between 1945 and 1970, each
of the two major parties polled over 40 per cent of the votes at general
elections. Their electoral base seemed reasonably secure. But in the
1970s, their share of the vote has fallen significantly. Party identifica-
tion has weakened, votes have become more fluid. No administration
has gone its full term and then succeeded in being re-elected. The
old rotation of parties in power has continued: but on an increas-
ingly weak base. This now finds supporting evidence in the findings
of the polls that a hypothetical Social Democratic-Liberal alliance
would attract a significant proportion of ‘floating’ and fed-up voters in
about equal numbers from both Labour and the Conservatives. The
scenario then goes that they would form the decisive bloc in a divided
Parliament. Electoral reform would become the principal political
bargaining point. Proportional representation would then destroy the
hegemony of the two-party system forever, and secure a permanent
majority for ‘the Centre’.
The trends are certainly clear, even if the scenario is less
convincing. Mrs Thatcher may make Royal Progresses; but the two-
party political system is in deep disrepute. Her popularity may well
reflect the fact that she appears to transcend it, with her appeal to
Nation and People above ‘party’, and is prepared to destroy it in
order to reconstruct it. But people do sense that we are at or near
the limit of the present political arrangements and dispositions. Yet
the meaning of this phenomenon is hard to interpret. The political
scientists explain it in one way. Here, at last, appears the ‘true’
voter: less traditional in political alignments, unattached to dogma
and doctrine, rationally calculating political choices on a purely
pragmatic, non-ideological, non-class basis: ‘Economic Man’ in the
polling booth – the great pluralist dream. It confirms the wished-for
break-up of the class structure of British political culture. And it is
said to ‘prove’ that the true heart of the political system and of the
‘British voter’ lies in the Centre. Rationality and Moderation have
fallen into each other’s arms.

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A gravitation to the right – not the centre

This is more sell-fulfilling prophecy than hard political analysis.

The interpretation of a natural gravitation of British politics to ‘the
Centre’, eschewing all extremes, would make more sense if the parties
had represented over the decades the spectacle of alternating extremes.
But, until recently, judged in terms of real strategies rather than ideo-
logical polemics and stage-managed caricatures, both parties have long
struggled precisely to occupy this mythical ‘middle ground’, provided
by a capital-led mixed economy, incomes policy, neo-Keynesianism
and corporatism. The social-democratic consensus has been the base-
line from which both sides have attempted to govern, and to which,
in the end, even adventurists like Mr Heath (in his ‘Selsdon Man’
period) were ultimately driven back. It is the failure, precisely, of the
Centre, old-style, and the steady erosion of its repertoire of crisis-
management, which has provoked successive movements in recent
years towards more extreme alternatives. It is the collapse and bank-
ruptcy of ‘the Centre’ which generated increasing pressure towards
these extremes. And if the revival of the left within the Labour Party is
one way of inheriting this collapse, it has been much more evident on
and towards the right. First, the populist undercurrents of ‘Powellism’;
then Mr Heath’s boom-or-bust excursion, before the miners and the
U-turn; then the formation of the Keith Joseph ‘Adam Smith’ kitchen
cabinet; finally – as it became clear that the doctrines of Hayek and
Friedman would need to connect with the reactionary instincts of
the Tory backwoods – the formation, radical offensive and electoral
success of the ‘Thatcher party’. This progressive abandonment of ‘the
Centre’ has taken place for the best of all possible reasons: it failed.
Things got worse, not better, under its increasingly weak and nerveless
leadership. This suggests that the increasing volatility of the electorate
is best explained, not in terms of the natural and inevitable gravitation
of British politics to the ‘middle ground’, but because of the manifest
inability of the two variants of consensus politics to stem the tide of
British economic disintegration and progressive deindustrialisation.
What’s more, the evidence from the movement of public opinion
suggests, not the permanence and stability of ‘centrist’ ideas, but a
steady gravitation towards the extreme right. A recent paper has
shown that, among voters strongly identifying with Labour, support
for more nationalisation, more spending on social services, retaining

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 THE ‘ LITTLE CAESARS ’ OF SOCIAL DEMOCRACY 193

Labour’s links with the trade unions and sympathy with strikers all fell
between the 1960s and the 1970s.2 Support among the same sections
for the sale of council houses, keeping the grammar schools, cutting
government spending, cutting profits tax, and strengthening law and
order and immigration controls have all swung significantly in Mrs
Thatcher’s direction. Manual workers who are also Labour supporters
and trade unionists showed markedly higher shifts of opinion – again
in this direction – than other groups, long before the very significant
swing to the right in 1979 which brought the most radical-right
government of the post-war period to office. This is particularly strong
in the area of the Thatcherite populist issues – anti-unions, anti-
statism, anti-welfare. When these are placed alongside the cluster of
issues which Crewe and others have called ‘Populist Authoritarian’ –
the so-called ‘moral’ issues of race, law and order, private initiative and
self-reliance, where even Labour supporters, strongly pro-Labour on
other issues, suddenly become explicitly ‘Thatcherite’ – the evidence
of a natural gravitation to centrist politics is thin. The underlying
movement is undoubtedly rightwards. Lack of faith in the two major
parties may, therefore, draw people in desperation towards a middle-
ground alternative. But not because this is where the natural fulcrum
of the British voter permanently and inevitably comes to rest. Social
Democracy must occupy ‘the Centre’ because it is there. Besides, that
is where they are. But their strongest card will not be the promise
to ‘restore the Centre’, but the vaguer threat to ‘break the political
mould’. In so doing, they inherit, not the mantle of Attlee, but the
legacy of Mrs Thatcher – for, though they may deflect it in a different
direction, that is what she promised too. Whether it is possible to
‘break the mould’ and ‘return to the Centre’ at the same time is the
particular card trick or sleight-of-hand on which the fortunes of Dr
Owen, Mr Rodgers, Mrs Williams and Mr Jenkins (a ‘breaker of
moulds’?) now depend.

The real character of Social Democracy

What, then, is its real political character and content? The break with
‘Labour Socialism’, however muted in some instances, is real and deep.
It is a final break with the historic Labour-trade union connection.
This is mounted as firmly on the back of the ‘trade-unions-are-too-

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powerful’ crusade as anything in Mrs Thatcher’s vocabulary, though

it is less virulently put. It is also a break with even a residual connec-
tion to working-class politics – even the rudimentary form in which
this is still acknowledged by the traditional Labour right – ‘Labour
as the party of the working class in government’. At this level, Social
Democracy is thoroughly managerialist in its political style. It will
have no organised political base – only the ‘detached voter’, combined
with a power base in parliamentary rule. It is ‘for’ democracy – in so far
as this highlights the undemocratic nature of British trade unionism;
and especially in so far as it means (or meant) ‘one-man-one-vote’ for
the Labour leadership, and the total independence of the parliamen-
tary party from democratic accountability. This is nothing positively
new, since for both the press and for Mrs Thatcher, ‘democracy’ only
works when it allows the ‘silent majority’ to out-vote the left. In earlier
days, the Social Democrats were the group within the Gaitskell orbit
most prepared to put its democratic conscience into permanent cold
storage so long as the trade union block vote delivered the right result
to the right. It is deeply and passionately hostile to every manifestation
of the left. The media have signally failed to bring out that the single
most important factor which precipitated the final break was the very
thought that non-Labour trade unionists might somehow be able to
exert an indirect influence over the leadership election – and I don’t
think it was the Federation of Conservative Trade Unionists they had
most in mind!
On the economic front, it is the party of ‘incomes policy’ in the
classic sense: i.e. as an instrument with which to discipline the demands
of labour and restore them to their rightful position – led by the over-
riding imperatives of capitalist profitability and competitiveness.
Neo-Keynesian in their sympathy for reflation, the Social Democrats
are nevertheless as committed as Mrs Thatcher and Sir Keith are to
the leadership of big industrial capital and the play of market forces.
That is what they mean by a ‘mixed economy’. They emerge as the
only, true EEC ‘party’ – not even in the robust sense of Mr Heath,
blowing the cold wind of European competition through the cob-
webbed boardrooms of British industry: more as an article of faith.
The unity through competition of free-market capitalisms is what
they mean by ‘Internationalism’. ‘A socialist who works constructively
within the framework of a mixed economy’ is the image to which
Dr Owen recently aspired. His reference points – Sweden, Austria,

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 THE ‘ LITTLE CAESARS ’ OF SOCIAL DEMOCRACY 195

West Germany and Holland. His memorable dates – the assimilation

of the German SPD to reformism at the Bad Godesberg meeting in
1959, and the overturning of the 1960 Labour Conference decision for
unilateralism. Which ‘moulds’ are likely to be broken by these ancient
instruments is something of a mystery. It is the restoration of the old
through the appearance of constructing something new

A traditional recipe

Despite its cavilling at the cost of Trident, Social Democracy is fervent

in its support for NATO and the Western shield. Indeed, in being
less committed to the British independent deterrent, it is likely to be
more suppliant to Washington’s grand Alliance strategy than even
its Labour predecessors. The Social Democrats, in the week of the
Thatcher-Reagan resumption of the role of world policemen, and
amidst the talk of NATO Retaliatory Forces and offensive Cold War
postures, did not allow themselves to blink an eye at what precisely
this loyal subordination to NATO strategy promises to become under
the Reagan-Haig-Thatcher hegemony. Instead, they chose to open
their parliamentary career by taking Labour to the cleaners about its
wobbling indecisiveness over unilateralism.
This may look, when pieced together, like a very ancient and
familiar concoction. The novelty appears to lie in the terminology
with which their politics of the Centre is verbally glossed. Despite
their commitment to ‘the new’, the Social Democrats have failed to
identify a single new political constituency around a single new issue.
Feminism is a good case in point, where a strong, vigorous and radical
movement has developed, to which the traditional political cultures
of both the established left and the right are deeply inhospitable. If
any organised force were in a position to disconnect the feminist
movement and women from the left, and to articulate a limited
version of feminist demands to a ‘new’ kind of political programme,
Social Democracy ought to be. One or two public figures have indeed
given this as their principal reason for evacuating the left for centre
ground with embarrassing speed. But it must be said that this is more
in the eye of the beholders than it is anywhere evident in the political
complexion of the new Centre. Apart from offering the person of Mrs
Williams to fortune, Social Democracy has not made a single gesture

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towards attracting this new social force. It gives every appearance of

not knowing it exists and of not knowing how or where to identify
and address it, if it did. Indeed, despite the promise of nationwide
campaigns and local groups, Social Democracy is at present totally
devoid of any single vestige of popular politics or popular mobilisation.
It is exclusively and doctrinally attached to the prospects of ‘politics
from above’.
The only single gesture in this direction is in the fulsome talk
about ‘participatory democracy’. This is Social Democracy’s way of
attempting to colonise the growth of anti-corporatism/anti-statism,
which has been one of the principal forms of popular alienation from
Labour. Here, like Thatcherism before it, Social Democracy is indeed
working on a real contradiction. Labour-in-power became the means,
not for generating a decisive shift of wealth and power towards the
popular classes, but a mode of representing the popular classes ‘in
government’ – which, in conditions of recession, rapidly became a means
of disciplining popular demands from above. The corporatist triangle
is now, and rightly, seen as a directive style of political management –
directed against the people, while at the same time incorporating them
through their representatives. This has consolidated the Big State over
the people – an identity which Mrs Thatcher was quick to exploit. This
is a contradiction within the very heart of Labourism, with its deep
parliamentary constitutionalism, its conception of the state as a neutral
instrument of reform, its inexplicable belief that Labour governments
can both ‘represent working class interests’ and manage capitalism
without something giving, and, above all, its fear and suspicion of
popular democratic politics in any form. Mrs Thatcher exploited this
identity between Labour and the state to considerable advantage. By
1979, Labour seemed much the same as Big Brother, much involved
in pushing people around to no visible effect; while Mrs Thatcher was
the populist champion of ‘the people’ against the power bloc: a pretty
remarkable reversal.

Participation without democracy

Social Democracy is gunning for the same space. But whereas

Thatcherism sought to master the antagonism between ‘people’ and
‘power bloc’, transforming it, at a critical point, into a populist move-

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 THE ‘ LITTLE CAESARS ’ OF SOCIAL DEMOCRACY 197

ment for National Unity around the new social market programme
– bearing Mrs Thatcher, at the same time, into the power bloc – Social
Democracy hopes to exacerbate the contradiction and transform it
through the programme of ‘participatory democracy’, and ‘decentrali-
sation’. Dr Owen and Co are doctrinaire ‘decentralisers’. This new
doctrine circles around the same themes: ‘the bureaucratic central-
isers, the corporatists who now dominate British socialism, the mood
of authoritarianism … the state … seen as the main instrument of
reform’.3 It operates on the same dichotomies: liberty versus equality.
Like Mrs Thatcher, and against the long socialist tradition, it privi-
leges liberty over equality. In this sense, it belongs firmly within a
much longer process – that of bending and articulating liberalism (and
liberal political economy) to the conservative rather than the radical
pole. Authoritarianism and the state as an instrument of reform, Dr
Owen argues, has not been ‘counterbalanced’ by a ‘libertarian streak’.
But whereas Thatcherism, detaching ‘liberty’ and ‘equality’, connects
it with authority (‘Free Market’ – liberty; Strong State – authority),
Social Democracy deflects it towards a third pole, in its struggle to win
space from the left. Not authority but – fraternity: ‘the sense of fellow-
ship, co-operation, neighbourliness, community and citizenship’. The
authentic centrist, cross-class, coalitionist code words. Participation
gives people a feeling of belonging. Decentralisation gives them the
illusion of real power. ‘Small is beautiful’ is a popular slogan in the era
of state capitalism. There is no question but that, somewhere in this
space, socialism has long since ceased to operate – to its profound cost.
It has deeply lost its popular, anti-power block, democratic vision.
There is space, after all, here – as the enemies of socialism in both the
right and the centre know well.
But ‘participation’ without democracy, without democratic
mobilisation, is a fake solution. ‘Decentralisation’ which creates no
authentic, alternative sources of real popular power, which mobilises no
one, and which entails no break-up of the existing power centres and
no real shift in the balance of power, is an illusion. It is a transformist
solution. It conflates the unthinkable with the improbable – all the
while giving the strong illusion of ‘moving forwards’. Transformism
is the authentic programme of the moderate left in a period of
progressive political polarisation along class lines. Its function is
to dismantle the beginnings of popular democratic struggle, to
neutralise a popular rupture, and to absorb these elements passively,

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into a compromise programme. Its true novelty is that it conflates the

historic programmes of the classic, fundamental parties of the left and
the right. It is the restoration of the old through the appearance of
constructing something new: ‘revolution’ without a revolution. Passive
revolution ‘from above’ (i.e. Parliament). Gramsci noted two aspects of
the programme of ‘transformism’ which are apposite to our case. The
moment when ‘individual political figures formed by the democratic
opposition parties are incorporated individually into the conservative-
moderate political class’: and the moment when ‘entire groups of leftists
pass over into the moderate camp’. We are entering the second.

A ‘Caesarist’ solution

Since the break-up of the great Liberal formation in the early years
of this century, the British political system has shown an increasing
tendency, in periods of crisis, to turn to Caesarist solutions. ‘Caesarism’
is a type of compromise political solution, generated from above,
in conditions where the fundamental forces in conflict so nearly
balance one another that neither seems able to defeat the other, or
to rule and establish a durable hegemony. Gramsci reminds us that
‘Caesarist solutions’ can exist without ‘any great “heroic” and repre-
sentative personality’ – though in the earlier period there were indeed
contenders for this role ‘above party and class’. But, he adds:

The parliamentary system has also provided a mechanism for such

compromise solutions. The ‘Labour’ governments of Macdonald
were to a certain degree solutions of this kind … Every coalition
government is a first stage of Caesarism …

In a period when the discipline of unemployment is sending a shiver

of realism through the labour movement, it may seem over-optimistic
to argue that we now confront a situation of stalemate between the
fundamental classes. Yet this does once more seem to be the case.
Thatcherism lacks the economic space or the political clout to impose
a terminal defeat on the labour movement. The working class and its
allies are so deep in corporate defensive strength that they continue to
provide the limit to Thatcherism despite their current state of disor-
ganisation. Irresistible force meets the immovable object. On the

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 THE ‘ LITTLE CAESARS ’ OF SOCIAL DEMOCRACY 199

other hand, the labour movement lacks the organisation, strategy,

programme or political will to rule. So far it has failed to act as the
magnet for new social forces, thereby itself embracing new fronts of
struggle and aspiration. It still shows no major sign of reversing its
own long decline. Such stalemates are ready-made for the appearance
of grand compromise.
Whether this is a solution which can more than temporarily stem
the tide remains to be seen. Sometimes ‘Caesarism’ is only a temporary
staving off of deeper currents. Sometimes it can lead, through
successive variations, to the formation of a new type of state. More
often, it is ‘an evolution of the same type along unbroken lines’. This is
certainly not to say that it cannot temporarily succeed; or that, having
succeeded in winning electoral support, it will not (as Thatcherism
has done before it) have real effects in preventing that reshaping of
the left and of socialism which alone can provide a real alternative –
permitting, instead, Labour in a parallel way, only to recompose itself
along familiar lines. A Labour government, succeeding to its third
rotation in power, under such conditions, would certainly neutralise
socialism for a very long time to come. That, after all, may be what
Social Democracy is really about.

Notes

1. ‘A Policy for Pinks’, Economist, 14 February 1981.

2. Tony Fitzgerald in an unpublished paper on movements in public opinion.
3. David Owen, ‘Power To The People’, Sunday Times, 25 January 1981.

199
 The empire strikes back
1982

mpires come and go. But the imagery of the British Empire
E seems destined to go on forever. The imperial flag has been hauled
down in a hundred different corners of the globe. But it is still flying
in the collective unconscious.
As the country drifts deeper into recession, we seem to possess no
other viable vocabulary in which to cast our sense of who the British
people are and where they are going, except one drawn from the inven-
tory of a lost imperial greatness. And now the country is going to war.
Going to war for a scatter of islands eight thousand miles away, so
integral a part of the British Imperium, so fixed in our hearts, that we
have not managed to build a decent road across the place or to provide
it with a continuous supply of power.
But this all-too-familiar story – the real history – from our imperial
annals has been displaced by a more potent myth. Civis Britannicus
Sum. We have set sail in defence of a high principle – and now, as if
by magic, the powers we thought had departed from us have returned.
In a dangerous, difficult and complex world, it is still possible to let a
few of the old truths shine forth. ‘Our boys’ are ‘out there’ again; and,
despite ‘the tragic loss of life’, Britain can show the ‘Johnny-Argies’ a
thing or two, yet. No tin-pot, banana-republic, jumped-up dictator
can tweak this lion’s tail. Pull it – and the Empire still strikes back!
Rumour and speculation to the contrary, Mrs Thatcher did not
invent the Falklands crisis. But she certainly now regrets that it was
General Galtieri, not she, who thought of it first; for it is doing her
government and its historic mission a power of good. What else is Mr
Cecil Parkinson – Tory Party chairman, but with no high ministerial
responsibilities and not, so far as is known, a notable naval strategist –
doing in the War Cabinet, if he’s not there for the purpose of exploiting
the crisis to the political hilt in the best and continuing interests of the
Conservative Party?

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 THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK 201

It has already delivered tangible rewards. Three million people and

more are unemployed; the whole social infrastructure is being savaged
by cuts; the economy continues to bump along the seabed. Our
Hunter Killer subs seem able to surface, but the economy stubbornly
refuses to do so. Yet, even before the Falklands crisis, these facts had
failed to convert themselves into a popular revulsion against the
government due to the absence of a credible alternative. (Oh, economic
determinism – three million unemployed equals a 100 per cent swing
to Labour – where art thou now?)
The programme of the radical right is still very much in business,
with no U-turn in sight. It is, clearly, still the dominant political force.
And now, powered by an imperial adventure that would have seemed
out of date in 1882, the government is riding high in the opinion polls,
some fifteen or twenty points ahead of its nearest rivals – at the mid-
term, when most other post-war governments have been clutching at
straws.
It has come, unscathed, through the local elections. Were Mr Parkin-
son to stoop his unyielding back so low as to give the Prime Minister
the opportunist advice to call a snap election tomorrow, the latest poll
suggests that 52 per cent of manual workers, a lead of 9 per cent among
trade unionists, as well as more men than women, would be prepared
to vote Conservative: a historic reversal, were it to be realised.
The opposition has been effectively disorganised. Labour is split. The
leadership and the parliamentary majority, hoisted aloft by the windy
gases exhaled in frontbench speeches – sound and fury, signifying a
total loss of grip on the political reality – is firmly attached to the
tail of a patriotic war. As if Labour’s cause has anything to gain from
dabbling in patriotic jingoism except more Tory votes.
The left, opposed to the war in a principled stand, is nevertheless
isolated, silenced by the usual media blackout. And – speaking of
the media – SDP support is crumbling, as the South Atlantic steals
the headlines: except, of course, for Dr Owen, man of the future,
reliving each intense moment from past heroic engagements when he
was at the Falklands helm, as if from the bridge or operations room
of some imaginary aircraft carrier. Worst of all is the spectacle of a
Conservative government leading the nation towards the sunrise, into
what is indisputably a popular war. The naval imperialism – ‘mistress
of the waves’ – on which past British greatness was built paid off a few
better than it did the majority. But it has been a popular cause before

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and – with so much else that is nasty, brutish and unpromising to

think about – has become so again.
‘Public opinion is fickle. Wait until the casualty lists start rolling
in.’ They will have to be British names, for Argentinian dead don’t
rank. For the moment, the most solid hope of halting the fighting is
the sombre calculation of how the country would take the despatch
of some ship of the size of the HMS Invincible to the icy depths of
the South Atlantic, courtesy of a French, South African, Israeli or
international arms trade Exocet missile. Empire has struck.
Its antiquated character remains one of the most striking features
of the Falklands crisis. The early inaction of the left was no doubt
attributable to sheer disbelief at this return of the repressed in the
middle of the nuclear missile age. The task force is a great armada
– though the last one was blown out of the water, breaking up in
the outer Hebrides. The fleet can no longer fire a broadside or get an
Exocet missile off its trail or keep the skies free of ‘Argies’.
Yet the language of the Battle of Jutland and the Battle of Britain
survives. Those great vessels, named after historic cities, with their
expensive equipment and their precious human cargo, would be so
many sitting ducks – of the bathroom variety – if only the ‘Argies’
had learned the lesson of the stockpile. Others will. That the common
humanity and emotion of families waving their relatives off at the
quayside should be recruited into this quest for past glories is an
obscenity – a piece of political recidivism. But it would be wrong to
assume that the charge of anachronism would make Mrs Thatcher
stumble or hesitate for a moment.
After all, the return to the traditionalist reference points of the
past has been one of the main lynch-pins of Thatcherism’s ideological
project. It is at the heart of its populism. ‘Mrs Thatcher called yesterday
for a return to traditional values’, the Guardian reported in 1978. She
has been advancing steadily towards the past ever since. ‘Together’,
she assured her audience about her visit to President Reagan in 1981,
‘we have discovered old verities’. Again and again, the simple, tried
and trusted virtues and ideals which stood our fathers and mothers
in such good stead have been identified with the definition of what is
‘great’ about ‘Great Britain’.
‘I think it’s astonishing how true many of the deep, fundamental
values have remained, in spite of everything. Things may have changed
on the surface, but there is still tremendous admiration for true

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 THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK 203

values’, she assured the readers of Woman’s Realm in 1980. The return
of Britain to greatness has been identified with the fixed reference
points of good old British common sense. In search of the populist
connection, Mrs Thatcher and her allies in the press and elsewhere
have unashamedly gone for the great simplifications.
The economy can be managed on the same principles as the family
budget: you can’t spend what you haven’t got. Mrs T is simply our
most-beloved Good Housekeeper. Children should be brought up
as our parents brought us up. Mothers should stay at home. Tin-pot
dictators must be stood up to. These are the grand truths which history
and experience teach: what she called, at the Conservative Women’s
Conference on the eve of her election victory, the ‘tried and trusted
values of common sense’. Better than ‘trendy theories’ – and all that
thinking.
Her approach is instinctual. ‘If you can’t trust the deeper instincts
of our people, we shouldn’t be in politics at all.’ And essentialist: these
are the essential human qualities of the British people, inscribed in
their destiny. The assumption of the radical right to power has been
safely located within Tory traditions, by a highly selective form of
historical reconstruction. ‘I know you will understand the humility I
feel at following in the footsteps of great men like our leader in that
year, Winston Churchill, a man called by destiny to raise the name of
Britain to supreme heights in the history of the free world.’
What event, what image, is more calculated to draw these different
strands together and condense them into a compelling symbol in
popular consciousness than one more great imperial adventure
on the high seas, especially when gut patriotism is laced with gut
moralism. ‘Nothing so thrills the British people as going to war for
a just cause.’
The Falklands crisis may have been unpredicted, but the way it has
been constructed into a populist cause is not. It is the apogee of the
whole arc of Thatcherite populism. By ‘populism’ I mean something
more than the ability to secure electoral support for a political
programme, a quality all politicians in formal democracies must
possess. I mean the project, central to the politics of Thatcherism,
to ground neoliberal policies directly in an appeal to ‘the people’; to
root them in the essentialist categories of common-sense experience
and practical moralism – and thus to construct, not simply awaken,
classes, groups and interests into a particular definition of ‘the people’.

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At different stages of the populist project, different themes have

been drawn into service in this attempt to capture common sense
for traditionalism and the right: race (‘people of an alien culture’);
nationality (the new Act, under which, incidentally, the Falklanders
ceased to be citizens of any special kind); foreign policy (the Iron Lady
episode); and law and order; have helped to give ‘what the nation is’
and ‘who the people are’ its particular traditionalist inflection.
This is a high-risk strategy for the right. It entails mobilising the
people in a populist arousal, sufficient to cut across and displace
other, more compelling definitions, interests and contradictions and
to supplant alternative images and meanings. The ‘people’ must be
mobilised if they are to join the party in the crusade to drive from the
temples of the state all the creeping collectivists, trendy Keynesians,
moral permissives and soft appeasers who have occupied it in the era
of the social-democratic consensus. Yet in order to prevent a populist
mobilisation from developing into a genuinely popular campaign,
the arousal of populist sentiment must be cut off at just the correct
moment, and subsumed or transformed into the identification with
authority, the values of traditionalism and the smack of firm leadership.
It is an authoritarian populism.
It is also a delicate and contradictory ideological exercise. It has
been required, for example, to square the circle consisting of the free
market, competitive individualist tenets of neoliberalism, as well as
the organic metaphors of flag, patriotism and nation. This work of
populist transformation and synthesis can be seen in the very person
of the great populist herself: the steely manner; the lugubrious
approach; the accent, revealing the expropriation of provincial
Grantham into suburban Finchley; the scrupulously tailored image
– just now, draped in black, as if half anticipating sorrowful news
from abroad about ‘our boys’ doing so well ‘out there’ against ‘them’;
the smack of firm leadership; the oceanic reserves of class patronage
and – from the heights of this assumption of authority – the popular
touch.
It is the success with which all the chords of populist sentiment,
feeling and memory have been struck at once, which testifies to the
sureness of touch with which the Falklands crisis has been handled
ideologically. The most powerful popular memory of all – the war,
when we came to the rescue of oppressed people ‘under the heel of the
dictator’; 1940, when ‘we stood alone’ against enormous odds; and

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‘1945’ – Churchill’s triumph, not the founding of the welfare state –

has been totally colonised by the right.
We have been invited to relive our last great moments of national
greatness through the Falklands war. In the process, the legitimacy,
the popularity and the justice of the one is transferred to the other. In
this way, and to the astonishment of the left, Thatcherism has literally
stolen the slogans of national self-determination and anti-fascism out
of mouths. The sovereignty of people, the right of self-determination,
the wickedness of dictators, the evil of military juntas, the torch of
liberty, the rule of international law and the anti-fascist crusade: in
a hideous but convenient ventriloquism, they have been run up the
flagpole of the right.
As the ‘war cabinet’ drapes itself in the ensign of the Royal Navy,
and the Mail remembers its past, who cares that the long-standing,
well-documented obscenities of the Argentine regime against its people
did not disturb Mrs Thatcher’s sleep until the day before yesterday?
Who minds that Argentina has so speedily become the only offending
fascist military junta in Latin America, and that neighbouring Chile,
where the roll-call of ‘the disappeared’ is almost as long, is a friend of
democracy?
Until a few weeks ago, the Argentinian generals were slipping in
and out of quiet briefing rooms in Western military establishments
and training schools around the globe. Until yesterday, Mrs Thatcher’s
only concern about the international arms trade was how Britain
could – to coin a phrase – ‘make a killing’ in that lucrative market.
Tomorrow, once the junta has been taught a lesson, and the national
spirit revived by a little blood-letting, things will no doubt slowly
return to ‘business as usual’; a much-relieved General Haig will send
his advisers back to Buenos Aeyer-es, where they naturally belong.
When flags unfurl, there is no time – fortunately – for awkward
contradictions. The British can take heart. The navy, with a little
effort, sails. Flags fly. Things are simple, after all.
We are up against the wall of a rampant and virulent gut patriotism.
Once unleashed, it is an apparently unstoppable, populist mobiliser
– in part, because it feeds off the disappointed hopes of the present
and the deep and unrequited traces of the past, imperial splendour
penetrated into the bone and marrow of the national culture. Its
traces are to be found in many places and at many levels. An imperial
metropolis cannot pretend its history has not occurred. Those traces,

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though buried and repressed, infect and stain many strands of

thinking and action, often from well below the threshold of conscious
awareness. The terrifying images of the past weigh ‘like a nightmare,
on the brains of the living’.
The traces of ancient, stone-age ideas cannot be expunged. But
neither is their influence and infection permanent and immutable. The
culture of an old empire is an imperialist culture; but that is not all it is,
and these are not necessarily the only ideas in which to invent a future
for British people. Imperialism lives on – but it is not printed in an
English gene. In the struggle for ideas, the battle for hearts and minds
which the right has been conducting with such considerable effect, bad
ideas can only be displaced by better, more appropriate ones.
Ancient thoughts will only cease to give us a compelling motive for
action if more modern thoughts can grip the popular imagination, bite
into the real experience of the people, and make a different kind of sense.
To do this would require a recognition of the critical importance of
the ideological terrain of struggle – and the construction of the instru-
ments by which such struggles are conducted. Yet the Labour Party,
the labour movement and the left have no national paper: all we can
do is read the Guardian and pray! No powerful journal of opinion, no
political education, no organic intellectual base from which to engage
popular consciousness, no alternative reading of popular history to
offer, no grip on the symbolism of popular democratic struggle.
The left thinks it is ‘materialist’ to believe that because ideas do not
generate themselves out of thin air, they do not matter. The right of
the labour movement, to be honest, has no ideas of any compelling
quality, except the instinct for short-term political survival. It would
not know an ideological struggle if it stumbled across one in the dark.
The only ‘struggle’ it engages in with any trace of conviction is the one
against the left.
More scandalous than the sight of Mrs Thatcher’s best hopes going
out with the navy has been the demeaning spectacle of the Labour
front-bench leadership rowing its dinghy as rapidly as it can in hot
pursuit. Only, of course – here, the voice of moderation – ‘not so far!
Slow down! Not so fast!’

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 The crisis of Labourism
1984 *

here are worrying signs that the labour movement is simply

T not willing to grasp, or is incapable of grasping, the seriousness of
the position into which it has fallen. Crises are not reversed simply by
thinking about them. But to recognise that they exist – and to try to
analyse why they are occurring – is the first, essential requirement for
overcoming them. Simply to deny their existence is to exhibit the
political nous of the ostrich.
In place of the radical reappraisal which this seems to require,
however, what one hears is the troubling noise of a great deal of whist-
ling in the dark: the solid affirmation, against all the evidence, that ‘we
can still win’, ‘things will turn our way’, ‘unemployment will deliver
the vote to us in the end’ or, at best, ‘we are going through a difficult
patch, but Labour is going to form the next government’. As Gramsci
once observed, you must turn your face violently towards things as
they really are. The reality for Labour is that it is only just holding
its own in popularity with the electorate, in circumstances which
ought to be favourable. More seriously, it does not seem capable of
forming a credible alternative or making a decisive political impact on
the electorate. And without a major revival, there can be no realistic
possibility of another Labour government this decade, let alone of
socialism this century.
‘Things’ are not automatically turning Labour’s way. The short-
term electoral indicators point the other way – in a situation of
extreme political volatility. The two-party electoral mould has been
shaken by the ‘unthinkable’ Labour/SDP split; and the party’s morale
has clearly been deeply affected by it. These short-term reversals only
compound the long-term political and ideological trends which have
now been moving steadily against Labour for some years, as shown
in the erosion of its popular base and solid class character, especially
since the mid-1970s.

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Many people will say this is gross exaggeration, founded on an

inexcusable pessimism. With scandals and banana skins liberally
strewn everywhere, surely the Tory magic is at last dispersing? The
authoritarian face of Mrs Thatcher, now more or less permanently
on view, lacks a great deal of its former immediate populist appeal.
Postponing elections, taking away basic civil rights, demolishing
councils because you do not like their political complexion is not
the most obvious route to sustained popularity in a democracy. For a
time Mrs Thatcher and her government seemed virtually error-proof,
swimming with every tide. If the tides have not turned, have they not,
at least, manifestly ebbed?
On the Labour side, there has been a partial upturn in the opinion
polls. Some of the splits and divisions have been healed. The left in the
constituency parties is both more vigorous and in much better heart.
The Benn victory at Chesterfield was a welcome bonus. There is a new,
younger, more vigorous leadership, with a young, vigorous, boyish,
freckle-faced leader, who has an infectious grin, a passion for rugby
and a fondness of the too well sculptured question at Question Time.
Do these and other advances mean that the crisis is now over?
Perhaps it never existed. Is Labour poised for political revival? Is it
ready to run the country? Is it once more the alternative party of
government? Does it show evidence of once more becoming a popular
political force?
These are dubious propositions. First, despite the revival, Labour is
still a very long way behind. To win a majority it would have to capture
every seat where it lay second in the 1983 election: a formidable chal-
lenge. The SDP may not be the threat it was, but the split in the anti-
Thatcher forces is exceedingly damaging structurally and wears a look
of permanence. It is a situation designed to provide a structural bloc
against movement to the left – which is why Dr Owen (who has gravi-
tated so far rightward he has virtually disappeared over the western
horizon altogether) takes such fiendish delight in it. Meanwhile the
Thatcherites, by their sheer bloody-minded determination to press on,
will continue to set the terms, define the parameters, establish the
benchmark of ‘political reality’.
The new Kinnock-Hattersley leadership shows little sign as yet of
becoming a popular political force, as opposed to a (not very successful)
electoral machine. Apart from the issue of the health service, it has
shown little understanding of the need to confront the real basis

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of Thatcher populism in the country at large. Its perspective is still

narrowly confined to the terrain of the labour movement and the daily
accommodations of policy which its contradictory structure requires.
More significantly, it still lacks a really sound grasp of the parameters
of Labour’s crisis or the ascendancy of Thatcherism, which should be
rooted in a searching analysis of Labour’s own record over the past
two decades. Neil Kinnock is solidly in touch with the well-springs
of Labourist culture – and that is important. But he has no feel for
the language and concerns of the new social movements, and that is
dangerous. He has embraced Eric Hobsbawm’s analysis, give or take
the ambiguities about alliances with the Alliance.1 But he does not
understand the politics of putting together a new historical bloc of
forces, which is very different from an electoral marriage of convenience
with the Alliance (in my view, a much more questionable proposition).
I make no prejudgements, but I offer a benchmark: no one who
thinks feminism and the women’s movement is a bit of a joke will
lead Labour towards socialism in this century. Everybody loves a
Welshman. But the Labour vote in Wales is down to 37 per cent – a
country in which, as Hobsbawm pointed out, ‘everything combined
to create a Labour and socialist stronghold’.
What the ranks are closing against is precisely the kind of searching
and agonising analysis which is necessary before anyone can chart a
new course. There is a manifest hardening of Labour hearts against
‘the pessimists’. Resentment is growing like rising damp against
those inside and outside the ranks ‘telling us what to do’. Only those
insulated from the grassroots, it is said, could be so disloyal as to
believe that the crisis is inside the labour movement as well as out
there in the real world.
These aspects constitute important enough problems of strategy
and development for Labour. But, essentially, the problem has not
gone away because it did not in the first place consist of a temporary
loss of electoral popularity. That was symptom, not cause. What is at
issue is the disintegration of the historic social democratic programme
of Labour, pursued in and out of government since the war. What
has ‘turned’ is that underlying consensus in the political culture
around the historic compromise struck in the post-war years, which
has underpinned British politics and which gave Labour its legitimate
claims of office as the alternative party of government. Gone are the
conditions which enabled Labour governments in office to convince

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the electorate that they could keep the capitalist economy alive and
pay off their social and industrial constituencies: Labour’s historic
compromise with labour. It cannot be done in times of economic
recession. What ‘went’ was the solidity of the political formations
around that compromise – Labourism as a particular constellation of
social forces. We may or may not agree on how far that social basis for
Labourist politics has eroded, or what new constituencies there are for
radical political change. But there cannot be serious argument about
the scale of the problem. It is not simply attributable to the misplaced
pessimism of a few free-floating intellectuals.
The complacent view of Labour’s crisis is held in place by the
consoling illusion that it all happened with the Falklands and,
therefore, that 1983 was the backwash of a brief but passing phase.
This view is historically incorrect and hence politically misleading.
Strategically, the election of 1979 was a more significant turning point
than 1983, though the scale of the disaster was less manifest. 1979, in
turn, was the product of a major reversal culminating in the middle of
the Callaghan government – the 1975-9 period. Those were the years
when the basis of post-war reformism was destroyed. There, the first
turn into monetarism occurred – led by Labour, not by the Tories.
It was then that the oil hike exposed the vulnerability of the British
economy. By that time trade-union unpopularity was far advanced –
and nowhere was it so unpopular as inside the Labour cabinet. That
was where the savaging of public expenditure began. Those were the
conditions in which the re-education of the Labour leadership in the
‘new realism’ of managing a capitalist crisis was completed.
They were also the circumstances in which Mrs Thatcher emerged
to capitalise on the crisis, put her finger on the experiences of the
people and disperse Labour’s exhausted programme to the four corners
of the political wilderness. Against that backcloth, she engineered the
fatal coupling of the anti-Labourist, anti-statist, anti-equality, anti-
welfare spirit with the revitalised gospel of the free market. Thus
the qualitatively new and unstable combination of ‘Thatcherism’ –
organic national patriotism, religion of the free market, competitive
individualism in economic matters, authoritarian state in social and
political affairs, began to cohere as an alternative social philosophy. It
was then that the seepage of Labour’s popular support quickened into
a torrent. In its wider sense the crisis is not of Mrs Thatcher’s making
alone. Historically, Labour is deeply implicated in it.

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Take the question of politics and class. The left is convinced that
too much ‘analysis’ will lead to the growth of a post-class politics in
which Labour abandons its historic mission to represent the working
class. But no one can pretend that the British class structure still
mirrors the portrait drawn by Engels in 1844, or that, then and now,
the relationships between class, party and political representation have
ever been simple or one-way. The relevance of the class issue to British
politics does not require us to say that class formations do not change,
since palpably they do. And when they do, the strategies and dynamics
of class politics will also shift, leaving to one side those organisations
transfixed in earlier structures, like beached whales. After all, such
shifts have occurred before within the history of British capitalism.
Labour, ‘Labourism’ as we know it, and modern trade unionism are
all the product precisely of one such shift in the 1880-1920 period. We
may again be at a similar watershed.
No one, looking around Britain today, would deny the pertinence
of class relations. No one seriously concerned to analyse the nature
of present class formations could fail to recognise the changing class
composition of our society: the decline of certain traditional sectors
and the growth of new sectors; the shift in patterns of skill; radical
recomposition as a result of the new gender and ethnic character
of labour; the new divisions of labour resulting from changing
technologies, and so on.
Likewise, no one would deny the enormous variety of class
circumstances and experiences, the internal divisions and sectionalisms
and the differential cultures which contemporary British society
exhibits; with the emergence of new social forces leading to what
Marx once called ‘the production of new needs’. But nor can we afford
to ignore the many pressures and forces emerging from contradictions
in social life, which are, like everything in Britain, inscribed within
class but do not have a simple class vs class origin.
Political issues often touch us as social consumers rather than as
producers; are more pertinent to domestic life, the neighbourhood or
locality than the ‘point of production’; are democratic questions, which
affect us as citizens rather than class subjects; are issues of personal
and sexual politics which influence the structures of our everyday life:
these now constitute the social politics of our era. They are backed by
strong constituencies and movements, in which, of course, working
people have a stake, but which do not necessarily move according to the

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tempo of the industrial class struggle. The articulation of these arenas

of struggle with the changing rhythm of traditional class politics is
the political challenge confronting Labour and the labour movement
today. What an increasing majority of people feel is not that all these
lines converge naturally in and around Labour but – quite the reverse
– that there is now the most massive disjuncture between where the
real movements, issues and subjects of politics are and the ways in
which they are traditionally represented in the political marketplace.
There is not – and never has been – the given unity of the working
class in Britain, which Labour could simply ‘reflect’ in its programmes.
There have always been the divisions and fracturings we would expect
under an advanced capitalist division of labour. Underlying these are
certain shared conditions of exploitation and of social and community
life which provide the contradictory raw materials from which the
complex unity of a class could possibly be constructed; and out of
which a socialist politics could be forged, but of which there was never
any guarantee. How else are we to unite the very different needs,
demands and ideas within the class and constitute those necessary
bridges and alliances with other sectors which are currently essential
to any popular political ascendancy? Where, for example, would
a socialist strategy be without having at its centre the needs and
demands of the many disadvantaged groups and communities at the
receiving end of the Thatcher recession? Yet Labour can neither win
elections nor lead the country into the next decade as the party of
disadvantaged minorities alone. They have to become part of a wider
popular strategy.
Now, what is the common political programme which resonates
with both these experiences and outlines a political strategy capable
of uniting them within a programme for socialism? Could we develop
such a programme on the basis of the current division between waged
and unwaged? Or without addressing the contradiction between the
defence of the working conditions of the employed and the need of the
unemployed for jobs? Could we retain the leapfrogging between high-
and low-paid workers on which the whole economistic trade union
strategy of the 1960s and 1970s depended, or attempt to construct
a political alliance between the two extremes without disturbing the
divisions between black and white or men and women?
People sometimes speak as if all we have to do to construct a new
social alliance is to add up incrementally the demands of everybody

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who happens to be in the room at the time. The fact is that, because
of the variety of social experiences and the uneven consequences of
capitalist development, these different needs and demands are often
genuinely contradictory. They have to be subsumed and ‘reconciled’
within some larger programme, which only a party aiming to become
a popular political force is capable of putting together. They also have
to retain their integrity, their autonomy and their difference within
that programme if the alliance is to be anything more serious than a
marriage of electoral convenience. This is a totally different conception
of how to form a ‘historical bloc’, which recognises its difference from
an electoral marriage of convenience. These are the strategic political
questions which lie behind Labour’s so-called ‘recovery’. They require
a strategy of renewal, a fundamental and permanent recasting which
is certainly not yet on the labour movement’s agenda.
Take the debate on council housing. Suppose that, instead of
adopting instantly fixed positions ‘for’ or ‘against’ the existing form
of public housing provision, we proceeded in the following way: first,
define what it is the private market in housing cannot do. Besides
identifying the variety of needs it cannot actually meet, this approach
will develop the broader socialist critique of the distortions produced
by pursuit of the private property ethic. It will look at the inadequacy
of ‘the market’ as the measure of human need – and thereby question
the very roots of Thatcherism.
Next, proceed to the massive changes which have actually taken
place in the patterns of residential and family life, the new needs that
have arisen, the variety of demands – whether from working-class
families who cannot afford to buy; young homeless blacks adrift in the
city; single-parent families; unmarried working women or gay men
living on their own with the need for decent and secure places to live,
and so on. In short, expose the socialist principle behind the provision
of housing as a social need for a diverse society and then try to design
a housing policy which reflects both the venerable tradition of public
housing and the real world of the 1980s and 1990s. The conclusion of
such a discussion may well be to reaffirm the present thrust of Labour’s
housing policies. But it would be a programme which had withstood
the pressure of ‘socialism in our time’.
Unemployment is another key issue. The problem here is that very
few people put much faith in Labour’s capacity to reverse the trend.
On this, as on so many other questions, Mrs Thatcher so far continues

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to win the battle for hearts and minds; and those who command the
definitions command the credibility. A deep fatalism has, therefore,
settled over the country in this respect, which is part of the fashionable
collapse before the Thatcherite world view that goes under the name
of the ‘new realism’. The new realism is really a capitulation to the
belief that, after all, market forces are economic reality and there
is no point arguing with or seeking to modify or influence market
forces. Unemployment is, therefore, the responsibility of world trends,
outside our capacity to influence. The problem is that this ideologically
motivated ‘explanation’ contains a tiny, rational core. Some part
of unemployment is indeed the consequence of a deep, capitalist
world recession. Some of it is also structural; located in the endemic
structural weakness of the British economy and in the restructuring of
our economic base which is progressing – unevenly, as it always does
under capitalism – at a very rapid rate under conditions of recession.
Of course, something can be done to reverse the trend of mass
unemployment and deindustrialisation. But, to be convincing, the
short-term measures have to be credible and concrete, and the long-
term strategy has frankly to acknowledge and address the structural
problems. Labour has so far done neither convincingly. ‘Jobs’ and
‘more welfare’ are the pious hopes to which the so-called ‘Alternative
Economic Strategy’ was reduced before it altogether disappeared – a
paper tiger. In the long term – while microchips eat people’s jobs,
word processors themselves show secretaries the way to the local dole
office and miners are forced to base their claims to a decent life on
the strategy of mining pits until the sea begins to seep through the
pit floor – Labour has nothing strategic to say about the strategy for
economic revival.
This was clearly evident in the terrible strategic defeat which the
miners suffered in March.2 To invite people in the tightest of economic
squeezes to come out on strike when coal stocks are at record levels is to
act, frankly, with the political nous of the leaders of the Charge of the
Light Brigade. To imagine that people will sacrifice their livelihoods
on the unevidenced assurances of their leadership, and without an
opportunity to argue through and express their commitment in a
democratic form, is to misread the relationship between leaders and
troops and to misunderstand the rationality of working-class action.
To expect that the defensive position is enough on which to build
a long-term alternative economic strategy is profoundly to misread

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 THE CRISIS OF LABOURISM 215

the current mood of the working class. Of course, Th atcherism’s clear

intention was indeed to savage and butcher the pits and destroy the
mining communities. Of course, politically, the government meant
to break the organised strength of the unions. Of course, the miners
clearly perceived what was at issue. But to mistake the moment of
1983 for 1972 or 1974 was an unforgiveable error. Saltley Gates was
a heroic moment: but there is no automatic button marked ‘Destruct
Mrs Thatcher’. To believe this is not to build on an understanding
of, but to be transfi xed by, the past. The miners were offered three
reasons for supporting the strike: in memory of those who had
built the union; for their families; and ‘as men’, who have a duty to
stand tip and fight. Glowing sentiments. And yet, in their backward
trajectory, their familial and masculinist assumptions, those words
fall on my ears as archaic. The cause is correct. The language is a
dying one.
In an article which provoked much controversy on the left, Michael
Ignatieff argued that the miners’ strike represented the end of class
politics as we have known it. Raphael Samuel in reply argued, inter
alia, that the defence of a class community was the essence of the issue.
Both views seemed to me to be incorrect or, rather, each expressed only
half the truth. The miners’ strike certainly contained a powerful ‘class’
dimension. But politically it was not, as Arthur Scargill represented
it, a ‘class-versus-class’ showdown, because, far from ‘the class’ being
united, it was deeply divided. The political task was not to fight a
united heroic battle but to unify the miners, in order to unify the
class, in order to unify a wider social bloc around the issues. The
internal divisions within the miners’ union had real, material and
ideological conditions of existence, and were not simply attributable
to the lack of some pre-existing and unproblematic class unity or
solidarity. Seen in the light of the failure to address this critical and
difficult political task, the absence of a ballot and the contempt which
many showed for the very idea of the ‘bourgeois’ deviation of a vote,
when a 1917 ‘Winter Palace’ scenario was unfolding before their eyes,
was a gigantic tactical error, as well as a major error of principle. One
result was that the strike was dominated, and ultimately defeated,
precisely by the splits and divisions which our ritualistic commitment
to the formulae of ‘class politics’ prevented us from understanding
or addressing. There followed the police protecting the ‘right’ of one
section of ‘the class’ to go to work against the interests of another

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section of ‘the class’, the media construction of the strike as ‘about’

law and order and violence, and the failure of one of the most strategic
encounters of Mrs Thatcher’s three terms.
The rational core in Ignatieff ’s argument is that, though in a sense
the very issue of class politics was at issue in the strike, it could not
ultimately be won in the coalfields and mining communities alone, but
only by generalising the strike into a wider social struggle, projecting
it on to the stage of national politics, in which various sectors of
society far removed from any pit-head felt, not only (as millions clearly
did) sympathy at a distance for the miners and their families, but
understood that there was something directly at stake for them too.
Around what issue could this building of a broad popular alliance
have been developed? In part, around the question of the future of
energy. But, much more crucially, what the miners’ strike posed was
whether, in making the painful transition from one stage of industrial
development to another (as sooner or later Britain must), the ‘cost’
in human and social terms is going, as it was in previous transitions,
to be borne by the sectors of the society who are most vulnerable to
technological change, who are then simply thrown on the scrapheap
of history, their communities and cultures offered up on the altar of
efficiency and ‘modernisation’: or whether, this time round, it is to be
a social cost on all of us, on the society as a whole. We know what
Thatcherism’s answer is on this question. What is the left’s?
The failure to see that an answer to this question was required, let
alone to address it, was (notwithstanding the crucial strategic mistakes
committed, despite his great courage, by Arthur Scargill) ultimately
a political one, and must be laid at the door of the Labour leadership.
If Labour has no other function, its role is surely to generalise the
issues of the class it claims to represent on the stage of national politics
and debate. Instead, its main aim seemed to be damage limitation. It
wanted to be rid of the miners’ strike (as, later, it wished to be rid of
the GLC) instead of seeking to transform that struggle.
The strike was thus doomed to be fought and lost as an old rather
than as a new form of politics. To those of us who felt this from
very early on, it was doubly unbearable because – in the solidarity it
displayed, the gigantic levels of support it engendered, the unparalleled
involvement of the women in the mining communities, the feminist
presence in the strike, the breaking down of barriers between different
social interests which it presaged – the miners’ strike was in fact

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instinctually with the politics of the new; it was a major engagement

with Thatcherism which should have marked the transition to the
politics of the present and future, but which was fought and lost
imprisoned in the categories and strategies of the past.
In this climate of fatalism, a trace of the old recividism appears:
‘what we need are more jobs but those can only be provided if industry
becomes more competitive and more profitable. Therefore, do not rock
the boat.’ Of course, as long as capitalist imperatives prevail, there
is a sort of logic in saying that more jobs will depend on the revival
of capitalist industry. That is the logic in which reformism is always
caught. In fact, of course, there is no historical evidence either for the
belief that recession produces an automatic turn to the left. Fascism
has emerged as often out of such circumstances as socialism. Neither
is inevitable. The outcome depends ultimately on how the struggle is
conducted.
The problem about expecting unemployment to serve as an electoral
conveyor belt is that Labour’s alternatives run headlong into the brick
wall of an ideological campaign which Thatcherism has already largely
won. This has successfully imprisoned common sense thinking about
the economy on the horns of the following dilemma: the only way
to reduce unemployment is to increase public spending, but this will
inevitably lead to inflation. We are trapped between the millstones
of dislike of unemployment and fear of inflation. Thatcherism has
effectively encapsulated all the economic alternatives within the terms
of this brutal ‘either/or’. It is part of a wider strategy, which it has also
conducted with masterly effect. It has two prongs.
The first point in the ‘new realism’ consists of convincing people that
the nation has been living beyond its means, paying itself too much,
expecting perks and benefits it can’t afford, and indulging in all that
consumption, permissiveness and pleasure. Very unBritish! Realities
must be faced! Expectations are out of control and must be lowered.
In that campaign, British masochism is a powerful ally. When the
economy is not being represented in terms of the household budget
(‘you can’t buy more at the shops this week than you have in the kitty’),
then it is likened to the British weather. One good summer has to be
paid for, in psychic currency, by at least five winters of discontent.
The second prong of the strategy is to disconnect, in the popular
mind, the word ‘public’ from its association with anything that is good
or positive, and to harness it instead to a chain of negative associations

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which automatically connect it with everything that is nasty, brutish,

squalid and bureaucratic – and to exalt, in its place, the private market
as the sole criterion of the Good Life.
This has been the strategic ideological project of the new right.
It consists, first, of the struggle to disorganise the left; to interrupt
the social-democratic consensus which has dominated and defined
the political settlement between left and right since the war. Second,
it aims to command popular conceptions of what is ‘good for the
country’. And third, it seeks to reverse every sign and signal pointing
towards leftish or social-democratic solutions and move them in the
opposite direction.
In 1945, it seemed that the only way to get less well-off people
decent health care was to break the circuit of money and market in
health and establish a public form of provision. In 1983, the aim is
to make it seem inevitable that the only decent health service people
can get is that which they pay for privately. This is much more than
eroding the welfare state – a thing not wholly unknown to Labour
governments. It is also, as the Social Affairs think tank put it,
‘breaking the spell of the welfare state’ – dismantling it ideologically
as a constant reference point, an inevitable fact of the political scene
that is taken for granted.3 The historical project of Thatcherism is to
reconstruct and redefine the political terrain, to alter the balance of
political forces and to create a new kind of popular common sense, in
which the market, the private, possessive, competitive ‘man’ (sic) are
the only ways to measure the future.
‘Hard-headed’ Labour politicians dismiss all this as ideological
window-dressing (and ideology is not serious politics), or as mere
manipulation (‘the Tories don’t really believe it’). But the light that
shines in Mr Tebbit’s eye or the one that has gone askew in Sir Keith’s
– is the light of the salvationist, the ‘born again’. They regard the
catechism of capitalism, so tarnished and discredited among the young
in the 1960s and 1970s, as the Sermon on the Mount. It is a creed to
live by, to bring up children by; a faith which will move capitalist
mountains; the salvation of the civilised world – the ‘free west’. For
such things, Mr Heseltine is willing to commit nuclear suicide. Mrs
Thatcher clearly commands the gift of translating this version into the
homespun idioms of daily life. She has the populist touch. But the
stake in the struggle remains the popular will. Why is Labour, then,
politically illiterate about it?

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 THE CRISIS OF LABOURISM 219

One explanation is that Labour understands perfectly well, but is

incapable of organising a popular political and ideological struggle
of this kind. It can mobilise the vote, provided it remains habitually
solid. But it shows less and less capacity to connect with popular
feelings and sentiments, let alone transform them or articulate them
to the left. It gives the distinct impression of a political party living on
the capital of past connections and imageries, but increasingly out of
touch with what is going on in everyday life around it.
A second reason is that it has always been deeply suspicious of the
self-activation of the working class. It is often the actual base for, but
not the organising centre of, local or national campaigns. It has become
an electoral rather than a political machine. Extra parliamentary
activity politics and campaigning in any political space other than
that directed to the House of Commons or within the confines of the
formal electoral system produces in its leadership the deepest traumas
and the most sycophantic poems of praise for parliamentarism. Yet
it is precisely the confinement within the parliamentary mould and
Labour’s containment within a formal definition of the ‘political’
which has been its undoing.
A further explanation is that it does not possess the material means
with which to wage this kind of popular political/ideological struggle.
Of course, it has to operate in the public terrain where the media are
either entirely colonised by the populist right – like the popular press
– or so solidly grounded in right-wing, neoliberal assumptions that to
start a conversation on radio or an interview on television from any
other baseline is literally unthinkable these days.
But, even within the media as they currently exist, Labour
commands no intellectual presence. It has never acquired a proper
legitimacy. And that is partly because – apart from the handful of
experts who advise its committees on policy matters – it has not
organised a core of ‘organic intellectuals’. Labour, then, still looks like
a party which has never heard of the strategy of a ‘war of position’ –
that is, struggling for leadership and mastery over a whole number
of different fronts in the course of making itself the focal point of
popular aspirations, the leading popular political force.
An even more worrying possibility is that Labour does not
believe such a struggle to be necessary because it does not take mass
political-ideological struggle seriously. Anti-Marxist as it is in its
political culture, Labourism is profoundly ‘economistic’ in outlook

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and ideology. It really does suppose that economic facts transmit

themselves directly into working-class heads, without passing through
the real world. Working-class consciousness is as automatic as self-
programming underground trains: once Labour, always Labour. And
yet the clear signs are that political automatism is certainly at an end
– if ever it existed.
Automatism was grounded on the assumption that Labour’s
political support is rooted in the material circumstances of the class
Labour claims to represent: ‘the culture of the working class is the
culture of Labour’. But is it, in that obvious, immediate sense? The
consequences of uneven economic restructuring, long-term economic
change and short-term deindustrialisation are bearing down directly
on these traditional Labour communities, whether occupational
ones like mining, or ecological ones like Bermondsey. The heartland
of the Labour vote, the backbone of its traditional support, the
traditionalist roots of its loyalists, have been profoundly disaggregated.
The traditional vanguard sectors are also increasingly a dwindling
proportion of the modern working class, though not for that reason
insignificant or less important. The pattern of support in urban areas,
where Labour has traditionally amassed giant majorities, is changing
both in scale and political character. Unemployment is savaging the
given structure of skills; technical developments are fragmenting
occupational communities. The age, gender and ethnic structure of
Labour’s potential social support in the country is changing rapidly
and profoundly and, so far we can see, permanently.
Changes of these kinds fragment the class culture of the party as a
political formation. They give rise to new constituencies, new demands.
They generate new tensions and demand new forms of organisation,
changing the social infrastructure of Labour politics. One has only to
think of the profound shift in the character of industrial conflict from
the private to the public sector, and add to that the social composition
and character of social strata which, from this point of view, have
represented the vanguard of the class in action against Thatcherism,
to catch a glimpse of how out of date is the typical Labour view of the
connections between party and class.
Far from guaranteeing Labour’s inevitable return to popular ascen-
dancy, the inevitability of Labourism – its automatism – is now
Labour’s most serious blockage to establishing a hegemony in these
conditions.

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 THE CRISIS OF LABOURISM 221

What is at stake is no more and no less than ‘the people’: the

popular will. Stuck at the end of the strategy of ‘social democracy
from above’ for so long, ‘the people’ are taking a terrible revenge
on Labour. Decades of block votes, things sewn up in backrooms,
deals done in compositing meetings, localities where Labour mafias
have ruled the roost like small-time Borgias, a view of politics which
depends on mobilising the respectability rather than the radicalism
of the working class (and, in the actual contradictory nature of class
consciousness, both do exist, to be mobilised by different political
forces), the engineering or hydraulic view of electoral politics – these
have become deeply ingrained in the culture of Labourism. But the
times are changing.
As a consequence, some Labour voters, especially in the more
prosperous south-east, are nodding at the canvassers when the knock
on the door comes – but slipping, sliding, eroding, drifting into
uncharted paths as soon as they go away, and they meet and talk in
the pub, on the job, in families, with mates, hanging out the washing,
calculating the pennies and the kids’ chances in a microchip world of
permanent unemployment. Are they really recidivist Tories at heart?
No. Are they Labour’s automatic electoral fodder? It would be unwise
for Labour to bank on it.
Can they be won to a vision, not simply a programme, of the
future? Here there is something to learn from Thatcherism, after all.
Paradoxically, she does raise hearts and minds an inch or two because,
vile, corrupt, awful as her vision of the future is, we know what it is.
We can imagine what life according to the gospel of free enterprise,
patriarchal respectability and authoritarian order would be like. We
know how we would be expected to bring up our children, make them
manage their pocket money; how women should live; who should have
babies and under what circumstances; who should, and should not, go
to bed with whom; how teachers in our classrooms should dress and
what lessons are to be read in the religious education hour – as well
as what the Public Sector Borrowing Requirement should be. It is an
‘alternative future’. It is a philosophy of life.
The one thing nobody knows is what Labour conceives to be an
‘alternative way of life’. It currently possesses no image of modernity.
It provides no picture of life under socialism. It has failed so far to
construct an alternative ‘philosophy’ of socialism for modern times.
In its profound empiricism, it has mistaken adaptation to the present

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as progress towards the future. In fact, realistically, Labour can never

adapt enough to become the ‘natural inheritor’ of capitalism. It has no
alternative but to renew itself and its vision or to go out of business.
Whether it is capable of that renewal or not remains an open question
now, which is why the ‘crisis of labourism’ is not quite so exaggerated
as it may at first have appeared.

Notes

1. Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Labour’s Lost Millions’, Marxism Today, October 1983.

2. This essay was first published in 1984, but revised in 1988. Hence Hall
writes from knowledge that the miners’ strike of 1984-5 finally conceded
defeat in March 1985.
3. Digby Anderson, June Lait, David Marsland, Breaking the Spell of the
Welfare State, Social Affairs Unit, Centre for Policy Studies, London
1981.

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 The state: socialism’s old caretaker
1984

here does the left stand on the state? Straightforward … or

W is it? Not any longer. Ten years ago, the left was broadly for state
intervention and state agencies – of the appropriate kind. But postwar
experience, and Thatcherism, are forcing a major rethink.
My aim here is to explore an issue which is central to the strategy
for the renewal of the socialist project, about which, however, I detect
considerable confusion among socialists. This is the issue of the state.
Now a great deal has been said about the role of the capitalist state by
the left, especially in recent times. It has almost acquired the status
of a fashionable political topic. My purpose is not to review this
already complex literature, but to come at the problem from a slightly
different angle. I believe that the status of the state in current thinking
on the left is very problematic. Many socialists now stand in a very
different place, on the question of the state, than they would have
taken up ten or twenty years ago. And yet, I believe that we have not
fully confronted or explained to ourselves why we have changed our
minds or how this new thinking about the state is likely to influence
strategies for the left.
I am well aware that this kind of exploration is a dangerous exercise.
One of our present dilemmas on the left is the habit of thinking that
we already know what the content and future of socialism is. We talk
of socialism as if it were an already completed agenda: the script of a
play which is already written and only waiting for someone to put it on
stage. Of course, there is a tradition of socialist thought and struggle to
draw on. But tradition is a tricky concept, especially for the left; a two-
edged sword, more diverse and contradictory in reality than we make
it appear when we construct it retrospectively. Our thinking about
socialism must also reflect the history and experience of socialism as
it actually exists – with all its vicissitudes. It must also ground itself
in current realities, take the pressure of our time, reflect the world

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around us in order to transcend it. Paradoxically, socialism will perish

unless it is able to grow out of the very soil of modern capitalism,
which despite everything, is still expanding, still revolutionising the
world in contradictory ways.
I do not, therefore, believe that what ‘we have always thought about
the state’ on the left will necessarily do for the next ten decades; or that
posing ourselves difficult questions is necessarily a sign of the weakening
of faith. We should leave Faith to the Believers. Indeed, that other way
– socialism as an already finished project – is one of the most powerful
sources of, and an excuse for, that profound sectarianism which has
always had a strong presence on the left and which I detect rising like
the smog once again, as those who dare to put a question mark over
our received wisdoms are instantly accused of treason, labelled as the
enemy, or dismissed as ‘pink professors misleading the left’ (in Tariq
Ali’s recent, immortal phrase) and despatched into outer darkness.
So why the problem?
Braving the terrors of excommunication from the newly appointed
guardians of orthodoxy, let us pose once more the question of where
we stand on the question of the state. It is not difficult to see why the
state has become problematic in recent years. This must reflect, on the
one hand, our response to the whole experience of ‘actual existing
socialism’, where, instead of progressively withering away, the state has
become a gigantic, swollen, bureaucratic force, swallowing up almost
the whole of civil society, and imposing itself (sometimes with tanks),
in the name of the People, on the backs of the people. Who, now,
can swallow without a gigantic gulp the so-called temporary, passing
nature of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’? On the other hand,
the very same period, since the end of World War II, has witnessed
a parallel, gigantic expansion of the state complex within modern
capitalism, especially in Western Europe, with the state playing an
increasingly interventionist or regulative role in more and more areas
of social life. It has become far and away the largest single employer
of labour, and acquired a dominant presence in every sector of daily
existence. What are we to make of that unexpected development,
never adequately predicted in the classical Marxist literature?
Even more difficult to work out is, what is our attitude towards
this development? On the one hand, we not only defend the welfare
side of the state, we believe it should be massively expanded. And yet,
on the other hand, we feel there is something deeply anti-socialist

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 THE STATE: SOCIALISM ’ S OLD CARETAKER 225

about how this welfare state functions. We know, indeed, that it is

experienced by masses of ordinary people, in the very moment that
they are benefiting from it, as an intrusive managerial, bureaucratic
force in their lives. However, if we go too far down that particular
road, whom do we discover keeping us company along the road
but – of course – the Thatcherites, the new right, the free market
‘hot gospellers’, who seem (whisper it not too loud) to be saying
rather similar things about the state. Only they are busy making
capital against us on this very point, treating widespread popular
dissatisfactions with the modes in which the beneficiary parts of the
state function as fuel for an anti-left, ‘roll back the state’ crusade.
And where, to be honest, do we stand on the issue? Are we for ‘rolling
back the state’ – including the welfare state? Are we for or against
the management of the whole of society by the state? Not for the first
time, Thatcherism here catches the left on the hop – hopping from
one uncertain position to the next, unsure of our ground.
Perhaps it might help if we knew how we got into this dilemma.
How did we get here? This is a vast topic in its own right, and I
propose to look at only four aspects here. First, how did the British
left become so wedded to a particular conception of socialism through
state management, the essence of what I want to call ‘statism’ or a
‘statist’ conception of socialism? Secondly, I want to sketch some of the
reasons why the very expansion of the state, for which so many on the
left worked so hard, turned out in practice to be a very contradictory
experience. Third, I want to confront head on the confusion caused
on the left by the ‘libertarianism’ of the right – the way Thatcherism
has exploited the experience of welfare statism and turned it to the
advantage of the new right. Finally, I want to consider some aspects
of the changing social and economic relationships today which have
influenced spontaneous attitudes on the left – what I call the growth
of a left libertarianism. In conclusion, I can only roughly indicate
some directions in which our thinking needs to be developed.

The history

First, how did the British left get so deeply embedded in a statist
conception of socialism? After all, it was not – as many people imagine
– always like that. The state did not have that central, all-pervasive role

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in early socialist thinking. Marx and Engels understood the role of the
capitalist state in developing a whole social and political order around
a particular mode of exploitation, and spoke briefly but vividly about
the need to destroy it in its existing form. But their thinking about
the future role of the state in the transition to socialism was extremely
sketchy. Other radical currents of thought in British socialism were,
if anything, more anti-state than pro-state in their general tendency.
Even in the key period, between the revival of socialism in the 1880s
right through to the 1920s and the emergence of the Labour Party in its
modern constitutionalist form as the majority party politically repre-
senting the working classes, a statist-oriented brand of socialism within
Labourism and the labour movement had to contend with many other
currents, including of course the strong syndicalist currents before
and after World War I, and later the ILP’s ethical Marxism, with their
deep antipathy to Labour’s top-downwards, statist orientation. One of
the many tricks which the retrospective construction of tradition on
the left has performed is to make the triumph of Labourism over these
other socialist currents – the result of a massive political struggle, in
which the ruling classes played a key role – appear as an act of natural
and inevitable succession.
And yet, it was precisely in this critical period – between the
1880s and the 1920s, when the parameters of British politics for the
following fifty years were set for the first time – that statism took root
in British political culture. In those days, what we now call ‘statism’
went under the title of ‘collectivism’. What is crucial for our analysis is
the fact that there were many collectivisms. ‘Collectivism’ was a highly
contradictory formation, composed of different strands, supported in
different ways by the right, the centre and the left – if, for convenience,
we can use those somewhat anachronistic labels. Collectivism was
regarded by many sections on the right, and by some influential sectors
of the leading classes, as the answer to Britain’s declining fortunes.
The country – the new collectivists believed – required a programme
of ‘national regeneration’. This could only be undertaken if the old
shibboleths of laissez-faire were finally abandoned and the state came
to assume a far greater role of organic leadership in society. A ‘populist’
bloc of support, they believed, could be won amongst the dominated
classes for such a project, provided the latter were ‘squared’ by state
pensions and other Bismarck-type benefits. This was the programme
of both the ‘social imperialist’ and the ‘national efficiency’ schools,

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 THE STATE: SOCIALISM ’ S OLD CARETAKER 227

and of the highly authoritarian populist politics associated with them.

And though they did not carry their programme in detail, they were
extremely influential in pioneering the shift in the allegiance of British
capital from its former commitment to laissez-faire, to its newer link
with a certain type of capitalist state interventionism.

Statism equals socialism

There is no space to deal with the links between collectivism and the
‘centre’, but it is a critical link in the story to remember that it was also
on this very question of ‘the state’ that the ‘old’ Liberalism transmuted
itself into the ‘new’ Liberalism: the new Liberalism was, in its own
time, the pioneer of the thinking which lay behind the early instal-
ment of the welfare state (in the 1906-11 Liberal administration), and,
in our time, it is really the political force which created that space in
British politics which we would now call ‘social democracy’.
But the key factor for our purposes was the progress which
collectivism made, under essentially Fabian inspiration, inside the
labour movement and in the Labour Party. In this period Fabianism
established its ascendancy as the philosophy of socialism for Labour.
Collectivism became, to be blunt, what the Webbs and their many
followers meant by socialism. That is, progressive legislation, social
welfare, a measure of redistributive justice, pioneered through the
state by a political elite legislating on behalf of the working classes
(who were required to elect ‘their government’ to office but who were,
of course, too inexpert to rule on their own behalf); resulting in a
gigantic state complex, administering more and more of society in
the interest of social efficiency, where the experts and the bureaucrats
would exercise a ‘benevolent dictatorship’ through the state, servicing
society’s many and complex needs. It was in this formative period
that the statist conception of socialism became riveted in place, as the
dominant current within Labourism and the British left.
We have no space to sketch the long, torturous route which led
from the emergence of this statist conception of socialism in the
1920s to the much-transformed reality of the modern state and state
interventionism as we know it after 1945. Suffice it to say that the path
from one to the other was by no means straightforward. Nevertheless,
the welfare state was constructed after 1945 on those earlier

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foundations, and is rightly regarded as the crowning achievement of

the post-war Labour government, the high tide of the spirit of popular
‘war radicalism’, and the most advanced achievement of the reformist
tradition of British social democracy.
The logic behind this development in the second half of the
twentieth century is not difficult to understand, even though we
may not subscribe wholeheartedly to it nowadays. The argument
ran as follows: capitalism has a thrust, a logic of its own – the logic
of private property, capital accumulation, possessive individualism
and the free market. This logic ‘worked’, in the sense that it created
the modern capitalist world – with, of course, its necessary ‘costs’:
exploitation, poverty, insecurity for the masses, class inequality, the
many inevitable victims of its ‘successes’. The left, it seemed, had only
one alternative: to break the ‘logic of the market’ and construct society
around an alternative logic – a socialist one. But to do this, it needed
an alternative centre of power, an opposing rallying-point, to that of
capital and the market. This opposing force was the state. Either the
state could be used to make inroads into the ‘logic of the market’,
to modify its excesses, abate its extremes, graft alternative goals (e.g.
needs not profits) on to the system, impose a redistributive logic on
the unequal ways in which capitalism ‘naturally’ distributes its goods
and resources – the reformist alternative. Or, the power of capital and
the market, installed behind the capitalist state, had to be actively
broken (‘smashed’), and the major social processes ‘socialised’ or made
public by being progressively absorbed and taken over into the state –
the revolutionary road. Both, it is clear, involved, to different degrees,
massive inroads into the ‘logic’ of the market by expanding the role
of the state.

The two great blocs

I believe this crudely drawn political landscape, blocked out into

its two, great, opposed ‘continents’ – the domain of capital and
the market versus the domain of the logic of social needs, imposed
through the state – is how the vast majority of us first entered into
basic political thinking. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that
these remain the two fundamental formations in British political
culture – more inclusive, in a way, than the traditional division into

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 THE STATE: SOCIALISM ’ S OLD CARETAKER 229

left and right. They have helped to set the parameters within which
British politics have fluctuated since the turn of the century. An essen-
tial part of the ‘historic compromise’ between the classes struck in
the interwar period was the new balance established between ‘state’
and ‘civil society’. On this basic ‘settling of the boundaries’ much
of the stability of Britain as a capitalist democracy has depended. It
was the shifting of these boundaries, in some sectors, away from the
free play of market forces, and closer to the reform-through-the-state
pole, which constituted the ‘revolution’ of the Keynesian welfare state
and the post-1945 settlement. This new consensus, basically, lasted
up to the advent of Thatcherism in the mid-1970s. It is this ‘settling
of boundaries’ which the new right challenged. Restoring the free
market principle to its former ascendancy is once again the fulcrum of
politics, the key dividing line between right and left. That is why the
question of the left’s attitude to the state now matters so profoundly.
All this makes it sound as if the balance of forces on this question
has been steadily moving in the reformist direction. Why, then,
has this development of the state been so problematic for the left?
One reason is that the state has gone on expanding and developing
powered, so to speak, by both the right and the left. We still speak
of the ‘capitalist state’. But, in fact, we no longer behave as if it had
a single, monolithic class character. The left, despite its rhetoric, has
its part of the state too: the welfare state, which distributes benefits
to the needy; serves society’s needs; redistributes resources to the less
well-off; provides amenities – and all on a universalistic basis, rather
than on the market terms of ‘ability to pay’. The NHS is the classic
example. Despite its dependence on the private sector and the inroads
into it made by private medicine, the NHS is still generally regarded
and experienced as having broken the logic which connected health
and medical care to wealth and the private ability to pay, and installed
in its place the idea of medical need served by a universal provision.
The history of Nye Bevan’s struggles to install the NHS demonstrates
not only how bitterly the market forces resisted this inroad into their
territory, but how impossible it would have been without an alternative
centre, capable of organising a materially different system of provision
– the state.
How could anyone who understood the material difference which
this has made in the lives of countless ordinary people regard this
development as contrary to the logic of socialism? We – rightly – want

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to see more of this, not less: more aspects of life organised on a similar
principle. The recent Centre for Policy Studies pamphlet proposed
cutting back on welfare not simply on pragmatic grounds of cost, but,
as its title proclaims, as a way of Breaking the Spell of the Welfare State.
And those boys – Sir Keith Joseph’s shock troops masquerading as an
independent research unit – know what they are doing. This centrality
of the state to the left is not confined to the area of welfare and benefits.
We have tended to think that the nationalisation measures of the
1940s and 1950s, and the Keynesian interventions in economic life,
which increased rapidly in the 1960s and 1970s, failed, not because
they went too far, but because they did not go far enough. The left is
still basically wedded to a positive view of the state’s role in socialist
construction.

The two-edged state

Matters are not quite so simple. Few areas of the welfare state are as
clear cut in their positive image as the NHS. And the welfare and
benefit side is not the only form in which the state has expanded in
post-war society. We have seen the parallel expansion of the warfare
state, too. And of the repressive, ‘policing’ aspects of the state: the state
as coercive agent, defending the social order, punishing the deviant,
extending its surveillance into civil society, disciplining the citizenry
on to the straight and narrow, its operations increasingly shrouded in
secrecy, beyond all normal forms of accountability. The ‘Orwellian’
state is alive and well, not only in Eastern European socialist demo-
cracies, but in Western European class democracies, alongside the
welfare state. The state which gives out benefits also snoops on its
recipients. Then there is the size and scale of the administrative side
of the state, coupled with its bureaucratic mode of operation. People,
when they are being ‘done good to’ by the state, increasingly experi-
ence it, in reality, as being ‘put in their place’ by it: by ‘experts’ who
always know better, or state servants who seem oblivious to the variety
of actual needs on the other side of the counter. The feeling is very deep
that the way the welfare state works makes people into passive, greedy,
dependent clients much of the time, rather than people claiming rights
from a state which is supposed to be their state, representing them
against the logic of the market.

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 THE STATE: SOCIALISM ’ S OLD CARETAKER 231

Then there is the awareness that welfare states have become general
throughout capitalist systems, with levels of benefit in many other
countries that have long since outstripped ours, and performing
functions not only imposed on capital by the working class but
necessary to the survival of capital. Free secondary education is, after
all, both a long standing radical demand and a reform imposed on
the idea of an educational market place and the degree of training
and skilling a modern capitalist system requires. The welfare-reformist
and the reproductive aspects of the state are increasingly difficult to
distinguish. As state functions multiply, so more of us are working in
state-related jobs. The changing composition of the working class and
the changing pattern of industrial conflict have moved increasingly to
these contested sites within the state. Even there we are aware of the
double-sided character of our work. The slogan which most accurately
expresses our dilemma and captures this contradictory reality is ‘In
And Against The State’. Increasing numbers of us are, regularly, both.

New right libertarianism

This brings us to the ‘libertarianism’ of the new right. Because it is

exactly this contradictory experience of the state on which Thatcherism
capitalised. It rooted itself in these dissatisfactions, and inflected them
into a whole broadside against the very principle of welfare as such. The
new right harnessed these popular discontents to its cause, converted
a dislike of the bureaucratic features of statism into a full-scale assault
on the ‘creeping tide of socialism’ and the ‘nanny state’. On these nega-
tive foundations it built the new positive gospel of the market as the
universal provider of goods and of The Good; launched the savaging
of public expenditure as a testament to Virtue; initiated the privatisa-
tion ‘roll back’; and raised the war-cry of Freedom and its identity
with the free market. The new right presented itself as the only party
committed to oppose the exponential growth of the state, its penetra-
tion into every corner of life. This was one of the key ways in which
Thatcherism cut into the territory of the traditional left, disorganised
its base and made itself ‘popular’.
The problem for the left is that the dissatisfactions with the state are
real and authentic enough – even if Thatcherism then mis-describes
and mis-explains them. Thatcherism did not invent them – even if its

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remedies for the problem are fictitious. Further, it exposed a weakness

of the existing system which the left had made too little of: the
deeply undemocratic character of state-administered socialism. Most
disconcerting of all, this revealed that the left and the new right share,
on this question, some of the same ground!
This was particularly disconcerting because the left believes that
ideology marches in exclusive blocks of ideas, each block attached to
its appropriate class or political position. It is therefore extremely odd
to find the left sharing with ‘the class enemy’ a critique of statism –
even if, when the conclusions from that critique are drawn, the two
sides radically part company. Of course, the problem here lies in the
fact that ideology does not function in blocks. The idea of liberty,
on which the whole anti-state philosophy was predicated, does not
belong exclusively to the right. They appropriated a certain version of
it, linked it with other reactionary ideas to make a whole ‘philosophy’
and connected it into the programme and the forces of the right.
They made the idea of Freedom equivalent to and dependent on the
freedom of the market – and thus necessarily opposed to the idea
of Equality. But freedom or liberty – in the wider sense of social
emancipation – has always been a key element in the philosophy of
the left. Within this chain of ideas, emancipation depends on equality
of condition. It is the equation with the market and possessive
individualism which limits it. So what the left urgently needs is to
re-appropriate the concept of freedom and give it its real expression
within the context of a deepening of democratic life as a whole. The
problem is that this socialist conception of Freedom is not compatible
with – is in fact deeply undermined by – the idea of a state which takes
over everything, which absorbs all social life, all popular energies, all
democratic initiatives, and which – however benevolently – governs
society in place of the people.

Choice

Perhaps we can all agree about ‘emancipation’. It has a resonant

feel to it, and touches very deep chords – as the new right correctly
understood. But what about another, trickier aspect of Freedom: the
question of choice? I am not sure the idea of ‘choice’ has so far played a
very central role in thinking on the left. And yet the most widespread

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 THE STATE: SOCIALISM ’ S OLD CARETAKER 233

and basically correct ‘image’ of actual existing socialism among ordi-

nary working people is the drab lack of diversity, the omnipresence
of planned sameness, the absence of choice and variety. Our concept
of socialism has been dominated by images of scarcity. The trouble is
that on the question of choice, capitalism and the free market seem so
far to have the best tunes. But is the idea of choice, which is intrinsic
to the whole critique of statism, an essentially reactionary, right-wing
capitalist idea?
I suspect this is partly a generational matter. Socially, culturally, in
everyday economic life, younger people set enormous store by choice
and diversity. And they see as the principal enemies of diversity both
big, corporate capital and the big state. They know what Thatcherite
economists do not seem to know – that the maximisation of popular
choice does not flourish in the storehouse of corporate capital, with its
carefully calculated marketing and financing strategies. And they do
not naturally associate it with the equally corporatist ‘bureaucratic’
modes of operation of the state. But, unfortunately for the left, they
have found a measure of choice in what we can only call the interstices
of the market. At the small end of the market, where the big battalions
and competition to the death do not entirely dominate, small
initiatives sometimes have a chance, and a degree of entrepreneurship
can create openings, or recognise a new need, even a new social
need, and experiment to a degree with satisfying it. I certainly don’t
mean to paint a rosy picture of the degree of openness which exists
here: all markets are constrained above all by inequality. But most
of the innovatory trends in everyday life with which younger people
spontaneously identify – in music, clothes, styles, the things they read
and listen to, the environments they feel comfortable in – operate on
what one can only call an ‘artisan capitalism’ basis. These things are
in constant danger of being regulated out of existence by the state or
ripped off by the big commercial providers.

Left libertarianism

Nevertheless, inevitably, the actual daily cultural experience of diver-

sity has come to be identified with a certain conception, or rather, a
certain experience of the market. And this is by no means confined
to non-political people. Culturally, where would the left be today

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without initiatives like City Limits or a thousand other small, ‘inde-

pendent’ publications; or Gay Sweatshop and hundreds of other
little theatre groups; or Virago and History Workshop and Readers
and Writers Cooperative and Compendium and Centreprise and
Comedia and – you name it? Young people on the left or right do not
expect to hear the new sounds which speak to them of their time on
either BBC or ITV, though they might catch them from the ‘inde-
pendents’ clustered around Channel Four, from Radio Laser or even,
God help us, the dreaded, arch-commercial, ‘pirate’ Radio Caroline.
Many of these initiatives operate precariously in the margins of the
capitalist market. But even when you move from the margins of the
market, the positive sentiments of younger people on the left, post-
1968, instinctively gravitate to those local or ‘grass roots’ initiatives,
where people, by their direct self-activity, can be persuaded to supple-
ment or develop new struggles around the existing bureaucratic
forms of provision of the state. The libertarianism of the right has
been matched, I believe, by a steady and unstoppable, slow but strong
current of ‘libertarianism’ on the left – mirroring, in its own way,
many of the broader social and economic trends at work in society,
transforming daily life and everyday attitudes, including those of the
younger generations on the left.
Does all this then add up to a covert invitation to give up another
set of ‘old’ socialist ideas, lie back and learn to love the free market?
Not at all. But it is an invitation to open our minds and fertilise our
imaginations a little by direct infusions from the contradictory reality
of what Marx, in his simple way, used to call ‘real history’. For one
thing, we know that, wherever in Eastern Europe, under actual-
existing socialism, the system of rigid economic planning of life, from
steel factories to hat pins, has been relaxed a little, the first – though
not necessarily the final – form which this has assumed is a return,
within the framework of socialist planning, of some ‘free market
mechanisms’. And this is not a problem to be left to left economists
and experts on Eastern Europe, since the image and reality of actual-
existing socialism is a problem for all socialists and has been such a
trump card in the right’s struggle against the very appeal of socialism
in the West. The second lesson we might draw is linked with this re-
evaluation of a whole historical experience, though not in a directly
organisational way. It is simply the re-examination of the new impetus
towards choice, the new spirit of pluralism and diversity, which has

234
 THE STATE: SOCIALISM ’ S OLD CARETAKER 235

become such a driving force of the masses under advanced capitalism,

and which will have to be more centrally reflected in our thinking
about socialism if we are ever to convince large numbers of people that
socialism is a superior ‘way of life’ to that which, with all its ups and
downs, they already know. Why else should the toiling masses under
capitalism ever commit themselves to an alternative which offers them
less than they can currently get?

No room for naivety

I don’t think we can afford to be naive about the state. Negatively,

though the state is a contradictory force, it does have a systematic
tendency to draw together the many lines of force and power in
society and convert them into a particular ‘system of rule’. In that
sense, the state does continue to organise and orchestrate the space of
capital accumulation in its broad societal aspects, and hold a partic-
ular, exploitative social order in place. This is not a neutral function
– though it is not the state’s only function, either. But insofar as it is
its role, the state has to be dismantled, and another conception of the
state put in its place. The lesson I think we can draw here is that we
have as yet a wholly inadequate conception of how a socialist state
would operate in ways which are radically different from that of the
present version.
We can’t afford to be naive about the market either. It is the principal
exploitative mechanism of a capitalist social order when set to work in
the context of private property and capitalist economic forms. I am
not sufficient of an economic expert to know whether some aspects
of the market can be combined with socialist economic forms, but
I am sure we need to ponder the idea more deeply. Certainly, I feel
sure that socialism cannot exist without a conception of the public.
We are right to regard the ‘public sector’, however little it represents
a transfer of power to the powerless, as an arena constructed against
the logic of capital. The concept of ‘public health’ is different from the
idea of private medicine because it deals with the whole environment
of health, which is more than the sum of individual healthy bodies – a
social conception of health as a need, a right.
‘Public transport’ is not simply a practical alternative to private
transport because it embodies conceptions of equal access to the means

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of mobility – to movement around one’s environment as a publicy

validated right. The idea of ‘public space’ signifies a construction
of space not bounded by the rights of private property, a space for
activities in common, the holding of space in trust as a social good. In
each case the adjective public represents an advance in conception on
the limits of possessive individualism, of liberal thought itself. In this
conception of the public and the social, socialism is still ahead. And
the public can only be carved out of market space, capital’s space, by
the engine of state action.

The state and society

On the other hand, ‘the public’ cannot be identical with the state.
Once the logic of capital, property and the market are broken, it is
the diversity of social forms, the taking of popular initiatives, the
recovery of popular control, the passage of power from the state into
society, which marks out the advance towards socialism. We can
envisage a ‘partnership’ between state and society, so long as the initi-
ative is always passing to society, so long as the monopoly over the
management of social life does not come to a dead halt with the state
elite, so long as the state itself is rooted in, constantly draws energy
from, and is pushed actively, by popular forces. One of the reasons
why some of the things which have developed around the GLC are
so exciting, so pre-figurative for the left, is precisely that one begins
to see here and there a glimmer of a local state transforming the ways
in which it ‘represents’ society politically; being more dependent on
the passage of power, through the state, to the constituencies than it
is on monopolising power; and thus one also sees a glimpse of how
a new principle, centralised through the instrumentality of the state,
can then yield space to a wide variety of different forms, social move-
ments and initiatives in civil society. What is no longer tenable or
tolerable is the state-management of society in the name of socialism.
Pluralism, in this sense, is not a temporary visitor to the socialist
scene. It has come to stay.
We could put all this another way by reminding ourselves that what
Marx spoke of when he referred to socialism was the social revolution.
The democratisation of society is as important as dismantling the
bureaucracies of the state. Indeed, perhaps the most important lesson

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 THE STATE: SOCIALISM ’ S OLD CARETAKER 237

of all is the absolute centrality to all socialist thinking today of the

deepening of democracy. Democracy is not, of course, a formal matter
of electoral politics or constitutionalism. It is the real passage of power
to the powerless, the empowerment of the excluded. The state cannot
do this for the powerless, though it can enable it to happen. They have
to do it for themselves, by finding the forms in which they can take
on the control over an increasingly complex society. Certainly, it does
not happen all at once, through one centre – by simply ‘smashing the
state’, as the sort of socialist thinking which is fixated on the state
would have it. It has to happen across a multiplicity of sites in social
life, on many different fronts, including, of course, the state itself,
whose tendency to concentrate power is precisely what constitutes it
as a barrier to socialism. Gramsci advanced the profound idea that
hegemony is not constituted only by the state, but in the multiple
centres of civil society. It follows that an alternative conception of
socialism must embrace this struggle to democratise power across
all the centres of social activity – in private as well as public life, in
personal associations as well as in compulsory obligations, in the
family and the neighbourhood and the nursery and the shopping
centre as well as in the public office or at the point of production. If
the struggle for socialism in modern societies is a war of position, then
our conception of socialism must be of a society of positions – different
places from which we can all begin the reconstruction of society for
which the state is only the anachronistic caretaker.

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 Blue election, election blues
1987

hatcherism’s third term was not unexpected, but the reality

T of it is devastating and will take some time to think through prop-
erly. It is all the more depressing because, in the event, Labour had such
a good campaign. For three weeks it looked like a party that could
actually win and hold power. Kinnock’s self-confidence, though over-
played, proved infectious. Organisationally, the party looked for once
as if it belonged to the twentieth century. The manifesto was muddled;
but, once the campaign got off the ground, it found an image and
acquired political definition. Labour managed to ‘stage’ a broad polit-
ical choice for the nation between the party of greed, privilege and
self-interest and the party of caring, collective provision and the under-
privileged. This was the only chance Labour had, and it went for it
with surprising energy.
However, though Labour’s ‘good’ campaign put heart into party
activists and the committed left, it did not in the end shift the overall
disposition of the vote. Some voters may have changed their minds but
the swings cancelled one another out. There was no massive change of
heart in the final three weeks. Few voters, for instance, seem to have been
swayed by the famous party election television broadcasts, which caused
such excitement amongst media pundits and so much heart-searching
amongst the Labour faithful. The election, in short, was won (i.e. lost)
in those terrible months and years since 1983. Thatcherism’s victory was
rooted not in any temporary fluctuations of support, but in the deep
movements and tendencies which have been reshaping the British
political map. The problem the left now faces is structural and organic.
One clue to this may lie in a persistent trend over the past five years.
Asked what policies they supported, significant majorities consistently
preferred Labour on unemployment, health, housing, education –
the welfare issues. During the campaign, these remained the most
important issues for the majority of voters polled.

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 BLUE ELECTION, ELECTION BLUES 239

In fact, Labour actually had some success in pushing them up the

political agenda. However, both before and during the election, if
asked about image – who was ‘doing a good job’, ‘giving the country
a lead’, making people ‘feel good to be British again’ – a majority
consistently said ‘Maggie’. The same thing has been going on in
America, where no majorities could be found for specific policies like
winding up welfare programmes, yet, when it came to ‘making you
feel good to be American’, people said Ronnie was their baby.
One way of interpreting this trend is that, increasingly, the
electorate is thinking politically, not in terms of policies but of images.
This doesn’t mean that policies don’t matter. It does mean that policies
don’t capture people’s political imaginations unless constructed into
an image with which they can identify. Far from this being a sign
of voter irrationality, there are a number of quite ‘rational’ reasons
why there should be a trend in this direction in the advanced ‘class
democracies’ like Britain and the US.
First, we live in a world where decisions are both complex and
remote, and the big bureaucracies of state and market control a great
deal of social life. So people are quite ‘rational’ to believe that they can’t
intervene with much hope of success, in detail, into policy matters, nor
can they affect the fine-tuning of economic or policy machines.
Second, the electorate is now mercilessly exposed to ceaseless
massaging by the media and to ‘disinformation’ from the politicians.
It isn’t surprising that politics, too, is being absorbed into this game of
impression-management.
Third, voters know perfectly well that, these days, a five-year
mandate will be interpreted any way the party in power likes. The
abolition of the GLC was never ‘popular’, but that didn’t stop Mrs
Thatcher from doing what was politically expedient. Democracy,
even in the narrow sense of ‘government by popular consent’,
didn’t once sully the lips of a single Tory spokesperson, and is a
concept altogether foreign to Thatcherism’s universe. ‘Choice’ was
counterposed to ‘democracy’ precisely because, whereas the latter is
public and social, the former can be defined in wholly private and
individual (i.e. ‘family’) terms.
In all these circumstances, people aren’t wrong to imagine that
what is required of them as citizens is simply to express a broad,
undefined ‘preference’ for one scenario or another, this image or that.
Some people regard this as a trivialisation of politics. But images

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240 selected politicaL WRITINGS

are not trivial things. In and through images, fundamental political

questions are being posed and argued through. We need to take them
more seriously than we do. Mrs Thatcher claimed she was excited to
be not just fighting for power, but helping to ‘set the agenda for the
twenty-first century’. But, how else can you discuss what Britain and
the British people are to become, except in terms of broad images? The
future has to be imagined – ‘imaged’, to coin a word.
The question of political imagery is not a matter of presentation, but
of ideology, which is a different and altogether more serious matter.
One reason why Labour did better than most of us expected is that,
this time, it did engage in ideological struggle. One reason why the
campaign failed to shift minds, hearts and votes was that it lost that
struggle, despite its efforts. And part of the reason why Labour lost it
is that, while it has only just begun to take these questions seriously,
Thatcherism has been intervening ideologically with consummate
skill ever since 1979.
Why has it taken Labour and the left more generally so long to
appreciate the strategic importance of the ideological arena? In part,
the answer lies in the way the left normally thinks about ‘politics’.
Electoral politics – in fact, every kind of politics – depends on
political identities and identifications. People make identifications
symbolically: through social imagery, in their political imaginations.
They ‘see themselves’ as one sort of person or another. They ‘imagine
their future’ within this scenario or that. They don’t just think about
voting in terms of how much they have, their so-called ‘material
interests’. Material interests matter profoundly. But they are always
ideologically defined. Contrary to a certain version of marxism, which
has as strong a hold over the Labour ‘centre’ as it does on the so-called
‘hard left’, material interests, on their own, have no necessary class
belongingness. They influence us. But they are not escalators which
automatically deliver people to their appointed destinations, ‘in place’,
within the political-ideological spectrum.
One reason why they don’t is because people have conflicting social
interests, sometimes reflecting conflicting identities. As a worker a
person might put ‘wages’ first: in a period of high unemployment, ‘job
security’ may come higher; a woman might prioritise ‘child-care’. But
what does a ‘working woman’ put first? Which of her identities is the
one that determines her political choices? Take another example. I am
a socialist and therefore passionately in favour of state education but

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 BLUE ELECTION, ELECTION BLUES 241

I have a daughter who is taking O-levels in a hard-pressed LEA. Do

I stick by my political principles or squeeze her into a ‘better’ school?
In fact, the harder things get in Thatcher’s Britain and the more
competitive they become, the more divided society is. And the more
divided it is, the more these ideological conflicts bear down on people’s
actual lives, cutting their ‘natural’ social and political identifications
in two. Appealing to the ‘real experience’ of poverty or unemployment
or underprivilege won’t do the trick. Even poverty and unemployment
have to be ideologically defined. A young unemployed person may
interpret this experience to mean that you should work and vote to
change the system. But it could equally be defined as a sign that
you should throw your fortune in with the winners, climb on the
bandwagon, earn a fast buck and look after ‘number one’. Material
interests did not, on their own, guarantee an automatic majority for
Labour in the working class this time, and it won’t necessarily do so in
the future, because it never has.
This does not mean that ideology determines everything. If
nobody was prospering under Thatcherism, ideology alone could not
parachute such an ‘illusion’ into the heads of the majority. However,
if some people are doing well – as they are, especially, in personal
terms, in the ‘South’ – and the ideological climate is right, and the
alternative ways of measuring how ‘well’ you are doing are effectively
silenced or stigmatised, then the small number who define themselves
as ‘doing well’ will be swelled by a much larger number who identify
with this way of ‘getting on’. Elections are won or lost not just on so-
called ‘real’ majorities, but on (equally real) symbolic majorities: a
‘symbolic majority’ includes all who identify ideologically with the
enterprise culture as the way of the future, who see themselves in their
political imagination as likely to be lucky in the next round. They form
an ‘imaginary community’ around Thatcherism’s political project.
The whole point of Thatcherism as a form of politics has been to
construct a new social bloc, and in this project ideology is critical. A
social bloc is, by definition, not homogeneous. It does not consist of
one whole class or even part of one class. It has to be constructed out
of groups which are very different in terms of their material interests
and social positions. The question is, can these differences of position
and interest be constructed into a ‘unity’? (It never is a unity, in the
strict sense.) Can these diverse identities be welded together into a
‘collective will’?

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In the second term, Thatcherism did not make a single move which
was not also carefully calculated in terms of this hegemonic strategy.
It stepped up the pace of privatisation. But it took care, at every step,
to harness new social constituencies to it, to ‘construct’ an image
of the new, share-owning working class, and to expand the bloc,
symbolically, around the image of ‘choice’. It has not only attacked
state education and the health service. It has created, side by side and
in competition with them, among the majority of users and right in
the heart of the working class, an alternative image: quicker service via
private health and a better chance for kids in a deregulated education
system – the ‘fast-lane’ schools and inner-city technology colleges.
Don’t for a moment underestimate the resonance which a slogan
like ‘power to the people’ carries in our over-bureaucratised, over-
managed, under-resourced society. Of course, only a few can
actually choose to be better off in these ways. But, for the time being,
a lot of people think this is the only way open to them to advance in
a society where competition and selectivity have become the name of
the game. If that’s the only game in town, some of them will play it!
Building a new social bloc means not only ‘symbolically’
including as many different groups as you can in your project, but
also symbolically excluding the enemy. The ‘loony left’ image was
one powerful example. Once the one-liner was launched, the deep
symbiosis between Thatcherism and the press guaranteed it an
uninterrupted flight. It locked together in a single image high rates
and political extremism with those powerful subliminal themes
of race and sex. The discourse of the ‘loony left’ was a code. In
London it made it possible to expunge the legacy of the GLC, and
to bring into the election, race (the anti-anti-racism backlash) and
sex (the anti-feminism, anti-gay, anti-permissive, post-Aids backlash
– Thatcherism’s hidden ‘moral agenda’) without a word having to be
explicitly spoken. So successful was it that the Labour leadership, the
party machine, much of the traditional ‘hard left’, slick New States-
men and all, could also make a heavy investment in it without having
to reveal their hand about race, feminism or sexual politics. Instead
of engaging with the ‘loony left’ image, Labour in effect colluded
with it. In the weeks before the election, the leadership cast its vote
unflinchingly for the ‘traditional’ image, in search of the ‘traditional
Labour voter’. Again, everybody understood that this, too, was a code.
It is a code for ‘back to the respectable, moderate, trade unionist,

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 BLUE ELECTION, ELECTION BLUES 243

male-dominated working class’. Mr Kinnock appeared as a manly,

‘likely lad’ who owed everything to the welfare state. His ‘familial’
image carried not a single echo or trace of feminist struggles over two
decades. The investment in ‘strong leadership’ and in ‘ordinariness’
carried its own message. It signalled the distancing of Labour from
all those ‘fringe issues’ and a commitment to rooting Labour political
loyalties exclusively through an identification with the traditional
culture of the left.
This was the image with which Labour chose to engage, ideologically,
with Thatcherism. The key question is, can Labour win with it? Can it
harness the fragmented experiences of living in Great Britain Limited
to a new, radical, political will? Can it construct around Labour a new
social bloc?
Of course, millions of people desperately need the welfare state.
And identification with parts of it remains strong. So, in some areas,
the traditionalist appeal did lend conviction to Labour’s programme.
It also contained an element of forward projection – in the form of the
question ‘what sort of society would you prefer to live in?’
On the other hand, it was also fatally narrow and backward-
looking. It did not have roots in the things which are transforming
social and economic life and it lacked a convincing strategy for, or
image of, modernisation. Labour may have carried conviction on
the ‘fair shares’, redistribution, front; but it lacked credibility on the
‘wealth-creating’ front. It could not construct a picture of what a
wealthy society might be like or how it could be created. And since
many identifications were made, not in terms of social wealth but in
‘family fortunes’, it had no image to set against Thatcherism’s image
of personalised and privatised ‘prosperity’.
The sober truth is that Labour probably did as well with this
traditionalist image as it was possible to do. It does not and cannot
carry majority support. It appeals to some sectors of, but cannot
unify, the working class. And it certainly is not hegemonic enough
to construct out of our increasingly fragmented and divided society a
new social bloc or collective political will for the future.
In the aftermath of the election, many people have been seeking
consolation in the belief that the appeal to the ‘traditional Labour
voter’ could, at least, carry half the country – the ‘North’. The
‘North’ has become a sort of geographical metaphor for where the
traditional Labour voter now resides. If only things were so neatly

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divided, Labour’s traditionalist appeal would make more sense. But,

unfortunately, that story is deceptively neat. The ‘North’ is not just a
geographical entity: it is also a state of mind. Looked at in this way,
the picture becomes a good deal bleaker.
First, the ‘North’ is not as solid as it looks. There are plenty of
‘South-minded’ working-class people living in the ‘North’.
Second, the disaster which Labour suffered in London and the
South East suggests that many people there who may be ‘North’ in
their living standards, conditions and even origins have, nevertheless,
become ‘Southerners’ in their heads. The ‘new’ working class in
the geographical ‘South’ now identify and vote in a majority for
Thatcherism. They no longer identify themselves with Labour’s
traditional working-class Labour voter. What is more, many people
in the underclasses – the unskilled, part-timers, young unemployed,
women living alone, black people, the homeless, inner-city casualities
– don’t see themselves or identify with this traditionalist image either.
Looked at not so much in terms of economic class but as ideological
identification,
Labour could not and cannot for the foreseeable future make any
inroads into the social landscape of the ‘South’ on the narrow basis of
the image they chose.
Third, the ‘North’ is not impervious to Thatcherite inroads as we
shall see in the coming months. The inner-cities strategy will not bring
about long-term sustained growth in the ‘North’, but it is going to erode
Labour’s political base in the great industrial urban areas. Thatcherism
in the ‘South’ has already had considerable success in targeting the
big-spending Labour councils, the comprehensive schools and council
housing – three major pillars of Labour’s political base. In the next
months we are going to witness a similar assault, economically and
ideologically, on Labour’s base in the ‘North’, with blistering effects.
There will be a flood of small businesses, pump-primed by
industrialists who know on which side their political bread is buttered.
The press will trumpet its immediate ‘success’ and Lord Young will be
‘economical’ with more statistics. Labour authorities will be side-lined
by ‘alternative’ private channels of growth, and isolated for attack
(some version of the London ‘loony left’ ideological missile is at this
very moment cruising up the M1). Thatcherism can’t ‘restore’ Britain’s
old industrial base – but that is not the project. It may not be able
to positively win over everybody – but that is not necessary either. It

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 BLUE ELECTION, ELECTION BLUES 245

has never had an overwhelming social majority on anything. But it

can mobilise the crucial two-thirds, which is enough. Not all of them
are, as yet, Tory voters, but many who still vote Labour or Alliance
have begun to benefit from Thatcherism, or are making pragmatic
adjustments to it.
What’s more, not all the two-thirds needs to be in any real sense
‘prosperous’. All Thatcherism has to do to erode Labour’s ‘Northern’
bastions is to lay a base for just enough people to put their feet,
tentatively, on the new Thatcherite ladders of success. Firstly, it has to
convince them that, concretely, this is a more likely way to a better,
more prosperous life than any other alternative on offer. Secondly,
it has to convince others who have not yet begun to do well to cast
their lot in with the free-market society. Once this threshold has been
crossed, a much larger number – a strategic majority, the necessary
two-thirds – move in their heads. The balance shifts. The ‘North’ has
begun its symbolic journey ‘Southwards’ …
What, then, about the possibility of constructing the different social
constituencies into a new social bloc around Labour’s traditionalist
appeal? Clearly, few modernising industrialists can be harnessed to
Labour’s current strategy. Big business is now pro-Thatcher, not simply
in pragmatic but in ideological terms. They ‘believe’. They understand
that Thatcherism is not just a strategy which favours capital; it must
also be a strategy for the whole society, ‘for capital’. The middle classes
are interestingly split. The self-made middle classes – numerically, the
overwhelming majority – who inhabit the culture of the private sector,
are Mrs Thatcher’s ideological vanguard. They have talked their way
into an impregnable philosophy of ‘number one’. The ‘public sector’
middle classes in education, local government or the social services
are not so directly in touch with the new prosperity and are more
inclined to seek rewards from socially useful and personally rewarding
forms of work which have been brutally savaged by the new criteria
of ‘value-for-money’ and ‘efficiency’. They are more detached from
Thatcherism. But this does not help Labour as much as it might, since
the Alliance now soaks up their disenchantment with Thatcherism –
it’s a ‘nicer’ option.
In the aftermath of the election, many people on the left are
arguing that Labour’s only hope lies in the working class. However,
Thatcherism’s electoral hegemony continues to rest precisely on certain
parts of the working-class vote. Where Labour commands a majority,

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that majority is overwhelmingly working-class. But the working

class is not overwhelmingly Labour. Indeed, there is no such thing
as ‘the’ working-class vote any more. Divisions, not solidarities, of
class identification are the rule. There are large and significant sectors
of the ‘working class’ as it really is today – the unemployed, semi-
skilled and unskilled, part-time workers, male and female, the low-
paid, black people, the ‘underclasses’ of Thatcherite Britain – who no
longer see themselves in a traditional Labour way. In Greater London
and the South East, Labour failed to connect with the forces that are
remaking the working class. Skilled workers in the new industries,
and the expanding clerical and office workforce, are, in their majority,
voters for Thatcherism. There are more of them in the South East
than in the North, but the balance is changing and will continue,
unevenly, to do so. The sectors of this vote who are home owners or
new shareholders are even more committed.
What then of the new social constituencies which, in any case,
have less of a clear-cut class identity? Women, whether in or out of
full-time work, did not vote overwhelmingly for Thatcherism and
have not done so since 1979. But Labour made absolutely no direct,
strategic or distinctive investment in what, from any point of view, is
a historic shift of political identification. Presumably, on the analogy
with ‘black sections’, to do so would be ‘sexist’! By the same token,
the ‘ethnic’ vote is less and less a Labour possession – and after the
disastrous handling of the black sections issue, who can blame them?
More owners of Asian small businesses are beginning to vote by class
rather than by race. A proportion of Afro-Caribbean people will not
be far behind.
None of this augurs well for the future. Politics does not reflect
majorities, it constructs them. And there is no evidence that
Labour’s commitment to traditionalism can construct such a
majority. Certainly, the consequences of Thatcherite restructuring
are horrendous. But larger and larger numbers of people no longer
experience all this as ‘traditional Labour voters’. Even less can they
articulate their aspirations through the traditional Labour image. The
question of Labour becoming in a deep sense the majority party of
society is therefore not about whether it can rally and mobilise its past,
but whether it has a convincing alternative scenario to Thatcherism for
the future. It cannot build such an alternative by, however honourably,
replaying ‘1945’ in 1987. It can only honour its past by aiming to move

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forwards. But to do so it needs a strategy for modernisation and an

image of modernity. What the election suggests is that Labour, far
from opening the hard road to renewal, largely turned its back on it.
It is therefore not surprising that – despite the good feelings and high
morale – its historic decline continues.

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 The meaning of new times
1988

ow new are these ‘new times’? Are they the dawn of a New Age
H or only the whisper of an old one? What is ‘new’ about them?
How do we assess their contradictory tendencies – are they progres-
sive or regressive? These are some of the questions which the
ambiguous discourse of ‘new times’ poses. They are worth asking,
not because ‘new times’ represents a definitive set of answers to them
or even a clear way of resolving the ambiguities inherent in the idea,
but because they stimulate the left to open a debate about how society
is changing and to offer new descriptions and analyses of the social
conditions it seeks to transcend and transform. If it succeeds in this
but accomplishes nothing else, the metaphor of ‘new times’ will have
done its work.
As the questions suggest, there is considerable ambiguity as to what
the phrase ‘new times’ really means. It seems to be connected with
the ascendancy of the new right in Britain, the USA and some parts
of Europe over the past decade. But what precisely is the connection?
For example, are ‘new times’ a product of ‘the Thatcher Revolution’?
Was Thatcherism really so decisive and fundamental? And, if so, does
that mean that the left has no alternative but to adapt to the changed
terrain and agenda of politics, post-Thatcherism, if it is to survive?
This is a very negative interpretation of ‘new times’: and it is easy to
see why those who read ‘new times’ in this way regard the whole thing
as a smokescreen for some seismic shift of gravity by the left towards
the right.
There is, however, a different reading. This suggests that
Thatcherism itself was, in part, produced by ‘new times’. On this
interpretation, ‘new times’ refers to social, economic, political
and cultural changes of a deeper kind now taking place in western
capitalist societies. These changes, it is suggested, form the necessary
shaping context, the material and cultural conditions of existence,

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for any political strategy, whether of the right or the left. From this
position, Thatcherism represents, in fact, in its own way, an attempt
(only partially successful) to harness and bend to its political project
circumstances which were not of its making, which have a much
longer history and trajectory, and which do not necessarily have a
‘new right’ political agenda inscribed in them. Much turns on which
version of ‘new times’ one subscribes to.
If we take the ‘new times’ idea apart, we find that it is an attempt
to capture, within the confines of a single metaphor, a number of
different facets of social change, none of which has any necessary
connection with the other. In the current debates, a variety of
different terms jostle with one another for pride of place, in the
attempt to describe these different dimensions of change. They
include ‘post-industrial’, ‘post-Fordist’, ‘revolution of the subject’,
‘postmodernism’. None of these is wholly satisfactory. Each expresses
a clearer sense of what we are leaving behind (‘post’ everything?)
than of where we are heading. Each, however, signifies something
important about the ‘new times’ debate.
‘Post-industrial’ writers, like Alain Touraine and André Gorz,
start from shifts in the technical organisation of industrial capitalist
production, with its ‘classic’ economies of scale, integrated labour
processes, advanced division of labour and industrial class conflicts.
They foresee an increasing shift to new productive regimes – with
inevitable consequences for social structure and politics. Thus Touraine
has written of the replacement of older forms of class struggle by the
new social movements; and Gorz’s most provocative title is Farewell
To The Working Class.1 In these forms, ‘new times’ touches debates
which have already seriously divided the left. There is certainly an
important point about the shifting social and technical landscapes of
modern industrial production regimes being made in some of these
arguments, though they are open to the criticism that they fall for a
sort of technological determinism.
‘Post-Fordism’ is a broader term, suggesting a whole new epoch
distinct from the era of mass production, with its standardised
products, concentrations of capital and its ‘Taylorist’ forms of work
organisation and discipline. The debate still rages as to whether
‘post-Fordism’ actually exists, and if it does, what exactly it is and
how extensive it is, either within any single economy or across the
advanced industrial economies of the West as a whole. Nevertheless,

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most commentators would agree that the term covers at least some of
the following characteristics of change. A shift is taking place to new
‘information technologies’ from the chemical and electronic-based
technologies which drove the ‘second’ industrial revolution from the
turn of the century onwards – the one which signalled the advance of
the American, German and Japanese economics to a leading position,
and the relative ‘backwardness’ and incipient decline of the British
economy. Secondly, there is a shift towards a more flexible specialised
and decentralised form of labour process and work organisation, and,
as a consequence, a decline of the old manufacturing base (and the
regions and cultures associated with it) and the growth of the ‘sunrise’,
computer-based, hi-tech industries and their regions. Thirdly, there is
the hiving-off or contracting-out of functions and services hitherto
provided ‘in house’ on a corporate basis. Fourthly, there is a leading
role for consumption, reflected in such things as greater emphasis
on choice and product differentiation, on marketing, packaging and
design, on the ‘targeting’ of consumers by lifestyle, taste and culture
rather than by the Registrar General’s categories of social class.
Fifthly, there has been a decline in the proportion of the skilled,
male, manual working class and the corresponding rise of the service
and white collar classes. In the domain of paid work itself, there is more
flexi-time and part-time working, coupled with the ‘feminisation’
and ‘ethnicisation’ of the workforce. Seventhly, there is an economy
dominated by the multinationals, with their new international division
of labour and their greater autonomy of nation state control. Eighthly,
there is the ‘globalisation’ of the new financial markets. Finally, there
is the emergence of new patterns of social divisions – especially those
between ‘public’ and ‘private’ sectors and between the two-thirds who
have rising expectations and the ‘new poor’ and underclasses of the
one-third that is left behind on every significant dimension of social
opportunity.
It is clear that ‘post-Fordism’, though having a significant reference
to questions of economic organisation and structure, has a much
broader social and cultural significance. Thus, for example, it also
signals greater social fragmentation and pluralism, the weakening of
older collective solidarities and block identities and the emergence
of new identities, as well as the maximisation of individual choices
through personal consumption, as equally significant dimensions of
the shift towards ‘post-Fordism’.

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Some critics have suggested that ‘post-Fordism’ as a concept marks

a return to the old, discredited base-superstructure or economic-
determinist model, according to which the economy determines
everything and all other aspects can be ‘read off ’ as simply reflecting that
‘base’. However, the metaphor of ‘post-Fordism’ does not necessarily
carry any such implication. Indeed, it is modelled on Gramsci’s earlier
use of the term, ‘Fordism’, at the turn of the century to connote a
whole shift in capitalist civilisation (which Gramsci certainly did not
reduce to a mere phenomenon of the economic base). ‘Post-Fordism’
should also be read in a much broader way. Indeed, it could just as
easily be taken in the opposite way – as signalling the constitutive role
which social and cultural relations play in relation to any economic
system. Post-Fordism as I understand it is not committed to any prior
determining position for the economy. But it does insist – as all but
the most extreme discourse theorists and culturalists must recognise
– that shifts of this order in economic life must be taken seriously in
any analysis of our present circumstances.
A recent writer on the subject of contemporary cultural change,
Marshall Berman, notes that ‘modern environments and experiences
cut across all boundaries of geography and ethnicity, of class and
nationality, of religion and ideology’ – not destroying them entirely,
but weakening and subverting them, eroding the lines of continuity
which hitherto stabilised our social identities.2

The return of the subject

One boundary which ‘new times’ has certainly displaced is that

between the objective’ and subjective dimensions of change. This is
the so-called ‘revolution of the subject’ aspect. The individual subject
has become more important, as collective social subjects – like that
of class or nation or ethnic group – become more segmented and
‘pluralised’. As social theorists have become more concerned with how
ideologies actually function, and how political mobilisation really
takes place in complex societies, so they have been obliged to take
the subject of these processes more seriously. As Gramsci remarked
about ideologies, ‘To the extent that ideologies are historically neces-
sary they have a validity which is “psychological”’.3 At the same time,
our models of ‘the subject’ have altered. We can no longer conceive

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of ‘the individual’ in terms of a whole, centred, stable and completed

Ego or autonomous, rational ‘self’. The ‘self’ is conceptualised as more
fragmented and incomplete, composed of multiple ‘selves’ or identities
in relation to the different social worlds we inhabit, something with
a history, ‘produced’, in process. The ‘subject’ is differently placed or
positioned by different discourses and practices.
This is novel conceptual or theoretical terrain. But these vicissitudes
of ‘the subject’ also have their own histories, which are key episodes
in the passage to ‘new times’. They include the cultural revolution of
the 1960s; ‘1968’ itself, with its strong sense of politics as ‘theatre’ and
its talk of ‘will’ and ‘consciousness’; feminism, with its insistence that
‘the personal is political’; the renewed interest in psychoanalysis, with
its rediscovery of the unconscious roots of subjectivity; the theoretical
revolution of the 1960s and 1970s – semiotics, structuralism, ‘post-
structuralism’ – with their concern for language, discourse and
representation.
This ‘return of the subjective’ aspect suggests that we cannot settle
for a language in which to describe ‘new times’ which respects the
old distinction between the objective and subjective dimensions of
change. ‘New times’ are both ‘out there’, changing our conditions of
life, and ‘in here’, working on us. In part, it is us who are being ‘remade’.
But such a conceptual shift presents particular problems for the left.
The conventional culture and discourses of the left, with its stress on
‘objective contradictions’, ‘impersonal structures’ and processes that
work ‘behind men’s (sic) backs’, have disabled us from confronting the
subjective dimension in politics in any very coherent way.
In part, the difficulty lies in the very words and concepts we use.
For a long time, being a socialist was synonymous with the ability
to translate everything into the language of ‘structures’. But it is not
only a question of language. In part, the difficulty lies in the fact
that men so often provide the categories within which everybody
experiences things, even on the left. Men have always found the
spectacle of the ‘return’ of the subjective dimension deeply unnerving.
The problem is also theoretical. Classical marxism depended on an
assumed correspondence between ‘the economic’ and ‘the political’:
one could read off political attitudes and objective social interests
and motivations from economic class position. For a long time, these
correspondences held the theoretical analyses and perspectives of
the left in place. However, any simple correspondence between the

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‘political’ and ‘economic’ is exactly what has now disintegrated –

practically and theoretically. This has had the effect of throwing the
language of politics more over to the cultural side of the equation.
‘Post-modernism’ is the preferred term which signals this more
cultural character of ‘new times’. ‘Modernism’, it argues, which
dominated the art and architecture, the cultural imagination, of the
early decades of the twentieth century, and came to represent the look
and experience of ‘modernity’ itself, is at an end. It has declined into
the International Style characteristics of the freeway, the wall-of-glass
skyscraper and international airports. Modernism’s revolutionary
impulse – which could be seen in surrealism, Dada, constructivism,
the move to an abstract and non-figurative visual culture – has been
tamed and contained by the museum. It has become the preserve of an
avant-garde elite, betraying its revolutionary and ‘populist’ impulses.
‘Post-modernism’, by contrast, celebrates the penetration of
aesthetics into everyday life and the ascendancy of popular culture
over the High Arts. Theorists like Fredric Jameson and Jean-François
Lyotard agree on many of the characteristics of ‘the postmodern
condition’. They remark on the dominance of image, appearance,
surface-effect over depth (was Ronald Reagan a president or just a
B-movie actor, real or cardboard cut-out, alive or Spitting Image?).
They point to the blurring of image and reality in our media-saturated
world (is the Contra war real or only happening on TV?). They
note the preference for parody, nostalgia, kitsch and pastiche – the
continual reworking and quotation of past styles – over more positive
modes of artistic representation, like realism or naturalism. They note,
also, a preference for the popular and the decorative over the brutalist
or the functional in architecture and design. ‘Post-modernism’ also
has a more philosophical aspect. Lyotard, Baudrillard and Derrida cite
the erasure of a strong sense of history, the slippage of hitherto stable
meanings, the proliferation of difference, and the end of what Lyotard
calls the ‘grand narratives’ of progress, development, Enlightenment,
Rationality, and Truth, which, until recently, were the foundations of
Western philosophy and politics.4
Jameson, however, argues very persuasively that post-modernism is
also ‘the new cultural logic of capital’ – ‘the purest form of capital yet
to have emerged, a prodigious expansion into hitherto uncommodified
areas’.5 His formulations remind us that the changing cultural
dynamic we are trying to characterise is clearly connected with the

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revolutionary energy of modern capital – capital after what we used

to call its ‘highest stages’ (Imperialism, Organised or Corporate
capitalism) – even later than ‘late capitalism’.
‘Post-industrialism’, ‘post-Fordism’, ‘post-modernism’ are all
different ways of trying to characterise or explain this dramatic, even
brutal, resumption of the link between modernity and capitalism.
Some theorists argue that, though Marx may have been wrong in
his predictions about class as the motor of revolution, he was right
– with a vengeance – about capital. Its ‘global’ expansion continues,
with renewed energy in the 1980s, to transform everything in its
wake, subordinating every society and social relationship to the law
of commodification and exchange value. Others argue that, with
the failures of the stalinist and social-democratic alternatives, and
the transformations and upheavals now taking place throughout the
communist world, capital has acquired a new lease of life.
Some economists argue that we are simply in the early, up-beat half
of the new Kondratiev ‘long wave’ of capitalist expansion (after which
the inevitable downturn or recession will follow). The American social
critic whom we quoted earlier, Marshall Berman, relates ‘new times’
to ‘the ever-expanding drastically fluctuating capitalist world markets’
(All That is Solid, p16). Others, with their eye more firmly fixed on the
limits and uneven development of capital on a global scale, emphasise
more the ceaseless rhythm of the international division of labour,
redistributing poverty and wealth, dependency and over-development
in new ways across the face of the earth. One casualty of this process is
the old idea of some homogeneous ‘Third World’. Nowadays, Formosa
and Taiwan are integrated into the advanced capitalist economies,
as Hong Kong is with the new financial markets. Ethiopia or the
Sudan or Bangladesh, on the other hand, belong to a different ‘world’
altogether. It is the new forms and dynamic of capital as a global force
which is marking out these new divisions across the globe.
However, it seems to be the case that, whichever explanation we
finally settle for, the really startling fact is that these new times clearly
belong to a time-zone marked by the march of capital simultaneously
across the globe and through the Maginot Lines of our subjectivities.
The title of Berman’s book, All That is Solid Melts Into Air (a
quotation from The Communist Manifesto), reminds us that Marx
was one of the earliest people to grasp the revolutionary connection
between capitalism and modernity. In the Manifesto he spoke of the

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‘constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance

of all social relations, everlasting uncertainty and agitation’ which
distinguished ‘the bourgeois epoch from all earlier times’. ‘All fixed,
fast-frozen relationships, with their train of venerable ideas and
opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become obsolete before
they can ossify. All That is Solid Melts Into Air.’
Indeed, as Berman points out, Marx considered the revolution
of modern industry and production the necessary precondition for
that Promethean or Romantic conception of the social individual
which towers over his early writings, with its prospect of the many-
sided development of human capacities. In this context, it was not the
commodities which the bourgeoisie created which impressed Marx,
so much as ‘the processes, the powers, the expressions of human life
and energy; men (sic) working, moving, cultivating, communicating,
organising and reorganising nature and themselves’ (All That is Solid,
p93). Of course, Marx also understood the one-sided and distorted
character of the modernity and type of modern individual produced
by this development – how the forms of bourgeois appropriation
destroyed the human possibilities it created. But he did not, on this
count, refuse it. What he argued was that only socialism could complete
the revolution of modernity which capitalism had initiated. As Berman
puts it, he hoped ‘to heal the wounds of modernity through a fuller
and deeper modernity’.
Now here exactly is the rub about ‘new times’ for the left. The
‘promise’ of modernity has become, at the end of the twentieth
century, considerably more ambiguous, its links with socialism and the
left much more tenuous. We have become more aware of the double-
edged and problematic character of modernity: what Theodor Adorno
called the ‘negative dialectic’ of enlightenment. Of course, to be
‘modern’ has always meant ‘to live a life of paradox and contradiction
… alive to new possibilities for experience and adventure, frightened
by the nihilistic depths to which so many modem adventures lead (e.g.
the line from Nietzsche and Wagner to the death camps), longing to
create and hold onto something real even as everything melts’.
Some theorists argue – the German philosopher, Jurgen Habermas
is one – that this is too pessimistic a reading of ‘Enlightenment’ and
that the project of modernity is not yet completed. But it is difficult
to deny that, at the end of the twentieth century, the paradoxes of
modernity seem even more extreme. ‘Modernity’ has acquired a

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relentlessly uneven and contradictory character: material abundance

here, producing poverty and immiseration there; greater diversity
and choice – but often at the cost of commodification, fragmentation
and isolation. More opportunities for participation – but only at the
expense of subordinating oneself to the laws of the market. Novelty
and innovation – but driven by what often appear to be false needs. The
rich ‘West’ – and the famine stricken South. Forms of ‘development’
which destroy faster than they create. The city – priviled scenario
of the modern experience for Baudelaire or Walter Benjamin –
transformed into the anonymous city, the sprawling city, the inner
city, the abadoned city …
These stark paradoxes project uncertainty into any secure judgement
or assessment of the trends and tendencies of new times, especially on
the left. Are new times to be welcomed for the new possibilities they
open? Or rejected for the threat of horrendous disasters (the ecological
ones are uppermost in our minds just now) and final closures which
they bring in their wake? Terry Eagleton has recently posed the
dilemma in comparable terms, when discussing the ‘true aporia,
impasse or undecidability of a transitional epoch, struggling out as it
is from beneath an increasingly clapped out, discreditable, historically
superannuated ideology of Autonomous Man (first cousin to Socialist
Man) with no very clear sense as yet of which path from this pile of
ruins is likely to lead us towards an enriched human life and which
to the unthinkable terminus of some fashionable new irrationalist
barbarism’.6 We seem, especially on the left, permanently impaled on
the horns of these extreme and irreconcilable alternatives.
It is imperative for the left to get past this impossible impasse, these
irreconcilable either/ors. For this there are few better (though many
more fashionable) places to begin than with Gramsci’s ‘Americanism
and Fordism’ essay, which is of seminal importance for this debate,
even if it is also a strangely broken and ‘unfinished’ text. ‘Americanism
and Fordism’ represented a very similar effort, much earlier in the
century, to describe and assess the dangers and possibilities for the left
of the birth of that epoch – ‘Fordism’ – which we are just supposed
to be leaving. Gramsci was conducting this exercise in very similar
political circumstances for the left – retreat and retrenchment of
the working-class movement, ascendancy of fascism, a new surge of
capital ‘with its intensified economic exploitation and authoritarian
cultural expression’.

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 THE MEANING OF NEW TIMES 257

If we take our bearings from ‘Americanism and Fordism’ we are

obliged to note that Gramsci’s ‘catalogue of … most important or
interesting problems’ relevant to deciding ‘whether Americanism
can constitute a new historical epoch’ begins with ‘a new mechanism
of accumulation and distribution of finance capital based directly
on industrial production’. But his characterisation of ‘Fordism’ also
includes a range of other social and cultural phenomena which
are discussed in the essay: the rationalisation of the demographic
composition of Europe; the balance between endogamous and
exogamous change; the phenomenon of mass consumption and ‘high
wages’; ‘psychoanalysis and its enormous diff usion since the war’;
the increased ‘moral coercion’ exercised by the state; artistic and
intellectual movements associated with ‘Modernism’; what Gramsci
calls the contrast between ‘super-city’ and ‘super-country’; feminism,
masculinism and ‘the question of sex’. Who on the left now has the
confidence to address the problems and promise of new times with
a matching comprehensiveness and range? The sad fact is that a list
of ‘new questions’ like that are most likely to engender a response of
derision and sectarian back-biting at most meetings of the organised
political left today – coupled with the usual cries of ‘sell-out’!
This lack of intellectual boldness on the left is certainly, in part,
attributable to the fact that the contradictory forces associated with
new times are just now, and have been for some time, firmly in the
keeping and under the tutelage of the right. The right has imprinted
them with the apparent inevitability of its own political project.
However, as we argued earlier, this may have obscured the fact that
what is going on is not the unrolling of a singular, unilinear logic
in which the ascendancy of capital, the hegemony of the new right
and the march of commodification are indissolubly locked together.
These may be diff erent processes, with different time-scales, which the
dominance of the right in the 1980s has somehow rendered natural
and inevitable.
One of the lessons of new times is that history does not consist
of what Benedict Anderson calls ‘empty, homogeneous time’, but
of processes with different time-scales and trajectories. They may
be convened in the same conjuncture. But historic conjunctures
of this kind remain complex, not simple: not in any simple sense
‘determined’ but over-determined (that is, the result of a fusion or
merging of different processes and contradictions which nevertheless

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retain their own effectivity, ‘the specific modalities of their actions’).7

That is really what a ‘new conjuncture’ means, as Gramsci clearly
showed. The histories and time-scale of Thatcherism and of new
times have certainly overlapped. Nevertheless, they may belong
to different temporalities. Political time, the time of regimes and
elections, is short: ‘a week is a long time in politics’. Economic time,
sociological time, so to speak, has a longer durée. Cultural time is
even slower, more glacial. This does not detract from the significance
of Thatcherism and the scale of its political intervention, about which
we have been writing. There is nothing slow, glacial or ‘passive’ about
the Thatcherite revolution, which seems by contrast brutally abrupt,
concise and condensed.
Nevertheless, from the perspective of the longer durée of new
times, Thatcherism’s project can be understood as operating on the
ground of longer, deeper, more profound movements of change which
appear to be going its way, but of which, in reality, it has been only
occasionally, and fleetingly, in command over the past decade. We
can see Thatcherism as, in fact, an attempt to hegemonise these
deeper tendencies within its project of ‘regressive modernisation’, to
appropriate them to a reactionary political agenda and to harness to
them the interests and fortunes of specific and limited social interests.
Once we have opened up this gap, analytically, between Thatcherism
and new times, it may become possible to resume or re-stage the
broken dialogue between socialism and modernity.
Consider another question with which people on the left perpetually
tease and puzzle one another: what kind of ‘transition’ are we talking
about and how total or how complete is it? This way of posing the
question implies an all-or-nothing answer. Either it is a New Epoch,
or nothing at all has changed. But that is not the only alternative.
We are certainly not debating an epochal shift, of the order of the
famous transition from feudalism to capitalism. But we have had
other transitions from one regime of accumulation to another, within
capitalism, whose impact has been extraordinarily wide-ranging.
Think, for example, of the transition which Marx writes about
between absolute and relative surplus value; or from machine-facture
to ‘modern industry’; or the one which preoccupied Lenin and others
at the turn of the century and about which Gramsci was writing in
‘Americanism and Fordism’. The transition which new times references
is of the latter order of things.

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As to how complete it is: this stand-and-deliver way of assessing

things may itself be the product of an earlier type of totalising logic
which is beginning to be superseded. In a permanently Transitional
Age we must expect unevenness, contradictory outcomes, disjunctures,
delays, contingencies, uncompleted projects overlapping emergent
ones. We know that Marx’s Capital stands at the beginning, not the
completion, of the expansion of the capitalist ‘world market’; and that
earlier transitions (such as that from household to factory production)
all turned out, on inspection, to be more protracted and incomplete
than the theory suggested.
We have to make assessments, not from the completed base, but from
the ‘leading edge’ of change. The food industry, which has just arrived
at the point where it can guarantee worldwide the standardisation of
the size, shape and composition of every hamburger and every potato
(sic) chip in a Macdonald’s Big Mac from Tokyo to Harare, is clearly
just entering its ‘Fordist’apogee. However, its labour force and highly
mobile, ‘flexible’ and deskilled work patterns approximate more to
some post-Fordist patterns. The motor industry, from which the Age of
Fordism derived its name, with its multiple variations on every model
and market specialisation (like the fashion and software industries), is,
in some areas at least, on the move towards a more post-Fordist form.
The question should always be, where is the ‘leading edge’ and in what
direction is it pointing.

The cultural dimension

Another major requirement for trying to think through the complexi-

ties and ambiguities of new times is simply to open our minds to
the deeply cultural character of the revolution of our times. If ‘post-
Fordism’ exists, then it is as much a description of cultural as of economic
change. Indeed, that distinction is now quite useless. Culture has
ceased (if ever it was – which I doubt) to be a decorative addendum to
the ‘hard world’ of production and things, the icing on the cake of the
material world. The word is now as ‘material’ as the world. Through
design, technology and styling, ‘aesthetics’ has already penetrated the
world of modern production. Through marketing, layout and style, the
‘image’ provides the mode of representation and fictional narrativisa-
tion of the body on which so much of modern consumption depends.

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Modern culture is relentlessly material in its practices and modes of

production. And the material world of commodities and technolo-
gies is profoundly cultural. Young people, black and white, who can’t
even spell ‘postmodernism’ but have grown up in the age of computer
technology, rock-video and electronic music, already inhabit such a
universe in their heads.
Is this merely the culture of commodified consumption? Are these
necessarily Trivial Pursuits? (Or, to bring it right home, a trendy
‘designer addiction’ to the detritus of capitalism which serious left
magazines like Marxism Today should renounce – or even better
denounce – forever?) Yes, much – perhaps, even most – of the time.
But underlying that, have we missed the opening up of the individual
to the transforming rhythms and forces of modern material life?
Have we become bewitched by the question of who it is, in the short
run, that reaps the profit from these transactions (there are vast
amounts of it being made), and so missed the democratisation of
culture which is also potentially part of their hidden agenda? Can a
socialism of the twenty-first century revive, or even survive, which
is wholly cut off from the landscapes of popular pleasures, however
contradictory and ‘commodified’ a terrain they represent? Are we
thinking dialectically enough?
One strategy for getting at the more cultural and subjective
dimensions of new times would be to start from the objective
characteristics of post-Fordism and simply turn them inside out. Take
the new technologies. They not only introduce new skills and practices.
They also require new ways of thinking. Technology, which used to be
‘hard-nosed’ is now ‘soft’. And it no longer operates along one, singular
line or path of development. Modern technology, far from having
a fixed path, is open to constant renegotiation and re-articulation.
‘Planning’, in this new technological environment, has less to do with
absolute predictability and everything to do with instituting a ‘regime’
out of which a plurality of outcomes will emerge. One, so to speak,
plans for contingency. This mode of thinking signals the end of a
certain kind of deterministic rationality.
Or consider the proliferation of models and styles, the increased
product differentiation, which characterises ‘post-Fordist’ production.
We can see mirrored there wider processes of cultural diversity and
differentiation, related to the multiplication of social worlds and social
‘logics’ typical of modern life in the West.

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 THE MEANING OF NEW TIMES 261

There has been an enormous expansion of ‘civil society’, related

to the diversification of social worlds in which men and women now
operate. At present, most people only relate to these worlds through
the medium of consumption. But, increasingly, we are coming to
understand that to maintain these worlds at an advanced level requires
forms of collective consumption far beyond the restricted logic of the
market. Furthermore, each of these worlds also has its own codes of
behaviour, its ‘scenes’ and ‘economies’, and (don’t knock it) its pleasures.
These already allow those individuals who have some access to them
some space in which to reassert a measure of choice and control over
everyday life, and to ‘play’ with its more expressive dimensions. This
‘pluralisation’ of social life expands the positionalities and identities
available to ordinary people (at least in the industrialised world)
in their everyday working, social, familial and sexual lives. Such
opportunities need to be more, not less, widely available across the
globe, and in ways not limited by private appropriation.
This shift of time and activity towards ‘civil society’ has implications
for our thinking about the individual’s rights and responsibilities,
about new forms of citizenship and about ways of ordering and
regulating society other than through the all-encompassing state.
They imply a socialism committed to, rather than scared of, diversity
and difference.
Of course, ‘civil society’ is no ideal realm of pure freedom. Its micro-
worlds include the multiplication of points of power and conflict, and
thus exploitation, oppression and marginalisation. More and more of
our everyday lives are caught up in these forms of power, and their
lines of intersection. Far from there being no resistance to the system,
there has been a proliferation of new points of antagonism, new social
movements of resistance organised around them; and, consequently, a
generalisation of ‘politics’ to spheres which hitherto the left assumed to
be apolitical: a politics of the family, of health, of food, of sexuality, of
the body. What we lack is any overall map of how these power relations
connect and of their resistances. Perhaps there isn’t, in that sense, one
‘power game’ at all, more a network of strategies and powers and their
articulations – and thus a politics which is always positional …
One of these critical ‘new’ sites of politics is the arena of social
reproduction. On the left, we know about the reproduction of labour
power. But what do we really know – outside of feminism – about
ideological, cultural, sexual reproduction? One of the characteristics of

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this area of ‘reproduction’ is that it is both material and symbolic, since

we are reproducing not only the cells of the body but also the categories
of the culture. Even consumption, in some ways the privileged terrain
of reproduction, is no less symbolic for being material. We need not
go so far – with Baudrillard – as to say ‘the object is nothing’ to be
able to recognise that, in the modem world, objects are also signs,
and we relate to the world of things in both an instrumental and a
symbolic mode.8 In a world tyrannised by scarcity, men and women
nevertheless express in their practical lives not only what they need for
material existence but some sense of their symbolic place in the world,
of who they are, their identities. One should not miss this drive to take
part or ‘come on’ in the theatre of the social – even if, as things stand,
the only stage provided is within what the Situationists, in 1968, used
to call the ‘fetishised spectacle of the commodity’.
Of course, the preoccupation with consumption and style may
appear trivial – though more so to men, who tend to have themselves
‘reproduced’, so to say, at arms-length from the grubby processes of
shopping and buying and getting and spending, and therefore take
it less seriously than women, for whom it was destiny, life’s ‘work’.
But the fact is that greater and greater numbers of people (men and
women) – with however little money – play the game of using things
to signify who they are. Everybody, including people in very poor
societies whom we in the West frequently speak about as if they
inhabit a world outside of culture, knows that today’s ‘goods’ double
up as social signs and produce meanings as well as energy. There is no
clear evidence that, in an alternative socialist economy, our propensity
to ‘code’ things according to systems of meaning, which is an essential
feature of our sociality, would necessarily cease – or, indeed, should.
A socialism built on any simple notion of a ‘return to Nature’ is
finished. We are all irrevocably in the ‘secondary universes’ where
Culture predominates over Nature. And culture, increasingly,
distances us from invoking the simple, transparent ground of ‘material
interests’ as a way of settling any argument. The environmental crisis,
which is a result of the profound imbalance between Nature and
Culture induced by the relentless drive to subordinate everything to
the drive for profitability and capital accumulation, cannot be resolved
by any simple ‘return’ to Nature. It can only be resolved by a more
human – that is, socially responsible and communally responsive –
way of cultivating the natural world of finite resources on which we all

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now depend. The notion that ‘the market’ can resolve such questions
is patently – in the light of present experience – absurd and untenable.
This recognition of the expanded cultural and subjective ground
on which any socialism of the twenty-first century must stand relates,
in a significant way, to feminism, or better still, what we might call
‘the feminisation of the social’. We should distinguish this from
the simplistic version of ‘the future is female’, espoused by some
tendencies within the women’s movement, but recently subject to
Lynne Segal’s persuasive critique.9 It arises from the remarkable – and
irreversible – transformation in the position of women in modern
life as a consequence not only of shifts in conceptions of work and
exploitation, the gendered recomposition of the workforce and the
greater control over fertility and reproduction, but also the rebirth of
modern feminism itself.
Feminism and the social movements around sexual politics have thus
had an unsettling effect on everything once thought of as ‘settled’ in the
theoretical universe of the left. And nowhere more dramatically than
in their power to decentre the characteristic conversations of the left
by bringing on to the political agenda the question of sexuality. This
is more than simply the question of men on the left being ‘nice’ to
women or lesbians or gay men, or beginning to address their forms of
oppression and exclusion: it has to do with the revolution in thinking
which follows in the wake of the recognition that all social practices
and forms of domination – including the politics of the left – are
always inscribed in and to some extent secured by sexual identity and
positioning. If we don’t attend to the ways in which gendered identities
are formed and transformed, and how they are deployed politically, we
simply do not have a language of sufficient explanatory power at our
command with which to understand the institutionalisation of power
in our society and the secret sources of our resistances to change. After
another of those meetings of the left where the question of sexuality has
cut through like an electric current which nobody knows how to plug
into, one is tempted to say especially the resistances to change on the left.
Thatcherism was certainly fully aware of this implication of gender
and identity in politics. It has powerfully organised itself around
particular forms of patriarchy and cultural or national identity. Its
defence of ‘Englishness’, of that way of ‘being British’, or of the
English feeling ‘great again’, is a key to some of the unexpected
sources of Thatcherism’s popularity. Cultural racism has been one of

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its most powerful, enduring, effective – and least remarked – sources

of strength. For that very reason, ‘Englishness’, as a privileged and
restrictive cultural identity, is becoming a site of contestation for those
many marginalised ethnic and racial groups in the society who feel
excluded by it and who hold to a different form of racial and ethnic
identification and insist on cultural diversity as a goal of society: in
new times.
The left should not be afraid of this surprising return of ethnicity.
Though ethnicity continues to be, in many places, a surprisingly
resilient and powerfully reactionary force, the new forms of ethnicity
are articulated, politically, in a different direction. By ‘ethnicity’
we mean the astonishing return to the political agenda of all those
points of attachment which give the individual some sense of ‘place’
and position in the world, whether these be in relation to particular
communities, localities, territories, languages, religions or cultures.
These days, black writers and film-makers refuse to be restricted to
only addressing black subjects. But they insist that others recognise
that what they have to say comes out of particular histories and
cultures and that everyone speaks from positions within the global
distribution of power. Because these positions change and alter, there
is always an engagement with politics as a ‘war of position’.
This insistence on ‘positioning’ provides people with co-ordinates,
which are especially important in face of the enormous globalisation
and transnational character of many of the processes which now shape
their lives. The new times seem to have gone ‘global’ and ‘local’ at
the same moment. And the question of ethnicity reminds us that
everybody comes from some place – even if it is only an ‘imagined
community’ – and needs some sense of identification and belonging.
A politics which neglects that moment of identity and identification
– without, of course, thinking of it as something permanent, fixed or
essential – is not likely to be able to command the new times.
Could there be new times without new subjects? Could the world
be transformed while its subjects stay exactly the same? Have the
forces remaking the modern world left the subjects of that process
untouched? Is change possible while we remain untransformed? It
was always unlikely and is certainly an untenable proposition now.
This is another one of those many ‘fixed and fast-frozen relationships,
venerable ideas and opinions’ which, as Marx accurately predicted,
new times are quietly melting into thin air.

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Notes

1. André Gorz, Farewell to the Working Class, Pluto 1982.

2. Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts Into Air, Simon and Schuster
1983.
3. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, Lawrence and
Wishart 1971, p377.
4. Jean-François Lyotard, The Post-Modem Condition: A Report of Knowledge,
Manchester University Press 1984.
5. Fredric Jameson, ‘The Cultural Logic of Capital’, New Left Review 146,
July/August 1984.
6. Terry Eagleton, ‘Identity’, ICA 6, 1987, p47.
7. Louis Althusser, ‘Contradiction and Over-determination’, in For
Marx, Penguin 1969.
8. Jean Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, Telos 1979, p62.
9. Lynne Segal, Is the future female?: troubled thoughts on contemporary femi-
nism, Virago 1987.

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 And not a shot fired
1991

he temptation to pay our last respects to Mrs Thatcher on

T the occasion of the final issue of MT is too strong to resist. How
would she feel if the journal which gave her so much respectful
attention during her long political reign – even going so far as to
name a whole political philosophy after her – were to neglect to do
the honourable thing in its closing pages? Some readers may think
that, as Julian Critchley recently remarked, her remains having been
shown to the Tory Party conference, she should now be permitted a
decent interment. After all, everyone (even Marxism Today) seems
convinced that Major’s smiling face presages a return to business as
usual. There is even a hint of a new phenomenon unfolding before
us – ‘Majorism’, with its rising public expenditure, more interven-
tionist role for the DTI (and, it is to be hoped, the Rottweiler kennels
for Michael Howard), a citizens’ charter for consumers, civilised
briefings on gay rights from Sir Ian McKellen, and a crafty, crab-like
approach (avoiding Tebbit traps and Ridley-like potholes on route)
towards the Maastricht summit. Where is the savage excess, the bru-
talism, of the Thatcher years now? Can there be any thing more
worth saying about them?
The centre of political gravity has certainly shifted. The whole
political atmosphere is different. But ‘Thatcher-ism’ was never
designed to refer primarily to this level of the political game. What of
its deeper objectives, underlying strategies and long-term directions?
My argument is that, while every effort is being undertaken to make
the memory of the Thatcher government disappear, Thatcherism
is still working its way through the system. Success does not mean
that everybody was converted to Thatcherism, or that it triumphed
completely, or even that Thatcher will have a political after-life.
Addicted to the euphonious cadences of her lovely voice as I became,
even I never believed in her political immortality. But that was never

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what we argued, hard as our critics struggled so to construct it.

Thatcherism’s ‘success’ means that we are still living in the aftermath
of its social revolution: in particular, of that new social regime which
Thatcherism installed, in civil society and public and institutional life.
Whereas most postwar governments attempted mainly to ‘manage
things’, Thatcherism had a project – a set of long-term, strategic
objectives, a model which it used as a template of reconstruction and
a strategy for putting this into effect. In short, it was engaged in a
‘hegemonic form of politics’. This way of looking at Thatcherism was
Gramscian in inspiration, a way of defining the distinctiveness of its
politics: this was not a zero-sum, all-or-nothing, game, but more like
Gramsci’s ‘incessant efforts’ to shift decisively the balance of forces.
We called it a ‘project’ – the project of ‘regressive modernisation’ – as
a way of insisting on its strategic and historic character. The analysis
also took on some of the overtones of the so-called ‘regulationist
school’ (writers like Aglietta, Lipietz and others) who were influenced
by Gramsci’s ‘Americanism and Fordism’ essay. They argued that the
key periodisations within capitalism were the shifts from one ‘regime
of regulation’ to another; and these always entailed both a new ‘regime
of accumulation’ and a new ‘mode of social and political regulation’.
Lipietz defined the latter as ‘a body of interiorised rules and social pro-
cesses … norms, habits, laws, regulating networks … that ensure the
unity of the process’. (It was around these themes that the critique of
Thatcherism and the ‘New Times’ analysis converged in these pages.)
Alas! ‘Hegemony’ is one of those foreign words which stick in the
gullet of pragmatic Englishmen, refusing to be absorbed into the
lower stomach. The left translated it as outright victory in a ‘war of
manoeuvre’, not – as it really was – the objective of a ‘war of posi-
tion’; and, finding no simple triumphs, breathed deeply again. The
idea that Thatcherism had a ‘project’ proved equally unacceptable to
that tribe of political pundits who grub around in the shallow earth
of parliamentary life, vainly hoping to glimpse something of historic
importance flitting by in the corridors of power. They consoled
themselves with the thought that Thatcherism was solely preoccupied
with the pragmatics of ‘staying in power’ – an observation of stunning
banality which passed for sophisticated wisdom in the serious press.
We might as well have tried spitting in the wind.
What was Thatcherism’s ‘project’? One way of understanding this
is in terms of that catchphrase of the Thatcher era – ‘market forces’.

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‘Market forces’ represents more than a rational preference for markets

over centralised planning as the more effective form of modern
economic organisation. It makes ‘the market’ into an organising
principle of social life – a law as general, for born-again Thatcherites,
as ‘the class struggle’ ever was to marxists.
It is the only valid language of moral and social calculation,
because it obeys an objective logic, driven by the ‘hidden hand’ of
impersonal forces, and is not interest-laden, context-bound or morally
constrained. The ‘social good’ can only be calculated by reducing it
to individual needs, aggregated on the basis of a formal (and empty)
‘equality’: it means imposing the collective will of a mythical majority
on the unruly but sovereign interests of individuals and is therefore,
by definition, the beginning of tyranny. Thus, ‘There is no such thing
as “society”, there is only individuals and their families’.
The left never took this seriously as a ‘philosophy’, that is, ideas which
organise and regulate practice. It preferred to explain Thatcherism in
moralistic terms – as the usual wickedness of ‘the old gang’. Thus it
constantly underestimated the depth of the ‘culture of individualism’,
the cogency of classic liberal political economy and the historical
embeddedness – alongside other philosophies, to be sure – with which
its discourses and practices are rooted in the everyday life of the first
‘market society’ on earth. To put it briefly, the left lacked a conception
of the kind of social revolution which brings a new regime into place.
The Thatcherites, however, not only espoused the market as a
social gospel, but, like latter-day saints, did not shrink from its
necessary corollaries: the use of state power to drive the model
through; the ‘deregulation’ of all institutional arrangements; the
massive accumulation of economic, social and cultural power in
the hands of the classes who own, manage and run things – an
inevitable consequence of all market systems; the ‘privatisation’ of
social problems; the restoration of the divine ‘right to manage’; and
– that unintended but inevitable consequence of the gap between the
religious zeal of the Mission and the pragmatics of its implementation
– the Ministerial Lie.
The private sector, which was already disciplined in a general way by
‘market forces’, but may have applied them in the past in less rigorous
ways, has been disciplined with remarkable single-mindedness. But
the main thrust of reform is most vivid and penetrating in the public
sector. There is not a school, hospital, social service department,

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polytechnic or college in the country which has not been so

remodelled. The practices of daily life, the professional ethics, the
language which is spoken in meetings, the way documents are pre-
pared, work routines designed and priorities defined and fi xed – all
have been totally reframed. The restructuring drive is remorseless,
all the more so given the social conservatism, institutional inertia
and bureaucratic deformation of our public institutions, as well as
the absence of any alternative strategy for their reform, which makes
them sitting ducks. Take the case of the NHS. The details have been
too well rehearsed to repeat here. In any case, important as they are,
it is possible to get bogged down in a pragmatic discussion (which
the media are only too happy to conduct) about whether this aspect
is preferable to that (of the order of, ‘would you prefer to be just
hanged, or drawn and quartered as well?’), while losing sight of the
process. It is clear that from the outset Thatcher was determined to
reshape the NHS; not because she is a wicked ogre who wants sick
people to suffer, but because its principles of organisation – univers-
ality of provision on an equal basis, funded through public taxation,
and the decommodification of health and illness – ran counter to
every shibboleth of her new model ‘philosophy’. Of course, if you ask
ministers, who have to calibrate the pragmatics of support and the
timing of legislation, they will deny this. But the Thatcherite ‘think
tanks’, whose task it was to pioneer ideas in their pure form and let
ministers worry about the timing, wouldn’t. They know that it was
unthinkable for a government committed to reconstructing social life
on the principle of ‘market forces’ to leave intact the NHS and all it
stood for.
Such a dismantling was set in train by the PM herself before the
1983 election, and only abandoned when it became clear that, as MT
argued at the time, in the NHS Thatcherism finally met the limit of
how far the British people were willing to go along with the destruction
of the post-war settlement. Tactically, she backed off: ‘The NHS is
safe in our hands’. But she did not back off strategically. After the
1987 election, ‘dizzy with success’, to quote Stalin, she returned to the
attack. Robin Cook is absolutely correct to describe the reform process
which Kenneth Clarke then set in motion as ‘privatisation’, if by that
word we understand, not the selling-off of hospitals and GP practices,
but the gradual and relentless disciplining of the NHS according to
the market model. The media’s attempt to stage-manage a rebuttal on

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the tendentious ground that, after all, the NHS is not being auctioned
off like British Gas, was an exercise in collusive bad faith.
The conception of ‘choice’ which underpins the NHS reforms
has two major and decisive weaknesses. First, it assumes, as classic
liberalism always has, that the means of exercising choice – money
– is evenly distributed. But the very market model on which it is
based ensures that this cannot and never will be so. The granting of
an equal right which can only be exercised unequally is a form of
‘negative freedom’; and this critique applies as much to Hayek and
Thatcher as it did to Locke and Adam Smith. The second problem is
that modernity is more individuated but it is also more complex and
thus more interdependent. Health, like transport, education, public
amenities and a host of other things, cannot be reduced in the modern
world to an individual calculus.
This point is well illustrated by what is happening in education.
Market choice needs information and, in the attempt to get schools to
‘mimic’ the market, the equivalent of ‘price’ (the point of equilibrium
between demand and supply) is now the league tables of schools. These
are not worth the paper they are printed on, in terms of the historic
failure to educate all children to a standard which modern life requires,
since the tables cannot measure the main factor which underpins this
failure – the massive discrepancies between the different backgrounds
from which schools draw their pupils and the relative measures of
success of different pedagogies with variable intakes. No matter.
League tables are what we will be given, since they are how parents are
going to ‘choose’, and how parental ‘demand’ is going to be funnelled
from one school to another (and how, accordingly, weak schools will
become weaker, and academically good schools more academic, and
the structure of educational opportunities more deeply unequal).
Higher education, meanwhile, is being submitted to market
disciplines in a more direct manner. The long-delayed expansion
is being driven through by tying the funding of polytechnics and
colleges to their capacity to compete in ‘the educational marketplace’.
This means that numbers must rise, unit costs must fall and no new
expenditure must be undertaken. The consequences, as everyone who
teaches knows, are that staff numbers have fallen drastically (some
polytechnics have lost a third of their academic staff over the last
decade), staff-student ratios and teaching contact hours have risen
dramatically, and inevitably the quality of teaching is suffering – at

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the very time when less well-prepared students from educationally-

disadvantaged groups are coming into higher education for the first
time. The one thing which will not lead to staff increases or get
teachers more money, time to think or research, or promotion, is –
teaching. That is because, though the market is not yet fully installed,
it has already ensured that polytechnics and colleges are conceived,
managed, funded and measured as business machines. Teaching
is simply one of those unmeasurable ‘goods’ – a by-product of the
management, accountancy and computer systems experts, which are
the only categories of staff to have actually increased.
What we are outlining here, then, is a philosophy, a model, a strategy
– the elements of a new social regime. If expressed in cookbook terms,
the recipe would go something like this (Mrs Thatcher’s Cookbook,
price £200 from Marxism Today’s Cookery Department): First, take
your institution by the scruff of the neck and ‘cap’ it. Secondly, detach
or float off as many operations as possible. If necessary, break the
power and authority of any representative arrangement still attached
to the carcass. Then, using market mechanisms, induce or squeeze
people and services out of the public into the private system, which
you should have ready at hand. Season and eat. That is the Model.
Then comes the Strategy. Send in the Thatcherite shock troops, in
three waves. The first is the new echelon of managers who, whatever
their private political inclinations (they are all, of course, honourable
people, kind to their families and dumb animals), function as the
New Model Army. Their task is to restore managerial prerogative,
break the power of the professionals and their ethic, and restructure
the institutions along market lines. They operate at the coal face of
the system, and are responsible for the day-to-day implantation of the
new habits, routines, disciplines, the language of calculation, the fine
tactical decisions, which gradually institutionalise the new ‘regime’.
These hired technicians of the Thatcher Revolution now operate in
every sector, and they speak that metallic discourse of ‘managerialism’
which is the main product of the business schools which have
mushroomed in every educational institution.
The second wave consists of businesspeople, who must be recruited
into the governing strata. Their task is to tutor and educate public
institutions into the mysteries of market calculation. It needs to be
added that, since the British business class is the most ill-educated, the
least intellectually formed and the most deeply philistine governing

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class in the Western world, this move – fulfilling an old dream of

that wily reprobate Lloyd George – is the equivalent of recruiting a
whole generation of Benthamite simplifiers into positions of strategic
power and influence. There they now sit, in their pinstripe shirts
and detachable white collars, in the few minutes they can spare
from lunching and launching their own market-driven enterprises,
guardians of the entrepreneurial re-education of schools, colleges,
polytechnics, universities, hospitals, arts councils, public services and
amenities. They are shortly to inspect schools – a task given them by
that renowned expert in classroom pedagogy, Mr Clarke, no doubt as
a reward for the breadth of their intellectual achievements. They may
not know much but at least they know what they like …
The ‘third wave’ consists of the ‘independent consultants’, called
in to advise on implementing ‘efficiency’ measures. Though invited to
conduct objective reviews, they are not only deeply imbued with the
managerialist ethic, but are usually well-apprised before they start of
the ‘improvements’ which the institution which invited them in desires
to make. Surprise, surprise – that is exactly what they discover these
institutions ‘need’ – a beautifully logical and self-fulfilling exercise.
They have the advantage of giving ‘cuts’ a spuriously impersonal air
and thus lend the imposition of ‘market forces’ a veneer of legitimacy.
These ‘independent consultants’ sometimes seem to have become
an ‘official’ arm of the implantation of a market regime in every
institution in the country. Anyone who does not recognise the main
outlines and consistency of the ‘model’ and the ‘strategy’ just outlined
either does not work in a large public institution, or is not in touch
with the strategies which now govern them or with how they are being
reshaped. Most people spend their waking hours learning the new
language of incentives, cost-effectiveness, quality audits, performance
indicators and the rest of the managerial newspeak, in which the
crude calculus of market forces is covered over by the thin fig leaf
of systems analysis mumbo-jumbo and quack psychology. Ways of
thinking, formulating strategies and defining objectives which reflect
the actual practices they are engaged in have become ‘lost languages’,
and a whole new form of institutional non-speak has been born.
One institution of higher education recently, discussing the lack of
adequate planning for new courses, expressed this problem as a failure
‘to think with any clarity about the nature and delivery of our product
portfolio’. It is just over a decade since these were referred to as ‘courses’

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and the customers for whom they are being designed ‘students’ and the
activity ‘education’. And not a shot has yet been fired …
It is this utterly transformed landscape over which Labour is
preparing to ‘take power’, hoping to graft a few humane considerations
onto a world which has been fundamentally remodelled. It is hoping
to find the humane heart of a welfare society beating still beneath the
Thatcherite veneer. And so it may be.
But our public institutions are not simply underfunded. They
lack a strategic place in the scheme of things. And they now operate
according to a completely different logic. The plain fact is that the
left has nothing remotely like a ‘social philosophy’ which it can state
in anything remotely resembling the pithy, memorable and succinct
form of Thatcher’s which we quoted earlier.
And the fact that Major lacks one too is no consolation. He has
been driven back by the horrendous social calamities which face every
modern society which tries to sustain modernity by ‘market forces’
alone. But, though he has tried out a few alternatives (the classless
society, the citizen’s charter), they lack conviction, because, unlike
Thatcherism, they are not harnessed to any deep institutional logic
or strategy. So Majorism is an un-hegemonic project, as much pulled
along in the slipstream of the Thatcher revolution, which is still
unrolling, as the left.
An alternative is not, of course, easy to dream up or snap into place.
The left, for example, cannot simply reverse Thatcher’s ‘There is no such
thing as society’, since it cannot any longer subscribe to the proposition
that ‘there is no such thing as the individual, there is only society’.
For this would be to return to exactly the simplifying, essentialising
collectivism which such very diverse forces as Thatcherism, ‘actual
existing socialism’ and the diversity and differentiation of modern life,
between them, have dismantled.
One of the problems about the current NHS debate, for example, is
that, faced with the imposition of the market model and its manifest
inequalities, we are tempted to pretend that all was well with it before.
But we know that this was not the case. It is not simply that the
old styles of state ownership and management of the public sector
are politically out of favour for the time being: they have failed to
provide the scale and range of services, the models of control and
accountability, the flexibility and sensitivity to consumer needs in a
diversifying society, or the innovations, that would have allowed them

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to keep in touch with modern developments. Nor is this simply because

they were bureaucratic and inefficient as well as unwieldy, defensive
and undemocratic to their ‘clients’: as we have seen with the collapse of
the communist experiment, the flaws of the state-managed economy
and society are profound and extensive, and any left alternative cannot
now avoid confronting that historic failure.
The problem is that, having faced up to that unpalatable fact, many
people fell back on an uncritical acceptance of ‘markets’. But their anti-
social side effects have not simply withered away. We have not squared
up to or pushed beyond this impasse. In fact, all markets operate on the
basis of prior, non-market conditions of existence. They always need
to be subject to real, wide-ranging and effective regulation. Above all,
they need to be harnessed and framed by a much wider social strategy,
one that can be materialised in terms of an actual institutional regime.
Since at least the emergence of mass democracy and perhaps before
then, the critical issue of modern politics is and remains the balance
between public and private forms (and spheres) of regulation. Feminist
debate has demonstrated both how complex this line is in modern
societies and how deceptive is the notion of a clear-cut, mutually
exclusive boundary between them. The lesson now needs to be applied
to our thinking about ‘the public sphere’. Without this, many of the
excellent and innovative ideas about how to redesign particular sectors
of public life (such as those in MT’s excellent issue on the subject) lack
any unifying principle or overarching strategy.
We have not yet conducted any deep or searching discussion on
where the line between the private and the public is to be redrawn:
which areas are to be principally regulated by which principle and how
the ‘private’ is to be overdetermined by some wider social logic. We
do not know what forms of regulation are capable of submitting the
laws of the market to this more general strategic social conception; or
– more important, from the point of view of the argument advanced
here – what an alternative public ‘regime of regulation’ would look like
and the institutional models by which it is to be instituted.
We know ‘the social’ exists. But we do not know, in post-state
socialist modern societies, how to calculate it. This is now the most
important agenda item for the left.

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 Our mongrel selves
1992

he great discourses of modernity – in this respect marxism no

T less than liberalism, both, in their different ways, Enlightenment
‘grand narratives’ – led us to expect, not the revival but the gradual
disappearance of the nationalist passion. Attachments to nation, like
those to tribe, region, place, religion, were thought to be archaic par-
ticularisms, which capitalist modernity would, gradually or violently,
dissolve or supersede. Globalisation, drawing more and more of the
globe into the net of the capitalist market, is, of course, no recent phe-
nomenon. It has been going on since the Spanish and the Portuguese
initiated the West’s ‘encounter’ with the Rest at the end of the fif-
teenth century. The recent integration of financial systems, the
internationalisation of production and consumption, the spread of
global communications networks, is only the latest – albeit distinctive
– phase in a long, historical process.
However, this has not necessarily resulted in the destruction of those
specific structures and particularistic attachments and identifications
that go with the more localised communities that a homogenising
modernity was supposed to replace. Of course, the forces of capitalist
modernity, in their combined and uneven development, have radically
dislocated the societies into which they penetrated. But the so-called
‘logic of capital’ has operated as much through difference – preserving
and transforming difference (including sexual difference) – as by
undermining it.
The engine of this expansionist history was the European nation
state, with its well-defined territorial boundaries, national economies
and increasingly national cultures. Of course, side by side with this
were the flows – of capital, goods, labour – between and across national
frontiers. As Immanuel Wallerstein has observed, ‘At the very moment
that one has been creating national cultures, each distinct from the
other, these flows have been breaking down national distinctions’.

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This tension between the tendency of capitalism to develop the

nation state and national cultures and its transnational imperatives is
a contradiction at the heart of modernity that has given nationalism
and its particularisms a peculiar significance and force at the centre
of the so-called new transnational global order. Negotiating this
contradiction was one of the key conjuring tricks of Thatcherism; and
it was the failure to resolve it – the illusion that Britain could snatch
the goodies of a ‘single market’ without sacrificing an inch of national
sovereignty, or ‘Englishness’ as a cultural identity, to the European idea
– that finally dethroned Mrs Thatcher and has brought her successor
to the brink of the post-Maastricht abyss.
Paradoxically, globalisation seems to have led to a strengthening
of ‘local’ allegiances and identities. One result has been a slow, if
uneven, erosion of the ‘centred’ nationalisms of the west European
nation state and the strengthening of both transnational relations and
local identities. Two features of this very uneven process have been the
re-valorisation of smaller, subordinate nationalisms and movements
for national and regional autonomy by precisely those groups whose
identities were subsumed under what Ernest Gellner calls the ‘political
roof’ of the big nation states; and the parallel growth of a defensive
reaction by those national cultures that see themselves threatened
culturally from their peripheries. At the same time as this has been
going on in western Europe, we have seen the break-up of the Soviet
Union and eastern Europe, and the revival of ethnic nationalisms
among peoples submerged for decades within the super-nationalism
of the Soviet sphere of influence. This seems to reflect a complicated
double-movement – the attempt by these emerging peoples to
reconstitute themselves as nations representing both a reaction against
the Soviet and state-socialist past, and a hope, which may turn out to
be illusory, that ‘nationhood’ is the only passport or entry-ticket they
have to the new west European prosperity.
Hence the confusing spectacle of what we may call ascending and
descending nationalisms, locked in a sort of combined-and-uneven
double helix. It seems clear that, despite the often over-rationalist
expectations favoured by the internationalist perspectives of the left,
nationalism is not only not a spent force; it isn’t necessarily either a
reactionary or a progressive force, politically. To quote Ernesto Laclau,
nationalism ‘has no necessary political belongingness’. It is capable of
being inflected to very different political positions, at different historical

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moments, and its character depends very much on the other traditions,
discourses and forces with which it is articulated. The nationalisms
of ‘small nations’, which are produced as the counter-discourses to
exploitation and cultural colonisation and linked with critical cultures
and political traditions, have a very different political meaning and
trajectory from those that have been generated as the historical reaction
against imposed state socialism, but have reappeared in political
cultures with strong ethnic or religious absolutist traditions. There is
no question that the decline of the centralised nation states, with their
incorporating cultures and national identities, implanted and secured
by strong cultural institutions, which tend to subsume all differences
and diversity into themselves, presents an unprecedented opportunity
for smaller nationalisms to realise their aspirations for autonomy in
new, more effectively self-governing arrangements. Nevertheless, it is
important to acknowledge that the drive to nationhood in many of
the ‘ascending’ small nationalisms can often take the form of trying
to construct ethnically (or culturally, religiously or racially) closed or
‘pure’ formations, in the place of the older nation states or imperial
formations to which they belonged; or, in Gellner’s terms, of trying
to realise the aspiration, which they see as the secret of success of the
great nation states of western modernity, of gathering one people, one
ethnicity, under one political roof.
But the history of the nation states of the west has never been of
this ethnically pure kind. Without exception, as Daff yd Elis Thomas
pointed out again recently, they are without exception ethnically
hybrid – the product of conquests, absorptions of one people by
another. It has been the main function of national cultures, which are
systems of representation, to represent what is in fact the ethnic hotch-
potch of modern nationality as the primordial unity of ‘one people’;
while that of their invented traditions has been to project the ruptures
and conquests, which are their real history, backwards in an apparently
seamless and unbroken continuity towards pure, mythic time. What’s
more, this hybridity of the modern nation state is, in the present phase
of globalisation, being compounded by one of the largest forced and
unforced mass migrations of recent times. So that, one after another,
western nation states, already ‘diaspora-ised’ beyond repair, are
becoming inextricably multicultural – mixed ethnically, religiously,
culturally and linguistically. Yet many of the new nationalisms are
busy trying, often on the basis of extremely dubious myths of origin

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and other spurious claims, to produce a purified ‘folk’ and to play the
highly dangerous game of ‘ethnic cleansing’. Here, the real dislocated
histories and hybridised ethnicities of Europe, which have been
made and remade across the tortured and violent history of Europe’s
march to modernity, are subsumed by some essentialist conception
of national identity, by a surreptitious return to ‘tradition’ – often of
the ‘invented’ kind, as Hobsbawm and Ranger define it – that recasts
cultural identity as an unfolding essence, moving, apparently without
change, from past to future.
Lest we think that this kind of ethnic absolutism is restricted to the
Balkans, which west Europeans have always thought unfit to govern
themselves, we must remember that versions of it are alive and well
in the old ‘modern’ nation states. In the face of the proliferation of
cultural difference, and the multi-ethnic character of the new Britain,
and threatened on the other side by the encroaching trauma of an
emerging European identity, we have seen over the past decade a
particularly defensive, closed and exclusive definition of ‘English-
ness’ being advanced as a way of warding off or refusing to live with
difference – a retreat from modernity that no exercise in managerial
newspeak or the ‘new entrepreneurialism’ can disguise or deflect.
Confronted by an openly racist far right in France or Germany, the
British are apt to be smoothly superior and complacent. Nevertheless,
the particular forms of cultural racism that have grown up under
Thatcherism’s shadow condense into a single discourse questions of
race and ethnicity and questions of nation, and national and cultural
belonging. The so-called ‘Tebbit test’ indicates the way in which
‘cultural belongingness’ (an exclusive form of ethnicity) has replaced
genetic purity and functions as the coded language for colour.
As Paul Gilroy observed in There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack:

A form of cultural racism which has taken a necessary distance

from crude ideas of biological inferiority now seeks to present an
imaginary definition of the nation as a unified cultural community.
It constructs and defends an image of national culture, homoge-
neous in its whiteness, yet precarious and perpetually vulnerable to
attack from enemies within and without.

Something of the same fear of difference can be seen, in different

forms, everywhere in the ‘new Europe’, as the most heterogeneous

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 OUR MONGREL SELVES 279

peoples hastily cobble together some unitary European cultural iden-

tity as a shield, not only against neighbours with whom they have
lived peacefully for centuries, but also against north Africans, Turks
and others drawn to Europe from the peripheries. These tenden-
cies have their respectable allies and supporters here, and their not
so respectable shock-troops elsewhere in Europe, as those displaced
by the destruction of indigenous economies, the pricing out of crops
and the crippling weight of debt, as well as by poverty, drought and
warfare, buy a one-way ticket and head across borders to a new life in
the west.
Raymond Williams repeatedly affirmed what he called the ‘rooted
settlements’ – ‘lived, worked and placeable social identities’ – to set
off against the ‘abstractions’ of modern national cultural identities.
With unerring accuracy, his writings place who or what is responsible
for these dislocations, against which national identity is summoned as
a reliable defence: ‘It is, in the modern epoch, capitalism which has
disrupted and over-ridden natural communities and imposed artificial
orders. It is, then, a savage irony that capitalist states have again and
again succeeded in mobilising patriotic feelings in their own forms
and interests.’
The persistent emphasis in Williams on ‘actual lives’ in ‘knowable
communities’ is salutary in the current post-Maastricht confusion. For,
much as one may support the shift from a narrow little-Englandism
to a broader European perspective, one has also to acknowledge that
the idea that, overnight, something called a ‘European identity’ could
be willed into being at the behest of a single market represents a
conception of culture and an understanding of the mechanisms of
social identification so shallow that it deserves the come-uppance
the Danes so tellingly delivered in their referendum. The more one
‘believes in Europe’ – or, to put it more accurately, the more the
question of Europe appears to be a contested concept worth struggling
over and around – the more important are the questions of Which
Europe? What is European culture? Whose European identity? – and,
indeed, of how and whether it might be possible to be ‘black and
European’. Williams saw the dangers of constructing a spuriously
unified cultural identity and falsely continuous national history when
the real history is one of ruptures and discontinuities – ‘industrial
conflict within rapid economic development and agrarian conflict
within impoverishment, depopulation and marginalisation’. National

279
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cultural revival, he insisted, requires ‘the working through of a history

among now radically dislocated and subordinated people, rather than
the fortunate resurgence of a subdued essence’. Nevertheless, his
emphasis on ‘actual and sustained social relationships’ as the principal
basis of identification and cultural ‘belongingness’ presents many
difficulties, which take us back to that original stress, in Williams’s
work, on culture and community as ‘whole ways of life’. Whose way?
Whose life? One way or several? Isn’t it the case that, in the modern
world, the more we examine ‘whole ways of life’, the more diverse, and
cut through by complex patterns of similarity and difference, they
appear to be?
Modern people of all sorts and conditions, it seems to me, have had,
as a condition of survival, to be members, simultaneously, of several,
overlapping, ‘imagined communities’; and the negotiations between
and across these complex borderlines are characteristic of modern
identity itself. Lest one view this capacity to live in and negotiate
several ‘worlds’ at once as a sign of the modern alienated condition,
a burden laid on the post-modern, western nomadic subject alone,
it is worth recalling that the burden of ‘double consciousness’ that
W.E.B. Du Bois identified was the burden of consciousness of the
slave, and his/her descendants, who, as C.L.R. James observed, are
obliged to be ‘in western civilization, who have grown up in it, yet are
not completely a part of it’.
In Towards 2000, Williams discusses the response of the white
working-class man to what he calls – too euphemistically by half – ‘the
most recent immigrations of more visibly different peoples’, and the
angry confusions and prejudices that are triggered when, as he puts it,
the blacks (for it is them – us – who are the ‘visibly different peoples’)
‘intersect with the most selective forms of identity’. He acknowledges
that the reaction to the presence of foreigners easily slides into
specifying this ‘otherness’ as black. But he objects to this always being
labelled ‘racism’, and especially to what he calls the ‘standard liberal
reply’ – ‘But they are as British as you are’ – which, he argues, is to
employ ‘a merely legal definition of what it is to be British’:

It is a serious misunderstanding when full social relations are in

question to suppose that the problems of social identity are resolved
by formal definitions. For … an effective awareness of social iden-
tity depends on actual and sustained social relationships. To reduce

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 OUR MONGREL SELVES 281

social identity to formal definitions at the level of the state is to

collude with the alienated superficialities of ‘the nation’ … which
are the limited functional terms of the modern ruling class.

This passage seems to me to contain a series of powerful truncations

and ellipses, and it is therefore no surprise that, in a now famous
exchange in There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack, Paul Gilroy, quite
correctly, fastened on it as representing in its implications a racially
exclusive form of social identity, and a sign of the degree to which
Williams’s work, like so much other thinking on the left, remains
both blind to questions of race and framed by certain unexamined
‘national’ cultural assumptions. As Gilroy asked, how ‘full’ must ‘full
social relations’ be? How ‘actual’ are the social relationships between
blacks and whites in many inner-city communities and how ‘sustained’
do they have to be to include equality of respect?
It is true that social identity cannot be reduced to formal legal
definitions. But if you are a black woman trying to secure rights of
citizenship from the local DSS office or an Asian family running the
gauntlet of the immigration authorities at Heathrow, ‘formal legal
definitions’ matter profoundly. They cannot be made conditional on
cultural assimilation. Since cultural diversity is, increasingly, the fate
of the modern world, and ethnic absolutism a regressive feature of late-
modernity, the greatest danger now arises from forms of national and
cultural identity – new or old – that attempt to secure their identity by
adopting closed versions of culture or community, and by the refusal
to engage with the difficult problems that arise from trying to live
with difference. The capacity to live with difference is, in my view, the
coming question of the twenty-first century. New national movements
that, in their struggle against old closures, reach for too closed, unitary,
homogeneous and essentialist a reading of ‘culture’ and ‘community’,
will have succeeded in overcoming one terrible historical hurdle only
to fall at the second.
I feel compelled to close, as it were, from another place – that of
the millions of displaced cultures and fractured communities of the
south, who have been moved from their ‘settled communities’, their
‘placebable feelings’, their ‘whole ways of life’. They are the products of
the new diasporas, obliged to inhabit at least two identities, to speak at
least two languages, to negotiate and translate between them.
In this way, though they are struggling in one sense at the margins

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of modernity, they are at the leading edge of what is destined to

become the truly ‘late-modern’ experience. They are the products of
the cultures of hybridity. They bear the traces of particular cultures,
traditions, languages, systems of belief, texts and histories that have
shaped them. But they are also obliged to come to terms with and
make something new of the cultures they inhabit, without simply
assimilating to them. They are not and will never be unified in the old
sense, because they are inevitably the products of several interlocking
histories and cultures, belonging at the same time to several ‘homes’ –
and thus to no one, particular home.
Salman Rushdie, who should know, has remarked, ‘having been
borne across the world … they are translated men’. They are the
product of a diasporic consciousness. They have come to terms with
the fact that in the modern world identity is always an open, complex,
unfinished game – always under construction. It moves into the future
through a symbolic detour through the past, produces new subjects,
who bear the traces of the specific histories, traditions and identities
that not only formed them but enable them to produce themselves
anew and differently. To quote Rushdie again from his Imaginary
Homelands:

The Satanic Verses celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the

transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations
of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices
in mongrelisation and fears the absolutism of the Pure. Melange,
hotch-potch, a bit of this and that, is how newness enters the world.
It is the great possibility that mass migration gives the world and I
have tried to embrace it. The Satanic Verses is for change-by fusion,
change-by-co-joining. It is a love-song to our mongrel selves.

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 PART 3 NEOLIBER ALISM

The great moving nowhere show

1998

hat is the political character of the Blair regime? Is New

W Labour a radically new response to the core political issues of
our time? Is its perspective as broad in sweep, modern in outlook and
coherent as Thatcherism’s neoliberal project, only different – because
it is breaking decisively with the legacy and logic of the Thatcher
years? Or is it a series of pragmatic adjustments and adaptive moves to
essentially Thatcherite terrain? Since taking office, New Labour has
certainly been hyperactive, setting policy reviews in place here, legis-
lating and innovating there. A careful audit of the achievements and
failures of these early years remains to be made. But that is for a dif-
ferent occasion. Here, we want to stay with ‘the big picture’. Where is
New Labour really going? Does Mr Blair have a political project?
Thatcherism, from which Mr Blair has learned so much, certainly
did have a project. Its aim was to transform the political landscape,
irrevocably: to make us think in and speak its language as if there were
no other. It had a strategy – an idea of where it wanted to get to and how
to get there. Mrs Thatcher had no fondness for intellectuals: the word
‘ideas’ did not trip lightly off her tongue. Nevertheless, everything she
did was animated by a social ‘philosophy’. From a reductive reading
of Adam Smith, she learned to see individuals as exclusively economic
agents. From Hayek, she learned that the social good is impossible
to define and that to try to harness markets to social objectives led
down a one-way slippery slope to the nanny state, misguided social
engineering, welfare dependence and moral degeneration – ‘There is
No Such Thing As Society’. From the monetarists she learned market
fundamentalism: markets are ‘good’ and work mysteriously to the
benefit of all; they are self-instituting and self-regulating entities;

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market rationality is the only valid mode of social calculation, ‘market

forces must prevail!’
What is more, she armed herself with a decisive analysis of the points
of historical change which had created the opening to Thatcherism.
But she did not, like some versions of the ‘Third Way’, simply project
the sociological trends on to the political screen. She never supposed
Thatcherite subjects were already out there, fully formed, requiring only
to be focus-grouped into position. Instead, she set out to produce new
political subjects – Entrepreneurial Man – out of the mix of altruism
and competitiveness of which ordinary mortals are composed. Above
all she knew that, to achieve radical change, politics must be conducted
like a war of position between adversaries. She clearly identified her
enemies, remorselessly dividing the political field: Wets v Drys, Us v
Them, those who are ‘with us’ v ‘the enemy within’.
When Marxism Today first began to discuss Thatcherism as a
‘project’, smart-arsed journalists and Labour analysts joined forces
to pour scorn on the idea – a thought altogether too concerted and
‘continental’ for the empiricist temper of British political culture.
Geoff Mulgan (Director of Demos, former MT contributor and now
in the Number 10 Policy Unit) advances a similar view elsewhere in
this issue.1 ‘Meta-political’ questions, he says, are irrelevant – a sign
that the left intellectuals who ask them are hopelessly isolated from
the ‘real’ business of government. They would be better employed,
like Demos, thinking up concrete proposals which New Labour could
put into effect.
Guilty British academics on the left are particularly vulnerable to
this kind of gross anti-intellectualism. However, Mulgan’s position
seems disingenuous. Of course, policy innovation is essential to any
political strategy – that is why Martin Jacques dreamed up the idea
of Demos in the first place. There is lots of room for lateral thinking.
But – Mr Blair’s Rendezvous With Destiny notwithstanding – May
1997 was not the start of ‘Year Zero’. All questions of perspective and
strategy have not been ‘solved’. As Decca Aitkenhead put it recently,
the Blairites sometimes behave as if ‘Number 10 is sorted for nuts and
bolts; it’s just not sure what sort of machine they add up to’. In fact,
it’s impossible to know how radical and innovative a concrete proposal
is until you know which strategy it is attempting to put in place and
the criteria against which its ‘radicalism’ is being assessed. Without a
strategic framework, the ‘concrete proposals’ could be brilliant; or they

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 THE GREAT MOVING NOWHERE SHOW 285

could simply be off-the-wall – completely batty. In recent months.

Demos has offered us plenty of both kinds.
In fact, seen in the context of New Labour’s sustained hype and
vaunting ambition over the past eighteen months, Mulgan’s idea that
nothing requires serious attention apart from pragmatic effectiveness
is not only wrong but curiously ‘off-message’ and wholly out of synch
with His Master’s Voice. It was clear from the outset that Mr Blair saw
himself in the Thatcherite mould and he has worked hard to model
himself on her style of leadership. And with some success! Recent
polls suggest the electorate is impressed with ‘what they regard as the
strong Thatcherite style’, though they also seem unsure whether this
is anything more than ‘better gloss, more PR and spin’ and, more
worryingly, they doubt that New Labour ‘will make a real difference
and force a clean policy break with the Tory years’.2 Mr Blair has
also modelled his ambitions to make everything in Britain ‘New’ on
Thatcherism’s project of national self-renewal. Consequently, these
days, no New Labour spokesperson opens his/her mouth, nor journalist
reports the event, without reference to ‘the Blair project’. It is New
Labour, not the intellectuals, who put this ‘meta-political’ question on
the agenda. It is Blair who talks of New Labour in apocalyptic terms
– ‘one of the great, radical, reforming governments of our history’, ‘to
be nothing less than the model twenty-first century nation, a beacon
to the world’, ‘becoming the natural party of government’. (‘Natural
parties of government’ are those whose ideas lead on all fronts, carrying
authority in every domain of life; whose philosophy of change has
become the common sense of the age. In the old days we used to call
them ‘hegemonic’.) Mr Blair is definitely into ‘the vision thing’.
New Labour’s latest bid to give ‘this vision thing’ historic credibility
and so to capture and define ‘the big picture’ is the ‘Third Way’. This
comes in several shapes and sizes. There is the intellectual’s version of the
‘Third Way’ offered by Anthony Giddens, Mr Blair’s most influential
intellectual, which sketches out a number of significantly novel
sociological shifts which seem to have major political consequences.
Many of these one would be happy to agree with or to debate further.
After all, economic globalisation is a reality and has transformed
the space of operations and the ‘reach’ of nation states and national
economies. There is a new individualism abroad, due to the growing
social complexity and diversity of modern life, which has undermined
much of the old collectivism and the political programmes it

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underpinned. Many problems do present new challenges or assume

new forms not well covered by the old political ideologies. We do need
to broker a new relationship between markets and the public good,
the individual and the community. These sociological shifts are part of
the great historical rupture – the onset of late-late-modernity – which
Thatcherism first mastered politically but certainly did not originate
or set in motion. This is where Marxism Today’s ‘New Times’ analysis
and its call for the reinvention of the left began, all those years ago. So
much is indeed shared territory.
But when we move from the intellectual to New Labour’s more
political and strategic version of the ‘Third Way’, we are less on the
terrain of political strategy and more, as Francis Wheen recently
observed, in some ‘vacant space between the Fourth Dimension and
the Second Coming’. The ‘Third Way’ has been hyped as ‘a new kind
of politics’. Its central claim is the discovery of a mysterious middle
course on every question between all the existing extremes. However,
the closer one examines this, the more it looks, not like a way through
the problems, but a soft-headed way around them. It speaks with
forked, or at the very least garbled, tongue. It is advanced as a New
International Model to which centre-left governments around the
world arc even now rallying. However, when it is not rapturously
received, it suddenly becomes, not ‘a Model’, just a ‘work in progress’.
Can it be both heroic and tentative? It cannot make up its mind
whether its aim is to capture ‘the radical centre’ or to modernise ‘the
centre left’ (and should not therefore be surprised to find young voters
placing its repositioning as clearly ‘centre right’!). It claims to draw
from the repertoires of both the new right and social democracy – but
also to have transcended them – to be ‘beyond right and left’. These
shifting formulations are not quite what one would call a project with
a clear political profile.
In so far as one can make out what it is claiming, does it offer
a correct strategic perspective? The fact – of which the ‘Third Way’
makes a great deal – that many of the traditional solutions of the
left seem historically exhausted, that its programme needed to be
radically overhauled, and that there are new problems which outrun
its analytic framework, does not mean that its principles have nothing
to offer to the task of political renewal on the left. Welfare reform is
only one of many areas where there is a continuing debate between
two clearly competing models, drawing on, if not identical with,

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 THE GREAT MOVING NOWHERE SHOW 287

the two great traditions that have governed political life: the left-
of-centre version, looking for new forms in which to promote social
solidarity, interdependence and collective social provision against
market inequality and instability; and the neoliberal, promoting
low taxes, a competitive view of human nature, market provision
and individualism. Can the ‘tough decisions’ on welfare which New
Labour have been ‘taking’ for eighteen months really be ‘beyond left
and right’? Or is that a smoke-screen thrown up to evade the really
hard questions of political principle which remain deeply unresolved.
One of the core reasons for the ‘Third Way’s semantic inexactitude
– measured by the promiscuous proliferation of such troubling
adverbs as ‘between’, ‘above’ and ‘beyond’ – is its efforts to be all-
inclusive. It has no enemies. Everyone can belong. The ‘Third Way’
speaks as if there are no longer any conflicting interests which cannot
be reconciled. It therefore envisages a ‘politics without adversaries’.
This suggests that, by some miracle of transcendence, the interests
represented by, say, the ban on tobacco advertising and ‘Formula
One’, the private car lobby and John Prescott’s White Paper, an ethical
foreign policy and the sale of arms to Indonesia, media diversity and
the concentrated drive-to-global-power of Rupert Murdoch’s media
empire, have been effortlessly ‘harmonised’ on a Higher Plane, above
politics. Whereas, it needs to be clearly said that a project to transform
and modernise society in a radical direction, which does not disturb
any existing interests, and has no enemies, is not a serious political
enterprise.
The ‘Third Way’ is hot on the responsibilities of individuals, but those
of business are passed over with a slippery evasiveness. ‘Companies’,
Tony Blair argues in his Fabian pamphlet The Third Way, ‘will devise
ways to share with their staff the wealth their know-how creates’. Will
they? The ‘Third Way’ does observe accelerating social inequality
but refuses to acknowledge that there might be structural interests
preventing our achieving a more equitable distribution of wealth and
life chances. As Ross McKibbin recently remarked, although most
people ‘do believe that society should be based on some notion of
fairness’, they also believe ‘that the rich and powerful can only be made
to acknowledge this by political action’. The ‘Third Way’s discourse,
however, is disconcertingly devoid of any sustained reference to
power. Mr Blair is constantly directing us, instead, to ‘values’. But
when one asks, ‘which values?’, a rousing but platitudinous vagueness

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descends. He can be very eloquent about community, an inclusive

society, with the strong supporting the weak, and the value of facing
challenges together. The problem arises when this communitarian side
of the Blair philosophy meets head-on the equally authentic, rocklike,
modernising, targeting, moralising streak in ‘Blairism’. In practice it is
difficult to believe fervently in ‘the politics of community’ and at the
same time to hold unshakably to the view that the task of government
is ‘to help individuals to help themselves’, especially when the ways of
implementing each so often point in diametrically opposed directions.
Besides, as a timely Guardian editorial observed: ‘What distinguishes
governments of the centre left is not their values … but their perennial
dissatisfaction with what markets – necessary as they are – produce.’
It therefore seems most unlikely that the shifting indecisions and
ambiguous formulations of the ‘Third Way’ offer us clear guidelines
for assessing the underlying thrust of the Blair political project. For
an answer to our original question, we will need to look at the Blair
performance overall, sifting the strong tendencies from the ebb and
flow of everyday governance, trying to disinter from its practice its
underlying political logic, philosophy and strategic direction.
In the global context, New Labour has brought a sweeping
interpretation of globalisation, which it regards as the single most
important factor which has transformed our world, setting an
impassable threshold between New Labour and Old, now and
everything that went before. This is crucial because, in our view, it is
its commitment to a certain definition of globalisation which provides
the outer horizon, as well as a dubious legitimacy, to Mr Blair’s whole
political project.
New Labour understands globalisation in very simplistic terms – as
a single, uncontradictory, uni-directional phenomenon, exhibiting the
same features and producing the same inevitable outcomes everywhere.
Despite Giddens’s strictures, New Labour does deal with globalisation
as if it is a self-regulating and implacable Force of Nature. It treats the
global economy as being, in effect, like the weather. In his speech to
the Labour Party conference. Mr Blair portrayed the global economy
as moving so fast, its financial flows so gigantic and so speedy, the
pace at which it has plunged a third of the world economy into crisis
so rapid, that its operations are now effectively beyond the control
of nation states and probably of regional and international agencies
as well. He calls this, with a weary finality, ‘the way of the world’.

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His response is to ‘manage change’. But it seems that what he really

means is that we must ‘manage ourselves to adapt to changes which
we cannot otherwise control’ – a similar sounding but substantively
very different kettle of fish.
This accounts for the passivity of the Blair government, despite its
pivotal role in Europe and leading position in the G7, etc, in the face
of the current crisis in Asia, Russia and elsewhere. It continued until
very late to reiterate the false reassurances that the Asian crisis would
have little noticeable effect on Britain. It has shown a surprising lack
of flexibility in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary. It seems
content to reiterate the mantra: ‘The goal of economic stability and
stable inflation will never be abandoned or modified. New Labour is
not for turning’ – which sounds increasingly like a desperate struggle
to win, not the present, but the last war.
It has signally failed to seize the advantage of the rapidly changing
terms of macro-economic debate to offer early, effective or radical
leadership to the international community, as one country after
another deserts the neoliberal ship and moves towards thinking
the unthinkable – that the unregulated movement of currency and
capital, aided and abetted by de-terrestrialised corporate power and
new technology, will, if left to the ‘hidden hand’ of macro-economic
forces alone, bring the whole edifice crashing to the ground. His
belated proposals for the reform of the IMF are far from radical.
Paradoxically, it is the high priests of global neoliberalism – Jeffrey
Sachs, Paul Krugman and George Soros – not Blair and Brown, who
have led the retreat towards regulation.
New Labour appears to have been seduced by the neoliberal gospel
that ‘the global market’ is an automatic and self-instituting principle,
requiring no particular social, cultural, political or institutional
framework. It can be ‘applied’ under any conditions, anywhere. New
Labour therefore seems as bewildered as every neoliberal hot-gospeller
that Japanese bankers don’t actually behave like Wall Street bankers,
and that if you dump ‘the market’ into a state-socialist society like
Russia without transforming its political institutions or its culture – a
much slower and more complex operation – it is likely to produce, not
Adam Smith’s natural barterers and truckers, but a capitalist mafia. As
Andrew Marr shrewdly observed, ‘It’s the politics, stupid!’
Since globalisation is a fact of life to which There Is No Alternative,
and national governments cannot hope to regulate or impose any

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order on its processes or effects, New Labour has accordingly largely

withdrawn from the active management of the economy (in the long
run, Keynes is dead!’). What it has done, instead, is to set about
vigorously adapting society to the global economy’s needs, tutoring
its citizens to be self-sufficient and self-reliant in order to compete
more successfully in the global marketplace. The framing strategy of
New Labour’s economic repertoire remains essentially the neoliberal
one: the deregulation of markets, the wholesale refashioning of the
public sector by the New Managerialism, the continued privatisation
of public assets, low taxation, breaking the ‘inhibitions’ to market
flexibility, institutionalising the culture of private provision and
personal risk, and privileging in its moral discourse the values of self-
sufficiency, competitiveness and entrepreneurial dynamism.
Economic Man or as s/he came to be called, The Enterprising
Subject and the Sovereign Consumer, have supplanted the idea of the
citizen and the public sphere. As the government’s Annual Report boldly
reminded us: ‘People are not only citizens, they are also customers’.
The government’s most significant breaches in this neoliberal edifice
have been the statutory minimum wage and the Working Time
directive – commitments it would have been difficult for New Labour
to have abandoned. It has, however, set the minimum wage at the
lowest politically-negotiable level, excluding the sector most at risk to
structural unemployment – young people between 18 and 21.
Giving the Bank of England its independence may have been
a good idea. But only a touching faith in economic automatism
can explain why this meant restricting its brief, effectively, to one
dimension of economic policy only – inflation – with, in effect, only
one tool of economic management – interest rates. It suggests that
Labour has been quietly seduced by the neoliberal view that, as far
as possible, the economy must be treated like a machine, obeying
economic ‘laws’ without human intervention. In practice, what
is gained in credibility by being able to say – ‘The Government is
not involved! Rising interest rates, an over-valued currency, falling
order books and rising regional unemployment have nothing to
do with us. They are unfortunate “facts of life” which folks must
simply put up with. You can’t buck global trends!’ – is lost in terms
of strategic control. Whether New Labour acknowledges this or not,
its effect is automatically to prioritise meeting inflation targets over
everything else. The irony is that it is precisely the whole structure of

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neoliberal, scientistic jiggery-pokery which is rapidly falling apart.

Economies are not machines. Changes in one sector have knock-
on consequences elsewhere. The hedge-funds equations which have
kept the inflated bubble of futures, options and derivatives markets
afloat are liquefying. The infamous monetarist ‘natural rate of
unemployment’, which enabled banks and governments to calculate
the necessary unemployment ‘costs’ for a given level of inflation, has
fallen into disrepute. The Bank of England itself says that ‘it cannot
be directly measured and changes over time’. The Federal Reserve
long ago sacrificed it on the altar of jobs and growth.
On the domestic front, the policy repertoire seems at first sight
more diverse, but has tended to follow the same tendential groove. The
main emphasis has been thrown on to the supply side of the equation.
There have been many commendable social-democratic interventions.
But its key watchwords – ‘Education and Training, Training and
Education’ – are driven, in the last analysis, less by the commitment to
opportunities for all in a more egalitarian society, and more in terms
of supplying flexibility to the labour market and re-educating people
to ‘get on their bikes’ when their jobs disappear as a result of some
unpredictable glitch in the global market. New Labour does not and
cannot have much of an industrial economic policy. But it can and
does expend enormous moral energy seeking to change ‘the culture’
and produce new kinds of subjects, kitted out and defended against
the cold winds that blow in from the global marketplace.
To this source also we must trace the remoralisation of the work
ethic, and the restoration of that discredited and obscene Victorian
utilitarian distinction between ‘the deserving’ and ‘the undeserving’
poor. The New Deal subsidises training and Mr Blunkett attacks
class sizes and expands nursery places for lone parents willing to seek
employment – very commendable, and about time too. New Labour
will not, however, intervene to ensure that there are jobs, though
its entire welfare reforms are riveted to work and paid employment.
Since it must depend on the private sector to provide them, it can
only morally exhort. Hence the paradox of Jack Straw holding parents
exclusively responsible for their children’s misdemeanours, while
Welfare-to-Work insists that anyone who can move and wants to draw
a benefit must leave their children, get up off their sick beds, overcome
their disability, come back out of retirement and work. Not since the
workhouse has labour been so fervently and single-mindedly valorised.

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Social inequality, broadly defined, is one of the critical defining

issues of national politics and a crucial test of the distinction
between the Blair project and market fundamentalism. According to
Giddens, in his book The Third Way: ‘The gap between the highest
paid and the lowest paid workers is greater than it has been for the
last 50 years’; and, though ‘the majority of workers are better off in
real terms than 20 years ago, the poorest 10 per cent have seen their
real incomes decline’. This is no aberration. It follows a period of the
most intense ‘marketisation’. It is what markets do – the kind of Will
Hutton, 40/30/30 society which markets ‘naturally’ produce when
left to themselves. What’s more, the nature of poverty has changed,
becoming more diverse, while its causes have multiplied. The term
‘social exclusion’ draws attention to these differences, and underlines
the fact that income and economic factors are by no means the only
reason different groups find themselves excluded from the mainstream
of society. There is, however, considerable evasiveness, both in
Giddens’s argument and in New Labour’s appropriation of it, around
the question of how important the income/economic factor in ‘social
exclusion’ is and what to do about it. Giddens’s bald statement that
‘exclusion is not about gradations of inequality’ looks like a sentence
in search of a ‘not only’ that went missing.
These issues are at the heart of New Labour’s profound ambiguity
and duplicity around welfare reform. After months of a Great Debate,
and a disastrous and aborted effort to begin to put ‘it’ into effect, we
are still really none the wiser about what Mr Blair really thinks or
proposes to do about welfare. We do not know whether he proposes
to transform the welfare state to meet its broader social purposes more
effectively, or intends to go down in history as the politician with
the ‘courage’ to wind up the welfare state as the basis of the social
settlement between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’ which has kept
twentieth-century capitalist societies relatively stable and free of social
violence. ‘Reform’ is the weasel-word, the floating signifier, which
masks this gaping absence.
He says welfare is not reaching those who are most in need. True:
but it does not follow that ‘targeting’, as such, is the correct overall
strategy. He says Britain, in a global economic context, cannot
financially sustain it. But he does not make anything of the fact that
the UK is about fifteenth in the world league table of social security
spending. He treats the present level of wealth distribution as a Natural

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Law rather than a political outcome. He believes welfare is bad for

us, corrupting our morals and inducing us to commit crime. But the
actual level of fraud is one of the most contested social statistics, and
the Fraud Office systematically fails to produce the missing millions.
There is as much evidence that the really poor, of whatever kind,
can’t live decently on the level of benefits they are offered, and that
many are thereby driven to crime, as there is for the proposition that
millions of people are making a ‘lifestyle choice’ to live on benefit in
perpetuity. He promises the poor not social justice (that is a bridge too
far) but ‘social fairness’. But his actual image of the citizen is of the
lonely individual, ‘set free’ of the state to face the hazards of the global
weather alone, armed against incalculable risk, privately insured up to
the hilt against every eventuality – birth, unemployment, disability,
illness, retirement and death – like those lean urban ‘survivors’ on
their mountain bikes who haunt our streets, their chocky bar, Evian
water-bottle and change of trainers in their knapsacks. Man as ‘poor,
bare, fork’d animal’, isolated and at bay before the elements.
Mr Blair represents his welfare reforms as a continuation of the spirit
of Beveridge, but this is simply not the case. For Beveridge understood
that welfare systems reflect and have profound effects on the wider social
framework. He knew that the principle of ‘social insurance’ was not
only efficient but a way of underwriting citizenship; that ‘universalism’,
despite its costs, was essential to binding the richer sections of society into
collective forms of welfare. He anticipated Galbraith’s argument that
the whole system would be in danger as soon as the rich could willingly
exclude themselves from collective provision by buying themselves out.
Why should they go on paying for a service they had ceased to use?
This potential ‘revolt of the elites’ is, of course, the critical political issue
in welfare reform. The establishment of a two-tiered system, with the
richer sectors buying themselves into private provision, is what helps
to fix in stone the political threshold against redistribution. It destroys
the public interest in favour of private solutions dictated by wealth
inequalities, and must drive what is then left in the residual ‘public’
sector to the bottom, perpetually in crisis and starved of investment,
while propelling those who are left out to the margins.
This ‘law’ is already manifest in education – though New Labour
systematically refuses to confront it. Buying the children out of
public education and into the selective private system has become a
habitual middle-class pastime, in which New Labour’s own leaders

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have indulged as light-heartedly as any other ordinary, unreflective,

Thatcherite, possessive individual. ‘Targeting’, ‘selectivity’, and ‘means
testing’, which Mr Blair has surreptitiously slid into place as his great
‘principles of reform’, are destined, as surely as night follows day, to
deepen already existing inequalities, to increase marginalisation and
social exclusion, to divide society into two unbridgeable tiers and
further fragment social integration and reciprocity. Hence the muffled
confusion surrounding the Harriet Harman/Frank Field fiasco.3 Mr
Field bats with the best of New Labour in terms of self-righteous
moralism about poverty and the desire to do to people things which
are good for their souls. His Methodist spirit is riveted by the fantasy of
the great Demon Fraud and the Feckless Work-shy. But he understood
that the principles of contributory social insurance and ‘universalism’
had to be preserved, however modified their forms; that a network of
voluntary agencies could only be introduced if regulated, underpinned
and enforced by the state. He believed that benefits must provide, not a
residual but a decent standard of life for those who qualify for them; and
that the costs of transition from one form of delivering these principles
to another had to be borne. These were the ‘unthinkable’ thoughts for
which he was dismissed. The debate about how much, in what form,
with what effects, therefore, remains to be had. Tiered universalism,
combinations of public/private contributory solutions, etc, remain to
be debated. There is work for Demos to do! But only after the principles
of reform have been openly and thoroughly debated.
It is deeply characteristic of the whole style of the Blair project that
Great Debates are announced which do not actually take place. Instead
of a clear and open laying-out of the alternatives, we have a massive
public relations and spinning exercise, and policy forums to speak over
the heads of the much-abused ‘experts and critics’, direct to selectively
chosen members of the Great British Public. There may be an open
invitation to participate, to join the consultation. But this openness is
effectively closed by Mr Blair’s own already-settled conviction that he
is Right – what Hugo Young called ‘his unfreighted innocence, wide-
eyed rationality and untroubled self- belief’. When in difficulties, the
party faithful – about whom he is a less than devoted admirer – are
summoned to hear the message, not to state their views. The Labour
Party, as an organisation within which these profound matters of
strategy may gain, through debate, some broader resonance in terms of
the everyday lives and experiences of ordinary folks, and genuinely be

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modified or win consent, has been ruthlessly emasculated. A terrifying

and obsequious uniformity of view has settled over the political scene,
compounded by a powerful centralisation of political authority, with
twenty-something Young Turks beaming out ill-will from ministerial
backrooms, the whole caboodle under surveillance from Millbank
and cemented in place by a low-flying authoritarianism.
The Labour benches have, with a few honourable exceptions, been
the most bedazzled by the hope of preferment, the most obsequious of
all. Critics, welcomed at the front door, are systematically discredited
through innuendo, and spin-doctored at the back door as being
trapped in a time warp, if not actually barking mad. Anyone who
does not pass the loyalty test is labelled with the ritual hate-word,
‘intellectual’, gathered into one indiscriminate heap – those who called
for the reinvention of the left while Mr Blair was still, metaphorically,
in his political cradle lumped in with Trotskyist wreckers – and the
whole shooting-match branded as ‘Old Labour’. ‘Bring me the head of
Roy Hattersley!’
Against a majority of people on the left, Marxism Today argued
that bringing the Labour Party into the late twentieth century and
transforming many of its traditional habits and programmes were
necessary, if traumatic, events. But the reduction of the party to a
sound-box is quite another thing. It reveals, to borrow a phrase of
Martin Kettle’s, how far the demotic has triumphed over the democratic
in the New Labour project. The attempt to govern by spin (through
the management of appearances alone), where you ‘gloss’ because you
cannot make your meaning clear; New Labour’s systematic preference
for media reality over sterner political realities; indeed, the constant
hype about ‘hard choices’ coupled with the consistent refusal to make
them – all are part of the same phenomenon. This is not a superficial
‘style’ we don’t much like, but something that goes to the heart of the
Blair project.
Despite all the promising talk about decentralisation and
participation, the commitment to devolution and constitutional reform
– which are significant – one gets the queasy feeling that New Labour
increasingly finds the rituals of democratic practice tiresome, and in
practice, if not formally, would be happy to move in the direction
of a more ‘direct’, plebiscitary, referendum style of governance. The
project is consistently more ‘populist’ than ’popular’. This is not the
populism of Mrs Thatcher’s neoliberal right, but it is a variant species

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of ‘authoritarian populism’ none the less – corporate and managerialist

in its ‘downward’ leadership style and its moralising attitude to those
to whom good is being done. It’s also deeply manipulative in the way
it represents the authority it poses as somehow ‘empowering us’ –
another triumph for ‘customer services’.
The same can be said of New Labour’s sense of agency – of who
exactly are the political subjects in whose image the Blair Revolution
is made. Many of us responded to his election as leader of the Labour
Party with the same optimism we greeted the nomination of Bill
Clinton. Not because we agreed with everything he believed, or
properly knew what it was he did believe, but because he was of the
generation who had lived through the Thatcher-Reagan era, through
the 1960s and the social and cultural revolutions of our time. We
hoped he would respond – however much we might disagree in detail
– with sensibilities informed by these late-modern experiences. How
wrong we were. The Blair social project is ‘modernising’ but modern
only to a very limited extent.
His key social constituency in the run up to the election was
‘Middle England’ – a profoundly traditionalist and backward-looking
cultural investment. His discourse on the family, social values and
diversity remains deeply conventional. Middle England commands
some votes. But as a characterisation of New Labour’s political
subject, it is the repository of English traditionalism, irredeemably
small-‘c’ conservative. As Jonathan Freedland recently reminded us,
Middle England is a place of the mind, an imagined community,
always located somewhere south or in the centre of the country,
never north – though Mr Mandelson has recently put in a claim
for Hartlepool Man. Middle England is peopled by skilled, clerical
or supervisory grade home-owners, never manual workers or public
sector professionals. It is committedly suburban, anti-city, family-
centred, devoted to self-reliance and respectability. Its cultural icons,
he argues, are ‘Neighbourhood Watch, Gordon’s Gin, Enid Blyton,
Ford Mondeo, Hyacinth Bucket, The Antiques Roadshow, Nescafe
Gold Blend, Acacia Avenue, Scouts and Brownies, Nigel Kennedy and
the Salvation Army’. Its voice is the Daily Mail.
Since the election, we have heard less of ‘Middle England’ and more
of ‘The People’. This is the great body unknowns, the Essex Lads,
the ‘Babes’, hommes et filles moyen sensuels. ‘The People’, Jonathan
Freedland argues, are the imagined subject of phrases like the ‘People’s

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priorities’, the Lottery as the ‘People’s money’, the ‘People’s Princess’.

The People are definitely not the ‘working classes’ or the ‘underclasses’
or the ‘chattering classes’ or manual workers or lone parents or black
families or trade unionists or public sector workers or Labour Party
rank-and-file members, come to that. Their desires must be flattered:
‘wooed’ rather than ‘represented’. They are spoken to rather than
speaking. When not watching GMTV or Sky Sport, they are to be
found in focus groups. The People, Nick Sparrow remarks, ‘are those
who matter once every five years’. Their voice is The Sun.
Then there are The Businessmen. The longer New Labour governs,
the more it cosies up to Business, reinventing itself in full-dress
corporate disguise. Mr Blair is constantly to be seen in their company.
Visually, he is exclusively associated with Success, a dedicated follower
of celebrity, which is the modern form of the success story. He looks
decidedly uncomfortable in the company of the poor. No doubt a
Labour government needs support from the business community. But
New Labour’s relentless wooing of the new business nouveaux riches
is nothing short of abject. Businessmen can do no wrong. Their logo
adorns every Labour Party conference delegate’s name-tag (‘Serving
the community nationwide’ – courtesy of Somerfield supermarket).
Their ads will soon be beamed into every classroom that is wired up
to the National Grid for Learning. Their expertise is required on every
public, regulatory or advisory body. They are the ‘wealth creators’,
whose salaries are beyond control, dictated by some extra-terrestrially
defined ‘rate for the job’: the big spenders, the off-shore investing
‘patriots’, the Mercedes-Benz and Don Giovanni crowd, with a finger
in every share-option deal and a luxury pad in every global city. The
fact that, comparatively speaking, they are set fair to also being the
most poorly educated, philistine, anti-intellectual, short-termist and
venal ‘business class’ in the western world does not seem to matter.
In an ill-advised attempt to appropriate the spirit of the new British
cultural revival, there was, briefly, ‘Cool Britannia’. But it was short-
lived. The energy levels here proved too high, the swing too wild and
unmanageable, the rhythms too loud, the fashion too see-through,
the culture too ‘multi-cultural’, too full of clever creative folk, too
subversive, too ‘Black British’ or ‘Asian cross-over’ or ‘British hybrid’
for New Labour’s more sober, corporate-managerialist English style.
This was definitively not the ‘modernity’ towards which Britain
required to be ‘modernised’.

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Finally, in recent weeks, an ‘enemy’ has surfaced on New Labour’s

social stage. These are ‘the intellectuals’, or, as Mr Blair charmingly
characterised them, the ‘chattering classes’. Recently, he declared
himself to have been ‘never a partaker of the chattering classes’. Critics
and whingers to the backbone, this lot ‘pocket everything that they
do like and then moan about the 10 things they don’t like’. He clearly
found it difficult to keep the tone of exasperation out of his voice. The
‘sneer squad’, as he dubbed them, occupy the forbidden zone of Radio
4, The Guardian, The Observer, Newsnight, Channel 4 News. They are
outside the circle of influence, ‘below the radar’. There is little doubt
that the readers of Marxism Today belong firmly to the lower circles of
this encampment.
It will inevitably be said that this account has been unfairly selective.
What about all the good things New Labour has set in train – the
peace deal in Northern Ireland, incorporating Human Rights into
British legislation, the minimum wage, family tax credit, expanding
nursery places, the school and hospital building programme,
breaking the tide of Euro-scepticism, the move towards devolution,
constitutional reform? Of course, these initiatives are welcome. They
add up to a substantial claim on our support. There are many others
which point in the right direction, which we should support, though
their implementation may be controversial. These include some of the
proposals for urban renewal, the efforts to reach through to some of
the deep, underlying causes of social exclusion in communities, and
the general commitment to improve standards in education – though
whether letting Chris Woodhead, Thatcherism’s chief Enforcer, loose
to brow-beat schools and abuse teachers is the best approach to the
latter objective one begs leave to doubt.
The momentous landslide victory of May 1997 was indeed an
historic opportunity, inviting New Labour to the difficult task of
facing up to the complexities of historical change and at the same time,
offering an alternative political strategy, different from and breaking
decisively with the neoliberal project, which was, internationally, the
first – but cannot be forever the last. And they don’t keep coming
back, offering you a second chance. So in answering the big questions
about the Blair project, one has had to be ruthlessly selective and go
for the strategic choices, trying to identify the persistent tendencies:
what seems to be the underlying framework of assumptions, the
shaping ‘philosophy’.

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The picture is ambiguous. There are still counter-arguments to hear.

New Labour remains in some ways an enigma, and Mr Blair, either
despite of or because of his ceaseless efforts to talk a project into place,
paradoxically appears both ‘bold’ and ‘vacillating’. But having held
one’s breath and crossed one’s fingers, it is necessary to speak it as it
looks. New Labour, faced with a near-impossible historic task, has not
fully confronted its challenge. Instead, it has been looking for easy –
‘Third’ – ways out, craftily triangulating all the troubling questions,
trying to finesse the difficulties. It may therefore turn out to be a
half-way decent Labour government, one which one would have been
grateful to have in ‘normal’ circumstances. The times – and the task –
however, are exceptional. And the higher the spin doctors pump up the
balloon, the more firmly one becomes aware how much of it is hot air.
What we knew after Thatcher was that the new right could respond
to the new historical conditions, though the results of its attempt to
do so were an unmitigated disaster. But could the left? The left was
certainly not in good shape when New Labour took office. However,
the fact is that Mr Blair does not seem to have any deep political roots
in its hopes and traditions. He is in some ways a modern man, at
ease with some of the changes which now characterise our world. But,
politically, he is essentially a post-Thatcherite figure, in the sense that
the experience of Thatcherism was, it seems, his shaping and formative
political experience.
So, try as he may to find an alternative ground on which to stand, he
finds the imperatives of a soft Christian humanism more compelling;
its cadences come to him more naturally than those of the centre left.
He is an able and clever politician and has become a clever, even to some
a charismatic, leader. Just now he is basking in the power a landslide
majority has conferred on him. And, far from betraying his principles,
he seems totally and honestly persuaded that what he is doing is right.
He has and will continue to make many important adjustments to
the legacy he inherited. There is also a genuine humanity which one
would have been unwise to put any money on in Mrs Thatcher. They
are similar figures, but they are not the same.
However, the difficult truth seems to be that the Blair project, in
its overall analysis and key assumptions, is still essentially framed by
and moving on terrain defined by Thatcherism. Mrs Thatcher had a
project. Blair’s historic project is adjusting Us to It. That touches half
– the modernising part – of the task, as Marxism Today argued it.

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But the other, more difficult, half – that of the left reinventing a
genuinely modern response to the crisis of our times – has been largely
abandoned. At the global and domestic levels, the broad parameters of
the ‘turn’ which Thatcherism made have not been radically modified
or reversed. The project of renewal thus remains roughly where it did
when Marxism Today published its final issue. Mr Blair seems to have
learned some of the words. But, sadly, he has forgotten the music.

Notes

1. Geoff Mulgan’s piece in the special 1998 issue was entitled ‘A Whinge
and a Prayer’, and was included as a dissenting voice.
2. The Guardian, 28 September 1998.
3. Frank Field was welfare reform minister in Blair’s first government,
working under Harriet Harman, who was Secretary of State for Social
Security. The two clashed, and in a 1998 reshuffle both were removed
from their posts.

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 New Labour’s double-shuffle
2003

he Labour election victory in 1997 took place at a moment of

T great political opportunity. Thatcherism had been decisively
rejected by the electorate. But eighteen years of Thatcherite rule had
radically altered the social, economic and political terrain in British
society. There was therefore a fundamental choice of directions for the
incoming government.
One was to offer an alternative radical strategy to Thatcherism,
attuned to the shifts which had occurred in the 1970s and 1980s;
with equal social and political depth, but based on radically
different principles. Two basic calculations supported this view.
What Thatcherism seemed to have ruled out was both another bout
of Keynesian welfare-state social democracy, Wilsonian-style, and
another instalment of old-style nationalisation. More significantly,
Thatcherism had evolved not just an effective occupancy of power, but
a broad hegemonic basis for its authority. This ‘revolution’ had deep
philosophical foundations as well as an effective popular strategy. It
was grounded in a radical remodelling of state and economy and the
‘colonising’ of civil society by a new neoliberal common-sense. Its
effects were ‘epochal’ (i.e. defined a new political stage).
This was not likely to be reversed by a mere rotation of the electoral
wheel of fortune. The historic opportunities for the left required bold,
imaginative thinking and decisive action in the early stages of taking
power, signalling a new direction. Critical to this was a ‘transitional
programme’ – a few critical examples, popular but radical, like raising
taxes to repair the destruction of the social fabric, a re-invention of
the state education system and the reversal of the very unpopular
privatisation of rail – to be introduced at once, chosen for their
indicative significance.
As critics, we had concentrated on this Thatcherite reconstruction of
the political/ideological terrain. On this, we were fundamentally right.

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But we may have underestimated the degree to which all this was itself
related to much deeper global shifts – the new post-industrial society,
the struggle by capital to restore its ‘right to manage’, the ‘globalisation’
of the international economy (which was its way out of that impasse),
the technological revolution and the rise of a new individualism and
the hegemony of neoliberal free-market ideas. This was the sea-change
which overtook the world in the 1970s. It still constitutes the ‘horizon’
which everybody – including the left – is required to address.
The other choice was, of course, to adapt to Thatcherite/neoliberal
terrain. There were plenty of indications that this would be New
Labour’s preferred direction: Peter Mandelson’s book, for example,
and the revisionist ideas peddled in this triumphalist phase by the
New Labour intelligentsia – ‘differences between left and right are
obsolete’; ‘there is no alternative’ (to neoliberal globalisation); ‘we
have no objection to people becoming filthy rich’ – provided clear
evidence of the kind of re-thinking in progress in inner New Labour
circles.1 Certainly one had no illusions about what ‘taking power as
New Labour and governing as New Labour’ implied. Martin Jacques
and I wrote an article for The Observer called ‘Thatcherism With a
Human Face?’ on the Sunday before the 1997 election, which cast
us irrevocably into outer political darkness. We knew that, once
squandered, such a moment would be lost for many years, perhaps
forever. We had a strong premonition that New Labour had already
made strategic choices which put it irrevocably on the second track.
And so it turned out. In a profound sense, New Labour has adapted
to neoliberal terrain – but in a significant and distinctive way. Its critics
are still not sufficiently clear about what the nature of that adaptation
is. Its novelty – if not in terms of what it consists of, then in how
the elements are combined – is not well understood. Still, it took
only a few weeks in 1997 for the basic direction to become crystal
clear: the fatal decision to follow Conservative spending priorities and
commitments, the sneering renunciation of redistribution (‘tax and
spend’), the demonisation of its critics (‘Old Labour’), the new ethos of
managerial authoritarianism (‘We know that we are right’), the quasi-
religious air of righteous conviction (‘Either for us or against us’), and
the reversal of the historic commitment to equality, universality and
collective social provision.
The welfare state had been Labour’s greatest achievement, then
savaged and weakened under Mrs Thatcher. Its deconstruction was

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to be New Labour’s historic mission. The two-tier society, corporate

greed and the privatisation of need were inevitable corollaries. This was
glossed positively as ‘modernisation’ – who could possibly be against
it? The linguistic operation – generating a veritable flowering of Third
Way waffle, double-talk, evasions and ‘spin’, depending on which
audience was being addressed – was critical to the whole venture.
The prime minister’s recent claims that New Labour’s reforms
of schools and hospitals (i.e. the re-introduction of selectivity and
creeping privatisation) are ‘firmly within Labour’s historic battle for
social justice’, or that foundation hospitals are fully in line with the
efforts of Nye Bevan to create a universal NHS which would de-
commodify health care – that such hospitals are really designed to
‘give power back to local communities’ rather than to open the door to
private investment – are only the most recent, blatant examples. The
shamelessness of this widespread evasiveness – being economical with
the truth as a principle of government – and the profound contempt
for the electorate it implies, has gone far to corrupt the whole political
culture. Cynicism and political apathy have inevitably followed. (New
Labour ‘spin’ has it that falling electoral participation is a sign of mass
contentment. But what is the point of voting, if the result is a New
Labour administration which agrees with the Tories on fundamentals,
only with bells on?)
New Labour does have a long-term strategy, ‘a project’: through
what Antonio Gramsci called a process of ‘transformism’, the aim
is to adapt social democracy from above into a particular variant of
free-market neoliberalism. However, it remains fashionable to deny
that anything like a project is at work here. Even the disenchanted
cling desperately to the hope that English pragmatism will prevail.
New Labour’s reasoned critics – Roy Hattersley, Frank Dobson, Chris
Smith, Bill Morris, even Polly Toynbee – remain ‘loyal’ (but to what?).
They look hopefully for signs that New Labour will of its own accord
– now that the second term is spinning out of control, perhaps in the
third? – refashion itself into something different. The key thing to say
about New Labour is that its so-called ‘pragmatism’ is the English
face it is obliged to wear in order to ‘govern’ in one set of interests
while maintaining electoral support in another. It isn’t fundamentally
pragmatic, any more than Thatcherism was – which doesn’t mean that
it isn’t constantly making things up on the run. In relation to the
NHS, Mrs Thatcher too was pragmatic in the short run (‘The NHS

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is safe in our hands!’), but strategically an anti-pragmatist. As with

the miners, she knew when to withdraw in order to fight again, more
effectively, another day.
Pragmatism is the crafty, incremental implementation of a strategic
programme – being flexible about the way you push it through,
giving ground when the opposition is hot, tactically revising your
formulations when necessary. (Having given us ‘the enabling state’
and the celebration of ‘risk’, the distinguished Third Way guru
Anthony Giddens now effortlessly slips us on to ‘the ensuring
state’ – as more businesses absolve themselves of their pensions
obligations.) Pragmatism requires modestly shifting the emphases
to catch the current political wind, saying what will keep traditional
‘heartland’ supporters happy (‘It can come across a bit technocratic,
a bit managerial’ – the PM), whilst always returning to an inflexible
ideological base-line (‘the fundamental direction in which we are
leading the country is correct’ – the PM). Of course, there will be
a thousand scams and devices dreamed up by New Labour’s blue-
skies policy-wonks, as ‘government is re-invented’ – for that is the
mission of the policy-advisers-turned-civil-servants in the No.10
policy, strategy and innovation units, and the New Labour-inclined
‘think-tanks’ (the IPPR, Demos). But unerringly, at the strategic level,
the project returns to its watch-words: ‘wealth-creation’, ‘reform’ and
‘modernisation’.
There is a dominant strategy or logic at work here, and
fundamentally it is neoliberal in character. Thus New Labour has
worked – both domestically and globally (through the institutions of
‘global governance’ such as the IMF, the WTO, the World Bank, etc)
– to set the corporate economy free, securing the conditions necessary
for its effective operation at home and globally. It has renounced the
attempts to graft wider social goals on to the corporate world. (Will
Hutton’s project of ‘stake-holder power’ lasted all of five minutes.)
It has deregulated labour and other markets, maintained restrictive
trade union legislation, and established relatively weak and compliant
regulatory regimes. The rail regulator, for example, cuts train services
and raises fares in order to make rail more ‘efficient’; it mainly serves
as the conduit for substantial public subsidies to inefficient private
firms, taking the risk out of investment, but still cannot find a public
alternative to the railways’ fragmented structure. The new broadcasting
regulator’s main purpose seems to be to dismantle the barriers which

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currently prevent global interests like Murdoch from buying at will

into and monopolising British press and media channels.
New Labour has spread far and wide the gospel of ‘market
fundamentalism’ – markets and market criteria as the true measure of
value. It has ‘cosied up to business’, favouring its interests in multiple
public and private ways (from the Formula One cigarette advertising
scandal onwards). The trend to inequality has grown exponentially
during its administrations, escalating towards American proportions.
‘The rich now have a bigger share of the nation’s post-tax income than
at any time under Mrs Thatcher’ (Michael Meacher). It has protected
corporate boardroom greed, and promoted business influence
in shaping social agendas favourable to its interests at the heart of
government (the connections of those advising the government on GM
and environmental issues with pharmaceutical and bio-technology
corporate interests have only just come to light). It has promoted the
image of ‘the businessman’ and ‘the entrepreneur’ as the principal
social role model, spreading the gospel of ‘entrepreneurial values’
(‘efficiency’, ‘choice’, ‘selectivity’) through the land. It has pursued a
splendidly variable range of privatisations – sustaining the sell-off of
critical public assets (transport, the London tube, air-traffic control,
the postal services); forcing the public sector to ‘mimic’ the market in
its internal operations, fatally blurring the public/private distinction
(Public Finance Initiatives, public-private ‘partnerships’); and stealthily
opening doors for private investment in, and the corporate penetration
of, parts of the public sector (the prison service, schools, the NHS).
Every media debate as to whether the latest creeping privatisation is
‘really privatisation’ is a form of trivial pursuit.
However, New Labour has adapted the fundamental neoliberal
programme to suit its conditions of governance – that of a social
democratic government trying to govern in a neoliberal direction
while maintaining its traditional working-class and public-sector
middle-class support, with all the compromises and confusions that
entails. It has modified the classic anti-statist stance of American-
style neoliberalism by a ‘re-invention of active government’. This is
not a return to government as we have known it, but a revolution
in ‘governance’.2 The term ‘governance’ is itself another shifty New
Labour concept: not a synonym for ‘government’ but the signifier of
‘a new process of governing, a changed condition of ordered rule’,
specifically designed to blur the difference between state and civil

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society.3 As Paul Du Gay argues, this involves ‘a new rationality of

rule’, in which ‘political government has been re-structured in the
name of an economizing logic’.
‘Entrepreneurial governance’, its advocates advise, promotes
competition between service providers, favours the shift from
bureaucracy to ‘community’, focuses not on inputs but on outcomes
(delivery), redefines clients as consumers, decentralises authority
through ‘participatory management’, and prefers market mechanisms
to administrative ones.4 Its neoliberal origins are hard to disguise.
Far from breaking with neoliberalism, ‘entrepreneurial governance’
constitutes its continuation – but in a transformed way. ‘To govern
better the state is to govern less but more “entrepreneurially”’ (Du Gay).
The entrenched New Labour orthodoxy is that only the private
sector is ‘efficient’ in a measurable way. The public sector is, by
definition, ‘inefficient’ and out of date, partly because it has social
objectives beyond economic efficiency and value-for-money.
It can only save itself by becoming more like the market. This is
the true meaning of ‘modernisation’. As Alan Finlayson argues,
‘modernisation’ is a loosely performative speech-act, in the sense that
it ‘acquires meaning and force only in the moment of its usage … It
is an “up” word, that makes things sound exciting, progressive and
positive … [Its] usage helps generate an appearance of structured and
unified thinking … It helps to render “natural” and un-contestable
that which is not necessarily so’.5
Part of its purpose is to establish a permanent divide between new
sheep and old goats. Public sector workers who oppose this drift are
represented as immured in the past, seriously ‘out of date’ and therefore
‘the enemy within’. They too must be ‘modernised’. Of course, in
fact they are grossly under-rewarded in relation to the private sector,
and deeply excluded as partners in the drive to improve the services
they actually deliver – the objects, but never the subjects, of ‘reform’.
The prime minister advised them to think of themselves more as
‘social entrepreneurs’. Meanwhile, the whole concept of ‘the public
interest’ and ‘the public good’ has collapsed. It too has been declared
obsolete. New Labour’s critics on the left or media commentators are
too embarrassed to invoke it. The proposition that markets are the
only measure of ‘the social good’ – advanced by Hayek, adopted by
Mrs Thatcher and reinvented by New Labour – has been swallowed,
hook, line and sinker. Marketisation is now installed in every sphere of

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government. This silent revolution in ‘governance’ seamlessly connects

Thatcherism to New Labour. It is the code which underpins the
‘jargon’ which New Labour ministers spout in their sleep. It is uttered
as ‘truth’ by New Labour’s welfare intellectuals from the hallowed
walls of places like the LSE.

The new managerialism

During the 1980s, sceptical critics used to ask how the analysis of
Thatcherite ideology affected ‘the real world’. One answer then – and
it is now even more the case – is through the practices of manage-
ment. Apparently simply a neutral social technology, ‘The New
Managerialism’ is really the vehicle by means of which neoliberal ideas
actually inform institutional practices. In New Labour’s case, in the
public sector, this is via the ‘New Public Management’ approach. This
involves the marketisation of the state’s governing and administra-
tive practices, the transformation of public service individuals into
‘entrepreneurial subjects’ and the adaptation of the machinery of state
to the ‘mission’ of ‘entrepreneurial governance’. Central to this recon-
struction of governance and the state is the enthusiastic adoption of a
‘Public Choice’ approach to the public sector. This ‘shift[s] the balance
of incentives [from input to delivery, and] … in Britain in the 1980s
led to the contracting out of services, the spread of internal markets
and outright privatisation’ (Making sense, p111). It is the main source
of the drive to reconstitute citizens as consumers.6
To its influence we now owe the boring repetition of ‘choice’ as one
of the key ‘modern’ values in Tony Blair’s discourse. Actually, there
is no identified groundswell of public demand for more ‘choice’ in
the abstract. Undoubtedly, many people would quite like to be able
to choose a good secondary school for their children and an efficient
hospital to be ill in, wherever they live and however rich or poor they
may be – a quite different matter. However, repeating that ‘choice’ is
a wide-spread demand is a way of making what is affirmed as a fact
but is really only a prophecy, self-fulfilling, on the principle that ‘those
things which people can be made to believe is true will be “true” (i.e.
“real”) in their effects’. As the prime minister said, in a classic instance
of Third Way gobble-de-gook, ‘Choice enhances quality of provision
for the poorest, helping to tackle inequalities while it also strengthens

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middle class commitment to collective provision’.7 He added that the

purpose of public service reform was ‘to deliver in a modern, consumer-
focused fashion’. As Catherine Needham rightly observed, ‘ministers
have begun to step back from the explicit language of consumerism
and competition, while still continuing to endorse the principles
behind them’ (Citizen-Consumers, p25).
The New Public Management ‘empowers’ civil servants to abandon
the principles of political impartiality and, like private-sector CEOs,
‘take ownership’ of their sectors, in a more ‘agency-driven’ style (the
doctrine embodied in the famous ‘Next Steps’ document). It replaces
professional judgement and control by the wholesale importation
of micro-management practices of audit, inspection, monitoring,
efficiency and value-for money, despite the fact that neither their public
role nor their public interest objectives can be adequately reframed
in this way. For this purpose, we require an army of managers,
who know little of the content of their field, but everything about
strategies of managerial control – and a regiment of consultants to
advise clients how to ‘creatively’ fudge their monitors. More widely, it
fosters the concerted drive to introduce corporate business leaders into
every sector of public life in order to spread a climate favourable to
‘entrepreneurialism’. As the private corporations and advisers on loan
from business become more and more practically entrenched at the
centre of government, and their representatives actively ‘volunteered’
at more local levels, so ‘the corporate enterprise’ itself becomes
progressively the new model of the state …
The state’s ‘educative’ function combines intensive micro-
management and centralisation of targets with more strategic
interventions exercised ‘culturally’ and ‘at a distance’. The latter is a
neo-Foucauldian ‘governmentality’ approach – controlling behaviour
and outcomes not by direct constraints but through the consent and
‘freedom’ of individuals (which may explain why neo-Foucauldians
like Nikolas Rose are so favourably mesmerised by it). This approach
does not require a mass conversion to entrepreneurial values (another
error made by critics of our analysis in the 1980s). Instead, knowing
that individuals can occupy various subject positions, the New
Managerialism aims to reproduce all of us in the new position of
practising ‘entrepreneurial subjects’, by fostering certain ‘capacities’
while down-grading others, shifting individual behaviour indirectly by
altering the environment in which people work, and operationalising

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new values by ‘modernising’ old practices. You change what individuals

do not by changing their minds but by changing their practices, and
thus the ‘culture’.
The wider point is to inculcate in the population at large a new
habitus (‘culture-change’): making into a new kind of common sense
those habits and practices which the new ‘free-market’, consumer-
focused conception of ‘governance’ requires. This approach is effective
well outside the machinery of state. Slowly but surely, everybody
– even if kicking and screaming to the end – becomes his/her own
kind of ‘manager’. The market and market criteria become entrenched
as the modus operandi of ‘governance’ and institutional life. Media
commentators and the press know no other language with which to
address public issues. They may object to this or that piece of New
Labour over-centralised ‘managerialism’, but seem unable to place
the logic from which these arise. Democracy has long since faded
as a practical ideal. Except in the banal form of ‘liberal democracy’,
Tony Blair has not had a single thought on the subject over two terms
in government. The general public seems to have swallowed this
managerialist discourse whole.
The passing-off of market fundamentalism as ‘the new common
sense’ has helped to drive home the critical lesson which underpins
the ‘reform’ of the welfare state: the role of the state ‘nowadays’ is not
to support the less fortunate or powerful in a society which ‘naturally’
produces huge inequalities of wealth, power and opportunity, but
to help individuals themselves to provide for all their social needs –
health, education, environmental, travel, housing, parenting, security
in unemployment, pensions in old age, etc. Those who can – the
new middle-class majority – must. The rest – the residuum – must
be ‘targeted’, means-tested, and kept to a minimum of provision
lest the burden threaten ‘wealth creation’. This is what we used to
call ‘the one third/two thirds strategy’, and is now referred to as ‘the
two-tier society’. New Labour, of course, says it cannot recognise
the phenomenon. However, it is manifestly the lynchpin of public
sector ‘modernisation’. It sounds the death-knell to the old notion
of ‘the public realm’, the social conception of the individual (‘There
is no such thing as society’) and the basic social-democratic idea of
collective provision.

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A double regime

New Labour is therefore confusing in the signals it gives off, and

difficult to characterise as a regime. It constantly speaks with forked
tongue. It combines economic neoliberalism with a commitment to
‘active government’. More significantly, its grim alignment with the
broad global interests and values of corporate capital and power –
the neoliberal project, which is in the leading position in its political
repertoire – is paralleled by another, subaltern programme, of a more
social-democratic kind, running alongside. This is what people invoke
when they insist, defensively, that New Labour is not, after all, ‘neolib-
eral’. The fact is that New Labour is a hybrid regime, composed of two
strands. However, one strand – the neoliberal – is in the dominant
position. The other strand – the social democratic – is subordinate.
What’s more, its hybrid character is not simply a static formation; it
is the process which combines the two elements which matters. The
process is ‘transformist’. The latter always remains subordinate to and
dependent on the former, and is constantly being ‘transformed’ into the
former, dominant one.
How can we explain New Labour’s double character? The political
scientist Andrew Gamble long ago pointed out that left parties
in government are often subject to contrary pulls – one towards
realising their governmental programme, the other towards doing
what is necessary to win electoral support and hold on to power.
These frequently conflict. New Labour’s subaltern programme is
driven by the second of those imperatives. It is the necessary ‘cost’
of maintaining loyalty amongst its traditional supporters, whilst its
governmental project favours a quite different set of interests. This
is not necessarily just opportunistic calculation. Many Labour MPs
have persuaded themselves that New Labour is still fundamentally
attached to ‘old’ Labour values, which will somehow eventually
reassert themselves; and the Blair government itself defends its
massive departures from these old values by rhetorically ‘spinning’
its verbal continuity with them. It must therefore find space in its
programme to address these subordinate pressures and constituencies
– provided they are not allowed to derail the progress towards a more
developed market state. Thus New Labour’s ‘balancing act’, its two-
step shuffle – and the way it has become mired in endless ‘spin’ in
order to square the impossible circle.

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 NEW LABOUR ’ S DOUBLE-SHUFFLE 311

There is another consideration. The full-blown neoliberal drive to

the market state we saw in Thatcherism had its costs. Its brutalism
antagonised many in society, including some of its original supporters.
People thought neoliberalism ‘red in tooth and claw’ a step too far.
Even many of Mrs T’s most fervent converts eventually abandoned
her for reasons of electoral calculation. But moving to the full blown
market state via a subordinated social-democratic route has the
advantage of addressing some of the problems of ‘the residuals’ and
losers – those who are likely to benefit least from the neoliberal route.
It also takes account of some of the ‘costs’ and the social upheaval
which its ‘transformism’ will create. It is authentically a ‘hegemonic’
strategy, even though it may not be capable of producing a stable
hegemonic outcome. It aims to win enough consent as it goes, and
to build subordinate demands back into its dominant logic. Forging
a plausible or pragmatic pathway from left to right, carrying a
proportion of its old supporters with it on particular points, dividing
and confusing the oppositions, and winning a measure of consent
for the project, may serve to establish neoliberal society on firmer,
less contested foundations. Certainly, the confusion which its
double-headed strategy sows in its own ranks obscures the long-term
objective and prevents a coherent and organised opposition from
emerging. The social-democratic route to neoliberalism may turn out
in the end to be what Lenin might have called ‘the best shell’ for
global capitalism.
This subordinate part of the New Labour programme involves a
certain measure of indirect taxation and redistribution, reforms like
the minimum wage, family tax credits, inducements to return to work
(the high visibility given to ‘skills and training’, however, is solidly in
line with the neoliberal emphasis on ‘the supply side’). To this we also
owe, in the second term, the build up of concern about the delivery
of public services, including a substantial injection of public funds
into health and education. In a retrospective gloss, New Labour now
suggests that the latter was always what it intended for its second
term, but the evidence for this is not compelling. In its first term it
systematically demonised the public sector and redistribution, and
was consistently and unapologetically ‘entrepreneurial’. Failing public
services surfaced as an issue, unannounced and unanticipated, towards
the end of the first term, around the time of the resignation of Peter
Kilfoyle, when the disillusionment amongst New Labour’s ‘heartland’

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traditional supporters had reached fever pitch; it was clearly forced on

to New Labour’s political agenda from the outside.
Public service delivery in the second term is really the key to
understanding how this hybrid New Labour regime functions. New
Labour is committed to improving the delivery of public services.
But its means of achieving this are impeccably ‘new managerialist’.
Redistribution, where it occurs, must be by stealth, lest a more vocal
and organised constituency should develop around it. New Labour
has set its stony face against enlisting public service workers and
professionals in the enterprise. It refuses to countenance a return
to a more full-blooded ‘mixed’ public/private regime (hence the
unrelenting vendetta against Ken Livingstone about funding the
tube). Instead, it has adopted the top-down managerialist approach
of centralised control, supplemented by the rich panoply of ‘the
audit culture’: the exponential expansion of public service managers
over professionals at the coal face; unachievable targets; socially
uninformative league tables; perpetual monitoring; moralistic
‘shaming’; the merciless proliferation of pointless bureaucratic
detail; the introduction of selectivity under the guise of ‘diversity’
(another piece of linguistic expropriation); vulgar hectoring by
public sector ministers retrained in the new, ‘bruiser school’ of New
Labour leadership (Prescott, Blunkett, Clarke, Reid); and the novel,
contradictory strategy of ‘tough love’.
In public service ‘reform’, how does the articulation of the subaltern
‘social democratic’ part of the repertoire with the dominant, neoliberal
part operate? Every change in the public sector must be accompanied
by a further tightening of the ‘modernising’ screw, as the unshakeable
trade-off of a certain kind of ‘reform’. The public think the aim here
is ‘better delivery’. The government knows that the price which must
be paid for this is ‘more modernisation’. Nothing – however good
or necessary – is allowed to happen which is not accompanied by
another dose of ‘reform’. And the kind of ‘reform’ implied must meet
the following criteria: (a) it must open the door to private investment
or blur the public/private distinction; (b) it must meet market criteria
of efficiency and value-for-money; (c) it must put managerial authority
in command; (d) it must reform working practices in a less collective,
more individualised direction; (e) it must stimulate competition and
divide workers by introducing incentive pay schemes and undermining
collective bargaining; (f) it must weaken the bargaining power of the

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unions; (g) it must reduce the size of the workforce and the cost of
the service; (h) it must hold public sector pay in line well behind the
private sector; (i) the service must be remodelled along ‘two-tier’ lines
by introducing selectivity. In short, marketisation and privatisation,
whether frontally or incrementally introduced, is what ‘reform’ now
means. This type of ‘modernisation’ is the New Labour ‘trade-off ’ for
any kind of change.
Take the fire-fighters’ dispute.8 Of course, a modern fire service
should function efficiently. Fire-fighters deserve to be well paid for
the risks they take on our behalf, and in return should have their
paramedical skills and professional levels enhanced. ‘Spanish practices’,
where they exist, serve no useful social purpose. But New Labour is
determined that they should not get a penny more unless and until
they first submit to new forms of managerial control imposed from
above, and at the cost of cuts in the labour force and the number of
fire stations.
New Labour ‘hybridisation’ has its political antecedents. Its
immediate ancestor is Clintonian triangulation. Clinton borrowed
from the Democrats, borrowed from the Republicans, and moved the
whole wagon-train further towards the market – a ‘knight’s move’,
or three-pronged shift, which was very influential in New Labour
thinking in its early stages, and even more so when Clinton was able
to bring off the much-envied prize of a second election victory. The
essence of this ‘transformism’ game depends on pulling selectively,
and in an ordered hierarchy, from opposing political repertoires,
maintaining a double-address to their different ‘publics’, so that you
can advance a ‘radical’ (sic) overall strategy of governance, on the one
hand, while maintaining electoral support and securing a third term
on the other. The subordinate agenda – redistribution, belated public
investment, public service ‘delivery’, etc – has to do, essentially, with
this second goal. That is the crucial ‘double-shuffle’ or ‘triple-play’
involved in the New Labour project. It delivers what Philip Bobbit
calls ‘the market state’, or, more simply, a ‘social democratic variant of
neoliberalism’ (in exactly the same way that Thatcherism delivered a
‘neoliberal variant’ of classic Conservatism). No prizes for identifying
the common thread!
This is the principal reason why ‘spin’ is an essential and organic
part of the New Labour project; it is not a surface excrescence, as
many critics fondly suppose. ‘Spin’ has the obvious purpose of putting

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a favourable gloss on everything. It turns every argument, by a

rhetorical sleight-of-hand, in New Labour’s favour. It is a sign of the
reduction of politics to public relations and the manipulation of public
opinion. But ‘spin’ also has the much deeper function of ‘squaring
circles’: re-presenting a broadly neoliberal project, favourable to the
global interests of corporate capital and the rich, in such a way that it
can mobilise the popular consent of Labour voters and supporters, the
trades unions and the less-well-off in society. This sleight-of-hand can
only be done by continuously sliding one agenda into or underneath
another. The New Labour phenomenon of linguistic slippage is thus
a function of its double-pronged mode of address. It spins the word
‘reform’, with its positive associations – the Reform Acts, the Factory
Acts, the welfare state, etc – until it somehow becomes equivalent to
its absolute opposite – marketisation! It masks the consistent shift of
direction from public to private, by exploiting the vagaries of words
like ‘change’ – or ‘radical’ – which can point in any direction (after
all, even Mussolini made the trains run on time!). Choice, which is
designed to introduce selectivity and the private sector, is represented
as part of an anti-inequality strategy. ‘Spin’ mobilises a concept’s
positive resonances – and transfers this charge to a very different,
usually contrary, idea.
Take the NHS. It remains ‘free at the point of delivery’ (actually, it
isn’t, but let that pass for a moment). Of course some public hospitals
will now be built by private construction companies on PFI terms,
whose real costs will only become clear two or three generations ahead,
and some of its services will be delivered by private American or British
pharmaceutical or health service companies to foundation hospitals
which have been ‘freed’ to raise funds and compete for staff. Who cares
that this is all at the expense of the general social provision of health
care and the founding principle of universality, and will create a two-
tier service? You foreground the pragmatic practicalities of ‘delivery’
in order to silence these other awkward questions about principle
and purpose you would prefer not to have to answer. What ‘delivery’
presumes is that no-one any longer cares who owns, runs, controls
or profits from, health-care, providing the possessively-individual
consumer’s personal need is satisfied. The reduction of the citizen to
consumer, and the ‘privatisation of need’ at the centre of the market
model, are thus the absolutely crucial but unspoken foundations to
this strategy. New Labour not only banks on the fact that this shift has

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 NEW LABOUR ’ S DOUBLE-SHUFFLE 315

occurred, but is actively ‘spinning’ to bring it about. It is not a passive

victim of sociological change but an active agent in its unravelling.
If people think of themselves as having a stake in the NHS, then it
matters to them who owns it, what principles inform its operation. But
if they can be induced, by relentless ‘spin’, to think of the NHS only in
the individualist terms of ‘I need a better bed’, or ‘I need to move faster
up the waiting list’, then they won’t mind who produces it or whether
health becomes a lucrative site of private sector investment. It’s simply
one more ‘market’ response to consumer demand.
At the moment, the resistance to the New Labour project is coming
mainly from the backwash of the invasion of Iraq and Blair’s decision
to commit Britain, wholesale and without qualification, as an ancillary
support to the US drive to global hegemony. No account of the New
Labour project would be complete without taking into account how
its domestic programme fits into its global mission to push through a
global neoliberal agenda and the dependency this has produced in the
foreign policy and geopolitical domains. The account offered here is
therefore incomplete. However, it does have a political purpose. The
New Labour ‘project’ is a complex political initiative and we need to
understand its complexities better than we do. The idea that it has simply,
like Topsy, grown higgledy-piggledy by its own accord, is nonsense.
Now that there are serious forces wishing to distance themselves from
the overall goals, we need to build the different, particular points of
opposition (the war, the US alliance, foundation hospitals, selectivity
in education, private-public initiatives, the reconstruction of the NHS,
the trade union opposition to privatisation, etc) into a more substantive
and integrated critique, in order that a more concerted and coherent
vision – and the political forces to make it popular and put it into effect
– can emerge. The two years between now and the next election are just
enough time to construct an alternative political project for/from the
left. Failing this, beyond the election awaits a third installation of New
Labour’s double shuffle, or – Heaven forfend – IDS!

Notes

1. Peter Mandelson was one of the main architects of New Labour. He was
co-author of The Blair Revolution: Can New Labour Deliver? Faber 1996;
and The Blair Revolution Revisited (2nd ed), Politicos 2002.

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2. See Modernising Government White Paper, HMSO 1999.

3. R. Rhodes, ‘The New Governance: Governing without Government’,
Political Studies 44 1996.
4. David Osborne and Ted Gaebler, Reinventing Government: How the
Entrepreneurial Spirit is Transforming the Public Sector, Addison Wesley
1992.
5. Alan Finlayson, Making Sense of New Labour, L&W 2003, p67.
6. For a critique, see Catherine Needham’s pamphlet, Citizen-Consumers,
Catalyst 2003.
7. Tony Blair, The Courage of Our Convictions: why reform of the public ser-
vices is the route to social justice, Fabian Society 2002, p28.
8. The FBU were engaged in a bitter dispute with the Labour government
from 2002 to 2003, which ended in a 16 per cent pay increase linked to
imposed changes in working conditions. As a result of this the FBU dis-
affiliated from Labour in 2004. ‘Spanish practices’ refers to trade union
practices – usually those that have developed over years of custom and
practice – that give advantages to workers that are regarded as unjustifi-
able by management and, at times, broader publics.

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 The neoliberal revolution
2011

ow do we make sense of our extraordinary political situation:

H the end of the debt-fuelled boom, the banking crisis of 2007-10,
the defeat of New Labour and the rise to power of a Conservative-
Liberal-Democratic Coalition? What sort of crisis is this? Is it a
serious wobble in the trickle-down, win-win, end-of-boom-and-bust
economic model which has dominated global capitalism? Does it
presage business as usual, the deepening of present trends, or the
mobilisation of social forces for a radical change of direction? Is this
the start of a new conjuncture?
Gramsci argued that, though the economic must never be forgotten,
conjunctural crises are never solely economic, or economically-
determined ‘in the last instance’. They arise when a number of
contradictions at work in different key practices and sites come
together – or ‘con-join’ – in the same moment and political space,
and, as Althusser said, ‘fuse in a ruptural unity’.1 Analysis here focuses
on crises and breaks, and the distinctive character of the ‘historic
settlements’ which follow. The condensation of forces during a period
of crisis, and the new social configurations which result, mark a new
‘conjuncture’.
My argument is that the present situation is a crisis, another
unresolved rupture of that conjuncture which we can define as ‘the
long march of the Neoliberal Revolution’. Each crisis since the 1970s
has looked different, arising from specific historical circumstances.
However, they also seem to share some consistent underlying features,
to be connected in their general thrust and direction of travel.
Paradoxically, opposed political regimes have all contributed in
different ways to expanding this project.
The term ‘neoliberal’ is not a satisfactory one. Its reference to the
shaping influence of capitalism on modern life sounds recidivist to
contemporary ears. Intellectual critics say the term lumps together

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too many things to merit a single identity; it is reductive, sacrificing

attention to internal complexities and geohistorical specificity. I
sympathise with this critique. However, I think there are enough
common features to warrant giving it a provisional conceptual
identity, provided this is understood as a first approximation. Even
Marx argued that analysis yields understanding at different levels
of abstraction, and critical thought often begins with a ‘chaotic’
abstraction – though we then need to add ‘further determinations’
in order to ‘reproduce the concrete in thought’. I would also argue
that naming neoliberalism is politically necessary, to give resistance
content, focus and a cutting edge.
Pragmatism may account in part for this scepticism about
neoliberalism as a concept: English intellectuals often cannot see the
practical efficacy of long-term, theoretical ideas. A discussion on, say,
the principles behind capital punishment quickly degenerates into
a debate on whether hanging, drawing or quartering best achieves
the purpose. I recall that many refused to apply the term ‘project’ to
Thatcherism and New Labour, though it was crystal clear that neither
political formation had been instituted by sleep-walkers, driven
by purely pragmatic imperatives. But in English common sense,
pragmatism often rules.

The neoliberal model

What, then, are the leading ideas of the neoliberal model? We can
only pull at one thread here. However anachronistic it may seem,
neoliberalism is grounded in the ‘free, possessive individual’, with the
state cast as tyrannical and oppressive. The welfare state, in particular,
is the arch enemy of freedom. The state must never govern society,
dictate to free individuals how to dispose of their private property,
regulate a free-market economy or interfere with the God-given right
to make profits and amass personal wealth. State-led ‘social engi-
neering’ must never prevail over corporate and private interests. It
must not intervene in the ‘natural’ mechanisms of the free market,
or take as its objective the amelioration of free-market capitalism’s
propensity to create inequality. Harvey’s book offers a useful guide.2
Theodore, Peck and Brenner summarise it thus: ‘Open, competitive
and unregulated markets, liberated from state intervention and the

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 THE NEOLIBERAL REVOLUTION 319

actions of social collectivities, represent the optimal mechanism to

socio-economic development … This is the response of a revived capi-
talism to “the crisis of Keynesian welfarism” in the 70s’.3 (Capitalism’s
other response, incidentally, was to evade state intervention by ‘going
global’.)
According to the neoliberal narrative, the welfare state (propelled
by working-class reaction to the depression of the 1930s and the
popular mobilisation of World War II) mistakenly saw its task as
intervening in the economy, redistributing wealth, universalising life-
chances, attacking unemployment, protecting the socially vulnerable,
ameliorating the condition of oppressed or marginalised groups and
addressing social injustice. It tried to break the ‘natural’ (sic) link
between social needs and the individual’s capacity to pay. But its do-
gooding, utopian sentimentality enervated the nation’s moral fibre, and
eroded personal responsibility and the over-riding duty of the poor to
work. It imposed social purposes on an economy rooted in individual
greed and self interest. State intervention must never compromise the
right of private capital to ‘grow the business’, improve share value,
pay dividends and reward its agents with enormous salaries, benefits
and bonuses. The function of the liberal state should be limited to
safeguarding the conditions in which profitable competition can be
pursued without engendering Hobbes’s ‘war of all against all’.
Margaret Thatcher, well instructed by Keith Joseph, grasped
intuitively Hayek’s argument that the ‘common good’ either did not
exist or could not be calculated: ‘There is no such thing as society.
There is only the individual and his (sic) family’. She also grasped
Milton Friedman’s lesson that ‘only a crisis – actual or perceived –
produces real change. When that crisis occurs the actions that are
taken depend on the ideas that are around … our basic function [is]
to develop alternatives to existing policies … until the politically
impossible becomes politically inevitable’.4 As the free-market think-
tank, the Institute of Economic Affairs, observed during the rise of
Thatcherism, ‘the market is an idea whose time has come’. This could
well be a Coalition vision-statement.
The welfare state had made deep inroads into private capital’s
territory. To roll back that post-war ‘settlement’ and restore the
prerogatives of capital had been the ambition of its opponents ever
since Churchill dreamt in the 1950s of starting ‘a bonfire of controls’.
The crisis of the late 1960s-1970s was neoliberalism’s opportunity, and

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the Thatcher and Reagan regimes grabbed it with both hands.

Neoliberalism is also critical to contemporary geopolitics.
Structural adjustment programmes have forced the ‘developing world’
to set market forces free, and open their economies to free trade and
foreign investment, while promoting the ‘liberal’ virtues of elections,
multi-party politics, the rule of law and ‘good governance’. This was
the prescription to bring about the ‘liberal-democracy’ that Francis
Fukayama saw as marking the end of ideology and the fulfilment of
the struggle for the good life. Western super-powers have consistently
intervened globally to defend this model in recent decades.
It should be noted, of course, that neoliberalism has many variants.
There are critical differences, for example, between American, British
and European ‘social market’ versions; South East Asian state-
supported growth and Chinese ‘state capitalism’; Russia’s oligarchic/
kleptomaniac state; and the monetarist ‘experiments’ in Latin
America. Neoliberalism is not one thing. It evolves and diversifies.
Nevertheless, geopolitically, neoliberal ideas, policies and strategies
are incrementally gaining ground, re-defining the political, social and
economic model, governing the strategies and setting the pace.
As we have noted, neoliberalism’s principal target in the UK has
been the reformist social-democratic welfare state. Though this was
a radically compromised formation, which depended on dynamic
capitalist growth to create the wealth for redistribution, its full-
employment objectives, welfare support systems, the NHS, and
free comprehensive and higher education, transformed the lives of
millions. In this model the state took over some key services (water,
bus transport, the railways), but it was less successful in nationalising
productive industry (cars, energy, mining).

The liberal heritage

Where do neoliberal ideas come from? Historically, they are rooted

in the principles of ‘classic’ liberal economic and political theory.
Here we can only outline the development of this body of ideas in
summary, headline terms. Critical was the agrarian revolution, the
expansion of markets (in land, labour, agriculture and commodities)
and the rise of the first commercial-consumer society in eighteenth-
century Britain. These arose on the back of successes in war, naval

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 THE NEOLIBERAL REVOLUTION 321

supremacy over continental rivals, the expansion of commerce, the

conquest of India and a high point in the colonial slave plantation
economies, which produced – often in conditions of un-free labour,
violence and systematic degradation – commodities and profits for the
metropolitan market: ‘jewels in the crown’, as the French called Saint-
Domingue (Haiti) just before the Haitian Revolution.
Economically, its foundations lay in the rights of free men –
‘masters of all they survey and captains of their souls’ – to dispose of
their property as they saw fit, to ‘barter and truck’, as Adam Smith
put it, to make a profit and accumulate wealth, consulting only their
own interests. Smith’s The Wealth of Nations brilliantly ‘codified’ the
economic model (using as an example no industrial enterprise larger
than a pin factory!).
Marx once described this moment in the accumulation circuits
of capital as ‘the very Eden of the innate rights of man’, the source
of the lexicon of bourgeois ideas – freedom, equality, property and
‘Bentham’ (i.e. possessive individualism and self-interest):

Freedom because both buyer and seller of a commodity … are

constrained only by their own free-will. They contract as free agents
… Equality because each enters into the relation with the other as
with a simple owner of commodities and they exchange equivalent
for equivalent. Property because each disposes of what is his own.
And Bentham because each looks only to himself. The only force
that brings them together and puts them in relation with each other
is the selfishness, the gain and the private interests of each (Capital,
1, p112).

Political liberalism has its roots in the struggles of the rising classes
associated with these developments to challenge, break and displace the
tyranny of monarchical, aristocratic and landed power. Englishmen
were born free: England was the true home of Liberty. This required
the consent of free, propertied men to a limited form of state, and a
leading position for them in society as well as wider political represen-
tation. Key moments were the Civil War; the execution of Charles I;
the ‘historic compromise’ of the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688; the
successes of the rising mercantile classes in commerce and trade; and
the loss of the American colonies, but then in consolation a Lockean-
inspired Constitution for an American Republic of free propertied

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men. Then came 1789, the violence and excessive egalitarianism of

the French Revolution, the successes of the Napoleonic Wars and the
conservative reaction to civil unrest.
Industrialisation and the rise of manufacture followed in the
nineteenth century: the ‘disciplines’ of waged labour, the factory
system, the triumph of free trade, urbanisation and the industrial
slum, as Britain became ‘the workshop of the world’. Hobsbawm calls
this triumph of the bourgeois classes, and of bourgeois ideas, modes
of organisation, thought and value, ‘The Age of Capital’. But radical
currents that had awkwardly nestled beneath the commodious canopy
of liberalism now began to chart another path: the Jacobin clubs,
radicalism, the demonstrators of Peterloo, Chartism, the struggles
over the franchise, cooperative and utopian communities, the early
trade unions and friendly societies. This contradiction forced forward
the ‘age of reform’ – struggles to extend the franchise; to impose limits
on working hours, and on child and female labour; and for Catholic
Emancipation, the abolition of slavery, repeal of the Combination Acts
and the Corn Laws; but it also propelled the gradual disengagement
from Liberalism of an independent working-class interest.
Later, family businesses became consolidated into joint-stock
companies – the basis of a corporate capitalist economy – which
came to dominate domestic and imperial economic expansion. This
development underpinned Britain as centre of the largest, most far-
flung empire on earth, and facilitated the triumph of a liberal imperial
class – ‘the lords of creation’ – and their ‘civilising’ mission.
These developments over two centuries form the core of classical
liberal political and economic thought on which neoliberalism now
dreams again. But here also begin the antinomies and ambiguities of
liberalism. Political ideas of ‘liberty’ became harnessed to economic
ideas of the free market: one of liberalism’s intersecting fault-lines
which re-emerges with neoliberalism. As Edmund Burke ironically
observed: ‘It would be odd to see the Guinea captain [of a slave
ship] attempting at the same instant to publish his proclamation of
Liberty and to advertise its sale of slaves’. But this is precisely the
‘splitting’ that Liberalism practised: Progress, but simultaneously
the need to contain any ‘threat from below’; tolerance, reform,
moderation and representative government for the English race, but
colonial governmentality, discipline and authority for recalcitrant
‘other’ native peoples abroad; emancipation and subjugation; free

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 THE NEOLIBERAL REVOLUTION 323

men in London, slaves in the West Indies; freedom now for some,
an unending apprenticeship to freedom for others; the universal
language of ‘mankind’ vs the particularity of the discourse of women;
a civilising ‘mission’ that harboured an untranscended gulf between
the civilised and the barbarians; today, the ‘soft’ face of compassionate
conservatism and The Big Society here, the hard edge of cuts, workfare
and the gospel of self-reliance there.
Classic liberal ideas began to decline in the late nineteenth century.
Dangerfield cited the suffragettes, the trade unions, reform of the
House of Lords (an old aristocratic bastion) and the struggle for Irish
independence as key triggers of the ‘Strange Death of Liberal England’.
In an increasingly plutocratic society, there was a growing coalescence
between land and capital: industrialists sought respectability in their
new country piles, while the old aristocratic and landed classes were
pleased to travel to the City to invest, as the rate of profit from imperial
trade soared. The new plutocratic classes took the world market as
their oyster. But the sharpening competition with other states and the
‘scramble’ for imperial power led Lenin to describe imperialism as ‘the
highest stage of capitalism’.
Facing competition from Prussia and Japan, a New Liberalism
emerged in Britain that embraced state intervention and ‘the
community’ (as ever, a convenient half-way stop to class). The social
insurance reforms of the Liberal Coalition of 1906-11 (Lloyd George
and Churchill) laid down an early template for the welfare state. Later
on, intervention against unemployment and the struggle against
poverty – associated with Keynes and Beveridge – led the second
phase. This is a history that Nick Clegg and the Lib Dems – grumpily
clinging to the tail-coats of their Conservative Coalition allies – have
conveniently forgotten or never understood.
The 1880s to the 1920s were a critical watershed that saw the rise
of capitalist ‘mass society’: mass production, mass consumer markets,
the market way of incorporating the masses into a subaltern position
in the system, mass political parties and industrial unions, the mass
media, mass culture, mass leisure, mass sport and entertainment, mass
advertising, and new methods of marketing, testing and supplying the
‘needs’ of the masses and shaping demand – embryo forms of today’s
focus groups, life-style market segmentation, branding, personal
relations consultancies, consumer services and the rest. The ‘managerial
revolution’ – a new coalition of interests between share-holders and

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capital’s senior managers – created not bourgeois entrepreneurs but

the investor and executive classes of the giant multinational capitalist
enterprises that now span the globe.
Neoliberalism, then, evolves. It borrows and appropriates
extensively from classic liberal ideas; but each is given a further
‘market’ inflexion and conceptual revamp. Classic liberal principles
have been radically transformed to make them applicable to a
modern, global, post-industrial capitalism. In translating these ideas
to different discursive forms and a different historical moment,
neoliberalism performs a massive work of transcoding, while
remaining in sight of the lexicon on which it draws. It is able do
its dis-articulating and re-articulating work because these ideas
have long been inscribed in social practices and institutions, and
sedimented into the ‘habitus’ of everyday life, common sense and
popular consciousness – ‘traces without an inventory’.
Of course, transcoding can also be an opportunity for mystification.
Thus Tory MP Jesse Norman, in The Big Society, quotes John Donne’s
wonderful affirmation of human inter-dependence: ‘No man is an
Island … Any man’s death diminishes me because I am involved in
mankind’. Norman then goes on to quote De Tocqueville, as if he and
Donne were saying the same thing: ‘The more [the state] stands in
the place of associations, the more will individuals, losing the notion
of combining together, require its assistance’. This is a mischievous
conflation, which the editorial addition of the ‘[the state]’ has greatly
helped on its way.

Neoliberalism in the postwar period: Thatcherism and Blairism

How then has neoliberalism been nurtured, honed and developed

across the post-war conjunctures? During the years that immedi-
ately followed the second word war there was a rare interlude – the
‘Butskell’ moment – of near-consensus on the basic shape of the
welfare state and mixed economy. But as the post-war economy
revived, and the US replaced the UK as the ‘paradigm instance’,
internal tensions came increasingly to the surface. Changes in the
class structure and the spread of affluence provoked a crisis of confi-
dence on the left. ‘Can Labour survive the coming of the telly, the
washing machine, the fridge and the small car?’ Gaitskell asked

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anxiously. In the 1960s, rock music, the new youth culture, the
decline of deference, the liberating effect for women of the contra-
ceptive pill, the counterculture and mind-expanding drugs – all were
straws in the wind of trouble to come: ‘resistance through rituals’.
‘1968’ unleashed an avalanche of protest, dissent and disaffi liation:
student occupations, participatory democracy, community politics,
second-wave feminism, ‘turn on, tune in and drop out’, an ambiva-
lent libertarianism; but also the cult of ‘Che’ Guevara, Vietnam,
the IRA, industrial unrest, black power, the red brigades … While
all this was going on, in the mid-1970s, and as inflation soared,
the IMF, useful for imposing structural adjustment programmes on
Third World states, imposed one on the British Chancellor. And in
the dim light of the three-day week Ted Heath declared the country
ungovernable. The post-war ‘settlement’ had collapsed.
In 1979 Thatcherism launched its assault on society and the
Keynesian state. But simultaneously it began a fundamental
reconstruction of the socio-economic architecture with the first
privatisations. (One-nation Tory Harold Macmillan called it ‘selling
off the family silver’) Thatcherism thoroughly confused the left. Could
it be not just another swing of the electoral pendulum but the start of a
reconstruction of society along radically new, neoliberal lines?
Still, the old had to be destroyed before the new could take its place.
Margaret Thatcher conspired in a ruthless war against the cabinet ‘wets’
and simultaneously plotted to break trade union power – ‘the enemy
within’. She impelled people towards new, individualised, competitive
solutions: ‘get on your bike’, become self-employed or a share-holder,
buy your council house, invest in the property-owning democracy. She
coined a homespun equivalent for the key neoliberal ideas behind the
sea-change she was imposing on society: value for money, managing
your own budget, fiscal restraint, the money supply and the virtues of
competition. There was anger, protest, resistance – but also a surge of
populist support for the ruthless exercise of strong leadership.
Thatcherism mobilised widespread but unfocused anxiety about
social change, engineering populist calls from ‘below’ to the state
‘above’ to save the country by imposing social order. This slide towards
a ‘law and order’ society (see Policing the Crisis) was a key stage in the
contradictory advance towards ‘authoritarian populism’.5
One counter-intuitive feature was that, in the dark days of her
electoral unpopularity, Thatcher brilliantly summoned to the rescue,

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not market rationality but an archaic British nationalism. The

Falklands War allowed Thatcherism to play, when required, from
two different ideological repertoires, with resonance in apparently
opposing reservoirs of public sentiment: marching towards the future
clad in the armour of the past. ‘The market’ was a modern, rational,
efficient, practically-oriented discourse, inscribed in the everyday.
Nationalist discourse, with its imperialist undertow (what Paul Gilroy
calls its ‘melancholia’, the unrequited mourning for a lost object),
was haunted by the fantasy of a late return to the flag, family values,
national character, imperial glory and the spirit of Palmerstonian
gunboat diplomacy.
Ideology is always contradictory. There is no single, integrated
‘ruling ideology’ – a mistake we repeat again now in failing to
distinguish between conservative and neoliberal repertoires. Ideology
works best by suturing together contradictory lines of argument
and emotional investments – finding what Laclau called ‘systems
of equivalence’ between them. Contradiction is its metier. Andrew
Gamble characterised Thatcherism as combining ‘free market’/‘strong
state’. Many believed this contradiction would be Thatcherism’s
undoing. But, though not logical, few strategies are so successful at
winning consent as those which root themselves in the contradictory
elements of common sense, popular life and consciousness. Even
today, the market/free enterprise/private property discourse persists
cheek by jowl with older conservative attachments to nation, racial
homogeneity, Empire, tradition. ‘Market forces’ is good for restoring
the power of capital and destroying the redistributivist illusion. But
in moments of difficulty one can trust ‘the Empire’ to strike back.
‘The people’ will turn out to cheer the fleet returning to Plymouth
from some South Atlantic speck of land; they will line the streets of
Wootton Bassett to honour the returning dead from ‘a war without
end’ in Afghanistan. (How many remembered this was Britain’s fourth
Afghan War?)
In the end Thatcherism was too socially destructive and ideologically
extreme to triumph in its ‘scorched earth’ form. Even her cabinet fan-
club knew it could not last. But it was a ‘conviction moment’ they
will never forget. And today, once again, many yearn to return to it in
some more consolidated, permanent and settled form.
Paradoxically, such a form was provided by Blair’s hybrid, New
Labour, which abandoned Labour’s historic agenda and set about

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reconstructing social democracy as ‘the best shell’ for a New Labour

variant of neoliberalism. Hybrid, because – borrowing the skills of
triangulation (one idea from each end of the political spectrum to
make a ‘Third Way’) from Clinton – it re-articulated social reform,
free enterprise and the market. This conflation was the real source
of New Labour ‘spin’ – not an irritating habit but a serious political
strategy, a ‘double shuffle’. New Labour repositioned itself from centre-
left to centre-right. Covered by that weasel word, ‘modernisation’, the
New Labour ‘saints’ remorselessly savaged ‘Old’ Labour. A substantial
sector of Labour’s ‘heartland’ left, never to return. But the ‘middle
ground’, the pin-head on which all mainstream parties now compete
to dance, became the privileged political destination.
New Labour believed that the old route to government was
permanently barred. It was converted, Damascus-like, to neoliberalism
and the market. And, buying in to the new managerial doctrine of
public choice theory taught by the US Business Schools, New Labour
finally understood that there was no need for the political hassle
to privatise. You could simply burrow underneath the distinction
between state and market. Out-sourcing, value-for-money and
contract-contestability criteria opened one door after another through
which private capital could slip into the public sector and hollow it
out from within. This meant New Labour adopting market strategies,
submitting to competitive disciplines, espousing entrepreneurial values
and constructing new entrepreneurial subjects. Tony Giddens, a Third
Way pioneer, is supposed to have told Blair that nothing could resist
‘the unstoppable advance of market forces’. ‘Marketisation’ became
the cutting-edge of New Labour’s neoliberal project.
New Labour thus embraced ‘managerial marketisation’. The
economy was actively ‘liberalised’ (with disastrous consequence for the
coming crisis), while society was boxed in by legislation, regulation,
monitoring, surveillance and the ambiguous ‘target’ and ‘control’
cultures. It adopted ‘light-touch’ regulation. But its ‘regulators’ lacked
teeth, political courage, leverage or an alternative social philosophy,
and were often playing on both sides of the street. Harnessing social
purposes to a free-wheeling private economy proved to be an exercise
much like Tawney’s ‘trying to skin a tiger stripe by stripe’.
There were social problems requiring urgent attention, but what
was most striking was New Labour’s moralistically driven legislative
zeal in its approach to them: ASBOs, community policing, widening

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surveillance, private policing and security firms, out-sourcing the

round-up and expulsion of visa-less migrants, imprisonment of
terrorist suspects without trial, and ultimately complicity with
rendition and a ‘cover-up’ of involvement with torture. Despite the
‘liberalism’, punitive conceptions of punishment took hold: longer
sentences, tougher prison regimes, harsher youth-offender disciplines.
A new kind of liberal ‘authoritarianism’ turned out to be one of the
jokers in New Labour’s neoliberal pack. Michael Howard declared
that ‘prison works’, implying that those who thought it didn’t were
‘bleeding-heart liberals’. Blair, certainly not one, espoused ‘tough
love’. (Later David Cameron invented ‘muscular liberalism’.) This
is certainly not the first time these two contradictory Janus-faces of
Liberalism have been evident.
New Labour did initiate very important social reforms, including
the minimum wage, shorter hospital waiting times, better health
targets, attempts to reduce child poverty, the doubling of student
numbers and (rather reluctantly) some equality and human rights
legislation. But triangulation was its life-blood, its leading tendency.
There was a continuous tension between a strident, Fabian, Benthamite
tendency to regulate and manage and the ideology of the market, with
its pressure for market access to areas of public life from which it had
hitherto been excluded. Regulation was often the site of a struggle to
resolve the contradiction between an enhanced role for the private
sector and the need to demonstrate positive outcomes. But there was
a strong impulse towards getting rid of the excrescences of the ‘nanny
state’, in areas such as planning and health and safety regulations, and
towards ‘flexibility’ in labour markets.
What was distinctively neoliberal about New Labour’s strategies?
The private funding of New Labour’s flagship achievements via the
Public Finance Initiative left future generations in hock for thirty
years to re-pay the debt at exorbitant interest rates. Yet ‘public-private
partnership’ became a required condition of all public contracts.
Contracting out, competitive tendering and ‘contestability’ opened
up the state to capital. Private contractors were better placed to cut
costs and shed staff, even at the expense of service quality. The rising
archipelago of private companies providing public services for profit
was spectacular. Consultants floated in and out to ‘educate’ the public
sphere in the ways of corporate business. Senior public servants joined
the Boards of their private suppliers through ‘the revolving door’.

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 THE NEOLIBERAL REVOLUTION 329

Emptied out from inside, the ethos of public service underwent an

irreversible ‘culture change’. The habits and assumptions of the private
sector became embedded in the state.
Neoliberal discourse promoted two discursive figures – the ‘taxpayer’
(hard-working man, over-taxed to fund the welfare ‘scrounger’) and
the ‘customer’ (fortunate housewife, ‘free’ to exercise limited choice
in the market-place, for whom the ‘choice agenda’ and personalised
delivery were specifically designed). No-one ever thinks either could
also be a citizen who needs or relies on public services.
The prevailing market discourse is, of course, a matter of ideological
representation – a point that Doreen Massey develops in her article
in this issue.6 Actual markets do not work that way. They do not
work mysteriously by themselves, or ‘clear’ at their optimum point.
Only by bracketing-out the relative wealth of buyer and seller can
they be called ‘fair’. No ‘hidden hand’ guarantees the common good.
Markets often require the external power of state and law to establish
and regulate them. But the discourse provides subjects with a ‘lived’
‘imaginary relation’ to their real conditions of existence. This does not
mean that markets are simply manufactured fictions. Indeed, they are
only too real! They are ‘false’ because they offer partial explanations as
an account of whole processes. But it is worth remembering that ‘those
things which we believe to be true are “real” in their consequences’.
Globally, New Labour agreed that ‘developing countries’ must be
exposed to the bracing winds of Free Trade and foreign investment.
The main purpose of global governance was to protect markets and
investments and maintain the conditions for the successful pursuit of
global capitalist enterprise. This required a major commitment to a new
geopolitical order, military expenditure, and the construction of a ring
of client states and dictators, many of whom routinely used repression,
violence, imprisonment and torture; and, if necessary, direct military
intervention – though naturally in humanitarian disguise.
The Blair experiment ended unexpectedly – the result of long
subservience to US foreign policy goals. The ‘special relationship’
guaranteed the UK a role as geopolitical junior partner and a place in
the global sun. It stood ‘shoulder to shoulder’ against the rise of Islamic
fundamentalism. George Bush, supported by the neoconservative
lobby, led Blair into armed intervention and regime change in Iraq.
Blair’s moralism was compromised by his specious logic, dissembling,
secret agreements of which everyone was kept in ignorance, sexed-

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up documents and flawed intelligence. His reputation has never

recovered.
Gordon Brown, who followed, did not fundamentally alter
New Labour’s neoliberal inclinations. Never a paid-up ‘Third Way’
proselytiser, his manse background, high moral seriousness and early
Labour formation stood in the way. The positive side of New Labour’s
‘double shuffle’ became identified with him: public investment,
limiting third-world debt and child poverty. But ‘redistribution by
stealth’ failed to build a political constituency or a principled defence
of the welfare state.
Besides, Brown admired the dynamism of American free-enterprise
capitalism. He fell for the profoundly mistaken belief that Labour
had somehow ended the cycle of ‘boom and bust’. He did not heed
the signs that the boom could not last forever – the uncontrollable
property market, the swelling private and public debt, the dubious
risk-taking devices invented by ambitious young traders, the
unregulated predations of the hedge-fund and private equity sectors,
the scandal of banks selling sub-prime mortgages worth more than
many borrowers’ total annual income, the enhancement of share
values, the astronomic executive salaries and bonuses, banking’s shift
to risk-taking investment activities. These were all signs a sophisticated
economic technician like Brown should not have missed. In the crisis
Brown’s international leadership was impressive, but it was all too late.
Neoliberal hubris had done its damage. By the time of the election
(which Brown should have called a year before), it was clear Labour
would lose. It did.

The coalition variant

A Conservative-Liberal Democratic coalition was fully in line with

the dominant political logic of realignment. In the spirit of the times,
Cameron, with Blair as his role model, signalled his determination to
reposition the Tories as a ‘compassionate conservative party’, though
this has turned out to be a something of a chimera.
At the same time, many underestimated how deeply being out
of office and power had divided the Lib-Dem soul and misjudged
the self-deception, hypocrisy and lack of principle of which the
Lib-Dem leadership was capable. Coalition now set the neoliberal-

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inclined Orange Book supporters, who favoured an alliance with

the Conservatives, against the ‘progressives’, including former social
democrats, who leaned towards Labour. A deal – its detail now
forgotten – was stitched up, in which the social liberals were trounced,
and Cameron and Clegg ‘kissed hands’ in the No. 10 rose garden
(the former looking like the cat that had swallowed the cream). The
Lib Dems thus provided the Cameron leadership with the ‘fig leaf’
it needed – while the banking crisis gave the ‘alibi’. The Coalition
government seized the opportunity to launch the most radical, far-
reaching and irreversible social revolution since the war.
Coalition policy often seems incompetent, with failures to think
things through or join things up. But, from another angle, it is
arguably the best prepared, most wide-ranging, radical and ambitious
of the three regimes which since the 1970s have been maturing the
neoliberal project. The Conservatives had for some time been devoting
themselves to preparing for office – not in policy detail but in terms
of how policy could be used in power to legislate into effect a new
political ‘settlement’. They had convinced themselves that deep,
fast cuts would have to be made to satisfy the bond markets and
international assessors. But could the crisis be used, as Friedman had
suggested, to ‘produce real change’?
The legislative avalanche began immediately and has not let up.
It begins negatively (‘the mess the previous government left us’) but
ends positively, in embracing radical structural reform as the solution.
Ideology is in the driving seat, though vigorously denied. The front-
bench ideologues – Osborne, Lansley, Gove, Maude, Duncan Smith,
Pickles, Hunt – are saturated in neoliberal ideas and determined to
give them legislative effect. As One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest put
it, ‘The crazies are in charge of the asylum’. They are single-minded
about the irreversible transformation of society, ruthless about the
means, and in denial about the ‘fall-out’. Osborne – smirking, clever,
cynical, ‘the smiler with the knife’ – wields the chopper with zeal.
Cameron – relaxed, plausible, charming, confident, a silver-spooned
patrician, ‘a smooth man’ – ‘fronts’ the Coalition TV show. This crew
long ago accepted Schumpeter’s adage that there is no alternative to
‘creative destruction’. They have given themselves, through legislative
manoeuvring, an uninterrupted five years to accomplish this task.
Its wide-ranging character must be judged in terms of the operational
breadth of the institutions and practices they aim to ‘reform’, their

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boldness in siphoning state-funding to the private sector, and the

number of constituencies they are prepared to confront. Reform and
choice – words already hijacked by New Labour – are the master
narrative. They may be Conservatives but this is not a ‘conserving’
regime (it is a bemused Labour which is toying with the ‘blue-Labour’
conservative alternative now). Tories and Lib Dems monotonously
repeat the dissembling mantras of their press and public relations
people: ‘we are clearing up the mess inherited from the previous
government’. But the neoliberal engine is at full throttle.
We cannot deal with the cuts in any detail here. They have only just
started and there is much more to come. Instead we limit ourselves to
tracking the neoliberal logic behind the strategy.
First, targeted constituencies – i.e. anyone associated with, relying
or dependent on the state and public services. For the rich, the
recession never happened. For the public sector, however, there will
be massive redundancies, a wage freeze, pay running well behind the
rate of inflation, pensions which will not survive in their present form,
rising retirement ages. Support for the less well off and the vulnerable
will be whittled away, and welfare dependency broken. Benefits will
be capped, workfare will be enforced. The old must sell homes to pay
for care; working parents must buy child care; and invalidity benefit
recipients must find work. Sure Start, the schools refurbishment
programme and Independent Maintenance Grants are on hold.
Wealthy parents can buy children an Oxbridge education, but many
other students will go into life-long debt to get a degree. You cannot
make £20 billion savings in the NHS without affecting front-line,
clinical and nursing services. Andrew Lansley, however, ‘does not
recognise that figure’. Similarly, though everybody else knew most
universities would charge the maximum £9000 tuition fees, David
‘Two-Brain’ Willetts doesn’t recognise that figure. Saying that square
pegs fit into round holes has become a front-bench speciality.
Women stand where many of these savage lines intersect. As Beatrix
Campbell reminds us, cutting the state means minimising the arena in
which women can find a voice, allies, social as well as material support;
and in which their concerns can be recognised. It means reducing the
resources society collectively allocates to children, to making children a
shared responsibility, and to the general ‘labour’ of care and love.
Second, there is privatisation – returning public and state services to
private capital, re-drawing the social architecture. Privatisation comes

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in three sizes: (1) straight sell-off of public assets; (2) contracting out
to private companies for profit; (3) two-step privatisation ‘by stealth’,
where it is represented as an unintended consequence. Some examples:
in criminal justice, contracts for running prisons are being auctioned
off, and in true neoliberal fashion Ken Clarke says he cannot see any
difference in principle whether prisons are publicly or privately owned;
in health care, the private sector is already a massive, profit-making
presence, having cherry-picked for profit medical services that hospitals
can no longer afford to provide; while in the most far-reaching, top-
down NHS reorganisation, GPs, grouped into private consortia
(part of whose profits they retain), will take charge of the £60 billion
health budget. Since few GPs know how or have time to run complex
budgets, they will ‘naturally’ turn to the private health companies,
who are circling the NHS like sharks waiting to feed. Primary Care
Trusts, which represented a public interest in the funding process, are
being scrapped. In the general spirit of ‘competition’, hospitals must
remove the ‘cap’ on the number of private patients they treat.
Third, the lure of ‘localism’. In line with David Cameron’s Big
Society, ‘free schools’ (funded from the public purse – Gove’s revenge)
will ‘empower’ parents and devolve power to ‘the people’. But parents
– beset as they are by pressing domestic and care responsibilities,
and lacking the capacity to run schools, assess good teaching, define
balanced curricula, remember much science or the new maths, or
speak a foreign language, while regarding history as boring, and not
having read serious novel since GCSE – will have to turn to the private
education sector to manage schools and define the school’s ‘vision’.
Could the two-step logic be clearer?
Fourth, phoney populism: pitching ‘communities’ against local
democracy. Eric Pickles intends to wean councils permanently off
the central grant system. Meanwhile, social housing is at a standstill,
housing benefits will be cut and council rents allowed to rise to
commercial levels in urban centres. Many will move to cheaper rentals,
losing networks of friends, child support, family, school friends and
school places. Parents must find alternative employment locally – if
there is any – or allow extra travelling time. Jobseekers’ allowances
will be capped. As the private housing lobby spokesperson said, ‘we
are looking forward to a bonanza’. Since the early days of Thatcher we
have not seen such a ferocious onslaught on the fabric of civil society,
relationships and social life.

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Fifth, cutting down to size state involvement in quality of life.

Amenities like libraries, parks, swimming baths, sports facilities,
youth clubs, community centres will either be privatised or disappear.
Either unpaid volunteers will ‘step up to the plate’ or doors will close.
In truth, the aim is not – in the jargon of ‘1968’ from which the
promiscuous Cameron is not ashamed to borrow – to ‘shift power
to the people’, but to undermine the structures of local democracy.
The left, which feels positively about volunteering, community
involvement and participation – and who doesn’t? – finds itself once
again triangulated into uncertainty. The concept of the ‘Big Society’
is so empty that universities have been obliged to put it at the top of
their research agenda on pain of a cut in funding – presumably so that
politicians can discover what on earth it means: a shabby, cavalier,
duplicitous interference in freedom of thought.
What is intended is a permanent revolution. Can society be
permanently reconstructed along these lines? Is neoliberalism hegemonic?
The protests are growing. Weighty professional voices are ranged
against structural reforms, and the speed and scale of cuts in a
fragile economy. There are pauses, rethinks and u-turns. There may
be more. If the Lib-Dem ‘wheeze’ of delivering cuts in government
and campaigning against them at the next election fails to persuade,
they face the prospect of an electoral wipe-out. The Coalition may fall
apart, though at an election the Conservatives might get the majority
they failed to muster last time. What happens next is not pregiven.
Hegemony is a tricky concept and provokes muddled thinking. No
project achieves ‘hegemony’ as a completed project. It is a process, not
a state of being. No victories are permanent or final. Hegemony has
constantly to be ‘worked on’, maintained, renewed, revised. Excluded
social forces, whose consent has not been won, whose interests have
not been taken into account, form the basis of counter-movements,
resistance, alternative strategies and visions … and the struggle over
a hegemonic system starts anew. They constitute what Raymond
Williams called ‘the emergent’ – and the reason why history is never
closed but maintains an open horizon towards the future.
However, in ambition, depth, degree of break with the past, variety
of sites being colonised, impact on common sense and shift in the
social architecture, neoliberalism does constitute a hegemonic project.
Today, popular thinking and the systems of calculation in daily life
offer very little friction to the passage of its ideas. Delivery may be

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more difficult: new and old contradictions still haunt the edifice, in the
very process of its reconstruction. Still, in terms of laying foundations
and staging the future on favourable ground, the neoliberal project is
several stages further on. To traduce a phrase of Marx’s: ‘well grubbed,
old mole’. Alas!

Notes

1. Louis Althusser, ‘Contradiction and Over-determination’, in For

Marx, Penguin 1969.
2. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, OUP 2007.
3. Nik Theodore, Jamie Peck and Neil Brenner, ‘Neoliberal Urbanism:
Cities and the Rule of Markets’, in Sophie Watson and Gary Bridge (eds),
The New Blackwell Companion to the City, Wiley 2011, p15.
4. Friedrich Hayek, Preface, 1982 edition Capitalism and Freedom (first pub-
lished 1962.
5. See Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke and Brian
Roberts, Policing the Crisis: ‘Mugging’, the State and Law and Order,
Macmillan 1978.
6. Doreen Massey, ‘Re-imagining the political field’, Soundings 48, 2011.

335
 AFTERWORD :
Stuart Hall as a political intellectual
Michael Rustin

here is, of course, something slightly anomalous about gath-

T ering a collection of Stuart Hall’s work under the title of ‘Political
Writings’. This is because, while the essays in this collection are cer-
tainly ‘political’ in their topics and concerns, so was virtually
everything that Hall wrote.1 With Universities and Left Review, the
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the early New Left Review,
Marxism Today, Soundings and the Kilburn Manifesto, and in other
such contexts throughout his life, Hall worked with political friends
and comrades to make many political interventions. But each of the
major areas of his work – for example his decisive contribution to the
invention and development of the field of Cultural Studies, his work
in redefining the sociology curriculum at the Open University, his
contributions to the understanding of race and ethnicity, and his
major role in the establishment of two institutions devoted to the arts
of ethnically diverse and diasporic communities, the Institute of
International Visual Arts (Iniva) and Autograph ABP – were also
‘political’ in his own broad understanding of this term. One of the
main purposes of his writing from its beginnings was to extend the
meaning of ‘the political’ outwards, in doing so drawing on intellec-
tual resources and interests which others might not recognise as
‘political’ at all.
Stuart Hall describes himself as having been compelled to see
the world in ‘political’ ways almost from his early childhood. Being
identified within his Jamaican middle class home as the darkest
of his parents’ three children was, he has said, his first formative
experience, since in that colour-coded world to be the darkest was by
no means to be perceived as the most favoured. Thus one could say
that Hall felt marginal from his very beginnings, a sense of himself

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 AFTERWORD 337

which was further enhanced by his arrival in Oxford at the age of

18, as a Rhodes Scholar, in the still culturally conservative England
of 1951. He found himself drawn, in Oxford, to students who shared
his dissident and radical feelings, many of them, like him, having
come from abroad to study. He has described how he became aware
of himself as a ‘West Indian’ (not merely a Jamaican) only after he
came to England. The ‘Caribbean Marxism’ of Eric Williams and
C.L.R. James, and their understanding from this perspective of
the nature of imperialism, was important in his early intellectual
formation.
Hall became a member of a leftist political group in Oxford that
was already at odds with ‘official’ Labour Party politics. But, although
there were Communist Party members in his group of friends and
political associates at this time, dissidence from Marxist orthodoxy
arrived at its moment of crisis in 1956 with the Soviet invasion of
Hungary, when many left the Communist Party. 1956 was also
the year of Suez, which was understood by Hall and many others
as Britain’s disastrous reversion to its old assumptions of colonial
superiority and imperial entitlement, after an apparent shift of attitude
within the Conservative Party after the war. He continued to occupy
this position of dissent both from the imperial mind-set of the British
governing class, and from the dogmatism and authoritarianism of the
Soviet system, throughout his life, with the intellectual fights on two
fronts which this always entailed. The emergence of the Campaign for
Nuclear Disarmament, and its rejection of both the contending Cold
War alliances, in which Hall played a prominent role as one of its
foremost speechmakers and intellectuals, enabled him to find that his
own commitments were shared by a whole new generation of activists
and campaigners.
In his later life, Hall began to write in more personal terms about
his experiences as a black West Indian permanently resident and
working in Britain, and the continuing partial sense of estrangement
from the majority society to which this gave rise. This ongoing sense
of vulnerability remained with him, notwithstanding the fact that
he was himself a significant public figure, not least through his
broadcasting, most often for the Open University, and that he was
widely respected for the originality and engagingness of his work.2
Hall described the expansions of the definition of politics as one
of the main commitments of the first New Left, at a conference in

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1997 which was called by a new generation of Oxford postgraduates

to examine its contribution. Here is what he said about this:

I think that there then was, and always will be, a space for radical
politics which is neither Stalinist nor social democratic. Somewhere
between the old forms of social democracy and the old forms of
Stalinism is the space in which a new politics and a new socialist
agenda can be constructed … The New Left contributed to – though
in no way completed – an expansion of the definition of what politics
is about. It helped to transform that narrow, confined, institution-
ally limited notion of ‘the political’. I think it only just began that
important job.3

Hall’s group of Oxford University friends became one of the strands

which came together as the first New Left in Britain, from 1956. The
foundation of Universities and Left Review (from which two of the
chapters of this book has been selected) and of the Universities and
Left Review Club and the Partisan Coffee House in London were
formative moments in this development. Film makers, dramatists,
artists and intellectuals of all sorts became involved in this early move-
ment, which was an exceptional moment of political rebirth. In parallel
with this development was the conversion of the dissident Communist
Party journal, The Reasoner, into the New Reasoner, following many
prominent resignations from the party. Hall’s dialogue with Marxist
perspectives significantly took place through this relationship, not least
with the historian Edward Thompson, who was the New Reasoner’s
most charismatic figure.

New intellectual resources

It is a notable fact that few of the formative figures of the New

Left were political scientists by intellectual formation, still less
‘professional politicians’. They sought to bring to politics perspec-
tives and ways of understanding which came from fields that were
broader than was traditional for politics as it had come to develop
in contemporary liberal societies. Three of its most influential
founding figures, Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart and Stuart
Hall, had their first intellectual home in English literature, and all

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 AFTERWORD 339

of them made use of its critical methods and moral sensibilities

to understand broader social and cultural fields. Charles Taylor, a
co-editor of Universities and Left Review, was a Hegelian philoso-
pher, and a critic of positivist approaches to social science. Another
leading figure, Edward Thompson, was a historian, although one of
a decidedly literary disposition, as was Raphael Samuel, who, like
Thompson, was committed to a genre of history which gave primary
importance to the experience and imagination of ordinary people.
For these writers, influenced as most of them were by Marxist ways
of thinking, politics meant much more than was captured by the
categories of conventional political science.
Hall and his colleagues were indeed receptive to insights from many
sources. One early influence on him was the literary criticism of F.R.
Leavis, who insisted, against what he saw as a complacent upper class
culture, that the moral dilemmas and possibilities of an entire society
were captured in the work of its best imaginative writers. Hall, who
studied English literature at Oxford, adapted the Scrutiny school’s
critical methods to show that popular as well as high cultural forms
should be valued and subject to discrimination.4 Richard Hoggart’s
classic The Uses of Literacy, which described the life of a working-class
community as a ‘lived culture’, no less full of meaning and values than
more specialised and rarefied cultural productions, was exemplary
in this respect. Theoretically fundamental for Hall was Raymond
Williams’s understanding of societies as essentially constituted by the
meanings assigned to them by individuals and groups, in particular
as these were defined by their locations in structures and cultures
of class. Thus the study of popular culture in Hall’s work, from his
1964 book The Popular Arts (co-authored with Paddy Whannel) to
the many works of description and interpretation undertaken by him
and his colleagues at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies,
became an important ‘lens’ through which a society and its politics
could be understood, and one of the spaces within which its implicit
politics could be challenged. Indeed, one of the central contributions
of Hall and the New Left to political thinking lay in the importance
it attached to the dimension of culture and meaning.5
In the 1970s, Hall and his colleagues absorbed the approach of
the sociological school of symbolic interactionism in the United
States. This had become a resource for the ‘new criminology’ and
its sympathetic reinterpretations of the meaning of ‘deviancy’, of

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340 selected politicaL WRITINGS

which the National Deviancy Symposium became the container in

Britain. The ‘European’ perspectives of semiotics and structuralism
also became resources for Hall’s analysis of mass communications
including television. While liberal media took pride in their
commitment to open-mindedness and balance, and their avoidance of
overt political bias, Hall and his students were able to show the ways
in which agendas were nevertheless set by invisible and unrecognised
conventions, whose effect was to confine debate within safe limits,
and deny a hearing to disruptive and ‘illegitimate’ kinds of dissent.
Hall’s article in this collection, ‘A world at one with itself’, exemplifies
this insight. This was not so much a matter of explicit political bias
– this of course happens, but Hall was rarely interested in stating
the obvious – but rather of a structure of representation which was
powerful because it was not quite what it seemed or claimed to be. The
ideas and approaches of psychoanalysis were also found to be of value,
especially to the understanding of differences of gender, ethnicity and
identity, which became more salient in Hall’s later writing.
Hall was Professor of Sociology at the Open University for seventeen
years, beginning in 1979 when he left the Birmingham Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies. Although he did not see himself as
a conventional sociologist, he nevertheless engaged deeply with this
field, which became open in the 1970s and 1980s to new theoretical
perspectives. Several of Hall’s significant early papers engaged with
sociological debates, for example his interventions in debates about class
and class consciousness. In ‘A sense of classlessness’ (1958), reprinted
in this volume, Hall took note of changes which were taking place in
the consciousness of social class at that time in Britain. He observed a
weakening of working-class identity, in particular, and the emergence
of less limited ideas of the self among working people. The growing
significance of ‘mass consumption’ in contemporary society, and the
opportunities which this afforded for self-expression and choice, were
an element of this. Hall was tentative in his interpretation of these
changes. He did not claim that the working class was disappearing,
or was becoming ‘bourgeoisified’. Nor did he believe that the Labour
Party, as some of its intellectuals and leaders such as Anthony Crosland
and Hugh Gaitskell advocated, ought to abandon its working-class
identification. The potentialities of this new sense of classlessness were
still, he thought, uncertain and open. A little later, the most perceptive
sociologists of class of that time, John Goldthorpe and David

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Lockwood advanced a comparable view.6 The distinction they drew

between ‘expressive’ and ‘instrumental’ collectivism allowed for the
possibility that a weakening of the cultures of class solidarity might be
taking place, rather as Hall had suggested, but that there might also be
a countervailing increase in ‘economistic’ class militancy. This proved
to be the case in the 1970s, although the militancy of this period was
pursued as much to maintain wage differentials within the working
class as to struggle against capital. Hall’s argument, which became
formative for his later political perspective, was that socialists, and
the Labour Party in particular, could not assume that class structures
and their traditional solidarities could just be called up on demand by
politicians. One had to understand the situation of working people
as they themselves saw it, and not rest on assumptions about their
traditional loyalties. Hall’s argument in ‘A sense of classlessness’ was
vigorously disputed in the pages of Universities and Left Review, by
Edward Thompson, and, less vehemently, by Raphael Samuel. Both
suggested that the manifestations of a more classless sensibility to
which Hall had drawn attention were actually superficial. They might,
they argued, have some purchase in the metropolis, but the ideas of
self-help and individualism had precedents in the nineteenth century,
and in any case had little relevance to the cultures of the working
class in northern industrial Britain. Hall made a spirited reply to these
criticisms in ‘The big swipe’ in Universities and Left Review.7 One can
already see in these exchanges the seeds of political divisions which in
a few years were to fracture the first new left.
Hall identified another new dimension of social change in a long
review article in Universities and Left Review, ‘Absolute beginnings’, which
anticipated some of most influential later writing of Hall and the Centre
for Contemporary Cultural Studies.8 Writing from his experience as a
teacher in a south London secondary modern school, Hall wrote about
the emergence of a spirited and lively youth culture, which appeared to
him quite fresh. He observed that even well-meaning teachers in the
contemporary school system had little capacity to engage with these
young people. Here was another kind of ‘emancipation’ which Hall
recognised to be taking place, in his prescient way. He again took note
of the standard ‘sociological’ description of this development, in young
people’s enhanced purchasing power, and their thus constituting a new
commercial market. His own emphasis, however, was on its challenging
and creative significance for the dominant culture. This recognition

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of differences and divisions of generation gave rise to another area of

disagreement with standard left-wing perspectives.
Before long, the study of youth cultures as sites of resistance to
the dominant way of life became one of the most influential areas
of work by Hall and the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies.
Their collective volume, Resistance through Rituals, examined different
instances of cultural diversity and dissidence, interpreted by their
authors as the expressions of different forms of relationship to the
dominant class structure.9 Hall himself wrote a fine article (not
included in that book), ‘The hippies: an American moment’, which
interpreted the complex ways in which this subculture had both
taken issue with conventional American norms and beliefs, yet had
drawn on ‘other’ traditions (American Indian and Eastern) to fashion
a counterculture in opposition to the mainstream.10 The theoretical
chapters of Resistance through Rituals began to examine the issues
involved in understanding the latent politics of these developments,
drawing from the newly translated work of Gramsci and his ideas of
cultural hegemony and conflict. In fact the political implications of
this generational awakening had already become visible, in the large
following for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament from the late
1950s, and in the student protests and emergent counter-cultures
which came to their climax in the late 1960s. For young people coming
to university from families with little formal education, the study of
youth cultures, and popular cultures more generally, became a point of
entry into academic work which linked with their own experience, and
challenged the condescensions of class which had hitherto dominated
the academy. These issues of generational difference are now acquiring
a new kind of relevance, as we have seen a vast increase in the numbers
of young people entering university compared with the 1960s, but a
decline in the opportunities for creative and rewarding work available
to them.

Marx and Marxism

Whilst Hall’s political thinking took account of these many different

disciplinary perspectives, he sought always also to ‘articulate’ them
into an integrated although subtle understanding of the larger social
system. (‘Articulation’ was one of his favourite theoretical terms.) This

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holistic perspective, concerned always with the possibilities for the

betterment of society, involved him a lifelong engagement with the
intellectual tradition of Marx.
Here is how Hall reflected on his original political formation, in
1992:

I entered cultural studies from the New Left, and the New Left
always regarded Marxism as a problem, as trouble, as danger, not
as a solution. Why? It had nothing to do with theoretical questions
as such or in isolation. It had to do with the fact that my own (and
its own) political formation occurred in a moment historically very
much like the one we are in now – which I am astonished so few
people have addressed – the moment of disintegration of a certain
kind of Marxism. In fact the first British New Left emerged in
1956 at the moment of the disintegration of an entire historical/
political project.11

This process of course had several subsequent vicissitudes, with

various hopes of revival of European Communism then ending in its
total collapse. Hall’s interrogations of this tradition coexisted with a
repeated rejection of its dogmatic formulations. And as one can see
from several essays in this volume, he engaged in never-ending skir-
mishes with its guardians of orthodoxy, and with their echo in the
weak Labourist belief that political loyalties could be simply assigned
to classes as unproblematic labels.
He understood that ‘totalising’ chains of connection between
the parts and whole of a society were frequently placed under great
intellectual strain. Too strong a pull from the end of what Althusser
termed specific ‘levels and instances’, and the idea of a holistic coherence
and interdependency was at risk of disappearing from sight.12 But at
the other end of the scale, too strong an insistence on the idea of
a unified social system, and complexities could be simplified to the
point where no understanding could be gained.13 Particulars, such as
the attributes of youth cultures, or of a protest movement, or of work
in the arts, mattered in themselves, since it was in the specific spaces
of a social system that creative possibilities emerged.
The central issue at stake in the engagement with Marx by Hall and
the New Left was set out in this canonical formulation from Marx’s
Preface to the Critique of Political Economy:

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344 selected politicaL WRITINGS

In the social production which men carry on they enter into definite
relations that are indispensable and independent of their will; these
relations of production correspond to a definite stage of development
of their material forces of production. The sum total of these relations
of production constitutes the economic structure of society – the real
foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to
which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode
of production in material life determines the social, political and
intellectual life processes in general. It is not the consciousness of
men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social
being that determines their consciousness.14

This model or metaphor of ‘base and superstructure’ was one with

which the main figures of the New Left, including Raymond
Williams, Edward Thompson, Hall himself, and in its second phase,
Perry Anderson, took issue.15 The decisive place which these writers,
including Hall, sought to assign to the place of consciousness,
meaning and culture, and, linked with this, to autonomous polit-
ical action, could scarcely be reconciled with this materialist thesis.
Williams’s critique of the base and superstructure model was crucial
to this debate, especially in the field of Cultural Studies.16 The problem
was to retain the essential idea of capital’s pervasive power within the
entire social system, yet also to recognise the essential role played
by subjective meaning and political agency. There was also the need
to understand the specific attributes of contemporary capitalism, in
particular its apparent stability and durability, given that in the period
during which these debates took place its supercession or overthrow
seemed extremely unlikely. The key resources for this work, within
the Marxist tradition, were found to lie in the writings of Antonio
Gramsci and Louis Althusser, many of which were newly translated in
English during the 1970s.
Gramsci had identified the different forms of domination practised
by the ruling classes of ‘western’ and ‘eastern societies’, and the
different problems which these presented for subordinate social
classes. The dense networks of civil society in liberal western societies,
and the fact that ruling class domination was achieved most of the
time through the management of consent rather than by violence,
rendered the 1789 or 1917 models of revolutionary seizure of power at
the centre unworkable and inappropriate. (Gramsci had learned a hard

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lesson from the failure of Italian Communist insurgency in the 1920s,

and the rise of fascism, which had led to his spending the remainder
of his life after 1926 in Mussolini’s prisons.) Thus Gramsci made the
distinction between the ‘war of manoeuvre’ and the ‘war of position’,
the latter being the necessary mode of struggle within relatively stable
liberal societies.
Gramsci had recognised that the ruling class exercised its power
not through the domination of a single class, but more often through
assembling alliances or ‘blocs’ of classes and class fractions. Differences
and divisions of religious and regional affiliation and subdivisions
among class fractions were significant in the constitution of such blocs,
which had to be seen as feats of political leadership. Resistance had also
to be conceived in strategic terms, and not imagined as the outcome of
an inevitable process which must eventually bring the working class to
power. Hall had found Gramsci’s essay on Americanism and Fordism
particularly instructive, in so far as it recognised the part which modern
social organisation – including mass production and consumption –
were beginning to play in a society which was elsewhere semi-feudal in
its social relations. It was from Gramsci’s analysis of this development
in the 1920s that the concept of ‘Fordism’ was evolved in the 1970s
to explain the mature operation of post-war capitalism, curiously
enough at the very time when the Fordist model in the West was itself
soon to fail. Hall and his colleagues on the journal Marxism Today,
from which we republish several articles, were greatly influenced
by these Gramscian ideas. Marxism Today was part of a broader
‘Eurocommunist’ tendency in the 1980s, which followed the Italian
Communist Party’s lead in trying to develop a more democratic form
of communism, better suited to Western European political life than
actual existing socialism in the Eastern bloc. Gramsci’s reflections on
the differences between the revolutionary potentialities of different
social systems at different moments led him to begin to develop the
concept of conjuncture which was further developed in Hall’s political
thinking and became essential to it. Social formations and their
modes of class domination differ from one another, and even where
these differences can be accounted for, there remains an element of the
uncertain and contingent in political action.
For example, Lenin’s political success in the 1917 revolution had to
be explained as a consequence of intersecting causal factors rather than
as the working-out of the inevitable laws of historical materialism.17

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These causes included Lenin’s genius for decisive leadership, the defeat
of the Tsarist armies in the Great War, even, one might add, the fact of
the German High Command having transported Lenin to the Finland
Station in a sealed train in order that he might effect the revolutionary
destruction of their enemy. Trotsky’s ‘law of combined and uneven
development’ better explained the condition of possibility of an urban
revolution in an agrarian country than the orthodox Marxist view
which saw revolution as the inevitable crisis of a mature capitalism.
Hall agreed with a formulation in the work of Marx which he most
admired, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.18

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please;
they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under
circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.

It is this co-existence of determination with an uncertain element of

freedom that gives meaning to the idea of conjuncture. In that text,
Marx wrote as a historian of the near-present, and this was Hall’s
preferred method of political writing too.
In a related way Althusser’s contribution to Marxist theory was also
found valuable by Hall, although he had more disagreements with
Althusser’s ideas than with Gramsci’s. Althusser made use of ideas similar
to those of American functionalist sociology in his understanding of
the role of sub-systems in the organisation of modern capitalism. His
identification of the role of the ‘ideological state apparatuses’ provided
a resource for analysing the roles of culture, education and the mass
media in the system of domination.19 His idea of ‘interpellation’, and
his adaptation of Lacan’s understanding of the role of language in the
formation of identity, provided a means for bringing cultural analysis
down to the micro-level of identities and the role of unconscious
socialisation in maintaining consent. The ideas of the ‘condensation’
and ‘displacement’ of meanings between one signifier and other,
derived ultimately from Freud via Lacan, added a further dimension
to the ‘mechanisms’ by which ideologies functioned as instruments of
power. The story which Hall and his co-authors told in Policing the
Crisis, of the ways in which symbolic equations were made between
popular fears of quite specific kinds of street crime and more widely-
felt anxieties about social disorder and breakdown, deployed this form
of explanation. Althusser’s theory of ‘overdetermination’ was valuable

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in the understanding of how, at a particular historical moment (the

May Events of Paris 1968 were an example), different ‘instances’ of
social conflict could become superimposed upon one another. In this
way a local confrontation might become the catalyst for the expression
of much wider grievances, sometimes revealing unexpected fractures
in the social order.
One could observe that such opportunities had been seized by
one’s political adversaries. The argument of Policing the Crisis was
that ‘mugging’ had been exploited by the political right as just such
a moment of cascading disruption. Its larger thesis was that this
crisis (of high inflation, widespread strike action, and other social
disorders) had brought the collapse of the ‘corporatist’ settlement
through which relations between capital, labour, and the state had
been managed during the 1970s. This collapse gave the opportunity
for the New Right to impose Thatcherism as a counter-revolutionary
solution to the contradictions of the British welfare state. Policing the
Crisis, which follows through a chain of effects which began with
the reporting of street crimes, is insufficiently recognised to be an
exceptional work of political analysis. It anticipated the future shape
and direction of Thatcherism a year before the election in which
Thatcher came to power.
We can see in this volume how many theoretical resources Hall
drew upon to analyse political developments in Britain. He pointed
to the new potentialities of a changing society, and argued for a
political recognition of these, including by the Labour Party.20 He
developed a critique of that party’s habits of thought, trapped as it
was by its acceptance of constitutional forms and the routines of
politics understood mainly as marketing. While these methods might
sometimes bring it a Parliamentary majority, what was mostly absent
(as we have noted, he saw Ken Livingstone’s GLC as one exception) was
the ideological and organisational mobilisation needed to maintain
momentum once office had been achieved. In the unequal struggle
of forces which followed whenever Labour took power, the drive for
change was usually defeated.
Hall’s most influential and memorable political essays, for
example ‘The great moving right show’ and its sequels, make use of a
Gramscian understanding of political strategy to analyse the purposes
and methods of the right. These essays, with reference to a specific
political conjuncture, describe how a counter-revolution was achieved,

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348 selected politicaL WRITINGS

bringing about a defeat for the left and social democracy. The New
Left had identified the elements of a new politics – renewing a radical
culture, joining up new and old kinds of social resistance, identifying
emergent cultural potentials – and had made some connections
between them in theory and practice. But in both the 1960s and 1970s
these radical hopes and aspirations were disappointed and stifled as
the Labour governments which had partially embodied them failed to
win control of their environment.
By contrast, Hall showed how Thatcherism was able to construct an
effective hegemonic project, gathering rather than losing momentum
as it retained office. Its achievement was to bring together many
different currents and movements of reactionary feeling and intention,
for example the Black Papers’ attack on progressive education, the
religiously-motivated and anti-feminist defence of the ‘the right to life’,
the censorious demand for ‘decency’ in the media, calls for respect for
military traditions (‘the Falklands factor’), and the evocation of the
fear of crime and immigration (the moral panic around ‘mugging’
was the starting-point of the systemic analysis set out in Policing the
Crisis). Thatcherism succeeded in articulating many strands into a
contradictory but nevertheless politically effective coherence. It was
able to be at the same time authoritarian – with the central state as
its enforcer, sweeping away intermediary resistances to its power in
local government, the professions, and the unions – and populist –
mobilising ‘the people’ against what it represented as the patronising
attitudes of the social-democratic state. It was able to be individualist,
in its advocacy of the virtues of competition and the free market, yet
also to advocate the ‘traditional’ values, of nation, family, race and
empire. Hall’s understanding of Thatcherite populism was influenced
by Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau’s writing, which described
the discursive processes through which political identifications were
achieved by the force of political action, and were not merely the
reflections of people’s ‘objective’ class positions.21
In articles published on ‘New Times’ in Marxism Today in the
1980s, Hall, Martin Jacques and others went on to attack the
assumptions of ‘Old Labour’, arguing that the political initiative could
not be recaptured for the left by mere evocations of the past.22 Their
idea was that the popular aspirations which had been emerging over
recent decades, for greater individual autonomy, higher qualities of
social provision, and a non-authoritarian approach by the state to the

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people, might be the basis for a new progressive movement to challenge

Thatcherism. What actually happened, however, after the election of
Tony Blair as leader in 1994, was the emergence of the ‘New Labour’
project of renewal, the main aim of which was to break the pattern of
electoral defeat that Labour had suffered for nearly two decades.
Marxism Today, in which the theory and critique of Thatcherism
had been largely developed, ceased publication in 1991. Committed
to continuing the political analysis and argument he had been
conducting all his life, Hall then joined with Doreen Massey and
Michael Rustin in 1995 to found a new journal, Soundings. This,
from its opening editorial, placed itself firmly in the tradition of the
first New Left: it was inclusive and questioning, and was committed
to a much broader conception of the political than the conventional
definitions allowed. Hall contributed actively to Soundings until
he died, writing about many issues – race and legacy of the Empire
Windrush, international relations after 9-11, the European idea – with
the range and connectedness that had always characterised his work.
It was in Soundings that Hall took full measure of New Labour.
He had initially welcomed some aspects of its project, particularly
Blair’s willingness to challenge Labour traditionalism and tribalism.
Whatever the content of Blair’s proposed reforms to the Labour Party,
which were centralising and exclusionary in their intentions and effects,
Hall welcomed the open and democratic means by which they were
at first pursued, and admired Blair’s abilities as a political performer
– as he had once regretfully acknowledged Thatcher’s. He also saw
no point in defending a ‘Clause 4’ of the Labour Party Constitution,
which no longer embodied any substantive purpose, and he had no
nostalgia for the old days of the trade union block vote, on whoever’s
side it may have been cast. However, he was critical of the emptiness
of the New Labour programme, and its failure to make any significant
challenge to the decaying post-Thatcherite regime. This was to become
a major theme for Hall, and for Soundings.
In ‘Parties on the verge of a nervous breakdown’, Hall noted New
Labour’s failure to think through what a feasible alternative to the
hegemony of individualism and the market might be.23 But he set
out the basis of his major critique of New Labour’s project in his
article ‘New Labour’s double shuffle’, written in 2003, which analysed
Labour’s huge 1997 victory (its Parliamentary majority was 179) as a
catastrophically lost opportunity to bring about real change.24 Hall saw

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New Labour in government as a hybrid system, whose dominant logic

was a neoliberal subordination to markets and corporate power, while
it retained a subordinate ‘social-democratic’ logic whose necessary aim
was to retain support from Labour’s traditional supporters. This was the
strategy which Gramsci described as ‘transformism’ – the reprocessing
of a reforming set of goals and values (in this case social-democratic)
within a pre-existing (in this case neoliberal) framework, providing
a semblance but not the reality of change. Especially illuminating in
Hall’s account was the idea that the ambiguity of the New Labour
project was part of its essence.
The analysis of neoliberalism from then on remained the main focus
of Hall’s political writings, as well as being a key theme for Soundings.
The Gramscian mode of thought which had been deployed in the
analysis of both Thatcherism and New Labour became increasingly
important following the financial crisis of 2007-2008. Hall noted that
neoliberalism had persisted in its course, giving no ground in the face
of its massive economic crisis. In ‘The neoliberal revolution’, he analysed
the pervasive power of this system, arguing that what was intended was
the permanent reconstruction of society on neoliberal lines.25 With
his colleagues, Hall went on to deepen this analysis, first in a series
of Soundings articles written between 2009 and 2011, later published
together as The Neoliberal Crisis, and then in a series of essays published
as After Neoliberalism? The Kilburn Manifesto.26 After Hall died in 2014,
Soundings initiated a further ‘programmatic’ stage of this argument,
Soundings Futures: Alternatives to Neoliberalism, to which he would
have contributed had he lived longer, together with Doreen Massey, our
friend and co-founding editor of Soundings, who died in March 2016.
This volume of Political Writings is not being published merely as an
archive of his work. The essays do show his development as a political
writer, and illuminate fifty years of British political history. But at
a time when politics has become an alienated activity, and much
academic study has retreated into its own instrumental specialisations,
they do much more than this. They provide an example of how it is
possible to bring the capabilities of an intellectual and an educator to
bear on thinking about politics, and in doing so to redefine politics.
We believe the scale of Hall’s achievement will become even more
evident as further volumes of his work are collected together and
republished. We hope that his writing will provide inspiration for a
new generation.

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We will give the final words to Hall himself. Reflecting on the New
Left, in a discussion in 1987, he said:

… To be a socialist now is to be a socialist with questions: it is to

be a socialist in the understanding that to be a socialist is also to be
a feminist, and that feminism interrogates socialism in a profound
way. It is also, for me, to be black, which interrogates thought in
the categories and in relation to the experience of ‘the West’ in
very profound ways. In that sense our political commitments are
bound to be provisional or contingent in ways in which they have
not customarily been. That is how I try to think the space in which
the socialist project could be renewed: taking the pressure of the
irreversible movements in contemporary society, and indeed around
the world, towards greater diversity, greater openness, greater choice,
and therefore in some senses, greater fragmentation. But it’s not only
fragmentation as loss. There are also gains …27

Notes
1. My co-editors discuss the selection criteria in the introduction to this
book.
2. Documents of this early period of Hall’s life are John Akomfrah’s film
installation, The Unfinished Conversation, and its single-screen version The
Stuart Hall Project, and the first volume of Hall’s memoirs.
3. Stuart Hall, in Stuart Hall, Raphael Samuel and Charles Taylor, ‘Then
and Now: A Re-evaluation of the New Left’, in Oxford University
Socialist Discussion Group (eds), Out of Apathy: Voices of the New Left
Thirty Years On, Verso 1989, pp150-1.
4. He began a doctoral thesis on the novels of Henry James.
5. Dennis Dworkin describes this development in Cultural Marxism in
Post-War Britain, Duke University Press 1997.
6. J.K. Goldthorpe, D. Lockwood, F. Bechofer, and J. Platt, The Affluent
Worker in the Class Structure, Cambridge University Press 1969.
7. Stuart Hall, ‘The big swipe: some comments on the “classlessness
Controversy”’, Universities and Left Review 7, 1959 (not published in this
collection).
8. Stuart Hall, ‘Absolute beginnings: reflections on the secondary modern
generation’, Universities and Left Review 7, 1959 (not published in this
collection).
9. Hall and Jefferson (eds), Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in
Post-War Britain, Hutchinson 1976.

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352 selected politicaL WRITINGS

10. Stuart Hall, ‘The hippies: an American moment’, in J. Nagel (ed), Student
power, Merlin 1969.
11. Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies’, in L.
Grossberg, C. Nelson and P. Treichler (eds), Cultural Studies, Routledge
1992, p279.
12. He saw this as a risk in the academic establishment of Cultural Studies,
in which its original ‘political’ purpose could be lost.
13. He perhaps came nearest to a ‘post-modern’ repudiation of holistic coher-
ence in the New Times project of Marxism Today in the 1980s, and in his
own essay on that subject (reprinted in this issue). So damaging was his
critique of traditional socialist formulae, in the midst of eighteen years of
Tory government and defeats for the left, that it was hard to see the
grounds within it for a positive alternative politics.
14. Karl Marx, Preface, Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy,
1959, p1.
15. Edward Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class asserted the
causal primacy of consciousness over structure in the formation of classes.
Perry Anderson, in Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, described the
crucial role of the church as the bearer of the West’s dynamic cultural
heritage, thus acknowledging the force of Max Weber’s critique of Marx’s
account of capitalism’s origins. Raymond Williams’s work is a prolonged
demonstration of the causal powers located in the production of cultures.
16. R. Williams, ‘Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory’, New
Left Review, 1/82. November-December 1973.
17. For more on this see introduction, pp2–3.
18. Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Lawrence & Wishart
1954.
19. See Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and other Essays, New Left
Books 1971.
20. At times Hall took an active role in trying to influence the Labour Party,
for example in the early 1960s in the production during Labour Party
Conferences of memorable overnight newsletters distributed each
morning to the delegates
21. But while Hall learned from the post-Marxist critique of Laclau and
Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (Verso 1976), he did not follow
them all in the way in their critiques of marxism.
22. Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques, New Times: The Changing Face of Politics
in the 1990s, Lawrence and Wishart 1989.
23. Stuart Hall, ‘Parties on the verge of a nervous breakdown’, Soundings 1,
1995.
24. Stuart Hall, ‘New Labour’s Double Shuffle’, Soundings 24, 2003, reprinted
in this volume.
25. Stuart Hall, ‘The neoliberal revolution’, Soundings 48, 2011, reprinted in
this volume.

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 AFTERWORD 353

26. Sally Davison and Katharine Harris (eds), The neoliberal revolution,
Lawrence & Wishart 2015; Stuart Hall, Doreen Massey and Michael
Rustin (eds), After Neoliberalism: The Kilburn Manifesto, Lawrence &
Wishart 2015.
27. Stuart Hall, ‘Then and Now’, p155.

353
 Notes on historical figures

Aneurin Bevan (1897-1960): an impressively fiery tribune of the people,

organised by the particular popular politics of the South Wales industrial
working class and intimately attached to the Labour Party. Represented
Ebbw Vale as MP for over thirty years. Minister of Health from 1945-1951,
overseeing the founding of the National Health Service. Fierce opponent of
Eden’s Suez intervention in 1956. A year later he shocked a good many of his
followers by renouncing unilateral nuclear disarmament.

Rhodes Boyson (1925-2012): brought up in a Labour household, becoming a

Methodist lay-preacher and a school-teacher. A man of uncompromisingly old-
fashioned views – which he proclaimed with brio – persuaded by the moral virtues
of the market, the wisdom of caning in schools, and the evils of homosexuality.
Gravitated from Labour to Conservative, becoming a Tory MP in 1974, and
remaining so until 1997. His Black Papers in Education (1977 and later) repre-
sented a powerful assault on comprehensive schooling and on anything which
went under the banner of ‘progressive’. He was part of the popular undertow of
the politics identified by Hall in ‘The great moving right show’.

George Brown (1914-1985): senior Labour politician in the 1960s. Of

working-class origins, trade unionism providing him with a route through
public life. A foot soldier in the making of the postwar settlement, first
mentored by Ernest Bevin. MP from 1945. He represented the right-wing of
the Labour Party, and after his active public career came to a premature end,
he quietly joined the newly formed Social Democratic Party.

Rab Butler (1902-1982): the principal ideological and political architect of

the Conservative commitment to the postwar settlement. Overseer of the
great reforming Education Act of 1944, and thereafter Chancellor of the
Exchequer, Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary. Outmanoeuvred for the
job of Prime Minister in 1957 and in 1963.

James Callaghan (1912-2005): Labour Prime Minister from 1976 to 1979,

losing the election of 1979 to Margaret Thatcher, after government policies
on public sector pay had resulted in the Winter of Discontent. Presided over

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 notes on historical figures 355

the beginning of the dramatic undoing of Labour’s ‘forward march’. Initiator

of the ‘great debate’ on education. In his years as prime minister one could
see his political authority evaporating day by day. Over his political career he
gravitated further and further to the right of the party.

Kenneth Clarke (1940- ): a beneficiary of the postwar settlement, joining the

Conservatives as a student at Cambridge. Regarded as possessing a reforming
and liberal instinct, but followed the prevailing political winds as a presence in
Tory politics. Chancellor of the Exchequer 1993 to 1997 under John Major,
and before that Home Secretary. Remained pro-Europe when his party begin
to drift to a Eurosceptic position. In 2003 he opposed the invasion of Iraq.
Stood for leadership of the Conservatives in 1997, 2001 and 2005, regarding
himself as ever-more an independent Tory after each defeat. Relishes his own
‘outspokenness’.

Robin Cook (1946-2005): an MP of the Labour left, who espoused a

number of progressive causes, and was a parliamentarian of standing. MP
from 1974 until his death. A tentative supporter of constitutional reform.
Foreign Secretary under Tony Blair, but then effectively demoted. Famously
resigned his posts in 2003 in protest over the war with Iraq.

Anthony Crosland (1918-1977): the most conspicuous intellectual of Labour

modernisation at the end of the 1950s, arguing against both Labour tradi-
tionalism and inherited notions of socialism. Th is represented a very different
species of ‘modernisation’ from that represented by the New Left of the same
years. See especially The Future of Socialism (1956). The intellectual face of
Hugh Gaitskell’s Labour revisionism, he first entered parliament in 1950. A
Labour MP and cabinet minister.

Anthony Eden (1897-1977): in the 1930s seen as the quintessential young,

dashing, reform-minded Conservative. Foreign Secretary in 1938 but
resigned in protest against appeasement, thereby usefully allying himself
with Churchill. Emerged alongside Harold Macmillan as a ‘natural’ leader
to follow Churchill, becoming Prime Minister in 1955. With his decision
to invade Egypt the following year, his political reputation all but collapsed
and Macmillan and Butler worked to remove him from office. He resigned in
January 1957, leaving the Tories – it seemed – in a perilous state.

Hugh Gaitskell (1906-1963): the arch-political moderniser of the Labour

Party at the end of the 1950s, espousing a social democracy underwritten by
a faith in the ‘politics of opportunity’. Consciously active on the right of the
Labour Party. Endeavoured to move the party away from its historic commit-

355
356 selected politicaL WRITINGS

ments to Labour socialism, and its close relations to the trade union movement,
pursuing this as leader of Labour from 1955 until his death in 1963. In fighting
to jettison the party’s commitment to the socialisation of the means of produc-
tion (Clause 4), and in his steadfast and militant rejection of unilateral nuclear
disarmament, he was constantly in the sights of the New Left.

Peter Griffiths (1928-2013): Conservative politician involved in the noto-

rious 1964 general election campaign in Smethwick in the West Midlands,
during which the slogan ‘If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Liberal or
Labour’ appeared. Griffiths won the seat from the sitting Labour MP, shadow
foreign secretary Patrick Gordon Walker. The visit of Malcolm X also brought
global attention to the constituency.

Jo Grimond (1913-1993): a Liberal politician and MP for Orkney and

Shetland between 1950 and 1983. Led the party between 1956 and 1967 and
in 1976. A supporter of Scottish home rule and an opponent of the UK’s
nuclear arsenal, he moved the party leftwards during his leadership.

Lord Hailsham (Quintin Hogg) (1907-2001): Conservative politician,

writer and orator. A major Conservative ideologue, formed within the cultures
of high Toryism, and born into an aristocratic back ground. In 1938 stood as
MP and won in a by-election for the Conservatives, as a supporter of appease-
ment (his opponent was Patrick Gordon Walker). At the time of the Suez
crisis he was First Lord of the Admiralty, and during his long career later
served as Lord Chancellor under Margaret Thatcher. On the moralistic end of
Conservative politics, Hall et al note in Policing the Crisis that Selsdon Park
released Hailsham into a ‘renewed burst of moral energy’.

Roy Hattersley (1932- ): prominent Labour politician and writer, MP for

Birmingham Sparkbrook between 1963 and 1997. Deputy leader to Neil
Kinnock between 1983 and 1992, and involved in attempts to ‘modernise’
the party and oppose the Militant Tendency. A Yorkshireman associated with
the right of the party, he later became a strong critic of New Labour, from a
position to their left.

Edward Heath (1916-2005): influential Conservative politician, MP for

Bexley between 1950 and 2001 and Prime Minister between 1970 and 1974.
Prior to the 1970 election, in a shadow cabinet ‘secret conclave’ at Selsdon
Park, Heath articulated a British take on Nixon’s law and order strategy and
free market agenda, described by Hall et al in Policing the Crisis as a ‘nebulous
package of popular fears and stereotypes’. The significant and well-organised
industrial unrest during the Heath government led to a U-turn on his free-

356
 notes on historical figures 357

market agenda, as he faced concerted opposition to the Industrial Relations

Act of 1971, and in 1972 and 1974 two successful miners’ strikes.

Derick Heathcoat-Amory (1899-1981): a justifiably forgotten Tory, impec-

cably traditional in every facet of his life. A strangely phantasmatic distillation
of old-school England, all the more curious as he could never see who he was
historically. Harold Macmillan’s Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1958 to
1960. A keen sailor, best known for having his yacht brought up the Thames
to collect him after his budget speeches.

Roy Jenkins (1920-2003): first elected a Labour MP in 1948, and a major

figure in the Labour governments after 1964. A great liberalising Home
Secretary, overseeing (among other measures) the decriminalisation of homo-
sexuality and the relaxation of abortion law, but on other issues on the right
of the party. A strong pro-European, becoming President of the European
Commission in 1977. One of the Labour right-wing ‘gang of four’ who in
January 1981 defected from Labour to form the Council of Social Democracy
(CSD) which soon changed its name to the Social Democratic Party. Hall
described the gang as ‘little Caesars’ (Caesarism refers to the rise of a leader or
other compromise-broker from above, in a situation where two political blocs
are at stalemate). Jenkins later (briefly) became the party’s first leader, winning
a seat in a 1982 by-election in Glasgow Hillhead (which he lost in 1987). In
June 1981 the SDP formed an alliance with the Liberal Party and in 1988 the
two parties merged, adopting the name Liberal Democrats in 1989.

Keith Joseph (1918-1994): Conservative MP from 1956 to 1987, and a

minister under Macmillan, Home, Heath and Thatcher. An intellectual
mentor of Margaret Thatcher and a neoliberal ideologue, strongly influenced
by the ideas of Milton Friedman. After the electoral defeat of Heath in 1974
worked with Thatcher to establish the Centre for Policy Studies, a think tank
promoting free-market conservatism, and wrote its inaugural pamphlet.
Shared Thatcher’s combination of free market ideas and regressive positions
on race and family, and as Education Secretary was strongly critical of the
foundational module in the Open University Social Sciences Foundation
Course, which Hall was involved in.

Harold Macmillan (1894-1986): Conservative Prime Minister from 1957

to 1963. Helped shape a Conservative politics in line with the post-war
consensus (later dismantled by Thatcher). A keen advocate of the Suez inva-
sion and vehement critic of Nasser, he speedily reversed this commitment
once he understood the depth of Washington’s outrage. He was known as
‘Supermac’, and ‘you’ve never had it so good’ was his catchphrase.

357
358 selected politicaL WRITINGS

John Major (1943- ): son of a circus performer from Brixton, rising unspec-
tacularly to become Conservative Prime Minister after Margaret Thatcher
was knifed by her erstwhile acolytes. Won the 1992 general election, but
his government was defined by sleaze, infighting over Europe and economic
disarray, particularly after the exit from the Exchange Rate Mechanism on
Black Wednesday. Given to flights of fancy about ‘maids cycling through
the mist’, cricket and warm beer, his attempt to re-assert traditional values
through a ‘back to basics’ campaign foundered quickly due to the (unwise)
attention it brought to the private lives of his backbenchers and ministers.
Presciently described the Eurosceptic wing of his party as ‘bastards’.

Angus Maude (1912-1993): Conservative politician and writer, dreamer

of a crystalline, uncompromising vision of Conservatism. Directed the
Conservative Political Centre from 1951 to 1955. A key figure in Margaret
Thatcher’s campaign for the leadership in 1975, became Paymaster General in
1979, a post he held until his resignation in 1981.

Richard Nixon (1913-1994): Republican President of the United States from

1969 to 1974. In his 1969 election campaign popularised the term ‘silent
majority’, by means of which he summoned the idea of a conservative middle
America whose voice had been lost among the vociferousness of the liberals,
hippies and anti-war campaigners of the 1960s. He also deployed a strong
‘law and order’ rhetoric, again as a way of detaching traditional voters from
liberalism. Hall saw this as influencing Edward Heath at his Selsdon Park
pre-election conference in 1970. Nixon’s election represented a return to
conservatism after a more liberal decade. He was forced to resign in 1974,
however, as a result of the Watergate scandal. Spiro Agnew was Nixon’s Vice
President from 1969-1973, but had already been forced to resign because of
being charged with criminal tax evasion. Nixon was therefore replaced as
president by Agnew’s replacement as Vice President – Gerald Ford.

David Owen (1938- ): a doctor of medicine, first elected as a Labour MP in

1966, and a minister in the 1974-9 Labour government. One of the ‘gang of
four’ in 1981 (for more information see Roy Jenkins entry), and SDP party
leader from 1983-7, retaining his seat as an SDP and then independent MP
until 1992. Owen opposed the 1988 merger with the Liberals and continued
as leader of the rump SDP until it closed down (apart from a few branches) in
1990. He was made a peer by John Major in 1992.

Cecil Parkinson (1931-2016): Conservative MP between 1970 and 1992. A

devoted Thatcherite who resigned from office on the same day as Thatcher.
A member of the Falklands war cabinet, and, as Conservative Party chair,

358
 notes on historical figures 359

architect of the party’s 1983 election victory. Appointed Secretary of State for
Trade and Industry but forced to resign in October 1983 when the pregnancy
of his personal secretary Sara Keays became public knowledge. Influenced
by Pinochet’s experiment with introducing neoliberalism in Chile in the
1970s, he argued that, under authoritarian conditions, ‘Chile could impose
a policy and a speed of application in that policy which just isn’t possible in
this country’.

James Prior (1927- ): a Conservative MP from 1959 to 1987 and a minister

in the Heath government of 1970-74. Served as a minister under Margaret
Thatcher, but was regarded by her as a ‘wet’. He resigned from government
in 1984.

Nicholas Ridley (1929-1993): Conservative MP from 1959 to 1992. After

Edward Heath abandoned the Selsdon Park programme formed the Selsdon
Group to keep its spirit alive. Served as a minister and cabinet member
throughout almost the entire period of Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet but was
forced to resign a few months before her, as a result of ill-advised remarks
about Europe and Germany.

Bill Rodgers (1928- ): first elected as a Labour MP in a 1962 by-election,

minister in the Labour government of 1974-9. Joined the ‘gang of four’ in
1981 (for more information see Roy Jenkins entry). Lost his seat in the 1983
general election, made a peer in 1992.

Arthur Scargill (1938- ): left school to become a coal miner in 1953, President
of the Yorkshire Miners from 1973, president of the NUM from 1981 to 2002.
Played a key role in the miners’ strikes of 1972 and 1974, which are regarded
as having significantly contributed to the demise of the Heath government.
Played an important role in NUM support for the Grunwick strikers from
1976 to 1978. As NUM President in the 1984-5 miners’ strike, his strategic
leadership came under criticism from a number of quarters, particularly for
his decision not to organise a national strike ballot. Hall shared much of this
criticism, but was clear that it was the Labour Party leadership that was most
to be criticised for failure of leadership during the strike.

Norman Tebbit (1931- ): Conservative MP 1970-1992. A leading right-wing

ideologue and anti-union campaigner, and successor in 1981 to Jim Prior
as employment secretary, in which role he adopted a much more hawkish
attitude to the unions. Remained in Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet until 1987,
when he left government in order to look after his wife who had been injured
in the 1984 Brighton hotel bombing. In 1990 he proposed what became

359
360 selected politicaL WRITINGS

known as the Tebbit test – when he argued that ‘a large number of Britain’s
Asian population fail to pass the cricket test’: ‘Which side do they cheer for?
It’s an interesting test’.

Shirley Williams (1930- ): first elected as a Labour MP in 1964, and a

minister in the 1974-9 Labour government, but lost her seat in the 1979
general election. A member of the ‘gang of four’ in 1981 (for more informa-
tion see Roy Jenkins entry), she won a seat for the SDP in a by-election later
that year, losing it again in 1983. In 1993 she became a life peer.

Harold Wilson (1916-1995): Labour MP 1945-1983, cabinet member 1947-

51, Labour leader 1963-76, Prime Minister 1964-70 and 1974-76. Regarded
in his early career as a left-winger, Wilson as prime minister was a centrist
and pragmatist. In 1963 he made a famous party conference speech calling
for a new Britain to be forged in the ‘white heat’ of the scientific revolution
– thereby inaugurating a long tradition within the Labour Party of moderni-
sation as a substitute for socialism.

360
 Index

‘1956’ 5, 6, 8, 104, 117, 118, 120, 121, 298, 299, 300, 307-8, 309, 310,
122, 123, 129, 139, 337, 338, 315, 326-7, 328, 329-30, 349,
343 Blunkett, David 291, 312
‘1968’ 117, 129, 134, 137, 139, 149, Bourdet, Claude 118
164, 166, 176, 234, 252, 262, Boyson, Rhodes 180, 354
325, 334, 347 British Empire 144, 145, 200, 202,
206, 322, 326, 348
Adorno, Theodor 108, 118, 255 League of Empire Loyalists 147
Advertising 33, 35, 36, 37, 41, 49, 55, see also British Guiana, Cyprus,
57, 62, 63, 123, 132, 287, 305, Devlin Report, Suez, Trinidad
323 British Guiana 119
Affluence 117 Brown, George 98, 100, 354
see also consumerism Brown, Gordon 289, 330
Ali, Tariq 224 Burke, Edmund 106, 322
Alliances (social alliances) 163, 166, Bush, George 329
209, 212-3, 216, 345 Butler, Rab 19, 21, 25, 27 (note), 354
Althusser, Louis 2-3, 317, 343, 344, Butskellism 19, 27 (note), 55, 95, 104,
346-7 324
Anderson, Benedict 257
Anderson, Perry 97, 133, 344, 352 Caesarism 198-9
(note) Callaghan, James 113, 118-9, 210, 354
Anti Nazi League 174 Cameron, David 328, 330, 331, 333,
Argentina 202, 205 334
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
Bagehot, Walter 25, 48, 106 (CND) 8, 10, 81, 82, 89, 129,
Baudrillard, Jean 253, 262 131, 133-6, 336, 337, 342
Bay of Pigs 71, 72, 75 Capitalism 20-2, 23, 32, 34-5, 36, 37,
BBC 89, 107, 111, 115, 234 39, 40-1, 42, 43, 44, 48, 52-4,
Benn, Tony 113, 208 55-6, 57, 59, 60-61, 100, 128,
Berlin 70, 73, 76, 78, 80, 82, 83, 130 134, 173, 176, 180, 181, 189, 210,
Berman, Marshall 251, 254, 255 211, 218, 224, 228, 248, 249,
Bevan, Aneurin 121, 229, 303, 354 254-5, 259, 275, 276, 302, 344
Beveridge, William 293, 323 Artisan capitalism 233
Black Power 113, 115, 149, 168, 325 Consumer capitalism 57-9, 61-4, 67
Black Papers 181, 348 Corporate capitalism 125, 137, 233,
Blair, Tony 12, 13, 283, 284, 285, 347
287-9, 292-3, 294-5, 296, 297, Neo-capitalism 97, 98, 102-3

361
362 selected politicaL WRITINGS

Post-capitalism 91-2, 125 Cold War 22-3, 26, 70, 73, 79, 80,
Welfare capitalism 86, 91, 231, 292, 104, 117, 119, 120, 121, 128, 135,
320 195, 337
see also individualism; globalisation; Cole, G.D.H. 119
markets; new times; post- Common sense 6, 11, 20, 172, 180,
Fordism; privatisation 184, 203, 204, 217, 218, 285,
Caribbean 71, 73, 74, 75, 115, 119, 301, 309, 318, 324, 326, 334
143, 144, 337 Communism 5, 71-2, 74, 86, 118-9,
see also Cuba, Jamaica, Trinidad 121, 122, 124, 129, 254, 274,
Castro, Fidel 70, 71 337, 338, 345
Centrism, the centre/consensus politics Community 31, 38, 39-40, 50, 56, 58,
100, 110, 112-3, 116, 149, 177, 60, 65, 66, 68, 93, 94, 96-7, 128,
187, 190, 191, 192, 193, 195, 197 132, 134, 212, 215, 220, 275,
China 70, 71-2, 73, 78-9, 103, 120, 278, 279, 280, 288, 306, 323,
320 333, 334, 339, 343
Churchill, Winston 203, 205, 219 Imagined communities 264, 280,
Clark, George 132 281, 296, 297
Clarke, Alva 116 Conjuncture, conjunctural analysis 1,
Clarke, Kenneth 269, 272, 333, 355 2-4, 11, 13, 117, 135, 173, 174,
Class 9, 11, 24, 28-46 passim, 47-9, 175, 185, 186, 189, 257-8, 317-8,
55, 61, 64-5, 90, 93, 94, 99, 104- 324, 345-7
5 (endnote), 131, 132-3, 136, Conservative Party, Conservatives,
138, 140, 144-5, 152, 156, 165, Tories 6, 18-27, 47, 51, 55, 64, 95,
166, 167, 176, 194, 196, 198, 229, 98, 158, 161, 163, 164, 166, 169,
231, 268, 270-1, 297, 321, 322, 173, 184, 185, 189-90, 192, 200,
323, 324, 342, 344, 345, 346 201, 203, 208, 239, 245, 266,
and CND 134-6 317, 323, 324, 330, 331, 332,
and education 38, 113, 182-4, 293-4 334, 337
class politics/consciousness 1, 3, 6, Selsdon Park, Selsdon man, 159,
9, 31-2, 33, 36, 40, 49, 53, 66-7, 160, 161, 164, 192, 356, 359
90-2, 95-7, 105, 125-6, 172-4, see also Thatcherism
178-9, 180-1, 185-6, 189, 191, Constantine, Learie 116
211-2, 215-6, 217-21, 240-2, 244, Consumption, consumerism 23, 29,
245-6, 249, 340-1, 343; see also 30, 35, 36-8, 39-40, 44, 48, 50,
determinism 53, 56, 57-9, 61-4, 91, 95, 125,
and race 115-6, 148, 149, 151, 152, 126, 139, 211, 217, 240, 250, 257,
156, 246, 280 260, 261, 262, 266, 273, 290,
see also working class, middle class, 306, 307, 308, 309, 314-5
labour movement, populism Cook, Robin 269, 355
Clegg, Nick 323, 331 Council for Social Democracy (CSD)
Clinton, Bill 296, 313, 327 187-8
Coalition government 190-1, 197, 198, see also Social Democratic Party
323 Crosland, Anthony 39, 48-9, 51, 52,
Coalition government 2010-15 13, 57, 59, 120, 130, 132, 137, 188,
317, 319, 323, 330-4 340, 355
Cohen, Stan 154 Crossman, Richard 130

362
 index 363

Cuba 70-84 passim, 103, 115 Eisenhower, Dwight 71, 72

Culture 38, 39, 40-1, 63, 65, 91, 93, Engels, Frederick 29, 32, 33, 45, 211,
98, 102, 108, 109, 118, 120, 124, 226
125, 126, 130-2, 144, 145, 211, Europe 70, 73, 74, 75, 76-7, 80-1, 82,
233, 250, 251, 252, 253, 254-5, 83, 84, 118, 257, 276, 278-9
257, 258, 259-264, 268, 275-6, Eastern Europe 84 (note), 119, 121,
277, 280, 281, 282, 284, 291, 129, 234
296, 297, 308-9, 340, 342, 344, EEC/Common Market/EU 194, 276
346 Disengagement in Central Europe
English culture, Englishness/ 75, 77-8, 79
Britishness, 13, 20, 93, 140, 143,
144, 145, 149, 151, 156, 157, 164, Fabians 122, 136, 138, 227
185, 205, 206, 263-4, 267, 276, Falklands War 200-6, 210, 326, 348
278, 296, 297, 303, 318, 321 Fascism 147, 173, 174-5, 205, 217,
New Left focus on 120, 126-7, 128, 256, 345
339 Feminism 2, 10, 12, 127, 135, 136,
Political culture 112, 114, 124, 130, 195-6, 209, 216, 242, 243, 252,
133, 136, 150, 153, 191, 195, 209, 257, 261, 263, 274, 351
219-20, 221, 226, 228-9, 277 Foot, Michael 62
and race 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, Fordism 251, 256, 257, 259, 435,
153, 156, 157, 263-4, 278-81 ‘Americanism and Fordism’ 256-7,
Working-class culture 30-1, 37, 40, 258, 267, 345
65, 93, 96, 97, 125, 148, 220, 341 Post-Fordism 249-51, 254, 259, 260
Youth culture 131, 325, 341-2 Freedland, Jonathan 296-7
Cyprus 26 Friedman, Milton 179, 192, 319, 331
Fukuyama, Francis 320
De Freitas, Michael (Michael X) 132
Democracy 24-5, 27, 103, 112, 121, Gaitskell, Hugh 21, 27 (note), 51, 56,
128, 137, 138, 155, 173-4, 180, 57, 64, 67, 78, 80, 81, 101, 121,
181, 194, 196-8, 230, 232, 236-7, 130, 131, 137, 194, 324, 340, 355
239, 260, 295, 309, 333, 334 Galbraith, John Kenneth 59, 126, 293
Derrida, Jacques 253 Gamble, Andrew 310, 326
Determinism, economic 31-2, 41-2, Garden House Hotel 161, 167, 169,
44-5, 46 127, 138, 173, 201, 251, 170
317, 344-6 Giddens, Anthony 285, 288, 292,
Devlin Report 62, 69 304, 327
Du Bois, W.E.B. 280 Gilroy, Paul 278-9, 281, 326
GLC see Greater London Council
Eagleton, Terry 256 Globalisation 11, 250, 254, 259, 264,
East Germany, GDR 70, 73, 77, 78 275, 276, 277, 285, 288, 289-90,
Eden, Sir Anthony 78, 121, 355 291, 293, 302, 315, 319, 329
Education 49, 50, 55, 66, 93-4, 155, Goldthorpe, John 97, 341
181-4, 221, 231, 240-1, 242, 270- Gorz, André 249
1, 272-3, 291, 293-4, 298, 332, Gove, Michael 331
333, 342, 348 Governance 288, 295, 304, 305-6,
Black Papers 181, 348 307, 309, 313, 320, 329

363
364 selected politicaL WRITINGS

Governmentality 308, 322 148, 149, 150, 158-9, 162, 182,

Gramsci, Antonio 1, 2-4, 14 (note), 185, 193, 280-1, 348
138, 158, 174, 175, 189, 198, 207, Individualism 30, 38, 39, 40, 58, 62,
237, 251, 256-7, 258, 267, 303, 66, 95, 96, 204, 210, 228, 232,
317, 342, 344-5, 346, 347, 350 236, 268, 273, 283, 285, 287,
Greater London Council (GLC) 12, 294, 302, 312-3, 314-5, 318, 319,
216, 236, 239, 242, 347 321, 325, 341, 348, 349
Griffiths, Peter 149, 356 Individual choice 57, 191, 232-4,
Grimond, Jo 80, 100, 356 239, 242, 250, 256, 261, 270,
293, 305, 307, 314, 329, 332, 340
Habermas, Jurgen 255 Industrial Relations Act 1971 166,
Haig, Douglas 195, 205 167, 179
Hailsham, Lord (Quintin Hogg) 160, Intellectuals 2, 5, 18, 138, 140, 219,
161, 164, 356 283, 284, 285, 295, 298, 318,
Hain, Peter 160, 169 340
Hall, Alan 119, 120 ‘pink professors’ 224
Hase, Janet 130 Iraq 315, 329,
Hattersley, Roy 188, 208, 295, 303,
356 Jacques, Martin 284, 302, 348
Hayek, Friedrich 179, 192, 270, 283, James, C.L.R. 280, 337
306, 319 Jenkins, Roy 193, 357
Heath, Edward 80, 98, 100, 110, 160, John, Gus 158
161, 164, 166, 176, 177, 178, 179, Joseph, Keith 180, 190, 192, 230, 319,
191, 192, 194, 325, 356 357
Heathcote-Amory, Derick 48, 51, 357
Hegemony 1, 6, 136, 163, 165, 174, Kennedy, John F. 70, 71, 72, 73, 74,
177, 189, 198, 220, 237, 242, 75, 83 (note)
243, 245, 247, 258, 267, 273, Keynes, John/Keynesianism 125, 179,
285, 301, 302, 311, 334-5, 348 189, 192, 194, 229, 230, 290,
Heseltine, Michael 218 301, 319, 323, 325
Hirst, Paul 112 Khrushchev, Nikita 5, 70, 71, 72, 73,
Hobsbawm, Eric 209, 278, 322 74, 75, 76 (note), 120, 130
Hoggart, Richard 29, 40, 41, 121, Kilfoyle, Peter 311
338, 339 Kinnock, Neil 11, 208, 209, 238, 243
Housing 29, 39, 50-1, 105-6, 213, 333
Howard, Michael 266, 328 Labour movement 54, 55, 58, 66, 67-
Humphry, Derek 158, 168, 169 8, 124, 131, 133, 138, 139, 140,
Hungary 5, 26, 104, 117, 120, 122, 179, 188, 198-9, 206, 207, 209,
129, 337 213, 226, 227
Hutton, Will 292, 304 see also trade unions
Labour Party 11-12, 19, 27, 51, 55,
Identity 9, 13, 126, 135, 240-1, 246, 56, 60, 62, 64, 67, 68, 80-1, 88,
250, 251-2, 261, 262, 263-4, 276, 95, 96, 98, 105-6, 119, 120, 125,
277, 278, 279-81, 282, 340, 346 131-2, 138, 163, 178-9, 181, 182,
Ignatieff, Michael 215, 216 188, 189, 190, 192-3, 194, 196,
Immigration 105-6, 142, 143, 147, 199, 201, 206, 207-22 passim,

364
 index 365

227, 240, 244, 245-7, 273, 347, Mandelson, Peter 296, 302, 315 (note)
349-50 Markets, market forces, marketisation
Black Sections 246 37, 66, 159, 194, 197, 204, 210,
Labour election campaign 1987 213, 214, 218, 228-9, 230, 231,
238-9, 240, 241, 242-4, 247 232, 233-4, 235, 236, 256, 262-
Labourism 122, 128, 129, 196, 207- 3, 267-74, 283-4, 289, 290, 292,
22 passim, 226, 227, 343 305, 306-7, 309, 313, 314-5, 318,
New Labour/Blairism 12, 13, 283- 319, 320, 323, 326, 327, 328, 329
300 passim, 301-16 passim, 318, Market state 310-1, 313
326-30, 332, 349 Market interstices 233-4
and New Left 120, 121, 122, 125, Social market 155, 179, 189, 197, 320
130, 131-2, 136-7, 138 Marx, Karl 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 41,
‘Old Labour’ 295, 302, 301, 327, 42, 43, 45-6, 93, 119, 129, 211,
348 226, 234, 236, 254-5, 258, 259,
see also social democracy 264, 318, 321, 335, 343-4, 346
Laclau, Ernesto 180, 276, 326, 348 Marxism, Marxists 4, 5-6, 32, 46,
Latin America 70, 71, 79, 114, 115, 86, 118, 129, 133, 174, 240, 252,
144, 170, 205, 320 275, 337, 338, 339, 342-6
Law and order 107, 109, 113, 116, 150, Marxism Today 12, 13, 260, 266, 271,
151, 158-171 passim, 176, 184-5, 284, 286, 295, 298, 299, 300,
193, 204, 216, 325 345, 348, 349
Leavis, F.R./Leavisites 118, 120, 339 Massey, Doreen 12, 13, 329, 349, 350
Lenin/Leninism 2-3, 25, 103, 132, Maude, Angus 19, 20, 120, 170, 358
173, 258, 311, 323, 345-6 Middle class 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23,
Liberal Democrats/Liberals 159, 187, 30, 33, 41, 42, 93, 115, 245, 250,
191, 198, 227, 323 308, 309
Liberalism 189, 198, 227, 320-3, Miners 53, 131, 166, 192
328 Miners’ strike 1984 11, 12, 214-7,
see also Coalition government 2010- 222 (note)
15 Modernisation 12, 98-102, 103, 216,
Lipietz, Alain 267 243, 247, 286, 287, 288, 296,
Livingstone, Ken 12, 312, 347 297, 299, 303, 304, 306, 309,
Lloyd George, David 272, 323 312, 313, 327
Lockwood, David 97, 341 Mouffe, Chantal 348
Mulgan, Geoff 284, 285
Machiavelli, Niccoló 3
MacInnes, Colin 131 National Front 132, 173, 173, 174,
Macmillan, Harold 51, 57, 61, 62, 69 185
(note), 131, 325, 357 National Health Service (NHS) 95-
McNamara, Robert 75, 81, 84 (note) 6, 101, 208, 218, 229, 235, 242,
Major, John 266, 273, 358 269-70, 273, 303, 304, 305, 314-
Management 21, 33, 35, 37, 49, 52-3, 5, 328, 332, 333
93, 125 Nationalism 86, 276-8, 325-6
Managerialism 94, 225, 271-3, 296, Nehru, Jawaharlal 72
297, 304, 312, 327 New realism 210, 214, 217
New Managerialism 290, 307-9 New Left 8, 104, 117-141 passim,

365
366 selected politicaL WRITINGS

337-8, 339, 341, 343, 344, 348, Post-Fordism 249-51, 254, 259, 260
349, 351 Post-modernism 249, 253-4
New Left Clubs 130, 131, 132-3 Powell, Enoch 96, 150, 153, 158-9,
New Left Review 121, 123, 135, 141, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 185
336 Powell, Rachel 132
New Reasoner 118, 121, 122, 123, 124, Powellism 150, 151, 185, 192
338 Prior, James 177, 359
‘new times’ 12, 248-65, 267, 286, 348 Privatisation 8, 269, 290, 301, 303,
Nixon, Richard 150, 159, 160, 358 305, 307, 313, 314, 325, 327,
Norman, Jesse 324 332-3, 334
North, the (in UK) 53, 94, 124, 140, Public sector 49-50, 54, 57-8, 95-6,
243-4, 245, 296, 341 217-8, 220, 235-6, 245, 250, 271-
North Atlantic Treaty Organisation 3, 274, 290, 293, 294, 305, 306,
(NATO) 22, 73-4, 76, 80, 82, 307, 311-3, 327, 328-9, 332-3
118, 129, 134, 195 Public sector ‘reform’ 268-70, 271-
Northern Ireland 153, 161, 298 3, 286-7, 291, 292-4, 303, 304,
Notting Hill 127, 132, 147, 148, 149, 306, 307-8, 309, 312-3, 314, 331-
168 2
Nuclear weapons 22, 23, 55, 76-84 see also education, health, housing,
passim, 104, 202 public transport
Counterforce strategy 70, 75, 76, Public transport 51, 235-6, 304, 305
80, 81, 82, 83, 84 (note)
Race/racism 10, 11, 86, 106, 118, 132,
Oakeshott, Michael 25 142-57 passim, 158, 162, 168,
Osborne, George 331 184, 185, 193, 204, 242, 246,
Osborne, John 120 263-4, 278-9, 280, 281
Over-determination 116, 257-8 Rock Against Racism 174
Owen, David 187, 193, 194, 197, 201, Reagan, Ronald 195, 202, 253, 296,
208, 358 320
Oxfam 89 Reasoner, The 122, 338
Reformism 128, 195, 210, 217
Parkinson, Cecil 200, 201, 358 Regulationist school 267
Partisan coffee bar 130, 131, 338 Ridley, Nicholas 266, 359
Pickles, Eric 331, 333 Rodgers, William 187, 193, 359
Polaris submarines 73, 75 Rodker, Ernest 130
Policing 151, 152, 156, 160, 168, 170, Rushdie, Salman 282
184, 230, 327-8 Russia/Soviet Union 5, 6, 74, 70, 71,
Policing the Crisis 2, 10-11, 325, 346, 72-3, 74, 77, 78, 80, 81, 83, 86,
347, 348 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 123, 129,
Populism, the people 8-9, 139-40, 134, 276, 289, 320, 337
149, 153, 159, 161, 162, 163, 179- Russian revolution 2-3, 103, 117,
80, 181, 185-6, 192, 193, 196, 344, 345-6
202, 203-4, 205, 218, 221, 224, Rustin, Michael 13, 349
226, 295-6, 325, 333, 348
Authoritarian populism 2, 10, 11, Samuel, Raphael 126, 130, 215, 339,
174, 193, 204, 227, 296, 325, 348 341

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 index 367

Scargill, Arthur 215, 216, 359 Straw, Jack 291

Scott, George 24, 25, 120 Students 87, 109, 112, 118, 119, 122,
Sedgwick, Peter 132 134, 153, 160, 161, 163, 169, 271,
Smethwick 106, 149 332
Smith, Adam 192, 270, 283, 289, 321 Subjectivity/subjective dimension of
Social bloc/historical bloc 136, 140, politics 3, 7, 15 (note), 31, 32, 40,
175, 176, 209, 213, 215, 226, 66, 87-8, 211, 249, 251-2, 254,
241-3, 245, 345 260, 263, 264, 280, 282, 284,
Social democracy 125, 173, 176, 177- 291, 296, 307, 308, 327, 329,
9, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 189, 340, 344
192, 204, 209, 218, 221, 227-8, Suez 18, 19, 26, 27 (note), 104, 117,
254, 303, 305, 309, 310, 311, 120, 121, 122, 123, 337
312, 313, 320, 327, 338, 348, 350
see also statism Tebbit, Norman 218, 266, 278, 359
Social Democratic Party 187-199, 331, Test Ban Treaty 73, 75
357 Thatcher, Margaret 6-7, 190, 191, 192,
Social movements 11, 134-6, 209, 193, 194, 196, 197, 200, 202,
236, 211-2, 249, 261, 263 203, 205, 206, 208, 210, 218,
Socialism 26, 44, 60, 66, 67, 99, 101, 239, 240, 266, 267, 269, 270,
103, 181, 197, 199, 207, 212, 213, 273, 276, 283, 295, 296, 299,
223-37, 252, 255, 258, 260, 261, 302, 303, 305, 306, 319, 320
262-3, 276, 277, 338, 345, 351 Thatcherism 6-7, 9, 10, 11, 172-81
and New Left 117, 118-9, 120, 124- passim, 189-90, 193, 196-7, 198,
5, 126, 127-8, 133, 135, 136, 137, 202, 203-4, 205, 209, 210, 214,
138, 139-40, 141 215, 217, 218, 221, 223, 225, 231,
Soundings 13, 14, 336, 349, 350 238, 241-2, 244-6, 248-9, 258,
South, the (in UK) 53, 140, 221, 241, 266-73, 276, 278, 283, 284, 285-
244, 245, 246, 296 6, 299, 300, 301, 302, 303, 307,
Soviet Union see Russia 311, 313, 318, 319, 324-6, 347,
‘spin’ 285, 294, 295, 299, 303, 310, 348, 349
313-4, 315, 327 Thompson, Dorothy 118
State, the 5, 22, 54, 125, 128, 138, Thompson, Edward 45, 90, 118, 123,
155, 162, 163, 164, 165-6, 170, 126, 128, 137-8, 139-40, 338,
175, 176, 179, 180-1, 182, 183, 339, 341, 344
196, 197, 199, 223-37 passim, Touraine, Alan 249
261, 268, 283, 293, 294, 304, Trade unions 30, 33, 100, 103, 127,
305, 307, 308-9, 318, 319, 320, 163, 166-7, 178, 193, 194, 210,
321, 324, 326, 328, 329, 346, 348 211, 212, 304, 325
nation state 275-6, 277-8, 285, 288 see also labour movement
local state 12, 236 Transformism 197-8, 303, 311, 313,
statism 136, 225-7, 231, 232, 233 350
anti-statism 179, 181, 190, 193, 196, Trinidad 115
210, 305
see also law and order; market state; Unemployment 152, 198, 207, 213-4,
welfare state 217, 220, 221, 238, 241, 291, 323
Strachey, John 52, 54-5, 120 United Nations (UN) 78, 79, 82, 120

367
368 selected politicaL WRITINGS

United States 22, 26, 33, 41, 43, 59, 8, 229, 230-1, 243, 292-3, 302-3,
102, 111, 115, 118, 126, 149, 159, 309, 318-9, 320, 323, 347
168, 239, 256-7, 315, 321-2, 324, Westergaard, John 92
330, 342 Whannell, Paddy 123, 131, 339
and Cuban missiles crisis 70-84 Willetts, David 332,
passim Williams, Eric 337,
Universities and Left Review (ULR) Williams, Raymond 30, 37, 39, 41, 61,
118, 120, 121, 124, 126, 129, 105, 118, 120, 123, 128, 279-81,
130, 131, 135, 137, 336, 338, 334, 338, 344, 339
339, 341 Williams, Shirley 193, 195, 360
ULR Club 129, 130 Wilson, Harold 98, 99, 100, 101, 110,
Uses of Literacy 29, 40, 44, 121, 339 132, 163, 176, 360
Wright Mills, Charles 40-1, 126, 135
Vietnam 89, 107, 111-2, 149, 325 Working class 20, 28, 29, 30-1, 32,
Violence 107, 109, 111, 112, 113, 114, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42,
115, 116, 117, 159, 160, 170, 329 47-8, 50, 54, 56, 59, 64-6, 124,
148, 149, 151, 176, 178, 183,
Wallerstein, Immanuel 275 214-5, 250, 339; see also labour
Walvin, James 142 movement
War of position/war of manoeuvre 12,
137, 219, 237, 264, 267, 284, 345 Youth/young people 49, 50, 86, 131,
Welfare state 18, 20, 21, 43, 50, 59, 134, 148, 152, 154-5, 233, 234,
95, 120, 136, 152, 218, 225, 227- 260, 299, 341-2

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