Marxism and Culture

Stuart Hall

I. "STATE OF PLAY": HISTORICAL WORK IN ENGLAND

It is difficult to speak as directly as I would like to the kind of work and interests of all the people in this room. I thought it would be better, therefore, to begin by surveying briefly the work in social and cultural history that is currently going on in England, and then to speak about the promise and the problems, both practical and theoretical, of this work. In the last three or four years, there has been a real explosion in social and cultural history in the United Kingdom. An attempt is now being made to write, and re-write, and work over again, both existing and new areas of working class history in order to give very special attention to consciousness and culture. The History Workshop and the History Workshop lournu1 is one focus of the extraordinary development of grass roots work in cultural and oral history. Indeed, the History Workshop is now too large to be in one place and has been regionalized. The oral history movement too, which I know is now playing a very important part in the United States, is also expanding rapidly. Besides bringing to light new sources of material, the oral history movement provides a very important base for linking intellectual work with community organizing. The Workshop in the East End of London has begun to publish memoirs and autobiographies of men and women who have been involved in the labor movement there, and some of these projects have attracted the added support of active filmakers, dramatists, and photographers who see the connection of oral history with local community work. Of equal importance is the relevance and centrality of historical work in other fields of radical intellectual inquiry. For. example, as part of the feminist movement, feminist historians are investigating aspects of the history of women, the family, and domestic labor. So

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too is the very strong emphasis on social history in the work associated with the Conference of Socialist Economists in Britain. Breaking the hold of marginalist economics is itself a major and important thing to be trying to accomplish. But it is also important that the breakthrough is happening in the context of an interest in historical themes and as an attempt to develop an economic theory which is sensitive to the historical and social dimensions. These are some of the areas of radical history activity. I think it might also be important to say something about the background impulses to this work, that might lead you to make either comparisons or contrasts with your situation in America. There has been a substantial tradition of Marxist historiography in Britain-Hobsbawm, Hill, Dobb, and especially Thompsonwhich has given particular stress to questions of consciousness and culture. The appearance of The Making of the English Working Class marks a turning point in this concern with cultural and social history. A second source of the renewed interest in cultural history was the student movement of the New Left of the sixties and early seventies. The importance of cultural revolution was, so to speak, put on the agenda in that period. People who were centrally concerned with the importance of struggle in the cultural dimension have gone on in subsequent work to maintain that interest, and to extend it. Finally, a very crucial impulse came from the feminist movement, which sparked new interest in historical work by insisting that historians cannot continue to write the history of the working class and the history of the labor movement with one half missing from the picture. This pressure has thus reoriented, from the base upwards, the writing of 19th and 20th century history and brought the domains of consciousness and subjectivity into the central concerns of historians. At the moment, it looks like there is a major revival in Marxist and radical thought in England. It is substantial not in terms of numbers, but in terms of penetration and depth. In one field after another in The last seven or eight years, Marxist ideas, theories, concepts, styles of work and commitment have begun to establish the principal and primary terms of reference for ongoing work. Teachers and researchers have been obliged to address themselves to Marxist and radical concepts and to the political implications and consequences of the work which stems from them. That is quite a significant turn in the intellectual climate. Undoubtedly, it has something to do with the weakness of other existing intellectual traditions. If one looks, for example, at literary studies and sociology, the penetration of radical and Marxist ideas in those two fields has something to do with the relative openness and disarray of the field that is being

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penetrated, as well as with what is doing the penetration. There has been a loss of confidence at the theoretical center of these fields. Nor is this loss just an intellectual phenomenon. It is a direct result of the failure of those intellectual fields to account for the developments with which they were confronted in the sixties. I. neednt say that the penetration of these and other fields by the left is now being strongly contested, both for the usual reasons-and for some special reasons. The field of education, together with the welfare state generally, appears to have been specifically selected by the intellectual and political right as an area of ideological confrontation. This has its effects, as you can imagine, on the employment of radical teachers, on the relative freedom of teachers in schools to innovate, and of course, on the resonance of Marxist and radical ideas. A revived right is thus actively engaged again in a struggle of ideas aimed at checking the development of radical intellectual work and at mobilizing the population in support of ideological retrenchment. That is the state of play out of which some of the developments I am going to discuss further arise. 11. COMBATTING HOTHOUSE INTELLECTUALISM, MARXIST REDUCTIONISM AND BOURGEOIS COMMON SENSE The expansion of a Marxist intellectual culture is always a very contradictory phenomenon. That is to say, it brings sharply into our own consciousness the profound uneveness between the relatively advanced intellectual debate in areas like social and cultural history, and the persistant defensive economism in which the class struggle is being waged in many other areas. This uneveness has consequences for the development of intellectual work, as it always does, in the most immediate and practical sense. It places contrary demands on intellectuals to do different kinds of things, and I mean that very seriously. The development of a Marxist and intellectual culture is not something which can be produced overnight; it is something which requires its own kind of specific, detailed and prolonged intellectual labor and struggle. The fact that a lot of work is not moving and developing as rapidly as it should has something to do with the very uneveness of the struggle itself. It inevitably provokes certain kinds of questions within the radical movement. Though less so, I suspect, than fifteen years ago, concern with theoretical and intellectual questions is still seen as kind of a luxury for the movement, a middle class academic trip. That is partly because of the profound antiintellectualism and reductionism of sections of the left, and it is partly

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because middle class academics pursue important intellectual questions in a fiercely academicist way. The anti-intellectualism of one part of the left is confirmed, as it were, by the hyper-intellectualism of the other. This polarization has affects in the ideological as well as the political left. A narrow hothouse intellectual culture, which feeds off its own most recent, usually French, ideas, is quite incapable of actually contesting the grasp of conventional ideas and conventional wisdom where it counts. For the conventional wisdom still remains very much in demand. It still goes on-of course it goes on-because the social relations which those ideas grasp have not been abolished in practice. Bourgeois ideas continue to fill out the mental space; people continue to think in terms of them. But it really is quite difficult in a narrow and self -satisfied intellectual setting to prepare teachers and students and workers who are in the field to go out and combat actively the existing conventional wisdom, As teachers ourselves we must keep taking our students back over and through and beyond the conventional. It requires teaching some bad history and some bad sociology and a lot of rotten philosophy so that our students can actively intervene in schools and colleges. If they dont know these themes, they dont know how to combat bourgeois common sense. Moreover, there is an ambiguity, at least in my own view, about the way that questions about culture and ideology figure in the intelectual work that is going on. It is clearly of great importance that an argument which is pitched somewhere on Marxist terrain should have the tools to equip itself to combat the dangers of reductionism and economism. This is absolutely essential. A Marxism which has not purified its own traces of reductionism and economism is going to be unable to understand the domain of culture and the complexity of capitalist social formations. The stress which has been given to the necessity of looking at social formations in their ideological and cultural dimensions helps prevent a return to old, bad habits, and it helps define the relation of the ideological domain to class struggle and the social processes of advanced capitalism. I experience a slight concern, however, that there is a return to certain comfortable intellectual positions when people find themselves invited to think once again about culture, One of the most serious theoretical and intellectual problems confronting the new concern with culture is how to conceptualize the areas of ideology, culture and consciousness without giving way, slipping back, to idealism. The concept itself, the way it has been taught, and all its intellectual connotations and extensions, awaken the sleeping forms of idealism which are there constantly waiting to reassert themselves through

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Hegelian Marxism, Crocean Marxism, or whatever. 111. HISTORY, POLITICS AND CULTURE Let me say something about the problems of analyzing culture, and particularly one problem : the difference between history from below and history of the whole. The advantages, the immense strides possible once one seriously adopts the perspective of investigating history from below, hardly need recommendation to this audience. It eloquently exposes the inadequacy of the conventional accounts of the historical process simply because of what they leave out. Indeed, not just what they leave out, but what they systematically repress. For the conventional wisdom has given an account of capitalism without the working class, an account of imperialism without Blacks, and an account of the division of labor without women. What kind of history is that? To take a position on these three central questions alone is to see how radically undermining of the conventional approaches history from below can be. Secondly, an interest in history from below has crucial political consequences. It can restore a sense of agency, a sense of activity, a sense of the capacity of the working class and of the repressed. O f course, the beneficiaries of those lessons about the capacities to resist are more often found among middle class intellectuals than among the working class itself. The working class knows when it is able to resist, and something, though not everything, of its own capacities. To discover that there is resistance going on down there comes like a bolt of inspiration from the blue, especially to intellectuals who have thought very unsystematically and uncritically about the supposedly unproblematic and onedimensional incorporation of the working class into advanced capitalism. Still, the sense of agency, if they take that sense of agency back into the working communities and localities, into their teaching, is of absolutely central importance. The importance of history from below extends beyond the rediscovery of the working class as an agent of its own history. It is also important for how we think about capitalist social formations generally. Recognition of the bases of cultural resistance and opposition takes us back to the material basis of that culture, that is to say that we are talking about a form of life which in reproducing itself materially always finds cultural and social expression which in some way relates to that fundamental process. If you expect there is some moment when His Majesty the Economy is going to stride forth and say, "Hold on lads, I'm about to determine everything"-if you are really waiting for that moment, then good luck to you-for His Ma-

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jesty is always not only acting and speaking through other levels, they are the principle languages of his ventriloquism. He constantly speaks in cultural and political and ideological terms. Therefore, a recognition of the bases of cultural resistance and opposition must take us back to the material roots of that culture. In reproducing itself materially a mode of production always finds cultural and social expressions which are in some ways related to its reproduction. And since one of the main outcomes of this fundamental process is the reproduction of a class society and of its classes, cultural expressions must consequently be class-bound , Incorporation is thus a problem for us. But we cannot look at it onedimensionally. A class is both the locus of a possible incorporation and the focus for possible resistance. History from below has taught us this lesson quite well. As a result we have a quite different sense of the complexity of the capitalist system itself, of the social formations it produces, and of their necessary and contradictory complexity. When this sense of complexity forms the basis both of our political and of our intellectual work, it is a major advance. It means the difference between what Gramsci called common sense and what he called good sense. He had no time for common sense. But he did insist that there was something in the way in which the classes reproduced themselves which always gave the people enmeshed in them a kind of understanding that they were not in the same universe as somebody caught in a different class. Working people have known that their ways of being in the world would always be different and would find forms of cultural expression, kinds of relationships, ways of building values into the day-today, which sets limits to the degrees to which the logic of capital could impose itself. That is good sense. It is the sense of what Lenin called the class instincts without which no political and intellectual work can be done. All of those things we are beginning to know, and they are rightly and profoundly transforming our intellectual and political work. But there are other things we need to put on the table alongside the obvious advantages of history from below. The forms of cultural struggle are exceedingly complex and mediated. There are forms which maintain the defensiveness and the solidarity of the class but which cannot take it any further. History from below does not get rid of the problem of the corporateness of the working class in western capitalist societies. It simply poses that corporateness as the central problem. We know that there are forms which allow people to resist and which at certain moments of time appear to be steadfastly opposed to capital. But when you look at them ten years later they have been absolutely incorporated. The movement from the far left to the front

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cover of Time is very short in our culture, very short indeed, and what it produces, of course, is a tendency to simplify. We look back and say, absolutely without any sense of historical specificity, that if a movement ended up being incorporated, then that must have always been its meaning. This is wrong. Forms of cultural resistance can, given the conjuncture, have an emergent, or oppositional, consequence at one moment, and be incorporated by capitalism and capitalist culture in another. The process which allows movements either to break certain boundaries, or to be not only gathered in and held, but also actually built back in, so they support the further development of capital, is a very complex and historical one. But then Marx never said capitalism functionally reproduced and extended itself. He said it worked on the back of contradictions-on the back of them. When the Factory Acts were introduced, as he showed, all the capitalists took to the streets and said the entire system of capitalist production was finished, that they couldnt possibly carry on in these conditions. But ten years later they were saying that the workers had something, and that it wasnt so bad for business after all. Marx did not therefore conclude that the agitation for the factory legislation was capitalist, that it was of no consequence to the working class, or that it was a struggle which nobody should have gotten into. If you are in a system which is structured in dominance, it will try to pick up even the most radical and negative features and build them back into its own self-regeneration. If you simplify this process you may satisfy your sense of self-righteousness, but you do not give an account of the political or cultural sphere in advanced capitalism. You cannot give an account of those spheres unless you are prepared to recognize that kind of complexity and specificity in their movement. We know some other things. We know, for example, that in Marxist theory the category of experience cannot be an unproblematic one. How can it be? Marxist theory asserts at one and the same time the centraI importance of the agency of classes in history, and also insists that in some important sense, history escapes us; it has decentered us, and passed us by. Therefore, we cannot go to the sources as if they unproblematically speak the whole vision of some complete, perfectly lucid and rational class, which has simply been kept in its place, you know, by the Bad Guys. We misplace the main thrust of what Marxist historical writing can accomplish if we re-read the history of the working class and of working class culture as a superior form of Western shoot-out-as if the working class has always been ready and ripe to stand up and throw the chains over, but it just happened that the right six-gun was there, at the right point in the right time, to prevent it

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This may be a comforting way to think about history, but it just does not get into the ways in which cultures are colonized. Gramsci's work is, of course, the most significant theoretical intervention in this field. He did not believe that one could deal under capitalist conditions with the autonomy of a class. If classes could be wholly autonomous under capitalism, then there would be no need for a struggle. They would be okay! A struggle is needed because capital constantly invades and recomposes classes, incorporating emergent possibilities and reproducing the dominant relations. I do not mean that this process is unproblematic, that it is certain always to happen, or that it will always happen in the same way. Nor do I want to argue that there is a Committee of the Ruling Class sitting somewhere plotting how to do it. But the subsuming of labor power under the logic of capital is real in this society. In such conditions, the culture of the resistant and subordiante classes will always be deflected. It will always contain imaginary elements. It will never be able to fully grasp the relations and conditions in which people exist. Therefore, the study of culture cannot be a transparency. A study of cultural resistance on the part of the working class cannot be simply an affirmation of their heroism, or what have you. It requires concepts: it requires the intervention of theory. As Marx said, if things were synonymous with their surface appearances, there would be no need for science, and he would not have spent all that time in the British Museum. He spent the time in there because he needed some concepts to interrogate what appeared to be the obvious, given forms of the culture and of their relations. He needed some way to get into the structure of those relationships which were not immediate; that is, they did not lie on the surface. If I should be asked, as a result of thinking about some of the problems and arguments that are going on in the field of cultural history in England, to draw some lessons, the main one would be the absolute importance of rigorous conceptual and theoretical work as a way of advancing the class struggle in theory. Working people, in addition to everything else they need under capitalist conditions, need intellectuals to be active beside them in the struggle. But they also require intellectuals to be right about the game they are playing. We are the repositories of the mental capital which belongs to them. There is no point, at this stage in history, in appearing on the streets, or outside the factories and offices, saying, 'You are always right, just go ahead with it. We are waiting for you." That cannot be what they need from us. That cannot be the way of recognizing our intellectual responsibility to the struggle. Part of our support for the working class must be

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our commitment to understand the nature of intellectual politics.

Readings in Culture and History

John Alt, Beyond Class: Decline of Labor and Leisure, Telos (Summer: 1976) 55-81. Nels Anderson, Dimension of Work: Sociology of a Work Culture (New York: 1964). Conrad Arensberg and Solon T. Kimball, Culture and Community (New York: 1965). Roland Barthes, Mythologies (New York: 1972). Zygmunt Bauman, Culture as Praxis (London: 1973). Walter Benjamin, Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Illuminations (New York: 1968) Fernand Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life 1400-1800 (New York: 1975). Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: 1969). Peter Burke, Culture and Society in Italy 1290-1420 (London: 1971). Centre dEtudes de la Civilisation francaise et europeane du XX Siecle, Culture et Ioisir dans la civilisation du X X siecle (Paris: 1972). Nancy Cott, Buds of Womanhood: Womans Sphere in New England 1780-1825 (New Haven : 1977).

Cultural Correspondence (Providence, Rhode Island: from 1975). Cultural Hermeneutics (from 1973).
Barbara Ehrenreich and Deidre English, For Her O w n Good: 150 Years of the Experts Advice to Women (Garden City: 1978).

H. M. Enzenzbergen, Constituents of a Theory of the Media, New Left Review,

64 (1970). Stuart Ewen. Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Roots of Consumer Culture. (New York: 1976). Paul Faler, Cultural Aspects of the Industrial Revolution: Lynn, Massachusetts Shoemakers and Industrial Morality, 1826-1860, Labor History 15 (Summer, 1974) 367-94. and Alan Dawley, Working Class Culture and Politics in the Industrial Revolution: Sources of Loyalism and Rebellion, Iournal of Social History, 9 (Summer, 1976) 466-80. Clifford Geertz, The interpretation of Cultures (New York: 1973). Lucien Goldman. Cultural Creation, The Hidden God (London: 1964). Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks (New York: 1971), see pt. 2, sect. 2. Herbert Gutman, Work, Culture and Society in Industrial America, Essays in Working Class and Social History (New York: 1976). Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel, The Popular Arts (New York: 1964). and Tony Jeffersons, ed., Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subculture in

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Post War Britain (London: 1976). William S. Hall, Culture and Language: The Black American Experience (New York: 1975) Frederic W. J. Hemmings, Culture and Society in France 1848-1898 Dissidents and Philistines (London: 1971). Max Horkeimer and Theodor Adorno, "Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception," Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: 1973). Frederic Jameson, Marxism and Form (Princeton: 1972). Gareth Stedman Jones, "Class expression versus social control? A critique of recent trends in the social history of 'leisure' " History Workshop, no. 4 (Autumn: 1977).

, 'Working-Class Culture and Working-Class Politics in London, 18701900: Notes on the Remaking of a Working Class" Journal of Social History, 7 (Summer: 1974) 460-508.
Martin Jay, Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfort School and Institute of Social Research 1923-1950 (Boston: 1973). John Lamer, Culture and Society in Italy 1290-1420 (London: 1971). Eleanor Leacock, The Culture of Poverty: A Critique (New York: 1971). Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World (New York: 1971). Steven Marcus, Engels, Manchester, and the Working Class (New York: 1975).
J . L. Price, Culture and Society in the Dutch Republic during the 17th Century (London:

1974).

Guenther Roth, Social Democrats in Imperial Germany (Totawa, N. J. : 1963). Marshall David Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago: 1976). Gerald Sider, "Mumming in Outport, Newfoundland" Past and Present 71 (May: 1976). Richard Sennet, The Fall of Public Man (New York: 1977). Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: 1969). Warren Sussman, comp., Culture and Commitment 1929-1945 (New York: 1973).

E. P. Thompson, "Time, Work Discipline and Industrial Capitalism," Past and Preset?,
58 (December 1967), 56-97. 405,

. "Patrician Society, Plebian Culture" Journal of Social History 7 (1974)382-

Victorian Studies, Special Issue on Victorian Leisure, 21, (Autumn: 1977).

Raymond Williams, Keywords (Oxford: 1976).

, Television, Technology and Cultural Form (London: 1974).

, Marxism and Literature (New York: 1978).

Working Papers in Cultural Studies, especially 718 (1975) "Resistance through Rituals."