butchersapron
Bring back hanging
I'm afraid to my mind that arguing
Is a result of that later bending of his thoughts and ideas then because it bears no real relation to what he ever argued or put forward himself whilst misreading what the people who split from the CPGB in 56 were up to (the rethinking of marx that the key players in that group engaged in came much later in the mid-late 70s and for some never came at all - for them it was just simply that the CPGB as an organisation was no longer fit for purpose and labour would have to do instead) and then confusing that 56-61 period with an academic movement that only came to light in anglophone countries at the very very earliest a whole quarter of a century later.
Hall's work at the BCCS wasn't really 'looking for resistance in cultural identity' (and most of his actual theoretical work rather than what his real job of running the centre was done in the mid-late-70s). The BCCS did not introduce the idea of intersectionality into this country (no matter what Suzanne Moore says) - again look at the chronology. Nor did they introduce the ideas of gender and race into the field of inquiry - after being set up by the most old fashioned of the 56 group (Hoggart) they simply did what their name suggests - that is, look at popular culture. This meant things like viewing habits, youth sub-cultures, attitudes towards work etc Hall took over in 68 and attempted to widen the ways in which they do this by introducing the ideas of Lucien Goldman (quickly discarded) then people that the NLR were then starting to translate and publish (Adorno, Gramscio etc - rememberhe has left the NLR a year after being made the first editor) but still covering the same an similar topics. The idea simply being that 'signifying practices' - culture - told us wider things about society as whole, how changes in the formation of capital relations, how commodities are consumed are being experienced and then, in turn reformulated. That reformulation can act as resistance is as far as Hall ever went - he never argued that it was central, or unrelated to material conditions (the opposite in fact) or leading or the only place it can occur. If you read back those works up until policing the crisis the only resistance they identified really was a lack of identification with either school or work. I think you've blown up their work into something it wasn't.
Gender and Race were always parts of the fields of enquiry if only as absences - and it was the failure to deal with these absences and the discriminations that were built on them by the state and its' institutions, by society and its institutions (chiefly the labour movement) that lead to the 81 riots and scarman report that sanctioned the top-downstate led multi-culturalism that has developed into present day identity politics. That's where Identity politics in this country came from - not from a handful of academics writing about the way young girls -de-code teenage magazines for a slightly wider group of academics. For my thoughts on that see this.
NLR has never had any real influence beyond marxist specialists. Perry Anderson has always been quite unapologetic about this and often wrote about this being the idea after he used his personal fortune to buy the mag out form the original 56ers and change direction quite sharply - this was the basis for his falling out with E.P Thompson for example. The mags content from anderson's takeover basically had two main themes, very rarely meeting. One was the translation of then cutting edge continental marxism (althusser etc) and the construction of a tradition called 'western marxism' through the translation and re-publication of old pieces from people like Korsch and Lukacs. The 2nd was the political bits and it mostly consisted of regurgitation of third-worldist cheerleading wirth little or no critical reflection on why each third world issue they concentrated on inevitably went a very different way than they had suggested it would. Neither of these had much real world purchase. Anderson at this time actually wrote a book about 'western marxism' in which he described how it was the end result of a separation of marxist theorists from political action, a retreat into the academy - in a very different way from how Kautsky, Lenin, Luxemburg etc had managed to play both roles. He himself wrote the story of his and the NLR's own political irrelevance.
The only thing i can think of that has much significance was Tom Nairn's work on Scotland and Empire which has had an influence on left-scottish nationalists but the vast majority of this work has taken place in his books, not in NLR. NLR did play a role in the three-way-debate between him Thompson and Anderson in the 60s and 70s which helped spark his thoughts on this - but then so did socialist register and other journals - and i think, at the time Nairn's position was the exact opposite of the one he now holds and that has had influence.
You really are squashing very different things and periods together here - the late 50s and the early-mid 80s - and seeming to treat them as one moment. Those at the early end rarely if ever re-thought their views in terms of identity and those at the later end never thought in terms of relations to an international communist movement.
(I've crammed in a lot there because i don't know that i'll be around much this week)
BTW this is my fav Hall quote for those still stuck in that model of a passive w/c having their lifes beamed into their heads by mass media and who try to use Hall and Gramsci to defend that nonsense:
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