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RIP Stuart Hall

ViolentPanda said:
E2A: one of the course readers for the OU's "Culture, Media and Identities" module, I believe.
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For me it was the three part Formations of Modernity series which were the standard textbooks for sociology students when i was at university...there was one called The Social and Cultural Forms of Modernity that I think specifically dealt with cultural stuff...he co-edited them all i think
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I read an excellent little summation of some of his political views in translation from french the other day - this was about the role he was appointed since his death of 'godfather of multiculturalism':

He defended a position articulated three elements: the need to fight against these inequalities are the historical product of slavery and colonialism, the indispensable recognition of cultural identities which are closely related to these inequalities, and vigilance against risk belief in the inherent "truth" of these identities. This is a fairly complex position, based on the long time to think multicultural societies in which we live
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an important insight - that politics and identities don't emerge naturally, as reflection of some given set of conditions, but that outlooks and identities are produced, constructed, worked on/against. Nothing is totally sewn up, foreclosed, but equally you can't take anything for granted, there's no guarantees.

Sounds obvious in a way but it meant re-thinking the whole project of the left and the challenges it was trying to respond to. We're still in that moment (probably have been since about 1919 to be fair!).
 
articul8 said:
an important insight - that politics and identities don't emerge naturally, as reflection of some given set of conditions, but that outlooks and identities are produced, constructed, worked on/against. Nothing is totally sewn up, foreclosed, but equally you can't take anything for granted, there's no guarantees.
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The word you're looking for is "contingent".

Sounds obvious in a way but it meant re-thinking the whole project of the left and the challenges it was trying to respond to. We're still in that moment (probably have been since about 1919 to be fair!).
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It meant re-thinking what "the left" as a political force of the time was, and was for. Basically the "new Left" project was a product of its' time, and contingent on what the originators of "the new left" brought to the project and were able to conceptualise and then realise. it certainly wasn't ever an over-arching critique and re-construction of "the project of the left".
 
I wasn't so much talking about the new left specifically, as about the response to Thatcherism, how it achieved hegemony and what this meant in terms of the task of re-thinking traditional left assumptions.
 
butchersapron said:
I read an excellent little summation of some of his political views in translation from french the other day

He defended a position articulated three elements: the need to fight against these inequalities are the historical product of slavery and colonialism, the indispensable recognition of cultural identities which are closely related to these inequalities, and vigilance against risk belief in the inherent "truth" of these identities. This is a fairly complex position, based on the long time to think multicultural societies in which we live
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Probably a translation error in this part, "the need to fight against these inequalities are the historical product of slavery and colonialism". The options are as follows:

(1) 'Are' agrees with inequlilities plural, and the sentence then - somewhat clumsily - seems to give information about the inequalities which need to be fought against (they're a product of slavery and colonialism)...

(2) OR, 'are' should be 'is' so the auxillary agrees with the need to fight. And then we have a need to fight against inequalities as some sort of historical product. Sounds a bit like Lukacs, and is bolder than the first.

So which is it?
 
Astonishing that she manages to imagine that the socialist society-->socialist movement "convened all components and generations of the New Left in one organization".
 
Socialist Society meetings in the eighties that optimistically (but, as it turned out, briefly) convened all components and generations of the New Left in one organization
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not quite clear what she means her - "optimistically convened" - does she mean convened them all in a spirit of optimism, or set out optimistically to convene them all? Who stayed out (who would also of seen themselves as a component or generation of the New Left)?
 
It's not the optimism - misplaced or otherwise - that i find astonishing, it's the content of the claim itself. She actually claims that it did in fact, if only for a short time convene all components and generations of the New Left in one organization. When what it actually was was a tiny group of academics and think-tank junkies with little or no class roots. There's more than a little arrogance in such a claim. I don't want to harp on it on this thread, or as major criticism of her appreciation of Hall, but that really lept out at me.
 
I don't know about "tiny" - the Chesterfield conference had about 3000 people queuing half way across town to get in. I doubt they were all "academic and think-tank junkies".
 
I think that her ladyship might have been kidding you on a bit there. That series of conferences were not strictly a socialist society membership thing either, but a Benn linked (as in they used his name) national conference for all socialists - those opposed to the socialist societies approach as well as those who supported it - as well as the dying labour left. SS organised them sure. There is no way on earth that you can say the socialist society was not dominated by the types that i mention. And you most certainly cannot make the claim the SS convened "all components and generations of the New Left in one organization" - because it's just not true.
 
Back on topic last night I read (amongst other things from that list you shared) - New Labour's Double-Shuffle - possibly the best analysis of what NEw Labour represented and its MO than I have come across.
 
Fantastically rabid - and just wrong - appreciation from the WSWS:

Cultural theorist Stuart Hall (1932-2014): A political career dedicated to opposing Marxism

Cultural Studies originated as part of an attack on revolutionary Marxism, directed above all against its contemporary expression, Trotskyism.
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Various media commentators have enthused about Hall’s ability to “identify key questions of the age”. History will judge him more harshly: his answers to these questions were confused, misleading and often supine
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Martin Jacques, former editor of Marxism Today, has claimed that Hall saw Britain “differently, not as a native but as an outsider”. More properly, he saw it as a non-native petty bourgeois. Everything about Hall’s upbringing suggests he was only seeking a different arrangement of the existing power structures in order to locate himself as a member of this emerging middle class layer.
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He joined a New Left made up of ex- and current members of the CPGB, various petty-bourgeois breakaways from the Fourth International and left Labourites seeking to provide the Labour and trade union bureaucracy with a buffer against Trotskyist criticism and opposition.[What a brilliant self-centred reading of the period :D)
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In 1960, Hall was one of the founding editors of the New Left Review (NLR), which has been a deplorable fount of anti-Marxism ever since.
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His “Marxism” was an ideology purpose-built to meet the requirements of the “left” petty-bourgeoisie, discontented, looking for “space”, but tied by a thousand strings to the existing order
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Sorry to bring WSWS back into it, but they had an even more fantastically rabid line yesterday that needs to be known about:

Alex Callinicos: An imperialist apologist writes on Ukraine


Alex Callinicos is the theoretical leader of the Socialist Workers Party in Britain and a senior lecturer at Kings College London. His most recent writings on Ukraine mark him out definitively as a pliant tool of imperialist intrigue, ready to employ any lie, no matter how brazen, in order to facilitate the predatory activities of Washington and London.
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These people criticise the actions of the cheka and their intellectual apologists remember.
 
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