Anticapitalism and Culture

Radical Theory and Popular Politics

Jeremy Gilbert

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781845202293
• eBook ISBN: 9781000189988
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Globalisation
• Index: Social Sciences

What does 'anticapitalism' really mean for the politics and culture of the twenty-first century?Anticapitalism is an idea which, despite going global, remains rooted in the local, persisting as a loose collection of grassroots movements and actions. Anticapitalism needs to develop a coherent and cohering philosophy, something which cultural theory and the intellectual legacy of the New Left can help to provide, notably through the work of key radical thinkers, such as Ernesto Laclau, Stuart Hall, Antonio Negri, Gilles Deleuze and Judith Butler. Anticapitalism and Culture argues that there is a strong relationship between the radical tradition of cultural studies and the new political movements which try to resist corporate globalization. Indeed, the two need each other: whilst theory can shape and direct the huge diversity of anticapitalist activism, the energy and sheer political engagement of the anticapitalist movement can breathe new life into cultural studies.

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A Political History of Cultural Studies, Part One: The Post-War Years

Cultural Studies and the Labour Movement

Cultural studies first emerged as a recognisable discipline in England at the end of the 1950s, with the publication of a number of key works. In their very different ways, these books were all concerned with questions of class, creativity, culture, history and power, and of the complicated relationships between different elements of social life. Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (1957) and Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society (1958) were closely followed by Williams’s The Long Revolution (1961) and E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963). All of these emerged partly from the climate of discussion and commentary around journals such as New Reasoner and Universities and Left Review in the late 1950s.

This context was itself the product of a complex interaction between a number of different intellectual and political tendencies of the time. In particular it emerged out of the work of scholars, both as teachers and writers, who were working at the boundaries between formal higher education and institutions and organisations strongly associated with the British labour movement. Specifically, they were involved with the movement to provide education for working-class adults who had not had the opportunity to experience higher education, a phenomenon which was widely understood as one element of the broad project of the labour movement to establish institutions and forms of self-organisation which could improve the lives of working people, either through expanding public, state-funded institutions—the core elements of the so-called welfare state—or through forms of autonomous collective provision by working-class organisations. It’s worth noting at this stage that the middle decades of the twentieth century saw a general tendency for working-class political movements—socialism, communism and their many variants—to move away from the tradition of autonomous self-organisation (that had produced institutions ranging from the cooperative retail societies of the United Kingdom to the workers’ councils of revolutionary Russia), towards a strategy focussed on expanding centrally controlled universal state provision of a whole range of services, from education and health to transport and energy supply, and state control of a range of key industries. On a very small scale, cultural studies emerged in the space in between these two traditions of working-class political activity. On the one hand, many of its early practitioners were involved with the Workers Educational Association, a democratic organisation funded largely by trade unions and dedicated to providing a range of education to working-class people. On the other, many of them were involved with the extramural departments of leading universities; those departments set up in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to meet the growing demand that people from outside the traditional professional and aristocratic elites be given access to some form of university education (Steele 1997).

Despite how politically different the Workers Educational Association and the extra-mural departments were from one another, they tended to be staffed by teachers motivated by similar political, ethical and pragmatic commitments. In fact many teachers worked for both groups. Their commitments involved not merely extending the opportunity for working people to access the same kinds of education as their more privileged peers but also developing new types of curriculum in the humanities which would be relevant to their experiences and which were informed by the socialist values which teachers and students in these contexts were presumed to share. This involved not only transferring the established university curriculum into new contexts but also interrogating the established boundaries and values of that curriculum. It has now become rather commonplace to observe that so-called humanities curricula have tended to promote the values and achievements of privileged elites down the ages (Williams 1977; Bourdieu 1986), but in the 1950s, when the received wisdom still held that the job of humanities scholars was to preserve a ‘Great Tradition’ (Leavis 1948) of ‘the best that has been thought and said’ (Arnold 1960), this itself was a highly subversive suggestion. The idea that, instead of simply reproducing the assumption that bourgeois high culture was self-evidently superior to the rest of the surrounding culture, and was inherently worthy of study for that reason, one might undertake a less hierarchical study of that culture as a whole or in different manifestations, a study which looked at the relationships between cultural, social and economic practices from a perspective informed by the egalitarian and collectivist values of the labour movement, emerged as a critique of those assumptions relevant this specific situation. It was this idea that eventually gave rise to cultural studies.

The point that I want to draw attention to here is that for all of its micro-political novelty and innovation, what marked cultural studies as different from other such interventions, and what has lent its story a certain heroic glamour ever since, was the fact that its disciplinary, pedagogic and intellectual innovations were all informed and motivated by a clear commitment to the political objectives of the British labour movement. Now, this on its own is a fairly uncontroversial statement. Things start to get more complicated, however, as soon as we have to address two facts. Firstly, there is the fact that the so-called British labour movement was never a singular homogenous entity, and it clearly never had a single coherent set of objectives. Secondly, there is the fact that most of the key figures responsible for the emergence of cultural studies were actually committed to one quite specific project within that movement. Let’s try to deal with these one at a time.

Firstly, the British Labour movement. Of course, no movement is ever really homogenous, and movements of all kinds are often made up of a number of quite different and at times mutually antagonistic traditions and groupings bound together by diffuse and weakly defined goals. Comparatively speaking, the British Labour movement since the early twentieth century has been fairly easy to pin down as a recognisable entity with clearly defined parts, as British labour politics has been characterised by an unusually tight relationship between trade unions and a single political party. The Labour Party was created by the trade unions and a number of socialist societies during the first decade of the twentieth century and to this day has been the only political party which any major union has officially supported (apart from the National Union of Mineworkers, which briefly supported the Socialist Labour Party of Arthur Scargill), while continuing to rely on the trade unions for financial support. Of course, at any time during that period, there have been vast differences between the political and practical agendas and aims of different sections of the labour and socialist movements, and the official aims of the Labour Party have also changed drastically over time. For example, in 1983 its aim was to establish a socialist Britain, independent of the United States and Europe, in which a democratic state controlled the commanding heights of the industrial economy. By 2005 its aim was to equip Britain to face the rigours of global competition by subjecting as much as possible of social life to the competitive logic of market economics and by effectively dismantling the public sector altogether. Yet at each of these moments there were voices to be heard within the party supporting the agenda which dominated at the other moment. Despite these differences, at any given instance, the vast majority of socialists and trade unionists in Britain have been members of organisations which officially subscribed to the stated values and nominal objectives of the Labour Party at that time.

In the 1950s—although there was just as much fierce disagreement between different sections of the left as at any other time—it is worth bearing in mind that the vast majority of its partisans would have subscribed to a particular set of assumptions that today would be regarded as highly marginal, and extremely left-wing. Almost all of them would have agreed that capitalism is a social system with an inherent tendency to generate social instability and inequality which has to be reigned in by democratic institutions. Indeed, even many politicians of the mainstream right would have agreed with this view at the time. People of different political persuasions would have disagreed on the question of whether the regulation of capitalism by democratic institutions should mean simply regulation of certain key areas of industrial policy by civil servants, gradual extension of public ownership over more and more of areas of economic life, establishment of new kinds of cooperative control of core services such as housing and manufacturing (intended gradually to displace the old, hierarchical systems typical of industrial capitalism), or revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeois state and the creation of a soviet republic. While most would have agreed that capitalism was a great source of economic and technical progress and innovation, those who did not regard it as also, basically, a problem, to be dealt with by institutions composed of or representing the wider community, were at that time in a tiny minority. Thinkers like Hayek and Friedman who were to become so influential after the 1970s had no influence at all at this time. A powerful tradition within British conservatism had itself always been rather sceptical as to the value of unregulated capitalism, recognising the threat that it posed to social order, aristocratic privilege and the security of the poorest people. This tradition was represented in the twentieth century by those so-called One Nation Conservatives, who took the reforming Victorian prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, as their model, and this strand was dominant within the Conservative party from the 1940s until the late 1970s. Mainstream sections of the Labour Party, therefore, were not considered terribly extreme when they expressed the firm conviction that the long-term goal of their movement was to replace capitalism altogether with a social system in which the means of production, distribution and exchange were collectively owned, as the constitution of the Labour Party continued to state until 1995, even though the right-wing of the party wanted to abandon this commitment from the 1950s onwards.

What all this means for us is that we can say with some confidence that as participants in the labour movement who were clearly not supporters of its extreme right wing, the pioneers of cultural studies all shared a very broad but very profound set of political beliefs and objectives which assumed the basically destructive, exploitative and undemocratic nature of capitalism, in particular its tendency to undermine all forms of community; and that the historic mission of the Labour movement was to replace it with a socialist democracy within which collectivist and democratic values would dictate the direction of future development. It was the desire to work through the implications of these assumptions for scholarly and pedagogic work in the humanities which was really the founding impulse of cultural studies, and which has had a profound influence on its development ever since.

Cultural Studies and the New Left

More than this, however, most of the early cultural studies writers were committed to a particular set of ideas about the direction which leftist politics in Britain and in the rest of the world ought to take and the values which ought to inform it. Indeed, several of these figures had a significant profile within the wider intellectual left which was by no means dependent upon their status as pioneers of cultural studies (which itself would not be fully recognised as such until at least the 1970s). It was as members of the so-called New Left, as much as innovators of a new field of scholarship, that figures such as Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall and E. P. Thompson would come to prominence. The stories of the New Left and of cultural studies are so intertwined that they are often thought to be just one story about one thing. My contention will be that they are not. In fact, we can only really understand the complex relationship between them, which was the defining relationship in shaping the political character of cultural studies until well into the 1990s, if we can conceptualise them as related but distinct entities.

So what was the New Left? Well, once again this is a term we have to be careful with, as it has been used in slightly different ways over time and rather differently in the United Kingdom and the United States. However, the first group to be identified with this label, the grouping that is now sometimes referred to as the First New Left (Kenny 1995), was a small number of intellectuals of two generations who coalesced around the journal New Left Review, founded in 1960 out of the merger of New Reasoner (edited by E. P. Thompson) and Universities and Left Review (of which Stuart Hall was one of the editors). Exactly how far these intellectuals represented anything but themselves and how far they were articulating the concerns and aspirations of a whole new generation of left-wing citizens is a matter for historical debate, which it is impossible for us to address with any authority, although we can say that at certain points in its history the New Left did seem to be broadly in tune with upcoming and influential strands of the wider political left. What is important for us at this stage is that they had a fairly specific and coherent set of ideas about what political course the organised left and its supporters should follow, and these ideas directly related to the values and priorities which they brought to the nascent discipline of cultural studies (Dworkin 1997). To understand these values and priorities, we have to understand the situation in which they emerged.

After the Russian revolution of 1917, the overriding fact shaping left politics across the world had been the existence of a nominal workers’ state in the USSR, governed by a communist party supposedly committed to world-wide proletarian revolution; a party which also commanded the second most powerful military machine in the world. The USSR had suffered losses and hardships during the Second World War compared to which even the ordeal of the British people seemed mild, and the military organisation of the Red Army was without question one of the key factors in the global defeat of fascism. Despite this, both before and after the war, the USSR had been subject to ongoing pressure from the great capitalist powers such as the United Kingdom and the United States, pressures which included military intimidation, economic embargoes and the political harassment of communist sympathisers in those countries. It had always been claimed by anarchists, by followers of the exiled former Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky, and by liberal and right-wing opponents of the USSR that Stalin had built a horrific totalitarian regime instead of a workers’ paradise, but many dismissed this as propaganda. For many on the left, therefore some kind of loyalty to the USSR was a sine qua non of any effective radical politics. In countries like France, Italy, China and many others, the largest party of the left was the Communist Party, officially affiliated to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Even where the Communist Party was small, as in the United Kingdom, it was the natural home for many activists, trade-unionists and intellectuals who saw the more moderate socialist parties (such as the Labour Party) as too willing to compromise with capitalists, liberals, conservatives and US imperialism to be able to bring about lasting and far-reaching social change.

In the late 1950s a number of developments converged to change this situation. Most famously, in 1956, the USSR both officially admitted the extent of state terror under Stalin (who had died in 1953) and suppressed a democratic revolution in Hungary against single-party communist rule (a revolution supported by many Hungarian communists). These final proofs of the extent of Soviet militarism and authoritarianism permanently damaged the credibility of the communist movement in the West and led many to leave the communist parties. At the same time in Britain, a new kind of political movement was becoming the focus of activity for many middle-class activists and young people. Founded in 1958, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament was an organisation which attracted support from many sections of society and which sought to use peaceful but high-profile forms of protest to tum public opinion against the stationing of nuclear missiles in Britain; its supporters were not drawn from any one political party or social group. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament sought to withdraw Britain from the cold war military conflict between the United States and USSR, in which Britain was clearly on the side of the United States in allowing US military bases to be located on the British mainland, but it also opposed the militarism of both the US and Soviet states. In this, it was largely motivated by an ethical, humanist critique of both American-led industrial capitalism and Soviet authoritarianism (Taylor 1988).

Another great event of 1956 was the Suez crisis: the botched attempt by France, Israel and Britain to take control of the Suez canal, which had recently been nation-alised by the left-leaning Egyptian government and was a strategically crucial route for shipping in the region. This is often remembered as the moment when the reality of post-Imperial geopolitics was brought home to the former Great Powers of Western Europe: France and Britain were thoroughly humiliated when it became apparent the United States would not back their plan and that as such it could not succeed. However, this was only one moment in the traumatic history of de-colonisation. The Algerian War was raging at this time: the experience of colonialism in Algeria and the French government’s determined and bloody attempt to retain control of this colony would leave its mark on a generation of Parisian intellectuals (Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, Bourdieu), not to mention Frantz Fanon, the godfather of postcolonial theory; all of whom would later become important influences within cultural studies. At the same time, the post-war period saw the first great wave of migration from the former colonies to the United Kingdom, bringing with it, amongst others, a young Stuart Hall from Jamaica to Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship. The questions of national identity, neo-colonial power and racism which the break-up of the old imperial system raised could not always be answered within the terms of traditional socialist thought, and this would provide a powerful impetus to the emergence of a new set of political sensibilities. At the same time as all this, the dynamics of class and culture within British culture were clearly changing in unexpected ways. The emergence of a consumer society and a comprehensive welfare state radically altered the condition of working-class people, changing the very meaning of working class, while the impact of American cinema, music, fashion and television on different sections of the population was provoking visible forms of cultural change which could not be easily dismissed as superficial or short-term.

This was the context which produced the New Left, which consciously sought to distance itself from both the communist tradition and the increasingly institution-alised and ineffectual mainstream labour tradition (the British Labour party, having won a historic victory in the 1945 general election which is still widely seen as having transformed Britain for good, had completely failed to build on this success, and was out of power for 13 years between 1951 and 1964). In particular this involved the investigation of socialist ideas from outside these traditions: the members of the New Left tried to break the hold which Soviet communism had had on the imagination of the radical left for decades by excavating the history of native radicalism in England, and by looking to the ideas of those communists who had been marginalised and suppressed by the dogma of Stalinism. Williams and Thompson both turned to the legacies of English radicalism—most notably the utopian, proto-ecological writings of the English socialist William Morris—for inspiration, and Hall and others would soon begin to take an interest in the writings of continental thinkers such as Gramsci, Lukacs, and Lucien Goldmann (Dworkin 1997). In many ways these twin impulses—to find elements of radicalism in one’s own culture that could be built on in the future, and to discover those radical philosophers from other places and times who might have been neglected—have driven the development of cultural studies and cultural theory ever since.

Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies

The first key institutional moment in the story of this development is the founding of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham in 1964. The fact that the centre was founded, and the term cultural studies was coined by Richard Haggart, is significant for our story here. Hoggart is normally cited along with Williams and Thompson as one of the three founding figures of cultural studies. Haggart was never clearly iden...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 A Political History of Cultural Studies, Part One: The Post-War Years
• 2 A Political History of Cultural Studies, Part Two: The Politics of Defeat
• 3 Another World is Possible: The Anti-Capitalist Movement
• 4 (Anti)Capitalism and Culture
• 5 Ideas in Action: Rhizomatics, Radical Democracy and the Power of the Multitude
• 6 Mapping the Territory: Prospects for Resistance in the Neoliberal Conjuncture
• 7 Beyond the Activist Imaginary: Nomadic Strategies for the New Partisans
• Conclusion—Liberating the Collective
• Bibliography
• Index