These Incessant and Persistent Efforts

In this week’s selections, Hall introduces us to the “new-style, middle-class, peaceful revolution” (The New Conservatism and the Old), “Authoritarian Populism” (The Great Moving Right Show), and “New Labor” (The Great Moving Nowhere Show). As a general remark, reading Stuart Hall read the “conjuncture” of three distinct moments in the postwar years was remarkable for the ways these pieces (together) provide an abstract or aerial view of the progression of political moments (or movements) and as individual texts, offer us a template for how to think, write, and analyze the conjuncture. 

Because conjunctural analysis is one of principal importance to Hall as a mode of interpretation and genre of writing, my questions this week are centered mainly around how we identify, define, and analyze a conjuncture. I also have questions about the extent to which a conjunctural analysis, while descriptive, also suggests ways forward and to what extent the terrains of struggle are limited/narrow.

Much like his theoretical meditation on ideology in “Marxism Without Guarantees,” Hall insists we go beyond an analysis that remains at such a level of abstraction that it effectively tells us nothing about what is distinct in this current moment, i.e., an attempt to add complexity and social, political, cultural, and ideological determinants to what is already given: that capital accumulation remains and as such, class struggle persists. The conjunctural analysis says yes, but asks how and on what terrain? For Hall, it is imperative to think about our current moment and its various contradictions (not merely the economic ones) because this insight answers immediate questions of action and political organization. 

Hall’s framing in the Great Moving Right Show is indebted to Gramsci. Here, he borrows from Gramsci’s definitions of the “organic” and the “conjunctural”: 

“A crisis occurs, sometimes lasting for decades. This exceptional duration means that incurable structural contradictions have revealed themselves… and that, despite this, the political forces which are struggles to conserve and defend the existing structure itself are making efforts to cure them within certain limits, and to overcome them. These incessant persistent efforts … form the terrain of the conjunctural and it is upon this terrain that the forces of opposition organize.” 

Hall is clear what constitutes the conjunctural — the “immediate terrains of struggle” — are the efforts being made to defend and conserve an economic and social position, not the economic conditions themselves. This struggle is over hegemony via the formation of social blocs. In my read, an “organic” crisis would be something like economic conditions – is this correct? As I understand it, a new conjuncture comes along if a crisis is “deep,” i.e., “organic” because the efforts to defend and conserve will necessarily not be “merely defensive.” While this definition of conjuncture seems straightforward, I am still struggling with how to understand “organic.” Are there crises apart from either the organic or the conjunctural? How do we distinguish? 

Lastly, as Hall identified the various contradictions in “The Great Moving Right Show”, a very obvious and perhaps silly thought occurred: the more that right-wing movements identify contradictions in the social democratic project and accentuate and exploit those vulnerabilities, the terrain of struggle itself moves further rightward. At the end of the essay, this left me wondering whether or not there are points of intervention — “pertinent, decisive, and effective,” as Hall said — that are more amenable to a left-wing project than those a conservative politics has captured.