Week 4 Handout by Abigail and Rajorshi

Facilitators: Abigail Escatel & Rajorshi Das. 9 February 2022 

 

Part I: Map of the Main Points 

 

“The New Conservatism and the Old” (1957) 

New Conservatism 

1. A “safe investment for the politically uncommitted,” “An unfinished business” (18) 

2. New middle class party recruits are “aggressive nationalist” (19). 

 

Welfare State and Refurbished Capitalism 

1. Middle class is against the redistribution of wealth. The private sector is offering opportunities for upward economic mobility. 

2. The revolution of the “welfare” focused on middle class virtues (20). 

3. Discontent led to a “peaceful revolution” that prioritized capital accumulation and opposed reason (23). 

 

Suez Debacle and the Way forward 

1. National Pride and Imperialism in post-World War II world. 

2. “Labour Party should see itself not merely as the passive agent of the parliamentary system, but… as the bulwark of democratic practice and the defenders of the tradition of reason, responsibility and patience in politics” (27). 

 

 “The Great Moving Right Show” (1979) 

The Shortcomings of Left Strategies 

1. The problem with the left position is that it reads history “as a series of repeats” (173). 

2. “Fascism” as name-calling tactic obscures the specificity of the political terrain (174-75) 

 

Examples of the Contradictory Forces of Social Democracy (178) 

1. Disinvestment in Welfare State to a “State Monopoly Capital” (180-181) 

2. Colonisation via the right’s restructuring of education to value economic and efficiency values thus

3. making it less about access improving life chances of poor (starts 181) 

3. Hall unpacks the right’s rhetoric of race, law, and order via the common sense production of a civilized/uncivilized world and the curation of consent for increased policing. (184) 

 

“The Great Moving Nowhere Show” (1998) 

Is the Blair Regime a new iteration of Thatcherism? Yes and No… 

1. Some things that are the same: Anti-intellectualism/against the intellectual (284, 295, 298), the rhetoric of making everything in Britain ‘New’ (national self-renewal, 285)  

2. The newness: Blair’s project is about adjusting the biopolitical citizen to neoliberalism post-Thatcher political shifts. (299) A shift to “authoritarian populism.” (295-96) 

 

New Labour & The Third Way:  

• The new labour party is not to be trusted. They aren’t very clear about their political goals other than putting on a public face of pleasing everyone (evasive, semantic inexactitude, no enemies, claims to occupy a mythical third moderate space. (286-87) 

• Described as “seduced by the neoliberal gospel” (289) consequently it focuses on individual responsibility and ignores institutional responsibility (i.e. business). (289)   

 

Part II: Keywords/Vocabulary 

 

Conjuncture/Conjunctural terrain (174, 175) “the immediate terrains of struggle” and “it is upon this terrain that the forces of opposition organise,” “the incessant and persistent efforts which are being made to defend and conserve the position.” (175) It is formative & constructed: “a new balance of forces; the emergence of new elements; the attempt to put together a new ‘historical bloc;’ new political configurations and philosophies; a profound restructuring of the state and the ideological discourses which construct the crisis and represent it as it is ‘lived’ as a practical reality; new programmes and policies, pointing to a new result, a new sort of ‘settlement’--within certain limits. (175) A process of disarticulation of old formations and rearticulation into new configurations.  

  

Hegemony (174, 285) A struggle within the dominant bloc (for Hall he depicts this struggle between the radical right, social democracy, and moderate wing of the right, p.177). Constituted by “active popular consent,” not limited to electoral results (174). 

 

Common Sense (172, 180, 285) It is a product of hegemony, and needs to be constructed, such as common sense against reason and intellect. “It is a particularly rich mix because of the resonant traditional themes – nation, family, duty, authority, standards, self-reliance – which have been effectively condensed into it” (180). Curated fantasies/myths of “Demon Fraud and Feckless Work-shy” (294). 

 

Representation (178) “an active and formative relationship. It organises the class, constituting it as a political force–a social democratic political force–in the same moment as it is constituted.” Depends on “the ways the apparatuses and philosophies–the means–by which the often dispersed and contradictory interests of a class are welded together into a coherent position which can be represented in the political and ideological theaters of struggle.” (178) 

 

Neoliberalism (179, 290) Production of new political subjects: “Entrepreneurial Man/Economic Man/The Enterprising Subject/Sovereign Consumer.”  “The deregulation of markets, the wholesale refashioning of the public sector by the New Managerialism, the continued privatisation of public assets, low taxation, breaking the ‘inhibitions’ to market flexibility, institutionalising the culture of private provision and personal risk, and privileging in its moral discourse the values of self-sufficiency, competitiveness and entrepreneurial dynamism.” (290) 

Part III: Multimedia 

 

Nationalism and Fascism Now: Houston Says Howdy Modi (Watch the first 4 mins of the video from 2019). 

 

Does the cocktail of religion or race-based nationalism, neoliberalism and popular support indicate the rise of democratic fascism and right-wing alliances? Given the fact that COVID vaccines are free in the US, does welfarism still hold value for some sections of society? Do we need to go beyond Stuart Hall’s Left/Right binary and interrogate the contradictions of contemporary political formations through a different lens? Who is the contemporary Left anyway? 

 

Discussion Questions:  

​​1. Given his critique of Blair in “The Great Moving Nowhere Show” (1998), can Hall’s earlier optimism about the Labour be seen as misguided? Is the New Labour’s “Third way” a product of the reexamination that he had sought in the 50s?  

 

2.  Given how Thatcher’s anti-trade union and anti-poor rhetoric is embraced by Blair, do these conjunctures imply the complete sidelining of the working class (and/or the organic intellectual) as a vote bank? Where does the upper class elite fit in these conjunctures?