Essay on Stuart Hall: Cultural Theorist and Enemy of Thatcherism

For the next two to three blogs I would like to post parts of a paper I wrote about Stuart Hall, one of the chief figures for the New Left movement in Britain and one of the developmental figures in the burgeoning cultural studies discipline.  This first posting will be a brief summation of Stuart Hall's life and his problem with the Margaret Thatcher regime in England.

I: The Life and Times of Stuart Hall

            Stuart Hall is the man who coined the phrase Thatcherism and for that hundreds of political pundits should be grateful.  Without that blanket term, many political pundits would have had to come up with their own unique buzzwords and theories about the cultural changes during the 1980’s rather than ripping off the work of Dr. Hall.  Unlike most political creatures, Stuart Hall is more than a man who coined a great phrase.  His life started off like most human lives start off; with his birth.  He was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1932 to middle class parents.  Due to his families higher class status he was able to get a proper English public school education and later was accepted into the Rhodes Scholar program as a member of Oxford College.  He was only the second black man to become a Rhodes Scholar partially due to the fact that the whole scholarship is named after a rather racist explorer (just a guess) (Journal of Blacks in Higher Education p.59).  Despite getting his Ph.D. in American Literature, Stuart Hall found his true calling to be cultural analysis with an emphasis on Marxist ideology.  His emphasis was on race based policies in Britain quickly discovered that as a black man in a mixed race marriage in the early sixties, he was not going to be treated as an equal by the stiff upper lip of the old British elite.  In fact the local Conservative party won an election with the Slogan “If you want a Nigger neighbor, vote Labour” (Journal of Blacks in Higher Education p. 59).  It is no wonder that Hall became one of the founders of the New Left in Britain. 

            As a founder of the New Left in Britain, he helped to create the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University.  Here he developed many foundational texts for the cultural studies discipline including his essay, “The Spectacle of the ‘Other’”, which sets out the groundwork for how minorities are represented in popular media forms.  His works deal with issues of identity politics and how people are both consumers and producers of culture.  A person’s identity is something that is not a static idea, but something that is constantly influx and always an ongoing process.  His studies of difference and identity politics eventually overlapped with politics and he became one of the biggest critics and writers outside of the punk rock movement on the Thatcher years in Britain.  He is perhaps the ground zero of the anti-Thatcher movement due to his coining of the term Thatcherism and his countless essays which masterfully criticized every aspect of her eleven year reign.  His criticism on Thatcher focused on how she differed from the Tories of old and was a new form of conservative who would attempt to rapidly and fundamentally change the British Welfare state into a a country of do-it-yourselfers and people who pull themselves up by their own bootstraps (Journal of Blacks in Higher Education p. 59).  He also turned his criticism inwards and called out the waning left movement and their inability to conquer the dominant Thatcher narrative by their failure to modernize.  The spirit of 1945 would not a win an election in 1983 as those old factions no longer supported the old Labour cause(Hall 216).  For all of his work, he has been called “Black Britain's leading theorist of black Britain” (that by Henry Louis Gates)(Adams Guardian.com).

            Now, where did Stuart Hall come up with all these fantastic and groundbreaking ideas?  One answer is that he just did, and stop asking questions, it's rather rude.  The less rude and perhaps real answer is that his work has been guided by two major influences.  The first being the work of Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist.  In nearly every essay in his book, The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left, there is at least one mention of Gramsci.  Hall is most interested in Gramsci’s discussion of hegemony and his other Marxist leanings.  His other biggest influence is the Trinidadian intellectual C.L.R. James (Phillips p.38).  Hall followed James’ lead on by focusing and writing about the relationship between politics and culture and claimed that James is the model on how to be a black intellectual (Phillips p. 41).  That looks like a crystal clear ringing endorsement.

II: The Problem

            Naturally, the question of what is making Stuart Hall so mad arises?  What is getting this esteemed gentleman’s goat so much that he has devoted his late 1970’s and 1980’s to writing about a particular issue.  The problem that Stuart Hall is writing about is the rise of and eventual reign of Margaret Thatcher and her policies conveniently known as Thatcherism.  He is concerned as to how Thatcher was able to seize power and how she was able to keep it.  He is concerned with why the left hasn’t been able to win an election against this very divisive politician.  Every popular musician (other than Ian Rubbish and the Bizarros) hated Margaret Thatcher and yet she ruled from 1979 to 1990.  She started a frivolous war with Argentina and was good friends with Ronald Reagan, yet still held on to power.  It is an oddity that Stuart Hall means to discuss and explore.  Margaret Thatcher and her policies were said to bring about a profound change to the British welfare state and would hurt virtually anybody who was not a rich white male or Margaret Thatcher and yet she still won numerous elections (in America this phenomena is called what's the matter with Kansas).  Hall is interested as to how Thatcher kept winning elections and how she used a combination of traditionalism and an appeal to old British Patriotism to stay in power. 

The problem does not fully rest with the acceptance of authoritarianism by the British public, but it also falls to the terrible and inadequate response of the British left to unite and defeat this menacing foe.  The British left was afraid of being known as being known as a bunch of socialists and instead of owning the term and fighting back, they tried to defeat Thatcherism on it’s own terms and failed miserably.  Another strike against the British left is that they have failed to modernize.  Hall seeks to explore how the British left has failed to update the term of socialism and how he thinks it will never take over Britain (Hall p. 180).  The failings of the left and the reign of Thatcherism make up the political and social events that concern Hall and constitute many of his writings in the cocaine fueled late 70’s all through the crack-cocaine fueled 80’s.


END OF PART 1