The memoir serves as an important
resource for understanding the petty-bourgeois opposition to Marxism in Britain
post-1956. Hall’s path—from the New Left to Cultural Studies, then to Marxism
Today and New Labour—demonstrates a deliberate intellectual development. It
reflects the ideological stance of a social class whose interests contrast
sharply with those of the working class. This review seeks to place Hall within
this wider historical context.
1956 and the Crisis of Stalinism
The year 1956 marked a major
crisis for Stalinism, highlighted by the Moscow Trials. Khrushchev’s “secret
speech” and the Hungarian workers’ uprising shattered the illusions held by
Communist Parties across Europe. In Britain, the CPGB lost nearly one-third of
its members. For revolutionary Marxists—especially Trotskyists of the
International Committee of the Fourth International—1956 confirmed Stalinism’s
counter-revolutionary character. They opened an opportunity to attract confused
CP members to a truly internationalist outlook.
Hall arrived at Oxford in 1951,
coinciding with the onset of this crisis. His memoir describes his political
awakening, which focused on opposing authoritarianism and dogmatism. However,
it is important to clarify that his real political shift was marked by his
rejection of Leninism, which was based on a pseudo-leftist critique of the
vanguard party.
Hall did not align with the
Trotskyists, who sought to clarify Stalinism and uphold the continuity of
Marxism. Instead, he became a founding editor of Universities and Left Review,
which later merged with E.P. Thompson’s New Reasoner to create the New Left
Review. This environment openly rejected the Leninist idea of the revolutionary
party, criticising it for Stalinism’s atrocities.
The Role of Jock Haston
During this period, Hall's mentor
was Jock Haston, a former Trotskyist who abandoned the Fourth International and
pledged his allegiance to the Labour Party, which he regarded as "one of
the most democratic workers’ organisations in existence." Haston’s
shift—from revolutionary Marxism to Labourism— symbolised the petty-bourgeois
response to 1956: a withdrawal from the working class and an attempt to find a
“third way” between Stalinism and Trotskyism that, in fact, represented a step
back into social democracy. Hall absorbed this outlook completely.
The British New Left didn't
revive Marxism; they outright rejected it. Their core belief was that Leninism
inevitably led to Stalinism, so they argued the revolutionary party should be
abandoned. This perspective falsely reverses historical facts — Stalinism was a
betrayal of Leninism, not its successor. Yet, the petty-bourgeois intellectuals
of the New Left equated Leninism with words like “authoritarianism,”
“dogmatism,” and “sectarianism.” Hall’s memoir can't challenge this ideological
stance because it was the foundation of his entire political perspective.
The New Left emerged from a specific social layer: middle-class intellectuals disillusioned with Stalinism but hostile to the working class as a revolutionary force. They sought a politics that would preserve their moral radicalism while avoiding the discipline and programmatic clarity required by Marxism.Hall’s own background—“middle-class Jamaican upbringing,” Rhodes Scholarship, Oxford intellectual circles—placed him squarely within this layer. His political development was not a break with his class position but its ideological expression.
Cultural Studies
Hall’s key institutional
contribution was leading the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at
Birmingham from 1972. While Cultural Studies is frequently seen as an
innovative academic field, Hall reportedly referred to it as “politics by other
means” Cultural Studies was effectively an intellectual framework created to
supplant class as the primary focus of social analysis.
Cultural Studies emphasized race,
gender, sexuality, nationality, and “subcultures” as separate areas of struggle
that are "relatively autonomous." This focus complicated viewing
capitalist exploitation as a unified system. As a result, the working class was
replaced by shifting identity-based 'agencies' as the main revolutionary
subjects. This shift was not a supplement to Marxism but a rejection of it.
Cultural Studies laid the ideological groundwork for current identity politics
that now dominate the pseudo-left.
The emergence of Cultural Studies
coincided with the decline of the traditional labour movement and the
increasing involvement of petty-bourgeois intellectuals within the growing
university sector. Hall’s theoretical innovations were not politically neutral;
instead, they reflected the aims of a social class eager to gain influence in
both the state and academia, rather than promote revolutionary change.
Marxism
Today
By the late 1970s, the CPGB
adopted Eurocommunism, forsaking any claim to revolutionary politics. Marxism
Today, the publication of the Eurocommunist faction, became the main platform
for this ideological shift, with Hall being its most prominent contributor. His
1979 essay, “The Great Moving Right Show," is often regarded as visionary.
However, its true importance lies in its adaptation to Thatcherism rather than
a critique of it. Hall suggested that Labour needed to move away from its
traditional working-class roots and fight elections on the same
"conjunctural” terrain established by Thatcher. This approach served as
the ideological basis for New Labour. By 1990, Blair was using Marxism Today to float the ‘New Labour’
project. Hall later expressed mild misgivings about Blair, but this is
irrelevant. He had already supplied the theoretical justification for Labour’s
rightward turn: the working class was in decline, class politics were obsolete,
and Labour must become a party of the “modernising” middle class.
Hall’s contributions to Marxism
Today played a role in weakening the working class during the neoliberal era.
By claiming that class politics were outdated, he offered ideological support
for Labour’s move away from socialism and towards market reforms. His
innovative theories—such as Cultural Studies, the “New Times” thesis, and
conjunctural analysis—laid the groundwork for identity politics. By breaking
down social analysis into individual identities, Hall fostered a politics
naturally opposed to the interests of the working class.
Identity politics benefits the
petty-bourgeois intelligentsia by shifting focus away from class as the main
political axis, emphasizing subjective experience over objective social
relations, dividing the working class into competing identity groups, and granting
moral justification for middle-class progress within capitalist structures.
Hall did not create identity politics, but he laid out its theoretical
framework.
Hall’s memoir is the
autobiography of a man who spent his entire career constructing an anti-Marxist
intellectual apparatus. History will judge him more harshly: as someone who
helped disarm the working class at the very moment it needed revolutionary
leadership.”
Notes
1.
Stuart Hall and Bill Schwartz, Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two
Islands (London: Penguin Books, 2017).
2.
Paul Bond, “Stuart Hall: A Political Obituary,” World Socialist Web Site, 2014.
3.
E.P. Thompson, “The Peculiarities of the
English,” Socialist Register (1965).
4.
Stuart Hall, “The Great Moving Right Show,” Marxism Today (January 1979).
5.
Geoff Andrews, Endgames and New Times: The Final Years of British Communism (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2004).
6.
Alex Callinicos, The New Mandarins of American Power (Cambridge: Polity, 2003).
7.
David North, The
Heritage We Defend (Detroit: Labour Publications, 1988).
