Stuart Hall Ten Years On [1932-2014]
Stuart Hall died aged 82 on 10th February 2014
He deserves to be remembered for a variety of reasons and some at least will argue whether they are all entirely positive ones. I am prepared however to err on the side of mostly positive while far from ignoring some significant potential downsides.
Hall was part of a generation, essentially the first new left, which was the one before that I am personally in. So I saw him speak on occasion but by the time I myself was speaking on platforms and organising conferences Hall’s health unfortunately meant that he often wasn’t.
In 1979 just on the cusp of the arrival of Thatcher I was a teaching in Birmingham and living in Worcester. Stuart Hall and the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies which he had run were a not insignificant presence in staff room discussions amongst the left in those days. Some of the studies of the Centre had looked at West Midlands youth and done so in a useful and interesting way.
Hall himself had been around a while by then. He had been associated with Universities and Left Review in the post-1956 era and then became for a relatively brief period an Editor of New Left Review in 1960 in the moment when EP Thompson was still a central figure.
Hall had moved into the area of cultural studies from the early 1960s.
For many, what much of cultural studies subsequently became may have seemed often rather long and sometimes incomprehensible words and paragraphs. It is important to remember the times however.
When Stuart Hall alighted on cultural studies it was something much of the left treated with disdain. Popular music and TV were not something warranting an engagement with by the left, although there were obviously even then important exceptions. One need only mention CND to realise that ‘youth culture’ and the left were not totally divorced. How far Hall was ‘on board’ with a rising youth culture in the early 1960s is perhaps a matter for debate.
Hall went on to do useful work around race, class and authority and became associated with Marxism Today which was nominally the theoretical organ of the Communist Party.
It would be reasonable to suggest I think that Hall did at least produce some important theory, but he was also very much associated with the Thatcherism analysis of the time, the idea that the working class was changing or perhaps just dead and so on.
That led into some theoretical underpinnings for New Labour and I don’t think there is anything to be gained by not making the point clear.
Like others who remained on the left despite this dalliance with Blair & Co, Hall subsequently recognised the strong element of neo-liberalism in the New Labour project.
Stuart Hall certainly deserves to be remembered for his work with the early New Left and the important role he played at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Obviously I’m rather less enthusiastic about his Marxism Today period and the dalliance with New Labour.
However he kept going over seven decades and that deserves respect, albeit as I’ve noted sometimes critically so.
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