Some of the following events may sound disturbingly familiar—consider yourself warned. An empire in decline has taken a rightward political turn, towards what might best be described as “authoritarian populism.” The Empire’s steady slide from its former glory days as a global hegemon has been accelerated in recent years by an economic crisis, which has fallen on the shoulders of working people via rising inflation and unemployment. The liberal democratic state, governed by a political party that is supposed to represent the working class, has proven ineffectual, caught between its avowed commitment to labor and its actual dependence on capital. Workers are fleeing in droves to the political party that represents the right, but portrays itself as an outsider looking out for the little guy against the Establishment.
In recent years, a wave of immigrants from the Empire’s former colonies have settled in the deindustrializing cities of the mother country. The tabloid news media sensationalizes a series of criminal actions associated with young men from these immigrant communities. Though their crimes are no different from the robberies and assaults committed by born citizens, the news media decry an alarming new crime wave originating with foreigners in the cities. “Permissiveness” becomes a catch-all explanation for all the problems that seem to plague the declining empire: rampant crime in the cities, unruly deviant youths, undisciplined union workers, unemployed mooches living on the dole, etc. Right-wing politicians and pundits bellow that it’s time to get tough and force the freeloaders to tighten their belts.
While the right promises austerity and law-and-order to crack down on hooligans, it creates an environment of deregulation and lawlessness for the capitalist class. Its leader proclaims, “There is no such thing as society.” The enemy is not simply the state but a wider culture of “collectivism.” The right wing espouses a full-throated ideology of neoliberalism that conflates individualism with competition and freedom with free markets. It’s an ideology that doesn’t seem like ideology, but something more like common sense. Seemingly self-evident, its tenets seduce many of the working people whose lives and communities will be crushed by neoliberal policies in the years to come.
Policing the Crisis was a collaborative project involving five researchers affiliated with the University of Birmingham. Its lead author, Stuart Hall, was the director of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies: a hub for groundbreaking research on youth subcultures and mass media audiences during the 1970s and 80s, commonly known as the Birmingham School. The research behind Policing the Crisis examined the news media’s coverage of so-called “mugging” crimes involving immigrants, beginning with a highly publicized assault by Afro-Caribbean youths in Handsworth, an inner-city area of Birmingham, in 1973. Hall and his colleagues built on previous studies by critical criminologists and sociologists who examined how the news media and state authorities manufactured “moral panics” that portrayed menacing Others as “folk devils.”
After the 1973 incident, British newspapers shrieked with scary headlines about dark-skinned immigrant youth mugging innocent people on city streets. The boundary between the state and the media was blurry at most; the news would typically act as a stenographer, uncritically reprinting the judgments and narratives of politicians and the police. Police arrested more youths, and the more youths they arrested, the more police could cite statistical evidence for a specter of rising crime rates, constructing facts. Those statistics were then parroted by the media and exploited by politicians who called for more police, more prisons, tougher laws, and harsher sentencing. This escalation of surveillance, scapegoating, and harassment immediately created a self-fulfilling prophecy—just as critical scholars of criminology and sociology could have predicted. For example, when a massive police presence was mobilized for the Notting Hill Carnival during the summer of 1976, the West Indian community responded in a ferocious uprising that drove off police and sent more than a hundred officers to the hospital.
Hall and his collaborators drew on Antonio Gramsci’s distinction between organic and conjunctural forms of crisis to situate the immediate convulsions of the 1970s within the long-term erosion of the postwar social order. The form of welfare state capitalism which emerged from compromises between business and labor had initially delivered prosperity but was devolving into stagnation by the end of the 1960s. The “mugging” crisis was indicative of a larger systemic collapse—a crisis of hegemony. The authors of Policing the Crisis sensed this was a pivotal moment that set the stage for a rightward political turn, culminating in Thatcher’s election the following year. Reflecting on these events in 2013 for the 35th anniversary edition of Policing the Crisis, Hall highlighted the book’s political prescience:
“The crises in the seventies were to be followed by the world-shattering political accession of Mrs. Thatcher—‘There is no such thing as society’—and the blitzkrieg launched by ‘Thatcherism,’ with its contradictory authoritarian and neoliberal, strong state/free market impulses, on the social fabric… Few believed that this was a historic turning point. They defined it as another of the usual swings of the political pendulum. But those of us who had heard the ugly sound of an old conjuncture unraveling, watched the crisis unfold, understood its populist roots and its long-term hegemonic project, were in a position to know differently.”
Following Thatcher’s election in 1979, Hall wrote an essay tracking the systemic forces behind the shifting political mood, “The Great Moving Right Show.” Thatcher’s triumph wasn’t an elaborate conspiracy, but rather a textbook example of ruling-class victory in the struggle for hegemony. The right had seized power by framing public discourse about social issues around terms like “collectivism” and “permissiveness,” terms that were thoroughly ideological but popularly circulated as common sense. Meanwhile, Labour had little to offer beyond messaging that merely softened the condemnations of the Conservatives while giving lip service to the working class.
Hall was keenly aware that authoritarian populism had been fueled by deindustrialization, rising levels of unemployment and inflation, and the economic stagnation of the 1970s. However, in thinking about the results of the election, he didn’t simply conclude, “It’s the economy, stupid.” Instead, Hall argued that ideological factors had played an independent and efficacious role that in many ways preceded the economic crisis. Thatcher’s victory had been the culmination of a counter-revolution against the 60s, the left’s offensive on the terrains of politics and culture. Although the overt racism and xenophobia espoused by Enoch Powell and the National Front had been beaten back by anti-fascist forces in the late 1970s, persistent reactionary attitudes, relying on logics of “magical connections and short-circuits,” cleared the ideological ground for a new Conservative hegemony. Hall wrote:
“At the ideological level… things have moved at a rather different tempo; in certain respects they predate the economic aspects. Many of the key themes of the radical Right—law and order, the need for social discipline and authority in the face of a conspiracy by the enemies of the state, the onset of social anarchy, the ‘enemy within,’ the dilution of the British stock by alien black elements—had been well articulated before the full dimensions of the economic recession were revealed. They emerged in relation to the radical movements and political polarizations of the 1960s, for which ‘1968’ must stand as a convenient, though inadequate, notation.”
Indeed, Hall had spent the better part of a decade searching for a kind of Marxism where the cultural, ideological, and political elements of a superstructure weren’t simply reduced to the economic base, but instead were granted relative autonomy and independent causality. He briefly flirted with Althusserian structuralism, like many others of the New Left generation, but ultimately concluded it was too “functionalist.” Yet Hall didn’t simply reject theory, as E.P. Thompson and many of his socialist-humanist followers were inclined to do. Instead, Hall and his colleagues at the Birmingham School turned to Gramsci’s theory of hegemony for a more useful formulation of the base-superstructure relationship—one that made greater allowances for popular resistance within social movements, as well as culture and everyday life.
Because the ability to control the state and exercise leadership over society is never guaranteed by economic power alone, the struggle for hegemony demands an alliance between classes and class factions, which Gramsci called a “historical bloc.” Hegemony isn’t just a matter of class domination, ideological mystification, or false consciousness. Gramsci argued that in advanced capitalist economies with liberal democratic states, revolutionary struggle entailed a protracted “war of position,” in which victory depends on the capacity to articulate popular sentiments and “common sense.” This strategy for revolutionary change is fundamentally different from the “war of maneuver”—exemplified by the Bolshevik Revolution—waged against the state in relatively underdeveloped societies. Culture occupies a pivotal place in the war of position, where in Gramsci’s words, “the superstructures of civil society are like the trench-systems of modern warfare.”
Thatcherism is instructive in revealing how a form of fascist politics can arise in a manner that is fully compatible with neoliberalism. Neoliberal opposition to the state in the name of freedom and individualism is often assumed to be antithetical to fascism. The particular historical events and circumstances surrounding Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany during the interwar years are typically considered ideal types for defining fascism.
The problem with the fascist label, as Alberto Toscano reminds us, is that it presupposes a healthy norm of liberal democracy within capitalist societies; fascism is seen as an aberration, an exceptional evil. Toscano draws from an intellectual lineage of anti-colonial and radical Black thought that confronts fascist conditions in the more familiar and routine processes of settler colonialism, imperialism, racial apartheid, and state repression. “Fascism,” as the Guyanese revolutionary Walter Rodney wrote in his anti-imperialist treatise How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, “was a monster born of capitalist parents.”
For Hall, the f-word was too easy and uncomplicated to adequately describe these events, which required a deeper analysis. He wrote, “There is a sense in which the appearance of organized fascism on the political stage seems to solve everything for the Left. It confirms our best-worst suspicions, awakening familiar ghosts and specters.” Hall certainly recognized that Thatcher’s neoliberal and authoritarian streaks were consistent and even complementary: attacks on Big Government aim at the regulatory state and the welfare state, but never its repressive apparatus of policing and militarism. Above all, neoliberals seek to destroy anything that smacks of socialism or “collectivism” and to remake social life according to the logic of capital, imposing austerity while forcing institutions like public schools to “run like a business.”
Yet Hall did not view Thatcherism as simply a top-down process imposed on the masses by the ruling class. Instead, “what we have to explain is a move toward ‘authoritarian populism’… [which] has been able to construct around itself an active popular consent.” Hall believed the concept of hegemony was especially useful for explaining how a historical bloc seizes power not only by fusing capital with the repressive state, but also by articulating seemingly commonsensical ideas that secure at least some degree of approval from subordinate groups.
If there’s any good news, it’s that hegemony, as Hall famously said, is hard work. The sutures that stitch together the dominant historical bloc are constantly on the verge of coming undone to reveal a festering wound in the body politic. Ordinary people are constantly resisting in ways large and small, and the fragility of the hegemonic order makes it vulnerable to all sorts of infiltration, ridicule, and subversion. The war of position never ends. This analytic power and political potential of Gramsci’s notion of the struggle for hegemony made it pivotal for the Birmingham School’s research on music, style, subcultures, and working-class youth in the 1970s.
Policing the Crisis was written during an intense conjuncture of resistance and reaction. The accelerating demise of the postwar order had devastating consequences for the working class. During the 1970s, the National Front, Britain’s white supremacist political party, was making significant electoral gains in working-class neighborhoods by channeling their rage and resentment into racism and xenophobia. Supporters of the National Front and racist skinheads were also involved in violence and intimidation against immigrants of South Asian and Afro-Caribbean descent.
Such violence incited the formation of anti-fascist street fighting squads, like the Anti-Nazi League established by the Socialist Workers Party in 1977. Culture, particularly music, proved to be a potent weapon in this struggle against racism and xenophobia. When Eric Clapton bloviated on stage about his support for the National Front, a group of activists and musicians joined forces to create Rock Against Racism. Combining mass demonstrations with carnivals and concerts in multi-racial working-class areas, Rock Against the Racism was remarkably effective in mobilizing a social movement through music—its crowning achievement was a march of 100,000 from Trafalgar Square to the East End, culminating in a concert in Victoria Park headlined by The Clash, Steel Pulse, and X-Ray Spex. Indeed, the social conflicts of this time had a formative influence on the development of punk and reggae as musical styles, while in turn punk and reggae played an integral role in marshaling a multi-racial movement of working-class youth to stave off the creep of fascism.
Although Thatcherism eventually triumphed in this crisis of hegemony, there are still significant lessons to be learned from the struggle against authoritarian populism nearly a half-century later. In the absence of an oppositional party willing or able to resist the Right, the work of mass mobilization and protest falls on the shoulders of social movements. As always, culture will be indispensable for both dismantling the dominant ideologies of late capitalism and reimagining a better future for a different world. In an enduring war of position, the challenge is still to communicate a new common sense. ♦