[csaa-forum] Cultural studies and left politics: the state of play

[Jason Wilson]

Padding up late on a friday afternoon, an expendable nightwatchman strides purposefully and optimistically onto the wicket...
 
Interesting that Jason's account of the UK Labour party in the 1990s sounds eerily familiar
 
"Thatcher won three terms because the opposition was so weak and clearly the mass of people would have been worse off under its policies. Voters realised this and voted for the lesser of two evils. The Labour party in the 80s refused to swallow this and blamed everyone else, especially the media, for their own failures."
 
Remove the 'u' from the party's name, move the action to the antipodes and fast forward a couple of decades and hey presto, a diagnosis of the problem that the list spent so long discussing in November emerges.
 
Clearly the electorate here in Oz didn't buy an injunction to read to their children as "new ideas for a better society".
 


Jason Jacobs <j.jacobs at griffith.edu.au> wrote:

Dear Terry et al, 

Just to correct - or really nuance one point in Terry's last post. While the cultural studies crew in the UK certainly did take Thatcherism seriously they actually mystified rather than clarified its popular appeal. First was Stuart Hall's nonsensical idea that Thatcher and her crowd appealed to a sensibility of popular authoritarianism, that somehow - using some strange mystical power - the masses were basically hypnotised by a market-driven law n' order agenda. (Note that Thatcher and her cronies never dared go as far as the current New Labour in its authoritarianism.) This was simply wrong - Thatcher won three terms because the opposition was so weak and clearly the mass of people would have been worse off under its policies. Voters realised this and voted for the lesser of two evils. The Labour party in the 80s refused to swallow this and blamed everyone else, especially the media, for their own failures. 
Secondly, Marxism Today launched its equally nonsensical 'post-Fordist' ideology (Jacques, Hall, Hebdige et al) which was really an apologetic acceptance of the market and Thatcher's 'there is no alternative.' Forget the fact that only a minority of Western manufacturing was ever 'Fordist' or that the emerging Asian economies - funded by Western investment - were using precisely the manufacturing techniques that the MT crew were saying were obsolete - what was revealed was the isolation of the left, projecting their own small worlds onto the real one. The success of New Labour depended on its major players having successfully internalised the failure of the left over the past 30 years and turning to so-called 'managerial' small-scale (read politically empty) approaches to society and its problems. Even so the Blair 'landslide' of 1997 disguised the fact that Blair did not win as many votes as the grey John Major in 1992. With no vision for the future its leaders increasingly 
 turned
 to the international stage in order to project their moral authority. Note that yesterday both Blair and chancellor Brown talked about Africa and solving its problems. Well the West has been meddling in Africa for 200 years and I think it's time the African nations did without the moral wand of Europe or America. 


I guess my point is that the post-war left - in its many national and international inflections - has been characterised by a marked inability to see its own shortcomings. Inspiring the electorate with new ideas for a better society (hang on, I'm just fetching my kum-by-ah guitar) would be a start. But that seems to have been left in the too hard basket for now. 

Jason 

(who's getting lunch for  three kids and not in his office at all)

Dr Jason Jacobs
Senior Lecturer
School of Arts, Media and Culture
Griffith University
Nathan Campus
Queensland 4111
Australia
Phone: (07) 3875 5164
Fax: (07) 3875 7730
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