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# Capitalism-and-Its-Critics-A-History-From-the

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Thatcher’s right-wing policies as an aberration and predicted that the party would eventually return to the pragmatic, one-nation approach of Macmillan. In the Labour Party, many people recognized that Thatcher’s emergence reflected the party’s failure to deal with stagflation and industrial unrest, but they consoled themselves that she didn’t have a viable solution, either. Across the political spectrum, many observers underestimated the lasting importance of Thatcherism.

One observer who didn’t make this mistake was Stuart Hall, a Jamaican-born scholar who had long been associated with the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University. Hall wasn’t a member of any political party. But in January 1979, four months before Thatcher was elected, he published in Marxism Today, the magazine of the Communist Party of Great Britain, an essay titled “The Great Moving Right Show” in which he analyzed the rise of “Thatcherism,” a term that wasn’t yet in popular use. Hall started out saying that the swing to the right in British politics “no longer looks like a temporary swing in the political fortunes, a short-term shift in the balance of forces.”31 It had been developing since the late 1960s, “and, though it has developed through a series of different stages, its dynamic and momentum appears to be sustained.” The core feature of Thatcherism, Hall said, was its challenge to the labor movement, which had played a central role in that postwar model of British capitalism. In “deploying the discourses of ‘nation’ and ‘people against ‘class’ and ‘unions,’” Thatcher was conducting “an assault, not on this or that piece of ‘irresponsible bargaining’ by a particular union, but on the very foundation and raison d’être of organized labour.”32 Hall also emphasized how successful Thatcher had already been in rallying support in elite circles for a sharp break with the past. To have discredited Keynesianism “in some of the most powerful and influential apparatuses of government, research and the universities,” he wrote, “and restored in its place Friedman and von Hayeck is, in itself, a remarkable reversal.”33

Like C.L.R. James and Eric Williams, Hall hailed from a middle-class Caribbean background. Whereas they were from Trinidad, he was from Kingston, Jamaica. His family had African, English, and Indian ancestry, and his father worked as an accountant for the United Fruit Company.34 As a schoolboy, Hall attended the elite Jamaica College. In 1951, at the age of nineteen, he was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford, where he studied English at Merton College. After graduating, Hall stayed in England to continue his studies, and by the 1970s he had become an influential cultural theorist. His account of how political messages and narratives could be encoded in popular culture, such as film, and then decoded by different audiences, was widely used by other scholars. He was a prominent figure in the British New Left that emerged during the 1960s and was one of the founders of the movement’s house journal, New Left Review.

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Like many 1960s leftists, Hall was heavily influenced by the writings of Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist philosopher whom Mussolini’s fascist regime imprisoned for more than a decade until his death in 1937. In the notebooks that he wrote in prison, Gramsci emphasized the role that cultural values and cultural institutions played in maintaining capitalist rule. By inculcating the masses with the belief that the status quo, and their subordinated position within it, represented the natural order of things, the bourgeoisie established a cultural hegemony that reinforced their political and economic power. Gramsci also said that crises of capitalism could last for decades and didn’t necessarily lead to a collapse of the system, as the early Marxists had predicted. Rather, they created a fluid environment in which capitalist elites would try to put together a new “historical bloc” of political forces, and a new ideological narrative, to secure their power. The ultimate outcome of the crises was uncertain.

In “The Great Moving Right Show,” Hall referred to some of Gramsci’s writings on capitalist crises, and he interpreted Thatcherism, through a Gramscian prism, as an effort to construct a new hegemony. “To sustain its possible credibility as a party of government in a crisis of capital,” he wrote, “‘Thatcherism’ retains some lingering and ambivalent connections to  … centre territory.” But the movement’s real goal was the “construction of a national consensus of its own.”35 Within this overall framework, Hall also emphasized two factors that made the late 1970s unique: an unprecedented crisis of the core institutions of social democracy, particularly the Labour Party; and an aggressive effort by the right to change the entire terms of political and economic debate, transcending traditional class alignments. In seeking to mediate distributional arguments between capital and labor, the Labour governments of Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan had strayed from the party’s historical role as the political representative of Britain’s workers, Hall wrote, and this shift had “had profound effects in disorganizing and fragmenting working class responses to the crisis itself.” In this unsettled environment, he went on, elements of the right had sought to win over some traditional Labour voters by exploiting cultural issues like immigration, law and order, an alleged breakdown of social discipline, and “the dilution of British stock by alien Black elements.”36

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This shift to the right had been developing since the late 1960s, Hall reminded his readers. He pointed to the emergence of far-right groups, including the National Front (NF), a whites-only, anti-immigrant political party whose supporters staged provocative marches through many British cities during the 1970s. The NF was a fringe organization. It never won a parliamentary seat, and in the October 1974 general election, its ninety candidates received about twelve hundred votes each. But despite its small size, the NF couldn’t be easily dismissed. With its racist ideology, hypernationalism, and thuggish street tactics, it hailed back to Oswald Mosley’s fascist movement of the 1930s. Moreover, it wasn’t entirely cut off from mainstream politics. Some members of the Conservative Party, most famously Enoch Powell, an MP and former minister, had adopted elements of the far-right message, particularly its racial stigmatization of recent immigrants to Britain, many of whom hailed from South Asia and the Caribbean, and its calls for a drastic reduction in immigration.

Twinned with the attack on immigrants, Hall noted, were media stories that fanned fear of crime and portrayed Black youths in the inner cities as potential muggers. In 1978, the year before “The Great Moving Right Show” was published, Hall had coauthored a book, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order, which highlighted these developments and the aggressive police responses they engendered. These included police officers using authorities established under the Vagrancy Act to stop, search, and potentially arrest people (particularly young Black men) simply on the suspicion that they might be intent on committing crimes. Hall and his four coauthors tied concerns about crime and race, and their amplification by the media, to Britain’s broader problems and the “crisis of hegemony” that the established order was facing, not just in economic terms, but also in cultural terms with the emergence of a counterculture that encompassed feminism, student unrest, environmentalism, and the permissive society. Race, the authors wrote, came “to provide the objective correlative of crisis—the arena in which complex fears, tensions and anxieties, generated by the impact of the totality of the crisis … can be most conveniently and explicitly projected.”37

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In “The Great Moving Right Show,” Hall emphasized that many of the cultural themes that Thatcher and her colleagues voiced—law and order, the need for social discipline, fear of being “swamped” by non-white immigrants—had been articulated well before the economic crisis of the mid- and late 1970s.38 (Powell gave his incendiary “Rivers of Blood” speech in April 1968.) It was therefore a grave error to regard the rise of Thatcherism as just a symptom of economic distress and lack of trust in the Labour government. “What we have to explain,” Hall wrote, “is a move toward ‘authoritarian populism’—an exceptional form of the capitalist state —which, unlike classical fascism, has retained most (though not all) of the formal representative institution in place, and which at the same time has been able to construct around itself an active popular consent. This undoubtedly represents a decisive shift in the balance of hegemony.”39 A key element in the right’s success, Hall went on, was its use of cultural messaging to generate popular support for a radical shift in economic policy. “Neither Keynesianism nor Monetarism win votes in the electoral marketplace,” he wrote.

But in the doctrines and discourses of “social market values”—the restoration of competition and personal responsibility for effort and reward, the image of the over-taxed individual, enervated by welfare coddling, his initiative sapped by handouts by the state—“Thatcherism” has found a powerful means of popularizing the principles of a Monetarist philosophy: and in the image of the welfare “scavenger” a well-designed folk devil.40

★ ★ ★

After “The Great Moving Right Show” appeared, some leftists criticized Hall for deemphasizing economics and class and overemphasizing culture, but that wasn’t really a fair criticism. He didn’t argue that Thatcherism’s popular appeal was based solely on cultural factors, or that culture trumped economics in determining history. Following Gramsci (and indeed Marx), he argued that, while cultural and political struggles developed their own momentum and had no preset outcomes, the framework in which they played out was largely determined by economics and class. “Gramsci always insisted that hegemony is not exclusively an ideological phenomenon. There can be no hegemony without the decisive nucleus of the economic,” Hall wrote in his essay “Gramsci and Us,” which Marxism Today published in June 1987 as Thatcher won her third election victory.41

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In the case of British Keynesianism, the economic nucleus had been split apart by the economic crisis of the 1970s, which hit ordinary people hard and undermined their faith in the system to deliver prosperity and stability. At the end of “The Great Moving Right Show,” Hall stressed this point in a discussion of why right-wing populism of the sort that Thatcher espoused was proving popular. “This is no rhetorical device or trick, for this populism is operating on genuine contradictions, and it has a rational and material core,” he wrote. “Its success and effectivity does not lie in its capacity to dupe unsuspecting folk but in the way it addresses real problems, real and lived experiences, real contradictions—and yet is able to represent them within a logic of discourse which pulls them systematically into line with policies and class strategies of the Right.”42

This argument shouldn’t be taken too far. Although Thatcher became the first British prime minister in the age of universal suffrage to win three elections in a row, she remained an extremely divisive figure. In many parts of Britain, she was reviled throughout her premiership, and her governments never gained majority support. In the three elections that she won, the Conservative Party received between 42 percent and 44 percent of the vote. Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system translated an electoral plurality into large majorities in the House of Commons.

Still, despite these qualifications, Thatcher’s strident nationalism together with her get-tough message on violent crime and welfare recipients appealed to certain elements of the British working class. So did her “popular capitalism” agenda, such as giving public housing tenants the right to buy their homes and selling cheap shares in companies like British Telecom and British Gas. “Council house buyers, privatized share purchasers, and employed union leavers had distinctive attitudes toward nationalization and redistribution,” the political scientist Geoffrey Garrett wrote in a 1992 study of survey data from the 1980s. “In all instances, those directly affected by the Conservatives’ reforms supported the ‘free market’ positions of more privatization and less redistribution of societal wealth. In fact, their attitudes more closely resembled those of traditional Conservative voters.”43

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Hall recognized these types of developments. In “Gramsci and Us,” he argued that a good deal of confusion of the left about the impact of Thatcherism could be attributed to the fact it was “simultaneously, regressive and progressive.” In seeking to re-create a nineteenth-century political economy beloved of Hayek and Friedman, it was taking the country backward. “But don’t misunderstand it,” Hall went on. “It’s also a project of ‘modernisation.’ It is a form of regressive modernisation.”44 Echoing Hayek and other critics of postwar managed capitalism, Hall said the Thatcher project involved stripping British capitalism of ties to the past that were holding it back. Thatcherism “had its beady eye fixed on one of the most profound historical facts about the British social formation: that it never ever properly entered the era of modern bourgeois civilisation,” Hall wrote. “It never made that transfer to modernity. It never institutionalised, in a proper sense, the civilisation and structures of advanced capitalism— what Gramsci called ‘Fordism.’”45 Hall was arguing that Britain had failed to embrace capitalist mass production in the same way as the United States, Germany, and Japan. Thatcher was deeply aware of this failure, he added, and so, deep down, were many of her fellow Britons. “Mrs. Thatcher knows that there is no serious political project in Britain today which is not also about constructing a politics and an image of what modernity would be like for our people. And Thatcherism, in its regressive way, drawing on the past, looking backwards to former glories rather than forwards to a new epoch, has inaugurated the project of reactionary modernisation.”46

Hall was a cultural theorist rather than an economist, but when he remarked that British capitalism had struggled to develop the appropriate “structures” of advanced capitalism, he was onto something very important. The issue wasn’t as simple as failing to adopt mass production. For many decades, multinational companies like Ford and General Motors had been operating large factories in the United Kingdom. So had British firms like British Leyland and British Steel. The problem, as Hall indicated, was an institutional one: the relationship, or lack of a relationship, between workers and management. Ford and GM factories in Britain were dogged with the same types of labor disputes that afflicted car factories operated by British Leyland. Between Ford plants in Essex and Detroit, which used similar machinery, there was a significant gap in productivity. In some deep way, British capitalism was lagging behind its major competitors.

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★ ★ ★

How can this failure be explained? The most convincing answer is that the postwar British economy, partly because of the country’s early lead in industrialization and partly because of its imperial heritage, inherited a set of institutions that were ill-adapted to an era in which international competition was increasing and commercial success depended on constant innovation and productivity growth. One of the institutions that weighed on British economic development was the City of London, many denizens of which tended to have a transactional view of finance and a short time horizon. These two attributes made them shy away from the sort of semipermanent investments that many German banks, for example, held in large German industrial companies. In British industry, lack of access to long-term capital was a common complaint.

Another handicap that Britain inherited was a fragmented system of industrial relations. In many global industries, regular investments to modernize plants and equipment are required to remain competitive. Given the power and independence of Britain’s plant-level labor unions, however, it was very difficult for firms (or entire industries) to get lasting agreements that reduced staffing levels in return for higher levels of capital investment and higher wages. “This was not an economy with a higher degree of patience either among investors or workers,” Nicholas Crafts, one of Britain’s leading economic historians, wrote in a 2018 history of British economic growth since the industrial revolution. “Either the absence of unions or strong corporatist trade unionism would have been preferable to the idiosyncratic British industrial relations system.”47

In game theoretical terms, British industry was stuck in a low-trust, low-productivity equilibrium. Thatcherism can be seen as a brutal effort to change the rules of the game by kneecapping one of the players: organized labor. Once the unions had been sufficiently weakened, managers would have the power to close less productive plants, eliminate restrictive practices, and invest in more labor-saving machinery. The result would be a decline in manufacturing employment but a pickup in productivity growth, which over the long term would lead to rising prosperity. That was the theory, anyway.

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During the 1980s, productivity growth did pick up somewhat, prompting Crafts to argue in a 2011 article that Thatcherism made the British economy more adaptable and innovative. “As the age of information technology and communications technology came along, Britain was able to embrace the opportunities associated with rapid diffusion of the new technologies, which required big changes in working practices and management hierarchies, better than its continental-European peer group,” Crafts wrote. “This would not have happened with 1970s-style industrial relations and a heavily-regulated service sector.”48

That, in a nutshell, is the case for Thatcherism: it modernized Britain. The case against it is that it created tremendous social costs and didn’t resolve some of British capitalism’s underlying economic problems, such as chronic underinvestment in physical and human capital and in research and development. The most obvious cost was high unemployment. Between 1960 and 1979, the UK jobless rate averaged 3.7 percent. Between 1980 and 1999, it averaged 9.1 percent.49 These jobless figures don’t account for millions of British workers who dropped out of the labor force and went on disability benefits. Thanks to the high value of the pound and aggressive downsizing, some parts of Britain, particularly in northern England and South Wales, were turned into rust belts, with emptied-out factories and decaying towns. The poverty rate rose from 13.4 percent of households in 1979 to 22.2 percent in 1990, the year that Thatcher’s fellow Conservative MPs voted her out of office.50 Wealth and income inequality also shot up. Between 1980 and 1990, the share of after-tax income received by the top 1 percent of British adults rose from 6 percent to 10 percent.51

This was what Hall’s “reactionary modernization” looked like in practice. Market forces were unleashed, and British capitalism was transformed. The result was an economy that was more flexible and open to innovation, yet still plagued by many of the problems that Keynesian managed capitalism had sought to eliminate: economic insecurity, high rates of unemployment and poverty, widening inequality, and financially driven instability. Hall detested the society that Thatcherism created. But he was also critical of his fellow leftists for having failed to create a rival version of modernity that went beyond the traditional framework of class and recognized the heterogeneity and fragmentation of contemporary societies. The organized left “doesn’t see that it is in the very nature of modern capitalist civilisation to proliferate the centres of power, and thus to draw more and more areas of life into social antagonism,” he wrote in “Gramsci and Us.” “It does not recognise that the identities which people carry in their heads—their subjectivities, their cultural life, their sexual life, their family life, their ethnic identities, their health—have become massively politicised.”52

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Passages like this illustrate why Hall is often portrayed as one of the founders of multiculturalism and identity politics. Given the emphasis that he placed on race and culture, he certainly earned this designation, but it needs to be applied carefully. Also in “Gramsci and Us,” he wrote: “The nature of power in the modern world is that it is also constructed in relation to political, moral, intellectual, cultural, ideological, sexual questions.”53 Notice the word also. Unlike some of his followers, Hall didn’t overlook economic factors. He believed that economic and cultural factors were both important drivers of history. Indeed, his critique of the Labour Party and some of his fellow leftists was that they had failed to comprehend how changes to the economy, driven by technical progress and globalization, were undermining traditional social structures and cultural values and creating a society of kaleidoscopic complexity and variety.

In this new world, Hall argued, it was essential to rethink and renew “the whole socialist project in the context of modern social and cultural life.” Explaining his pessimism about the Labour Party’s political prospects, he said he suspected that it “does secretly still believe that there’s a little bit of lee-way left in the old, economic-corporate, incremental, Keynesian game.” He went on: “I honestly believe that that option is now closed. It’s exhausted. Nobody believes in it any more. Its material conditions have disappeared. The ordinary British people won’t vote for it because they know in their bones life is not like that anymore.”54

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“Social disintegration is not a spectator sport”

Parsing Globalization: Samir Amin, Dani Rodrik, and Joseph Stiglitz

In July 1993 a new open-air museum opened on the southern outskirts of Budapest. Memento Park featured dozens of Communist-era monuments that had been put in storage a few years earlier when Hungary ended decades of one-party rule. Among them were a bronze statue of Vladimir Lenin, which had long stood in the city center, and granite statues of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, which had loomed over the entrance to the Hungarian Communist Party’s headquarters. In creating what was effectively a Communist theme park, Budapest’s city council wasn’t honoring the patron saints of Marxist-Leninism: it was trying to stimulate the local economy. “It is more interesting for tourists than for Hungarians,” Mayor Gábor Demszky explained. “We want it to become an international attraction.”1

Hungary had established a multiparty democracy in October 1989, the month before the Berlin Wall came down. During the following two years, the Soviet Union unraveled, and the Cold War came to an end. By 1993 Mayor Demszky wasn’t the only one eager to move on from forty years of ideological struggle, which had climaxed, during the 1980s, with the dramatic sight of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, after both championing huge arms buildups, engaging with a reformist Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. In early 1992 the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping restarted the economic reform program that he and his Communist Party colleagues had halted after crushing the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. During a visit to Shenzhen, a Special Economic Zone in southern China that had been established to attract foreign investment, Deng said: “Development is the only hard truth. It doesn’t matter if policies are labeled socialist or capitalist, so long as they foster development.”2 India, too, was taking steps to reinvigorate its moribund economy. Under the guidance of finance minister Manmohan Singh, an Oxbridge-educated economist, the Congress Party government liberalized trade, removed restrictions on foreign investment, and chopped back the “License Raj,” a bureaucratic quagmire that required businesses to obtain approval from many different government agencies before they could enter a new market or open a new factory.

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