Making the case for a progressive common sense
Mark Perryman reviews Stuart Hall and Alan O’Shea’s unpicking of how opinions are made and unmade
As the Party Conference season draws to a close the disconnect between the politics of the Westminster bubble and the rest of us couldn’t be more obvious. Persons in suits, mostly men, addressing other persons in suits, mostly men, given huge chunks of airtime while their party membership figures plummet and the great unsayable for the political class, that fewer and fewer can be bothered to vote for one, other or any of this lot scarcely gets a mention.
Stuart Hall was one of the founders of the 1950s British New Left. Decades later he looked back in an autobiographical essay to explain why the New Left took popular culture seriously.
” First, because it was in the cultural and ideological domain that social change appeared to be making itself most dramatically visible. Second, because the cultural dimension seemed to us not a secondary, but a constitutive dimension of society. Third, because the discourse of culture seemed to us fundamentally necessary to any language in which socialism could be redescribed.”
This position represented a fundamental challenge to how politics was traditionally defined, by Left and Right alike:
” In these different ways the New Left launched an assault on the narrow definition of ‘politics’ and tried to project in its place an ‘expanded definition of the political.” The logic implied by our position was that these ‘hidden dimensions’ had to be represented within the discourses of ‘the political’ and that ordinary people could and should organise where they were, around issues of immediate experience; and build an agitation from that point.”
Thirty years ago in the mid 1980s, following Labour’s 1983 General Election defeat, Stuart Hall came to prominence as one of the Left’s most influential political analysts. There was at the time some kind of sense that the understanding of, and immersion in, popular culture, by the political Left was an important part of any kind of progressive renewal. We could read about it in the pages of Marxism Today and the Labour Party’s New Socialist. Experience it in practice as Ken Livingstone’s GLC launched a programme of free festivals and all manner of other cultural initiatives. Or dance to it with the launch of the Red Wedge pop and politics coalition. None of this amounted to establish anything resembling the beginning of a progressive common sense but there was at least some sort of a loosely defined left culture that connected to, or at least related to, the popular.
In 2013 much of this has disappeared. 14 years of neoliberal Labour did its best to dismantle much of the hope and belief that the alternative to Thatcherism would be something fundamentally different. In the closing remarks to his brilliant book on Martin Luther King, The Speech author Gary Younge makes an essential point :
“While it is true that we cannot live on dreams alone, the absence of utopian ideas leaves us without a clear ideological and moral centre and therefore facing a void in which politics is deprived of any liberatory potential and reduced to only what is feasible in any given moment.”
Gary Younge is describing precisely the predicament that neoliberal Labour has lumbered us with. The Blairist and Brownite versions combining to achieve the ultimate on privatisation, of idealism. This is what Stuart Hall , and his co-writer Alan O’Shea , set out to unpick in their chapter Common-Sense Neoliberalism, the latest addition to the After Neoliberalism Manifesto. The authors place an understanding of the meaning of the ‘commonsensical’ at the centre of the remaking of a progressive politics. Describing common sense as :
” It is a form of ‘everyday-thinking which offers us frameworks of meaning with which to make sense of the world. It is a form of popular, easily-available knowledge which contains no complicated ideas, requires no sophisticated argument and does not depend on deep thought or wide reading. It works intuitively, without forethought or reflection. It is pragmatic and empirical, giving the illusion of arising directly from experience, reflecting only the realities of daily life and answering the needs of the ‘common people’ for practical guidance and advice.”
This suggests a very different kind of politics to one the Left is used to. We might imagine Nigel Farage and UKiP as the past and present masters of the ‘commonsensical’ in politics and not what anything to do with any such project. But this is incredibly defeatist, not to say dangerous. Take a fondly remembered victory, the Poll Tax, or the beginnings perhaps of a new win, the Bedroom Tax. A common-sense argument against the unworkable injustice of these taxes linked to their hugely effective renaming for what they are by their opponents. Or tax avoidance. ‘Pay your taxes, just like the rest of us, we don’t have the choice of offshore accounts or cosy deals with HMRC so why should you?’ Again the beginnings of a progressive common sense.
Hall and O’Shea, drawing on the Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci, call this ‘good sense’. And they make the case that “Good sense provides a basis on which the Left could develop a popular strategy for radical change – if it takes on board that common sense is a site of political struggle.”
Mike Marqusee in a typically excellent article A Party To Dream Of describes the prospects for an Outside Left as a ‘long haul’. In or out of Labour, part of one part of the Left, or another, or none, there is perhaps no better place to begin that journey of hope with the ambition of a new common sense.
Common-Sense Neoliberalism is available as a free download from here
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Here’s a four generational story of uncommon sense & the benefit of social security.
My Granddad Jack from Kingston Upon Hull was a semi literate but clever trawler man and docker who fought for health benefits and health and safety measures on the docks in Kingston Upon Hull when they were losing a none union man a fortnight, due to low pay labour and none existent health and safety legislation.
My Grandmother Maggie Holt an extremely literate mother of five children worked for Reckitt & Colman where she put an extra Lemsip sachet in every packet on the production line because the price was too high for poor people and she felt they deserved an extra sachet for the money spent. (This fact was read out with serious East Riding chuckles at her eulogy)
My Father Francis was second eldest in a musical, clever, Yorkshire family of five kids with Uncles who were dockers and fishermen, he passed his eleven plus and had a thirst for knowledge. His elder sister got the money for grammar school, Maggie and Jack saw Sandra as being the one who couldn’t walk onto the dock and into paid work, it was a tough decision there was money for one child to go to grammar school not two.
They chose the one socially and economically weakest, their eldest bright daughter.
My Father couldn’t face a life on the docks and took his second choice the armed forces at 17.
Dad spent his years in the Royal Navy doing museums in Hiroshima, Tiger balm Gardens in Singapore, Hong Kong and unfortunately Aiden during some of the worst atrocities imaginable. He brought everything he learned of the cultures and histories home to his family. There is still art in the family from my Dad’s escape from the docks into horror, that was the price he was ready to pay to experience the culture denied him via education.
My Father came out of the forces in 1972 during the power cuts of the big coal strike. I was born in Lossimouth, my incubator failed to be powered and I was kept alive with warm blankets and the fierce belief of my father and my family that the strikes were RIGHT!
Dad became a furnaceman working 12 hour back to back shifts for 25 years in the North of England. He worked two weeks on nights (12 hours each) Then two weeks on 12 hour days. His body was never expected to rebel, his mind was not expected to rebel, we were expected as a family to accept that the men in our home worked hard. There was no family time, there was only tiptoeing, Mum crying, Dad exhausted defeated and angry and eventually booze.
Around me the mining fathers of my friends worked the same shift patterns. There was little to write home about for those unfortunate enough to want more.
More life, more learning, more time, more recognition, more reading, more opportunity. It didn’t exist for those like my father. Their tenuous pride was erected on the ability to provide via suffering and sweat. This they did in spades and we children looked on with the sort of pride that comes from sniffing your Fathers donkey Jacket in the cupboard when he has crawled to bed and breathing in the smell of diesel and fire and his sweat.
Thatcher took even this from us. This paved the way for the booze to really kick in for men like my Dad.
We lost him in 1982.
We lost many like him in 1982
The alcohol abuse that took place after the closures in the North was something else.
Men in the working men’s clubs coming home to a home they didn’t know how to belong too. Wives too used to a working husband to accommodate the shame of a none working husband and the rages and the sobbing and the booze.
My brother and I grew up in a family crippled by the pit closures, the steel closures, the potteries and the furnaces.
But really we were crippled by the shame and the booze that followed. A tradition of provision that had transcended suffering and lack of privilege turned in on itself due to shame.
My brother and I fell out of school as Dads rages and drinking grew intolerable, our Mother collapsed, became alcoholic, was sectioned at one point. Our working arms of the family we shunned due to our shame, we were isolated by policy, and the lack of understanding that still predominates in Westminster.
My smart brother started using drugs on the estate with other sons of other workless working men. I tried to hold everyone up at 12/13/14 years of age.
I failed and we fell, we all fell under pictures of the Tiger Balm Gardens of Singapore, stories of Union members feeding poor families back in the day and the spectre of a beautiful socialist principle eaten and shat out into the faces of the sons and daughters of those warring, working men who instigated it.
Its taken us years of benefit, further education, counselling and courage to come back from what Thatcher and her ilk did to us. To our family of working socialists.
My brother and I are 42 and 32 respectively, now at Uni as mature students, now finding a chance to bring our family back to the mainstream of opportunity.
But what a long walk and how much suffering?
We came from a root man who couldn’t read but who fought for what was morally right, how is encouraging the security of society to thrive, anything other than common sense?
I can’t read Cameron, Gove and Co discussing the unemployed as though they are on a par with criminals without feeling a stirring of visceral rage.
These people are the scourge of the socially minded, kind and decent, ordinary tax paying man and woman. They need to be strung up and exposed for the disgusting war that they perpetually wage on the poor and the underprivileged of this country.
Common sense says you can’t blame poor people for being poor when YOU HAVE MADE THEM POOR.
Please can Left Unity do something to address this.
My brother got to University by doing four years of unpaid volunteering for BTCV where he earned enough NVQ’s to apply to Sheffield Hallam and progressed via the social meritocracy of working his arse off for his dole money whilst dodging attempts to get him into call centres and shelf stacking.
The employment department were not accepting of his BTCV work and progression because it didn’t go through one of the approved ‘bodies’ set up to get people off benefit.
I got in to Falmouth Uni via APEL I have worked years of minimum paid office and factory jobs but wrote a huge amount of political and social stuff in my down time, the work I submitted was accepted as a body of work equivalent to requisite A levels.
Thank GOD our higher bodies of education are rooting for those like my brother and I they are the lifeline my Father didn’t have.
We are both planning to go into FE lecturing to help those like us to get up the ladder.
Our Dad has just retired at 67. He has spent the last five years as a care worker in an old peoples home. Not bad for an ex naval man attached to a parachute regiment who did 25 years in a glass furnace and survived becoming an alcoholic due to Thatcher.
He now has a Land Rover Discovery with black windows because as he says, ‘I don’t have to drive the bugger to work so I can afford it.’
I think he deserves a bit more given what he’s been through, but he’s happy and his kids are FINALLY at Uni.
The government are lucky that men like my Father are as tough as they are, were they a touch less strong then blood would be shed.
I’m inclined to have to be less tough!
About Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams and FR Leavis. Go back to Matthew Arnold he was the man who understood that reform was not about removing the high brow or demonizing the ordinary. He was a school inspector who understood that ALL human culture should be available to all and that all culture was valuable in all its forms.
Can we get Harrow and Eton to take 50% none monied to increase the schools educational and cultural merit? Can we start to insist that private school accepts and acknowledges the strength and sensibility that able children of low income working families can offer?
Do we continue to allow a stratified education system that denies the existence of bright, young people from a low socio economic background?
How does this affect our countries productivity? How does this affect policy?
How does this affect the cabinet, front bench, judicial system, education?
It’s not enough that smart kids from Sheffield and Manchester go to Oxford they don’t come from feeder schools and this is where the separation takes root.
The system of private school nepotism needs to be smacked flat for an experiment in democracy to happen.
We need to see what happens if ordinary smart kids from differing socio economic backgrounds are put through the same top notch schooling and then see what their policies are, how they view the body politic and progress.
Our system favours the wealthy, this HAS to change.
If our country is to progress the old order must be challenged and beaten.