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(From Bruce Robbins's review of a new bio of Stuart Hall. This business about the state being "a site on which ruling-class policies can be contested and crucial concessions won" obviously has a relationship to the Syriza fiasco. What does it mean to "contest"? Does it mean voting for Hillary Clinton or does it mean to organize a march on Washington to protest nativist immigration policies? I doubt that Gramsci would have ever written the kind of articles that Adolph Reed has written in the name of Marxism.)
Although Gramsci appears only toward the end of these lectures, he is clearly the book’s hero. One suspects that Hall has delayed his appearance because, as an activist-theorist in the same vein as Hall, Gramsci believed that before outlining the tactics and theory of political action, one must first explain the conditions that determine whether these ideas will succeed. For Gramsci, the willingness to consider the possibility of the left eventually seizing power doesn’t come from an optimism of the will (which was not even Gramsci’s phrase); it comes from a “soft” but politically empowering position that the left takes toward the state.
In Gramsci’s view, the state isn’t simply a coercive instrument of the ruling class, but also a site on which ruling-class policies can be contested and crucial concessions won. Hall agrees: It is bad politics to think of the welfare state as “really just a ruse of the capitalist class” when “millions of people struggled for it, struggled to win from the State what was owed them, and continue to engage in political struggles to enlarge that aspect of the State.” Cultural studies isn’t famous for its attention to the state, but that is where Hall finally points it: “What sense can be made of these struggles if we talk about welfare as if it were just a clever way in which the capitalist class continues to exploit workers?”
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