On 12/7/2010 12:29 AM, Alan Rudy wrote:
> SA: Why does there have to be a contradiction between Purdy's quite
> interesting analysis and Williams'? Your reaction strikes me as utterly
> overwrought. Williams referred to an extensive set of bargains and
> negotiations, do you honestly think Williams wasn't aware that these
> negotiations had been going on for decades? With his history, his knowledge
> of that history? In any event, it is really very straightforward - to a
> sympathetic reader who knows that Williams was a founder of modern cultural
> studies and focused most of his work on ideology critique and unpacking
> discourses of many types - to read Williams' analysis as one focused on
> discursive shifts at the level of national politics rather than strategic
> shifts in the war of position at the level of regional and national trade
> unions. Perhaps he goes elsewhere (towards the specifics of union democracy
> and party politics) in the rest of the piece, I don't know, do you? If os,
> I apologize and my intervention can be attributed to my ignorance of "The
> Great Moving Right Show".
I read the essay a long time ago and liked it. It didn't just deal with Labour and the unions, but also with immigration and other issues. It's a good essay that analyzes the mood in Britain, how a certain social reality was constructed, and how that constructed reality was turned to Thatcher's ends.
Sorry if my objection seemed overwrought, it's just that on that crucial point Hall seems so wrong. Obviously Hall was aware of the history Purdy relates, though I suspect he might have shared the militantly anti-incomes policy view that was orthodoxy on the British far left at the time. Vociferous critique on one important point doesn't imply rejection en bloc of everything someone has to say.
I'll go back and re-read the piece.
SA