On Dec 6, 2010, at 5:01 PM, SA wrote:
> On 12/6/2010 3:59 PM, Doug Henwood wrote:
>
>> I just happened to re-read Stuart Hall's classic, "The Great Moving Right Show," written in 1979 during the early days of Thatcherism, yesterday. He writes of the use of "national interest" against the working class:
>>> The expression of this representative relationship of class-to-party, in the present period, has depended decisively on the extensive set of bargains negotiated between Labour and the trade union representatives of the class. This "indissoluble link" is the practical basis for the claim to be the natural governing party of the crisis. This is the contract it delivers. But, once in government, social democracy is committed to finding solutions to the crisis which are capable of winning support from key sections of capital, since its solutions are framed within those limits. But this requires that the indissoluble link be used, not to advance but to discipline the class and organizations it represents. This is only possible if the link - class-to-party — is dismantled and if there can be substituted for it an alternative articulation: government-to-people. The rhetorics of "national interest", which is the principal ideological form in which a succession of defeats have been imposed on the working class by social democracy in power, are exactly the sites where this contradiction shows through—and is being constantly reworked. But government-to-people dissects the field of struggle differently from class-to-party. It sets Labour, at key moments of struggle—from the strikes of 1966 right through to the present 5 per cent norm—by definition "on the side of the nation" against "sectional interests", "irresponsible trade union power", etc.
>
> I don't buy this at all. I think it's exactly the opposite of the truth. Is Hall saying the interests of the working class really were opposed to those of "the nation"? Or is he saying the contrast drawn between the two was spurious, in which case why did Thatcher succeed?
>
> I think the real problem is that the trade unions in fact accepted, more or less, this distinction between "their" interests and "the nation's" interests. The results were disastrous. This essay argues that there was another way. I especially endorse the last sentence:
I don't really see how these positions are incompatible. The Labour right and the Tories both wanted to subdue the working class. They would have greeted an attempt to "democratize" the economy with even more hostility than they did the actual unions and Labour Party of the late 1970s. Invoking the "national interest" to suppress labor as a political force was one of their main tricks. And we see the worthless Andy Stern doing the same thing in 2010.
Hall's essay is an attempt to figure out how Thatcher won over popular opinion for what was an elite agenda - how what was once a very far right doctrine became the common sense of British political discourse. Something similar happened with Reagan here. And we're still under its sway, despite a massive crisis of the economic model, thirty years later. It's worth learning from Hall's analysis because we seem doomed to repeating that history of right-wing triumph in an economic crisis that has nothing to do with the crises of the 1970s - this is not an inflationary mess caused by trade union power and an overgrown welfare state. But the same rhetoric and analysis live on.
Doug