The limits of Althusser's reading of Marx

The centrality of the “articulation” concept to Hall's Marxism is stressed in several theoretical accounts of Hall's work, but its provenance is consistently attributed to the work of “Western Marxists” like Gramsci and Althusser at the expense of the development theory that Hall also extensively drew on when developing the concept.Footnote ⁶ Kobena Mercer has recently argued that the “U.S. reception of Hall's scholarship tended to overlook the key concept of ‘articulation’ in his sociological texts” and cites two papers in which Hall engages with theories of non-Western societies.Footnote ⁷ Gregor McLennan has stressed that the concept of articulation was “everywhere in Marxist theoretical analysis” in the 1970s, not just in the writing of Western Marxists who foreground analyses of political and ideological “superstructures,” but also in more specifically political economic analyses of the “articulation of the forces and relations of production within the mode of production” and the “articulation of different modes of production within a given social formation.”Footnote ⁸ Hall's engagement with South African thinkers and debates is frequently invoked by South African social scientists and theorists pursuing theoretical extensions of Hall's work.Footnote ⁹ Notwithstanding these acknowledgments of Hall's engagement with theories of underdevelopment in the global South, there has yet to be systematic engagement by historians with the non-European influences on Hall's thinking.

As Aidan Foster Carter pointed out as early as 1978, the concept of “articulation”—as it was widely used by development theorists in the 1970s—was completely absent from Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar's writing.Footnote ¹⁰ The term is used frequently in Reading Capital, but as a translation of Marx's concept Gliederung.Footnote ¹¹ Marx uses the term in the Grundrisse to convey the idea that different elements of a social formation are related to one another as a body is to its limbs—Glied being the German for “limb.” Althusser and Balibar use “articulation” in the same way, as an anatomical metaphor to capture the relations of linkage and effectivity which exist between the various levels—economic, political, and ideological—of a social formation.Footnote ¹² This metaphor was deployed against the pervasive “base–superstructure” metaphor where superstructural phenomena are understood as “expressions” of more fundamental economic relations.

For development theorists in the period, articulation had a much more specific, sociological meaning.Footnote ¹³ They spoke of the articulation of modes of production as a phenomenon in which capitalist relations of production exist alongside and in relation to social relations from precapitalist modes of production. “Articulation” described the relation between capitalist and precapitalist modes of production within a single social formation. Specifically, the articulation concept was meant to capture situations in which precapitalist relations of production were subordinated and made functional to capitalist relations without being fully undermined or transcended in the course of a society's economic development. It is this latter usage of articulation, rather than Althusser's, that Hall's notion is closest to and in conversation with.

Hall's distance from Althusser's usage of the term is registered in critical engagement with that latter's thought in a series of seminar papers presented at the Centre for Contemporary Culture Studies’ “Theory Seminar” in the early 1970s. In these papers, Hall strongly approved of Althusser's theory of “overdetermination” according to which historical change is driven by the accumulation and coalescence of a multiplicity of contradictions, economic and noneconomic, peculiar to each practice constituting a social formation, rather than by a simple economic determinism.

However, Hall argues that this complex view of the movement of history was not followed through in Althusser's theory of articulation. While Althusser's analysis began by showing the complexity of historical change, Hall argues that in his subsequent elaboration of “structural causality” in his paper “On the Materialist Dialectic,” Althusser abandons the plane of history entirely and investigates, in purely epistemological terms, the nature of structures in general.Footnote ¹⁴ That is, the relationship between a structure and its elements abstracted from any historical or empirical reality. Here we have an elaboration of a structure with complex relations between its constitutive elements, but the structure itself is relatively inert. Hall writes that he approves of Althusser's analysis in his essay “Contradiction and Overdetermination,” which is “grounded in a historically specific analysis using the effective concept of a conjuncture .” He rejects, however, Althusser's elaboration of the notion of structural causality in Reading Capital, where ‘the real qualitative discontinuities between the different levels of the social formation … are dispersed into the formal elements which enable us to ‘think’ the structural unity of an ‘ever pre-given’ complex whole.”Footnote ¹⁵

It is only through an analysis of history, claims Hall, that we can understand how a particular social formation is “structured in dominance.” That is, how certain elements are endowed with greater significance and causal efficacy than others at a given historical moment. Reading Marx's notes on method in the 1857 Introduction to the Grundrisse faithfully, Hall argues, means acknowledging that while Marx breaks with the idea of a simple evolutionism, he categorically does not abandon the problem of accounting for the significance of empirical historical developments. To demonstrate his point, Hall takes the example of the development of “money” through history:

Here, Hall argues that Marx elaborated a “law of uneven development” in which the historical emergence of a particular social or productive relation is not evolutionary—that is, merely embryonic in earlier stages, developing progressively, before fully realizing itself in the capitalist mode of production. Marx's analysis, according to Hall, investigates how a relation or element present in previous historical moments is recast and transformed by political struggles and economic processes which “articulate” it with various other relations in a given mode of production. Historical development is thus studied by charting qualitative variations in a particular relation based on its differential articulation in successive modes of production through history.

Hall's concept of articulation is concerned with capitalism's uneven development and how elements from previous modes of production are recast in subsequent modes. It aims to account for more than the complex relation between base and superstructure theorized by Althusser and Balibar. It is a theory of historical development and transition, sensitive to the historical and social context in which certain productive relations emerge. In what follows, I will show that Hall develops this embryonic idea with the help of theories of uneven development. These theories are primarily sociological and political-economic in nature, rather than philosophical. UNESCO conferences on race and colonialism, which Hall contributed to from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, provided the fora for this engagement with development theory.

Hall and the shift in UNESCO's antiracism campaigns

Before his contributions to UNESCO seminars on the nature of postcolonial societies and on sociological theories of race, Hall exhibits little sustained interest in sociological and economic theories of underdevelopment. It is the nature of the publications, the themes which they explored, and the contributions they elicited that produced the encounter between Hall's heterodox Marxism and empirical studies of Third World societies. While this encounter was relatively transitory, it constitutes a fascinating chapter in Hall's intellectual trajectory because it forced him to develop his more abstract reflections on Marxist method into more systematic sociological protocols for analyzing specific societies and historical contexts. The seminars in question reflected a reorientation in UNESCO'S antiracism campaigns following the publication of their revised Statement on Racism published in 1967.

UNESCO's first two statements on race—published in 1950 and 1951—focused on refuting scientific racism. Both statements challenged typological conceptions of race—the notion that human behavior is determined by a set of stable characteristics inherited from separate racial stocks—by showing that such views were contradicted both by anthropologist's understanding of cultural difference and by geneticists’ understandings of variation within human populations.Footnote ¹⁷

In response to a rise in anti-Semitic incidents in Europe between 1950 and 1960, the intensification of the civil rights movement in the United States, and the stifling of opposition to the apartheid regime in South Africa, UNESCO officials decided to issue an updated statement on race in 1967. The 1967 statement urged that greater attention be paid to history—particularly the history of slavery, colonialism, and anti-Semitism—and to “the social structure” in which racial prejudice operates. Given that the causes of racial prejudice were overwhelmingly social and historical, the statement argued that eliminating racial discrimination required more than education and publicizing scientific research which undermined the presuppositions of racist beliefs and doctrines. It stressed the social and historical context in which racism emerges, noting that racial discrimination is most virulent in

This new sociological emphasis of UNESCO's antiracism efforts was reflected in several conferences and publications sponsored by UNESCO in the course of the 1970s. The publications focused on bringing both the history of colonialism and social and economic factors into the study of contemporary race relations. Hall, on the invitation of the director of the Social Science Programmes at UNESCO, Marion Glean O'Callaghan, participated in several conferences and colloquia dedicated to race, colonialism, and antiracist struggles in this period.Footnote ¹⁹ In these papers, Hall puts his thought in conversation with economic and sociological theories of Third World social and political formations.

The “nonstandard” conditions of the class struggle in these societies—the close overlap between racial and class divisions, the total or partial absence of “free” labor markets, and the coexistence of highly capitalized industrial sectors and precapitalist agrarian sectors within a single national economy—allowed Hall to deepen his anti-teleological account of capitalist development and his antireductionist account of class struggle. In what follows, I will focus on two of the UNESCO publications in which the development of the notion of articulation is explicitly pursued.

The critique of plural society

In his essay 1977 “Pluralism, Race and Class in Caribbean Societies,” Hall applies the concept of articulation he developed in critical dialogue with Althusser's theory of structural causality to Caribbean social formations. Hall takes as his target “pluralist” theories of Caribbean and African societies. These theories have their origin in J. S. Furnivall's studies of colonial Burma and the Dutch East Indies.Footnote ²⁰ Thinkers like Leo Kuper and M. G. Smith drew on Furnivall's work to argue that postcolonial African and Caribbean societies were “plural societies” in which “culture,” rather than class, was constitutive of the major patterns of social stratification.Footnote ²¹

They argued that plural societies, unlike societies where various population groups share a set of basic institutions, are characterized by cultural sectors with their own distinctive and exclusive institutions. These institutions function parallel to one another, rarely overlap, and often stand in antagonistic relation to one another. Unlike more culturally homogeneous societies, “plural societies” lack a central value system that can integrate these mutually exclusive social institutions. The “unity” of plural societies is thus typically achieved by one of the cultural segments holding a monopoly of power and exercising control and coercion over the other sections. The class structure of these societies is transposed onto their cultural heterogeneity, with a high level of coincidence between class stratification and racial/cultural stratification. Moreover, plural-society theorists like M. G. Smith and Leo Kuper argued that the limited manifestation of class-based solidarities across cultural segments meant that class analyses could not explain social stratification in African and Caribbean societies.Footnote ²² It was therefore argued that the relationship between mutually exclusive cultural institutions is constitutive of all other social relations in these societies, including class relations.

Hall credited the plural-society theorists with recognizing a crucial distinguishing feature of societies of the Caribbean vis-à-vis other class societies, namely that there is a much sharper cultural or racial homogeneity of various social classes than in other societies. However, in stressing the extent to which various cultural institutions function parallel to one another, Hall argued that the model of the “plural society” fails to come to terms with how the hierarchy of cultural sections is legitimized and maintained.Footnote ²³ According to Hall, a sociological model adequate to Caribbean societies needed to specify “not simply the plurality of their internal structures, but the articulated relation between their differences.”Footnote ²⁴

Hall drew on theorists of “plantation society” and social stratification to sketch such a model. His main references were the work of George Beckford and Lloyd Braithwaite. Beckford, a member of the New World Group at the University of the West Indies, argued that the near total destruction of indigenous social forms during colonial conquest had produced a social tabula rasa upon which economic, political, and social life on the island colonies could be fundamentally reshaped.Footnote ²⁵ In this context, the slave plantation emerges as a “total institution” in the Caribbean colonies, fully determining economic and political policy. Brathwaite, on the other hand, argued in a series of publications that Furnivall's theories of “plural society” stressed pluralism over the processes of legitimization which maintain patterns of stratification among the cultural segments of these societies.Footnote ²⁶ For Braithwaite, the model of the “plural society” blurs the distinction between parallel or horizontal relationships of cultural segments and the hierarchies which exist between them.

Hall, drawing on Beckford, notes that the various European, African, Latin American, and South Asian elements that constitute Caribbean societies are not “pure” because, historically, they are all mediated through, and thoroughly transformed by, a distinct Caribbean institution—the slave plantation. It is plantation production that first draws together the different social groups which compose Caribbean societies. And it is slavery which institutes mutually exclusive institutions by distributing population groups along racial, colour, and status lines into two dichotomous social spheres. It is also the conditions of slave production which institute the domination of white planter cultural forms and institutions over the cultures and institutions of the enslaved. The plural-society model is misleading, according to Hall, because it fails to acknowledge the extent to which the cultural segments that make up Caribbean societies are not primordial, or inherited from Europe, Africa, or South Asia, but are produced by the conditions of slave production—“the differentiation between the cultural institutions which arise within slave society is a differentiation of slave society itself.”Footnote ²⁷

For Hall, contra the plural-society theorists, it is not cultural differences that produce class differences in the Caribbean. Rather, it is the peculiarity of the Caribbean mode of production which first institutes the patterns of cultural segmentation and stratification. The abolition of slavery, according to Hall, leads to the termination of legally enforced caste barriers between “slave” and “master” society, but the foundational divisions produced by the plantation determine the nature of the class society which follows. The abolition of slavery leads to a degree of social mobility across racial frontiers, but “the symbolism of race, colour and status” remains the “idiom of social stratification and mobility.”Footnote ²⁸ This is evidenced by the fact that social mobility is reserved for those sections of the black and colored communities able to assimilate closest to the culture of the white plantocracy. According to Hall, this is not evidence, however, that these societies are not properly class societies. He insists that Caribbean society is “not, usefully, considered as an ethnic or race-based or even race-colour-based social system, but a social-class stratification system in which the race–colour elements in the stratification matrix constitute the visible index of a more complex structure.”Footnote ²⁹

Hall explains that this form of class society is complex, “but no more so—though in a different way—than modern industrial social structures.”Footnote ³⁰ He argues that the transition of Caribbean societies to capitalism is not all that distinct from the transition of Western societies to capitalism. One needs to distinguish, explains Hall, the “modal” distribution of classes between those who possess and those who do not possess the means of production from “the actual distribution of classes and class fractions into empirical groups in specific societies.”Footnote ³¹ Hall explains that in England, for instance, capitalist industrialization was achieved on the basis of an alliance between the emerging bourgeoisie and the precapitalist feudal aristocracy. Similarly, in Caribbean societies, Hall observed a transition to capitalism based on an alliance between an emerging black “national bourgeoisie” and sections of the precapitalist planter class in the emerging commercial sector. Moreover, Hall notes how ostensible “ethnic” or “racial” forms of political mobilization like the black power movement in Jamaica mobilize a notion of blackness aimed at fermenting forms of class solidarity between the urban and the rural poor.Footnote ³²

Hall draws his narrative about Britain's transition to capitalism from Perry Anderson.Footnote ³³ This is the first time Hall compares the development of British capitalism to the development of capitalism in the global South. Here the comparison is deployed to make sense of race and class in the Caribbean. Later we will see Hall make a reciprocal comparison; theories originating in the global South will be used to make sense of the class struggle in Britain. Crucially, however, Hall does not draw the comparison in order to lament Britain's “decline.” Rather, the comparison serves to stress the importance of turning to the history of development to understand seemingly aberrant aspects of the class struggle in the present—in this case, the contemporary salience of social categories like race that are ostensibly incompatible with the advanced forms of production and “free” capitalist labor markets.

The idea here is that the nature of society's precapitalist modes of production shapes, in part, the nature of the capitalist society which follows. The transition to capitalism does not immediately sweep away precapitalist social relations. The nascent capitalist class may, for instance, pragmatically ally itself with precapitalist classes during the process of transition. Moreover, certain precapitalist institutions may be preserved if they prove functional to capitalist interests. These are themes we see Hall pursue further in his subsequent UNESCO paper.

Hall's engagement with theories of apartheid's “modernity”

Hall tackled the question of the relationship between race and capitalism beyond historical legacies of slavery in his subsequent UNESCO publication, “Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance.”Footnote ³⁴ Hall explains that he is concerned with determining “how different racial and ethnic groups were inserted historically, and the relations which have tended to erode and transform, or to preserve these distinctions through time—not simply as residues of previous modes, but as active structuring principles of the present organization of society.”Footnote ³⁵ His central references shift from theorists of Caribbean societies to neo-Marxist accounts of apartheid South Africa.

Throughout the 1970s, South African émigré neo-Marxist scholars in Britain were engaged in a fiery debate with liberal historians and social scientists about the nature of apartheid ideology.Footnote ³⁶ There was a diversity of perspectives within both the “liberal” and “Marxist”—or, as they were labeled at the time, “revisionist”—camps. Some of the liberals, inspired by W. W. Rostow's modernization and stages-of-growth theory, argued that with increasing industrialization and economic growth, policies of racial segregation in South Africa would gradually be undermined.Footnote ³⁷ Industrialization and technological advancement would usher in fundamental changes in the divisions of labor and a more complex allocation of resources to production. This, in turn, would lead to rationalization of the production process. Economic and social relations would be pushed in an egalitarian direction as firms recruited workers based on their technical qualifications, rather than ascribed ideological criteria like race. Moreover, the locations of plants would be chosen based on the resource requirements of industry, and not according to the arbitrary territorial segregation of racial groups.

The neo-Marxist “revisionists” sought, in various ways, to challenge the idea that industrialization and apartheid ideology were incompatible. The dominant approach of these revisionist scholars was to challenge what they saw as the central tenet of the liberal interpretation of apartheid: the notion that racial ideology was extra-economic or, more precisely, precapitalist or preindustrial. They sought to show that the formative context for the emergence of apartheid was the rise of industry: the emergence of the gold mining on the Witwatersrand in the late nineteenth century and the rise of secondary manufacturing industries from the 1940s onwards. Apartheid, according to the South African Marxists, was a modernist doctrine, born out of the labor requirements and production processes of industry, not a premodern reaction to industrialization.Footnote ³⁸

Hall clearly had the stakes of the debate among South African émigrés in mind when he argued that South Africa constituted the “test case” for examining the relationship between race and class in contemporary capitalist societies because “South Africa is the ‘exceptional’ case of an industrial capitalist social formation, where race is an articulating principle of the social, political and ideological structures.”Footnote ³⁹ He engaged with two important contributors to the revisionist challenge to the liberal notion that apartheid and industrialization were incompatible: the neo-Weberian perspective of John Rex and the neo-Marxist perspective of Harold Wolpe. For the purposes of this article, I will focus on Hall's engagement with Wolpe and the theorists Wolpe drew on to develop his analyses of apartheid. It is in relation to these ideas that Hall develops his notion of articulation.

In developing his theorization of apartheid, Wolpe critically engaged contemporary Marxist critiques of modernization theory. The most influential was that developed by Andre Gunder Frank in a series of articles dealing with economic underdevelopment in Latin America.Footnote ⁴⁰ Based on a series of radical deductions from the work of Latin American structuralist development economists, Frank rejected the claim, expressed by both liberal modernization theorists and several Latin American communist parties, that there remained significant remnants of feudalism in Latin America.

Frank rejected teleological conceptions of economic development according to which countries pass through the same succession of developmental stages. On this account, underdeveloped countries are considered to occupy a stage that developed countries have already transcended. Frank argued that developed countries had never been underdeveloped in the manner in which Third World countries were in the present. This is because underdeveloped countries were the product not merely of their own economic, political, cultural, and social structures, but also of their relationship with core capitalist powers. According to Frank, “the metropolis destroyed and/or totally transformed the earlier viable social and economic systems of these societies, incorporated them into the metropolitan dominated world-wide capitalist system, and converted them into sources for its own metropolitan capital accumulation and development.”Footnote ⁴¹

Countries are underdeveloped, therefore, not because they have not yet successfully “modernized,” but because their economic interests are subordinated to the capitalist accumulation of metropolitan powers. Frank argued that even the most remote and isolated regions of Latin America had, since the time of colonization, participated in commodity exchange and other processes which have their source in capitalist accumulation by the metropole. Even the seemingly most “archaic” economic processes present in Latin America were thus thoroughly integrated into the worldwide capitalist economic system. Frank thus argued that it made little sense to speak about feudalism in contemporary Latin America.

In the British context, Ernesto Laclau, who had recently moved to England from Argentina to pursue graduate study at Oxford on Eric Hobsbawm's invitation in 1969, published an influential critique of Frank's theory of underdevelopment in the New Left Review in 1971.Footnote ⁴² He argued that Frank's analysis had the implausible implication of subsuming the radically different forms of exploitation experienced by the Chilean inquilinos, the Ecuadorian huasipungueros, the slave of the West Indian sugar plantation, and the textile workers of Manchester to a single form of relation termed “capitalist.”Footnote ⁴³

According to Laclau, this lack of historical and social specificity in Frank's work stemmed from his failure to distinguish an “economic system” from an economic “mode of production.”Footnote ⁴⁴ An economic system, according to Laclau, designates relations between different economic sectors and productive units, whether on a regional, national, or world scale. An economic system, explains Laclau, can be capitalist while incorporating several different modes of production. Therefore we can simultaneously acknowledge that substantial feudal relations of production exist in Latin America, while also insisting that these do not exist as exogenous to capital, or as declining sectors of the economy, but as integral to the broader economic system.

The declining rate of profit at the metropole, explains Laclau, forces Western capitalists to seek productive units in which either the organic composition of capital is low or super-exploitation of labor is possible—or both. A feudal mode of production meets these requirements and, therefore, at certain historical moments, it is in the interests of Western capitalists to maintain feudalism in the periphery to combat the tendency of the rate of profit to fall at the core. Laclau insisted that dependence be traced to concrete modes of production, rather than to the omnipresence of capitalism. “It seems to me more useful,” writes Laclau, “to underline these difference and discontinuities than to attempt to show the continuity and identity of the process, from Herman Cortes to General Motors.”Footnote ⁴⁵

Wolpe combined Laclau's theory of the preservation of feudalism within a broader capitalist economic system with the work of French Marxist anthropologists who specialized in precapitalist economic systems in French West and Equatorial Africa. Claude Meillassoux and other members of the Paris–Brazzaville school of French economic anthropology argued that exploitation in precolonial, precapitalist economic systems in sub-Saharan Africa was not characterized by the extraction of surplus value. Rather, these societies were characterized by a “lineage mode of production” where elders achieved their dominant position not through the accumulation of commodities, but by controlling—through their monopoly over social knowledge and elite goods—rates of marriage and levels of fertility, and thus the size and distribution of the labor force.Footnote ⁴⁶ Meillassoux's core theoretical takeaway from his studies of these “lineage modes of production” in West Africa was that an adequate Marxist account of a particular social formation cannot focus purely on production but must also address the issue of social reproduction: how social groups and particular social classes are maintained from generation to generation.

Wolpe, using the language of some of the French anthropologists, argued that South African industrialization was achieved on the basis an articulation—or complex combination—of precapitalist and capitalist modes of production, rather than the latter merely supplanting the former.Footnote ⁴⁷ He followed Laclau by suggesting that the conditions of industrialization in South Africa, particularly the mining sector's demand for a large supply of cheap labor, meant that it was in the interests of capitalists for the precapitalist modes of production to be maintained and subordinated to capitalist accumulation, rather than simply destroyed. This is because the nascent capitalist sector could not fulfill all the material needs of workers. The maintenance of precapitalist communities thus plays a crucial role in the cheap reproduction of the labor force by essentially subsidizing the cost of workers’ means of subsistence—a cost that would have otherwise been incurred by the capitalist. Through low wages and precarious employment, workers are periodically expelled by the capitalist sector to rural areas where a subsistence economy could provide for their basic needs.

Wolpe argued that as capitalism expanded to become the dominant mode of production in South Africa, it tended to erode the economic viability of communal rural social formations that were a source of cheap labor for South Africa's mining industry. Apartheid, according to Wolpe, emerges, in part, as a response to this undermining of the material basis of the cheap migrant labor system. On the one hand, the apartheid regime engaged in various policies to bolster the economic viability of rural homelands and to strengthen the legitimacy of “traditional authorities.” On the other hand, it involved the establishment of an elaborate system of domination and control to maintain the periodic expulsion of black migrant laborers back into the rural areas where their material needs could be met by precapitalist communal forms of economic and social organization. This allowed the South African labor force to continue to be “reproduced” at little expense to South African capital.

Hall approved of Wolpe, Laclau, and the French Africanists’ general approach. He credits Wolpe and the French Africanists with approaching the phenomenon of racism “not by deserting the level of analysis of economic relations (i.e. the mode of production) but by posing it in its correct, necessary complex form.”Footnote ⁴⁸ First, this involved identifying how different racial groups stand in different relations to capital—in terms of both the functions they are assigned in the productive process and how their labor power is reproduced.Footnote ⁴⁹ Second, it produces a more complex understanding of the relationship between racial groups. It demonstrates that racial groups are not homogeneous in their class composition, as we saw plural-society theorists argue.Footnote ⁵⁰ This disturbs the notion that black political organizations necessarily express the interests of the working class, or that all fractions of white labor necessarily have an interest in the preservation of the status quo. However, the fact that an overwhelming majority of the white working class do support apartheid points to the fact that ideological positions cannot be ascribed as a bloc to classes defined at the economic level.

Hall followed the Africanists and Laclau by insisting on the importance of the history of the development of capitalism for the analysis of race in the present. Here Hall was not arguing that racism is merely a hangover from a previous mode of production or a bygone epoch. He explains that while “Britain's long imperial hegemony” may have “laid the trace of an active racism in British popular consciousness,” this was not sufficient for understanding the operation of racism in the present.Footnote ⁵¹ This would require understanding how the nature and function of racism have been transformed by “the contact between black and white workers in the conditions of postwar migration.”Footnote ⁵²

Hall thus follows the South African émigrés by trying to find the roots of contemporary racism, not in the residues of previous modes of production that will be progressively undermined in the course of capitalist industrialization, but as the outcome of fundamental transitions which reshape and reconfigure social classes in the long-term interests of a new mode of production. Such a process involves both an incorporation of elements of previous modes of production and a fundamental transformation of them. Hall is not invoking the idea of uneven development to argue that Britain's “decaying imperial state” is to be blamed for contemporary racism.Footnote ⁵³ Rather he is claiming that only through an appreciation of the distinctive features of a society's development, with close attention paid to moments of transition and discontinuity, can we understand the economic and social significance of racism in the present.

For Hall, transitions are brought about by a combination of both ideological and economic factors. While Wolpe hints at the force of ideological factors in the formation of South Africa's racialized social order, his analysis, according to Hall, tends to suggest that the crisis in capitalist accumulation necessarily produces apartheid's systematic forms of racial discrimination. South Africa's class structure, underpinned by an “articulation of modes of production,” is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for the virulence of apartheid's racist practices and ideology, according to Hall. To understand why a society develops a particular kind of racialized structure, one must examine how ideological and economic factors work in tandem. Here Hall draws on Ernesto Laclau's early theorization of populism.

In his first book Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory, Laclau argued that while class struggle is determined by articulations at the level of the mode of production, the particular character the class struggle will take—the popular-democratic struggle—depends on the articulation between the class struggle and ideological elements and interpellations like “the People” and “the Nation.”Footnote ⁵⁴ These interpellations, Laclau insists, have no necessary class character. The particular class connotation that gets ascribed to them depends on how they “articulate” diverse and contradictory class interests and ideologies to forge various class alliances. “Articulation requires,” according to Laclau, “the existence of non-class contents—interpellations and contradictions—which constitute the raw materials on which class ideological practices operate. The ideology of the dominant class, precisely because it is dominant, interpellates not only the members of that class but also members of the dominated class.”Footnote ⁵⁵

Hall, echoing Laclau, suggests that the nature of the broader social formation should be understood as a complex articulation of economic, political, and ideological levels. This means that ideologies cannot be reduced to coherent, transparent class interests. Therefore it needs to be determined how the interests of heterogeneous social classes are reconciled by the hegemonic ideology. Hall, however, stops short of describing race as an “empty signifier” which becomes contingently attached to different class practices, as Laclau presented interpellations like “the Nation” and “the People.” Hall presents articulation of race and class as a much more multifaceted process than the discursive struggle over the connotation of a particular nonclass interpellation. Hall draws on Laclau here, not in order to stress ideological factors over economic ones, but in order to nuance the accounts of economic development that he is critically engaging in the paper.

He describes three distinct levels at which the articulation of race and class should be sought. First, at the economic level, race can become a pertinent category in the division of the labor and distribution of functions in a capital mode of production. Second, on the ideological level, fractions of the working class come to “‘live’ their relations to other fractions and through them to capital itself.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Finally, on the important level of political struggles, racist interpellations are “occupied and redefined to become the elementary forms of an oppositional formation—for instance, where ‘white racism’ is vigorously contested through the symbolic inversions of ‘black power’.”Footnote ⁵⁷

The role played by race at each of these levels, explains Hall, has broader implications for the development of capitalism and the class struggle in a given society. It influences the nature of capital accumulation and the extraction of surplus value through racial divisions of labor influencing such processes as “the domestic reproduction of labour power ‘below its value’, the supply of cheap labour, the regulation of the ‘reserve army of labour’, the supply of raw materials, of subsistence agriculture, the hidden costs of social reproduction.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Racialized social relations also enter into the nature of the class struggle, thwarting “attempts to construct alternative means of representation which could more adequately represent the class as a whole, or which are capable of effecting the unity of the class as a result,” and contribute to the “cementing ideology which secures the whole social formation under a dominant class.”Footnote ⁵⁹

Gramsci as a theorist of underdevelopment and “regressive modernization”

Beyond the articulations of modes-of-production literature influencing Hall's thinking about the relationship between race and class, it also significantly shaped his interpretation of the work of Antonio Gramsci. As David Forgacs points out in his analysis of the reception of Gramsci's thought in Britain from the late 1950s, Gramsci was “creatively readapted” to the British context by his disciples there.Footnote ⁶⁰ Hall's specific “creative readaptation” involved figuring Gramsci as a theorist of articulation and underdevelopment.

What is striking about Hall's invocation of Gramsci's thought in his 1980 UNESCO paper is that it is not lauded as a representative of a more nuanced “Western Marxism” developed on the Continent. Rather, Gramsci's thought is valued because it was developed in a European power, Italy, which was, more than any other, “brutally marked by the law of uneven development: with massive underdevelopment in the South. This raises the question of how the contradictions of the Italian social formation are articulated through different modes of production (capitalist and feudal), and through class alliances which combine elements from different social orders.”Footnote ⁶¹ According to Hall, it is in the context of the particularly glaring class contradictions of Italian social formation that Gramsci was led to pose the problem of how economic relations of production are reproduced socially, technically, and ideologically.

In the UNESCO paper, Hall thus read the articulation literature in terms of Gramsci but he also read Gramsci in terms of the articulation literature. Gramsci was figured here as a theorist of how elements from distinct social orders or modes of production combine at particular moments to form the basis for different class alliances. Gramsci is also credited with extending the idea of articulation beyond the economic sphere by laying the foundation for an analysis of the complex relationship between economic, political, and ideological levels of the social formation and thus overcoming the residual functionalism of more orthodox Althusserian accounts of the process of reproduction.

This reading of Gramsci as a proto-underdevelopment theorist was echoed in another contribution to a UNESCO colloquium in 1985. Hall notes that Gramsci's first contact with socialist ideas was in the context of the growth of the Sardinian nationalist movement at a time when “Sardinia stood in a ‘colonial’ relationship to the Italian mainland.”Footnote ⁶² The influence of Wolpe's analyses of apartheid South Africa and Laclau's analyses of Latin America are clear when Hall likens Gramsci's sensitivity to the way in which the “backward” South and “advanced” North are combined within the Italian social formation to contemporary neo-Marxist studies of the “‘peasant’ economies of the hinterland in Asian and Latin American countries on the path to dependent capitalist development,” and of “‘migrant’ labour forces within domestic labour markets; ‘Bantustans’ within so-called sophisticated capitalist economies.”Footnote ⁶³

Gramsci, like these underdevelopment theorists, recognized, according to Hall, that the general law of value has not had the tendency to homogenize labor power across the capitalist epoch. Rather, Gramsci's thought lays stress on the fact that the law of value “operates through and because of the specific character of labour power rather than—as the classical theory would have us believe—by systematically eroding those distinction as an inevitable part of a worldwide, epochal historical tendency.”Footnote ⁶⁴

Hall explains that this coexistence between “backward” and “advanced” sectors within the Italian social formation, and the way in which the former incorporates the latter, was a major theme of Gramsci's analyses of Italian fascism. Gramsci was conscious of how Catholicism in Italy represented a formidable alternative to the development of a secular and progressive national capitalism. Gramsci highlighted, according to Hall, the role that “fascism played in Italy in ‘hegemonizing’ the backward character of the national–popular culture in Italy and refashioning it into a reactionary national formation, with a genuine popular basis and support.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Fascism is described here as successfully incorporating precapitalist ideologies and social forms into a modernizing capitalist developmental agenda. While Hall categorically refused the label “fascist” to describe Thatcher's ideology, his contemporary analyses of Thatcherism are strikingly similar to how he describes Gramsci's analysis of fascist ideology as emerging from the “uneven” character of capitalist development in Italy.Footnote ⁶⁶

Hall's analyses of Thatcherism in the 1980s drew inspiration from a wide range of sources. I don't mean to suggest here that underdevelopment theory was the only, or even the most important, influence on his thinking. However, there are aspects of his analysis, generally neglected in engagements with his thinking, where Hall's reading of Gramsci as a theorist of underdevelopment clearly shaped his interpretation. It is only when we highlight the background of some of Hall's thinking in development theory that his choice of certain lines of argument and his deployment of specific narratives make sense.

In a well-known analysis, Hall describes the crisis of postwar social democracy in the late 1970s as the context for the emergence of Thatcherism. He characterizes the nature of successive postwar governments in Britain—whether Conservative or Labour—as essentially corporatist.Footnote ⁶⁷ The state intervened in British society to secure a compromise between organized labor and British capital. By the end of the 1970s, he argued, deepening economic crises and increasing working-class militancy meant that the state could no longer effectively intervene in British society to secure concessions from the working class to prevent a crisis in capitalist accumulation.Footnote ⁶⁸ Amid this crisis, Thatcher and other populist figures in the Conservative Party attempted to reconfigure the role of the state as part of their broader ideology which Hall describes as “authoritarian populist.” Hall coined this term to reflect the fact Thatcherism does not merely secure its legitimacy through force or coercion but also by successfully condensing a wide range of popular discontents with the postwar economic and political order and mobilizing them around an authoritarian, right-wing and radical free-market political agenda.Footnote ⁶⁹

Hall describes Thatcherism as playing on the contradictions underlying British economy and society to build a popular consensus. Hall's description of these contradictions is strikingly similar to the contradictions we saw between the “backward” South and “advanced” North in his reading of Gramsci, and between the various modes of production in underdeveloped societies. As early as 1978, Hall and his collaborators in their Policing the Crisis explained that postwar capitalism only survived on the basis of a major reconstruction of capital and the labor process. They argued that, in the British case, this reconstruction was achieved on the basis of on “an extremely weak and post-imperial economic base” which rendered British capitalism “unevenly developed, permanently stuck in transition.”Footnote ⁷⁰

This notion of an unevenly developed British capitalism was recapitulated in Hall's interpretation of Thatcherism. Hall explains that

There are clear and powerful echoes of the Andersonian declinist characterization of British capitalism in this passage. But viewed through the lenses of the development theory on which Hall drew to deepen his understanding of historical transitions, we can see that Hall is deploying these familiar arguments about Britain's failure to modernize for reasons that have little to do with promoting the idea of British decline. Rather, he is following a strategy akin to that employed by UNESCO and South African theorists of apartheid to account for the persistence of seemingly archaic social relations like racism, namely turning to the history of the uneven development of capitalism to identify the distinctive features of a given society's capitalist modernization.

We see Hall argue that Thatcherism emerges, first and foremost, as a project of “modernization.” It seeks to sweep away the archaic social institutions and cultural habits that it perceives to be at the root of Britain's decline and replace them with modern bourgeois values—self-interest, competitive individualism, and antistatism. But just like fascist modernization, or the development of capitalism in countries in the global South, it does so through incorporating aspects of the archaic institutions that precede it. It is therefore a project of “regressive modernization”—“drawing on the past, looking backwards to former glories rather than forwards to a new epoch.”Footnote ⁷²

The social basis for this paradoxical hegemonic project, Hall argues, is the petty bourgeoisie. Thatcherism takes as its paradigmatic social model the “hard-faced, utilitarian, petty-bourgeois businessmen” rather than “the grouse-shooting, hunting and fishing classes.”Footnote ⁷³ The petty bourgeoisie, economically squeezed by the growing power of corporate enterprise, the state, and multinationals in the postwar years, represents the most likely ally to the modernizing free-market agenda of Thatcherism. At the same time, it is also a social class with organic ties to the more archaic elements of the British social order, deeply attached to conservative values of tradition, family, and nation. Through the petty bourgeoisie, Thatcherism is able to mobilize the backward elements of the English social formation around its modernizing agenda by presenting itself as the defender of “Englishness” under threat by immigration and moral degradation. Thatcherism thus represents “[m]ultinational capital ‘lived’ through the prism of petty-bourgeois ideology.”Footnote ⁷⁴

The petty bourgeoisie as the principle social ally of a reactionary political project is drawn directly from Gramsci's analyses of fascism. However, Hall gives the Gramscian analysis a distinctly “underdevelopmentalist” cast by describing the petty bourgeoisie as a point of articulation between a declining industrial mode of production and an emerging multinational form of capitalism. Thatcherism, for Hall, cannot straightforwardly be said to represent the petty bourgeoisie. Rather, it is a petty-bourgeois ideology which “‘represents’ and is helping to reconstruct both national and international capital” insofar as it “articulates into a configuration different subject, different identities, different project, different aspirations. It does not reflect, it constructs a ‘unity’ out of difference.”Footnote ⁷⁵

Hall's analyses of Thatcherism attracted contemporary criticism from Marxist scholars for giving Thatcherism a coherence and epochal significance that, they argued, it lacked.Footnote ⁷⁶ Hall's Marxist critics attributed this misdiagnosis to Hall's overwhelming focus on Thatcherite ideology, and to his neglect of underlying economic forces. This led Hall, these critics claimed, to emphasize discontinuities over continuities in British capitalism. They suggested that a careful political economic analysis, both of British society at large and of Thatcher's policies in government, reveal that there was not as large a gulf as Hall suggest between the so-called social-democratic containment of capitalist crises and Thatcherism.

What these critiques miss is that it is not merely Hall's “ideologism” that leads him to argue that Thatcherism represents an epochal shift in British capitalism. It is also his reliance on theories of development that focus specifically on moments of transition which issue in a reshaping of the class configuration of a given society. Hall, following the approach of these theorists of development, constructs a narrative about the distinctiveness of Britain's modernization process. This process is punctuated by moments of crisis and transition that are the key to understanding how elements from previous historical epochs are recast. Reconstructing this process of development, according to this approach, allows one to appreciate the important function that seemingly archaic elements play in reproducing the relations of production of the contemporary mode of production and in solidifying the hegemony of the ruling classes.

I don't mean to suggest that the preceding contextualization completely invalidates the criticisms of Hall's analyses of Thatcherism. I merely seek to emphasize the extent to which it is not merely Hall's overwhelming focus on superstructural elements that produces his interpretation, but also the sociological and political-economic arguments that are deeply infused into his understanding of historical transitions. Future critical scrutiny of Hall's analyses of Thatcherism might consider engaging these elements. Specifically, future studies of Hall's thought could fruitfully interrogate the extent to which the kinds of transition described by the development theorists that Hall draws on are in fact comparable to the transition that Thatcherism represents.