stuart hall

"Look, Gramsci, the Italian Marxist, believed in pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the spirit. You must look at what's happening now. If it's unpropitious, say it's unpropitious. Don't fool yourself. Analyse the conjuncture that you're in. Then you can be an optimist of the will, and say I believe that things can be different. But don't go to optimism of the will first. Because that's just utopianism."

guardian, saturday interview february 11

 

Naturally, we arrive at the riots of the summer, the place where the austerity, these so-called "failures" of multiculturalism, the absence of politics, all meet, in Foot Locker, of all places. "The riots bothered me a great deal, on two counts. First, nothing really has changed. Some kids at the bottom of the ladder are deeply alienated, they've taken the message of Thatcherism and Blairism and the coalition: what you have to do is hustle. Because nobody's going to help you. And they've got no organised political voice, no organised black voice and no sympathetic voice on the left. That kind of anger, coupled with no political expression, leads to riots. It always has. The second point is: where does this find expression in going into a store and stealing trainers? This is the point at which consumerism, which is the cutting edge of neoliberalism, has got to them too. Consumerism puts everyone into a single channel. You're not doing well, but you're still free to consume. We're all equal in the eyes of the market."

and this is the most pessimistic of all his ideas: that three decades of neoliberalism have got into people's consciousness and infected the way young people respond to poverty just as they have neutered the way politicians express themselves.