Conversations with Stuart Hall: The inheritors of '68

In January 1968, the South Vietnamese Chief of Police shot dead a young man in a check shirt, at point blank range, in the streets of Saigon. For me, at nineteen, the photograph of this event had a double meaning. Of course, it showed starkly the casual brutality of the regime which the Americans were propping up. But it showed something else. The young man in the check shirt was not an innocent bystander, caught up in a stop and search raid. He was an officer in the National Liberation Front. He had been fighting - and killing - as part of the NLF's Tet (New Year) offensive, which had fought its way to the outskirts of the US Embassy itself, threatening the headquarters of the mightiest military machine on earth.

So, for me and millions like me, the lesson of Tet was not the victimhood of the Vietnamese but their heroism. Alongside the anti-war movement, the offensive forced Lyndon Johnson to abandon his ambitions for a second full presidential term. It inspired the uprising in American cities which followed the assassination of Martin Luther King in April, and the rebellion of students and workers in France in May. In August, it was emulated by protestors at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, and supporters of the Prague Spring. It was captured on film again in October, when Tommy Smith and John Carlos raised their black-gloved fists in protest against racism and for human rights during the men's 200 metres medal ceremony at the Mexico Olympics.

It's all the more odd, then, to be told that the most enduring legacy of 1968 was the neoliberalism of the 1980s. Yet the idea has become increasingly prevalent. It is the core thesis of conservative historian Dominic Sandbrook's monumental history of post-war Britain - already over 3300 pages long and in four volumes, and he's only up to 1979. It's the view of former 1960s revolutionary Régis Debray, who now argues that the uprising of which he was a part let loose the ultra-capitalism of the 1980s and 1990s.¹ Likewise, left-wing commentator Anthony Barnett argues in his Brexit book The Lure of Greatness that 'the revolt that began in 1968 led to a renewal not of socialism but of capitalism'.² In a Guardian article about the V&A's 2016 exhibition about the late 1960s counter-culture, You Say You Want a Revolution?, Polly Toynbee accepted that 'out of all this revolution against "the system" came a "me" individualism that grew into neoliberalism'.³ The exhibition's narrative began in swinging London and ended in Silicon Valley: its thesis was that Apple (Beatles) gave birth not to a new society but to Apple (Steve Jobs).

The idea that Thatcherism was somehow Tariq Ali's fault would have seemed very surprising to the lady herself. In late March 1982, commenting on the Brixton riots of the summer before, Thatcher announced that that 'we are reaping what was sown in the sixties. The fashionable theories and permissive clap-trap set the scene for a society in which the old virtues of discipline and self-restraint were denigrated'.⁴ Three years later, she grouped together a potpourri of 1960s folk devils - striking teachers, football hooligans, left-wing local councillors, trade union pickets - as examples of the 'enemy within'.⁵

Though she espoused economic libertarianism, Thatcher was a social conservative, an ideological marriage that was not new, or - really - hers. 2018 also sees the fiftieth anniversary of Enoch Powell's rivers of blood speech in Birmingham. In his remarkable series of lectures and articles about emergent Thatcherism in the late 1970s, Stuart Hall identified Powell and Powellism as its progenitor. Concentrating on another Birmingham speech, in Northfield during the 1970 election, Stuart noted how Powell had first identified an 'invisible enemy within', consisting of students 'destroying universities' and 'terrorising cities', the near destruction of civil society in Northern Ireland and the accumulation of 'further combustible material' of 'another kind'. Thereby, as Stuart argued in his 1978 lecture 'Racism and Reaction', black people, their...