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Doreen Massey and Stuart Hall discuss ways of understanding the current crisis.
Doreen There are many different ways of thinking about the current crisis, but certainly one useful way is to think about the present as a conjuncture - this way of analysing was very productive in the discussions about Thatcherism in the late 1970s and 1980s in Marxism Today and elsewhere, in which you played a leading role.1 Perhaps we should start by thinking about what conjunctural analysis is, and how it differs from other kinds of analysis.
Stuart It's partly about periodisation. A conjuncture is a period during which the different social, political, economic and ideological contradictions that are at work in society come together to give it a specific and distinctive shape. The post-war period, dominated by the welfare state, public ownership and wealth redistribution through taxation was one conjuncture; the neoliberal, market-forces era unleashed by Thatcher and Reagan was another. These are two distinct conjunctures, separated by the crisis of the 1970s. A conjuncture can be long or short: it's not defined by time or by simple things like a change of regime - though these have their own effects. As I see it, history moves from one conjuncture to another rather than being an evolutionary flow. And what drives it forward is usually a crisis, when the contradictions that are always at play in any historical moment are condensed, or, as Althusser said, 'fuse in a ruptural unity'. Crises are moments of potential change, but the nature of their resolution is not given. It may be that society moves on to another version of the same thing (Thatcher to Major?), or to a somewhat transformed version (Thatcher to Blair); or relations can be radically transformed.
Gramsci and Althusser, who helped us to think in this way, were primarily interested in such moments of major ruptural crisis (like 1917), when the 'organic' relations of society - especially the economic structure - were deeply reshaped. Gramsci thought the conjunctural level less significant than the organic. But he does also talk about using the notion of conjuncture in a broader, more methodological way: as a way of marking significant transitions between different political moments; that is to say, to apply it as...