This blog is part of a very amorphous project called the HooHa Group.
One of our new initiatives is Living the Dream - a semi-regular series of podcasts in which we talk about some of the issues and concerns that we are trying to explore as a project.  The intention is that these podcast will be along similar lines to what we are writing about. Its all part of our attempt to create a no bullshit space for radical anticapitalist/emancipatory politics with a Brisbane focus.

You can listen to it directly here http://hoohagroup.podbean.com and as soon as we get the okay from iTunes you will  be able to subscribe through them

But here is a quick intro: Listen to this episode

#hoohaltd

The recent passing of Stuart Hall led me to do something I’ve been meaning to do for some time – read one of his many co-authored political interventions: Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order. A foundational work in cultural studies, the book looked critically at the phenomenon of ‘mugging’ in Britain during the 1970s, a crisis of authority confected by government and media.

Hall and his co-writers argued that the rise of this new focus on law and order was the result of a significant weakening in the government’s ability to generate consent from its citizenry. Or, as the author’s approvingly quote Gramsci: “the crisis of the ruling class’ hegemony [occurs] because the ruling class has failed in some major political undertaking for which it has requested or forcibly extracted the consent of the broad masses…A ‘crisis of authority’ is spoken of: this is precisely the crisis of hegemony, or the general crisis of the State.”[1]

We have seen something of this across Australia of late. Crises of authority – taking the form of bikies, out of control drinkers and ‘one punch’ attackers and paedophiles – have emerged from all quarters, generated in tangent with a willing media driven as always by their own bottom line more than political expediency.

How are such law and order drives usually read by the Left – if we are to continue with the fiction that such a thing exists? Firstly, law and order drives are read as media sensations of the lowest calibre. The easily led ‘bogans’ (read, working class), entirely depending on the Herald Sun or Courier Mail for their drip-fed opinions, are joined in a chorus of moral outrage. Secondly, they are a distraction, one foisted on the people by a conniving government intent on taking away liberties and rights while citizens backs are turned.

The fantastic thing about Hall’s work is that it looks beyond such shallow readings – highlighting instead the relationship between law and order, political crisis and hegemony. In the remainder of this article I want to sketch out briefly some of the ways that the tools employed in Policing the Crisis can be used to come to a better understanding of what’s going on in Queensland in particular at the moment.

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