Stuart Hall, Marxism without guarantees, and ‘The hard road to renewal’

This piece overviews Stuart Hall’s contribution to Marxism and to the left, and argues that whilst there were significant problems with the manifestation of Marxism Today, his work on hegemonic renewal holds great relevance in a left that is today in crisis. Paradoxically, it suggests that the spirit of the Bennite democratic socialism project of the early 1980s, which was critiqued at the time by Hall and Marxism Today, is currently closer to the kind of coherence required for the left to establish a hegemonic alternative to contemporary neoliberalism.