Universities & Left Review 6 Spring 1959

Politics of Adolescence?
Stuart Hall
HEN we put Roger Mayne's photograph of a young W "teddy boy" and his girl friend on the cover of ULR 4, everybody asked us, "Why? What has this to do with socialism?" Now, suddenly, there is a "youth" problem. We know there is because Mr. Gaitskell says so. The Labour Party has just set up a "star panel" to give "the best and widest advice on all questions concerning the nation's young people" . . . One would have thought that such events as Notting Hill would have brought the politicians sharply up against the problem of youth. But no: not until Anthony Howard spelled out the electoral implications of the revolt of youth, did Transport House lumber into action. Votes, votes, votes. . . . Of course, the question of the increasing age of the Party and its inability to win young people for politics is a vital issue. There must be something radically wrong with a working class party which can't recruit enthusiastic young working class people. And it's not just a matter as some of Anthony Howard's articles in the Manchester Guardian suggestedof dingy constituency Party rooms, dull speeches and jumble sales. The fact is that the Party is afraid that the instinctive radicalism of youth will break up the truce which the present leadership has made with the status quo. But there are deeper causes. Those who are adolescents today were born during the last years of the War, or just after. This is a difficult fact for the labour movement to assimilate, but it is central to the whole question. Boys of fifteen in the current affairs class in my Secondary School discovered Hitler for the first time in a recent Television series entitled "Tyranny". The usual response of established, ageing trade union officials to this fact is to echo the Prime Minister: "young people todaylet's face ithave never had it so good." And nothing irritates young people more. They are not responsible for the fact that they are not growing up in the heroic days of the labour movement. The "stalemate state" is quite tough enough for them. There are a host of new problems to cope withand not always much help, sympathy or understanding forthcoming from their elders. Young people wantand needto make their own life: not live it second hand. The post-war generation of working class young people have had to assimilate the experience of the post-war boom. They have had to try to find their feet in the Welfare Stateand the Welfare State means to them, not the fight for social services and security associated with the Thirties, the Means Test and the Dole. They find it impossible to project themselves imaginatively into those conditions. The Welfare State means, much more, red tape and government bureaucracy, stuffy public school accents in high places and tired trade union officialese in low places, Times umbrellas or Mirror busts, grouse shoots, hunting the hounds and Network Three. And that's the pointthe tragedy and hope of the situation. Instinctively, young working class people are radical. They hate the stuffiness of the class system, though they cannot give it a political name: they hate the frustrations of petty conservative officialdom, though they cannot spell "bureaucracy". But they feel and experience these things in private, emotional ways, for this is how adolescence encounters the world. Things don't add together to make complete pictures. They find it difficult to search out the causes of things. "Profundity" and "intensity" are the cults of a "left-bank" middle class adolescence, but they mean very little for working class boys and girls. They may understand superficially: but they feel in depth. They are sensitive to appearancesto how things look, to how things strike them. They are open to suggestion and persuasion. Politically, they have no categories by means of which to distinguish between the corrupt conservative Trade Union official they meet at the works, and the shiny, corrupt boss who is probably a prospective Tory M.P. These two often look to them as if they're on the same side. They sound as if they're saying the same thing. Perhaps they are. . . . Adolescence is, in any case, a difficult period of adjustment, physically and psychologically. The world comes through to the adolescent in short, uneven bursts. All the time, they are trying to make some sense. But what appears to the sociologist and the politically experienced as a political question takes the form, for them, of a personal anxiety. They have their private fears and exaltations. But the job of politics is to connect the private and the publicto humanise our nightmaresso far as it can. This is what the politics of the 50's has not done. For it is not just a matter of an uncomfortable period of adolescence, which will pass. Time, here, is not necessarily the great healer. For what has happened is that the nightmares and private fears of a whole generation have been projected into the public domain. Adolescence has become a social phenomenonand can become, as Notting Hill showed, a public menace. That is because it is our society to which they are trying to adjust, and so, in a sense, their frustrations are the frustrations of us all. They are only less "mature", less polite, less conformist and restrained in giving vent to their feelings than we are. Our experiences are the same. One can find a counterpart to adolescent "delinquency" in the verbal violence of any novel of the Angry Young generation. But what is it they are against? In many ways, like their grammar school counterparts, young working class people sometimes appear to be rebels without cause. The enemy is so hard to flush out. Everyone can feel and smell the concentrations and arbitrary exercise of power in our society. But who can name them? The intellectuals flounder about: think of the number of targets Jimmy Porter lashes at, and yet, even at the end of Look Back In Anger we feel that something essential has been missed, that the Queen and the Union Jack are merely convenient symbols for something Jimmy Porter couldn't quite name. The play has forcebut the force is coined retrospectively. One has to look back to find legitimate ways of feeling. It is not that Jimmy Porter wants to remake the Thirties. No more so than the young "teddy boy" apprentice wants unemployment. The point is that the Thirtiesand for some people "1945"offers a point of reference, a language of shared misfortune and revolt, a spirit of regeneration and construction. But that is what has dis-

appeared from political languageand politicsduring the post-war period. No politician is using language to challenge power and to declare revolt, though they are all deeply involved in wielding power, covertly. Our politics has no emotional resonance, and no humanity: it is stiff, and dry and colourless and conciliatory. It cannot connect together with any thread the private and the public: and therefore, for many young people it is deeply irrelevant. And the young writers and artists look back to the Thirties because it offers them the only convenient language for talking about commitment in the present. It gives us at least a feeling of what it would be like if we were alive. It is worse for working class adolescentsfor they have no language at all. In the post-war period, they have made an expressive language of their own: a language of rhythm, in jazz and skiffle, a language of movement in jive (how many working class kids in the Thirties could dance?), a language of colour and variety in their dress. In these ways, the swell of youthful energy, the lust for self-expression can somehow be coped with and tamed. But even here, the pressures of the society can be seen. Commercial enterprise battens upon adolescent tastes: the record shops, the cheap clothing stores, the managers of teen-age stars, Tin Pan Alley. "Adolescence" becomes a business. Young people hardly notice the corruptions, because somehow the rapid changeover in styles and tastes must be catered for. In the process, they do not know how much they are losing, though half the time they feel in-

stinctively they are being "had". A good deal of their language is defensive, and a good deal of their nonchalance as well. Watch these kids dance: they enter into the music with a kind of finality, so fully that they appear to be distanced from themselves and the music as they move together. The absence of feeling in their faces and eyes betrays the depth of feeling they have. They care, though they may not care about much. In the terms they understand, they are reaching out for what mistakenly they think is adult sophistication. The "cool" generation is also the "sent" generation (the "beat" generation is reserved for the fully over-developed society!): but the "cool" form their self-expression takes is the price they think they have to pay for acceptance by a society where a laugh that is too loud or a song in the "wrong" place represents a gross breach of good taste. It is "good taste" and conformity and stuffiness, above all, which they revile and rejectthe cement in the seams of a class society. They hate conformity because it represses them, it constrains themfor no reasonable purpose, except, apparently, for the sake of repression and restraint and petty conformity itself. They cannot translate these phenomena into political terms, but they know, from the inside, what conservatism feels like. It is anti-life. But where is life to be found? And who leads the way? At previous periods, when working class communities were more closely knit together, there were at least some guide lines between the half-way-house of adolescence and adulthood. The family code may have been rigid: it was also warm and friendly and receptive. Young men were forced through the rougher paces of life by stricter necessitiesjobs were scarce and education hard to come by. These things have by no means altered. Education is free to all, but the three-tiered system is still oppressive and stultifying. And these days, jobs are scarce again, though there is probably a bit more "lolly" in it, if you have one. But no challenging, exciting new vistas have opened up in the Opportunity State for the majority of working class adolescents. The family is there, but it is no longer so solid, or so circumscribing. There are no political movements going on which capture the imagination of young people. Jobs are still dull and repetitive. Youth clubs are temporary resting places between difficult years, but there one meets one's own friends, with the same problems. Youth clubs frequently serve, inadvertently, to enable young people to generalise what, in private, they have thought of as their personal woes. If the day, the ordinary, the acceptable is drab, then only in the darkness does life itself begin. If the gap between generations never closes, then young people feel the need to project their discontents into some symbolic figure, large enough to contain them all. That is why the gang is so necessary, why the identification with "adolescent" heroes is so absolute: they must project outwards into the adolescent "hero"the James Dean, the Elvis Presleywho embodies their problems and through whom, vicariously, they live out their fears, or they must huddle inwards, for protection and comradeship. What young people want is the taste of life itself: physically and psychologically, they feel capable of tasting it for the first time. They cannot believe that, in fact, it is as staid and insipid as it appears to be. They feel that adults are cheating them. They are resentful. And when the meal is tasteless, one forms the habit of using strong condiments. That is the role which violence plays in adolescent life: it is not wilful callousness, but a part of their predicament. It is a successful surrogate, a releasefor the jew. Some-

times, if you are very, very "sent", and get to feel things with the knuckles and the knee, violence is almost like life itself: cold, unyielding, giving nothing away, like an inert, slumping body. Only the very few are driven so close to the edge that they resort to violence as a way of coming to grips with the world. For most young people, life is a good deal less vicious, less exciting than that. But there are elements of violence, tangled together with everything else, in adolescent life today. It is one way of affirming one's own existence. It would be a mistake to think that "politics" alone can save us allthat if we nationalise enough and legislate enough, everything else will come right. Even if the vitality and radicalism of youth could be caught up in some great political movement, young people would still want to sing and dance, just as their fathers would want to slip away from the meeting for a pint in the local. Skiffle and jazz are not substitutes for politics: they are legitimate forms of creative expression in themselves. Politics are not a replacement for life. Life is living together, making one's own friends and learning the guitar. The point is that there should not be an unbridgeable gap between those who play skiffle and those who talk politics. The two should not be, as they are today, opposed, but complementary. It would be worse if, in desperation to attract working class youth, the Party should "go in" for a bit of skiffle and jive and coffee bars, on the side, to coat the dull tranquilliser of politics. For that would be to deny the life and language of adolescence itselfwhich, in its blunt way, has a few lessons for the politician too. Young people have no built-in allegiances to Labour. They didn't come into the world with their Constituency Party dues paid up for life. There aren't immutable historical laws which say that the Labour Party must go on and on forever, whatever it does. Young people may conventionally vote Labour: but spiritually, they have to be won. And what they are saying, in part, is that they can only be won by a political movement which matches by design the radicalism which they inhabit instinctively. They can learn to livebut it must be the real thing, not "partly living". They desperately need the community of each otherand many of them find it in the same decent, relaxed ways in which young people, for ages, have: they get together and talk. But the community must really exist. They won't buy cheap phrases about "the good of the nation as a whole". That's the politics of spivsand they'll tell Mr. Macmillan, Mr. Gaitskell or Prince Philip where to stuff it if they give them half a chance. You can't legislate for adolescence: but there are things Which can be done. I mean political action which tries, not merely to tailor the political scene for the floating vote, but to alter the social context of life itself. This is particularly true of the system and content of present secondary education. For this is where, at the moment, the lines of communication between generations are fouled. The days of the trained elite, the "guardians of our cultural heritage" have, happily, passed. Patronage is dead. In a democracy, the life of the community must pass through the working class, or the community itself will degenerate into barbarism. But, at the moment, education is still hopelessly stratified: culture and science for the managers of the future, what's left for the rest. Except in the comprehensive schools, there exists nowhere in the present system a "comprehensive" education or "equal" facilities for the education of the majority of the nation's children. Except for a handful of dedicated teachers, the philosophy 4

of "the secondary modern school" is that what's left over after the Grammar and Public Schools have had a bite will do. Nothing else is passing through. The system is clogged, like a sealed tube. But so far, Labour has discussed the problem of education without reference to the problems of "youth". That is why Learning To Live is such a limited document. Complementary to the question of content and facilities in education, is the question of the school itself. At the moment, the school is considered as a holding cupboard, which relieves parents of the responsibilities for the unmanageable during the best part of the day. It is not seen, as it should be, as a social centrea place where the full activities of children and youngsters can be contained in an increasingly urbanised society, a focus for the responsibilities (at present hopelessly dispersed) of parents, teachers and youth workers. For that reason, the emotional centre of the lives of young people falls outside of the school-walls, and school is seen as a barrier to "experience" (increasingly to be picked up on the streets and in the cafes), rather than the source of experience for young people. Outside of education, there is the question of a Socialist Youth Movement. The perils of a working class Party without an active and independent youth movement should by now have penetrated even through the screen thrown up by Party managers. The urgent question now, is whether anything is going to be done to build (that means money, time, organisers, and the guarantee of independence) a youth movement in this country from scratch: or whether the "star panel" is a convenient way to shelve a thorny problem. We can't legislate for adolescence. But we can legislate for the kind of society into which young people are growing, and for the kind of politics they will tolerate. At the same time as the Party complains about the apathy of youth towards politics, thousands of young people spend their Easter walking 53 miles in protest against a "nuclearprotected" future. Is that apathy? It didn't sound like it. The increasingly youthful character of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament is the most significant political fact since the beginning of the Cold War. So were the University marches against Apartheid and in protest against Southern Rhodesian policies in Nyasaland. These are the signs which socialists should be watching: and mulling over the fact that such signs of life and enthusiasm are springing up, so far, outside of the context and against the prevailing spirit of the Party. We cannot make young people grow up straight. But we can alter the context of their growing. The politics of humanity: of guts. That is the politics which young people today are waiting for. And what does Labour's "star panel" on youth have to say about that?

We very much regret that, inadvertently, we omitted to acknowledge as a quotation the first paragraph of our article on advertising, / Dreamed I Stopped the Traffic . . . ULR 5. This paragraph is in fact a quotation from one of a series of lectures which Mr. Daniel Bell recently delivered in this country, and which subsequently appeared in The Listener.