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Politics of Adolescence?

Stuart Hall

WHEN we put Roger Mayne's photograph of a young"teddy boy" and his girl friend on the cover of

ULR 4, everybody asked us, "Why? What has this to dowith socialism?" Now, suddenly, there is a "youth" prob-lem. We know there is because Mr. Gaitskell says so. TheLabour Party has just set up a "star panel" to give "thebest and widest advice on all questions concerning thenation's young people" . . . One would have thought thatsuch events as Notting Hill would have brought thepoliticians sharply up against the problem of youth. Butno: not until Anthony Howard spelled out the electoralimplications of the revolt of youth, did Transport Houselumber into action. Votes, votes, votes. . . .

Of course, the question of the increasing age of theParty and its inability to win young people for politics is

a vital issue. There must be something radically wrongwith a working class party which can't recruit enthusiasticyoung working class people. And it's not just a matteras some of Anthony Howard's articles in the ManchesterGuardian suggestedof dingy constituency Party rooms,dull speeches and jumble sales. The fact is that the Partyis afraid that the instinctive radicalism of youth will breakup the truce which the present leadership has made withthe status quo. But there are deeper causes.

Those who are adolescents today were born during thelast years of the War, or just after. This is a difficult factfor the labour movement to assimilate, but it is centralto the whole question. Boys of fifteen in the current affairsclass in my Secondary School discovered Hitler for thefirst time in a recent Television series entitled "Tyranny".The usual response of established, ageing trade unionofficials to this fact is to echo the Prime Minister: "youngpeople todaylet's face ithave never had it so good."And nothing irritates young people more. They are notresponsible for the fact that they are not growing up inthe heroic days of the labour movement. The "stalematestate" is quite tough enough for them. There are a host ofnew 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 peoplehave had to assimilate the experience of the post-warboom. They have had to try to find their feet in theWelfare Stateand the Welfare State means to them, notthe fight for social services and security associated withthe Thirties, the Means Test and the Dole. They find itimpossible to project themselves imaginatively into thoseconditions. The Welfare State means, much more, red tapeand government bureaucracy, stuffy public school accentsin high places and tired trade union officialese in lowplaces, Times umbrellas or Mirror busts, grouse shoots,hunting the hounds and Network Three.

And that's the pointthe tragedy and hope of thesituation. Instinctively, young working class people areradical. They hate the stuffiness of the class system, thoughthey cannot give it a political name: they hate the frustra-tions of petty conservative officialdom, though they cannotspell "bureaucracy". But they feel and experience these

things in private, emotional ways, for this is how adoles-cence encounters the world. Things don't add together tomake complete pictures. They find it difficult to search outthe causes of things. "Profundity" and "intensity" are thecults of a "left-bank" middle class adolescence, but theymean very little for working class boys and girls. Theymay understand superficially: but they feel in depth.They are sensitive to appearancesto how things look, tohow things strike them. They are open to suggestion andpersuasion. Politically, they have no categories by meansof which to distinguish between the corrupt conservativeTrade Union official they meet at the works, and theshiny, corrupt boss who is probably a prospective ToryM.P. These two often look to them as if they're on thesame side. They sound as if they're saying the same thing.Perhaps they are. . . .

Adolescence is, in any case, a difficult period of adjust-ment, physically and psychologically. The world comesthrough to the adolescent in short, uneven bursts. All thetime, they are trying to make some sense. But whatappears to the sociologist and the politically experiencedas a political question takes the form, for them, of apersonal anxiety. They have their private fears and exalta-tions. But the job of politics is to connect the private andthe 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 periodof adolescence, which will pass. Time, here, is not neces-sarily the great healer. For what has happened is that thenightmares and private fears of a whole generation havebeen projected into the public domain. Adolescence hasbecome a social phenomenonand can become, asNotting Hill showed, a public menace. That is because itis 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 conformistand restrained in giving vent to their feelings than we are.Our experiences are the same. One can find a counterpartto adolescent "delinquency" in the verbal violence of anynovel of the Angry Young generation.

But what is it they are against? In many ways, like theirgrammar school counterparts, young working class peoplesometimes appear to be rebels without cause. The enemyis so hard to flush out. Everyone can feel and smell theconcentrations and arbitrary exercise of power in oursociety. But who can name them? The intellectualsflounder about: think of the number of targets JimmyPorter lashes at, and yet, even at the end of Look BackIn Anger we feel that something essential has been missed,that the Queen and the Union Jack are merely convenientsymbols 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 wantsunemployment. The point is that the Thirtiesand forsome people "1945"offers a point of reference, alanguage of shared misfortune and revolt, a spirit ofregeneration and construction. But that is what has dis-

Universities & Left Review 6 Spring 1959

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appeared from political languageand politicsduring thepost-war period. No politician is using language tochallenge power and to declare revolt, though they are alldeeply involved in wielding power, covertly. Our politicshas no emotional resonance, and no humanity: it is stiff,and dry and colourless and conciliatory. It cannot connecttogether with any thread the private and the public: andtherefore, for many young people it is deeply irrelevant.And the young writers and artists look back to theThirties because it offers them the only convenientlanguage for talking about commitment in the present. It

gives us at least a feeling of what it would be like if wewere alive.

It is worse for working class adolescentsfor they haveno language at all. In the post-war period, they have madean expressive language of their own: a language ofrhythm, in jazz and skiffle, a language of movement in

jive (how many working class kids in the Thirties coulddance?), a language of colour and variety in their dress.In these ways, the swell of youthful energy, the lust forself-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: therecord shops, the cheap clothing stores, the managers ofteen-age stars, Tin Pan Alley. "Adolescence" becomes abusiness. Young people hardly notice the corruptions,

because somehow the rapid changeover in styles and tastesmust be catered for. In the process, they do not know howmuch they are losing, though half the time they feel in-

stinctively they are being "had". A good deal of theirlanguage is defensive, and a good deal of their noncha-lance as well. Watch these kids dance: they enter into themusic with a kind of finality, so fully that they appear tobe distanced from themselves and the music as they movetogether. The absence of feeling in their faces and eyesbetrays the depth of feeling they have. They care, thoughthey may not care about much. In the terms they under-stand, they are reaching out for what mistakenly theythink is adult sophistication. The "cool" generation is alsothe "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 thinkthey have to pay for acceptance by a society where alaugh that is too loud or a song in the "wrong" placerepresents a gross breach of good taste. It is "good taste"and conformity and stuffiness, above all, which they revileand rejectthe cement in the seams of a class society.They hate conformity because it represses them, it con-strains themfor no reasonable purpose, except, appar-ently, for the sake of repression and restraint and pettyconformity itself. They cannot translate these phenomenainto political terms, but they know, from the inside, whatconservatism 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 weremore closely knit together, there were at least some guidelines between the half-way-house of adolescence andadulthood. The family code may have been rigid: it wasalso warm and friendly and receptive. Young men wereforced through the rougher paces of life by stricter neces-sitiesjobs were scarce and education hard to come by.These things have by no means altered. Education is freeto all, but the three-tiered system is still oppressive andstultifying. And these days, jobs are scarce again, thoughthere is probably a bit more "lolly" in it, if you have one.But no challenging, exciting new vistas have opened up inthe Opportunity State for the majority of working classadolescents. The family is there, but it is no longer sosolid, or so circumscribing. There are no political move-

ments going on which capture the imagination of youngpeople. Jobs are still dull and repetitive. Youth clubs aretemporary resting places between difficult years, but thereone meets one's own friends, with the same problems.Youth clubs frequently serve, inadvertently, to enableyoung people to generalise what, in private, they havethought of as their personal woes.

If the day, the ordinary, the acceptable is drab, thenonly in the darkness does life itself begin. If the gapbetween generations never closes, then young people feelthe need to project their discontents into some symbolicfigure, large enough to contain them all. That is why thegang is so necessary, why the identification with "adoles-cent" heroes is so absolute: they must project outwardsinto the adolescent "hero"the James Dean, the ElvisPresleywho embodies their problems and throughwhom, vicariously, they live out their fears, or they musthuddle inwards, for protection and comradeship. Whatyoung people want is the taste of life itself: physicallyand psychologically, they feel capable of tasting it for thefirst time. They cannot believe that, in fact, it is as staidand insipid as it appears to be. They feel that adults arecheating them. They are resentful. And when the meal istasteless, one forms the habit of using strong condiments.That is the role which violence plays in adolescent life: itis not wilful callousness, but a part of their predicament.It is a successful surrogate, a releasefor the jew. Some-

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times, if you are very, very "sent", and get to feel thingswith the knuckles and the knee, violence is almost like lifeitself: cold, unyielding, giving nothing away, like an inert,slumping body.

Only the very few are driven so close to the edge thatthey resort to violence as a way of coming to grips withthe world. For most young people, life is a good deal lessvicious, less exciting than that. But there are elements ofviolence, tangled together with everything else, in adoles-cent 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 legislateenough, everything else will come right. Even if the vitalityand radicalism of youth could be caught up in some greatpolitical movement, young people would still want to singand dance, just as their fathers would want to slip awayfrom the meeting for a pint in the local. Skiffle and jazzare not substitutes for politics: they are legitimate formsof creative expression in themselves. Politics are not areplacement for life. Life is living together, making one'sown friends and learning the guitar. The point is thatthere should not be an unbridgeable gap between thosewho play skiffle and those who talk politics. The twoshould not be, as they are today, opposed, but complemen-

tary.It would be worse if, in desperation to attract working

class youth, the Party should "go in" for a bit of skiffleand jive and coffee bars, on the side, to coat the dulltranquilliser of politics. For that would be to deny the lifeand language of adolescence itselfwhich, in its bluntway, has a few lessons for the politician too. Young peoplehave no built-in allegiances to Labour. They didn't comeinto the world with their Constituency Party dues paid upfor life. There aren't immutable historical laws which saythat the Labour Party must go on and on forever, what-ever it does. Young people may conventionally voteLabour: but spiritually, they have to be won. And whatthey are saying, in part, is that they can only be won bya political movement which matches by design the radical-ism which they inhabit instinctively. They can learn tolivebut it must be the real thing, not "partly living".They desperately need the community of each otherandmany of them find it in the same decent, relaxed ways inwhich young people, for ages, have: they get together andtalk. But the community must really exist. They won't buycheap 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 givethem half a chance.

You can't legislate for adolescence: but there are thingsWhich can be done. I mean political action which tries, notmerely to tailor the political scene for the floating vote,but to alter the social context of life itself. This is par-ticularly true of the system and content of present second-ary education. For this is where, at the moment, the linesof communication between generations are fouled. Thedays of the trained elite, the "guardians of our culturalheritage" have, happily, passed. Patronage is dead. In ademocracy, the life of the community must pass throughthe working class, or the community itself will degenerateinto barbarism. But, at the moment, education is still hope-lessly stratified: culture and science for the managers ofthe future, what's left for the rest. Except in the com-prehensive schools, there exists nowhere in the presentsystem a "comprehensive" education or "equal" facilitiesfor the education of the majority of the nation's children.Except for a handful of dedicated teachers, the philosophy

of "the secondary modern school" is that what's left overafter the Grammar and Public Schools have had a bitewill do. Nothing else is passing through. The system isclogged, like a sealed tube.

But so far, Labour has discussed the problem of educa-tion without reference to the problems of "youth". Thatis why Learning To Live is such a limited document.

Complementary to the question of content and facilitiesin education, is the question of the school itself. At themoment, the school is considered as a holding cupboard,

which relieves parents of the responsibilities for the un-manageable during the best part of the day. It is not seen,as it should be, as a social centrea place where the fullactivities of children and youngsters can be contained inan increasingly urbanised society, a focus for the responsi-bilities (at present hopelessly dispersed) of parents,teachers and youth workers. For that reason, the emo-tional centre of the lives of young people falls outside ofthe school-walls, and school is seen as a barrier to "ex-perience" (increasingly to be picked up on the streets andin the cafes), rather than the source of experience foryoung people.

Outside of education, there is the question of a SocialistYouth Movement. The perils of a working class Partywithout an active and independent youth movement

should by now have penetrated even through the screenthrown up by Party managers. The urgent question now,is whether anything is going to be done to build (thatmeans money, time, organisers, and the guarantee ofindependence) a youth movement in this country fromscratch: or whether the "star panel" is a convenient wayto shelve a thorny problem.

We can't legislate for adolescence. But we can legislatefor the kind of society into which young people are grow-ing, and for the kind of politics they will tolerate. At thesame time as the Party complains about the apathy ofyouth towards politics, thousands of young people spendtheir Easter walking 53 miles in protest against a "nuclear-protected" future. Is that apathy? It didn't sound like it.The increasingly youthful character of the Campaign forNuclear Disarmament is the most significant political factsince the beginning of the Cold War. So were the Univer-sity marches against Apartheid and in protest againstSouthern Rhodesian policies in Nyasaland. These are thesigns which socialists should be watching: and mullingover the fact that such signs of life and enthusiasm arespringing up, so far, outside of the context and against theprevailing spirit of the Party.

We cannot make young people grow up straight. Butwe can alter the context of their growing. The politics ofhumanity: of guts. That is the politics which young peopletoday are waiting for. And what does Labour's "starpanel" on youth have to say about that?

We very much regret that, inadvertently, we omitted toacknowledge as a quotation the first paragraph of ourarticle on advertising, /Dreamed I Stopped the Traffic . . .ULR 5. This paragraph is in fact a quotation from oneof a series of lectures which Mr. Daniel Bell recentlydelivered in this country, and which subsequently appearedin The Listener.

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