A deep organic crisis forces the Right to construct rather than merely reflect responses

Evidence

Gramsci insisted that we must get the “organic” and “conjunctural” aspects of a crisis into a proper relationship. What defines the “conjunctural”—the immediate terrain of struggle—is not simply the given economic conditions, but precisely the “incessant and persistent” efforts which are being made to defend and conserve the status quo . If the crisis is deep—“organic”—these efforts cannot be merely defensive. They will be formative : aiming at a new balance of forces, the emergence of new elements, the attempt to put together a new “historic bloc,” new political configurations and “philosophies,” a profound restructuring of the state and the ideological discourses which construct the crisis and represent it as it is “lived” as a practical reality: new programs and policies, pointing to a new result, a new sort of “settlement”—“within certain limits.” These new elements do not “emerge”: they have to be constructed. Political and ideological work is required to disarticulate old formations, and to rework their elements into new ones. The “swing to the Right” is not a reflection of the crisis: it is itself a response to the crisis. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 1099

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Hall’s core formulation that conjunctural terrain is defined by efforts to defend the status quo, and that a deep crisis makes those efforts ‘formative’ — a dense, reusable analytical frame.
• DEFINE: Defines organic vs conjunctural crisis and the crux that the Right’s response is constructed, not reflective.
• XREF: The conceptual backbone of the whole chapter and of the reader’s goal of understanding Hall’s intellectual framework; ties to Gramscian hegemony reading across earlier chapters. — connects to: Climate catastrophe demands constructing a collective subject that does not yet exist — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 139
• SEED: The phrase ‘the swing to the Right is itself a response to the crisis, not a reflection of it’ is a sharp framing device for a political-economy essay.