Hall rejected the primacy of class contradiction and embraced Althusser’s instance model

Evidence

To be absolutely crude about it, I think that Marx works much better about capital than about class. Marx on the world market is absolutely crucial, but Marx on the class struggle is much more deeply lodged in a very specific historical experience. And so extrapolations from that to the idea of the revolutionary subject is dubious. And certainly the master centrality that is given to the class contradiction as the one which unlocks all the others—I can say that I have never held that. So I can say I am a Marxist in the Althusserian moment because Althusser suggests that there is always an economic instance, a political instance, and an ideological instance, and the economic and the political is the condition of the ideological instance and the ideological is the condition for the operation of the political and economic. So he gives me a Marxism I can assent to. If that is Marxism, I can begin to live with it. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 987

Categorization

• DEFINE: Althusser’s model of economic, political, and ideological instances as mutually conditioning — a key scaffold for how Hall thinks about ideology and race/class articulation.
• XREF: This frames Hall’s approach to race as produced within, not outside, the economic/political/ideological conjuncture — directly relevant to how Islamophobia analyses treat ‘culture’ as a named instance.