Stuart Hall was eighty-two when he died last week, but he still had a lot to say. His enthusiastic engagement with “After Neoliberalism? The Kilburn Manifesto” was proof of that. Red Pepper caught him in full flow when we went to interview him and his co-authors, Doreen Massey and Mike Rustin, in the build-up to the manifesto’s launch at the end of last year.

His answer to our first question — how had neoliberalism defied political gravity by using its own financial crisis as a way of entrenching its policies of dismantling the welfare state and decisively defeating organized labor? — was Hall at his finest.

“It is a rather complicated question,” he answered, “because it means unpacking some of the ways in which we’re accustomed to think about the economy in relation to other aspects of society. Aspects which people might have expected to fall into line as a consequence of the crisis haven’t done that at all. So we have to ask ourselves, what is the relation between the economy and politics? What is the effect of ideology on politics? And what is the relation of all those things to how people live their lives every day?”