That this may appear to announce that Cultural Studies had a politics is not surprising. The political position of Cultural Studies is that of the critique of the present and of the utopian conceits for the future.
This critique begins with the profoundly negative critique of the Frankfurt School and became later, at the instigation of the Birmingham School, an equally positive critique critique of contemporary culture. Positive in the sense of emphasizing the resistance to authority and the constant reproduction of the social relations through the production of culture.
Birmingham expressed an overt commitment of theory to the needs of opposition political and social formations. One of the intractable problems that confronts -ed Cultural Studies is that the commitment to critique a commitment that requires that one be led by the evidence is often at odds with commitments to particular groups and politics. This is not to say that Cultural Studies has no overarching political commitments.
It most certainly has always been committed to the politics of the left, as can be seen in its origins in Critical Theory and in the Gramscian interventions and commitment to the working class that one finds in British Cultural Studies.
Cultural Studies, however, always turns its critique back on itself and this results in the difficulty in maintaining long-term commitments to any political orthodoxy. Orthodoxy invites its critique and results in the constant questioning of the very orthodoxies that we hold most dear. This underlines the centrality of materialism in understanding the origins of contemporary Cultural Studies.
