Culture Matters

Culture Matters

Fair Play Cabaret: shows with a social and political purpose
Tuesday, 08 October 2024 10:18

Fair Play Cabaret: shows with a social and political purpose

Published in Cultural Commentary

Fair Play Cabaret

With the backing of Equity, a cultural campaign is being launched which is centred around an ongoing series of events across the country. They are attempts, both onstage and offstage, to address aspects of social and cultural changes which have been so detrimental to working people during recent decades. These include attacks on unions, public services and public spaces, low wages, insecure work and poverty.

Shows and events will feature different types of performance, including comedy, music, spoken word and theatre. Generally, the shows will feature four or five performers and will last for two hours. Everyone associated with these events, including performers, must be a union member and provide photos of their union cards for publicity purposes.

This is a wide-ranging strategy in which Equity will initially take the lead, organising cross-union support and collaboration; the first event is at the GFTU headquarters where union activists receive education and training.

Shows will take place in venues which either belong to the labour movement or are, at least, public venues with a unionised workforce. Shows will operate at different scales, from large halls to small libraries. There will always be reduced concessionary admission rates for people who are unwaged.

We intend to book acts whose work best represents our values, providing entertainment which has a political and social purpose.

Bread and Roses Poetry Award 2024 - the winners!
Monday, 23 September 2024 10:02

Bread and Roses Poetry Award 2024 - the winners!

Published in Poetry

The five winners of the seventh Bread and Roses Poetry Award are: Linda Burnett, Amy Fox, Bernadette Gallagher, John F. Keane, and Nicholas McGaughey. £100 will wing its wandering way to their worthy workers' wallets, and we'll publish an anthology online, soon. We'll also produce a printed version, by the end of November.

The anthology will include the winning poems plus poems by Neil Clarkson, Josa Keys, Ella Fradgley, Atar J. Hadari, Jane Campbell, Jade Welburn, Jimmy Andrex, Jane Smith, Susan Young, Sim Smailes, Nick Moss, Theeda Winter, Angela Topping, Cameron Evans, Matt Duggan, Steven Taylor, Tara Singh, Sue Moules, Wendy Young, James Lawton, Abu Leila, Tracey Pearson, Curtis Brown, James O’Brien, Melissa Parker, Colette Coen, Seth Connor-Fullwood, Denni Turp, Kevin Searle, and Alan Briggs

We'll send copies to everyone included in the anthology, and it'll be on sale in bookshops and in our Books section. Thanks to all who entered this year, and best wishes to all aspiring writers.

This Albion: Snapshots of  Compromised Land
Monday, 16 September 2024 09:23

This Albion: Snapshots of Compromised Land

Published in Books

In 21 pieces about a variety of urban and rural locations in England, Scotland and Wales, Charlie Hill takes us on a tour of post-industrial Britain. From escaping to the Highlands during the pandemic to a trip to a Soho boozer, from camping in a church in Herefordshire to playing football in inner-city Birmingham, from feeling twitchy in a Gwynedd resort town to a run-in with the builders of HS2, This Albion draws on the theories of the Situationists and the writing of Mark Fisher to create an original and accessible snapshot of a society divided and brought together by geography and class.

Charlie Hill has been longlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story prize 2024.

This Albion: Snapshots of a Compromised Land, by Charlie Hill, ISBN 9781912710744, is available here

'A deep, poetic beauty': Review of 'This Albion: Snapshots of a Compromised Land' by Charlie Hill
Monday, 16 September 2024 09:17

'A deep, poetic beauty': Review of 'This Albion: Snapshots of a Compromised Land' by Charlie Hill

Published in Cultural Commentary

Bobby Seal from the Psychogeographic Review reviews This Albion: Snapshots of a Compromised Land by Charlie Hill

I had for some time believed the key to effective writing was to concentrate on the surface of things. Record them faithfully, and they’d do the work for you. After all, the world is manifestly absurd and provides you with everything you need in the way of character and environment and plot; why complicate – or simplify – things with undue authorial mediation?

Recently, however, I had started to question the value of such an approach. . .

Charlie Hill’s slim paperback more than makes up for its lack of length and detail with the depth and perceptivity of his observations as he charts a series of walks he has made through locations in England, Scotland and Wales. The book’s format is simple: each short essay focuses on a particular place Hill has visited in recent years, some urban and some and others rural, and crafts a collecion of meditations on what he sees, hears, thinks and feels.

img src="https://psychogeographicreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/contents-774x1024.jpg" sizes="(max-width: 438px) 100vw, 438px" srcset="https://psychogeographicreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/contents-774x1024.jpg 774w, /  

Mercifully, there is nothing self-consciously clever or showy about Hill’s prose, though his resume suggests he is more than capable of writing in this way if he chose to. Instead, he tells his story, his series of stories, simply and clearly. However, the overall achievement of these separate pieces, when considered as a whole, is to present us with something much more profound. Hill’s snapshots show a nation in flux, its people split by division. He feels the weight of history resting heavily on today and senses anxiety about the future underlying much of Britain’s public discourse.

But there is hope aplenty. Like some latter-day pilgrim Hill sketches a starburst of destinations radiating out from his home in Birmingham, England’s phrenic centre.  He is everyman and everywoman, he is you and me, and he guides us on his walks with humour and good sense and, despite the despair he notes in some quarters, he also meets kindness, acceptance and positivity wherever he goes. Though simple and staightforward on the surface, Hill’s writing conjures up a deep poetic beauty.

This Albion: Snapshots of a Compromised Land, by Charlie Hill, ISBN 9781912710744, is available here

Callout for short stories from the Morning Star
Saturday, 14 September 2024 13:03

Callout for short stories from the Morning Star

Published in Fiction

Andy Hedgecock introduces a callout for short stories. Image above: not Lenin writing flash fiction, but Lenin in Smolny, by Isaac Brodsky, 1930 (detail) Photo: Tretyakov Gallery/CC

In the summer of my 15th year, in a room with a view of Loch Linnhe, I read The Sixth Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories. I had no presentiment of the enduring influence of this 35p paperback. I still have my copy: it includes six well-written and entertaining excursions into the supernatural and two explorations of more ambiguous territory: The Door In The Wall by HG Wells, and The Grey Ones by JB Priestley. These stories have several features in common. They were written by socialists, they undermined the anthology’s title by failing to include a single ghost and – more significantly – they are narratives of transcendent complexity and weird resonance. For me, as a teenage reader, they were a revelation. In a few thousand words – without breaking the spell of their relentlessly engaging plots – their authors played with structure, language and symbol to challenge perception and provoke speculation.

For example, The Grey Ones reflects on psychiatry as a means of control, historical representations of evil, fear of otherness, and the tension between individualism and social cohesion. In addition, it dabbles with notions of paranoia, conspiracy, reason and intuition. These tales – steeped in sadness and primal anxiety – reinforced my relish for short fiction as a reader, writer and critic. George Saunders, a frequent chronicler in fiction of the failings of corporate capitalism and the distractions of consumerism, summed up the appeal of the form when he said: “When you read a short story, you come out a little more aware and a little more in love with the world around you.”

Ra Page, founder and managing editor of Comma Press, shares Saunders’s belief that stories can change the way we see the world. “The short story is the natural home of the dispossessed, the disenfranchised, the unheard – characters on the periphery,” he says. “Like the poor sledge-driver, Iona Potapov, in Chekhov’s Misery, its protagonists are often ignored and considered insignificant in their lives, yet they still ‘thirst for speech.’ Right now, too many people in the world are being left unheard, thirsting for speech. As a form, the short story doesn’t just welcome these kinds of perspectives,” says Page, “it puts them centre-stage.”

Page’s passion for short fiction – and his commitment to bringing new voices, fresh outlooks and unorthodox storytelling to a wider audience – has led to the creation of a short fiction list of striking variety. There is sci-fi from Iran, Iraq, Kurdistan, Egypt and Palestine; stories exploring the intersection of art and science; tales from uncelebrated cities; and single author collections from M John Harrison, David Constantine, Sarah Schofield, Sara Maitland and Hassan Blasim.

Professor Ailsa Cox, Professor of Short Fiction at Edge Hill University, has explored the potential and appeal of the short story from the perspectives of writer, academic and critic. “It’s the immediacy and the concision of the short story that makes the writing so vivid,” she says. “You can get down to business. You don’t have to fill in all the background and explain every detail. You’re there, in the moment. That does mean you have to read in a different way, a slower way, filling in the gaps and not minding ambiguity. Page for page, a short story takes longer to read, and a good one leaves you wondering, as if you’ve just woken from a dream. Because they're so immediate and – with luck – don’t take too long to publish, short stories keep up with a fast-changing world. In my view, the best short stories don’t usually deliver an obvious political message; that makes for dull and predictable writing that doesn’t challenge the reader. Good short stories subvert reality, sometimes through touches of the fantastic, the weird or the gothic.”

Cox notes this tendency in Lucy Wood’s short stories set in the Cornwall unseen by tourists, in Alice Ash’s linked stories of a rundown estate in Paradise Block, and in the uncanny landscape of Fen, Daisy Johnson’s debut collection. “The short story is endlessly inventive,” she asserts. “It’s where writers go to play. But it’s also a hugely accessible form.”

Sarah Schofield – author, academic and convener for the annual Short Story Prize awarded by Edge Hill University – acknowledges the progressive potential of the short form: “Short stories are brilliantly sneaky and subversive. In the UK particularly I wonder if sometimes they are seen as a little innocuous, and so writers have more room to explore an idea and address power imbalances, be they social, political, or other.”

Like Ailsa Cox, Schofield is wary of in-yer-face moralising and stresses the importance of crafting an effective interaction between reader and author. “The short form is unique in its ability to explore the minute weirdness of our contemporary existence and always has been. A great short story, one that leaves space for the reader and doesn’t bash them over the head with a glib or didactic message, is an act of nuanced investigation alongside the reader.”

Stories don’t work well as policy documents or draft manifestos, but the best of them offer more than mere entertainment. They illuminate specific aspects of human experience. Examples of nuanced and collaborative investigation can be found in the stories of China Mieville, SJ Bradley and Schofield herself. Covehithe – a haunting collision of absurdist nightmare and rational anxiety – is one of several explorations of ecological disaster in Mieville’s 2015 story collection, Three Moments Of An Explosion.

Despair does battle with resilience in SJ Bradley’s Backstreet Nursery, 2050 (from the collection Maps of Imaginary Towns, 2024). As the title suggests, this is mundane, near-future science fiction. In a few pages, Bradley sketches a society that extrapolates from our own; a sham democracy in which the population are neglected and coercively controlled. Rejoice, from Schofield’s collection Safely Gathered In, appeared as a special feature in the Morning Star (December 24 2021). Themes of loss and vulnerability are counterpointed by a child’s fascination with Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher’s evasion of scrutiny through her use of spin and divisive language has obvious contemporary echoes, but the story has multiple layers of meaning.

These are terse but powerful tales, and we need more of them. We need stories set in workplaces, estates and decaying city centres; stories exposing abuses of power, corporate calamities and government deceptions; stories powered by the hopes, fears, experiences and imaginations of working-class writers.

So, we’d like you to send us your stories. We wish to publish them. Contributions are voluntary, and any profit will support the Morning Star. To quote Sarah Schofield again, “Developing skills in story writing, storytelling, is a delightful and empowering process. Looking at something through the lens of fiction gives you the space to see it afresh.”

Stories, of up to 1,600 words, should be submitted to: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

The Harlot & The Rake
Monday, 09 September 2024 11:30

The Harlot & The Rake

Published in Poetry

Fran Lock introduces The Harlot & The Rake by Peter Raynard, a new pamphlet from Culture Matters which is free to download below, with donation if possible. The front and back cover images are by Martin Rowson

William Hogarth (1697–1764) was an English painter, printmaker, and social satirist, best known for his series of ‘modern moral subjects’, most notably A Harlot’s Progress (1731) and A Rake’s Progress (1733). These works are characterised by their combination of dark, caustic humour, graphic and openly sexual images, and a stern moralistic tone. A Harlot’s Progress is a series of six paintings unfolding the fate of a young woman from the country, arriving in London for the first time, and being lured into a life of prostitution. A Rake’s Progress is a series of eight paintings telling the story of Tom Rakewell, a young man who follows a path of dissipation, lechery, and self-destruction after inheriting—and in short order squandering—his father’s fortune.

Hogarth spent much of his childhood in a debtors’ prison, an experience that left him with an awareness of poverty, and a greater degree of sympathy towards the poor than many of his contemporaries. It also left him profoundly mistrustful of the wealthy, and with an abiding concern with what he saw as the slow deterioration of British morals. Raynard’s heroic crown of sonnets after Hogarth runs the same gamut of moral and social concerns, but bring a contemporary socialist sensibility to bear on the interconnected fates of Tom Rakewell and Moll Hackabout.

The collection opens with ‘The Heir’ in which the newly monied Rake is already scheming his idle and
profligate future at the expense of his female dependents:

mother weeping, wife with child warming inside her.
He will leave enough to oil their grief, but says there
is no need to pray.

The poem’s speaker has an omniscient satirical eye, relating events in the third person, and in the present active tense. This imparts to the poem a quality of penetrating and impartial witness and combined with the metrical strictures of the sonnet form, it produces a distinct poetic voice, at once watching events unfold in real-time and at a disinterested distance of centuries. Raynard’s speaker owes something to the excoriating wit of Pope as well as to his own startlingly apt turn of phrase. Who else would signal the hollow and airless propriety of 18th Century patriarchy with the lines:

his Father, a staid suit of a man
battened down by the clamp of God’s utility

What impresses about this poem, I think, is the way in which Raynard extends Hogarth’s original commentary of moral decline and hypocrisy by weaving the turpitude of the individual with that of the state and its most venerated institutions. While Tom betrays his family, his religion, and the presumed probity of his class by setting out to waste his fortune, this same fortune is built —on a national scale—upon the betrayal of humanity, a betrayal that same church passively sanctions:

with enough silver to sail a ship. London ho!
with its trade winds blown by slave labour. God well knows.

The next sonnet in the crown is after The Harlot’s Progress, and Raynard alternates between Rake and Harlot throughout the sequence. By choosing to write a crown of sonnets, a form in which each of the fifteen sonnets is linked to the preceding and succeeding sonnets by repeating the final line of the preceding sonnet as its first line, and where the first line of the first sonnet is repeated as the final line of the final sonnet, Raynard skilfully entangles the stories of the exploited woman and the rich and feckless wastrel. This is something he signals explicitly in the text with the description of the pimp as ‘the Rake’s shadow’, and a theme he returns to with mounting conviction and intensity throughout the collection.

By following the Rake’s abandonment of his female family with ‘Moll Hackabout arrives at the Bell Inn, Cheapside’ Raynard offers a sad and suggestive commentary on the futures of women thus abandoned. Moll’s choices upon arrival in London are limited and stark: she could support herself as ‘seamstress’ with ‘pins & needles’, likely performing what was called ‘slop work’ (the sewing of rough, ready-made clothes) for starvation wages, or she could allow herself to be sold to the highest bidder. Thomas Hood’s campaigning poem ‘The Song of the Shirt’ written over a century later offers an insight into the life of a seamstress in London, and demonstrates how slow society was to grapple with the plight of destitute women and girls:

Stitch! Stitch! Stitch!
In poverty, hunger, and dirt,
And still with a voice of dolorous pitch
She sang ‘The Song of the Shirt!’

The poor in London were compelled to use what physical capital they had in order to exist, trapped in bodies worn out by hard use. Poor bodies break down, class was—and is—a form of built-in obsolescence; for women this is also reproductive and sexual. As their trade takes its toll on their physical frames, they are forced to offer themselves for evermore abject forms of labour: what the prostituted woman does in order to survive is that which kills her. A bitter irony lost on neither Hogarth nor Raynard.

It is the sequence’s clear-sighted and empathetic treatment of Moll that is its most compelling feature. Raynard turns his gift for the acutely coruscating lyric riff upon Tom Rakewell and those who encourage him, as in these lines from ‘The Rake at the Levee’:

we’ll show him many ways
a man can spend riches, gambling drinking fucking
pox-ridden bitches. Behind them are the pictures:
‘Judgement of Paris’, driven by the mad rutting

of hormonal lust, limp biscuit men gather round
with all the pox from pleasure, tasty teeth turn foul.

or as in the grotesque carnival described in ‘The Orgy’, where wealth and degeneracy are linked together through the metaphor of the orgasm:

Pockets bulge with stress
burst open a scene of cocks with no crow.

Moll’s portrayal meanwhile is always underscored by a deep understanding of her status as a uniquely exploited worker, as painfully enmeshed in the logics of a rapacious emergent capitalism as millworkers or match girls. Moll’s life is inescapably tied to the whims of men, who emerge in the sequence as an oppressor class who profit from, punish and discard her for her ‘shame’ at will.

I found ‘From Kept Woman to Sex Worker’ particularly poignant, as the criminalisation of prostituted women, and the comparative leniency towards both pimps and johns is still a dangerous reality today. Moll’s ‘rise a balloon men / will pop’, the piece ends with her being dragged away, and it almost feels as if a snatch her own voice infiltrates the poem under the pressure of the moment:

Judge Gonson bursts in, three bailiffs
in tow, spots the witches hat and stick, tie for Moll

to go. Told she’s nothing but a common law stiff
of a whore. Which of these puritans are pure of whiff?

These forever-men still command immoral strays
as chattel catching wealth snatchers take Moll away.

Raynard uses the connected but very different downfalls of Tom and Moll to interrogate the complexities of ‘choice’, the notion of complicity and the limits of our sympathy. Do we pity Tom Rakewell, now become a Tom O’ Bedlam, repenting in a madhouse? Do we pity Moll, beating rope in Bridewell Prison? Or dead in ‘the cold dark ground where a pauper’s/ place may be found’? What seems telling is that Moll is bereft of even sincere mourners, punished, as Raynard writes for ‘a simple dream to simply exist’ with only her madam upset by her passing. Tom Rakewell meanwhile is attended in his extremity by his much-abused wife, ‘Sarah, who somehow stays’. Are we left with a feeling of unfairness that Moll’s only solace is death; that she is shunned and neglected even as she leaves life? Or perhaps we feel that although not equally responsible for their fates, both the Harlot and the Rake have been cruelly duped by the malignant machinery of Capital, equally seduced and destroyed by money?

“What Hogarth etched and engraved, Raynard successfully recreates in verse. The comparisons of life in Britain today are there to be made.” (Owen Gallagher)

The tone Raynard manages to hit with his quite ravishing language and the use of the 3rd person voice as witness carries you along like you’re on some kind of walking tour of the grubby streets of the human mind/body, leaving you eager to turn the next page, the next corner, to see what has next befallen Moll or Rake.” (Martin Hayes)

The Harlot and the Rake: poems after William Hogarth, by Peter Raynard, ISBN 978-1-912710-77-5 is available as a hard copy to buy (£7.50 plus £2.50 p&p), please email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Or you can download it as an e-publication below, please make a donation here.

Culture Matters Presents: Charlie Hill & Wayne Dean-Richards Double Header
Sunday, 08 September 2024 10:40

Culture Matters Presents: Charlie Hill & Wayne Dean-Richards Double Header

Published in Fiction

Culture Matters are proud to present an online prose double-header featuring the writerly talents of CM stalwarts Wayne Dean-Richards & Charlie Hill.

Charlie will read from his recently published CM pamphlet This Albion: Snapshots of a Compromised Land, a psycho-geographical journey across the UK's post-industrial edges; a journey driven equally by wit, warmth, and keen-eyed observation.

Wayne will read from his CM collection of short stories, Money & Blood, which probes the dark power of capitalism in our everyday lives, its legacies of violence, and its often tragic consequences.

Join us for readings from both authors, with a lively Q&A hosted by associate editor, Fran Lock. It will be wild!!!

About the Authors:

Wayne Dean-Richards’ work has appeared in a shedload of magazines and several anthologies. Spouting Forth published a collection of his short fiction – At the Edge – and a novel – Breakpoints. Another story collection – Cuts – and one with his son Kalman Dean-Richards – A Box of Porn – subsequently appeared. A new story collection – Money & Blood – was recently published by Culture Matters, and a collection of poems – It's A Mad World But Funny – by Outside Left.

Charlie Hill is a writer from Birmingham, who left school at 16 to work in the Bull Ring fish market. He then spent decades in-and-out of minimum-waged work & years with no fixed abode or precariously housed. He started writing on buses & in the pub & his first novel was published in 2010. He now works as a Fellow for the Royal Literary Fund. Charlie still lives in Birmingham, though he is happiest up a fell or near the sea.

Join us via Zoom:

Culture Matters Double-Header

Time: Sep 22, 2024 06:00 PM London

Join Zoom Meeting

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88917433521...

Meeting ID: 889 1743 3521

Passcode: 964023

Sapling & Wood
Sunday, 08 September 2024 09:57

Sapling & Wood

Published in Books

Red in tooth and claw: that is one way of characterising nature, but by no means the only way. Dog eat dog: that is one way of characterising the culture of our conflicted species, but again not the only way.

The poems in Sapling & Wood explore aspects of nature and culture from the standpoint of the poet’s own experience, aided by relatives and friends, and by other authors, notably William Blake and Walt Whitman.

Illustrations from a variety of sources, including friends’ artwork, enliven the text, and a prose commentary by the poet preambles each of the four sections into which the book is divided, namely “Kith”, “Kin”, “Enmities & Reconciling”, and “Word Over All”.

Here is a sample poem from the collection:

Another Proverb of Hell

After William Blake; for Murdo Richie

David B 

The experience of defeat is bitter.
Too often borne, it can make us quite forget
what sweet is; conversely, it can educate.
It can be a school for victory.

Marx knew this.
Down the long battlegrounds
and graveyards of our forebears’ history,
he saw the People felled each time we rose,
our status reaffirmed as soon as we contested it.
Back we went to being slave or serf
or proletarian; but each time we learned,
and sometimes made some lesser gain,
some lesser good than gaining power.

Never must we forget it:
both gains and goal are our sweet heritage,
equally with the gall that is defeat.

For Marx, student of ancient history,
Antaeus stood as the best example
of this ancient truth: Antaeus,
that Titan wrestler, no sooner downed
than springing up, renewed,
like a Green Man, with fresh vigour
and keen cunning, ready for ever
to fight back.

David B 2 

 Green Man image by Tom Malone

Sapling & Wood, ISBN: 9781912710737, £14, is available here.

Left Cultures: A Lexicon of Stories Past and Present. 
Friday, 26 July 2024 14:23

Left Cultures: A Lexicon of Stories Past and Present. 

Published in Cultural Commentary
 
Left Cultures delves deep into the left's cultural past to discuss gems of storytelling within film, literature, music, art, people, place and much much more. Cultures which have influenced and inspired an eclectic bunch of comrades to continue in this tradition by creating new cultural endeavors on the left today. Colliding together the past and preset to celebrate the power and rich diversity of storytelling on the left, each annual edition has a set of 50-plus personal stories and 50-plus bespoke illustrations. 
 

You can buy Left Cultures from their online shop at www.leftcultures.com. Above is the cover of Left Cultures 2; below, we reprint a sample story from that edition, together with its accompanying image. The story is by Shaun Dey, the image is by Gary Embury.

shaun Dey double page spread image res

It all started with an obsession at an early age with Marvel comics. I found to my delight that I could actually copy my favourite characters, which got me into drawing and painting – although my dad made me drop Art at school, despite my teacher’s protestations. “You won’t get a job with art” he said … that was the end of me drawing for quite a while.

When I was 15, punk changed my life. Punk led me to John Heartfield and Dada, and the possibilities of montage – which then led me onto Picasso and the Cubists. Alongside that was the growing influence of film – Scorsese, John Waters and Roger Corman in particular (I loved the fact that Corman would knock out films in a couple of days, with The Wasp Woman only taking 24 hours from start of shooting to finishing the edit).

Not that I was doing anything with all this stuff yet. I ended up working for the local council and at the age of 23 became a mouthy trade union shop steward around the time of the Miners’ Strike, another life-changing event. I got involved in a number of unofficial strikes and political campaigns. Learning how to make a point in under three minutes at union meetings came in handy later in constructing an argument/narrative in a film and keeping it as brief as possible.

Just over 10 years later, my mum’s death made me look at where my own life was going and I started drawing again. Two months later, I was accepted onto an art foundation course just as it became clear I was being forced out of work due to my union activity. I ended up getting a Fine Art degree as the anticapitalist movement was taking off, and got involved in Indymedia – using new affordable digital camcorders to film your own struggles rather than allowing mainstream media to misrepresent them.

That led me to a long trip around Latin America, seeing how social movements used film and the influence of third cinema on the way video activists worked – and then another visit to Latin America in 2005 led to the formation of Reel News, particularly visiting the Brukman clothing factory workers who ran their factory under workers’ control after occupying it to try and save their jobs four years previously – and only occupied it because they didn’t have the bus fare home. We thought, if they can end up running a factory with nothing, surely we can start a regular newsreel of inspiring struggles with nothing!

Then, in a dispute of construction workers in 2011, I was asked to put videos out every week for the workers to send round to build further action. They eventually won – and I learnt how to do my job properly. Since then Reel News has been involved in a number of victories, and I have my dream job, spending all my time with inspiring people fighting back …

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