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.
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
Richard Penderyn outlines some of the current problems in the heritage industry, and some ways of introducing cultural democracy
Heritage and the historic environment in the UK is rich. It spans millennia and includes amazing sites, from Stonehenge to Caernarfon Castle and from Orkney to Osborne House. Such sites include human-made landscapes and gardens, and I am using the terms heritage and historic environment to also include the large collections of objects which are related to these sites through historic activity, and are exhibited in museums within these sites or kept in large museum stores.
These sites and objects are the material evidence that allows archaeologists and historians to validate historical events and articulate interpretations of past human life and activity. In recent years (but also in historic times) material evidence has been purposefully destroyed, often during war, in acts that have been almost universally condemned. An example was the destruction of the site of Palmyra and more recently the destruction of many sites in Gaza. Losing the material evidence means that we can only consider unsupported interpretations about the past and as such lose the capacity to debate and explore our history. This is why preserving material objects is important.
For the work of preservation and interpretation to take place, organised effort for managing and protecting cultural heritage is necessary. In the UK, this work is undertaken primarily by charitable membership organisations such as the National Trust and English Heritage. These are non-profit organisations whose main responsibility is to protect cultural heritage and make it available to people now and in the future.
Many national museums which are responsible for large and significant collections also function under charity law. While membership support for them is in some cases available, in general entrance for permanent exhibitions is free, while other access has to be paid for.
A communist approach to culture
In Britain's Road to Socialism (BRS), the Communist Party of Britain has laid the foundations of the role of culture in society, and in consultation with cultural workers it has also more recently published a short booklet called Class and Culture, available to download from the party’s website. The main points articulated in the BRS document are:
1) Capitalist ownership undermines the potential of art and culture to contribute to the liberation of the working class, as it leads to its commercialisation and a focus on profit, irrespective of any social need both in terms of individual creative expression and in appreciation and celebration of cultural experiences
2) That art and culture has a central role to play in challenging the values, notions and thought processes of capitalism, through a sustained cultural struggle against it.
3) The state has an important part to play in the promoting, supporting and regulating cultural activities in order to initiate and extend working-class participation in art and culture as well as establish more social ownership and democratic control of cultural experiences, so that culture is made by and for the many, not the few.
In the UK we are taking for granted that cultural heritage organisations should be charitable under a membership framework which is basically paid access to heritage. Using the approach laid out in BRS, I am exploring here what the membership framework is, some of the problems that it generates, and how alternative models could function.
Finding other income sources
Some of these heritage organisations receive funding from the government, but increasingly in the recent years this funding has been reduced, and in many cases the government has withdrawn funding altogether while allowing heritage organisations to raise funds from outside any government budgets. The inevitable consequence for a heritage organisation not having secure funding is to shift its focus from heritage protection and access, to securing income.
As such new departments are formed to deliver fundraising programmes and product and business marketing strategies. Shops and cafes take priority, and sometimes become as important as the cultural attractions themselves. Typical examples are a) prime-location gallery spaces in museums being replaced by cafes and b) shops and infrastructure prioritisation for commercial activities in historical sites as opposed to activities for protecting and accessing heritage.
This not only diverts attention from the core function of heritage organisations which is to maintain and study the material evidence of our history, but it also increases the proportion of employees who are not related to that core function, as they are busy with additional logistical and managerial tasks to run the business / income making side of the organisation.
In many cases, projects to study and offer access to sites and collections are stopped because the expected “return on investment” in monetary terms is not adequate; i.e. the expected income from visitors is not large enough to justify the “investment”.
Some will say that a nice cafe and shop is an additional attraction to a site, thus increasing access to heritage for people, however in the next section I will argue why this is not the case.
Lack of funding also applies pressure to heritage organisations to engage in opportunistic activities which are connected to income generation. This has often meant receiving funding from organisations whose ethics are questionable, and monetising heritage by “discreetly” advertising corporations and big capital.
Journalists are quick to criticise decision-making in large heritage organisations in relation to funding activities and sponsorship from “unethical capital” partners, but they rarely touch upon the real issues which are: a) that the government does not provide enough funding and therefore it is inevitable that heritage organisations will engage in such activities and b) that capital is never ethical and therefore any sponsorship by “big money” is by definition problematic.
One example of sponsorship which has led to intense discussion and criticism is the money received by the British Museum from BP which is obviously linked to the climate change crisis. Another is the money received by many heritage organisations, including the National Portrait Gallery and the Tate from the Sackler family which is linked to the opioid epidemic.
If funding was guaranteed from the government, then the only focus for these organisations would be heritage, its study and access for people within a secure and long-term framework of planning.
The income from membership is of course significant and makes these organisations sustainable to some extent, but it means that only people who can afford a membership have access to heritage. I discuss this problem next.
Culture and class - visitors
Heritage organisations in the UK can be considered as bourgeois playgrounds. They are places visited by the better-off, who are economically powerful enough to donate generously towards maintaining the ideological narrative of the ruling class. In that sense, Capital "owns" the heritage industry. In many cases historic houses and collections are still owned by members of the ruling-class and their descendants, but they are managed by heritage organisations on their behalf because their up-keeping has become too expensive. In that sense Capital literally owns heritage and allows access to it. In both cases, access to heritage is to a large degree controlled by Capital.
The membership fee creates an immediate barrier to heritage for the people with limited finances. Therefore, again by definition, the membership-led charity is a construct of exclusion for the working class.
Many heritage organisations are showcases of colonialism, slavery and exploitation. They demonstrate a history of collecting activities by rich families. The starting point of each visit to a historic property or site is celebrating the money that made or bought the property and its gardens. The aesthetics and the language are distant to working-class visitors. As such, the environment is uncomfortable and often offensive for people who are struggling financially. When I struggle with the weekly grocery shopping, it angers me if I visit places celebrating extreme wealth and exploitation (even if I do not have to pay entrance fee, let alone when I do).
However, that is not the whole story. As the BRS document and the booklet Class and Culture make clear, culture can be an instrument of ideological oppression but also can be an instrument of liberation.
Heritage organisations, through staff members who are making a real difference with their work, have made huge efforts to express alternative narratives, celebrate the achievements of workers and truly engage with the working class. They have led critical interpretation of colonial history and flagged the deep problems of capitalist exploitation. They have engaged with working-class communities in a regular and honest way. However, such cases of focus on the working class are still rare exceptions and the result of time-consuming research which requires significant funding.
One would cynically argue that the drive to diversify audiences by including stories of working-class people is led by a target-driven institutional culture in order to build better engagement profiles for future funding applications. However, it is true that many employees in these organisations do really care about their audiences, want to engage with communities and to make a difference to their well-being.
Due to the persistence and creativity of staff members in various heritage organisations a number of excellent initiatives are in place where access (including transport) to heritage sites is offered for free. In some ways this is a positive action, but it also emphasises the inequality and the uncomfortable setup of charity.
And then we return to the issue of the cafes and shops: a day out for financially struggling families would certainly mean inability to afford a decent meal from the cafes of historic properties or sites. Does it really add to the attraction? I know well that it does not. It is a way of establishing an additional barrier between the rich and the poor, which is why I argue that the existence of the cafe and shop in their current money-making format is problematic.
Culture and class - workers
The employees working in heritage organisations often have rare combinations of skills including dexterity and knowledge of manual techniques, and also academic research and study. Many of them hold research degrees. If we consider these skills in comparison to the skills of employees in other fields, heritage workers are paid far less than what they should be, which is why there have been disputes in several heritage organisations including the Science Museum, the National Museums in Liverpool and the National Museum Wales.
The low salaries of employees working in heritage organisations have significant consequences:
1) Employees who cannot afford to work in heritage: they receive such low salaries that financial independence is impossible, let alone supporting dependants. They often rely on family to continue working or have partners with better-paid jobs who support them. The same applies to volunteering posts, where it is broadly expected to work for free for a period of time (typically several years) before one can be considered for a paid post. Considering the greater proportion of female workers in memory organisations, this also fuels gender (sex) inequality, and leads to workers seeking employment elsewhere because they simply cannot afford to work in the heritage sector.
2) Employees who have income from other sources and do not depend on their salary: Typically they come from affluent families with little understanding or experience of the working class. This means that these employees are difficult to be motivated in a class struggle sense to improve conditions of work, including salaries. It also means that any effort of interpreting historical evidence with a focus on the working class are the result of academic research, as opposed to own experience and as such it becomes distant. In this case a low salary leads to the job being transformed into a hobby based on cultural entitlement as opposed to a focus on access.
Culture and class – senior management
The framework of the charitable organisation also requires a complex governance structure. This typically includes a board engaged on a voluntary basis and a paid chief executive alongside a senior management team. While in the past such organisations where typically ran by people with a background in heritage, the fundraising focus means that the board and the senior management is required to have expertise in managing commercial activities.
In general, board members and senior post-holders of heritage charities care about heritage and want to make a difference. But they fail to recognise the following problems:
1) Their voluntary contributions and/or their paid work includes an element of self-importance because it translates into isolated decision-making based solely on their views and beliefs. It is extremely rare to have decision-making processes that involves workers and volunteers. When a senior post is appointed, the organisation changes without the employees ever making any decisions. Policy and strategy comes from the top down and priorities are set based on somebody’s grand vision, as opposed to the interests or ideas of the employees who have the primary experience of working with heritage objects and visitors. Realising the grand vision is typically measured through quantitative metrics. Reaching targets means that board members and senior manager have another success story under their belt, on their way to knighthood. None of this serves the interests of the working class.
2) The salaries of senior posts for large charities are many times bigger than the salaries paid for junior posts. The argument is that higher salaries attract more capable leaders, and that the savings made by cutting a senior salary will not actually save significant amount of money in the wider scale of economics in the organisation. But it is ethically problematic that senior members of staff benefit financially from the work of lower-paid colleagues within a charitable framework where maximum use of membership income needs to be shown to be invested in historic, material evidence. In an ideal scenario, the gap between top and bottom paid posts in an organisation would be minimal. In the present situation, the senior manager should return a significant part of their high salary, as a donation to the charity.
Another world is possible
To sum up, heritage belongs to the people, and it is the people who should care for and benefit from it. The current system of charitable organisations based on membership income does not serve the people:
1) It generates significant ethical issues around access and funding and often diverts attention from the main objectives of protecting and studying heritage,
2) It excludes people from enjoying culture and learning from it,
3) It leads to unreasonably high executive salaries and low-paid employees, leading to minimal working-class representation and additional ethical concerns.
In order to develop a heritage landscape truly serving the interests of the people and fulfilling our duty of care for future generations, the following points should be considered as part of a wider government plan for cultural democracy:
1) Heritage should be managed and protected under a long-term plan of centrally funded and guided activity, based on local communities with the main focus on access for the working class, enjoyment and appreciation by the working class, and better terms and conditions for workers in the heritage industry.
2) Heritage must be freely accessible for everyone, and it should become an anchor of social engagement for communities. Heritage must be owned by the public and form a core asset in education, underpinning the critique of historical injustice and exploitation of people by capitalists and thus becoming the vehicle of realising the power of the working class.
3) The leadership of heritage organisations should be appointed by democratically elected committees of heritage workers and local stakeholders. The massive inequalities of pay in heritage organisations should be eliminated.
4) Apart from education and access, decision-making about the management of heritage must be based on scientific analysis and expert knowledge, and not with income generating criteria.
To quote from Britain’s Road to Socialism: “The role of art and culture as a liberating form that can stimulate as well as stifle human development has to be fully appreciated. It is an important medium through which the values, notions, prejudices and thought processes that serve the interests of capitalism must be challenged.”
Soil and Soul was first published in 2001 and it was a thoroughly well-received book. In his Foreword to it, George Monbiot described it as ‘a ground-breaking book.’ The plaudits that McIntosh was given were indeed wholly justified and it seems that Monbiot was the most perceptive of all McIntosh’s commentators:
It (Soil and Soul) is a first step towards the decolonisation of the soul: the essential imaginative process we have to undergo if we are to save the world from the political and environmental catastrophes that threaten it.
There is clear recognition here that there is political responsibility for all the chaos in our world today. Monbiot goes further and suggests that there is a need ‘to develop daring and imaginative means to tackling the powers that have deprived us of ourselves.’ We could add that ‘these powers’ have been engaged in ‘depriving us of ourselves’ for several centuries now. And because ‘these powers’ have not been sufficiently challenged in all this time these powers have become emboldened with ever greater rapaciousness, which has resulted in ever greater deprivation at the expense of ourselves.
Monbiot recognises that McIntosh’s book is ‘one of the most striking challenges to corporate power in British history ’and he further recognises that McIntosh has in fact developed ‘a radical politics of place.’
While this assessment is accurate, Monbiot fails to address in greater detail what those political powers are that are responsible for depriving us of ourselves. This failure by Monbiot mirrors the failure of McIntosh himself, in his otherwise terrific book. Both writers seem unable or unwilling to use the word ‘capitalism’. Yet, the subtitle of Soil and Soul does give a clear hint of what the book is furtively all about – People versus Corporate Power.
It is rather odd in a book of nearly 300 pages that capitalism is mentioned less than a handful of times. Yet, the book itself is a tour de force account of activism against corporate power that also proved successful. Indeed, the book is a celebration of that success.
The radical politics of place
The book is written in two parts. The first part is called Indigenous Childhood; Colonial World and allows the writer to look back on his idyllic childhood growing up on the island of Lewis in the Western Isles of Scotland. The second part is called The French Revolution on Eigg and the Gravel-pit of Europe.
The first part concerns ‘the radical politics of place’ that Monbiot referred to, where McIntosh and others managed to clear out the lairds (owners) of the island of Eigg and prevent a super-quarry from decimating a part of Harris.
McIntosh’s account of both his childhood and his knowledge of how colonial powers changed the relationship the indigenous people had with their environment is deeply insightful. What is particularly interesting is his unearthing of Celtic Christianity and its relationship to the natural world and to the rhythms of the people. It possessed a poetry that grounded the people with their environment, with their communities and their place in the world.
That, of course, changed with the coming of Catholicism and Roman centralisation. Later this changed again from Catholicism to Calvinism. Change, as we know, is constant but McIntosh seems to analyse such changes as somehow phenomenological. The sustainable lifestyles associated with the Hebrides gave way – just like everywhere else – to what McIntosh calls ‘Capital -intensive production methods’ that had ‘usurped ecology and human community. The ecosystem of place had started to unravel.’
While McIntosh uses the term ‘capital-intensive’, and also talks of a ‘culture change’, he uses language in a similar vein to Monbiot who talks of ‘the powers.’ McIntosh later in the book talks of ‘the Domination System’ but these terms seem to deliberately attempt to obfuscate the onward march of what threatens the world and that is, and has been, plain old- fashioned and constantly re-fashioned capitalism.
Why the fear to use the word? Is it because the language of the Left may scare some people away? Is it that a new language of ecological and environmental activism must somehow separate itself from the language used traditionally on the Left? Whatever the answers to these questions, the fact is that capitalism will continue to ravage the land, the sea and people everywhere in order to make profit.
This is, after all, the raison d'etre of the system. The social and environmental horrors of this world did not suddenly appear like rainfall, they were created by the powers of capitalism to make money. Culture change does not suddenly happen like snowfall, it is engineered by the powers of capitalism. Ecological damage? Tough. Human communities ravaged? Again, tough.
Yet McIntosh does talk about alienation and how the dissociation between people and place can set in. He refers to the radical humanism of Erich Fromm and his work To Have or To Be? (1976). The title and the question mark at the end of it opened up a discussion about the alienation that comes with consumerism. ‘Being’ for Fromm has a more spiritual and creative sphere whereas the pursuit of ‘having’ can never bring lasting happiness and will always separate the haves from the have-nots. Greed, envy and aggression must give way to sharing, to shared experience which is more genuinely productive and far less wasteful. McIntosh praises this book – and rightly so – since it seems to accord with his mission as a ‘spiritual activist.’
McIntosh uses the word ‘activism’, a word familiar on the Left but he separates himself from those who may see their activism in more secular ways by saying that his activism is distinctively spiritual. Yet the activism of those who took part in Black Lives Matter protests, those who campaign against war and the arms trade, those who challenge poverty and inequality, those who march for Palestine, those campaigning against low pay, job losses, privatisation, women seeking an end to misogyny, people of colour seeking an end to racism, people maintaining that no human being is illegal, people active against climate chaos and those who seek redress in a myriad of ways against a system that only craves profit before people – all these activists are spiritual too. Their response to what they all see as wrong comes from a moral awareness, an interior understanding of what is unjust, unfair and unacceptable. This is something all communists, socialists, environmentalists and others have in common – it is a moral revulsion at what the powers, the domination system, the constant culture change of capitalism is doing to us all and to our world.
This is the source of alienation. It is created out of the competitiveness for greater profits. Marx refined Hegel’s concept of what he called ‘the rabble’ to what Marx called ‘the proletariat.’ Writing in The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844) Marx talks about alienated labour. The worker who labours to produce commodities for the market has no relationship to what he or she produces. He or she is merely a wage slave who requires their wage to subsist. This is as true today as it was in the 1840s. This is but one aspect of alienated labour because the labourer will always be external to what he or she produces. It is made for someone else’s profit and someone else’s possession. Political economy, for Marx:
…hides the alienation in the essence of labour by not considering the immediate relationship between the worker and production. Moreover, Labour produces works of wonder for the rich, but nakedness for the worker. It produces palaces, but only hovels for the worker; it produces beauty, but cripples the worker; it replaces labour by machines but throws a part of the workers back to a barbaric labour and turns the other part into machines. It produces culture, but also imbecility and cretinism for the worker.
Capitalism must simply have more to make more money. Both nature and human beings are exploited for this end. Alienation as a concept came to be explored in literature, art and in psychoanalysis. The Frankfurt School of thinkers of which Fromm was a member, as McIntosh tells us, took an intellectual leap after the publication of Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts in 1932 in Moscow – which McIntosh does not tell us. Fromm’s classic To Have or To Be? seems a fitting work for McIntosh to argue his ‘spiritual activism’ case but in other works by Fromm there is a clear challenge to modern capitalism, particularly in his book The Sane Society (1955).
This text received equal praise and condemnation on its publication – the condemnation came as a result of its truth, which many did not wish to hear. The Frankfurt School, it should be remembered, sought to fuse their understanding of Freud with their analysis of Marx. Another important member of this group of thinkers was Herbert Marcuse. In one of his best-known works, Eros and Civilisation (1955), he clearly has a play on the title of his work with the title of Freud’s Civilisation and its Discontents (1929). What Marcuse shares with Fromm is an understanding that modern civilisation has a demand for our sublimation, our conformity. And the need to continually progress our productivity increases our own domination – a word used by McIntosh in Soil and Soul.
The pathology of capitalism
Marcuse and Fromm both agree on the need to redefine what is meant by progress and account for the violence we see all around us through the failure of our economic and political system to make use of our capacity for love and reason. This failure results in the development of the reverse where the forces at play in our economic and political system seek to control life totally or destroy it.
This is exactly what we are seeing today in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, Haiti and elsewhere and the root cause of all this mayhem is the need to compete and control markets, resources and people. And when war breaks out there are vast profits to be made from selling arms. This is the pathology of capitalism. McIntosh seems to understand this instinctively, but without any reference to marx, Marxist thinkers or to capitalism itself as the culprit in its own chaos.
His book recalls two tremendous campaigns that were both successful. The first one concerned getting rid of the laird of Eigg, Keith Schellenberg. McIntosh played a crucial role in this and he must be duly commended. Schellenberg was a privately educated Englishman with German ancestry who made his money in business. McIntosh and others assembled a broad spectrum of people to challenge his right to rule. There were plenty of meetings, publicity campaigns, fundraising, newspaper articles, and media interviews.
While McIntosh maintains all this activism was spiritual, many would see this as good old-fashioned class struggle. Certainly, that is exactly what Schellenberg thought, as he labelled the campaigners communists and called McIntosh a Marxist. Strange as it may seem, one could have a tinge of sympathy for Schellenberg since as the laird of Eigg and a member of the ruling class he had been told since birth that those who challenge your right to rule are communists. We see this in the United States as Donald Trump ludicrously calls Kamala Harris a communist and labels her ‘Comrade Kamala’.
Eigg eventually gained its freedom through a community buyout scheme introduced by the Holyrood parliament. It was a wonderful achievement and victory for the people of Eigg and McIntosh played an important part in this. The various people who came together formed what those on the Left would call a broad democratic alliance. McIntosh eschews such language, yet it is undeniable that without a broad democratic alliance there could not have been victory.
A similarly broad democratic alliance of forces managed to prevent a super-quarry from destroying a mountain and the way of life on Harris. Capitalist expansionism will go to isolated communities like Harris, underneath the sea or into space in search of resources and profits. There is nothing new in this. Destruction of a mountain with all the necessary logistics and infrastructure required to do this – as well as noise and dust pollution – would have had a devastating impact on Harris. This would have led to alienation of the human community from its environment on a grand scale. McIntosh played a pivotal role in campaigning against the super-quarry.
One great idea he had was to bring over from Canada the Mi’Kmaq warrior chief Stone Eagle to aid the campaign. He seemed to fit the required media attention his presence would bring, by having had his native lands once exploited and despoiled. The recruitment of Stone Eagle to the campaign was inspired. He gave his blessings to the mountain, to the land and to the people of Harris whose ancestors were once cleared from their land and sailed to places like Canada. His presence was considerable. It was a warrior from the Cree tribe in the nineteenth century who famously said:
Only when the last tree has died and the last river has been poisoned and the last fish has been caught will we realise that we cannot eat money.
McIntosh does not use this quote, but it shows a powerful understanding of the deranged irrationality that is inherent in capitalism. It is doubtful if the Cree warrior had read Marx – yet he sums up exactly what capitalism is about.
The community that came together to prevent the super-quarry won a marvellous victory against corporate power. What McIntosh stressed throughout his book is the importance of community, of people coming together. This solidaristic approach is exactly what capitalism loathes, peddling the constant refrain of individualism.
One aspect that is crucially important today is the ongoing development with Hi-Tech and the advance of AI. When McIntosh published Soil and Soul in 2001 there was clearly huge advances being made technologically. Everyone was online and mobile phones were upgrading themselves each year. In 1995 the world’s first online dating site was launched in the form of Match.com. A few years after McIntosh’s book would come Facebook (2004), YouTube (2005), Twitter (2006) and Instagram (2010). And, of course, there is so much else besides. Foucault could see long before all this happened that a paradigm shift had occurred whereby the traditional mode of production had now given way to the mode of information. This is clearly where we are today and Big Data is buying and selling all this information.
Yet twenty years before Foucault’s death in 1984 it was Marcuse in One Dimensional Man (1964) who could clearly see at his time how ‘Technology serves to initiate new, more effective, and more pleasant forms of social control and social cohesion.’ Those were prophetic words indeed for that is where we are today.
The feudal lords of the digital
Two recent books analyse the current malaise even deeper. Byung-Chul Han in Capitalism and the Death Drive (2019) suggests we are now living in a digital panopticon. He tells us ‘structurally this society does not differ from the feudalism of the Middle Ages.’ Han then goes on to affirm:
The feudal lords of the digital, like Facebook, give us some land and say: ‘Cultivate it. You can have it for free.’ And we cultivate it exhaustively, this land. At the end of it all, the feudal lords return for the harvest. This is an exploitation of communication. We communicate with each other, and we feel free when we do so. The feudal lords extract capital from the communication. And the Secret Services monitor them. This system is extremely efficient. There are no protests against it because we live in a system that exploits freedom.
The information we willingly give on our phones, tablets and computers is stored and sold. Data is huge business and with it all comes widespread surveillance. Today’s largely online workforces are all constantly monitored, given targets within a culture that is performance -driven. Han suggests that this culture is effectively a form of self-exploitation. It leads to burnout and depression. This is contemporary capitalism, and this is our alienated condition today.
Han’s book argues that capitalism is not merely destructive ecologically but is directly responsible for all the social catastrophes around us and for our mental collapse. Conjure up Edvard Munch’s The Scream of 1893 and see how accurate a depiction this painting is for all alienated workers and individuals struggling to cope with their mental health in an uncaring world. Brutal competition, he claims, ends in destruction. And the engineered compulsion in today’s workplace to perform produces an emotional coldness and general indifference not only toward each other but to ourselves. This is the latest manifestation of alienated labour.
Yanis Varoufakis argues that Technofeudalism (2023) has in certain respects killed capitalism, not by any advent to socialism but by a regress to feudalism. Again, the information we now freely give is effectively the consumer providing free labour. This too is a form of self-exploitation. Each time we order commodities online, book holidays, order theatre tickets we provide free labour that is stored in what Varoufakis calls ‘cloud capital.’ And every time we order from Amazon we are effectively paying Jeff Bezos rent. Rent was what defined feudalism and the sheer amount of business that is now done online by consumers is in the breathtaking order of hundreds of billions of pounds.
The owners of today’s big tech companies are essentially the new feudal overlords. And, as we know, they can also sow misinformation and create dangerous political ruptures. It is widely commented upon that many of these overlords based in California’s Silicon Valley not only support Trump but can visualise a Hi-Tech takeover where politicians are no longer required. This is not only the ultimate wet dream for these overlords, it is the completion of the alienation project that Hegel and Marx detected centuries ago.
Clearly, Alastair McIntosh could not have read these texts in 2001 because they were not yet written but the technological developments were clearly leading in that direction. Interestingly, many of our thinkers like Slavoy Žižek and Alain Badiou have gone back to Hegel, since alienation for him was not the complete negative that it was for Marx. It was communism for Marx that would finally end alienation. But according to Hegel alienation can be productive, even necessary, for the development of what he calls the True. When alienation is encountered it is obviously traumatic, but this simultaneously can lead to Freedom. Being alienated means coming to terms with an inner negativity that defines our subjectivity and this process can bring us to our own common humanity.
The people of Eigg, Harris and Silicon Valley all share a common humanity with everyone else on the planet. For McIntosh the secret is the coming together and the fight for community:
If humankind is to have any hope of changing the world, we must constantly work to strengthen community. We need, first, to make community with the soil, to learn how to revere the Earth.
Yes to that! But McIntosh then says:
We need to make community of human society. We need to learn empathy and respect for one another so that people get the love they need…. It means understanding and overcoming the psychology of racism and exclusion, sharing wealth and skills… shifting from competition to co-operation in politics and economics.
This sounds remarkably similar to what Marx was advocating. Community and communism come from the same Latin root communitas meaning public spirit. McIntosh is free to define himself as a spiritual activist and he has undoubtedly shown terrific campaigning skills. Yet what he did was in a sense the actions of a communist who sought to stimulate and develop a greater public spirit, and an increase in the common good. The struggles he was a part of successfully created a much greater public spirit, and have contributed hugely to the common good.
Many would welcome his advice today since communitarianism and communism are both sought to liberate mankind from grotesque levels of alienation designed to sublimate our creative capacities to win a better and fairer world for all. Soil and Soul can certainly be a good companion on that journey.
In the Foreword to this publication we are asked to reflect on how Left-leaning culture has helped to inspire us. What was the journey we made? What is our story? What were the formative influences in raising our political consciousness? How did we become the people we are today who enjoy and benefit from reading Culture Matters? ‘What wonderful ideas have been embedded into our daily lives from a left-wing perspective that we just don’t question?’ is what we are asked to consider.
A few of us may have been fortunate enough to be raised in socialist households and gained progressive values at the knees of our enlightened parents. Is there a term for this experience, for example 'cradle socialists'? Michael Rosen, whose parents were members of the Communist Party, in his detailed memoir, So They Called You Pisher!, describes having to change secondary school aged 14 after the Tory de-regulation of rents meant that his family couldn’t afford to remain where they were living.
At the new school he describes trying to find other pupils who were ‘blues enthusiasts, Aldermaston marchers, surrealists, jazz types, walkers, campers, ex-Communists, anti-apartheid protestors’. He does eventually find one or two. Indeed, in the 52 stories or accounts presented here there are only a very small number, perhaps 3 or 4 who were inculcated with socialist, progressive political views from an early age. The overwhelming majority of the stories here are from folk who have had to find their own road to progressive socialism in the face of hostility or indifference, and therefore identifying the cultural signposts they discovered on their way, the cultural ‘gems’ as described in Left Cultures, is invaluable.
What is fascinating to discover from Left Cultures is that for the overwhelming majority of the storytellers, the turning points in their journey come about through what are seemingly trivial or mundane objects and experiences, culture in the broad, everyday sense. Left Cultures asks: set against the ‘dullard right-wing mainstream media’ what has the Left to offer culturally to counter the hegemony? A main aim of Left Cultures appears to be identifying, sharing and recording these experiences in order to ‘bring back gems of Left Culture that have been marginalised back into public view’.
Agreed that is useful to know or remind ourselves how far infant steps can lead. After reading each story, it’s informative to check in the brief biographical sketches at the end of the book to find the present situation of the contributors. Most, if not all, seem highly successful or effective in their chosen cultural or academic field.
Roughly categorising the 52 various stories shows that an initial interest in music was the key for around 11; 8 found inspiration from visual art of some description, 6 by a particular film: 7 by literature and political writers; 3 by alternative newspapers or zines; 2 by participating at a young age in demos; others refer to community education, football, seeing the London Riots, or Clarion House. The picture is perhaps not as clear as this simple categorisation might suggest, but most do refer to a single starting point on their journey.
For example, to provide more detail, the music category includes: the lyrics to Everything Counts by Depeche Mode; punk music, especially the Jesus and Mary Gang; illegal homemade cassette swopping, ‘a culture of sharing’; Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Brenda Fassie, Hugh Masekela; Manic Street Preachers; Rage Against the Machine, Stiff Little Fingers, Crass Records; and The Jam.
Visual art: comics (one person found their way to John Heartfield from their enjoyment of Marvel comics); banners, murals, stickers, badges; Gerard Richter; and George Gabriel, a Cypriot painter.
Films: Ken Loach, Godard, Patrick Keillers, and the film ‘Z’ are pinpointed as revelatory.
Literature: Raymond Carver, Caradoc Evans, Jane Eyre (the power of solidarity shown by Helen Burns): the writings of Marcus Garvey, the study Family and Kinship in East London.
Of course it’s necessary to read the trail in each individual case to make sense of how the above random set of artifacts and experiences raised or reinforced their political and cultural consciousness.
It is not entirely clear on what basis this second round of story tellers, (or indeed the first cohort) was selected and invited to contribute. It is claimed in the Foreword to this second edition that ‘the themes discussed in the stories (in Left Culture 1) were ‘inspiring, influential, thrilling, educational and passionate in many cases off the wall’, and basically they wanted to add to this lexicon, to increase the breadth and depth of examples.
One of the stories in this edition is literally ‘off the wall’ as it describes chipped woodchip wallpaper stimulating artistic imagination, later ruined as a potential for others after the Tory Right to Buy council housing took root, and alternative interior decoration schemes were then allowed. Rachael Miles certainly tells an unusual story!
The lively and imaginative artworks enrich the themes of this book and are probably going to makes a strong immediate impact with most readers. The artists responsible for accompanying each story have responded imaginatively and their illustrations are far more than just an addition, they are a vital part of the offer.
The main purpose of this enterprise would seem to be to stimulate debate and further questions. How far will Left Cultures pursue this task of collecting and recording individuals narrating the background to the values and beliefs they presently hold? To what extent is this ‘lexicon of what the Left has to offer us culturally both past and present’ of value, rather than an interesting, nostalgic indulgence? Can it help us understand effective ways of bringing the present younger generation to want a progressive, socialist society? This publication should be a good basis for trying to answer this question, but wouldn’t detailed surveys involving hundreds or thousands of respondents? To which the reply could be that this format, with its lavish illustrations and highly individual stories, some quite lengthy, is likely to have a much greater impact than a survey report. More fun, more enjoyable!
To sum up, Left Cultures 2 is a lively read where you can feel you are meeting interesting people, hear their back-story and gain a sense of solidarity in these beleaguered times. You will likely read it all the way through quite quickly, then pick up individual stories again, and follow up or check out the cultural creators a story mentions.
It is surprising to find out exactly what has triggered, or fired up individuals to begin to identify a progressive way forward. And it is striking that there are no mentions of any religion, which surely can be a positive force, promoting an interest and desire for social justice and (for example) action to address the climate crisis.
Their stories also tell us what happens next, how they have been enabled to continue to grow and develop, finding other like-minded individuals or groups for support. It does encourage us to think more carefully about how we engage with other people, perhaps what we have to offer groups and individuals with whom we are involved. Do we appreciate what aspect of left culture inspired us, and could stimulate or support young people today?
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.
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 …
Nigel Falange MP. He’s ditched the Gieves and Hawkes country squire Master of the Hunt outfit because that race has been won. The “man of the people” who’d far sooner drool spittle into a beggar’s open wound than share a pint with “the people” in a Clacton pub. His Revanchist Party goon coterie running to heel. All now taking their seats –their shiny once- in -a lifetime Ede and Ravenscroft trousers already gone slightly sweat- stale from farting arses fueled on proper ale and varicocele tightness at the crotch. Falange says they’re the new kids on the block. Falange as heartthrob Donny, side-swapping scab Lee as acting-hard Marky Mark, hanging tough with his wooden stick and shouting about Islamists and Travellers instead of slant-eyed gooks. The rest just faceless, lip-syncing, glad to be on stage.
Falange has sold Clacton his story that all its problems are caused by non-essential immigration. The boarded-up shops, the 5.1% unemployment. Falange can play a crowd as beautifully as Elly Ney played piano. Soon enough, the crowd of Londoners who retired to the sea air are muttering about woke ideology and immigrants stealing British jobs and those fuckin Muslims and their rejection of British values. Apparently, Sade lived in Clacton as a kid, but it’s these new kids on the block who know how to siren-sing the sweetest taboo. The cafes are all empty. The slot machines have no one to pay out to. Falange, Flashman at Dulwich and flash man on the trading floor, has played his shell game well. Clacton’s population is 95% white. “Where’s the ball? Where’s the ball? “He’ll double your money if you can find the ball.
Black sun rising over Salo-on-Sea and there’s all sorts of old shit rising up in the Colne as it crawls its way to Brightlingsea. Falange and his new party money men organizing charabancs full of pound shop Powellites to prowl the seafronts performatively gesturing and pointing, on the lookout for drowning children to mock, railing about gunboats and protecting borders, while coastal erosion drags Clacton into the sea. And Frangopoulos’s Haw Haws cheer on the Revanchist MPs as they work to turn a class-in-itself into a class against-itself. Falange wonders though how much time he has to waste breathing in the stale fish and chips and doughnut air before he can slime back to Mayfair pubs and a twilight wander through Shepherds Market. And somewhere a light aircraft engineer thinks aloud “We only have to be lucky once, you will have to be lucky always.”
Brett: Hi. What’s your name, where do you live, and when, and why, did you first become interested in writing?
Bram: Hi, Brett, how you doing? My name is Bram. I live in Glasgow in Scotland. I'm originally from Edinburgh, that's where I grew up. I've been writing since probably a very young age. I was the 2015 Scottish Slam Champion and I've kept on performing and writing poetry for the stage and for the page since then.
Brett: And what specifically inspired you to begin writing this particular book, Bram?
Bram: I've always been interested in theories around dystopias and utopias. I've always been fascinated by stories about the apocalypse and the pre- and post-apocalypse films like Mad Max. I'm also a huge fan of Mark Fisher and even just his prose style, his approach to writing and structuring essays, that was very influential on me as a journalist. He was paraphrasing both Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek when he said ‘it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism’, and that leads into an analysis of some of the aesthetics of apocalypse fiction, and why those might not be the most useful frame through which to understand our dystopian present.
Brett: Due to my own Scottish roots I’ve always been drawn to the country’s great literary tradition of producing narratives that can be seen to be antagonistic, pessimistic, and even apocalyptic. As a writer who is based in Glasgow, is this a creative heritage which you feel consciously a part of and, if so, why? Is it the weather? The landscape? The economy? The politics? The history?
Bram: That's a good question. Why is Scottish fiction and storytelling apocalyptic? Oh, that that's a really good question. I didn't grow up in Glasgow actually. I mean, I was born in England to Scottish parents. My mum's from the Orkney Islands, my dad grew up in Aberdeen, but his family's originally part Dutch, hence the strange name. Scotland’s got its own very distinct social codes, it's got its very own distinct norms and traditions, and it's got its own incredibly rich history, and it's a rich and bloody history as well. You know, there's a strong argument that you could consider Scotland a colonized people although, you know, obviously that's been the case for so long now that that's very normalised. And there is a strong tradition of class consciousness and political consciousness in Scottish writing.
I think definitely, you know, Irvine Welsh's work is directly political, commenting on, you know, inequality, poverty, prejudice against people of working-class backgrounds or people with drug problems, you know? Ian Banks was a master of crafting science fiction novels which kind of dealt with the human condition, and where humanity might be headed among the stars, and deep philosophical issues about our, you know, in-built tendencies for violence, or even for empathy. So, yeah, I think it lends itself with its tendency to be rainy and gloomy, to maybe some dystopian speculation, you know, ruminating while the storm rages outside.
Brett: In your book you contend that evidence shows that ‘we do not truly care about other people — or rather, people we have ‘othered’. This could be countered however with the observation that millions upon millions of people actually don’t care for themselves either, physically, psychologically, emotionally and/or domestically.
Bram: You know, I think that often if you find yourself in an oppressive low, if you find yourself in a cycle of addiction, if you find yourself unable to escape a cycle of abuse, a lot of that has to do with, or is exacerbated by, a sense of shame, a sense of low self-worth, and a sense of not being able to picture a better world for oneself. And I think a lot of that shame comes from that same process of ‘othering’. You think , ‘Well, I'm not like a normal person. I'm not like a good person. I can't get out of here.’ I mean, I'm just drawing on my own experiences there, my limited experiences with addiction, my kind of extensive experience of suffering from bipolar disorder, going through treatment for other mental health problems.
So, I don't know, I mean I'm somebody who has a regime of self-care, self-analysis, you know? I go to therapy, I exercise and meditate. Those are all things that I have had to learn to do out of necessity to care for myself. Otherwise I would have been, I don't know, dead in jail. All I would say is that for me my recovery has massively involved learning to love structure. I have a very structured life, I structure it for myself, I try and keep busy. I exercise, and I try and eat as healthy as possible – don't always manage it!
Brett: You quote the anthropologist, Jason Hickel: ‘[I]t seems all too clear: our economic system is incompatible with life on this planet.’ However, you also reject the speculative communist solutions put forward by the Swedish author, Andreas Malm. That is, you write: 'By the time we have regulated and campaigned our way to Malm’s functional communist society, everyone will be dead'. What should we do then?
Bram: I think the urgency of the apocalyptic messaging that we've had on climate change and other things for so many years has been quite intense. I think the problem with some of that messaging for me at least has, in fact, been its emphasis that we can do something you know from cycling schemes to, you know, carbon credits, carbon offsetting schemes like that. All of these things seem to me to be very much like distractions that capitalism has come up with to kind of, you know, convince us that something's being done when, in actual fact, the problem isn't being addressed. And I think really if you look at the big polluters those are nearly all corporations and, you know, even if all of the nations of the world reduce the output from people's homes, the output from industry, it's the output from agriculture that really contributes to climate change.
So really, on a fundamental level, there is nothing that we can do to fix climate change, I believe at least, without transforming or getting rid of capitalism in quite a radical way. We've known about the problems of particularly climate collapse, you know, and threats to ecosystems, problems with extracting fossil fuels; we've known about that since the 1960s, that was the time for concerted political action and, in an actual fact, like if humanity had taken collective action at that point we could probably have mitigated a lot of the effects of it. And that really was the ambition of my book: not to propose a different system or, like Andreas Malm does, not to propose necessarily any different solutions, but rather just to draw attention to the ways in which we're not talking about the problems in a very useful way.
Brett: Of course, we can condemn the self-centred, capitalist lifestyle choices of ordinary citizens on the ground, even when they delude themselves into thinking that they’re helping to reverse climate change by recycling regularly and buying fair trade tea bags. However, shouldn’t it be our leaders in politics, business, industry, science etc. who should be publicly and permanently held to account for their myopic, self-serving decision-making, ideally with real-world legal consequences which their peers will genuinely heed and fear?
Bram: You know, no matter how virtuous you are in one area, there's probably something else that you're doing that's harming the planet and, you know, you can you can try and live like an absolute saint but, nonetheless, you still have a carbon footprint. There's a thing called the Five Earths Argument. I mean, basically, what that says is that if everybody in the developing world was able to access, you know, the kind of consumer goods, fast food and all that stuff that we have available to us in the West, we would need the resources of five earths to feed everybody.
As to your point about should it be leaders in politics, business, industry, science who should be publicly held to account, I definitely do think that they should be. I think the likelihood of them being held to account is probably pretty low. You only have to look at things like the investigation into the Post Office Scandal to see how slippery those six figure salary senior executives can be when you put them on the spot. Things like public inquiries can become a ritual: they're meant to reassure us that something is being done, heads are going to roll. Meanwhile, in the background, the next scandal is probably brewing under the same kind of secretive management cultures. Our rights as people in this country to protest are under threat, rights to free speech and freedom of association are under threat. If you don't have power and you want to see change, you have to take power in whatever form that you can.
‘The Darkest Timeline: Living in a World with No Future’ is published on June 24th 2024, and is available to pre-order now on the Revol Press website.
In the closing Winter Lecture for the London Review of Books, Terry Eagleton discusses the origin and uses of culture. Half-way through the piece, Fran Lock and Alan Morrison provide a complementary chorus of new poems. We are deeply grateful to the LRB and 'the dreadful Terry Eagleton', as King Charles called him, for their kind permissions to republish his lecture.
In Jude the Obscure, Jude Fawley finds himself living in Beersheba, the area of Oxford we know as Jericho, home at the time to a community of craftsmen and artisans who maintained the fabric of the university. It doesn’t take Jude long to realise that he and his fellow craftsmen are, so to speak, the material base without which the intellectual superstructure of the colleges couldn’t exist: without their work, as he says, ‘the hard readers could not read, nor the high thinkers live.’
He comes to recognise, in a word, that the origin of culture is labour. This is true etymologically as well. One of the original meanings of the word culture is the tending of natural growth, which is to say agriculture, and a cognate word, coulter, means the blade of a plough. The kinship between culture and agriculture was brought home to me some years ago when I was driving with the dean of arts of a state university in the US past farms blooming with luxuriant crops. ‘Might get a couple of professorships out of that,’ the dean remarked.
This is not the way culture generally likes to see itself. Like the Oedipal child, it tends to disavow its lowly parentage and fantasise that it sprang from its own loins, self-generating and self-fashioning. Thought, for idealist philosophers, is self-dependent. You can’t nip behind it to something more fundamental, since that itself would have to be captured in a thought. Geist goes all the way down.
There’s an irony here, since few things bind art so closely to its material context as its claim to stand free of that context. This is because the work of art as autonomous and self-determining, an idea born sometime in the late 18th century, is the model of a version of the human subject that has been rapidly gaining ground in actual life. Men and women are now seen as authors of themselves, as a result of the deepening influence of liberalism and possessive individualism and – to perpetrate a dreadful cliché – the rise of the middle classes. (If you open a history book at random, it will say three things about the period you light on: it was essentially an age of transition; it was a period of rapid change; and the middle classes went on rising. That’s the reason God put the middle classes on earth: to rise like the sun, but, unlike the sun, without ever setting.)
You can’t have culture in the sense of galleries and museums and publishing houses unless society has evolved to the point where it can produce an economic surplus. Only then can some people be released from the business of keeping the tribe alive in order to constitute a caste of priests, bards, DJs, hermeneuticists, bassoon players, LRB interns, gaffers on film sets and the like. In fact, you might define culture as a surplus over strict need. We need to eat, but we don’t need to eat at the Ivy. We need clothes in cold climates, but they don’t have to be designed by Stella McCartney. The problem with this definition is that a capacity for surplus is built into the human animal. For both good and ill, we’re continually in excess of ourselves. Culture is reckoned into our nature. King Lear is much concerned with this ambiguity.
Wanted: Culture, to legitimate the social order......
Since the material production that gives birth to culture is racked by conflict, bits of this culture tend to be used from time to time to legitimate the social order that strives to contain or resolve the conflict, and this is known as ideology. Not all culture is ideological at any given time, but any part of it, however abstract or high-minded, can serve this function in specific circumstances. At the same time, however, culture can muster vigorous resistance to the dominant powers.
Banksy musters some vigorous resistance to the dominant powers
This resistance is more likely to occur, curiously enough, once art becomes just another commodity in the marketplace and the artist just another petty commodity producer. Before that, in traditional or pre-modern society, culture generally serves as an instrument of political and religious sovereignty, which means among other things that there are steady jobs for cultural workers as court poets, genealogists, licensed fools, painters and architects patronised by the landed gentry, composers in the pay of princes and so on. In those situations you also know more or less whom you are writing or painting for, whereas in the marketplace your audience becomes anonymous.
The world no longer owes the cultural worker a living. Ironically, however, it’s the integration of art into the market that gives it a degree of freedom. Once it’s primarily a commodity, culture becomes autonomous. Deprived of its traditional features, it may curve back on itself, taking itself as its own raison d’être in the manner of some modernist art; it is also free to serve as critique on a sizeable scale for the first time. The miseries of commodification are also an enthralling moment of emancipation. History, as Marx reminds us, progresses by its bad side. In the very process of being pushed to the margin, the artist begins to claim visionary, prophetic, bohemian or subversive status – partly because those on the edges can indeed sometimes see further than those in the middle, but also to compensate for a loss of centrality. A movement called Romanticism is born.
....and so capitalism gives culture a job to do
At roughly the same time, so is industrial capitalism, which with admirable convenience gives culture a job to do just as it’s in danger of being driven out by philistine mill-owners. There’s now a growing divide between the symbolic realm and the world of utility, a divide that runs all the way down the human body. Values and energies for which there isn’t much call in the workaday world of bodily labour are siphoned off into a sphere of their own, which consists of three major sectors: art, sexuality and religion. One of these endangered values is the creative imagination, which was invented in the late 18th century and is nowadays revered among artistic types, though organising genocide in Gaza requires quite a lot of it too.
The distance that opens up between the symbolic and the utilitarian, while threatening to rob culture of its social function, is also the operative distance you need for critique. Culture would expose the crippled, diminished condition of industrial-capitalist humanity through its full and free expression of human powers and capacities, a theme that runs from Schiller and Ruskin to Morris and Marcuse. Art or culture can issue a powerful rebuke to society not so much by virtue of what it says but because of the strange, pointless, intensely libidinal thing that it is. It’s one of the few remaining activities in an increasingly instrumentalised world that exists purely for its own sake, and the point of political change is to make this condition available to human beings as well. Where art was, there shall humanity be.
PCS workers issuing a powerful rebuke to society
The harmonious realisation of one’s powers as a delightful end in itself: if this is what the aesthetic comes to be about, it’s also the ethics of Romantic humanism, which includes the ethics of Karl Marx. The aesthetic becomes important when it isn’t simply about art. Marx’s thought concerns the material conditions that would make life for its own sake possible for whole societies, one such condition being the shortening of the working day. Marxism is about leisure, not labour. The only good reason for being a socialist, apart from annoying people you don’t like, is that you don’t like to work. For Oscar Wilde, who was closer in this respect to Marx than to Morris, communism was the condition in which we would lie around all day in various interesting postures of jouissance, dressed in loose crimson garments, reciting Homer to one another and sipping absinthe. And that was just the working day.
Half in love with the powers that repress us? Image by kennardphillips
There are problems with this vision, as there are with any ethics. Are all your powers to be realised? What about that obsessive desire to beat up Tony Blair? Or should one realise only those impulses that spring from the authentic core of the self? But by what criteria do we judge this? What if my self-realisation clashes with yours? And why should all-round expression beat devoting oneself to a single cause, like Alexei Navalny or Emma Raducanu? Do human capabilities really grow malevolent only by being alienated, lopsided or repressed? And what if we’re half in love with the powers that alienate and repress us, installed as they are inside the human subject rather than purely external to it?
Hegel and Marx have an answer of a kind to the problem of clashing self-fulfilments, which goes like this: realise only those capabilities which allow others to do the same. Marx’s name for this reciprocal self-realisation is ‘communism’. As the Communist Manifesto puts it, the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. When the fulfilment of one individual is the ground or condition of the fulfilment of another, and vice versa, we call this love.
And the hands that act on it...
by Fran Lock
their charnel austerity, logged in the body. a city repellent to memory, walk. this bleak referendum of razors, indifferent justice, law like a nail knocked into hunger. the law is a meat-hook with your name on it, kid. breathe. with the rhythm of syndrome, the dark particulate scraped from a lung. breathe. stertor, stridor, inspiratory stress. productive cough that closes the throat. their mouths are feudal thresholds. have alphabets, inscribed against empathy. say: this is the world, and what're you going to do about it? step out. step out of step. break that masochists pact, patterned into apathy: work-or-death and worked-to-death. the moment becomes the movement, the moment we decide to move. flip this tyranny of tyrian shekels; pathologies of profit, their sick vocations of control. love. as conspicuous sabotage, direct action, conductor of heat and dissonance. in a world we cannot occupy or exit, be the hand that lights the match, the arm that bears the torch.
Marxism is about political love. I mean love, of course, in its real sense – agape, caritas – not the sexual, erotic, romantic varieties by which late capitalist society is so mesmerised. We’re speaking of the kind of love that can be deeply disagreeable and isn’t necessarily to do with feeling, that is a social practice rather than a sentiment, and which is in danger of getting you killed.
Agape
by Alan Morrison
agape - agape - agape - love without possessiveness platonic love spiritual love political love love without possessions love unfettered by desire love without covetousness love without expectation hearts without property hearts freed from property love devout in poverty agape - agape - agape - love as common ownership unconditional love universal love communism of souls souls in common ownership hearts & souls in fellowship no hedges in heaven only untethered purple heathland lavender heather lavender ever & ever love as common good numinous communism eudemonia - welfare of all capitalism can never make us happy pits us against ourselves in pursuit of profit & empty property only love without covetousness love without possessiveness love for one & all universal unconditional can approach that utopian conception to be happy agape - agape - agape -
Wanted: Culture, to buy off anarchy
Early industrial capitalism had another mission for culture to accomplish. A new actor had just appeared on the political scene – the industrial working class – and was threatening to be obstreperous. Culture, in the sense of the refined and civilised, was needed to buy off the other half of Matthew Arnold’s title, anarchy. Unless liberal values were disseminated to the masses, the masses might end up sabotaging liberal culture. Religion had traditionally bred a sense of duty, deference, altruism and spiritual edification in the common people. But religious belief was now on the wane, as the industrial middle classes demythologised social existence through their secular activities and, ironically, ended up depleting what had been a precious ideological resource. Culture, then, had to take over from the churches, as artists transubstantiated the profane stuff of everyday life into eternal truth.
What else was happening around the time of Romanticism and the industrial revolution? The revolution in France. One might do worse than claim that this was what thrust culture to the fore in the modern age – but culture as a riposte to the revolution, as an antidote to political turbulence. Politics involves decision, calculation, practical rationality, and takes place in the present, whereas culture seems to inhabit a different dimension, where customs and pieties evolve for the most part spontaneously, unconsciously, with almost glacial slowness, and may therefore pose a challenge to the very notion of throwing up barricades.
The name for this contrast in Britain is Edmund Burke, who came from a nation, Ireland, where the sovereign power had failed to root itself in the affections of the people because it was a colonialist power. In Burke’s view, this rooting wasn’t happening in revolutionary France either, since the Jacobins and their successors didn’t understand that if the law is to be feared, it is also to be loved. What you need in Burke’s opinion is a law which, though male, will deck itself out in the alluring female garments of culture. Power must beguile and seduce if it isn’t to drive us into Oedipal revolt. The potentially terrifying sublimity of the masculine must be tempered by the beauty of the feminine; this aestheticising of power, Burke writes in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, is what the French revolutionaries calamitously failed to achieve. You mustn’t, to be sure, aestheticise away the masculinity of the law. The ugly bulge of its phallus must be visible from time to time through its diaphanous robes, so that citizens may be suitably cowed and intimidated when they need to be. But the law can’t work by terror alone, which is why it must become a cross-dresser.
Edmund Burke pontificating against the French Revolution
Burke believed that the cultural domain – the sphere of customs, habits, sentiments, prejudices and the like – was fundamental in a way that the politics to which he devoted a lifetime were not, and he was right to think so. There have been some suspect ways of elevating the cultural over the political, but Burke, who began his literary career as an aesthetician, neither despises politics from the Olympian standpoint of high culture, nor dissolves politics into cultural affairs. Instead, he recognises that culture in the anthropological sense is the place where power has to bed itself down if it is to be effective. If the political doesn’t find a home in the cultural, its sovereignty won’t take hold. You don’t have to detest the Jacobins or idealise Marie Antoinette to take the point.
Despite his aversion to Jacobinism, Burke ended up feeling some sympathy for the revolutionary United Irish movement, an extraordinary sentiment for a British Member of Parliament. The Irish playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, also an MP, was even more dedicated to the United Irish cause. He was, in fact, a secret fellow-traveller – a fact that, had it been widely known, might have wiped the smiles off the faces of his London audiences. The United Irishmen were Enlightenment anti-colonialists, not Romantic nationalists, but the rise of Romantic nationalism in the early 19th century once more brought culture to the centre of political life.
Nationalism was the most successful revolutionary movement of the modern age, toppling despots and dismantling empires; and culture in both its aesthetic and anthropological senses proved vital in this project. With revolutionary nationalism, culture in the sense of language, custom, folklore, history, tradition, religion, ethnicity and so on becomes something people will kill for. Or die for. Not many people are prepared to kill for Balzac or Bowie, but culture in this more specialised sense also plays a key role in nationalist politics. There are jobs for artists once more, as from Yeats and MacDiarmid to Sibelius and Senghor they become public figures and political activists. In fact, nationalism has been described as the most poetic form of politics. When the British shot some Irish nationalist rebels in 1916, a British army officer is said to have remarked: ‘We have done Ireland a service: we have rid it of some second-rate poets.’
Wanted: Culture, to rival religious faith
The nation itself resembles a work of art, being autonomous, unified, self-founding and self-originating. As this language might suggest, both art and the nation rank among the many surrogates for the Almighty that the modern age has come up with. Aesthetic culture mimics religion in its communal rites, priesthood of artists, search for transcendence and sense of the numinous. If it fails to replace religion, this is, among other things, because culture in the artistic sense involves too few people, while culture in the sense of a distinctive way of life involves too much conflict. No symbolic system in history has been able to rival religious faith, which forges a bond between the routine behaviour of billions of individuals and ultimate, imperishable truths. It’s the most enduring, deep-rooted, universal form of popular culture that history has ever witnessed, yet you won’t find it on a single cultural studies course from Sydney to San Diego.
For the liberal humanist heritage, culture mattered because it represented certain fundamental, universal values that might constitute a common ground between those who were otherwise divided. It was a ground on which we could converge simply by virtue of our shared humanity, and in this sense it was an enlightened notion; you didn’t have to be the son of a viscount to take part. Since our shared humanity was rather an abstract concept, however, something that brought it back to lived experience was needed, something you could see and touch and weigh in your hand: this was known as art or literature. If someone asked you what you lived by, you gave them not a religious sermon or a political pamphlet but a volume of Shakespeare.
The self-interest of this project, as with almost all appeals to unity, is obvious enough: culture, like the bourgeois state for Marx, represents an abstract community and equality which compensate for actual antagonisms and inequities. In the presence of the essential and universal, we are invited to suspend superficial distinctions of class, gender, ethnicity and the like. Even so, liberal humanism captured a truth, albeit in a self-serving form: what human beings have in common is in the end more important than their differences. It’s just that, politically speaking, the end is a long time coming.
Wanted: Culture, to make profits and fight wars for political demands
The vision of culture as common ground was challenged from the late 1960s by a series of developments. Students were entering higher education from backgrounds that made them disinclined to sign up to this consensus. The concept of culture began to lose its innocence. It had already been compromised by its association with racist ideology and imperialist anthropology in the 19th century, and contaminated by political strife in the context of revolutionary nationalism. From the end of the 19th century, culture became a highly lucrative industry, as cultural production was increasingly integrated into production in general, and the manufacture of mass fantasy became deeply profitable. This, we might note, isn’t yet postmodernism. Postmodernism happens not just with the arrival of mass culture but with the aestheticising of social existence, from design and advertising to branding, politics as spectacle, tattoos, purple hair and ridiculously large glasses. Culture, once the antithesis of material production, has now been folded into production.
Modernism, now a century behind us, was the last time culture offered itself as a full-blooded critique of society, a critique launched mainly from the radical right. If it does so no longer, neither does culture in the sense of a specific form of life. Most such life-forms today are out not to question the framework of modern civilisation but to be included within it. Inclusion, however, isn’t a good in itself, any more than diversity is. One thinks fondly of Samuel Goldwyn’s cry: ‘Include me out!’
All of this is sometimes known as cultural politics, and has given rise in our time to the so-called culture wars. For Schiller and Arnold, the phrase ‘culture wars’ would have been an oxymoron like, say, ‘business ethics’ (Beckett is said to have remarked that he had a strong weakness for an oxymoron). Culture in their eyes was the solution to strife, not an example of it. Now, culture is no longer a way of transcending the political but the language in which certain key political demands are framed and fought out. From being a spiritual solution, it has become part of the problem. And we have shifted in the process from culture to cultures.
Both types of culture are currently under threat from different kinds of levelling. Thinking about aesthetic culture is increasingly shaped by the commodity form, which elides all distinctions and equalises all values. In some postmodern circles, this is celebrated as anti-elitist. But distinctions of value are a routine part of life, if not between Dryden and Pope then between Morrissey and Liam Gallagher. In this respect, anti-elitists who like to see themselves as close to common life are deluded. At the same time, cultures in the sense of distinctive forms of life are levelled by advanced capitalism, as every hairdressing salon and Korean restaurant on the planet comes to look like every other, despite the prattle about difference and diversity. In an era when the culture industry’s power is at its most formidable, culture in both of its main senses is being pitched into crisis.
Culture in our time has become nothing less than a full-blooded ideology, generally known as culturalism. Along with biologism, economism, moralism, historicism and the like, it is one of the major intellectual reductionisms of the day. On this theory, culture goes all the way down. The nature of humanity is culture. Behind this doctrine lurks an aversion to nature (one of culture’s traditional antitheses) as obdurate, inflexible, brutely given and resistant to change. At precisely the point where nature is capricious, unpredictable and alarmingly fast-moving, culturalism insists on regarding it as inert and immobile.
It’s not that culture is our nature, but that it is of our nature. It’s both possible and necessary because of the kinds of body we have. Necessary, because there’s a gap in our nature that culture in the sense of physical care must move into quickly if we are to survive as infants. Possible, because our bodies, unlike those of snails and spiders, are able to extend themselves outward by the power of language or conceptual thought, as well as by the way we are constructed to labour on the world. This prosthesis to our bodies is known as civilisation. The only problem, as Greek tragedy was aware, is that we can extend ourselves too far, lose contact with our sensuous, instinctual being, overreach ourselves and bring ourselves to nothing. But that’s another story.
This video of the lecture is worth watching not only for the Q and A session, but for Terry's closing rendition in song of Raglan Road
Terry Eagleton is a British literary theorist, critic, and public intellectual. He is currently Distinguished Professor of English Literature at Lancaster University. He has published over forty books, anmd hundreds of articles and reviews, and is the most influential contemporary cultural theorist.
Fran Lock is an editor, essayist, the author of numerous chapbooks and thirteen poetry collections, most recently Hyena! (Poetry Bus Press), which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2023. She is a Commissioning Editor at Culture Matters, and she edits the Soul Food column for Communist Review.
Alan Morrison is a Sussex-based poet. His collections include A Tapestry of Absent Sitters (2009), Keir Hardie Street (2010; shortlisted for the 2011 Tillie Olsen Award, Working-Class Studies Association, USA), Captive Dragons (2011), Blaze a Vanishing (2013), Shadows Waltz Haltingly (2015), Tan Raptures (2017), Shabbigentile (2019), Gum Arabic (2020), Anxious Corporals (2021), Green Hauntings (2022), Wolves Come Grovelling (2023) and Rag Argonauts (2024).He was joint winner of the 2018 Bread & Roses Poetry Award, and was highly commended in the inaugural Shelley Memorial Poetry Competition 2022. He edits The Recusant and Militant Thistles, and is book designer for Culture Matters.
The glossy brochure reads like a description of a story rather than a story itself. Like the lost art of political pamphleteering, it makes promises it needn’t keep and promises it needn’t promise. Labour will do this and that for the benefit of the arts, culture and creative industries; it will put money here, support those there, scaffold this group, secure that role, lift up them, open opportunity and, not only that, it will be green, sustainable and inclusive. Aren’t the arts brilliant! Isn’t culture great! Look how much money they all make!
And what can be said of the hipster Islington interns who produced this neoliberalist napkin during their smashed-avocado and decaf latte tea-break? A lugubrious legion of lickspittles paying lip service to political puffery, bringing to mind a quote from Jorge Luis Borges: ‘They seek neither truth nor likelihood; they seek astonishment. They think metaphysics is a branch of the literature of fantasy.’
Any commitment to the arts is to be welcomed. We live in an age of philistines and boors. The arts, culture and creativity inside and outside of our education system has been downgraded and devalued by the Tories. Creative subjects have been squeezed out of the curriculum by ministers, and their lackeys have fired phoney shots from their cottage industry ‘culture war’ which, in truth, is a proxy for an actual class war. Cultural Studies text books may soon have blank pages where the history of Marxism used to be written.
Jeremy Corbyn’s 2019 A Charter for the Arts was only 7 pages long. ‘Creating Growth’ is 19 pages long. The word ‘socialist’ appears three times in Corbyn’s document and the word ‘economy’ appears twice. In Starmer’s magnum opus ‘economy’ features ad nauseam, alongside ‘business’, with ‘socialist’ not featuring once.
The foreword for Starmer’s ‘Creative Growth’ is written by Thangam Debbonaire. Corbyn’s ‘Charter for the Arts’ opens with ‘The Socialist Vision of Jennie Lee.’ Debbonaire was educated at two private schools, Bradford Girls' Grammar School and Chetham's School of Music, and then she went off to Oxford. Jennie Lee was educated at the state school, Beath High, and was the daughter of a miner. Lee's maiden speech at Westminster was an attack on the budget of Winston Churchill, accusing him of ‘corruption and incompetence.'
Debbonaire resigned her role of shadow Arts and Culture Minister due to her lack of confidence in Jeremy Corbyn. Lee was instrumental in founding the Open University and principle of open access to higher education for all. Lee’s husband, Nye Bevan, was the founder of universal, free healthcare through the NHS. Debbonaire is a school governor, a trustee of the University of Bristol Students’ Union (UBU), member of the local traffic action group, and co-founder of the House of Commons string quartet ‘The Statutory Instruments’ who perform culture with class - social class.
In her foreword Debbonaire writes that ‘the UK has won the highest number of Nobel prizes for literature and the second highest number of acting Oscars this century.’ Really? Wasn’t V. S. Naipaul (2001) from Trinidad and Tobago, and Doris Lessing (2007) from Iran? Isn’t Kazuo Ishiguro (2017) from Japan, and Abdulrazak Gurnah (2021) from Tanzania? And wasn’t Harold Pinter (2005) fined for refusing national service as a conscientious objector?
Debbonaire also writes that ‘the creative industries as a whole, have enormous economic value to the UK,’ associating arts and culture with the grubbiness of ‘growth potential’ as if they are commodities whose only value is to further the nation’s GDP. It looks like she hasn’t done her homework: here are some quotes about Nobel prizewinners:
The scrutiny of suppressed histories, of oppression’s closed rooms, and the scepticism of division, the emotional force uncovering illusion, and the compassionate consideration of the refugee, just doesn’t seem to fit in with Labour’s economic understanding of the arts.
Private education rules culture, ok?
As for film award ceremonies, it was reported that, over the last 10 years, 40% of the recipients of the main prizes at the Oscars, Baftas and Mercury went to private school, whereas only about 6% of the population are privately educated. Of course, this is the type of elitism Labour claim they want to change and, indeed, Starmer’s would-be cabinet will almost certainly have the most state educated ministers in post-war history. You have to start somewhere.
In The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx outlines a picture of unabated continual commodification ‘when all that men have regarded as inalienable become objects of exchange . . . virtue, love, opinion, science, conscience, etc. — where all at last enter into commerce.’ This genealogy is notable for several reasons: aspects of life which were previously not commodified are now on a linear and seemingly irreversible production line. That is, there is a relentless colonisation of the life-world by commodity relations which leads to ‘universal venality’. This corruption of community bonds causes people to fetishize commodities and become alienated by them, oblivious to their exploitation.
The design of Labour’s brochure is quite nice, blocks of red and an easy-on-the eye font, with stock photos trying their hardest not to be stock photos. While the ambition for authenticity is admirable, the conclusion is clear and simple: this political party’s plan for the arts, culture and creative industries in the UK under Keir Starmer is but a plan for further commodification, privatisation and commerce.
There is too much reliance on a nationalist and instrumental approach to culture, for instance, as well as PFI-style funding solutions, i.e. there is too much emphasis on economic growth rather than culture’s intrinsic value. This means subordinating cultural content to a means of legitimising exploitation and oppression through diversion, spectacle, irrelevance and inaccessibility.
There is no reference to tackling class inequalities, for example, by making discrimination on the basis of class unlawful, just like race, sex and disability, as well as introducing a legal duty on public bodies to make tackling class and income inequality a priority.
As a consequence, here are a few of our alternatives proposals for ‘creating culture’ rather than ‘creating commodities’:
Education
Working-class history, its artistic and sporting achievements, interests and perspectives, to feature fairly, equally and continually in all arts and humanities curricula and tutorial systems from primary education level upwards, including at private schools which benefit from a charitable status
Culture Industries
Fair, equal, continual and transparent inclusion, participation and representation of working-class individuals, their creative works and sporting records with regards to the membership, administration, executive decision-making and funding processes of publicly-funded cultural institutions and their related bodies. Thus, addressing the social, financial, geographical and historical barriers which prevent people from diverse and deprived backgrounds from accessing culture as both practitioners and consumers. Democratise (for example) Arts Council England, BBC, Booker Prize Foundation, British Film Institute, British Institute of Professional Photography, Creative UK, English National Ballet, Football Association, Lawn Tennis Association, National Museum Directors' Council, National Lottery, Opera UK, Premier League Football, Royal Academy of Arts, Royal Academy of Dance, Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, Royal Drawing School, Royal Institute of British Architects, Royal Musical Association, Royal Society of Literature, Royal Society of Sculptors, Rugby Football League, UK Interactive Entertainment, UK Music, UK Sport, Wimbledon, etc.
Events
Publicly-funded festivals of working-class art, creativity and sporting endeavour to take place in different UK cities each year with affordable ticket prices. Documentary coverage and screenings to be marketed and streamed on BBC television, radio and iPlayer. For example:
Working-Class Culture: Film, Literature, Sports, Photography etc.
Publicly-funded art galleries, theatres, cinemas etc. to exclusively and actively promote and exhibit contemporary working-class artefacts, events, performances, festivals, productions etc. for at least three months of the year.
Working-class artists in residence with their independent exhibitions to held throughout the year, with financial support, in unlisted or vacant council-owned buildings
Working-class poetry, short story and/or novel extract readings to take place on BBC radio and BBC iPlayer weekly
Initiatives for cultural democracy
Government-led regulation and reformation of the ownership and control of the UK’s mainstream media: newspapers and their websites, magazines and their websites, social media platforms, television and radio etc. In turn, public taxes should be invested in community-based and grassroots media production which directly addresses the concerns, issues and tastes of local people
Government-led regulation and reformation of the monopoly of UK football clubs under foreign-ownership which, in turn, alienate and exclude local and regional fans and communities with overpriced ticket and shirt sales etc.
Increased accessibility to musical instruments, drawing, painting and ceramic materials etc. for those on low-incomes and/or from deprived backgrounds. These could be provided via the re-introduction and revitalisation of libraries as publicly-funded culture hubs in local communities
Publicly-funded digital hubs to be established in economically disadvantaged areas to provide access to technology, training, and mentorship for aspiring creatives
Provision of affordable workspaces and resources for working-class creatives, including production facilities, sporting facilities etc., particularly in deprived areas
Development of initiatives and services which promote and achieve mental health and well-being amongst working-class talent within the creative and digital industries
Integrated education programs in digital and creative organisations to address and eradicate conscious and unconscious social class bullying, intimidation, humiliation and/or bias in the workplace, in administrative materials, in promotional materials and during work-related social gatherings
Expansion of apprenticeship programs in the creative and digital industries with a particular emphasis on recruiting and supporting individuals from low-income working-class backgrounds
Establish a program where local councils provide financial support to crowdfunded video games that reach a certain number of backers from their community. Councils can offer grants or low-interest loans to successful crowdfunding campaigns, helping independent creators cover development costs and marketing expenses. In exchange, developers could be required to include elements of local culture, history, or landmarks in their games, promoting tourism and community pride.
Financial Assistance
Grants to be made available to working-class individuals and organisations to help to develop digital and creative projects in their community which focus of social issues, diversity, inclusion, motivation and aspiration
Twelve month subsidised work-placement schemes (including travel expenses) at regional companies or organisations for low-income arts and sports graduates. For example: film/media, creative writing, music, performance, football, tennis, snooker etc.
Tax incentives for creative and digital companies in order for them to demonstrate a commitment to hiring and retaining working-class talent, as well as investing in initiatives that benefit economically disadvantaged communities in their region
Low-income and unemployed artists with independently verifiable creative portfolios to be financially-supported by the DWP and DCMS so they are able to continue with their pursuits and endeavours
Financial assistance from the DCMS for low-income musical acts wishing to tour post-Brexit Europe and beyond, as well as sporting individuals who need to access training facilities abroad.
