For a Left Cultural Politics
Much of our contemporary culture works to deny the existence of class and inequality, at the same time as its structures of nepotism and unpaid internships keep working-class voices marginalized. We need to wrestle back control at the point of cultural production.
“The Flower Vendor (Girl with Lilies)” by Diego Rivera
The deceitful rhetoric of classlessness has permeated the two-party political systems in both the United States and United Kingdom since the days of Reagan and Thatcher. It was their masterstroke: to protect their neoliberal ideology in a wall of “common sense” rhetoric and so-called meritocracy, thereby obfuscating the causes of poverty and inequality and placing the burden of failure for structural and societal injustices squarely with the individual.
But in recent years, both the United States and the United Kingom have seen a reawakening of class-consciousness, one that seeks to explain these glaring injustices, which allow wealth created by the majority to be extracted by a very small elite.
Class Returns
That reawakening has coincided with the fallout from the 2008 financial crisis, when taxpayers were made to foot the bill for a corporate bailout in which the working class lost out most of all. In my book, Steal as much as you can, I detail the complex relationship that has developed ever since, between working-class communities and the industries of culture that shape our horizons. Despite being narrated as an avenue for greater working-class participation and equality, the mainstream media — in its hiring practices and commissioning principles — remained stubbornly skewed towards the more affluent end of society. One result of that has been a failure to address or represent the growing concerns for working-class communities at the sharp end of right-wing economic policy, and specifically, austerity.
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