‘From Printing to Streaming, Cultural Production Under Capitalism’

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Cuba’s one time Minister of Culture Armando Hart once said ‘To confuse art and politics is a mistake; to separate art and politics is another mistake.’ You can also say, to confuse art and economics is a mistake; to separate art and economics is another mistake – a paradox that I explore in my new book, ‘From Printing to Streaming, Cultural Production Under Capitalism’.

www.plutobooks.com/9780745340968/from-printing-to-streaming

Culture, in the sense of aesthetic creation, has always been central to the good life under capitalism, which has engendered a magnificent apparatus for its production and consumption across the globe, but this apparatus is so riddled with contradictions basically economic in origin that it negates its own potential. Marx thought capitalism was hostile to the arts, because it cannot fully control aesthetic labour and the process of creativity the way it controls the alienated labour of the factory worker, but he never gave the question any prominence because in his own time and by his own estimation, it was marginal to the accumulation of capital. But that was before the birth of the mass media. With the invention of new technologies of mechanical reproduction came the emergence of the culture industry as a distinct sector of capital, infiltrated by the techniques of advertising and heavily interlinked with other sectors like electronics, which provided both the means of production and the means of consumption.

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Kiss Channel 4 Goodbye?

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The prospective privatisation of Channel Four induces in me a state of cognitive dissonance. Part of me is appalled at this wanton repetition of what the patrician Harold Macmillan way back called ‘selling off the family silver’, and another part of me answers back, but what is there worth saving? I remember, you see, what Channel Four was really like when it started, before it adopted a populist agenda in the 1990s, and I’m speaking not just as a viewer but as one of the numerous independent filmmakers who was commissioned by them. Over its first decade, C4 was truly novel, adopting unconventional and groundbreaking programme formats and bringing a whole new generation into production, in fulfilment of its public service remit, to be innovative, to inspire change, to nurture talent and to offer a platform for alternative views.  Read more

After Beforetimes: a New Year reflection

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The word that sums up what has happened: beforetimes. Beforetimes, life, we supposed, was normal. Our lives moved forward according to the rhythm of the seasons, the way stations of birthdays and anniversaries, and the passage of Shakespeare’s seven ages of man. This was normality, and we recognised it was imperfect. In beforetimes there was injustice, but many of us knew where we stood: underdogs in a struggle against the self-interest of capital. We were aware our weakness. We were hampered by the deficits of actually existing democracy after the collapse of communism, after the war on terrorism, after the near-death experience of capitalism. We didn’t agree about how to go about improving things or even exactly what a fair society ought to look like, but some progress was made through fighting to enlarge what society understood to be normal, insisting on everyone’s right to participate whatever their sexuality, ethnicity or religion, and protesting the injustice of the economic inequalities which exacerbated these differences. The first thing to impinge on this sense of normality was the growing awareness of climate change, which made the question of a radical change in direction a matter of increasing urgency, but still we believed that another world is possible. That was beforetimes. Read more

Going Viral: A Coronavirus Diary

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Coronavirus brings globalisation into focus by forcing attention onto the different layers of interconnectedness in our twenty-first century world. As the virus spreads around the planet in waves, the pandemic impinges on different social and economic sectors each according to its own rhythm, throwing them out of joint one by one. The synchronisation which normally keeps the whole system running harmoniously breaks down. It is precisely at the moment the system breaks down that we realise how interconnected it is. What is normally hidden because, as we used to say, it functions like clockwork, is exposed. We discover that while our clocks are nowadays calibrated atomically, public time is not at all uniform but constituted by the superposition of many different tempos.

Free Associations 78, 2020

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Chanan 334-1265-1-PB

 

Cultural environmentalism in Leicester

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A small but fascinating interdisciplinary workshop at the University of Leicester on March 6th, on the theme of environmental justice in Latin America, convened by Paula Serafini, proved a congenial occasion for a screening of ‘Cuba: Living Between Hurricanes’. The event, which focussed on cultural production in response to environmental injustice, was  slightly depleted by two or three non-arrivals due to understandable reluctance to travel from abroad; two of them gave their contributions via internet – is this how things will shape up in the foreseeable future?

What made it so engaging was the variety of presentations about a diverse range of cultural manifestations – street theatre, performance, music, textiles, video – and of phenomena susceptible to cultural intervention – conservation in the Colombian paramo, potato cultivation in the Peruvian Andes, conflict over pulp mills on the Uruguay river, shareholder meetings in London. Read more

The Plan that came from the bottom up

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Here’s a timely new film, The Plan – or in full, ‘The Plan that came from the bottom up’ – about how to envision an alternative to the present disastrous disposition of a world headed for self-destruction by one means or another. There’s nothing airy-fairy about what it proposes. The plan in question dates back to the 1970s and was drawn up by the Lucas Aerospace Combine Shop Stewards Committee. What they proposed (with the encouragement of Tony Benn, Harold Wilson’s industry minister) was the conversion of production for war (about half of Lucas Aerospace’s output consisted in military contracts) to the manufacture of socially useful products ranging from wind turbines to kidney dialysis machines.

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Questions about ‘Money Puzzles

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Some questions I’ve been asked about ‘Money Puzzles’, ahead of the first UK screenings in Crewe, London and Liverpool over the next few days.

lucyWhat are the origins of ‘Money Puzzles’ and how do they fit in with your background as a documentarist?

‘Money Puzzles’ is a sequel to ‘Secret City’ (2012), which is about the City of London—the square mile that has been described as ‘a state within a state’. ‘Secret City’ was made in the wake of the Occupy movement, which concentrated attention on the City as the Vatican of financial capitalism. ‘Money Puzzles’ reverses the perspective and looks outward, beyond the citadel of finance, towards the global system of financial capital of which the City is one of the principal agents.

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‘Money Puzzles’ almost ready

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Almost ready. About to get delivery of  the first DVD preview copies of ‘Money Puzzles’, and then I’m off to Lisbon, where its first screening takes place at Doclisboa on 29th October.

[vimeo]http://www.vimeo.com/174092191[/vimeo]

Over the eighteen months I’ve been making ‘Money Puzzles’, a good deal has happened in the world and not much has changed, and where it has, matters are getting worse. Read more

Referendum Blues

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Like many other socialists, I have had strong doubts about whether the EU is capable of the reforms that would be needed to shake off the shackles of its disastrous neoliberal policies, especially after two visits to Greece last year to film episodes for our new documentary about money and debt, Money Puzzles. I could not imagine myself voting to leave, despite a number calls from the left to do so which I found pretty persuasive, partly because I refused to align my vote with the utterly disreputable politicians calling for exit, and partly because all my instincts, my sense of cultural identity, belong with a European imaginary. I have to say ‘imaginary’ because actually existing Europe is as far from its democratic ideals as actually existing socialism in Eastern Europe was from real communism. Read more

Neighbourhood Solidarity in Madrid

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As elections approach in Spain, the latest episode from our forthcoming documentary Money Puzzles.

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/146373683[/vimeo]

In Greece last July our camera witnessed the tangible forms of solidarity elicited by the extreme austerity imposed by the unrelenting finance ministers in Brussels. ‘Solidarity For All’ is the name of an association of more than 350 solidarity groups across the country helping to feed people, provide health care, and other kinds of services they can no longer afford and whose public provision has been severely cut by austerity measures. But this is not just a stopgap. In Mandra, on the outskirts of Athens, where we filmed a food distribution centre, a local organiser explained that they’ve developed relations with local producers that cut out the middleman, and this was the kernel of a different way of organising society. Something similar is true of the widespread networks of local solidarity groups across Spain, each concerned with particular issues like protection from eviction or running food banks, but activists are never far away from the idea of alternative forms of social organisation, according to different values where money no longer determines what ‘value’ means, and people escape the atomisation and social isolation, with its dire psychological effects, that capitalism in crisis imposes to an ever more intense degree.

One of the reasons for the Eurogroup’s intransigence was the fear that what started in Greece might spread elsewhere in Europe. Syriza seemed to offer the hope that it was possible to overcome the fractured state of the left to create a irresistible new political force. The result of the Referendum last July, when over 61% of voters said No to the bailout conditions, seemed to confirm it. If the effort immediately collapsed when Alexis Tsipras lost his nerve and capitulated to Europe (a moment we documented in Greece, Europe, Undemocracy), then the latest developments in Portugal (Portugal gets new leftwing PM after election winner only lasted 11 days) suggest this dream has not been killed off, even if it implies compromises. In Spain–where I went to film at the beginning of November–there are elections coming up on December 20, but here the left is still fractured, and electoral politics are complicated by the emergence of a populist right wing party, Ciudadanos, in response to the sudden rise of Podemos on the left, who also face a challenge from other left groupings like Izquierda Unida. The primary political issue, however, during my fortnight in Barcelona and Madrid, was Cataluña’s bid for independence, with its unresolvable political and economic conundrums, rather different from the issues in the Scottish case. The issue plays into the hands of the constitutionalist majority, and no-one I spoke to thought that the left could win the elections.

The elections come up obliquely in this short video, Neighbourhood Solidarity in Madrid, filmed in Puerta Del Angel, just across the river from the city centre, with the local branch of the RSP (Red de Solidaridad Popular, or Network of Popular Solidarity) covering the districts of Latina and Carabanchel. The group’s primary activity is a food bank, but they also support people–that’s to say, each other–in other ways, and there are volunteers who provide professional advice or give classes in maths or languages.

The RSP Latina Carabanchel exemplifies the strength of the movement against austerity known as 15M, from the date of the mass demonstrations of the indignados in cities across the country (15 May 2011). The movement has generated a wide set of local initiatives attacking the effects of austerity politics in parallel fields, loose federations of autonomous local groups under umbrella names that indicate their focus. Thanks to a small network of friends active in one or other of these groups, I was able to connect with people working on housing, food provision, and healthcare in Barcelona and Madrid. These sequences will be included in the completed film. My thanks especially to Ricard Mamblona in Barcelona, and Concha Mateos in Madrid, who were both extremely generous with their time and attention as production managers, and to the camera people they found to work with me, Oriol Bosch Castellet and Raquel Salillas.