The Working Class Culture Festival
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The Working Class Culture Festival [WCCF] aims to reunite the working class movement with progressive and contemporary culture, a link broken and exacerbated by the rise of post modernist education and rampant neoliberalism. With cuts and funding to cultural initiatives from both Labour and the Conservatives, a historic link, that was integral to both developing artists in the UK and the progressive political movements, was severed. The left, since the 90s, has been on the retreat and only in the last 5 to 10 years have we been able to go on the offensive, this work has largely left behind cultural work. The WCCF aims to re-engage this. With a broad showing of artists and mediums we aim to educate and show materialist art, countering the neoliberal funded rise of post modernism in art. The working class are often shunned by the art world, being treated as mere user/consumer with no expression of self. It is for this reason that the broad church of the left needs to reengage with fine art in a fundamentally fresh way. The generation of cultural capital needs to come, not from existing art institutions, but from the working class movement itself. The kernel of our aim is to expose the truth of cultural power, it is vital we look at deeds, not words. Many institutions and universities will subvert the working class with lectures and slogans, but all agitational culture must be reorganised to ensure it learns from specific experience of our present existence, particularly after recent shifts in mainstream politics. We must make sure we are clear, who our real enemy is, the reactionaries, the western chauvinists in the ivory towers, who bring to bear the full might of capitalism against our culture.
A place for dialectics in art, not post modernism, a place for anger, for love. We are a broad church, united by a common goal. Hyperindividualism can be fought with, and only with, showing academia and institutional education for what it is, self-serving.
The growth and expansion of our cultural worth will be built by, and will build, new movements. The focus will no longer be the individual under capitalism, nor a mirror held up to our movements and conditions, but a hammer to smash capitalist propaganda machines, ready to be replaced with the working class’ vision. Whatever that may be. While the inaugural festival is South East London, at the Piehouse Coop, we aim to grow far beyond London, allowing the working class from the whole of the UK to engage with art, not just those in the capital. Our workshops, ‘Thinking Hands’, also aim to do this by providing free art education to children in local areas, from traditional crafts like sculpture, drawing and painting, to contemporary arts like zine making and graphic design. Educating and providing a service to working class families. Our analysis of class is vital to our work but intersectionality plays an equally important role, female, BAME, LGBTQ+ and disabled workers have long been discriminated against and fetishised, being subjects never owners of cultural capital. Having specific spaces in place to grow agency and creativity, from disability focused life drawing to lectures by BAME activists. We have outlined a huge campaign, and while we are small now, our goals are mighty.
Remember,
‘our demands most moderate are,
We only want the earth.’
While the event has tiered pricing we want all interested in the event to attend so please email wccf@un-orr.com if you would like a free ticket.
