As the recession deepens righteous anger grows about the systemic greed and unbridled power of the few at the top. Once again people are starting to make connections between their own vulnerability and the exploitative, unequal nature of the capitalist system. A sign of the times here is the launch of the No2EU, Yes to Democracy campaign which is fielding a platform of left candidates in the forthcoming European elections. Opposed to the Lisbon Treaty, with its charter for privatisation and subversion of workers’ rights, the campaign stands for a democratic Europe built on principles of social justice.

rather than opposing the capitalist system they saw the enemy as ‘universalism’

What is interesting about No2EU is the way it poses a challenge to the identity (and post-identity) politics which have become so significant in oppositional thinking for the last quarter century or more. For many radicals the neo-liberal impasse of Thatcherism encouraged a re-evaluation of what progressive politics should be about. Rather than opposing the capitalist system – which looked increasingly impregnable – they saw the enemy as ‘universalism’, of which there were left versions as well as right. Feminism provides the case in point. Launched in the 1960s and 70s, the ‘second wave’ of feminism demanded recognition for women as women, not as women who were adjunct members of the working class. The same was true of black power, and the gay, lesbian and bisexual movements. This new types of identity politics asserted the difference of political subjects against monolithic and exclusive definitions of what it is to be human.

Although these movements were still strongly aligned with the traditional left and the critique of capitalism in the 1970s, a decade later identity politics were becoming increasingly disconnected from socialism. By the late 1990s the new social movements, as they were now called, were strongly libertarian, pluralist and suspicious of any kind of unifying principle concerning what radical politics might be for. The anti-globalisation protests and the series of World Social Forums (WSF) which emerged from them in the 2000s show this very well. Indeed, the collapse of the WSF over the last few years suggests that the strong emphasis on identity, autonomy and plurality has been self-defeating. With no general goals, or programme for achieving them, the new social movements seem to have lost their way.

Still, the demands for recognition and autonomy which drove the new radical politics back in the 70s have not gone away. The challenge now must be to integrate them with the demands of the labour movement. That’s where No2EU, Yes to Democracy comes in. Simultaneously an attack on BNP far right nationalism and the pseudo-cosmopolitanism of the EU, the campaign calls for a Europe where workers’ rights are protected and public services are enhanced rather than cut back and privatised.

The recent strikes at the Lindsey oil refinery suggest that a crucial negotiation has to made here; between the principle of recognising others, in this context workers of other nationalities within the EU, and the need to defend pay and conditions which have been struggled for over many years. The right approach is surely not to say that one simply trumps the other, that the recognition of identity is more important than economic equality or vice versa. Rather it is to show how capitalism conveniently appeals to the recognition of difference (‘workers of whatever nationality have the right to work anywhere in Europe’) while exploiting difference as means of driving down wages across Europe in a race to the bottom. At Lindsey it was workers from impoverished southern Italy who were contracted for well below union negotiated rates.

All this suggests that reconciling difference and identity with demands for social justice is going to involve, above all, the exposure of pernicious ideology. But that’s nothing new. Perhaps two thirds of the struggle of radicals has always consisted in refuting lies and ‘telling truth to power’ as Edward Said once put it.

About the author

Jason Toynbee is Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at The Open University. His research interests are in creativity, copyright, and ethnicity - mainly through music - and his new book, Bob Marley: Herald of a Postcolonial World? is just out.

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When I did my degree in Communication Studies the bits I loved best were in an emerging academic field called cultural studies. This had a far wider definition of culture than just the mass media. In cultural studies, culture was considered as a whole way of life, or to put it in an even stronger form, everything was culture.

The so-called ‘cultural turn’ was driven partly by a theoretical development that was happening throughout the humanities and social sciences. Academics began to take seriously the idea that rather than the world simply existing and then being reflected in language, the world and its objects were produced through language – as well as visual systems like painting and photography. In this new conception, then, what we know stems from what we think, say and represent rather than from the nature of the world ‘out there’. Once this step is taken, the characteristics of the particular culture we inhabit become hugely important, shaping our world. In fact, there is no longer one world, but as many as there are different cultures.

Punk at a demonstration.
[image © copyright BBC]

These developments weren’t only theoretical. Cultural studies was driven too by a radical politics, a sense that huge areas of culture, especially the popular, were treated with contempt and excluded from serious consideration. During the 1970s, pioneering research at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies showed how working class youth – mods, rockers and punks – actively engaged in making meaning and alternative values. A decade later this approach had been extended to the teenage girls who read Jackie magazine, and women viewers of soap operas. Today, all manner of popular cultural activities are the object of study. It would be hard to think of anything that people get up to outside work that hasn’t been redeemed by cultural studies.

I’m not so sure I feel the same way about the field now though. Most of all I doubt the political claims that are still implicit in much cultural studies work. For one thing the cause of ‘reclaiming the popular’ seems to have been won. Popular culture is widely acknowledged, and cultural studies academics have even become media pundits. For another, the politics of popular culture itself now seem rather weak. The recession brings this home. For instance, the democratic implications of reality TV shows like Big Brother look pretty shaky in the light of economic meltdown. Can popular culture really be said to be liberating when you’re out of work and your house has been repossessed?

The return of the material that we’re witnessing has a further aspect I ought to mention. Claims for cultural relativism – the idea that cultures create their own worlds of meaning and value – appear much less certain in hard times when millions of people across the world are facing the same problem, imminent poverty. In other words, the recession helps us to see that human beings have a common existence and face common problems. That doesn’t mean we should abandon the politics of cultural difference and recognition, but it does suggest the need to think in a much more universal way than cultural studies has done so far.

Lastly, I think we need to challenge cultural studies’ hard core constructionism – the idea that what we know is constructed through language and representation. If we’re to make sense of crunch culture we have to bring back reality. This can’t be a naïve version whereby we simply see things for what they are, but a conception of the real which acknowledges complexity, depth and the fact that while society is indeed produced by humans it is by no mean under fair and democratic control.

Anyway, next week I’m going to put my head between the lion’s jaws and make this argument at a symposium on Culture after the Crunch (244k PDF). The other speakers are cultural studies’ luminaries including my OU colleagues John Clarke and Tony Bennett. Grrrrr … .

About the author

Jason Toynbee is Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at The Open University. His research interests are in creativity, copyright, and ethnicity - mainly through music - and his new book, Bob Marley: Herald of a Postcolonial World? is just out.

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What happens to culture in a crunch? The question isn’t a new one. When recession comes around – as it always will in that unequal, unstable system we call capitalism – it is bound to have an impact on media and the arts. Still, that doesn’t mean the relationship between economic crisis and culture is straightforward.

Take the Depression of the 1930s. During this period musicians, film makers and writers documented the devastation caused by capitalism as it leapt off the rails. In the US, popular songs like ‘Brother, Can You Spare a Dime’, or films such as The Grapes of Wrath, showed the plight of ordinary people thrown out of work or forced to accept starvation wages. Yet for every one of these social realist texts there were hundreds of escapist fantasies, best represented perhaps by the new genre of the screen musical. At RKO studios Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers spent the decade dancing their way through glitzy sets in big dresses, top hat and tails. No poverty here, except through its absence – if the camera was to track across the dance floor and into the street suddenly we’d see all the beggars. Of course we never do.

RKO Studios.
[image by Mark Hinds, some rights reserved]

Jump forward to the present and you wonder how much has changed. Actually, I’d say quite a lot. As my colleague Parvati Raghuram explained in her recent blog about the BBC television show, Strictly Come Dancing, the fantasy of ballroom dancing now has a strong dimension of the ordinary. In other words, the celebrities who battle it out on the dance floor start out as banal, even mediocre, at least in relation to their dancing abilities. As in reality TV more generally what’s at stake is the mediated transformation of ordinariness.

The contrast with Ginger and Fred is that while they too had attributes of the ordinary, the fictional world they inhabited was completely separate from everyday reality. In reality TV, however, a bridge between the ordinary and the sublime is created. We are lured into believing that the apotheosis of everyday life can be achieved just by entering the gates of the media. Politically, this is much more pernicious than a Ginger and Fred film where fantasy remains, well …. fantastic.

Unlike the all-singing, all-dancing musical, reality TV emerged in a time of relative affluence. It’s a pre-crunch genre. So what will happen to it now? My money is on the irruption of real reality. Even though the coming recession is likely to be less extreme in its scale and immediate consequences than the 1930s Depression, the ideological bubble now being burst is a lot bigger. We’ve been told for years that the market provides us with almost unlimited bounty. The shattering of this neoliberal myth will be shocking indeed. I predict the return of documentaries about the hard lives of the millions, dramas with a social conscience, and more scandals concerning the revolting richness of the rich. It’s even possible that rock musicians will write as though they exist in the world itself (rather than in the reflection of a mirror hanging in a suburban bedroom).

Undoubtedly we’ll see more fantasy too, more sublime escape into an imaginary realm. Musicals are probably finished in the West.  But as GDP dives and unemployment soars, it's highly likely that  new popular genres will emerge to carry us through to recovery. Still, there is an alternative. We might just decide to call the whole thing off and abolish capitalism altogether.

About the author

Jason Toynbee is Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at The Open University. His research interests are in creativity, copyright, and ethnicity - mainly through music - and his new book, Bob Marley: Herald of a Postcolonial World? is just out.

Subscribe to Jason Toynbee's posts