Some highlights from the latest manifesto of The Movement for Cultural Democracy
Interesting new content from the Movement for Cultural Democracy - an initiative from Red Pepper magazine and others (see article here). It aims to place UK culture and arts in the context of rights (who gets to make and recieve culture) and voice (what pressing needs and excluded voices can be expressed through it).
They’ve just published version 2 of their Manifesto, which has some proposals which chime with our radical localist agenda. Some selections:
2. We believe that decisions about which cultural activities are supported and funded should be made at as local level as is possible and reasonable via genuinely equitable and diverse structures that employ the principles of participatory democracy. A network of local and regional elected representatives will be created with a mandate to ensure that cultural spending empowers the communities that elect those representatives…
4. We will champion investment in people and process over products and results…
8. We oppose the undue influence of corporate interests and state intervention in cultural activities. Instead, we support the development of truly grassroots democratic cultures...
10. We propose that it is made mandatory for arts councils and local authorities to protect public spaces and to put these spaces into the service of public-led forms of cultural production. At its most basic, this would mean opening idle spaces and empty buildings up to creative practitioners and community groups in ways that put existing communities first. Section 106 funding, raised from private land development, should be invested into the expansion of publicly owned assets for cultural activity – libraries, recording studios, community arts centres, performance spaces, exhibition centres, playgrounds and parks, etc.
16. We firmly believe that lifelong creative and cultural learning that is free at the point of use must be available to everyone in our society and embedded into the national curriculum so that all children in Britain, from primary school up, benefit from the provision of free lessons in music, drama, creative writing, dance, painting, gardening, food, fashion, design, etc…
17. We believe that our cultural lives in a cultural democracy will unlock positive social value that can in turn bring the benefits of creativity, community and joy into all aspects of our democratic life, from the grassroots into government, from childhood to old age. A society defined by this paradigm – of culture for all, by all – will be a stronger society and a happier one…
We wonder whether some of the other manifesto points begin to breach the “arms-length” principle that has always ideally pertained, between state-funded arts and the government or state at the time.
Should the ambit of the arts automatically serve an agenda on (as point 9 suggests) “the need for radical inclusion and full-scale decolonisation that enshrines and enacts anti-racism, gender equality, disability rights, sexual freedom, freedom from poverty and ecological sustainability at the heart of Britain’s cultural institutions…They should simultaneously also expose the roots of social, economic and environmental injustice”?
It’s certainly not about resisting these principles (many of A/UK’s followers, including ourselves, would subscribe to most or all of them). But isn’t one of the truly utopian elements of arts and culture that it is a zone in which feelings, experience, form and thought arise freely, entirely at the self-determination of the artist?
We want to bring cultural expression into a new politics for precisely these reasons - to unearth and map “structures of feeling” (as Raymond Williams would put it), that maybe haven’t had a chance to articulate themselves before. The measures we’ve cited above would certainly improve access to resources of grass-roots cultural expression.
But we would only caution to listen to what arises first, as the seeds and sensibility of a new citizenship, than prescribe it from the outset.