Under capitalist realism, quality is conflated with whatever succeeds in the market economy. When this is translated to the battleground of personality politics, we find ourselves rewarding those who display as little divergence from the status quo as possible, given our (market) fear that anyone else is incapable of achieving mass appeal. To appreciate how far this thinking is able to supplant the rational faculties needed in order for a democratic society to properly function, consider the following two cases of collective amnesia.
The first comes from the centrist and liberal contingent in the UK, who, feeling they had no clear representation in party politics since the departure of Tony Blair, made repeat calls for a centrist leadership candidate in the shape of a David Miliband, or even a British equivalent to Emmanuel Macron or Justin Trudeau. Tune into LBC or the Radio 4 Today programme and you’ll hear people describing any one of these (relatively) young, white, able-bodied men as “looking the part” or having the appeal of a “true leader”. The structural racism, sexism, ageism and classism at play in this assessment is almost too obvious to dwell on, but its motivations can never be divorced from the realities imposed by capitalist thinking. This assessment is all the more absurd for the fact that the only examples of such leadership figures in recent memory also account for two of modern politics’ most dire and embarrassing legacies. The first is of course Tony Blair, whose tenure was exposed fairly unequivocally as being little more than an elaborate PR-sham dreamed up by Alastair Campbell and Peter Mandelson, and which led to one of the gravest political mistakes made in recent memory. The other was David Cameron, once the first prime minister reputed to have copulated with a dead animal, now responsible for causing — and subsequently abandoning — the biggest constitutional crisis in modern British history.
I don’t want it to seem as though I misunderstand the underlying principle of democracy here, but instead seek to highlight that the concurrent evolution of democratic societies alongside capitalism has delivered us to a point where suitability has been transposed by a maddening fixation on the external and superficial indicators of market attractiveness. On the one hand, and in its more extreme guise, this equates to a perpetuation of the white, male power stereotype. But its mechanisms have also become more agile in an era of heightened activity in identity politics, broadening its scope to include a slightly wider set of demographics — judged purely along lines of age, gender and race — but nevertheless remaining just as prohibiting in terms of values, style, delivery and taste.
This amounts to something similar to the false advertising techniques employed by Blair during the 1990s, and allows the perpetuation of the status quo to continue under the guise of a more progressive and inclusive politics. This is an accusation that’s been levelled at the Democratic Party in America, particularly since the election of Barack Obama as the President of the United States of America, and secondly of Hillary Clinton as the Democratic candidate for the 2016 presidential election. Both were celebrated widely by the liberal media as wins for both the black community and women respectively, but often without acknowledging the real-term harm being caused to both demographics as a result of increased levels of poverty, homelessness and incarceration by the neoliberal politics that these two figures represented and preserved, as well as the agenda of hegemonic control that subjugates countries in the global south and promotes war. This is why congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez represents something exciting and unprecedented, for while her status as a second-generation Puerto Rican immigrant woman has undoubtedly shaped the course of her career and politics, neither factor of her identity overshadows the anti-capitalist policy platform on which she stands, and which she is seemingly irrepressible in bringing to the establishment.
This lends AOC an authenticity and rigour that holds up even under the heightened levels of scrutiny imposed by the internet, and which has been lacking in contemporary politics. It was just this lack of authenticity that gave Hillary Clinton’s attempts to ingratiate herself on a young, “woke” audience during the 2016 presidential campaigns such an air of discomfort. The tendency to solely attribute her defeat to a global conspiracy shows a total aversion on the part of the legacy media to admit its own blind spots, and to interrogate its own woeful ineptitude in challenging the sham PR tactics of the neoliberal political project, which, to an audience of digital natives who exist in a continual stream of discourse and analysis, are always patently obvious. It is easy to forget, given the Democratic candidate’s ultimate defeat, that Clinton was nevertheless the grande dame of the liberal establishment during the campaign, with few others even reckoning in the media consciousness as a viable contender. In the two-party system, criticism of Clinton became almost taboo as the broad church represented by the Democratic Party focussed its energies on creating a barrier to the much larger threat of Trump. While its motivations were understandable, this led to resentment among a younger, left-leaning set of voters — but not exclusively — who held no loyalty, or in many cases even memory, of the Clinton brand. Once again, this generation was correct in feeling that an older generation, a generation that was responsible for, and in many ways still preventing them from recovering from, the economic crash of 2008, was now also censoring their means to political expression. Not to mention the active contempt many held for Clinton on account of her loyalty to Bill.
There were even some who were celebrating her candidateship as a win for feminism, a view that showed a flagrant disregard for the young women who accused Bill Clinton of sexual misconduct and who were treated largely as collateral damage in the desperate scramble to save his presidency and reputation. Perhaps it was not until Donald Trump’s inauguration, and in comparison with the nauseating, convivial displays put on between the Obamas and Bushes, that the full depravity of Clinton’s career sunk in — the depression wrought in the sharp lines that accompanied his vacant stare.
Hillary Clinton, like Blair, had tried to align herself with progressive causes and celebrities for the sake of attracting a younger electorate, courting the likes of Katy Perry, LeBron James, Morgan Freeman, Lady Gaga, Lena Dunham, Beyoncé and Jay-Z. To everyone besides the liberal media, it was obvious why this tactic no longer worked: the internet had brought us far closer to both celebrities and politicians than in the years when this kind of PR campaign was first employed, eroding the fourth wall to the extent that any edifice was now abundantly apparent. Politicians would no longer be able to engineer the appearance of wider cultural movements, as they were in the 1990s, and Hillary’s attempts thus fell short of securing her a victory. A clear message had been sent out: electioneering in the old sense — using PR spin and celebrity endorsements — would no longer work on younger voters. The emphasis had shifted and political beliefs of all persuasions were being shaped by online communities. History is always dictated by success stories, and on account of Trump’s win, the narrative of the online culture wars is now being told in almost exclusively damning terms, as if the medium itself were to blame for the messages that were shared by the alt-right during the campaign. In fact, the internet had hastened and exaggerated political critique across the board, leaving politicians from both persuasions more exposed, and more likely to be identified for their cynical election ploys, than ever before.
The verdict from this young voter base of digital natives was that, without a strong, anti-establishment policy platform, inclusion — even at the highest level of government — won’t automatically equate to an improvement of conditions for marginalised and underserved communities. In fact, there is a tendency, similar to that which we saw under Blair, of these underserved communities being used and exploited by such election campaigns, where, in a bid to boost the progressive credentials of their candidates, they are sold out for photo opportunities and magazine feature fodder.
Though Trump’s policies and general presence amount to something far more corrosive for ethnic minorities and working-class people than a Hillary Clinton presidency would ever have been capable of, this shouldn’t stop us from reflecting on the fundamental issues latent within the neoliberal project. Trump, arguably on account of the fact that his explicitly racist and xenophobic platform simply couldn’t elicit much by way of cool celebrity endorsements, seemed to fortuitously escape the same trap of so many awkward PR moments and celebrity selfies (though his opportunistic engagements with Kanye West and Kim Kardashian in the years since certainly suggests some appetite). Again, we come to the uncomfortable conclusion that Trump’s success might be partially explained by a series of unfortunate mistakes made possible by the ideological vacuum created by neoliberal politics, as much as any real agency on the part of him or his team.
Inclusion within a system that by its very nature holds in contempt the communities from which minority and working-class candidates hail, will often also reduce both to spectacle and abuse, particularly in cases where the person in question resists, or else fails, to align themselves with the styles of delivery peddled by those in power. We’ve seen this played out vividly in the case of British MP Diane Abbott, the first black woman elected to British parliament with one of the strongest and most consistent support-bases of any MP in her constituency of Hackney North and Stoke Newington. As a black woman in the Houses of Parliament, however — and crucially a black woman whose politics and delivery differs from the majority white, privately educated political class on account of having never tried to replicate its style of managerialism, whose origins can be traced back to the earliest days of imperialism — she has also been on the receiving end of a core strain of explicit racism and bigotry. A liberal media that feels sufficiently entitled to castigate her for incompetence on the grounds of this divergence has legitimised this — its unchallenged value judgements on tastefulness, competence and appropriateness once again wielded as definitive proof.
It is here, too, that we begin to see most vividly how tastefulness and respectability are used as tools to promote assimilation, and assist oppression. In the UK, when Nigerian-British MP Kate Osamor recently faced dismissal from Parliament owing to her son’s involvement in drug-related crime in 2016, we saw the British establishment’s respectability alarm ringing at full volume. After his conviction was disclosed, Osamor was referred to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards by Conservative MP Anne-Marie Trevelyan, herself a graduate of the £8,920-a-term St. Paul’s Girls School. Osamor’s response in lashing out at a Times journalist after doorstepping her two months later was illegal, though perhaps worthy of some empathy given the vast structural violence that had led to her entire career being undermined by the selective justice of parliamentary procedure — and indeed the police. In what now appears like a perfect example of the cruelty that is often latent in the notion of respectability, several members of the liberal media responded with outrage to the former, while failing to speak out half as vehemently against the racism that had contributed to Osamor’s anger. Structural violence and racism that prevents millions from prospering would be permitted, but a momentary loss of control would not. And all this is without even mentioning the vast amounts of cocaine swishing around the British establisment that several of these appalled journalists are no doubt aware of.
The hypocrisy of demanding “respectable” behaviour from minority groups within a system that belies vast, structural violence and inequality is of course not just limited to parliamentary politics, either. Take for example the horrendous treatment by the British press of footballer Raheem Sterling. Since his first appearances for Liverpool in 2012, but more acutely in the years since joining Manchester City in 2015, Sterling has faced a sustained and vicious attack from the British media, suffering vile chants from football supporters vindicated by a racist tabloid culture determined to humiliate and deride his every lifestyle choice. Unsurprisingly, the Sun and the Daily Mail are among the worst culprits, oscillating in their “reports” between headlines shouting about Sterling’s “outrageously decorated”46, “blinging house”47, or his shopping trips to Primark. What unites these seemingly schizophrenic headlines, which castigate Sterling one minute for spending too much money and spending too little the next, is a grotesque conflation of racism and class discrimination. Sterling presents an affront to the British establishment both in his blackness and his unwillingness to abide by its tyrannical rules of taste. Sterling is proud, confident and expressive — three qualities that are celebrated when they are embodied by the white inheritors of the British establishment — but viewed as an audacious overstepping of one’s territory when they are embodied by a man, who against the odds of a society and economy that is aggressively skewed against black people, nevertheless succeeded. Marginalised candidates will be accepted by the establishment providing they play by its rules, and are sculpted and packaged to fit within its highly autocratic middle-class rules of taste. In other words, providing they are never able to make any direct or implied challenge to the establishment nor its attendant power structures.
Irrespective of the fact that Sterling has been permitted access to the highest echelons of celebrity and fame, an expressive and self-confident black man from a working-class background — one who builds the house he wants to live in according to aesthetic preferences that have evolved outside of what’s been ordained by Grand Designs presenter Kevin McCloud — is a level of self-determination that the media is evidently unwilling to accept. The aggression towards Sterling, and other members of the newly rich whom the media either explicitly or implicitly castigates as tasteless, is driven by a growing insecurity, owing to the fact that its existence relies on an ever more precarious set of value judgements that are being undermined and derided from every angle on account of the internet. The British establishment has always tried to counter its own insecurities by igniting hate and bigotry, and yet Sterling, for all the abuse he’s sustained, has nevertheless emerged resplendent — a hero to millions and a brilliant counterpoint to the British media’s entrenched prejudice.
What’s more, owing to their authority on the subject of good taste, the middle-class gatekeepers of our collective culture have also been able to effectively disguise their own bigotry. Racism is frequently painted as a problem contained within the “white working class” — a label that is useful for some purposes, but which also negates the fact that a large portion of the working class comes from minority ethnic populations, while emphasising the plight of white communities above black and Asian communities, and dividing the working class along lines of race to thereby minimise the possibility for solidarity.48 While the likes of Tommy Robinson continue to inflate their own sense of importance by declaring themselves representatives of the working class in Britain, the media has arguably failed to sufficiently challenge this idea, and also on occasion, unfairly tended to reduce the working class to this stereotype. The effect of which is to censor and negate the working-class experience, whilst simultaneously distracting from, and downplaying, the very prevalent forces of racism that run through the heart of the middle-class establishment, leaving their “respectable” rages unnoticed.
Good Morning Britain host Piers Morgan is one such example of how the smirking bigotry of the middle classes continues to get a free pass. While there’s no denying that Tommy Robinson is a gangrenous ulcer on the leg of modern Britain, his reach extends nowhere near that of today’s coiffed and fake-tanned TV and radio show hosts peddling a far less explicit but no less harmful message of supremacy. In June 2018, and with fear of this book becoming a thesis on TV show The Apprentice, its host Alan Sugar — entrepreneur and self-styled representative of the upwardly-mobile — tweeted a picture of the Senegal football team at the 2018 World Cup with the following caption: “I recognise some of these guys from the beach in Marbella. Multi tasking resourceful chaps”.49 The statement worked on several levels to expose Sugar’s racism, demonstrating abject colourism in the assertion that all Senegalese people look the same, while openly mocking the structural factors extending from colonialism that keep people from the global south constrained by a capitalist system designed to work against them. So fundamental is this way of thinking to the false illusion of white supremacy that still underscores great swathes of the white Western identity, that this kind of joke went largely unchecked until the arrival of the internet and the ability of incisive, passionate people to finally hold the likes of Sugar to account. To the extent that this happened in Sugar’s case, however, the mainstream media still nevertheless continued to platform him. Sugar’s contract with the BBC remains intact, giving implicit approval to this kind of commentary, which, however casually they might want to portray it, originates in the cruelty and violence of colonialism and systemic racism.
Meanwhile, of course, Boris Johnson continues to use the slang of early-twentieth-century colonisers with what, by his estimation at least, equates to a mischievous irreverence for today’s “political correctness”. His style is arguably less conspicuous in its racism than that of Geert Wilders in the Netherlands or even Donald Trump, but that hardly diminishes its corrosive effect. In recent years, Johnson has written a limerick claiming the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has sex with goats, dubbed Barack Obama “part-Kenyan” with an “ancestral dislike” of Britain, referred to black people from the Commonwealth and the Congo variously as “piccaninnies” and having “watermelon smiles”, and said that women who wear Burkas look like “bank robbers” and “letter boxes”. These comments allow Johnson to embody the true character of nationalism and white supremacy in modern Britain, where most racists don’t consciously acknowledge their own bigotry but, like Johnson, occupy management roles and live in respectable townhouses, while only entertaining these naughty views in the quiet company of their friends and family, usually after a few drinks. In this sense, Johsnon gives voice to, and legitimizes, a tendency that is rampant up and down the country.
Much has been written about his bewildering rise to power, and how his brand of schoolboy humour and suppressed laughter absolves him, and a large demographic like him, of the racism they’ve been accused of for decades, presenting their harmful and discriminatory views as little more than casual jokes. This tactic allows Johnson to emerge as the poster-boy for a certain strain of “common sense” that presupposes the superiority of white people and protects their freedom to observe, and make jokes about, the divergent tendencies of a “colonial underclass”. To his supporters, including those who quietly laugh into their glasses of Côtes du Rhône with each new slur that he delivers, Johnson represents a nostalgic dream of unabated bigotry, a time when people didn’t have to live under the tyrannical constraints of a basic humanity. Johnson, in spite of defending one of the most longstanding and entrenched beliefs of the British Empire, is therefore able to present himself as some kind of agitating outlier, happy to take the flak from a young cohort of moralisers and do-gooders who for too long have been able to repress the tendencies of their elders.
He is able to do this because the press, rather than calling him out, insists on perpetuating an image of Johnson as the bumbling idiot. Time and again we hear about Johnson’s various “gaffes”, with the media presenting racist slurs as an ongoing series of mistakes made by a foolhardy and reckless politician. “Cringe worthy!” cries the Mirror. “Calamitous!” says the Independent. Politico even invited readers to consider some of Johnson’s “best (and worst!) gaffes”.50 Even the arguably more damning takes fail to name what is really happening, with the BBC referring to his slew of racist comments as “controversial foreign insults”.51
Johnson serves as an exaggerated example through which to explain a phenomenon that is happening in far quieter ways all around us. His popularity proves that racist and elitist mentalities run deep in British society, and our failure to successfully hold him to account signals a far greater failing in identifying and eradicating the quieter forms of exclusion and bigotry that shape and inform our institutions and mainstream culture.
Part of the problem in being able to challenge this view is that so few people with the effective means of doing so are granted permission to the platforms governing our media, and those that are, find themselves constrained by its increasingly restrictive rules of taste and propriety.
This might seem to contradict my earlier point: that often white, middle-class people speak on behalf of, and at the expense of, working-class and minority people. But the containment of the latter to within the secondary space of the comment section, rather than occupying senior editorial positions, is an act of marginalisation in itself. So long as working-class and minority writers are disproportionately tasked with producing “personal essays”, rather than holding the editorial reins of these establishment outlets and having the opportunity to shape them in their image, the use of the comment section as a means of achieving greater diversity and inclusion remains pitifully superficial, and no better than the tokenistic efforts of the New Labour leadership outlined earlier in this book.
Stuart Hall claimed that the notion of “diversity” popularised in the late Nineties was little more than a euphemism for “difference”.52 By the same logic, it is this same “difference” that underscores so many “outreach” programmes, or similar, which uphold the de facto occupancy of the highest positions of power and influence by the white middle-class establishment, but provide easier participation in its output to a wider group of divergent peoples. Whether it’s inviting more children from underprivileged backgrounds to see a Phyllida Barlow show at the Royal Academy, or a Polly Stenham play at the National Theatre, the dynamic remains the same: rich, privileged, white people retain the prestigious role of creator, while the organisations responsible for ordaining their work allow a greater number of outsiders to share in the glory of its matchless quality. It also makes several quiet assumptions about taste.
The assertion is always that low-income equates to lower culture, and that only by granting access to the kinds of high art produced by the upper-classes can we hope to educate and improve the lives of working-class subjects. This works on the assumption that working-class culture is inherently bad, rather than accepting the far more accurate explanation that by maligning working-class culture for such a long time, it now appears vulgar, distasteful and wanton when compared with the more pervasive modes of expression propagated by the middle-class establishment. I have highlighted already the discursive nature of these rules of taste and their ability to cement elitist judgements, but I have also shown, through the example of Johnson, his TV show acolytes and a media that fails to hold them to account, how rules of taste specifically governing British culture in the present moment actively seek to undermine working-class and minority communities. This is not a hypothetical observation about the shortcomings of a media in the abstract, but a blow-by-blow account of how our current cultural gatekeepers continue to fail the majority of working-class and low-to-middle-income people up and down the country.
Simply creating more space for working-class and minority voices to participate in a culture that, by its very nature, subjugates and erases people in these communities is inherently disingenuous. What’s more, the mechanisms by which outreach, diversity, representation and inclusivity function are themselves an extension of capitalist thinking, with underlying value judgements ascribed to certain superficial indicators of wealth and status at the level of both the recipient and the purveyor. The target of such schemes are those conspicuous outliers of the status quo — people living in inner-city council housing, for example — and not just assessed along lines of financial necessity, which manifests in several other ways too. Rarely do you find outreach programmes seeking to target, for example, the culturally-barren landscape of most commuter-belt Persimmon housing estates, despite these often also containing some portion of social housing, since these places fit squarely within the middle-class dogmatic standards of respectability. Fewer still are targeted at the sterile environs of north and west London’s gated communities, which while affluent, are equally bereft of any authentic “culture”. It is this hypocrisy that makes such attempts appear so much like civilising missions — less an authentic attempt to educate, and more a bid to indoctrinate low-income and minority communities to promote assimilation.
What’s more, any challenge to this way of thinking immediately undermines the false assumptions of meritocracy on which the gatekeepers of this industry function, and by which they are assumed to hold any authority. In spite of their specialist degrees and years of work experience — in fact, because of such factors — the vast majority of people working in the arts also advance several harmful assumptions about human capital. In what will no doubt offend many people I know, it requires us to interrogate the flawed mechanisms by which art, and the people tasked with ordaining it, are selected.
In Capitalist Realism, Fisher urges us to see that the marketplace necessarily dictates a dissociation of objects from the more intimate and metaphysical meanings ascribed to them by the communities to which they belong. This is because, in a capitalist society, everything is reduced to a system of equivalence, becoming the metric of an external — and therefore implicitly, objective — system of economic value. This leads to a scenario by which we casually accept the fairly absurd premise of the museum, whereby disparate and unconnected objects are presented collectively due to the importance retroactively attributed to them under the economic imperatives of rarity and fame, but also country of origin, culture of origin, and proximity to the approved histories of Western civilisation. It is why we also accept the fairly absurd premise of most commercial galleries — enclaves of dubiously-acquired wealth frequented by the super wealthy, but nevertheless peddling a line of artistic integrity. To illustrate his point, Fisher uses the example of the British Museum, a place “where you see objects torn from their lifeworlds and assembled as if on the deck of some Predator spacecraft.” He further explains: “In the conversion of practices and rituals into merely aesthetic objects, the beliefs of previous cultures are objectively ironized, [and] transformed into artefacts.” In this sense, he argues, “Capitalist realism is therefore not a particular type of realism; it is more like realism in itself.”53 Realism is the appropriation of objects, or replication of events and experiences in as life-like terms as possible, so as to eliminate the need for active participation, and promote consumerism or its cultural equivalent: tourism. It is the reduction of life to sterile commodity.
Some of the most powerful documents of this phenomenon include Thomas Struth’s Museum Photographs — a series of images capturing tourists in some of the world’s most prestigious museums and galleries. Without any of the explicit irony seen in the likes of Martin Parr’s work, Struth captures the quiet surrealism of viewing objects dislocated from their lifeworlds and reimagined purely as spectacle against the sterile background of the gallery wall. In Pergamon Museum III, (Berlin, 2001) for example, visitors saunter between Doric and Ionic pillars lining the walls, though crucially never entering through them as originally intended. This creates a disquieting spectacle, of two disparate images — the pillars and the people — transposed on top of one another in some kind of collage, never interacting or touching and forever existing on two separate and distinct planes of reality. In another, Louvre 4 (Paris, 1989), onlookers admire The Raft of the Medusa, their smartly-dressed attire and relaxed poses contrasting starkly with the flesh-spectacle and suffering in front of them.
These images distil a phenomenon by which we voyeuristically dip into any number of issues, causes or cultures with a clinical and safe distance. We are tourists of culture rather than participants, having only to attend a museum or, increasingly, capture it on our phones. It’s an individualistic pursuit whose mechanisms also come to reflect the tendencies of commerce. Stand for a few minutes in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam or the Louvre in Paris as the crowds elbow each other to catch a glimpse of the Sunflowers or the Mona Lisa, and you see how far the marketing of these objects has played a part in their cultural cachet. Most of us couldn’t explain the merits of either painting compared with the other items in the gallery without resorting to the received wisdom of our school textbooks or Wikipedia, so it’s fair to assume that the slack mouths they elicit aren’t in every case a response to the superlative brushstrokes. No different to celebrity, fanaticism for the objects contained within the holy walls of the gallery is a direct response to the institution’s ability to successfully posit itself, and everything it contains, into an economic construct of superlative value. And these institutions are built on the false notion of white supremacy, on centuries of peddling a Eurocentric, almost exclusively white art history whose driving force — from the patrons of Renaissance Florence to the gallerists of the Upper East Side — has always been capitalism.
Pergamon Museum 3, Berlin 2001 © Thomas Struth
Louvre 4, Paris 1989 © Thomas Struth
I say all of this only in the hope of reminding us of the mechanisms by which the gallery or museum function, rather than seeking to boycott an industry that I have, and will probably at times continue to participate in. But it is here that we begin to develop an understanding of how, and even in spite of economic factors that undoubtedly exacerbate inequality, the institutions governing our so-called collective culture cannot help but perpetuate a culture of elitism and exclusion. That’s because the role of the curator in the above example — and by extension, the editor, publisher, theatre director and record label boss — is itself no more than a modulator of an economic value system steeped in hierarchy and elitist thinking. Insofar as they are tasked with acting in the institution’s economic interests and perpetuating the rigged notion of high culture, the curator in an establishment institution such as the British Museum functions no differently to a trader or investment fund manager, responding to market trends rather than seeking to establish anything like a conscientious or radical agenda. In order to perpetuate the myth of their inherent value and secure their future existence, these roles by their very nature have to be filled by candidates whose cultural signifiers — from posture and manner of speech, to the fairly imperfect measure of intelligence and aptitude that is school and university grades — suggest their proximity to these structures of power.
Over time and through diversity programmes, these signifiers might adjust slightly to include a broader “scope” of people. But that breadth will again be drawn along superficial lines that reduce candidates to little more than the indicators of their social and cultural capital. Concessions might be made to include more black people, more disabled and more northern people, for example, who the market has historically undervalued, but they will still nevertheless be required to function in much the same way as their predecessors, to uphold the values and judgements of an institution that has always historically erased these demographics in real terms.
In outreach, diversity and inclusion programmes, we see not so much the effort to include a wider scope of experience within mainstream culture, then, but the effort to indoctrinate more people into the pervasive modes of taste ordained by the establishment. Post-Blair, we are able to see more clearly how efforts to bring working-class and minority people into the fold of mainstream culture, without forfeiting existing power structures, serves only in the interests of those incumbent gatekeepers, and how, through the altruistic framing of these narratives, we can be distracted from the efforts to create a cultural hegemony.
In order for democracies to function effectively, it is essential for there to be not only adequate representation in the scope of political candidates and parties, but a representative mainstream media and avenues of culture which serve as a proxy for political beliefs and a window into the wider world. This is crucial to the functioning of opinion, but also self-belief and identity, with the media and cultural institutions serving as a mirror to individual experiences and communities, reflecting their history, belief systems and origins. For a democracy to function, all members of a society are required to achieve a degree of self-actualisation to the extent that they can believe their vote counts, and that their actions will be capable of shaping outcomes beyond their immediate experience. This factor won’t even be intuited by those whose cultural cachet has always been assured by the markers of a university education, a level of earning that grants them access to the kinds of consumer lifestyles seen in advertising campaigns, and a family legacy of being invited to important social occasions. But for the vast majority of people, focussed solely on being able to pay their bills and feed their families from month to month, the belief that they have any kind of agency to affect these processes can never be assumed.
Popular culture is one of the few ways that we can assure more people of their relevance to society. Year on year we see campaigns to increase voter participation, the crux of the message being: if we all opted out, nothing would improve. But the engineers of these campaigns would be wise to realise that voter turnout is intimately connected to a person’s conception of how far they matter, which can either be confirmed or denied by the mainstream culture that is propagated by our TV screens, book pages, galleries, music streaming services and column inches. And the role of art and literature in democracy doesn’t stop there — as our societal values continue to evolve and are constantly being renegotiated, so it’s required to be just as agile, giving us a means by which to evaluate our own viewpoints and invite serious introspection towards our own complicit role in a range of issues.
All of which has been undermined not only by an explosion of art and culture set squarely within the middle-class experience, but by the fact that what working-class exposure does still exist is presented increasingly through the sardonic and disapproving lens of its broadly upper-middle-class producers. Over the past few decades we’ve seen a huge rise in the number of reality TV and documentary formats that essentially pit their producers, directors and presenters against a range of minority and disadvantaged communities. The most famous and openly derided examples being shows such as The Jeremy Kyle Show, Benefits Street, My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding and Educating Yorkshire, as well as a host of spin-off shows including Educating Essex and the snappily-titled Educating Greater Manchester. To a lesser extent, even shows with no ostensible class bias, such as Louis Theroux’s documentaries, are guilty at times of employing the slightly removed and sardonic gaze that subtly implies judgement and mockery. The inevitable line of defence for these shows is that they take aim at both the rich and the working classes depending on subject matter, the implication being that they either don’t see class or don’t consider it to be a factor in whatever issues they happen to be reporting. Yet while the one constitutes “punching up” — that is, speaking truth to power and challenging privilege — the other serves little purpose beyond perpetuating negative stereotypes of an already heavily derided set of people.
The same goes for reality gameshow formats that hire from a pool of almost exclusively working- and lower-middle-class applicants. This is justified on the grounds that these people have volunteered themselves — a line of reasoning that accepts no responsibility for exploiting the financial imperatives that might have led them to do so. In 2019, it was reported that former Love Island contestant Mike Thalassitis had committed suicide owing to financial struggles and mental health issues. The show’s producers vowed to offer greater psychological support to contestants, without addressing the fact that the format itself was arguably responsible for setting unrealistic expectations for its participants. The reality TV show format has always been predicated on the derision and mockery of working-class people — even if that sometimes means extending its reach into what is largely judged to be the “thick” and “gauche” nouveau riche — the entertainment value always hinging on the spectacle of its “naive” participants.
I hope that we will soon start to reflect on TV shows such as X Factor and Britain’s Got Talent with a more critical analysis of the way they exploit their contestants: directors goading mainly young, eager-eyed people from mainly working-class backgrounds, who don’t yet realise how slim their chances of success are, to pour out their most personal and heartfelt stories of financial strain and family struggle. I hope we will wince at the way that they were mined for all their sob-story value before being discarded, or how less fortunate applicants were also ridiculed for their lack of ability. I hope that we will start to see how TV and other avenues of popular entertainment increasingly commoditized human beings — reducing them to little more than a backstory, suitable for a Coldplay overture if little else. And while I’m not the first and won’t be the last to highlight the questionable morality of these shows, I might just be the first to try and equate them with a liberal, broadsheet culture that is arguably guilty of committing many of the same crimes.
In recent years we’ve seen countless aspiring young, freelance writers be persuaded by senior editors to write first-person pieces detailing some of their most personal and compromising information, all in exchange for a small fee and often with psychological repercussions that the publication and its editors had no intention of providing for. The liberal media is among the worst culprits of this, boosting its own traffic by trading on its prestige and the difficulty of breaking into paid journalism, with the writer in question often realising that what was once framed by hungry editors as their matchless writing abilities, was really just a ruse for persuading them to do that which the permanent members of staff were unwilling to do themselves. I have also watched as many young writers from low-income backgrounds, who were mined for their novel takes in the first-instance, were later discarded for having refused, or in many cases, failed to understand the legacy’s media’s rules of taste.
This is where most media outlets currently stand, appearing to have made no real effort to redress their highly elitist hiring policies, and making only small concessions to a younger, poorer workforce with minimal capacity to actually shape or advance things for the better. But I hope to have shown that inclusion, without any degree of agency or control of the editorial agenda, in this sense, amounts to more harm than good.