31.01.2008

Saving culture from capitalism

The dispute over cuts in Arts Council funding demonstrates the baleful influence of capitalism on culture, argues James Turley

You know the establishment has got something vastly wrong when Joanna Lumley comes perilously close to advocating workers’ control - but there she was, in an Observer spread (January 13), quoted as saying “We in the theatre should be setting the targets. We don’t want apparatchiks appearing with boxes saying, ‘Have you thought of this or this?’ Every theatre or dance or music organisation should be run by the people who understand it, not by managers.”

Such was the effect of Arts Council England’s festive season funding ‘shake-up’, which turned out unsurprisingly to be bureaucrat-speak for substantial cuts - 194 grants were to be significantly reduced or scrapped altogether. It did not help ACE’s cause that many of the cuts verged on the surreal. Sleepy Exeter’s Northcott Theatre was thrust into the spotlight - its grant (of £547,000) was to be withdrawn entirely, on the eve of its grand reopening after a £2 million refurbishment funded in part by ... an Arts Council grant.

Indeed, the most striking aspect of the whole story is the sheer universality of the contempt with which the proposed cuts have been met. The Exeter political establishment, for example, including ultra-Blairite MP Ben Bradshaw, has got behind the Northcott, and the city council is “seeking legal advice”, since it went ahead with the refurbishment following assurances of continued funding from ACE. Most prominently, the Young Vic theatre in London was packed out, as the arts community, from local theatre companies up to Kevin Spacey and Ian McKellen, congregated for a ‘debate’, which seemed to line ACE outgoing chief executive Peter Hewitt up against everybody else.

On January 28, the various regional arts councils met to discuss budgets - the national budget is to be ratified and published on February 1. The Guardian reported that around 25 victims are to be reprieved (a list likely to include the most spectacular exemplars of ACE’s incompetence, such as the aforementioned Northcott, the Bush Theatre and the National Student Drama Festival). By any measure, though, there is still a lot of money leaving the arts in 2009 - and, as The Guardian notes, “the way the affair has been handled is likely to be raked over for a good while yet” (January 28).

What went wrong?

It would be easy to dismiss this as simply a sudden outbreak of ineptitude at Arts Council HQ - and many have. Rightwing libertarians will no doubt consider the whole thing further evidence of the pernicious influence of ‘government’ into (rightfully) private affairs.

Marxists, of course, cannot be satisfied with the simplicity of the former and the idealism of the latter, and must look a little deeper. Why, in the first place, does there need to be a body like the Arts Council at all? It is clear that, for a huge section of the theatre of this country and others, survival depends on grants from bodies like it, in a way that even small record labels do not. The problem is simple: under capitalism, the value of a commodity is realised in its sale. Commodities which attract small sales - theatre tickets, gallery admissions, underground punk CDs - are restricted to smaller scales of investment. That is fine for pressing records ... but the overheads involved in maintaining theatre spaces, for example, are qualitatively higher. These operations simply are not profitable (the trade in luxury art objects being a signal exception) - money goes in, art comes out.

At the same time, art is an immensely useful product for all classes, for different reasons. Whatever the ideologies of a bourgeois culture at a given time, they cannot float about in the ether, but must come embodied in artefacts, practices and rituals. Art is pivotal to this - thus, in spite of the fears of an older ruling class, the bourgeois order has always managed to make room for it. Concretely, in today’s society, that means the only option other than throwing the galleries and theatres onto the open market - bureaucratic management.

As an aside, it is worth noting that, even at times when vulgar market-fundamentalism is on the lips of every capitalist ideologue, this sort of bureaucratic government control of various kinds of enterprise is ever-present. The Financial Times wasted no time in demanding the nationalisation of troubled bank Northern Rock; look closely at any economic activity and the state is plugging innumerable gaps.

The Arts Council, or something very like it, is unlikely to wink out of existence any time soon. But if such organisations are very rarely under mortal threat from tendencies elsewhere in capitalist society, it is certainly not true that they can simply lope on undisturbed.

In the case of ACE, its recent history is full of the ‘restructuring’ that has characterised public bureaucracies in this period. It came into being after the Arts Council of Great Britain was split into three parts for the different GB countries. At first, they operated independently of the regional arts boards; now, they are amalgamated. In March 2006, to the consternation of artists, the national office was “streamlined” in such a way that most advisors directly connected to actual artistic enterprises were dropped (see www.artscouncil.org.uk).

There is also, of course, the signal matter of cash. ACE distributes lottery money - but does not have a specific percentage of the lottery fund designated to it at the point of ticket purchase. Rather, 28p of every £1 spent on lottery tickets - along with unclaimed prizes - goes to ‘good causes’, whose relative awards are decided by the National Lottery Distribution Fund, run by the department for culture, media and sport.

It is difficult to imagine, then, that the New Labour establishment has not been putting pressure on ACE using the purse strings. New Labour, knowing its political tenor, would certainly be happy to force - as the cuts likely would - many of the victim organisations into a more ‘entrepreneurial’ spirit: that is to say, producing tat or going to the wall. More vulgar economic pressures abound - running imperialist military adventures costs money, and fiscal belts need to be tightened in the shadow of a looming recession. Then there is the Olympics.

The bottom line

Communists must, of course, oppose these cuts, as we oppose all such incremental attacks on the working class. And an attack on the working class it is - the subsidisation of theatres, for instance, brings ticket prices at least closer to the reach of ordinary people, and allows the kind of community arts projects which bring such people into artistic production. Many of these projects, it should be remembered, have coalesced into revolutionary theatrical movements - those associated with Dario Fo and Augusto Boal, for example.

We must not stop there, however. It is a sad symptom of the current state of the left that, in virtually all these situations, we hear demands for an end to cuts but nothing further, nothing that will inspire our class to fight beyond the dreary reality to which an ‘end to cuts’ defaults. The Socialist Party, for example, was quick to get behind the Northcott campaign on a local basis, but concentrated almost entirely on the 50 or so jobs that would be lost. We must seize the opportunity to demand a full, truly socialist reorganisation of artistic production.

It is clear that the current arrangement, while more amenable to popular participation in ‘high art’ than the free play of market forces, is in its own way an abomination. During the German revolution of 1918, however, a very different sort of ‘arts council’ arose - the Arbeitsrat für Kunst (‘Workers’ Council for Art’). It was an organisation of artists (not all enthusiastic revolutionaries) who seized the opportunity to organise themselves and their work on a collective basis. Long after the revolution’s failure, the German cultural scene bore the marks of the AfK, most famously in the form of the great Bauhaus school and its collective and interdisciplinary methods, founded by AfK alumni such as Walter Gropius.

We must heed the words of ‘comrade’ Joanna Lumley - apparatchiks really do have no place in the artistic institutions of human culture. These bureaucrats are completely unaccountable to the mass of people, and crucially to the artistic producers themselves. Any such council must be elected by and recallable to artists and art workers, who in turn should run the galleries and theatres in the place of venal art dealers and philistine managers. That is the only way to avoid the farcical aloofness so sharply demonstrated in the recent funding debacle.