ART AND THE LABOUR MOVEMENT:
A MARRIAGE MADE IN MATERIALIST DETERMINISM
by Richard Russell.

Once upon a time art was just for toffs and churches. True, the working class has always created its own culture; indeed many of the great creative artists in history came from proletarian poverty; but while old Johnny Smith's woodcuts rotted away a long time ago, every single one of George IV's voluminous costumes is preserved in strict air-conditioning at the V & A. Since history is the only thing we have to learn from, and that history is merely a few pieces of jigsaw defaced by the graffiti of the triumphant, the cultural and aesthetic undercurrents of proletarian art are unclear. They are, however, real enough in our time.

Life needs art. Away from the divisive grind of western capitalist over-production, we need expressions of our individualism, our collectivism, our alienated nature. The council estate is made tolerable by songs about it. Drama and film can depict the human condition, including the working class condition, in ways which in themselves can improve that condition. Even supposed bourgeois arts like opera and ballet relate to humanity beyond class limits. To take just two examples: Tosca and the Rite of Spring both pull apart issues concerning oppressed femininity conditioned by rigid social structures; in Tosca she kills her would-be rapist; in the Rite she's forced to dance herself to death.

Art was only ever bourgeois because the rich had grabbed all the loot. You only got to see a Gainsborough if you were a friend of Lord Snotty-Git. You only got to hear Mozart if you were friends with Count Von Snotty-Git. That was before BBC2. Now the people are the consumer base, the art critics, the opera fans. I didn't see Tosca by putting on clean undies and handing over eighty quid at Covent Garden: I caught it at Christmas while avoiding Only Fools and Horses. My copy of Marriage of Figaro only joined me after an illustrious career at Blackheath Libraries. We've got art coming out of our ears.

Things are even better than that. Somewhere on the internet is every 'great master' ever painted, every 'great classic' ever recorded, and, after Project Gutenburg , the entire canon of what we call 'great literature'. I've got the complete poems of Shelley: took me about eight minutes and cost me about 27p. Broadband communications open up the worlds of film, opera, drama, as well as being a cheap way of retrieving all those seventies albumns you lent someone and never got back. While the established culture corporations like Sony and Time Warner are veering wildly between ineffectual litigation and knee-jerk merger, our cultural life is steaming ahead without them making a penny.

A hundred years ago, we were moving to a situation where there was a pianoforte in every living room. Now we're getting to the stage where there's a library, an art gallery, a thousand channels of tv and radio, and a titanic juke box in every living room. This is still only half the story. We don't need to worry about the future of the arts with respect of consumers: that will take care of itself. Notions of keeping drama 'alive' or 'opera' alive are merely the bleatings of an industry which has lost its grip on the reins of profit. Thanks to Radio 3, free to air, more people can enjoy opera than ever before in history; and my guess is that plenty do. Long ago the working class lost its stereotyped ignorance: it just needed exposure to culture in order to appreciate and assimilate it. Today's pensioner on £70 a week is just as discerning of the arts as any Medici, or Borgia, or Caesar. With a couple of white plastic boxes she can cover her walls with Michaelangelos, read Keats all day, and do the ironing to Puccini. Art has never been more consumed.

The real question is not consumption, but production. We need to create the best conditions under which art from the labour movement can flourish. This art will happen - is happening now. One big reason is the technology. Those white plastic boxes don't just bring shiny packaged twentieth century culture. The same boxes comprise a recording studio, a film editing suite, a digital artists workshop, a photographic studio, a global distribution network, radio station, and, given the deliberately proscriptive price of ink, a publishing house. Millions more recording studios (thanks to Cubase, or more accurately, cheap bootlegs of Cubase) means millions more albums. Millions more printing machines means millions more novelists and poets. Now, I know not everyone who has Word has an idea for a movie script, but more than enough do. Which brings us to my main point. Thanks to increasingly cheap technology, the means of cultural production has finally reached the working class. The remaining problems are those of distribution and exchange.

The best chance at the moment for the distribution and exchange of the art of the proletariat lies in the e-mail inbox. Notwithstanding weapons of mass destruction, you'll soon have a broad-band inbox and proletarian culture will flood through it. Movies, books, photos. Just make sure the software you use to screen out the cyber-breasts still allows you to receive Picasso's Demoiselles. Many creative artists already have websites; the ethos being that you're not being paid for anything anyway so you might as well give some of it away to drum up business. Of course, talk that we've seen the future and it's full of art and it's all free, is heavily discouraged by a quivering Sony and a rather sheepish Microsoft. The big players have a web presence, but they no longer have control of the market. Since the commodity is now a mere file on your hard drive, all the fetishism of that commodity, from the non-degradable cellophane wrapping to the sloganeering carrier bag, could soon be things of the past. Culture has suddenly gone from the battery to free-range.

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