By Anthony Killick.
The election of Donald Trump is the latest occurrence signalling neoliberalism’s transformation into some form of neo-authoritarianism constituted by a renewed commitment to upholding corporate interests and a frightful endorsement of racism and misogyny. How should those involved in the production, distribution and exhibition of film culture respond? The answer is that the disintegration of social democracy and its accompanying narratives has created a gap that should be filled with an unapologetic, compassionate and conciliatory, socialism.
Providing spaces for discussion is something that is undertaken by film festivals the world over. However, the types of spaces in which films are shown have an impact on their interpretations. Typically, such cultural events are reserved for the middle classes, due to a variety of urban and cultural dynamics that exclude those at the lower end of the socio-economic strata from access to a commercialised arts scene. One of the major problems here is that socially stratified cities reduce the capacity for people to engage with others from different socio-economic-cultural backgrounds. Film festivals that program and exhibit films within theoretical and spatial contexts that are primarily oriented towards opposing neoliberalism seek out spaces within the city wherein social stratification can be alleviated, and often facilitate discussions that take anti-austerity, anti-neoliberal and even anti-capitalist perspectives as the baseline of potential solutions to local and global problems. This form of unity is important in an era where the identity politics that began with the New Left in the 1960s has been co-opted by business interests, and now exists either as an irreconcilable plurality of races, classes and genders, or as a politically neutered, niche market consumerism.
A discussion at LRFF 2015 hosted by the Radical Film Network
“European social democrats and American democrats In government were lured into a Faustian bargain with the bankers of Wall Street, the City of London, Frankfurt and Paris, who were only too pleased to let reformist politicians take a small cut of their loot as long as the politicians consented to the complete deregulation of financial markets.” (2016: 210)
“And so, when in 2008 the vast pyramids of financial capital came crashing down, Europe’s social democrats did not have the mental tools or the moral values with which to combat the bankers or subject the collapsing system to political scrutiny.” (211)
In short, Trump is not the problem. The problem is the lack of an anti-corporate left within the mainstream, as well as the unwillingness of social democrats on both sides of the Atlantic to back one where it exists (and as a result, if it wasn’t Trump this time round it would surely be someone just as nightmare-ish in the near future). The majority of PR people that constitute the “centre-ground” and “moderates” were stupid enough to get rid of Bernie Sanders, and they’re stupid enough to continue their attack on Jeremy Corbyn, without realising how much ground they concede to the right-wing in doing so.
Ideological concessions are reflected in government policy. Since New Labour, social democracy’s policies on the arts and culture have been dominated by rhetoric around the “creative industries,” which has played a role in the UK’s transition from a manufacturing to a services-based economy. Over the years, this has been referred to interchangeably as the “knowledge economy” or “creative economy,” in which information supposedly becomes a new form of social capital among a newly trained, tech-savvy population of university graduates with an entrepreneurial spirit. The reality, as pointed out by numerous academics, is that the creative industries have proven to be little more than a veneer for corporate business interests. Far from being the cornerstone of a sustainable economy, they are characterised by unpaid internships, precarious employment and peripheral or ancillary positions that have little if anything to do with creative endeavour.
According to social scientist, Toby Miller, what distinguishes the creative industries discourse from other forms of industrial deliberations is that, as opposed to the auto-industry or the textile-industry, creativity “refers to an input, not an output. This bizarre shift in adjectival meaning makes it possible for anything that makes money to be creative.” In other words, a person could be said to be working in the creative industries if they pour pints in a bar that happens to be in a theatre. The appearance that the creative industries make a significant contribution to GDP is due to the controversial inclusion of Information Technology (where the money is, according to Miller) in their original identification and mapping. This is not to say that the creative industries are completely populated by money minded profiteers, far from it. Obviously, there are many academics, industry heads and workers within the sector who sincerely care about the arts and culture, as well as the social health and well-being of their students, employees and co-workers. They constitute one of the strongest barriers to the complete instrumentalisation of the arts by the profit-incentives of neoliberalism. Nevertheless, it has to be recognised that the creative industries discourse is one that arises from social democracy, particularly New Labour, and that this has not only failed to deliver on its proverbial “third-way,” but social democracy itself is now existentially threatened.
Though we lack any public funding, public health is a major concern of the Liverpool Radical Film Festival. Our aim is to provide a space for discussion in which people can come together and figure out how best to resist racism, misogyny and neoliberalism. As well as being an act of protest in itself, the festival hopes to facilitate processes and actions that, in the short term, work towards curtailing the power of corporations over governments, and, in the long term, allow for the creation of structures wherein people are able to live in dignity and respect.
This year’s festival has been divided into two themes. The first, “indigenous struggles, international resistance,” foregrounds the fact that indigenous people battling governments and multinational corporations over land and water rights raise the most urgent questions facing humanity, particularly climate change. For this reason, local struggles have global consequences. As well as screening Bakur (North), a film currently banned in Turkey for its representation of PKK resistance, the day culminates in a screening of Michael Chanan’s latest film Money Puzzles, which situates the days program in a context of finance capitalism, debt, austerity, and the radical responses being taken up by people across the world.
LRFF 2015 screening Sleaford Mods: Invisible Britain (Sng, Hannawin, 2015)
Colleagues and friends who, for the past thirty years, have been social democrats, must surely now recognise that social democracy will become vigorously anti-corporatist, or it will become irrelevant. The centre-ground it claims to hold has shifted so far to the right, and voter distrust in its candidates has become so endemic, that Donald Trump has become the president of the United States, and number 10 is populated by racist fanatics. Does this mean that social democrats need to become socialists? No. But it does mean that, at the very least, they need to stop calling socialists lunatics, and their enlightened liberal media needs to stop berating such a plurality of people as “militants” and “hard-left,” when in reality they simply advocate multi-form resistance to the neoliberal policies to which social democracy has acquiesced. In an age where elective candidates are reliant on funding and media coverage from billionaires and corporations, Sanders’ campaign at least highlighted the possibility of sacking off these so-called king-makers and their adjacent media. If the world has four more years before civilisation buckles under the weight of climate change, we must spend them on a concerted effort to end neoliberalism. This means supporting politicians who advocate curtailing the power of rampant finance capitalists. More immediately, it means working in our communities to set up independent structures and institutions around health, education, good food, independent media and a vibrant, non-profit arts and cultural scene.
Anthony Killick is a PhD candidate studying film festivals and politics at Edge Hill University and co-director of the Liverpool Radical Film Festival.
Reference
Varoufakis, Yanis (2016), And The Weak Suffer What They Must?: Europe, Austerity and the Threat to Global Stability, New York: Random House.