MARJORIE MAYO recommends an accessible and unsettling novel that uses a true incident of death in the Channel to raise questions of wider moral responsibility
Talking class and culture
MIKE QUILL reports on a lively conference in Barnsley that took stock of working-class access to culture and proposed strategies to embed culture within the trade union movement
ESSENTIAL FIRST STEP: The conference at NUM HQ, Barnsley
MIK SABIERS wallows in a night of political punk and funk that fires both barrels at Trump
Reasonable radicalism, death in Abu Dhabi, locked-room romance, and sleuthing in the Blitz
SIMON DUFF recommends a new album from renowned composer and oud player Anour Brahem.
JAMES WALSH has a great night in the company of basketball players, quantum physicists and the exquisite timing of Rosie Jones
A New Awakening: Adventures In British Jazz 1966 - 1971, G3, and Buck Owens
JAMES WALSH is moved by an exhibition of graphic art that relates horrors that would be much less immediate in other media
AROUND 60 people gathered last Saturday in Barnsley for the Communist Party’s first-ever conference on culture. Called “Class and Culture,” the conference was held in the inspiring surroundings of the NUM headquarters in Barnsley, and was chaired by Ron Brown, co-convener of the party’s Culture Commission.
The aim of the event was to bring together party members, supporters, cultural activists and performers, to look at ways in which the cultural struggle, and the drive to promote cultural democracy, could be ramped up and integrated more closely with our economic and political struggles for a better world.
Communist Party chair Ruth Styles opened the event by sketching out some key problems which we faced in the struggle for cultural democracy. Firstly, problems of access of working-class people to cultural experiences of all kinds, because of cost, location and the increasing lack of cultural education in schools.
More from this author
MIKE QUILLE relishes political theatre at its most entertaining, engaging and effective
MIKE QUILLE is impressed by the rigorous Marxist approach to be found in a new book on the dialectics of art
ADAM THERON-LEE RENSCH talks to Mike Quille about what it is to be a working-class writer in the US and patronising perceptions of class that abound left, right and centre
Labour’s manifesto proposals for broadening access to culture are initiatives which will enhance the lives of millions, says MIKE QUILLE
Similar stories
ALISTAIR FINDLAY welcomes a collection of essays from one of the cultural left’s most respected speakers and activists
Successful communist projects have culture at their core, as it is fundamental to embedding revolutionary ideas among the people and preventing revisionist decay, writes JOHN PATEMAN, ahead of this month’s major conference in Barnsley
Artists are frequently first in line when it comes to cuts, but society as a whole is left all the poorer – it’s time they were properly valued, says ZITA HOLBOURNE of Artists Union England
VANESSA CORBY asks what will the arts do for everyday working people?