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A Case Study: the Future of “Big Brum Theatre-in-Education Company.”
The Enlightenment took place some three hundred years ago. Until then working people had been regarded almost as cattle. In the Enlightenment scientists discovered new things about the world – Galileo, Newton, Descartes. They showed that authority had been wrong in its description of the world. So why should authority have been right in its description of people? – who after all were making the new discoveries about the world. This led to the need for a new political understanding. Kant dared people to think for themselves.
At the same time new ways of making money were discovered. Wealth no longer came only from the land. It also came from machinery, technology, science. But the political structures of the old world still dominated culture. The new society was forced into the old class structures. In effect the use of reason to understand ourselves (just as we could understand more about the world) was replaced by technology, by a new way of using the world. The working class had no land. It was stolen from them by the enclosure acts. So the working class was forced to work in the new factories and instead of being the new emancipated human beings they were still treated like cattle. This lead to increased political resistance and opposition, to modern ideas of democracy. It began mainly in Britain but it soon spread to other European counties and to America. These changes, technological and economic, led to an international struggle between foreign powers for two things: raw materials and even cheaper labour, For markets and manufacturing. Politics is usually in a state of confusion because it doesn’t just describe a situation but uses moral values to interpret it, and these vary culturally. These international tensions led to two world wars in which working people were asked to die to defend societies who were owned by the people who were exploiting them as if they were cattle. Obviously this led to more political unrest and agitation. Ideology couldn’t say we want you to die so that we can have bigger markets – instead you have to die for England or Great Britain (or as the case may be, for Germany). The first world war was fought to produce a land fit for heroes to live in – not for human cattle to live and die in poverty.
The economic battle for markets and profits produced the Great Depression of the interwar years. In turn this produced a new advanced form of exploitation: Fascism, which combines financial and economic contrivance with a distortion of imagination. There was a specific reason for the distortion of imagination. The next world war could not be fought, as wars had been in the past, on a call for obedience and duty. Because of the political changes I’ve mentioned, the involvement of the working class depended on their more active support. And so overnight the human cattle were transformed into patriotic warriors, the “yeomen of freedom” and into Das Volk. An extraordinary cultural transformation! It follows from the role of imagination in modern politics. Now in times of economic and social hardship, of international unrest, there will always be a turn to the political right – and as this solves nothing, then ultimately to the extreme right. Forty or so years ago this began to happen in this country. The post-war labour government had established a welfare state that was based not on “Das English Volk” but on the Enlightenment that began some three hundred years ago. But even in the welfare state society was still shockingly unjust. The old classes were still in power. So the working class – the majority class -- struck for a more just share in society and a greater say in government. It is extraordinary how even today the right wing press insists that this made the country ungovernable – they do this at the time when the biggest disaster ever produced by capitalism almost brought the country to its knees. The solution was to make the poor poorer. In response to Capitalism’s cycles of chaos, the right-wing made new pact with the devil. It devised a new financial and political system: it is called neo-liberalism, laissez faire allowed to run to an extreme. Financial controls were removed from bankers and financial institutions. The market would solve Capitalism’s problems. Everything was to be put up for sale in order to make greater profits. This is leading to the destruction of the “well-being–well doing--welfare society” and to the waste of the sacrifices of the millions of soldiers and workers who died to create it in world wars that failed to bury the past.
How is it possible for a modern technology society to produce poverty, neglect, waste and widen the gap between the poor and the rich? Thatcherism. Thatcher said there is no such thing as society. And ironically this was supposed to lead to Cameron’s Great Society. You can see how the corruption of imagination works in politics. Britain is not a Great Society, it is a sick society and its culture is sordid. This must happen when imagination and reason, culture and practicality, are torn apart. Society becomes dangerous. Poverty returns. But there is a new twist. We are now the entertainment society. In the last thirty years society has been gripped by a strange hysteria. It combines entertainment and spectacle with debt, anxiety, poverty and dread. When there is constant entertainment poverty is made to appear almost acceptable – at least to the rich. entertainment. This hysteria is strangely and symptomatically like that which gripped Nazi Germany in the thirties. Every day is a festival. When everything must be sold, when the market depends on quick sales, then manufacture itself becomes weirdly nihilistic -- everything is made banal, trivial, over-simplified, gaudy, trashy, without the complexities and subtleties that make us human. The market corrupts cultural imagination. Our culture is drowning in the effluent of Capitalism. Instead of imagination penetrating behind the appearance of things to reveal real human needs, it is used to stimulate greed and panic. Even the young are damaged. It is said that instead of being in the vanguard of reason and a source of creativity-- as is natural for youth – the young are becoming reactionary, turning to the right to find scapegoats to blame for their own inevitable lowly position on the economic slope – after all, at the base of the economy there will always be the many not the elite few. It is an economic fact that the base of the mountain must be broader than the heights.
To justify his rage against his enemies Hitler did not say they were human-cattle – he said they were not even human. If you describe any human being -- even one -- as non-human, then you have corrupted the imagination you need to understand your own humanness. Thatcher went one stage further than Hitler. She said there was no society. There were only the family and its incestuous financial doings. If there is no society there are no human beings because society is what makes us human. Thatcher’s market is a return to the human cattle market. It is the logic of neo-liberalism. Of course the effects of this will come slowly – but they will come. Thatcher has trespassed on the fundamental ground of human civilization – the amity of the community. Thatcherism is a loaded pistol under a tea-cosy
All societies have structures. There is an up and a down. But today in Britain we do not have this: we have an up and a down, down, down, down, down, down. What Big Brum’s performances and workshops bring to its young audiences is not entertainment, not the ceaselessly enervating stimulus of the market. It respects its audiences’ humanness and enables them to share their problems – which are serious --and their insights – which are profound – with each other. Many in these audiences are among the down down down down down. Now Big Brum’s future funding is under threat. If it is closed, its audiences will be forced one further stage down. Down down down down down – and down again. What Big Brum brings to its young audiences is not specious entertainment. It is the drama of society.
EB 19 2 2015