Summer remix - Live from the Raymond Williams Society, 2019

On April 26 and 27, 2019, seven months before Jeremy Corbyn led the British Labour party to unexpected defeat in a general election, the Raymond Williams Society held its annual conference. Now, in July 2024, as Keir Starmer celebrates a landslide victory for the Labour party, and a new Labour government prepares its long-term agenda, we present a completely re-edited and remixed look at the session on cultural democracy.

The conference addressed the topic: Cultural Production and the Redundancy of Work: precarity, automation and critique. The Movement for Cultural Democracy organised a panel at the conference and Sophie Hope, Nick Mahony and Stephen Pritchard spoke at it.

In this episode Sophie Hope describes some of the context to Owen Kelly, and we listen to live recordings of Nick and Stephen’s presentations.

Nick Mahony’s presentation, “Realising Cultural Democracy”, provides a historical background for the growth of the Movement for Cultural Democracy. He draws a link between the writing of Raymond Williams in The Long Revolution and the birth of this current manifestation of a movement for cultural democracy that began at The World Transformed in Liverpool, in September 2017.

Stephen Pritchard reflects on his childhood in Jarrow in a performance style lecture that uses video and archival sound recordings as part of the presentation. The presentation, “Home Is Where We Start From”, has a poetic air that weaves in critiques of the way working class culture has been deliberately co-opted or dismantled; and the ways in which gentrification and art-washing continue to attempt to do this.