WARNING: May Contain Cuts

Here is an article by Tom Houseman (Sense of Urgency/Rising Strike) that will feature in the next issue of the fanzine, which is due out next month. Enjoy.

WARNING: May Contain Cuts

After decades of spin doctors, broken promises, and bare-faced lies, it should at last be widely acknowledge that the lifeblood of British politics is misdirection. With that in mind, it is bizarre that we have taken at face value the coalition government’s zealous imposition of its cuts. “We all have to do our bit”, chant the slack-jawed public into the reporter’s microphone, as if repetition will suffice in the absence of thought or discussion. The more sophisticated version of this mantra is the claim that “I’m not happy about it, but public sector workers/students/the arts have to shoulder their share of the burden”. Underlying this claim is the ultimate misdirection: by assuming that the state (i.e. the taxpayer) should only pay for things that contribute to the economy, we’re making massively important statements about what society is and should be – and as long as these statements slip under the radar of public debate, austerity budgets will continue to go unopposed.

Education, like art, is not an investment. It should not be judged in terms of its expected financial return, as it has an intrinsic value not captured by its profitability. More importantly, education and art are completely disfigured when left to the brutal logic of cost and benefit. The students who, increasingly, make their university choices with only careers in mind will only learn what is useful for business, until academia is nothing more than the training of the account managers and sales executives of tomorrow. If art is only viable in spaces that attract the approval of private financiers, at best, it will only ever reflect the preferences, lives and experiences of the rich. At worst, it will go the way of all cultural commodities, becoming ever cheaper and more disposable. (In this way, acquiescing to the cuts is tantamount to making the X Factor the model for all creativity).

Lurking behind the increase in university fees and the various cuts to the arts, to education, to public services, and to benefits, is the awful inner logic of a society in which capitalism sets the terms of debate. The government is trying to abdicate our responsibility as a society to guarantee the integrity of things that would be destroyed or mutilated if left to the logic of the market. They are attempting to render all social life subservient to the open competition of narrowly-defined self-interest. As any sane person can recognise, such naked competition will only ever have one result: those with the necessary resources will acquire yet more, while those born with little will die with nothing.

Learning for learning’s sake, art for art’s sake, genuine democracy, and protection from extreme poverty, are not luxuries that can be restricted to those that can afford it when a nation finds itself strapped for cash. They are society itself. If we do not protect these fragile spaces from the overbearing logic of the market, they will wither and die, leaving us with nothing other than a new feudalism, where we serfs eke out an immiserated existence, paying tribute to the Lord-Bankers for little more than the right to keep working for them.