Revolutionary Socialism in the 21st Century
 
Revolutionary
Socialism in the
21st Century

2024 cultural highlights

rs21 members

As the year draws to a close, rs21 members review their cultural highlights of 2024.

Grinny by David R (North London) 

I have been enjoying Sam Leith’s The Haunted Wood, a wry history of the books written for children, from the didactic Christian manuals of two hundred years ago to the likes of Anthony Browne and Raymond Briggs. Leith, in turn, put me on to the novels which were around in my childhood but which I’d missed the first time around. 

Two that I read this year are Nicholas Fisk’s books Grinny (1973) and You Remember Me! (1984). In the first, a monster occupies the home in which Tim and Beth live. She hypnotises the adults, while she makes preparation for an invasion. Beth unravels the mystery first, seeing through her surrogate grandmother’s strange questions, before Tim too experiences the creature’s alienness, beginning with the monstrous grip of her metal claw. 

Grinny returns disguised in the second of Fisk’s books, to lead a fascist conspiracy (the ‘Rule of Law’). In strict, literary, terms You Remember Me! is an inferior book. The author finds it harder to generate tension when the reader knows who the antagonist is. But the book contains some smart passages on why not to trust fascism. The journalist Fanny delivers a set-piece lecture to Tim, who is slow at spotting the enemy the second time around. ‘When you see some magic-type person, a public person,’ Fanny says, ‘hogging the media to talk about bringing back the birch, and hanging, it’s time to get a little nervous. Because the person who gets beaten or hanged might turn out to be someone you know.’ Then, when that warning isn’t enough to persuade him, she goes on, ‘When that sort of person talks about action groups, and banded-together brotherhoods of citizens and vigilantes – get terrified. Because the person who gets dragged away in the middle of the night for a flogging might turn out to be you. Yes, you – simply because you’re a decent, normal, pleasant, dim human being.’

The right-wing rulers we had to face in the 1980s weren’t the same as the ones of the 1930s, and the right has gone through another generational renewal since. But the novel’s warning is as necessary now as it was then. 

All We Imagine as Light by jst (East London)

Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light explores caste, class, gender, racialisation and family. It is framed through the lives of two Malayalee nurses navigating Mumbai’s intense and relentless streets. Time feels compressed in the city and the film’s slow pacing, dreamlike quality, and use of light unravel the fantasies and fissures beneath Mumbai’s surface. Sometimes harsh realities are displayed, like Islamophobia and forced eviction by property developers, and we are forced to read a billboard, in English: ‘Class is a privilege. Reserved for the privileged.’ Through their journey, the women interrogate cultural attitudes about marriage, what a woman should be and what kind of family one should have. They challenge rigid and dominant expectations. The film ultimately asks: ‘How can displaced people reshape the city?’ It offers glimmers of hope as the women reorient their fate and forge new bonds of solidarity through love, friendship, and work.

First Dog on the Moon by Charlie H (East London) 

A ‘cultural highlight’ of a rather different sort – not a book, recording or gig, but rather an online cartoonist. Australia’s First Dog on the Moon, published online (and occasionally in print) by the Guardian.

Political cartooning done badly can be dire, but when it works it illuminates issues and people better than writing can – a picture that makes you laugh is worth several thousand words. In their very different ways, Steve Bell and Garry Trudeau (Doonesbury) have over decades beautifully skewered the venality, stupidity and sheer awfulness of British and American politics and politicians. The First Dog does the same with Australian politics, with the spur of climate change giving his work an even sharper edge.

Like Steve Bell, his work features talking (and often very angry) animals – Brenda the Civil Disobedience Penguin, Fiona the Unpaid Bettong Intern, and from their side Senator Ian the Climate Denialist Potato. A joyous blend of satire, surrealism and sheer silliness, his work is also explicitly anti-capitalist, feminist and anti-racist, but never preachy. The world needs more ‘anarcho-marsupialist’ cartoonists.  

A love letter to the creativity of the everyday by Sabrina H (South London) 

I don’t consider myself a particularly ‘cultured’ person. I can probably count the number of art galleries and museums I’ve been to on the fingers of my hands. I frequently make it my new year’s resolution to finally become an ‘art person’, by starting to take advantage of London’s many cultural opportunities. 

Perhaps strangely for an ‘uncultured person’, my favourite political philosopher is Theodor Adorno. Adorno’s writing reflects his broad interest in literature, music, theatre and more. In many ways, I thought to be ‘cultured’ is to be like Adorno – deeply engrossed in different expressions of ‘high art’, and its critical analysis. But in the last few months, something in my attitude to art has shifted. Maybe it is not necessary to become this kind of ‘art person’ to appreciate culture. 

That is why my cultural highlight of 2024 is the creativity of the everyday – the art, music, writing and theorising that is produced by friends and comrades as part of their regular lives. I love going to my local alternative pub and watch as one of the regulars sits at his usual spot at the bar, drawing sketches that then will be taped, pride-of-place, behind the liquor shelves. I feel flooded with joy when standing front row at my friend’s band’s gig, admiring the skills that go into writing their own music, and bringing it to live with instruments. I highly enjoy the camaraderie of the many banner making sessions I participated in this year – not just a piece of mass-produced visual propaganda that is picked up from the curbside at a big protest, but a result of our collective, creative, political production. And I have already learned a lot from attending the rs21 Art Group and Writing Group in the last few months. 

Even if none of these examples hang in any of London’s many museums and galleries, they have shifted my perspective, encouraged me to think more deeply about art and politics and moved me when I needed something to give me joy and happiness. And perhaps this is enough to be an ‘art person’ and ‘culture enjoyer’ in the new year.  

Ghostly Past, Capitalist Presence by Neil R (North London)

The most interesting book I read was Tithi Bhattacharya’s Ghostly Past, Capitalist Presence. It tells the tale of how the old but delightful ghosts of precolonial Bengal who lived in the trees, gardens and the wild areas of the ‘world’ were replaced by the frightening gothic spectres of the ‘home’ under colonial modernity. It explores how and why this happened: through the dissemination of ‘colonial knowledge’, the creation of a new ‘Hindu’ nation by the upper-class and upper-caste Bhadralok and the development of a ‘scientific spiritualism’ in the new public meeting rooms and homes of Bengal. It is a fascinating and very readable story.

After the Party by Colin F (South London)

Too much of drama on TV is about the police, and much could be termed copaganda. So it was refreshing to realise After the Party on Channel 4 is not about the police and even though they are involved they are portrayed as fairly marginal. The lead character is Penny, brilliantly played by Robyn Malcolm. She is a spirited, experienced teacher who has her pupils’ interests at heart and supports them in ways that the school authorities don’t always appreciate.  

It’s when Penny perceives a problem closer to home that she speaks out and faces some serious flack for doing so. Is she right or is she misguided? This is the question that the series keeps the audience asking throughout its six episodes. If you are looking for TV which reflects the world we live in, and the oppression that needs to be challenged, After the Party could be for you. (Content warning: this show contains sexual abuse) 

Anora by Jonas M (Stoke)

The standout film this year was Palme d’Or winner, Anora. Topping the lists at Cannes, Sean Baker’s latest cinematic odyssey follows the story of Brooklyn sex worker Annie, as she seemingly discovers love in a set of encounters with a new client. Building a reputation as someone who tells stories of society’s marginalised and castigated, Baker offers us a comic and relentlessly-paced glimpse into the world of oligarchic power. Through the lens of a Romeo and Juliet-style relationship between sex worker and client, Mikey Madison’s wonderfully portrayed Annie confronts the realities of class and patriarchy when her new lover’s family want to disown her by any means necessary. I watched a lot of good films this year, but none made me laugh, swept me with anticipation and put me squarely in the camp of the film’s protagonist as much as Anora did. Watch it!

The Hole by David L (Manchester)

One of my cultural highlights for 2024 has been reading the novella The Hole by the Mexican communist José Revueltas. Written during his time in Mexico’s Lecumberri prison for taking part in the student uprisings of 1968, Revueltas depicts the attempt by three prisoners kept in the titular confinement cell to bring heroin into the prison via one of their mothers. Rather than depict heroic students or protestors who might better serve a particular sensibility or sympathy, Revueltas instead portrays subjects often considered ‘wretched’: criminalised addicts whose only concern is their next fix to escape the literal panopticon hell they find themselves in. 

The novella is a powerful and searing criticism of carceral barbarism and the spectacle of punishment. The violence of the prison implicates all within it: the guards engage in it so casually and gleefully. The prisoners are seemingly little better. But despite their own selfishness, when the prisoners eventually violently confront the guards, they seize a kind of dignity, however momentary, from resistance. The guards in contrast know only how to apply force, and in doing so dehumanise themselves, being referred to as ‘apes’ throughout the novella. As the Labour government pushes for more prisons to be built, works like The Hole remind us that they will only ever be sites of class war and theatres of cruelty that will only worsen the problems in our society.

Ipswich Town Football Club by Luke E (South London) 

As a left wing person from Suffolk it is sometimes hard to find cultural events that evoke that sense of home or pride of place. Adulthood is too often a long drawn out process of successive disappointment in the adults and institutions you grew up with, as you learn the way they see the world and get more clarity on the lives they lead. In this context my cultural highlight was a rare bright light in my thoughts and relationship to ‘home’: Ipswich Town football club got promoted!

Going from a record fifteen seasons straight in the second division of English football, finishing just about nowhere every season, to relegation, and then suddenly to promotion again, to a wild and ridiculous successive promotion (with more last-second goals than I could dream of) against all odds, was absolutely electrifying to watch. More than (or maybe just equal to) the joy of winning games, the slight nudge to message old mates and catch up again was well needed and the weekly chat about the football has rekindled relationships with people who haven’t disappointed me, reminded me that there is love and light back home even if it’s not as prevalent as five year old me believed.

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