Journal of Class & Culture - Volume 1, Issue 2, 2022

This article argues that even if working-class literature has often been marginalized within literary studies, scholars interested in it – including scholars within the field of working-class studies – should not alienate themselves from that discipline. Instead, they should claim a space for the study of working-class literature within it. The main reason for this is that the insistence on working-class literature’s literariness will contribute to a more solid theorizing of it, which will also benefit its study within other contexts, such as working-class studies. The argument is based on a discussion of Swedish working-class poet Stig Sjödin (1917–93) and his reception by literary historians. Sjödin was active both on the book market and within the labour movement. However, the latter part of his oeuvre has been largely ignored within literary studies, which illustrates the narrow understanding of literature within the discipline. Drawing on theories put forward by Marjorie Perloff and Rita Felski, the article argues that the study of working-class and labour movement literature can function as a catalyst for challenging this understanding and for promoting a more inclusive conceptualization of literature and literary aesthetics.

The National Union of Journalists (NUJ) has reporting poverty guidelines for its 25k+ members to use alongside its code of conduct. These were introduced following a campaign from trade union activists and are now available to media workers in the industry including, among others, staff at the BBC, the tabloid and broadsheet press. These guidelines were created to challenge the demonizing and stereotyping of the working poor and people in receipt of benefits found in British journalism. In this article these guidelines are contextualized, within the ideology of austerity, a British media dominated by the middle and upper class and the resulting demonizing of the poor during economic crises. This article posits that the campaigning work can provide a theoretical and practical challenge to encourage and enable workers to join forces in rejecting the scapegoating of low-paid, unemployed and under-employed workers as seen in the media. In so doing, it considers that, while the guidelines may have limited influence in some sections of the media, they are nonetheless a significant tool, and position of solidarity, in challenging the depoliticizing individualizing apparent in reporting poverty, the ‘skivers versus strivers’ discourse, and in providing a critique of the journalistic use of sources. This article, written by a contributor to those guidelines and leader of the NUJ campaign, serves as an introduction to this unique British trade union approach informed and led by collaboration with people who have experienced of poverty.

Access to the theatre industry is often frustrated through lack of experience. Many theatre companies have a stated aim to widen participation in order to fully represent the communities and society that they work in. This study assesses how opening up access to the rehearsal room can embolden and accelerate change as well as encourage a multiplicity of routinely marginalized voices to speak and be heard. It seeks to ask whether opening access to the rehearsal room has benefits for participants, companies and the industry at large. In this context, opening the rehearsal room means to facilitate observation access for those not directly involved in the production. After a nascent, small-scale version of the observation offer, a questionnaire was circulated to those who were invited and/or actively participated in the observation offer with conclusions drawn from responses and other related contextualizing literature. The results suggest that the offer can help to increase participation, with suggestions as to how it can be fine-tuned in further, future iterations.

This article introduces a new dialectical framework of the Necrocene, which presents a binary choice between two possible futures, immediate catastrophe or imminent utopias. The first future, immediate catastrophe, is post-capitalist and post-human underpinned by an adherence to business-as-usual capitalism. The second proposition imminent utopia is imagined as a post-capitalist and post-growth future defined by economics that are eco-socially balanced. Therefore, while the political status quo is predominantly concerned with scrambling to save capitalism and peddling the myth of green growth these dialectics quickly direct us to a profoundly different path. A path defined by a particular eco-socialist perspective on the need to transcend capitalism and its ecocidal growth imperative as a revolutionary necessity. Although this position is not in itself novel to radical socialist and ecological politics, the article finds that an intellectual preoccupation with distant utopias significantly outweighs the practical strategic considerations relating to the messy and uncertain but essential work of anti-capitalist struggle in the here and now. To this end, it argues for imminent utopias to be enacted through a revolutionary praxis of prefiguration, embracing the uncertainty of the current historical moment, as an opportunity to actively forge post-capitalist relations that prioritizes economies of care, eco-social balance and collective flourishing.

This short article draws on the personal experiences of a working-class activist involved in the campaign to save the local libraries in the area in which she was born and grew up. It explores the difficulties involved in being a working-class activist in what are predominantly middle-class political spaces dominated by those who do not have grass root connections to the community. It considers the gulf between middle-class approaches to, and understandings of, activism when compared to those of working-class people. In doing so it draws a distinction between activists who are from the communities where the work takes place and who need and use the services under threat and those who support the fight to save the libraries but consider the people who live in the community as ‘deprived‘. The author questions whether it is possible to reconcile the two in a way that can promote social justice and reduce oppression.