For the last 35 years, arts and culture, in the form of the “creative industries”, have been primarily valued as a driver of economic growth. This connection was more than a marriage of convenience, whereby the sector simply used metrics of gross value added (GVA), employment, or innovation spillovers as advocacy tools for government funding. Rather, it was a powerful economic imaginary. The idea of cultural industries emerged in the 1980s. This was a time of deindustrialisation, when many old industrial cities believed that lost jobs could be replaced by the kinds of cultural activities quite literally occupying the newly vacant factories and warehouses. The cultural industries were viewed as part of a new post-Fordist economy, in which standardised goods gave way to niche customisation, an expanded service sector, and the growing importance of knowledge “intangibles” in production.

Goods with a high “aesthetic” content and services that provided “experiences” proliferated, driven by individualised lifestyles. Production of high-touch, customised goods and services required the embodied aesthetic know-how and “out of the box” innovation traditionally associated with artists. Cultural industries thus went from being a pre-industrial artisanal hangover to post-Fordist bleeding edge almost overnight. This was the flip side to the belief that the new consumption economy, uncoupled from utilitarian need and driven by infinite – because insatiable – desire, would generate new demand for high-profit consumer goods, stimulate investment, and counter the signs of economic slowdown that had been around since the mid-1970s.

It was this structural connection to post-Fordist growth, rather than clever advocacy metrics, which gave the creative industries a forward-oriented, even utopian, aspect in the later 1990s. They were closely linked to the new agglomeration economies of cities, now released from their nation-state containers to swim in global flows – an urban “renaissance” generating a sense of metropolitan autonomy coupled to the progressive politics of an educated, professional class.

But before the turn of the millennium, the links to European-style social market economies had given way to the creative entrepreneurialism of Silicon Valley. This shift was exemplified by the profoundly a-social market definition of creative industries given by the UK government in 1998, as “those activities that originate from individual creativity, skill, and talent, with the potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property”. This seemed to hand the keys of the future over to the “creative class”. For, as Richard Florida suggested, “if workers control the means of production today that is because it is inside their heads; they are the means of production.”

A failed vision

As it turned out, “creatives” remained factors in a production process controlled by those who owned the IP for the hardware and software systems within which cultural production was rapidly subsumed and the hedge fund capital that financed them – a tendency only accelerated by predatory AI systems. If the 1990s promised flat hierarchies, networked production, and grassroots innovation, by 2025 six out of the 10 largest corporations on the planet were involved in the production and/or distribution of culture – the ecosystems of which they increasingly dominate.

The upshot of this creative utopian vision was the marginalisation of culture in public policy. Government expenditure on culture in OECD countries sits at pre-2008 levels, despite growth in total government spending. Indeed, though culture was now an industry, the strategic levers applied to it were pure innovation neoliberalism – promotion of entrepreneurship, skills, and networking, public sector outsourcing, management by economic performance metrics – rather than the kind of state-led industrial strategies seen in China and South Korea.

Whether culture should be an industry or not, the capacity of neoliberal states to actually engage in industrial development was extremely limited. As the platforms and monopolies suck the life out of the cultural ecosystem, the sector has suffered a serious erosion of conditions. Cultural workers were never full professionals – their career paths were not clear, their associations (if there were any) rarely controlled entry and work conditions. But if the professional class is in decline more generally, then the creatives are in freefall. Employment in the creative industries is concentrated in metropolitan cities, and in particular parts of those cities.

The social context in which 1980s cultural industries emerged – cheap rent and public housing, free education, welfare payments, a social infrastructure of civic institutions and associations – has also disappeared. As the economic argument for culture stumbled and sources of income dried up, the advocacy game moved on to proving economic worth via social impact – health and wellbeing, social cohesion, tourism, and other “spillovers” – expressed as complex fractions of GDP using convoluted metrical calculations worthy of a 16th-century astrologer. More recently, culture is to be seen as the soft power complement to Europe’s rearmament drive. And so on.

In any event, the Faustian bargain between culture and economic growth has now been sprung. If the cultural sector agreed to self-identify as “industry” as a condition of state funding, it is now being asked by the UK government to give up its collective IP to the AI tech bros in order to boost productivity – for the greater national good. In the face of this, the cultural sector stands mute, as years of industrial and impact metrics have hollowed out its sense of value. But what exactly is the role of arts and culture in the modern polity?

The Faustian bargain between culture and economic growth has now been sprung.

Culture as foundational

In my book Culture Is Not an Industry, I try to argue that art and culture should be seen as part of the social foundations, alongside health, education, social services, and basic infrastructure. I used Nancy Fraser’s notion of “Cannibal Capitalism”, wherein capitalism relies on “non-economic” systems of regulation, political legitimacy, ecological sustainability, and social reproduction (child-raising, education, nurture, etc.) – systems that, nonetheless, it systemically undermines in its search for ever-expanded profits. Like the ouroboros, it eats its own tail. I argue that culture is also part of social reproduction (and is similarly being devoured), in which case, to place culture under industry and economic development is a fundamental category mistake. It should stand with the other social foundations and not be forced to serve economic development.

But this immediately hits a problem. Many who would broadly agree with this emphasis on the social foundations would struggle to include culture within it. If foundational liveability is a matter of ensuring the supply of universal basic services for most citizens, most of the time, how does culture fit in? Isn’t the proliferation of fabricated cultural desires and their ancillaries in fashion, travel, Instagram and TikTok, online shopping – the whole lifestyle-entertainment complex – deeply implicated in the sorts of useless, wasteful consumption that has brought us to the current systemic crisis? More generously, is not art and culture a matter of discretionary spending rather than need, something pleasurable that comes after, once the basics have been met? After all, art is not food, water, or housing.

Certainly, it is easy to dismiss popular culture as hedonistic and destructive, though there is often a scent of an older, patronising view of “mass culture” here that we should be wary of. Perhaps it is more useful to view culture as a capability rather than a need (or a luxury). Amartya Sen emphasises the capabilities that allow citizens to live “the lives they have reason to value”. This certainly does require material resources – as Hegel said, “secure at first food and clothing, and the kingdom of God will come to you of itself.” But foundational cultural provision, like education, with which it is closely aligned, equips citizens with the ability to fully engage in culture, to participate in the shared “rules of the game”, in which our active individual parole works in relation to a common langue. It involves a capacity to evaluate and judge our shared values and traditions, as articulated through art and culture, which is crucial to democratic life. Citizenship is then less a right or status than an activity of decision and choice where we are defined as much by shared meanings as shared needs.

Infrastructure, ecosystem, civil society

The cultural foundations can be seen as an infrastructure, a material apparatus or assemblage of cultural and educational institutions, spaces of preservation, learning, production and consumption, and the provision of cultural funding and support that allow individuals to acquire the capability to “fully participate in the cultural life of the community”, as the UN Declaration of Human Rights has it. This requires public funding and local democratic participation. This is not about funding “market failure” – funding things that, unfortunately, cannot be made to pay on the market. Rather it is about an explicit public, democratic commitment to providing the foundations by which everyone can participate in culture as far as they want to.

But a lot of cultural activity takes place outside or on the periphery of direct state funding, in the realm of civil society. These are ecosystems of small-scale businesses and embedded markets, community economies and non-commodity exchanges of the commons, art and cultural fields that are located on the edges of the fully transactional commercial sectors. These local cultural ecosystems make our towns and cities worth living in. Though not directly publicly funded, they produce public goods that we all share and enjoy: the book and record stores, the small performing venues, the side-alley galleries and pop-up cinemas, vibrant cafes and bars, local craft and fashion spaces, festivals and street markets. These ecosystems are facing a crisis, their public goods rapidly being privatised as the air is sucked out of the system by predatory platforms, big finance, hospitality chains, and real estate.

Perhaps it is more useful to view culture as a capability rather than a need (or a luxury).

The question, then, is not just about levels of state funding for cultural infrastructure but how national and local governments can find new ways of protecting the ecosystem of local embedded markets and variegated spaces of the commons. How to produce public goods that help sustain this non-state sector, to support local ecosystems that are disappearing into the maw of the capitalist ouroboros.

This is not just a local problem, however, for the predatory algorithms of platforms reach deep into the eyes and ears, into the excitable frontal lobe receptors, of everyone’s lived experience. The AI juggernaut, driven fast and furious over the political, legal, and digital sovereignty of so many nation states – and towns and cities – is currently set to fundamentally restructure our cultural and communications system with next to no democratic debate. A Gutenbergian revolution driven by a bunch of alt-right sociopaths in Northern California.

This will require strong, concerted pushback at many different scales. It will be a tough battle, but it cannot be fought without a strong sense of the social and political purpose served by arts and culture. Ultimately, it is a foundation of free citizenship, of individual and collective development in common, one based on an affective, aesthetic (related to the senses), imaginative, and embodied symbolic space of collective communication and meaning making. Images and sounds, movements and rhythms, and forms of poetic language speak to us about our place in the world. They allow a form of collective meaning-making, a distinct mode of symbolic knowledge not available to abstract-rational discourse, providing an indispensable, if sometimes opaque, contribution to our shared social life. The transformative ideals we place on culture relate to the creative freedom we experience through the capacity to enjoy, engage, participate, make, experience, critique, and celebrate art and culture.

As Dylan Riley recently wrote, civil society is not some singular agent but a site of Gramscian struggle for hegemony. It is a struggle that the broad left-of-centre, and even the small “c” conservative right, are currently losing. As Kaiser Y. Kuo wrote, “We’re left here in America, and perhaps in the West more broadly, with free speech devoid of shared meaning, innovation without a shared purpose, and pluralism without a civic scaffold sturdy enough to hold it.” The fight for a cultural infrastructure is not just about finance but about politics, about confronting “the systematic destruction of the cognitive and social infrastructure that makes cooperation possible in the first place”.

Growth?

Is there then no relationship between culture and the growth agenda? In direct terms, it’s pretty minimal; the economic “footprint” of the cultural sector is dwarfed by that of social services, health and education, housing, and infrastructure. In some cases, restricting the role of AI in culture and social media might actually reduce GDP (along with the emissions from data centres).

Indeed, for many, culture’s primary relation should be to sustainability, even degrowth. This ranges from measures to reduce the carbon footprint of the production-consumption cycle of art and culture to using them to inculcate ideas of climate emergency and sustainable living. But, apart from AI, culture’s carbon footprint is not that large compared to, say, construction or transport, and it is hard to see how initiatives in this area can compete with the mass production of renewables or replacing cement, all of which require massive state direction. So too, the cultural sector’s ability to change minds is of different order to that required to build the political coalition for a serious green transition. Which, of course, is not to say these sustainability goals should not be undertaken by the cultural sector.

Jason Hickel, a well-known proselytist for degrowth, writes that “those who sought to pave the way for capitalism in the 16th century had to destroy other, more holistic ways of seeing the world.” This made people adopt a dualist philosophy “leveraged to cheapen life for the sake of growth; and it is responsible at a deep level for our ecological crisis”. On the one hand, this looks to an epochal, if not civilisational, cultural change that goes beyond anything cultural policy could handle. On the other, it reduces modernity to a particular worldview, ignoring powerful counter-currents in European thought that have long challenged this dualist, extractivist and growth-oriented worldview.

From our perspective here, culture’s long opposition to “economy” (however hypocritical and self-serving this has often been) and its articulation of very different ways of seeing the world represent a crucial resource in any project of fundamental social transformation. Indeed, we might say that rather than being a means of climate-sustainable awareness-raising, the very act of investing in cultural infrastructures and ecosystems as foundational to sustainable liveability would itself be a sign that we were overcoming the dualist-capitalist worldview.

More recently, there’s been a new “left productivism”, a call for a new industrial growth strategy in which the modernist promise of abundance can be fulfilled. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s bestseller Abundance is centrist “new deal” but barely “green”. But Matt Huber, Keir Milburn and others present a heroic growth agenda embedded within socialist and ecological ideals.

Few involved in this new growth agenda mention culture, a strong exception being Mariana Mazzucato. Already in her account of the “mission economy”, the heroic purpose of transformation is to be equally shared by the guy sweeping the floor at NASA all the way up to the scientists and astronauts at the pointy end of the moonshot. In her latest pamphlet, on the public value of arts and culture, she has an epigraph from Saint-Exupéry: “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood… Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.” The forms of “arts and culture” in play here are very wide, ranging from the shared culture of communities, to cultural festivals such as Notting Hill Carnival, and to the BBC with its economic and technological spillovers. This “culture” is to be used, somehow, to shape people around an ambitious economic mission, though it is not really clear what this mission is, other than a green and just transition. Signing up culture for such an open, unspecified mission is not necessarily something that will generate buy-in. But in any case, with such a big and amorphous lever as “culture”, it is unlikely to be very effective, even if it does give some colour and glamour.

Conservation and emancipation

Benign as this mission might be, using culture as an ideological-emotional tool to shape a new economy is also to re-instrumentalise it. Of course, moments of momentous renewal and transformation can call into being the great designers, architects, sculptors, and artists associated with other such moments – the Bauhaus and New Deal that Mazzucato evokes (and we might add Haussmann’s Paris, early 1920s St Petersburg, the Festival of Britain, or, to be honest, the early days of Italian fascism).

But rather than viewing culture as a means to shape an economic mission, these are surely signs that the vision has already gone beyond economics, to value acts of creation and imagination as an essential element of the mission’s end goal. Faced with these heroic calls, evoking Raymond Massey in The Shape of Things to Come, or even Gary Cooper in The Fountainhead, I am always tempted to remember Baudelaire’s spleen, or Dostoevsky’s underground man, or the darker moments of Joy Division. Art as freedom is also sometimes critique and refusal. Negative dialectics.

Art as freedom is also sometimes critique and refusal. Negative dialectics.

In all this, we should not forget those other traditions that were also wary of untrammelled growth and unexamined progress: the small “c” conservatism of writers such as Edmund Burke or T.S. Eliot, those who look to tradition, sanctioned hierarchies, long-standing institutions and rituals of religion, civic life, and family. Burke’s idea of society as a “contract… not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born”, was aimed at the French Revolution, but it can also apply to contemporary notions of culture as well as “sustainable development”. This conservatism has been a victim of accelerated capitalist growth, of the neoliberal ouroboros. It faces the profound uprooting of traditions, the shattering of the established foundations of family and community life, and waves of ontological insecurity that have unmoored us from any shared vectors of meaning, fragmented by a hyper-individualistic media sphere.

We on the Left might bring a tradition of cultural critique and artistic autonomy, a questioning of authority and holding it to account, a confidence in our ability to rule ourselves, individually and collectively, thus leaving behind our “self-incurred tutelage”, as Kant had it. This is the radical enlightenment bargain that our tradition of art and culture forms a part of. This may now rightly be subject to post-colonial reckonings – and those of women, ethnic minorities, queer people – and all those who fell afoul of that conflicted endeavour for enlightenment.

But we are faced with a radical onslaught from the tech bros and their alt-right allies, in which every aspect of human experience is lined up for control and commodification, just as any sense of justice is to be swept away as irrelevant to techno-progress. Then some form of radical enlightenment, one that knows also how to conserve and sustain – culturally, not just environmentally – might be the order of the day. We are only just waking up to the fact that art and culture are not luxuries but rather were neoliberalism’s first privatisation, the reduction of a fundamental realm of human experience to that of a rational-individual consumption economy. Perhaps culture could help show the way out?