What Is A Culture War?
Media Round-Up:
The Horror Express (1972) - Very fun and silly horror film about a monster on a train in late Tsarist Russia. Every outfit here is PHENOMENAL.
The Suicide Squad (2021) - James Gunn is a really frustrating director/person who sits in that 'woke edgelord' category and this film really shows that. There are lots of fun things going on here but his insistence on being shocking and getting high on his own style, fucks the pacing and tonal texture of his films.
We're All Alone In This Together (2021) - Dave is very much an archetypal corny male spoken word poet, so there's a few cringe bits in here, but generally a hard-hitting album with some masterful touches and a STACKED set of features.
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In political circles, ‘culture war’ is the word of the day. From free speech to kneeling, there is a clear strategy from the Tory government (and their sycophants in the press) of using these ‘culture wars’ to score political points. What is much less clear is exactly what a ‘culture war’ is. I think there is a tendency for self-identified progressives to either fight these ‘wars’ on facile points with ‘facts + logic’, or to ignore them entirely as being fights detached from ‘real issues’. Here I want to try and nail down exactly what a culture war is and how it should be fought (if at all).
Generally the definitions of a culture war are about irreconcilably different sets of cultural values clashing for dominance. I want to push this a little further though, because that could cover almost anything, and in reality not everything gets called a culture war. As such I’m going to add some extra criteria for a culture war as is commonly understood in liberal/leftist discourse - where the term is most commonly used.
These criteria are that the point of conflict be:
Superficial: According to a KCL study: 77% of people agree that the media often makes the country feel more divided than it really is, including 33% who strongly agree.
Astro-turfed for political gain: To quote a Guardian article on the topic: “ “I think one of the mistakes people make when they talk about culture wars is they think that it’s something that necessarily sweeps up the whole of society, and everybody’s invested in it.” He thinks that more often than not it’s a dispute between two sides of an educated elite.”
Based in ‘culture’ rather than real/material/political issues: As put by Neil Mackay in the Scottish Herald “A culture war is what happens when a society hollows out and dies politically. And a culture war destroys the left and liberals. The right – especially the far right – thrives on culture wars. The left doesn’t, the left splits, and as a result loses. Often the left spends more time hating itself than it does the right. We seem to prefer purity purges to taking power and changing the world.”
Let’s put this slightly reductive representation of a common definition to the test.
The example I’ll use here is the debates over statues of controversial (read: abominable and bigoted) figures like Winston Churchill and Edward Colston. These long-standing debates were brought into the fore and made into a ‘culture war’ issues last summer when the statue of Edward Colston was toppled and thrown into Bristol Harbour. This obviously clears the first bar of being a clash of cultural values pretty easily, with a few relatively clear positions forming in terms of how we should think about these sorts of figures in the cultural consciousness.
Superficial
Are statues superficial? On some level they're pretty easy to ignore, I don't know the specifics of every statue that I walk past. They’re also largely aesthetic rather than having a direct effect on people’s material conditions. At the same time I’d say people of colour having to live in the shadows of their oppressors is important. Detaching emotions from our politic leads us down some very dark roads and I think a persistent push for empathy should be upheld.
Individual experience aside, a statue is more than a hunk of rock, it’s representative of the ideology of a space. There’s a reason why most statues of Confederate generals in the US were built during Jim Crow segregation rather than during/immediately after the Civil War. When you have slavers and imperialists being venerated with statues it reaffirms that these are who we as a society are being told to view as heroes and to fully accept their ideologies
Astro-Turfed
When we talk about these culture wars being astro-turfed we often erase the real grassroots movements which existed long before these individual issues were blown up onto a national scale. With statues there have been decades worth of grassroots interventions about the Edward Colston statue in Bristol. It’s presence is clearly something that has been a well-recorded concern for a substantial number of Bristol’s residents. A similar story goes for the various Cecil Rhodes statues and many others.
While the focus on statues may have been blown up by the media, it also very much reflects the broader issues about Britain’s refusal to reckon with the violence of its imperial past and present. That goes far deeper than a few days of front pages. It’s present in the education system, foreign aid, immigration and the very fundamentals of how Britain exists as both a state and a cultural object.
Culture Not Real
There is a tendency to try and separate these 'culture war' issues from 'real' ones - but that distinction is pretty arbitrary.
Take the example of the statues. On the surface it is separate from material issues. Statues aren't stopping anyone from paying their rent, or killing anybody. However, you have to consider that this bullshit narrative around history is what provides the cultural/intellectual backing for the continued refusal to pay any sort of reparations for the incredible harm enacted by the British state.
On a less celebral level culture if culture isn't substantive then why was practically every senior politician doing their best to flagshag as much as possibe during the Euros - a large cultural event.
Furthermore, to borrow from Black Marxist thought, it is worth questioning what we do and don't consider to be 'material'. Why is race or gender not considered a material condition when surely they have both substantive effects much like class, much like how class isn't some sort of concrete biological thing unaffected by culture/social relations. To paraphrase Kieron (@decolonialcommi), without serious interrogation 'material/substantive' can just mean 'things I feel comfortable talking about', which often shuts off conversations surrounding violences towards minority groups.
At risk of sounding like an infographic from 2016 - everything is political. To draw the line between culture and politics is nonsense.
As people seeking liberation we shouldn't completely dismiss culture wars. Inf fact, we need to stand up for people who bear the brunt of them, because while they may be abstract intellectual exercises for some, for others they cause a real increase in the tangible violences they experience. This could be seen with how the 'culture war' over statues led a swarm of the fash to assemble around the Winston Churchill statue in Parliament Square.
At the same time, we need to look beyond the surface level and unpack the fundamental ideologies. There's no point going back and forth over whether trans athletes should be allowed to compete in sport without unpacking where that conversation sits in terms of the broader construction of gender and the racialised elements therin. It also needs to be placed in the wider reality that many trans people cannot access the healthcare they need due to ridiculously long NHS lines and the expense of the private market.
Crucially if we are going to fight these 'wars' then they have to be on our terms not theirs. Going back and forth with miserable hateful middle-aged middle-class white women over whether Terry Pratchett supported TERFs or not is fighting on their terms. Loudly shouting about how the England players are actually descendents of immigrants is fighting on their terms.
Fuck that. Each battle can have its own purpose, whether that's for education, improvement of living conditions, solidarity or something else entirely. We win by setting the terms for our own liberation, holding fast to those aims and following through.
I’m less online lately, but whsiper on the winds and maybe you’ll fine me! Always appreciate your support whether that’s verbal, financial (ko-fi.com/tayowrites) or whatever else.