Tory policy dismantling of welfare and art schools killed working-class popular modernism

Evidence

Test Dept were one of the last examples of what has been called post-punk, but really they are part of a longer trajectory of art pop/pop art going back to the 1950s. The conditions for this popular modernism were subject to sustained attack in the mid-Eighties, and they have never recovered. The Tories began to dismantle the infrastructure of social security, higher-education maintenance grants, squatting and art schools that had given working-class people access to the resources of so-called high culture and time to produce their own sound, fiction and art. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1368

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s abiding theme of how material infrastructure — grants, squatting, art schools — underwrites cultural production, echoing ADDENDUM candidates about trees as infrastructure and institutions that enable creative labor. — connects to: Neoliberal education policy deliberately dismantled the art-school mixing of working-class culture and theory — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1541; Tory welfare cuts dismantled the welfare infrastructure that enabled working-class popular modernism; Neoliberal modernisation aimed to destroy non-market sources of social reproduction — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 354 (+1 more)
• QUESTION: Fisher’s causal claim that specific welfare cuts ended popular modernism invites testing — which precise policies, and how direct was the effect?

Broader Connections

• Tory welfare cuts dismantled the welfare infrastructure that enabled working-class popular modernism #corroborates (0.95)
• Neoliberal modernisation aimed to destroy non-market sources of social reproduction #expands (0.72) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 354