Welfare-state spaces indirectly funded postwar Britain’s alternative culture

Evidence

Connected to this is the reduction in the amount of time that could be spent for purposes other than the kind of frenetic anxiety related to the world of work. That Tory book is really part of this attempt to impose such anxiety — we are not working hard enough, after all. What we have seen with the coalition government is the systematic shutting down of space where time could be used differently. This has a massive impact on culture, because it was within those spaces that any alternative culture could be produced. Many of the key developments in popular culture since the 1960s were facilitated by the space provided by the welfare state, social housing, etc. They amounted to a kind of indirect funding for cultural production. With those spaces closed down, much of the culture of late-capitalist Britain is moribund, miserable, repetitious and homogenous. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1670

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the standing ‘Grafting & Growth’ interest in infrastructure and indirect support systems, and to general questions about what social conditions enable creative production. — connects to: Postwar British labor education ran on state funding to voluntary workers’ associations — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 302; Welfare-state programs, not markets, produced extreme social mobility in the UK — Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous…, 18; The mid-twentieth-century welfare state extended middle-class access to the previously excluded — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1740 (+2 more)
• SEED: An essay angle: the welfare state as covert arts patronage — social housing, dole, and slack time as the real subsidy behind postwar pop culture.

Broader Connections

• Tory welfare cuts dismantled the welfare infrastructure that enabled working-class popular modernism #corroborates (0.88)
• The mid-twentieth-century welfare state extended middle-class access to the previously excluded #corroborates (0.75) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1740
• Welfare-state programs, not markets, produced extreme social mobility in the UK #qualifies (0.70) — Mark Blyth, Austerity, 18