By Stefan Szczelkun It was a pragmatic thought. Could working-class artists be made more visible in the world through using published books? Could they slip onto the shelves…

Continuing the Our Culture series, John Pateman exposes the hidden class politics of Britain’s public libraries. Far from being neutral spaces of learning, he argues they were hijacked to be instruments of social control designed to instill bourgeois values although still retained a positive educational function for working people. He traces their history from the working-class pithead libraries to today’s funding crises, and asks how libraries might yet be transformed into genuinely democratic, community-led spaces serving working-class needs.

In our ongoing Our Culture Series, we examine how art and media reflect, and too often distort, the realities of working-class life in Britain. In this essay, filmmaker and writer Brett Gregory explores the systemic barriers that have killed off British working-class cinema, from the film schools he has worked in to the funding bodies that decide on what reaches our screens. This isn’t just an obituary, it’s a reminder that working-class storytelling still takes place in everyday life, on phones, in classrooms, and across the internet on places like YouTube; even if the British movie industry has turned its back on the working class, that once made it great.

Our Culture is a new series from Culture Matters exploring the relationship between culture and capitalism through a Marxist and dialectical lens. The series investigates how capitalism extracts value and integrity from culture, turning creativity into commodity, yet still leaving space for subversive and emancipatory potential. It also seeks to imagine what a democratic culture could look like under a future left government, outlining realistic policies and ideas for change.

In this interview, Culture Matters contributor Jenny Farrell discusses the meaning of culture as a field of class struggle. Between the “first culture” of the ruling class and the “second culture” of the working class. Looking to Marx, Lenin, and Gramsci, she argues that culture is never neutral. It either reinforces domination or becomes a tool of resistance. Alan McGuire then follows up with questions that deepen the conversation and set the pace for the series to come.