Solidarity Steve

The history of the working class and our stories are slowly dying, and will be repackaged and retold through the eyes of the establishment unless we act to save them.

As someone that argued for a long time for alternative left wing perspectives I welcomed and was overjoyed at the new media developments which have given rise to alternative left news media. These news sources are a welcome addition that was sorely missing ten years ago, but it doesn’t go far enough and it doesn’t go wide enough.

We cannot rely on the mainstream media or the capitalist funded media to tell our stories and struggles, we cannot rely on them to tell the authentic stories of the working class, we cannot rely on them to accurately depict the trade union movement and its importance in the world.

The left needs to be creating fictional content, dramas, comedy, documentaries and dipping its toe in to all aspects of media (gaming, tv, music etc).

There is a clear crisis of working class representation within the media world, and this would seek to rebalance that at every level and just as importantly it will help share our stories, our narratives and highlight our shared history.

It is imperative that the left helps keep working class history and culture alive, the lack of diverse working class content, the lack of our story has created a vacuum which has been filled by right wing narratives.

It won’t be easy.

This would be a huge undertaking and require an operation all of its own, there would be a lot of money and expertise involved which would be a hard burden for any one organisation to bear.

The best way would be to utilize the power and resources of the trade union movement. With the movement working together to commission joint content through a democratic union run production company and media channel.

The baby steps we are taking for the most part only preach to the converted but if we start creating engaging alternative content that has the potential to reach a wider audience, then it will help raise awareness of our shared history and help spread our culture and narratives.

It really could inform, educate and entertain.

The talkshows, the podcasts, the interviews they are all great but they predominately help working class aspiring journalists, what about actors, writers and all those working class individuals trying to tell working class stories?

In yesteryear we could at least partly rely on the BBC to commission content which portrayed working class life, with working class actors but as the BBC seeks to stamp out the left from its content, where do we go?

Simply put; we cannot rely on the establishment to keep our stories alive, we cannot rely on them to keep our history alive, we cannot rely on them to give the working class opportunities and we cannot trust them to authentically depict us.

We need to take it into our own hands, it is our history, they are our stories and they need to be told by us.

It is time we have content created by the working class, for the working class.