Race to the Bottom: Proletarianization and Racialization in the British Theatre
I spoke today at an excellent conference in Glasgow organised by Liz Tomlin called ‘Class Concerns’. My aim was to sketch an approach to thinking about class in cultural production in relation to: 1) the shifting historical and material conditions of class struggle, and 2) race and other technologies of power, by offering a broad sketch of what this kind of analysis tells us about theatre production (in the UK) in the last 60-odd years.
If you’re thinking I bit off a bit more than I could chew in the 15 minutes I had, you may be right, but here’s what I said…
I want to offer a complementary analysis, in this paper, to what we might loosely categorise as the Weberian sociology of cultural production, in which class is defined by occupation and social status, and is often used as a shorthand for ‘class origin’. Much of this research seeks a) to develop critiques of the ways in which class matters in culture, because it constrains individuals’ capacities to thrive within cultural production as it is currently structured, and b) to propose alternative ways of organising culture that would redress these inequalities. That project could hardly be more timely. As the authors of the Creative Industries Policy Evidence Centre’s 2021 Report on ‘Social Mobility in the Creative Economy’ tell us, class inequalities are ‘more pronounced in the Creative Industries than in any other industrial sector’.
I should stress that everything I say here is intended to complement and advance that project. I do, however, want to offer a critique of what can happen when its model of class-as-origin-and-occupation is adopted within theatre studies.
Recounting her fieldwork with backstage workers on Broadway, Christin Essin describes the technicians’ ‘neighborhood’. They shun a ‘jam-packed Starbucks’ in favour of ‘a modest coffee shop hidden in a hotel lobby’; they frequent ‘family-owned restaurants overlooked by the preshow dinner crowd’ and ‘counters with stools in unnoticed corners where locals can meet in relative quiet’. We can all, I am sure, recognise this genre of account of working-class life that is local rather than generic, modest not showy, familial and social not corporate and commercial. And it shows up here in support of Essin’s project, which seeks ‘to invest in a fuller understanding of theatrical labour; to emphasise a united work-force with mutual professional goals, economic investments, and political interests; and to connect seemingly dissimilar work practices as a strategy of workplace solidarity’.
Essin’s ethnography is informative and clarifying on its own terms. It cannot, however, fulfil its commitment to ‘emphasise a united work-force with mutual … political interests’, without minimising political interests that are not aligned. What Essin calls the ‘history of gender exclusion and white supremacy’ in backstage theatre work is notably relegated to the past in her account. Questions about the gendering of work, or the potentially discriminatory function of the ‘proven credentials, longevity, and strong industry connections’ that confer Broadway employment, are set aside with gestures towards the rarity of ‘overt acts of exclusion’ and assertions about ‘an industry that rewards persistence and a union that has expanded its definition of family’.
What this genre of analysis cannot account for, then, is the existence of class, which it merely presupposes. If we want to know why and how these workers are positioned as they are; how that structure came into being and is able to reproduce itself, and whose interests it serves, we will need an approach that is more historical and materialist in its methodology, and focused on developing an institutional critique of the cultural sector.
My proposal, therefore, is to complement the ethnographic model by inverting it. Instead of asking what class illuminates about the ways in which culture is produced, I ask what culture illuminates about the ways in which class is produced. Therefore, instead of thinking of class as an origin that shapes individuals’ capacity to function within relatively stable socioeconomic relations, I think of class as a product of what are – from a historical perspective – often extremely unstable social relations. This approach therefore seeks to provide an account of class that is structural, relational and dynamic, and therefore for that fact that, as Stuart Hall put it, ‘classes do not always show up in their appointed place’. Class, in this paper, then, will be treated as a dynamic structure of socioeconomic relations. Crucially, however, I do not want to imply that class constitutes any such dynamic structure, nor that it underpins or predominates over other such structures. Class is a dynamic structure of social relations that is characterised by antagonistic material interests and co-constituted with other such structures, such as race and gender.
My reason for insisting on the concept of material interests and their antagonism is that I hope to develop a political critique, and there is no politics without opposed interests. There is therefore, strictly speaking, no such entity as ‘the working class’ in my analysis; there is only the ongoing process by which a working-class relation to capital is produced, namely proletarianization: the ways in which workers are a) made to sell their labour-power in a market structured by the interests of capital accumulation, and b) – in the process – deprived of the means, in their working lives at least, freely, directly and decisively to engage reality. In Marx’s terms, they are alienated. But since class is co-constituted with other social relations, predominant among which, I would argue, is race, proletarianization does not operate alone. Proletarianization is a process that is always racialized, by which I mean that it is always operating in concert with racialization: the process whereby racialized groups are produced and reproduced in the interests of white supremacy. My aim, then, is to develop a political critique of proletarianization and racialization in theatre production.
I’ll focus initially (and artificially) on an account of proletarianization, before following up with some brief observations about how these processes are co-constituted with the development of what Cedric Robinson called ‘racial regimes’, before concluding with some general observations about the theoretical and political stakes of the approach I have outlined.
This is Doug Sutton, a carpenter who worked in the National Theatre’s scenery workshop in partnership with his son, Alan, photographed in 1980.
Standing behind in this image is the National’s then newly-appointed workshops manager, John Malone, who had previously run a ‘commercial scenery construction business’ for Trident Television.
This is Bill Bundy, the theatre’s technical administrator, who had hired Malone for his capacity to work ‘on the scale of a factory’. The Suttons felt that Malone took that brief too far. Tellingly, they said that they ‘found most TV scenery so imperfect as to make viewing painful’. The Suttons were objecting, in other words, to proletarianization: to the ways in which their work was being rationalized in the interests of capital accumulation by the imposition of an intermediate stratum of management. This is not to say that they were becoming ‘working-class’, but that the nature of their class position and its shaping effect on their working lives was changing.
To understand this change, we can draw on Raymond Williams’ categorisation of historical conditions as either residual, dominant, or emergent. The residual aspect here is workshop production: small groups of skilled workers (often, as in this case, family groups), operating with relative autonomy, doing very specialized and bespoke work. The dominant historical condition for theatre in 1980, by contrast, was the recently established and increasingly co-ordinated and professionalized theatre sector that had emerged since the early 1960s as part of the post-war project of generating a new national infrastructure, of which David Edgerton has recently offered a detailed account (though not really in respect of culture). The new sector’s challenge to theatre professionals was exemplified by Peter Hall wondering, when he took over the NT in 1973, ‘how on earth we could continuously fill, with plays and with people, not one theatre but three’.
Although these problems were magnified by the scale of the NT, they were not unique to it, but shared by the directors and administrators of new theatre buildings and organisations that were springing up across the country. They were classic challenges for what Barbara and John Ehrenreich termed the ‘professional-managerial class’ or ‘PMC’: middle-class technocrats who did not own or control the means of production, but sustained capitalist reproduction by administrative and managerial mediation between capitalists proper and their workers. To conduct this mediation at the NT, Hall turned to his former colleague from the RSC, John Goodwin, who had implemented the 1965 ‘Goodwin Plan’ to significantly reduce that company’s output and make it more efficient. The core priority of theatre companies, in other words, was no longer putting on plays, but the administration and management of their resources.
In 1978, Hall also hired a new general administrator, Michael Elliott (who came from paper manufacturers Kimberly-Clark). In 1979, Elliott successfully quelled a long-running industrial dispute at the theatre by threatening to ‘suspend […] employment’ of any member of staff refusing to cross picket lines and telling non-striking staff that ‘the [striking] stagehands have a calculating, money-grabbing agenda, despite, in some cases, already earning more than coalminers’, echoing Margaret Thatcher’s then-current election campaign and the ‘neoliberal revolution’ whose emergence it secured. Economically, this led to what David Harvey has termed ‘flexible accumulation’, a dramatic reshaping of socio-economic norms and practices from the late 1970s that was characterised by greater wage restraint, increased sub-contracting and outsourcing, and more casualisation and self-employment.
In the theatre, specialist functions such as set and costume construction were increasingly outsourced, equipment was commonly hired to reduce the costs of maintenance and storage, and self-employed creative workers were increasingly casualised. Artistic directors’ tenures were also increasingly marked by substantial capital projects to maximise the value of physical asset of their buildings and resources, and their company’s intellectual property: its brand, and productions. This shift indicates that, under the dominance of a neoliberal regime that had been emergent in 1980, resources to be managed had become assets to be sweated. That process is known as rentierisation, and it was marked, in the theatre, by managers and organisations seeking to become rentiers, who could earn income from the control of assets.
These shifts in the dynamic structure of class relations in theatre production have been marked by the widespread casualisation and deskilling of workers. The expectation that actors would be capable of transformation from role to role, for example, has been substantially eroded by the imposition of the managerial stratum of casting directors. The skills of scenic painters are likewise being made redundant by technologies that produce contract rents. Furthermore, the PMC has itself been either proletarianized or joined forces with rentierized capital to such an extent that, as the Ehrenreichs noted in 2013, it now ‘lies in ruins’. The professionalization its members sought has proved to be their proletarianization.
But how is this history of proletarianization also racialized? Here, I turn to Cedric Robinson, and the concept of the ‘racial regime’ (to which I cannot do any justice here but will have more to say about soon). ‘Racial regimes,’ Robinson wrote, are ‘constructed social systems in which race is proposed as a justification for the relations of power’. The creation of a new theatre sector in the 1960s and 70s was a case in point because it was avowedly a national project, and the nation is a racialized figure. Access to the sector’s resources, then, was consistently policed along racial lines. In 1975, two Black students at Central complained that they were not allowed to complete their training because there were ‘no parts available’ for them in the final two terms. The policy was quickly revoked, but the sector they joined still routinely denied resources even to leading Black artists. The theatre, as an institution – its workers, organisations, audience, repertory, and so on – remained committed to de facto racialized exclusion into the 1990s.
Race did not only work, however, to justify exclusion. It also justified the stratification of inclusion under the figure of the nation whose allegedly natural hierarchy was reinforced by the content theatre produced. By the early 1990s, however, the social pull of what Stuart Hall termed ‘multicultural drift’ was shifting the terrain of cultural production, and the time for hard and fast exclusion was up. It is notable, however, that the leading Black-led company of this period, Talawa, was prevented from securing a permanent home by the withdrawal of Arts Council support in 2005, just at the time that other theatres were finding ways of maximising the value of their assets. Talawa’s current Artistic Director, Michael Buffong, successfully rebuilt the company by programming predominantly a Black-cast white repertory. Talawa now has a permanent home in Croydon’s redeveloped Fairfield Halls, and it is tempting to conclude that the company has achieved stability partly by accepting the terms of its racialization, one of which is that it must work to secure the value of the cultural assets of whiteness.
Taking, finally, a much broader view, we might argue that the proliferation of digital technologies in theatre in the last twenty years has seen it increasingly inserted into what A. Sivanandan called the ‘new circuits of imperialism’, under which capital has shifted to extracting surplus value from labour in the global south to generate assets that can be sweated under near-monopoly conditions in the global north. Here, workers find themselves increasingly proletarianized into the service economy by debt and casualized employment, or forced into the position of what John Narayan calls ‘a new underclass of citizens … locked out of mainstream society: de-schooled, under-employed and overpoliced’.
I’ll frame my very brief conclusion by turning to the part of my title I’ve not yet mentioned. I’ve offered an account of class that is characterised by the race to the bottom of proletarianization. I’ve resisted the tendency in class-based analysis to relegate race to the bottom of the agenda, and proposed instead that we pay attention to the ways in which it runs through social relations from top to bottom.
The theoretical and political stakes of that analysis, then, are as follows:
considerations of class must pay attention to interests, and the ways in which they are reshaped by the emergence of new conjunctural conditions;
examining the co-constitution of proletarianization and racialization can clarify the interests that govern the production and reproduction of class relations;
those relations have shaped cultural production in unstable and dynamic ways, so any analysis of how to reshape it must begin on the terrain that they establish;
any analysis of class that is tethered to origins or methodologically nationalist is in danger of finding itself in lock-step with racialization, and undermined and out-flanked by the operation of the ‘new circuits of imperialism’.
