Cultural Work Needs a (Creative) Class Struggle

by Tiziano Bonini

This post is part of an ongoing collaboration with cheFare

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Photo by Monica Garniga on Unsplash

There is a class problem in the Italian creative and cultural industries. And this problem is enormous, yet it is the elephant in the room that creatives pretend not to see.

The Italian "creative class" does not reflect the diversity of Italian society. Instead, it consists predominantly of a very specific fraction of society: the urban middle class, rich in cultural, social, and economic capital, which is reproduced from father to son, from generation to generation.

Why is this a problem? Because what this class produces - newspapers, books, films, TV series, advertising, fashion - is a universe of symbols that inherently carry the cultural heritage of those who create them. There is a class that continues to produce symbols, representations of the world, opinions, and narratives, and a class that consumes them without having access to the means of production. This might sound like an outdated discourse in the era of widespread creativity and digital media, which supposedly transform consumers into "prosumers."

In Italy, media studies still focus heavily on analyzing media texts, the mythical "message," or at best, its "reception." Only recently has attention shifted back to media "production", trying to understand the rules, production routines, and cultures underlying the media production infrastructure. This infrastructure, invisible to most, significantly affects WHAT is produced and HOW. However, while European and American media scholars have continued to discuss class and the class composition of cultural work, in Italy, the class issue in media production is almost nonexistent.

There is a class that continues to produce symbols,

representations of the world, opinions, narratives,

and a class that consumes them,

without having access to the means of production

Yet it is a debate we must have, even in Italy, and I will try to explain why we must have it and why it is not old at all.

To explain why we need this debate in Italy, I will share a personal story. It feels like a kind of coming out, but I believe many will see themselves in this story and may finally give a name to the discomfort they feel as part of a minority within the cultural industry.

My paternal grandmother was a sweet woman. Every Friday afternoon, I would go down to her house to help her roll out pasta, which she then turned into tagliatelle for Saturday. She had an adventurous life, an immigrant in Venezuela in the 1950s, running a restaurant for Italians in Caracas while my grandfather worked as a truck driver in the Andes. Later, they moved to Tanzania before returning to Italy in the 1970s.

I remember my grandmother spending entire afternoons writing her name in a notebook. When she filled one, she started another. She was practicing her signature because she was illiterate. She had lost her parents and left school early. Before emigrating to Venezuela, she worked as a farmer, and so did my grandfather. My maternal grandparents had a similar story. My parents, however, managed to graduate from technical and commercial institutes.

At home, we didn’t have books on literature or essays, just a few encyclopedias, romance novels, and my father’s mechanics books. I doubt I was exposed to an extensive vocabulary in my early years. In the 1980s, television was our constant companion on Saturday nights. At thirteen, I spent hours playing video games on an old Amstrad computer or reading Bonelli comics.

My sister and I were the first in our family to graduate. Coming from a long line of farmers with no land, we represented an exception in an Italy where social mobility is increasingly stagnant.

For thirteen years, I worked in Milan's cultural industry, mostly in radio. On Friday nights, I’d meet friends, TV writers, freelance journalists, advertisers, documentary filmmakers, theater people, video makers, and video artists. Over time, I noticed something: the people I formed genuine friendships with were often outsiders like me, kids from the provinces, children of non-graduate parents who had taken unconventional paths. This same feeling persists now that I work in academia. My closest European colleagues tend to be those with non-graduate parents. We are always in the minority compared to the dominant group, brilliant, fun, blasé minds, children of graduates, entrepreneurs, and urban elites.

For years, I felt out of place, afraid I didn’t belong. 

Although working classes who do not live in large urban centers

make up the majority of the population,

they are a large minority within Italy's creative and cultural industries

It took me years to understand the ethos of the urban creative, that invisible network of micro-knowledge that lets you know how to “be in the world” in certain scenes or micro-communities governed by unwritten rules that make like-minded people recognize each other on the fly and take each other on. The only form of defense was the Morettian “I'll come, but I'll stay in the background,” a social shyness that dies hard, even with maturity. The feeling that you were there by mistake, an error of the social machine, that “your” place in society was somewhere else, never quite went away. On one hand, my mother kept asking, "When will you start working for real?" while I tried to convince her that what I was doing was work. On the other hand, I felt like a minority—rural, provincial, a child of the working class trying to break free from hardship.

A few days ago, The Guardian published an article titled "Impostor Syndrome is a Pseudo-Medical Name for a Class Problem." The author, Nathalie Olah, argues that impostor syndrome is not a pathology but a natural reaction for those from working-class or minority backgrounds who face daily prejudice. She cites studies showing that in the UK creative industries, only a marginal percentage of workers come from working-class families.

According to a 2018 study conducted by Create London with sociologists from the University of Edinburgh and the University of Sheffield ("Panic! Social Class, Taste and Inequalities in the Creative Industries"), only 18% of those working in music, performing arts, and visual arts come from working-class families. In publishing, the percentage drops to 13%, and in film, television, and radio, it’s just 12%. The study concludes that if you’re a working-class graduate in media, it’s understandable to feel like an impostor.

In Italy, the situation is even worse. Despite working-class people outside major cities being the majority, they are a tiny minority in the cultural and creative industries. Their perspectives barely shape the daily production of symbolic material that fuels the country through media infrastructures, newspapers, and consumer goods.

The root cause is structural. Cultural and creative industries require significant cultural and social capital. But in a country where social mobility has stagnated, where urban centers and provinces remain divided, it is mostly the children of graduates or wealthy families who earn degrees and access cultural careers. Cultural capital reproduces itself across generations, becoming hereditary along with family networks and social capital.

The urban middle class, hit hard by economic crises, invests everything, sometimes more than they have, to pass on their cultural capital to their children, sending them to study abroad, paying for expensive master’s degrees, funding unpaid internships in publishing, and sustaining them through precarious creative careers.

Those who resist are not the most talented

but simply the richest in the family

University students from educated families often stand out with their confident language and presence, always starting one step ahead. Meanwhile, those from working-class backgrounds are often more hesitant and less socially adept. This disparity extends into the job market, only those with financial or social support can endure the unpaid internships and precarious contracts required to establish a career in the cultural sector.

Why then is this debate necessary? Because until we realize that grand media narratives are an effect (also) of the class composition of those who produce them and that they reproduce their stereotypes, naturalizations, prejudices and clichés, we will not be able to understand the media nor especially understand how to govern them in order to live in a media ecosystem that fosters democracy and cultural biodiversity (someone called it pluralism).

If we begin to look at the media as the fruit of a gaze that is not “natural,” objective, but on the contrary, “social,” of a specific social group, then we can also begin to demand a change in the social composition of this gaze.

And we can direct cultural policies toward supporting the careers of less wealthy, less white, less male, less urban, less “daddy's boys” students. More scholarships, more grants for artists, more awards for provincial journalists, more welfare state for cultural work, more social housing (to say the first platitudes that come to mind, but there is certainly much more in literature).

When a graduate comes out of university and would like to enter the cultural industry, it often happens that he succeeds only if he has someone to have his back in the period of precariousness when he does not yet have a reputation to spend as a cultural worker. Those who resist then are not the most talented but simply the richest in family, or the richest in social capital (those who grew up in the city) which allows them to accelerate their job search through personal contacts.

There was a time in my life when I was about to give up: I had a post-graduate fellowship at the university, but it was running out and it was not enough to cover expenses (and at the time, fortunately, the Island was at the dawn of hipster gentrification). I was in debt to my girlfriend at the time. I was doing odd jobs in radio and publishing. I went to take my resume to a bar in Isola, Milan. They didn't take me. It was 2004. Then things got better, I got lucky. But so many others, potential writers, film makers, beautiful and original artists, full of energy and passion, excellent intellectuals, more solid and prepared than me, quit. And by quitting, they have made this industry more homogeneous and conformist.

In universities, fashion, publishing, digital, film and broadcasting, we need the gaze of those who grew up in the South, or in the suburbs, or woman, or in a small mountain town.

The increasingly evident political, ideological, economic, and social rift between centers and suburbs, between large urban centers and inland areas, is also healed by a media system that does not only gather voices on the streets of Milan and Rome, that does not only talk about urban fashions, that does not tell the South in a stereotypical way.

“They are like me, but they feel better,” Frankie Nrg wrote this in 1997. I heard him shout it one night at Norman, a concert hall on the outskirts of Perugia. It is even more true today. Class is not creative. Creativity is about class.