The first cut on this record has been cross-format focused for airplay success.

The men beep on their drums. I'm. I'm

. Hello and welcome to Politics Theory Other, a podcast from Tribune magazine.

My name is Alex Doherty and my guest today is Rhianne Jones. We spoke about her article in Tribune,

an enterprise allowance of the left, which looks at the disappearance of working class voices

from the arts and how the left might rebuild working class culture. We also chatted about her

article on similar themes, entitled The Arts Class, which was published in the Progressive Review.

Today's interview was recorded before the December general election, but having listened back and given the increased necessity of rebuilding a left working class culture, it feels even more relevant than it did before Labour's electoral defeat.

If you'd like to hear the extended version of today's interview, then please consider becoming a supporter of the show.

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Go to patreon.com forward slash poll theory other to sign up.

Rian Jones grew up in South Wales and is now based in London, where she writes on

history, politics, popular culture and the places where they intersect. So reading your

article in Tribune and thinking about that middle class takeover of cultural production that you

described that occurred through the 1990s and the 2000s. I found myself thinking about my own

relationship to popular culture as a kid. And I sort of imagine that we might have had not dissimilar

experiences in the sense that we're of a similar age. We're both in our late 30s. Our class

backgrounds might not have been wildly dissimilar. I mean, in my case, I came from a kind of

a downwardly mobile

middle-class family and grew up on a council estate in the West Midlands. And obviously, you grew up in

the Welsh valleys. And I think one of the things that occurred to me was that that increasing

middle-class takeover of so much of the media was a very palpable thing to me in the early 2000s. You know, I remember being aware of it before reading your work, for instance, or the work of Mark Fisher, who talked about this a lot. And I don't know how it was for you, but for me, the symbols of it at the time for some reason were, firstly, the actor Benedict Cumberbatch, who, you know, aside from the very

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