Reading through my final draft of the book, there is a distant perfume of politics, perhaps at times being a bit astringent.

THE ROOTS OF THE KKK, Ibiza, spring 1970 -photo: Robert Golden

As I have lived much of my life in opposition to the cultural managers of the status quo, both in the media corporations and in the public institutions, some people in positions of cultural management have considered me a wild-eyed extremist or perhaps worse. This is madness.

I embrace the dream of Democracy, not as lived but as imagined. I have spent much of my life documenting people living within Democracies. Their oppression, poverty of culture, education and spirit dismays me. It does so because it is solely a consequence of other’s greed. For the last forty years this greed has clearly been a result of neoliberal policy-makers and politicians, CEOs and bankers kidnapping the democratic state via huge corporate wealth getting its claws into the political parties and the politicians.

These neoliberals began with one main goal, to overturn the humane gains of the post World War Two welfare state. To them, caring for the poor and ill, and young and old is repugnant. They are thugs truly without any sense of communal humanity, who use the tools of capitalism to take ownership of our wealth, of the state’s wealth and of the earth itself. Their two central tactics were and are to rape the earth for their own profits, and to shove the exploitation of human labour as far as possible to gain as great a difference (the profit margin) as they can between the cost of (our) labour and the price we must pay for that which we make for them to sell to us.

This totally mendacious sociopathic greed is dressed up with PR words like ‘free markets’ which are anything but free; ‘personal liberty’ which is about the concept of positive freedoms (that anyone can do anything to anybody without restraint in a dog-eat-dog world of bullies), and ‘fair trade’, which, if you ask any developing country’s economists, they will tell you it is anything but fair. Most of the ‘democratic’ gains throughout history have been written into laws to protect property owners and their wealth.

And of course, all of this is disguised by the media and the educational systems which are largely owned or influenced by the neoliberals who are enemies of plurality (differing opinions), which is a vital part of the lifeblood of any real democracy.

This is why my work is often concerned with the way we are ruled, with the pain and the unfairness, and indeed, with the sheer nonsense of it all, that as a species, as a nation, as a people and as individuals we allow this tiny minority (.05%) of the population to injure the rest of us.

DOCK WORKER, Hull Docks, 1975 - i have photographed so many faces with too much pain in their eyes.

For me, I see few other reasons to make films or photographs other than to continually point these things out; to show simply that within the context of a democracy that is neither real nor ours, and to reveal within an economic system that is in reality a predator on our lives, we need to find ways to bring peaceful change, to resist and to think critically about these things that surround us with illusions day in and out. Sometimes my documentations and other’s as well, create moments of discovery.

Robert Golden

12:40, 21 September 2022

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