MANIFESTO
Unite and unite!
We call upon the folk of England to stand together for the re-politicisation of folk.
English folk culture is under siege from two great enemies. The right lay claim to the historic ideals and symbols of England and co-opt them for nationalist and exclusionary dogma. The bourgeoisie romanticise, sentimentalise, curate and commodify folk, exploiting it for their own gain. Curatorial projects bowdlerise folk and enclose the commons. The right turns culture into a weapon of division. Both steal from the people.
We reject both. We reclaim folk.
Today, brands capitalise on a revival of interest in England and sell expurgated fragments of its culture back as bourgeois spectacle. Folk is a political expression. Folk culture is the culture of the proletariat. It has always been the voice of working people against the elite: the song of the poor against the rich. It is the assertion of the community against enclosure. It is not nostalgia. It is not a lifestyle choice. It is the living commons and it belongs to the people who make it, not to curators, collectors, profiteers, or nationalists.
History is repeating itself. A hundred years ago, the first folk revival sanitised folk into a pastoral idyll. It celebrated a vision of rural England at odds with the real world geography of Britain. It ignored the lives of working people in cities and industries. What was political and unruly was cut down to pleasant fragments that served a myth of English greatness.
The second revival of the 1960s put politics back at folk’s heart. It stood with trade unions and socialist movements. It was internationalist, leftist and alive to the issues of the proletariat. Folk was a rallying cry, a voice of solidarity, a culture of resistance.
Now, we are in the midst of a new revival, a third folk revival, and we face a choice. We can stand up to nationalists and reclaim folk in the name of social, political and environmental justice or we can watch while capitalist forces profit from the exploitation of our history, our culture and our identity. When folk is fetishised, it is defanged. It becomes a personal, individual project rather than one about community. Our experience of folk is too often a highly aestheticised picture mediated through the curated Instagram feeds of an educated elite. Folk must be egalitarian, internationalist, inclusive, and defiant. It must resist commodification, resist gentrification, and resist enclosure once again. It must remain political.
The Folk Union exists to reclaim folk as a weapon of the people, not a museum piece or commodity. We do not guard relics. We organise and we act. We defend folk as the living commons and put it back where it belongs: in the struggles of our own time - workers’ rights, housing, land, ecology, identity, solidarity.
Folk is not for sale. Folk is not for the Right. Folk is ours. Folk is The Commons. Do not search and find. Invent.
Let us all unite!