I must be mad. No sooner have I finished fundraising for agitprop musical The Liberty Tree, than I’m straight into fundraising for The Tolpuddle Radical Film Festival.

To be a left-wing cultural activist these days seems to mainly involve being a beggar. It might be irritating to constantly receive crowd-funding emails begging you to donate your hard-earned dosh for “rewards” of dubious value but, believe me, it’s no fun to be constantly sending them out either.

Yet I believe it is crucial that as a movement we find the energy, and the money, to maintain and promote an a different cultural narrative to the “there is no alternative” neoliberal story that for 30 years has been so relentlessly promoted by the mainstream media.

The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci pointed out 100 years ago that political consciousness is determined as much by culture as it is by economic structures and conditions and the right-wing have always understood this.

Hitler spoke about the power of propaganda in his earliest writings and the Establishment’s use of political song and graphics — the national anthem and flags — are immensely powerful.

Thus it should be no surprise that for the last 30 years primetime hits like The X Factor, Dragon’s Den, The Apprentice and Benefit Street, through to daytime trivia like Homes Under the Hammer and Storage Hunters and on to the soaps, have shamelessly promoted neoliberal capitalist values where the winner takes all, the poor deserve to be poor and business is an unqualified good for society, day in and day out on our TV screens.

On the left, the political power of culture is perhaps best illustrated by the fact that in the 1960s there was almost full employment and the welfare state had ameliorated some of the worst effects of poverty.

Yet the youth of that time went on a 10-year binge of rebellion and revolt. It was culture, not economic conditions that created this oppositional consciousness — the rock music, novels, films and the plays and TV dramas of the “angry young men” that created the political consciousness of the ’60s generation.

But the power of alternative culture to challenge the status quo and generate oppositional consciousness is today often underestimated by contemporary leftist political organisations.

Fortunately, it’s not by the Tolpuddle festival, which is perhaps the main cultural event of the labour movement and a key date in the calendar of anyone working for progressive political change.

Theatre, music, literature, painting and crafts are all well represented at Tolpuddle but due to technical difficulties and lack of resources, film only made its first appearance last year.

Film is perhaps the 21st-century art form that is most ideally suited to the internet age we now live in. Film is ubiquitous on the internet — from the banal YouTube cat videos to the raw amateur footage of revolt and the resulting police brutality from across the world. Moving images, combined with synch sound, are the most powerful tools of the world wide web.

2015 is the 800th anniversary of the sealing of Magna Carta and the 750th anniversary of Simon De Montfort’s 1265 parliament at which representatives of the cities and boroughs were present alongside knights for the first time.

These two events together paved the way for the emergence of the House of Commons and British representative democracy as we know it today. 

So for this second year of the Tolpuddle Radical Film Festival, the theme is: “This is What Democracy Looks like?” The question mark is crucial as we have chosen the films to critically explore the relationship between the democratic citizen, the state and the corporation in this era of globalised, neoliberal turbo-capitalism.

The Square (2013) is an Oscar-nominated documentary on the Egyptian uprisings and the aftermath.

No (2012) is a drama based on real events in which an ad executive comes up with a campaign to defeat Augusto Pinochet in Chile’s 1988 referendum.

The Spirit of ’45 (2013) is Ken Loach’s moving documentary on how the spirit of unity, which buoyed Britain during the war years, carried through to create a vision of a fairer, united society.

It Happened Here (1963) is a drama set in 1945 when the nazis have won the second world war and invaded Britain.

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (2003) is a documentary on the 2002 coup d’etat attempt, which saw Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez removed from office for two days and then reinstated due to popular pressure.

Reykjavik Uprising (2015) is a documentary exploring the reaction of the Icelandic electorate to the 2008 banking crisis, which resonates loudly with the current Greek situation and United We will Swim... Again (2015) is an exploration of local democracy in action in Britain.

The fact that after 30 years of relentless mainstream neoliberal propaganda there is still a labour movement is testament to the power of the ideas of social and economic justice that are so creatively expressed in these films.

As a movement we must try to remember that films, songs, poems, novels and plays are central to the process of engaging with the disaffected and depoliticised and raising an oppositional consciousness that will motivate people to fight for those principles.

• Chris Jury is a scriptwriter and actor and artistic director of Public Domain Productions. He is co-director with Reuben Irving, of The Tolpuddle Radical Film Festival and is speaking at the 2015 Tolpuddle radical history school on the subject of political or cultural revolution: which comes first?