“EVERY document of civilisation is also a document of barbarism,” said Walter Benjamin, for behind castles and cathedrals lie histories of violence and oppression. Yet paintings, plays, poems, and films can all express and protest against — as well as deny and legitimate – the exploitation and barbarism of ruling elites that fuel class struggles throughout history.

Benjamin’s insight seems particularly relevant to many exhibitions, plays and films that have come out this year, an example being The Political History of Smack and Crack by Ed Edwards. A brilliant drama about personal relationships, it also exposed the shameful story of the British state’s collusion in our drugs problems.

Through supporting armed counter-revolutionary movements funded by the profits of the illegal drugs trade Western states, including Britain, have played a major role in causing the massive drug problems that the working class have suffered disproportionately from in the last 40 years, both as users and as victims of drug-related crime. There’s a full review and interview with Edwards on the Culture Matters website (culturematters.org.uk) if you want to know more.

2018 was the year of the Great North Exhibition, the government’s “artwashing” attempt to gloss over and prettify the terrible damage done to northern working-class communities by neoliberal policies of deindustrialisation, benefit cuts and precarious employment.

But, as with Edwards’s play, you just can’t keep some artists quiet. In among the liberal, anxious celebrations of a depoliticised “northern-ness,” some artists and curators insisted on telling the truth. At the Baltic in Gateshead, David Blandy and Larry Achiampong used computer-gaming visuals in The Wall and The Incongruous to continue their unrelenting critique of the way mining communities have been treated.

They ended their fantasy film about a land that isolates itself to extinction with the most savagely direct indictment of the state-sponsored violence used on picketing miners at Orgreave that I’ve ever seen.

Also at the Baltic, Michael Dean’s angry but grimly humorous installation Having You On touched on uncomfortable truths, with themes of lack of money, foodbanks and what it means to exhibit art in a society scarred by poverty and the waste of human life.

In Newcastle, the Amber Collective’s Sirkka Liisa Konttinen curated a great photographic exhibition Women by Women on the representation of women and girls in north-east England and Amber also ran a subtly oppositional festival The Inner Eye, focusing on documentary photography and film from the German Democratic Republic.

Over four days of exhibitions, films and discussions, the astonishing explosion of creativity in the GDR in the 1970s and 1980s was celebrated, with the 1984 film Shunters showing the way ordinary railway workers operated a vast and busy shunting yard. Skilfully filmed and edited it brings out the symphonic, musical quality of the operation.

It was a homage to the dignity of labour and, by implication, the socialist project of the GDR and it was brilliantly programmed alongside another short film, The Bowes Line, Amber’s own contribution to documenting working-class lives and jobs in the north-east.

Just An Ordinary Life, a film about women photographers in the last years of the GDR, made some telling aesthetic and political points, including the economic equality of men and women in the socialist state. This led to much freer and more satisfying personal relationships as well as opportunities for women to practise their art.

Their work also emphasised the relational aspects of photographing people and their common, vulnerable humanity. This “socialist gaze” contrasted with the sexualisation, commodification and alienated otherness apparent in the “capitalist gaze” of photographers elsewhere.