Germany is declining rapidly. However, during a visit in July 2024, I discovered that some good things can still be found on the streets of Berlin. Amid the activities of the Konteksty Post-Artistic Congress 2024, the main reason for my trip, I enjoyed the summer sun and a coffee on a terrace somewhere in Neukölln when a street journal vendor walked by. He sat down with the people at the table next to me and chatted with them for about 15 minutes, enthusiastically explaining the newspaper’s contents. Seemingly convinced, my neighbors purchased a copy. They exchanged laughter and handshakes, and resumed their activities.
The paper my neighbors bought was a copy of Arts of the Working Class. It is a street journal similar to those found in most European cities, distributed to marginalized, mostly unhoused individuals who sell them and retain 100% of the proceeds. What distinguishes Arts of the Working Class is its content. It contains high-quality texts on art and society, all packaged in beautiful graphic design.
Cover of Arts of the Working Class #34, the latest issue
Arts of the Working Class gives art writers the perfect excuse to do what they love most: producing low-paid, high-level content for internationally recognized periodicals. It provides vendors with a product imbued with cultural cachet. Berlin cool kids get to buy a paper not only because they want to support the cause but also because they’re genuinely interested in the contents. It’s also worth noting that Arts of the Working Class has so far been resistant to the rampant political censorship in Germany.
While the journal’s economic model deserves attention and praise, I want to focus here on its title, Arts of the Working Class. Emotionally, I’m a fan, but, conceptually, I’m not sure what it’s supposed to mean. What is, exactly, an art of the working class? Art owned by the working class? Made by the working class? Produced in the service of the working class? An art production chain owned by its workers? Art that operates within a working-class aesthetic register?
What do the editors of Arts of the Working Class have to say about it? On their website, I found a statement: the street journal’s ‘terms are based upon the working class, meaning everyone, and it reports everything that belongs to everyone.’ This is, beyond doubt, the most radically inclusive definition of the working class I ever encountered, as well as the most unhelpful one for class struggle. Tactically, I understand that the editors prefer a retreat in irony over entering the muddy waters of defining class today, where one might only expect left-wing in-fighting. But, then again, it makes me wonder: does ‘working class’ mean anything to the publishers, beyond a vague, nostalgic identity?
I read the ambiguous rhetoric of Arts of the Working Class as a tactical workaround for two problems in the public debate: a general confusion about class composition under post-neoliberal capitalism (where is the working class?), and a more specific confusion about the class position of art workers (are art workers workers?). While these questions might seem academic or even trivial, they have serious consequences for the organization of labor and the representation of workers. Who and what are we? Who are our comrades, and who are our adversaries? How to break the wheel of disorganization? How to collectivize and resist?
The Author as Producer
In his groundbreaking book History and Class Consciousness from 1923, Georg Lukács for the first time foregrounded ‘class consciousness’ in Marxist theories of organization. Rather than describing the position of the working class as an enumeration of data (Klasse-an-sich), he explored whether there is a unified standpoint or a shared consciousness among members of the working class (Klasse-für-sich). Following in Lukács’s footsteps, Walter Benjamin wrote his famous text on ‘The Author as Producer’ in 1934, formulating a simple, sharp principle for class-conscious cultural work. In short, he insists that it is the responsibility of an art worker to understand their position as a contemporary producer, and, given the social, historical, and technological circumstances, to carefully determine their medium and mode of production accordingly. For instance, Benjamin argued that novelists should abandon the traditional medium of the novel in favor of the faster, more accessible medium of the newspaper, which would better serve the goal of ‘political progress’. One could argue that we face the same question today, except that the positive, universal goal of political progress is replaced by the more fragmented and bitter aim of resistance against political regression. What to produce as an author in the cataclysmic mess of techno-feudalism?
However, translating the principle of the author as a producer to the present-day context is not as simple as a cheeky, post-modern inversion. One of the core successes of neoliberalism has been to replace working-class consciousness with internalized micro-entrepreneurialism. In the book Speculation as Mode of Production, Marina Vishmidt has shown that this is especially true for artists who happily jump on the bandwagon of speculative capital and become some of capital’s most tragic agents. There is, in other words, very little ground to adopt Benjamin’s assumption that art workers have a (latent) class consciousness. Before asking ‘What does the author as a producer produce today?’, we must consider ‘How can the author today understand themselves as a producer once again?’
The Art Worker
In response to this question, people working in the arts – including myself – recently have taken to calling themselves ‘art workers’. Historically, this notion originated in the Constructivist and Productivist avant-gardes of the 1920s, the very same years in which Lukács conceptualized class consciousness. Its emergence was closely linked to social realist aesthetic positions during the Popular Front era, such as the Congress of Cultural Workers in Lviv, where artists and writers declared their solidarity with workers in the 1930s. Only much later, in 1969, it was taken up in the West by the New York-based Art Workers Coalition.
I believe that the most recent rediscovery of ‘art worker’ is related to the rise of social practice art. But it does not necessarily indicate a rediscovered class consciousness. For instance, what to think of one’s ‘identification’ as an art worker in the face of the fact that a 2023 report of the British Sociological Foundation shows that only 8% of artists today have a working-class background? In the essay ‘In a Class of Our Own? Art Workers and the Working Class’, Mia van den Bos writes: the ‘problem with the term “art worker” is that it gestures towards, whilst simultaneously revealing nothing about, class. […] “Art worker” elides different class positions behind the precarious reality of freelance art work, without recognizing that a class-based selection process has already occurred before the first invoice is sent.’ ‘Art worker’ could be just another trendy buzzword used to improve the social status of artists, in this case by performing affinity with the working class.
On the other hand, the words we use shape our understanding of art and its role in society. For instance, in the book Art Work, Katja Praznik argues that the use of the term ‘art worker’ inherently implies a socialist understanding of art as a commonly available public good, which is, by definition, opposed to the capitalist notion of the ‘work of art’ as an exclusive commodity. Van den Bos, too, gives ‘art worker’ the benefit of the doubt, arguing that it can engender a sense of broader solidarity among precarious workers, and prompt conversations about how class ‘dictates who can and cannot afford to make, write about or curate art and therefore what kind of class interests and perspectives are furthered in the art world.’ The question, in short, is not one of ‘correct identification’, but of revamping the historically productive analytical notion of class for the more complex reality of artistic production in post-neoliberal capitalism, which could, in turn, empower an organization of art production in opposition to ‘the class-based selection process before the first invoice’.
We don’t have to start these conversations from scratch. Many thinkers have theorized contemporary class composition and offered possible pathways to a new class consciousness that encompasses the strange and contradictory experience of life as an art worker. What follows is a leisurely stroll along some of these theories. We will meet precarians, projectarians, cybertarians, cognitarians, and other members of emergent (dangerous?) classes.
Precariat
Since the ‘80s, deregulation of labor markets, privatization, increasing numbers of freelancers, and other trends in post-Fordist neoliberalism have structurally increased levels of precarity among workers in the west. Guy Standing, one of the most prominent thinkers on class composition today, has described the collective experience of decreased material and psychological welfare as that of the ‘precariat’. Quintessential to this precarian experience is a twofold extension of work: sideways, the separation of work and leisure is diffused by intermittent employment and continuously being ‘on call’; and frontal, work is extended indefinitely in the absence of sick leave insurance and pension schemes. Without job security, the work never ends.
If one were to make a list of precarian occupations, ‘artist’ would certainly feature on it. The Netherlands, where I live and work, is usually known for its ‘attractive’ funding system and relatively good social provisions. But the average artist in the Netherlands earned a gross income of just over 18 thousand euros in 2019 (compared to the average income of 32 thousand among the working population), with 80% of people in the visual arts working as freelancers. This is, of course, not new. In 2016, a government-commissioned independent review concluded that art workers have poor bargaining positions, are often not insured against occupational disability, have a low pension accrual, and have a high risk of unemployment. Artists are, in other words, at the forefront of flexibilization and precarization, alongside delivery riders, taxi drivers, and other (mostly platform-mediated) gig workers. If art workers today can make any claim of avant-gardism, it must be their membership of the flex-work avant-garde.
A further important characteristic of the precariat, as Standing observes, is the high amount of invisible and mostly unremunerated labor performed. In the arts, we continuously rewrite our CVs and portfolios, update our websites, submit funding applications, practice, study, and learn, all in our own time. Then, of course, there is the bulk of socially coded ‘lifestyle’ work which ‘doesn’t feel like work’: going to exhibitions openings and reading groups, having dinners with collectors, social media engagement, and generally taking care of our ‘visibility’ and ‘relevance’. Again, art workers are not alone in this. Marxist feminists like Bojana Kunst, Leigh Claire La Berge, Katja Praznik, and Silvia Federici have argued that artists’ experiences of invisible, underpaid labor mirror those of other precarious workers in society.
While it’s hard to challenge the concept of precarity, or its proliferation, critics have contested Standing’s idea of the precariat as the new dangerous class. The precariat includes people working bullshit jobs (defined by David Graeber as jobs described as essentially irrelevant by those who execute them). The ‘digital revolution’ has obviously increased the volume of bullshit jobs, with its endless expansion of click work, content moderation, search engine optimization, and so on. However, the precariat would also include the group described as the professional-managerial class (or pmc for short). The pmc is the steadily growing group of highly educated urban desk workers who perform managerial or consulting tasks. While their work creates little to no use value, members of the pmc would not typically describe their own work as a bullshit job, and even if they don’t have a steady contract, they are usually well-paid. It has therefore been argued that the precariat is socially too loose, and with material interests too divergent, to ever become a dangerous class.
Projectariat
Standing’s books and lectures contribute to a general theory of class composition, but they don’t explain some of the more characteristic dissonances that we encounter while working in the arts. Many artists somehow think that the market is not where their practice is, and their practice is not where the market is, despite the extreme proximity between the two. Hans Abbing has called this ambivalence the ‘Janus face’ of the art world. When art and market meet, the clash between informal, precarious, low-paid, self-organized practice, and the big money and splendor seen in art fairs, blue-chip galleries, and auction houses, often leads to cognitive dissonance. For instance, I’m reminded of an artist who told me that she was invited to a luxurious dinner with the patrons of an exhibition she took part in. She enjoyed the champagne and lobster but afterward returned to eating crackers for a week at home, not being able to afford anything else. She was left with the feeling that the whole affair had been a mix-up, that she had been part of something she should not have been.
On closer inspection, the popular compartmentalization of different ‘sides’ or even ‘art worlds’ does not hold up. In Seven Days in the Art World, Sarah Thornton described how the circuits of artist studios, art education, magazines, auctions, galleries, fairs, and prizes may follow their own protocols and habits but are in the end all interrelated and interdependent. Gregory Sholette went several steps further and, in the book Dark Matter, showed how unsuccessful artists (he calls them ‘prefailed’) are the dark matter of the art world. To identify successful artists worthy of astronomic investments, market players like gallerists, collectors, and advisors need to be able to discern the contrast with a much larger group of failed artists. Unsuccessful artists are therefore the dark matter, the invisible connective tissue churned out by art academies in large quantities, without whom the entire system would implode. Art workers, in short, are a fundamental part of a system they feel fundamentally disconnected from and that structurally keeps them precarious.
Rethinking class composition with these systemic traits of artistic labor in mind, Kuba Szreder coined the notion of ‘the projectariat’. The projectariat includes those artists, curators, academics, writers, assistants, and technicians who earn their livelihood moving between short-term contracts or commissions, the point being, of course, that this is the vast majority of art professionals. Projectarians experience a contradictory privilege; often highly mobile, they are carried in the international circuits of contemporary art along with some of the wealthiest of the so-called ‘1%’, but their work is insecure. Typically, they are also laden with debt incurred to pay for the educational credentials required to access this mobile existence. Projectarians make up a ‘poverty jet set’, for whom the specter of impoverishment looms as each project ends, making the project the dominant structuring factor in their life.
Yet, it would be naïve to understand projectarians as mere victims. One of the entries in Szreder’s book ABC of the Projectariat is the sharply ironic concept of ‘Artyzol’. It combines the Polish term for artist (artysta) with a brand name for Communist-era insecticide spray, ‘Muchozol’. Artworld events generate clouds of artyzol, and the intoxicating fumes are typically supposed to sustain art workers in place of actual remuneration. The term ‘artyzol’ evokes the allure of contemporary art and the strange relationship between toxicity and intoxication that surrounds the international art world. Artists may not actively support the exploitative nature of the art market (and its hostile take-over of whatever is left of public art institutions), but they silently accept its terms of engagement, and, probably, enjoy being part of an exclusive social circle. As critic Kim Charnley put it in a review of Szreder’s book: ‘Contemporary art’s heady extravaganza of free market values depends on banal exploitation. Actually, the projectariat produces the artyzol that perpetuates its own exploitation.’
Entreprecariat
We must, unfortunately, push the point of material and ideological complicity further. A growing group of (young) creatives identifies with the creative industries. The flexible and critical thinking that makes them so creative and the fact that they don’t want to sit still makes them extremely enterprising. They see opportunities, they want to take the initiative. They find their way – sometimes easily, sometimes with great difficulty – on the market. Precarious but free, they live from gig to gig, hopping between side jobs and cheap studios. Their precarious existence is embellished by silver laptops, inspiration posters, impressive internships, self-help books, chai lattes, productivity apps, a portfolio of 128 pages, and other outward displays of cultural entrepreneurship. They try to shape their own lives with the resources they have: staying positive, seeing solutions, developing innovative business models. They might still try to find their way into public institutions and funding bodies but also experiment with crypto, crowdfunding, and corporate assignments.
Thanks to this focus on freedom, flexibility, and self-reliance, the difference between precarious work and self-employment gradually blurs until it eventually becomes imperceptible. Thus, these cultural workers are initiated into the ‘entreprecariat’ of the creative industry, to use Silvio Lorusso’s apt term. This is also the core of what autonomy means in the neoliberal sense: dogmatically staying positive, thinking in solutions, business models, and innovations, with the inexhaustible belief that one will manage to make it alone. The members of creative industries-compatible entreprecariat mine cryptos, raise money with crowdfunding campaigns, create art market art for the ultrarich, make food art for conferences, draw mangas on Twitch, make documentaries about social design, sell ecologically sustainable merchandise, design virtual fashion, have a following on Patreon or Substack, sell books at an independent art book fair, and create NFTs.
There is nothing wrong with trying one’s luck in the creative industries, or with making a good living (it happens). But we cannot ignore the fact that individual declarations of autonomy in the creative industries often come down to dependence on the market, with the artist in practice often being happy to work for a platform and a pittance. In the fusion of autonomy and entrepreneurship, the art ethos – thought dead in the creative industries – re-enters through the back door: one has to make sacrifices to be able to do one’s ‘dream job’.
This transformation means that autonomy has become the responsibility of the individual, financially as well as intrinsically. It is permissible for entreprecarians to keep an autonomous, non-lucrative practice, as long as in addition one also participates in society in a ‘productive’ way. A serious problem here is that an individualized notion of independence or autonomy plays into the hands of managerial instrumentalization. A self-regulating sector, where people take care of each other in perfect harmony with the market (read: where cultural workers divide their poverty among themselves), is right up the alley of a neoliberal manager. The entreprecarian, in other words, is the perfect neoliberal subject.
Cybertariat
Working conditions on ‘the platform’ already came up a few times. It is no coincidence that the rise of digital technology and the notion of creative industries coincided, and it became clear early on that the advent of the internet would revolutionize ‘creative’ labor. For instance, in 2009, Rosalind Gill published the booklet Technobohemians or the New Cybertariat? based on her intensive work and conversations with a new professional group that had emerged in Amsterdam: web designers and developers. She asked:
‘What are we to make of someone who says they love their work and cannot imagine doing anything they enjoy more, yet earn so little that they can never take a holiday, let alone afford insurance or a pension? How are we to think about a person who is passionate about the creative work they do up to 80 hours per week yet feel fearful that they will not be able to have the children they long for because of the time and money pressures they face?’
Fifteen years later, web designers and developers in the west are usually not too badly off in economic terms, but there is still a large cohort of exploited cybertarians. Web work has grown into an enormous, technofeudal outsourcing industry with its workforce based mainly in India, Manilla, the Philippines, and other places in the ‘majority world’. Their overlords (Zuck, Elon, etc.) are the members of the small ‘virtual class’. This class enemy has been described by Arthur Kroker and Michael Weinstein in Data Trash: The Theory of the Virtual Class as deeply authoritarian, technocratic, corporate, autistic, and techno-optimist. The 1994 book remains one of the sharpest analyses of the mass psychological forces that shaped the early web (social weak links, instant information, post-historical depoliticization, global markets-opportunism, the desire to abandon wetware, and so on) as part of a concerted political effort to accelerate capitalism. It also perfectly shows that recent phenomena like the alt-right, the manosphere, and Luigicore are the expected cultural projections of the virtual class and those who share its nihilist ‘Will to Virtuality’ rather than disruptive or subversive subcultures.
Art workers are not exactly part of the cybertarian workforce found in click and troll farms. However, it is good to keep in mind that the art world has been transformed less by the extravaganza of ‘stupid’ NFT money than by the extremely precarious conditions of gig working platforms like Fiverr, where artists take online commissions to make websites, illustrations, or renders for a quick buck. Silvio Lorusso and Morgane Billuart have more to say about the topic of digital cultural gig work. But to conclude this text, I want to delve a little deeper into the position of art within global, digitally mediated production chains.
Cognitariat
For a last theory of contemporary class composition, we turn to the Italian tradition of post-operaism. The goal of post-operaism is communist liberation through the abolition of labor, which quite obviously conjures the unavoidable question: what is class struggle beyond work? This has resulted in many unique, provocative, and often hopeful theories of emergent class composition.
In the early 2000s, in the book Soul at Work, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi coined the definition of the ‘cognitariat’. He stipulates that creatives are the new production line workers, occupying their dedicated spot at a global, fully digital conveyor belt. The cognitariat deals with an entirely new form of alienation: they are not alienated from their bodies, as the factory conveyor belt worker described by Marx and Engels was, or from their consciousness, as theorized by Lukács, but an ‘alienating bifurcation’ (split) occurs in their soul. The cognitarian is coerced into cultivating and performing exactly the right amount of instrumental creativity and uniqueness.
Bifo’s theory gives a whole new dimension to the idea of artists as the flex-work avant-garde. To his understanding, precarity is the dominant form of government of late-stage capitalism. Precarity, he says outright, is an era. If this is true, it must be possible to catch glimpses of another world through the cracks in political reality. Even if art is not here to save the world, flex work hardships might have taught art workers some lessons that are of interest to many more groups of workers under neoliberal regimes, providing some basis for post-corporatist types of organizing. (Mia van den Bos recently published a convincing argument about why art workers should and can engage in organizing a post-corporatist, social union.)
Art of the Working Class
I can imagine that the ‘riot of the -riat’ presented above has provoked eye-rolls, or at least some nervous laughter. Who needs precariats, entreprecariats, projectariats, cybertariats, cognitariats, affectariats, and so on? Why make class struggle so complex? Are people afraid to engage with, or worse, incapable of recognizing the good old proletariat?
But let’s return to Arts of the Working Class for a second. They have a serious political perspective, with a serious material praxis to back it up. If things were so simple, why do they feel the need to retreat in irony when defining ‘working class’? And why are art workers in general so confused about their class position, so badly organized? Is this not the classic issue of the ‘little person’: producing in an extractive system that they struggle to understand, let alone control? These complexities tell me that we need complex class composition analysis, gleaning from different texts and experiences, and speculating together. Who knows, maybe a simple political perspective will present itself at some point, which can in turn inform real commitment and change in praxis (with and beyond art).
Having said that, the question of whether there is an art of the working class can never be answered theoretically. It’s not a question of finding the right representation (language) but rather of constituting a practice that would be adequate (true) to our time. I therefore want to end by citing an artist I admire for his continuous dedication to the art of the working class. In November of 2023, Dutch parliamentary elections led to a landslide victory of the extreme right, populist ‘Freedom Party’ (led by Geert Wilders). In a public gathering of art workers to discuss how to deal with this situation, De Bruyne said something that stuck with me: We have made art for the elites for three decades now. Now, we want to make art for the people again.