of the 1930s. But their struggles have much more in common with these classical images of the “alienated” working class than they do with those of the contemporary artists represented in the W.A.G.E. survey. Both groups are subjected to plenty of indignity and injustice—but this doesn’t mean that the issues they face are the same, any more than apples and oranges are the same because they are both fruit.
“Cut Up into Two Persons”
“I think what’s confusing,” said Jennifer Dalton during that long-ago discussion of my Theses at Winkleman Gallery, “is that you say that artists are middle class, but we feel working class. We feel replaceable.”
The issue of class has moral overtones. If politicians endlessly pay homage to the “middle class” as a way of painting a magical picture of the American economy as an even playing field where we can all potentially realize ourselves, struggling artists may claim the idea of themselves as “working class” partly as a way of putting a name on their own embattled condition and piercing stereotypes that all artists are well-to-do dandies. As the example of Melamed shows, even successful artists routinely have to fight in order to claim what should be theirs. Even more importantly, inasmuch as the vast majority of contemporary artists do not actually make a living through their art but get by through a variety of other jobs, they are in actual fact members of the working class.
The theory that contemporary art is characteristically middle class may sound dismissive, as if it were a way of saying that artists’ grievances aren’t as significant as those faced by “real” workers. This is far from the case. It might be important to remember, therefore, that the reason Marxists look to the working class is not moral. Marx and Engels’s attachment to the working class was definitely not just a modified version of the biblical promise that “the meek shall inherit the Earth” or that “the last shall be first.”
Rather, it was their contention that the working class was exploited, but also uniquely positioned to be a revolutionary agent in a capitalist society. Capitalists had become the dominant class; capitalism had created a vastly productive, interconnected world economy (albeit one that ran on truly shortsighted logic and inequality); and the working class had a special relationship to maintaining this system. That is, workers collectively do the work that makes this sprawling system function and it therefore needs them on an ongoing basis, day in and day out. This fact gives them special power. Among other things, it gives them a unique weapon, the strike, which no other group can claim. By simply uniting and making a collective decision not to work, the working class can wield tremendous power.
It has become fashionable among aesthetic theorists invested in “immaterial labor” as a new capitalist norm to assume that Marx and Engels’s faith in the proletariat was misplaced. It used to be that pundits would argue that workers in the United States were too comfortable, too bought off by capitalism. These days, it is more common to argue the reverse, that the working class under conditions of globalization and neoliberalism has become too unstable, too decomposed to ever have hope of political solidarity or united action. Marxism, we are told, is applicable only to old-fashioned factory workers—a condition of labor in nineteenth-century Europe that no longer holds under contemporary technological capitalism. Adam Turl has neatly summed up the host of distortions that underlie these various theories:
What most post-industrial concepts have in common . . . is that they narrowly identify the working class as industrial workers, rather than the class of wage workers as a whole, which also includes white-collar workers, service workers, transportation workers, and so on. They also mistakenly associate the relative decline in the number of industrial workers with their declining social weight in the economy, when rising productivity in industry actually increases the potential power of industrial workers even if their relative numbers might diminish. Finally, post-industrial theory tends to conflate the decline in labor parties, trade unions, and other forms of traditional working-class organizations—the product of several decades of neoliberal attacks—with structural changes that they argue render the class less powerful, or even powerless.
The Marxist concept of the working class is far more dynamic. While employers utilize structural shifts—deregulation, industrial decline in one region, and so on—to weaken working-class organization and lower labor costs, these changes are not permanent barriers to working-class struggle. On the contrary, they guarantee that the working class will be compelled to resist. The revival of such resistance is a political and organizational question rather than a structural one. Marxism locates within capitalism—driven to accumulate capital through the expropriation of surplus value—the class whose labor turns the wheels of production, however shaped, and therefore possesses the power to transform it. The working class, though its structure has changed dramatically over time, still possesses the centrality and power attributed to it by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels when they wrote the Communist Manifesto.45
In other words, economic and political theories that dwell on an insurmountable new “postindustrial” condition suffer from a faulty theory of class, no less than the aesthetic theories we looked at earlier. Yet nothing in this theory says that other classes or social groups don’t have real grievances or participate in social struggle. The unemployed, students, and others can and do play decisive political roles. What the Marxist emphasis on the working class does indicate is the pragmatic reality that, in a capitalist world, the working class has a form of social power and a key role to play that these other groups don’t, and that politics rooted in these other groups will have an in-built limit in the absence of a connection with an organized working class because systematic change requires some systematic way to challenge power. As the Manifesto states (rather sternly) of the middle class:
The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance they are revolutionary, they are so only in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat, they thus defend not their present, but their future interests, they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat.46
For middle-class agents to become effectively political involves them decisively breaking with the biases associated with their own class, because in a society where the relationship between capitalist and worker is the most important one, the middle class occupies a vacillating center position. Marx himself writes, in Theories of Surplus Value, that a member of the petite bourgeoisie “is cut up into two persons. . . . As owner of the means of production he is a capitalist; as a labourer he is his own wage-labourer.”47 Among professional artists or those who aspire to be professional artists, it is this characteristically middle-class split that explains the seemingly paradoxical political temperament that observers often find, with artists pulled between egalitarianism and meritocracy, caught between what they have to gain from class struggle and what they have to lose.48 Lucy Lippard captures this contradiction beautifully in “The Pink Glass Swan,” her classic essay about artists and class:
Looking at and “appreciating” art in [the twentieth century] has been understood as an instrument (or at best a result) of upward social mobility, in which owning art is the ultimate step. Making art is at the bottom of the scale. This is the only legitimate reason to see artists as so many artists see themselves—as “workers.” At the same time, artists/makers tend to feel misunderstood and, as creators, innately superior to the buyers/owners. The innermost circle of the art-world class system thereby replaces the rulers with the creators, and the contemporary artist in the big city (read New York) is a schizophrenic creature. S/he is persistently working “up” to be accepted, not only by other artists, but also by the hierarchy that exhibits, writes about, and buys her/his work. At the same time s/he is often ideologically working “down” in an attempt to identify with the workers outside of the art context and to overthrow the rulers in the name of art.49
Among other things,
