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, such an internally divided temperament accounts for the historical difficulty in organizing artists into any sort of coherent political formation. Visual artists, in fact, are not unlike the peasants Marx memorably described in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte as being “formed by the simple addition of homologous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes.”50 Peasants’ lives were rooted in the form of small property; their collective interests didn’t fuse into anything greater but merely formed an aggregation of individual units, making them politically weak though numerically vast.
Contemporary artists—highly educated, concentrated in urban centers where they often interact professionally, and moreover thrown back into the working class because of the capricious nature of the art market—are generally much more naturally radical than the peasantry that formed the backbone of reaction in France. Their conditions are similar, however, in that as artists their collective labor doesn’t really add up to anything larger and is not related to any larger institution that they could take control of collectively. Artists merely form a collection of individualities, of individual franchises jostling to distinguish themselves from one another.
The upshot is that visual artists’ middle-class position is not merely a limit on their relation to larger social struggle but also on their ability to organize to transform their own conditions. Attempts to organize artists to address inequality have generally run aground on a simple but crucial issue: what institution is there to which they could relate in order to make collective demands? What power do they have besides moral authority? As Carl Andre, once an advocate of identifying radical art with blue-collar labor, said in 1979 when asked to join in a global “artist strike” against the system, “From whom would artists be withholding their art if they did go on strike? Alas, from no one but themselves.”51
Still, this reality doesn’t mean that artists’ protests cannot have a real and vital impact. In some ways, you could even say that the very unattached nature of artistic struggle gives it a certain mercurial power that can help serve as a detonator for wider change. To return to the example of the Art Workers’ Coalition, after forming in the late sixties to take on a wide range of issues affecting artists—from MoMA’s silence on the war in Vietnam to the museum’s “blackmail” of painters into donating work to its collection52—it collapsed after a few short years, undone by its wildly eclectic nature and endless squabbling. However, in the meantime, its highly visible