Dave Beech - Art and Postcapitalism

Art and Postcapitalism

Aesthetic Labour, Automation
and Value Production

Dave Beech

First published 2019 by Pluto Press

345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA

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Copyright Dave Beech 2019

The right of Dave Beech to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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ISBN 978 0 7453 3925 2 Hardback

ISBN 978 0 7453 3924 5 Paperback

ISBN 978 1 7868 0508 9 PDF eBook

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To my art teachers

In memory of Stroud Cornock,
artist and teacher
19382019

This book was written while I was a Professor of Art at Valand Academy, University of Gothenburg, and a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Arts, London. I want to thank colleagues at both institutions for their continued support and critical interrogation of the ideas that I set out in this book. I also want to thank comrades in the Marxism in Culture lecture series based at University College London.

An early version of my analysis of the forms of activity and types of subjectivity included in contemporary postcapitalist theory was delivered in October 2017 at AltMFA, an alternative educational organisation established by artists for artists in London. Also, in October 2017, I gave a presentation on the concept of postcapitalism for the Collection Collective seminar In the Future All Our Homes Will Be Museums at the Kunsthalle Bratislava. Since both presentations were shaped, in large part, by an email conversation that I had with Peter Hudis about the transformation of work and life in postcapitalism, I want to thank Peter for his generosity in explaining some key principles for thinking about postcapitalism.

An earlier version of my argument about postcapitalism in relation to questions of work rather than art was developed as an article for Parse journal. As part of the open peer review process I am grateful to have received excellent feedback from Sarah Brouillette and Jasper Bernes. I also want to thank Marina Vishmidt for making this possible. I gave the first presentation of my rereading of theories of nonalienated labour at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, in 2017, at the invitation of Gareth James. I am indebted to the audience for raising serious questions about my methodology and conclusions. I hope that the arguments in this book have been improved as a result, but I also hope that if problems persist then I will hear about it.

My investigation of nonalienated labour was significantly extended and improved by an email exchange with the great generosity of the Marxist art historian Andrew Hemingway, for which I am deeply thankful. I have also benefitted from exchanges with Jason Bowman, Andrea Phillips, Mick Wilson, Tom Cubbin, Josefine Wikstrm, Bruno Gulli, Alberto Toscano and Charles Esche. My thanks to Kim Charnley for comments on an early draft and to Bryan Parkhurst for commenting in such detail on the first full draft of the manuscript.

Thanks also to Jakob Horstmann for making this book possible and for making it better.

I would like to thank the CCW Graduate School for awarding me research time to complete this book.

This book contributes to the political theory of art. Prompted by an observation that current debates on postcapitalism differ from their nineteenth- and twentieth-century counterparts (socialism, communism and anarchism) by omitting art from descriptions of universal emancipation, this book sets out to reconstruct the politics of art through the lens of the supersession of the capitalist mode of production. In doing so, however, I confront the political imaginary of contemporary art. Today, evidently, art is replete with critical practices but typically lacks a clear understanding of the difference between resisting the existing social system and superseding it. In order to assess the various theories of arts hostility to and complicity with capitalism, I will draw on contemporary value theory to focus the analysis on the contradiction between value production and the production of material wealth that characterises both (1) what is distinctive about work in the capitalist mode of production and (2) what is decisive in the transition from capitalism to postcapitalism.

Value theory is a relatively recent tendency within Marxism and post-Marxism that arose in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the rise of the global justice movement in the 1990s and the financial crisis of 20078.

This diverse movement indicates that despite the notion, which became widely voiced after 1989, that there is no alternative to capitalism, increasing numbers of people around the world are searching for such an alternative. However, there appears to be little or no consensus within the global-justice movement as to what such an alternative might consist of.

Value theorists respond to this issue specifically by arguing that the principal advocates of the so-called traditional left made grave errors in their definitions of capitalism and therefore misconceived the nature of postcapitalism. Value theory declares that postcapitalism is not achieved with the workers state, the redistribution of wealth, decommodification, the abolition of money or the collective ownership of the means of production but only with the supersession of value production. I will adhere to this principle without endorsing the political abandonment of the workers movement or the emphasis on the commodity and commodity form, as some of its leading exponents have concluded.

Postcapitalism today is not another word for communism but the name of a political project that deliberately distances itself, to a greater or lesser extent, from the Marxist and socialist tradition. Contemporary postcapitalism binds itself uneasily to historical postcapitalism through repeated acts of revision, rejection and critique. Prominent authors of postcapitalist theory such as Paul Mason, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, Katherine Gibson and Julie Graham, Kathi Weeks, Miya Tokumitsu, Moishe Postone, Michael Heinrich and John Holloway, share an exasperated discomfort with the history of the anticapitalist struggle, despite the diversity of their political and theoretical projects. Contemporary postcapitalism, it could be said, is the intellectual programme, variously conceived, to extend the radical emancipatory politics of the left by leveraging it away from the ostensibly narrow concerns of the workers movement.

What has happened, among other things, is that the micropolitics of work not only brackets itself off from the workers movement but preserves and conceals a hostility to the working class and the workers movement in its dream of worklessness. When political theorists after 1968 refer to the traditional left as a narrowly-conceived class politics that suppresses all other political discourses and movements, the term traditional left is deployed to identify only those specific elements of the socialist and Marxist traditions to be jettisoned by the new politics and therefore is necessarily a distortion because it represents the breadth of socialist and communist traditions from the perspective of what they lack. When the workers movement aligned itself with anticolonial, feminist, ecological and peace movements, for instance which it did from the start and regularly throughout these instances are extracted from the traditional left as if they did not belong there.