Art and Postcapitalism

Aesthetic Labour, Automation and Value Production

Dave Beech

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780745339245
• eBook ISBN: 9781786805096
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism
• Index: Economics

Artistic labour was exemplary for Utopian Socialist theories of 'attractive labour', and Marxist theories of 'nonalienated labour', but the rise of the anti-work movement and current theories of 'fully automated luxury communism' have seen art topple from its privileged place within the left's political imaginary as the artist has been reconceived as a prototype of the precarious 24/7 worker. Art and Postcapitalism argues that art remains essential for thinking about the intersection of labour, capitalism and postcapitalism not insofar as it merges work and pleasure but as an example of noncapitalist production. Reassessing the contemporary politics of work by revisiting debates about art, technology and in the nineteenth and twentieth century, Dave Beech challenges the aesthetics of labour in John Ruskin, William Morris and Oscar Wilde with a value theory of the supersession of capitalism that sheds light on the anti-work theory by Silvia Federici, Andre Gorz, Kathi Weeks and Maurizio Lazzarato, as well as the technological Cockayne of Srnicek and Williams and Paul Mason. Formulating a critique of contemporary postcapitalism, and developing a new understanding of art and labour within the political project of the supersession of value production, this book is essential for activists, scholars and anyone interested in the real and imagined escape routes from capitalism.

1
What is Postcapitalism?

As a term, ‘postcapitalism’ – with or without a hyphen – is a recent addition to the political vocabulary. It has been argued, however, that it was the birth of capitalism, not its professed death, that initially prompted postcapitalist speculations. Karl Kautsky, in his classic study of Thomas More’s Utopia (published originally in 1516), argued that utopianism emerges when the capitalist mode of production is only just finding its feet and therefore ‘Socialism found a theoretical expression earlier than Capitalism.’¹

The deep historical roots of this contemporary political trope are captured by Rob Lucas’ description of the central argument of Paul Mason’s 2015 book, Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future, as ‘a high-tech Cockaigne of “full automation”, where everything from foodstuff production to infrastructure maintenance required no labour inputs at all’.² Contemporary postcapitalism revives the fantasy of a fourteenth-century poem, The Land of Cokaygne, in which geese roast on the spit and larks smothered in stew fly down into open mouths and ‘Every man may drink his fill/And needn’t sweat to pay the bill.’ Automation, as it is lauded in Aaron Bastani’s theory of ‘fully automated luxury communism’ and Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’s ‘Left Accelerationism’, recodes the imaginary land of luxury and idleness as a feasible future.

Cockayne takes on a new significance in late nineteenth-century Europe with the rise of a revolutionary working-class movement. Cockayne is a scene of agricultural life purified of agricultural work. A. L. Morton, the great historian of utopia, dubbed the Land of Cockayne a ‘poor man’s heaven’³ and Walter Benjamin called it ‘the primal wish symbol’.⁴ Steve Edwards correctly describes Cockayne as pastoral from below. Aristocratic idleness, which is depicted in pastoral literature and painting (noble types in peasant costume lazily tending flocks and inactively reaping the agricultural harvest), is universalised by abolishing the labour that in pastoral is merely off-stage or just completed or not-yet-begun. If, for the nobility, scenes of rest within a fictional day’s work resonate with a life of idleness, for the agricultural workers themselves, scenes of idleness could only evoke a lifetime of rest if they were inserted into fictions of unlimited naturally-occurring produce.

Cockayne and its modern variants, including the Bluegrass song ‘The Big Rock Candy Mountain’, have been incorporated into a utopian strain of Marxism.⁵ In his two-volume study, The Principle of Hope,⁶ Ernst Bloch, the principal defender of utopian thinking within the Frankfurt School, associated Cockayne with stories of Eden and the New Jerusalem, fairy tales of dragon-slaying and the sales pitches of pedlars of age-reversing ointments, all of which are, in Bloch’s analysis, poetic images of hope. But what do we hope for when we hope for idleness? Bloch recognised that hope can be expressed in reactionary as well as revolutionary forms of utopianism. Similarly, I want to say that postcapitalism straddles a spectrum of political positions, and not only with regard to its prominent advocacy of a Cockaignean condition of worklessness.

Fredric Jameson, who has done more than anyone to rekindle interest in utopian thought after the alleged decline of history, refers to the early tradition of utopian images of natural plenty as ‘old peasant dreams’,⁷ implying that they are reactionary rather than revolutionary. William Morris, who E. P. Thompson noted ‘had become one of the two or three acknowledged leaders of the Socialist movement in England’ in the mid-1880s, was similarly concerned about the ‘Cockney Paradise’ of visions of lavish idleness. In a class-divided society of workless owners and propertyless workers, the affirmation of idleness represents a genuine aspiration of the worker. However, what troubles Jameson and Morris is how much the wish for idleness replicates the reality and values of the dominant class.

Silvia Federici is nonetheless right to raise the question of a deeper submission to the ‘work ethic’ within the socialist suspicion of idleness. Narrating the birth of capitalism through the seemingly impossible task of converting the poor from the dream of a lawless luxury worklessness to the ideal of hard work and honest pay,⁸ it is vital to understand that the affirmation of hard work and the demand for higher wages preserves capitalism rather than contributing to its abolition. Does this mean, therefore, that it is universal idleness that holds the more radical threat to capitalism than the elimination of the unearned incomes of capitalists – that the problem with capitalism is labour, not capital?

Although Federici articulates her critique of the ‘work ethic’ more pointedly as a critique of the workers’ movement than of capitalism, her opposition of the abolition of work and the affirmation of work can be mapped onto rival strains within the workers’ movement and her preference corresponds, roughly speaking, with the revolutionary tradition as opposed to the more reformist, social democratic and trade union tradition. For the early socialists and communists, worklessness had the specific connotation of the abolition of wage labour, forced labour, wage slavery and alienated labour. If, however, Federici means something more expansive, then the closest precedents of her argument can be found not in the workers’ movement itself but the condemnation of work in nineteenth-century anarchism and aestheticism, which I will discuss in more detail later.

So, to what extent is universal idleness required by a theory of post-capitalism? Is it possible for a fully automated and workless future to remain capitalist or is universal worklessness incompatible with capitalism? What kind of idleness, if any, does postcapitalism require? In certain branches of the contemporary politics of work it is possible to come away with the idea that postcapitalism consists of the affirmation of idleness against the ‘work ethic’. Bruno Gulli makes a strong case that what disappears in postcapitalism is ‘productivity, which is proper to the concept of wage labor and “job” not labor or production’,⁹ but I will try to refine this argument to identify the decisive factor in differentiating capitalist and postcapitalist social relations of production. Or, to put the question in a different register, if capitalist social relations put fetters¹⁰ on the forces of production, as Marx argued, what might we mean by unfettered production?

In the period between the Levellers of seventeenth-century England and the Utopian Socialists of early-nineteenth-century France, the struggle against the enclosure of the commons, the lengthening of the working day, the technical division of labour, mechanisation and deskilling was conceived primarily through geographical forms of rupture.¹¹ Socialism, initially, could be imagined only as a harmoniously administered colony. Utopian Socialism, as it was expressed by Owen, Fourier and Saint-Simon, lacked historical agency and therefore represented not proletarian fantasies of postcapitalism but the dreams of capitalists, lapsed minor aristocrats and bureaucrats for harmony¹² and cooperation.¹³ Louis Marin, the author of Utopics,¹⁴ identifies the geographical character of Utopian Socialism. What was utopian about Utopian Socialism was its depiction of a place where people lived in harmony. As a long-established literary genre, utopia had always conjured up images of far-off lands in which a people untainted by ‘our’ modes of governance and property relations managed their affairs more humanely than European nations.

Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen were utopians, in this reading, not simply because they believed that a better society was possible but also, and more precisely, because they believed that this new society could be fashioned by providing land to a colony of volunteers. Utopian Socialism was a colonial dream that might more accurately be named Settler Socialism, and for that reason its technique of geographical displacement needs to be highlighted above the common perception that utopianism is a plan for a society that exists only in the future. Utopianism may legitimately claim to be postcapitalist insofar as it always hoped that its colonies would act as a prompt to social change in the societies from which they fled, but this clearly requires a second phase of social transformation that is not brought about by utopian strategies alone. Hence, Utopian Socialism was not a form of postcapitalism, strictly speaking, but an exodus from industrial capitalism through the formation and administration of colonies.

When the hope of establishing utopian colonies was supplanted by the revolutionary project of the abolition of capitalism, the spatial politics that had always been suppressed within Settler Socialism was dissolved altogether in a temporal order of supersession. The political difference between socialism and communism showed itself for the first time in the 1840s when communists ‘demanded a radical reconstruction of society’, as Engels later described the event. Early communists mocked Utopian Socialism for its administrative methods, charismatic leaders, religiosity and barrack lifestyle. If socialism consisted of an exodus from capitalism, communism was postcapitalism. Rejecting the utopian construction of distant colonies, communists nursed the idea of a revolutionary transformation of the existing society modelled after the French Revolution. Postcapitalism, understood as a political project of immanent social change plotted in a temporal sequence after capitalism, is an 1840s idea.

Spatial considerations reasserted themselves in speculations during Marx’s lifetime about where the imminent world revolution would strike first. In David Harvey’s geographical reading, Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto (which was written in English and translated into French, German, Italian, Flemish and Danish), was ‘Eurocentric rather than international’.¹⁵ Initially, postcapitalism slotted into the spatial configuration set by colonial modernity. ‘The organization of working-class struggle concentrates and diffuses across space in a way that mirrors the actions of capital.’¹⁶ It was assumed that the greatest challenge to capitalism would emerge from within the most advanced nations themselves as a result of the formation of the intensity of working-class organisation attendant to industrialisation. However, given the February Revolution in Paris, the revolutionary movement of March in Prussia, Austria and neighbouring states, revolutions in Milan and Venice, the Prague Rising, Chartism in England and the success of Belgian workers in demanding reforms, the emphasis on Europe had more than chauvinism behind it in 1848. David Fernbach, the eminent Marx scholar and translator, holds that 1848 was an ‘unparalleled’ year for ‘Marx as a revolutionary militant’,¹⁷ but before the end of the year the ‘communist revolution had proved to be a much longer and harder struggle than Marx had originally anticipated’.¹⁸ And, we can add, the geography of revolution was never as narrow afterwards.

The shift from socialism to communism was acknowledged at the time by Lorenz von Stein, who characterised it as a shift from the organisation of the workers by an enlightened elite to the self-organisation of workers. His widely-read book, Socialism and Communism in Contemporary France, published in 1841, presented the first comparative political assessment of leftwing political theories and became a major sourcebook for subsequent accounts of socialism and communism. For von Stein, communism was the spontaneous political expression of the working class, whereas socialism was the theoretical product of bourgeois social reformers. The early-twentieth-century opposition of reform and revolution translates von Stein’s analysis of the class composition of socialism and communism into two rival political strategies.

Michael Löwy has surveyed this ‘transitional stage between the “utopian socialism” of Fourier or Cabet and proletarian communism, between the appeal to Tsar Alexander I and the self-liberating workers’ revolution’.¹⁹ For Neo-Hegelian philosophers such as Bruno Bauer and Arnold Ruge, who opposed the ‘crude communism’ of militant artisans with ‘true communism’, the primary dispute was whether the masses were the enemy of ‘critical thinking’ or whether it was necessary ‘to set the masses in motion in the direction indicated by theory’.²⁰ Viewed from the perspective of communist workers, though, there is a perceptible shift from philosophical to proletarian communism that itself can be divided into ‘the “materialist communism” of the 1840s (Dézamy), the efforts of self-organization and self-emancipation (Chartism, Flora Tristam), and the praxis of revolutionary action by the masses (the Chartist riots, the revolt of the Silesian weavers)’.²¹

While a utopian, territorial socialism marks itself out by leaving one place and occupying another, forming itself through an act of rupture that divides the land into separate social en...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Postcapitalism, Critique and Art
• 1. What is Postcapitalism?
• 2. Art’s Hostility to Capitalism
• 3. Artists and the Politics of Work
• 4. Avant-Gardism and the Meanings of Automation
• 5. Laziness and the Technologies of Rest
• Conclusion: Gratuity, Digitalisation and Value
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index