Red Bloom | The Art Workers' Inquiry
Red Bloom Communist Collective, photo courtesy of the collective
Red Bloom is a collective of communists who aim to develop revolutionary practice relevant to the current conditions in New York City and beyond. They are an affiliate organization in the national Marxist Center network that works in coalition with other radical groups in and out of this network. They are committed to internationalism, Marxist-feminism, Black/brown/Indigenous liberation, the transparency of revolutionary organizations, working-class independence, and abolition.
The Art Workers’ Inquiry is an organizing group in Red Bloom of workers seeking to build power across New York’s vast arts industry. They define art workers as anyone whose labor contributes to the artistic production process, from dancers to art handlers to bartenders at performance venues. The Art Workers’ Inquiry builds connections and strengthens bonds of solidarity between art workers with the ultimate goal of building a new, worker-run model of artistic labor.
How has the pandemic changed the way you think about the production of art in your own practice and/or in the industry? This is one of ten questions the Red Bloom Art Workers’ Inquiry asked in a recent survey on the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on art workers. What follows is an account of the Art Workers’ Inquiry within the broader history of worker inquiries, some thoughts on how the pandemic has changed how we think of our own practice of asking questions of our fellow art workers, and our desires and demands for the future of our industry.
The Art Worker’s Inquiry formed as a group when we decided to create a survey based on the original workers’ inquiry compiled by Karl Marx in 1880. Marx’s inquiry was commissioned by the French socialist publication La Revue socialiste and comprised 101 questions that probed numerous aspects of the life of a worker. In addition to gathering research and forming a kind of ethnography of workers under capitalism, the inquiry aimed to push and agitate—in its progression of questioning—the survey-taker to think about the political implications of revolt and revolution. Though it was never carried out in Marx’s time, the template for the workers’ inquiry was put into use in the postwar period by the likes of the Johnson-Forest Tendency (a project initiated by C. L. R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya), which tapped into the Black radical tradition in the United States. Workers’ inquiries were also conducted and weaponized by organizers in the Italian operaismo (workerism) movement at the factories of Olivetti and Fiat. (Asad Haider and Salar Mohandesi have written a comprehensive history of the workers’ inquiry in Viewpoint magazine.)
Tailored to the concerns of art workers, the first survey the Art Workers’ Inquiry developed consists of seventy questions divided into twelve sections, each centered on a topic such as labor, profession, or social reproduction. Our approach is interdisciplinary in order to expand our analysis of an industry that is extremely exploitative in part because it is structured on the myth of “doing what you love.” We have conducted the inquiry one on one as well as with a class at Cooper Union, the DSA Media Working Group, and in open events at spaces including Interference Archive, Unnameable Books, and Stellar Projects.
The Art Workers’ Inquiry had an event scheduled for March 16, 2020, four days before non-essential businesses were ordered to close in New York. We canceled that event and were suddenly faced with figuring out what organizing could look like when we couldn’t gather in public space. Many members of the collective were forced to spend long hours on zoom for our jobs, so we experimented with distanced forms of being together other than video meetings. We wrote each other letters. We played the game telephone by asking one member to call another and share music or a movement exercise, after which the recipient of the call would phone the next person and repeat what they had learned from memory. When the uprisings over George Floyd’s murder began, we joined the rest of Red Bloom in shifting our energy to the streets.
By the time we decided to draft our most recent inquiry, Art Work During a Pandemic, it was clear to us that art workers’ conditions had changed dramatically. The rage and sorrow over police violence, and the power of last summer’s protests, stayed with us. Abolition was firmly planted in the cultural discourse as an idea with teeth. Art institutions rushed to send emails claiming solidarity with Black lives; some groups framed defunding the police as a friendly belt tightening within a bloated sphere of state spending; others, like the Democratic party, doubled down on their support of the police. But none of this erases a very real question for art workers: What do our cultural institutions look like without police?
Red Bloom Communist Collective, photo courtesy of the collective
The composition of the working class is vastly different than it was a year ago, and it’s likely to continue changing. Jobs in “arts, entertainment and recreation” fell by 66% in 2020, the largest decline among the city’s economic sectors. This swelling of the reserve army of labor put pressure on those of us still employed to take on numerous additional tasks, from developing online classes from scratch in a matter of days to participating in elaborate cleaning protocols that allowed museums and other institutions to justify reopening.
In our survey, we asked art workers to elaborate on exactly how their working conditions had changed. Are you receiving unemployment? Is it adequate? We also asked what changes art workers would like to see in their lives after the pandemic. They answered that they want better pay, more permanent full-time positions, industry-wide unionization, wage equity, wage transparency, health insurance, adequate paid sick leave, severance pay, increased worker protections (including on-site protection/PPE), means to effectively confront acts of racism and sexism within the workplace, public arts funding, and centrally located spaces to meet, work, and socialize.
Many of the answers we received reflect fundamental changes that would impact the lives of all people, not just art workers. The responses overwhelmingly express a desire for a socially just world in which everyone would have the time and freedom to create and live an unalienated, fulfilling life. Many respondents report that the conditions of the pandemic had also produced positive changes in their lives. They were relieved from the pressure to perform and network in social contexts, able to leave abusive workplaces, and given more time and space to rest and deepen interpersonal relationships and bonding with their partner(s) and community.
Prioritizing a culture of care, love, and justice against one of exceptionalism, the art workers we surveyed want free and widely available education; universal single-payer health care; free housing; expanded mutual aid networks; police and prison abolition; debt relief; ways to address racial injustice, misogyny, and settler colonialism; action on climate change and the environment; a robust social safety net; changes in the systems of food production; large investment in social programs and housing; reduction of the 40-hour work week; heavy taxes on the 1%; protection and respect for workers everywhere; better pay and benefits for essential workers; slower production; solidarity with people around the world; and a movement of working people coming together for self-determination.
Respondents also wrote about art institutions. They want to be less reliant on museums or even to abolish museums and their boards completely. They want freeports, art fairs, and commercial art galleries to disappear; they question the financing of these institutions and their reliance on assets from real estate and capital campaigns. They want to upend the racist and exploitative art world.
What would a cultural institution that answers the desires of the art workers in our survey look like? As they exist today, our cultural institutions are embedded in capitalism and constrained by its economic imperatives. The financial structures that constitute art institutions produce poverty, dispossession, gentrification, debt, austerity, white supremacy, and ecological destruction. Any attempt to reform art institutions will continue to reproduce this capitalist dystopia. All art and all wealth is created socially, and should be socially owned and democratically controlled. The task is to create a different kind of institution embedded in an economy based on worker ownership and social organization without private property.
Art institutions could be experimental, transitional spaces for the radical transformation of society. They could focus on the needs of all art workers, expanding the concept of “artist” and “art worker” to include everyone who helps in the creation of art and the reproduction of the art industry. Together, these workers could focus on eco-social relations of subsistence and production. They could create frameworks that center around biological time, not factory time, and structure labor in accordance with the patterns and flows of the natural world. They could work on housing, transportation, and abolition—in other words, the life that art workers desire for everyone. Reshaping labor will reshape everyday life.
Reimagined and reconfigured as emancipatory, art institutions could create a radically different world where people’s needs are taken care of and where everyone can luxuriate in the full experience of being human.
Reach us at artworkers@protonmail.com