Notions of formal and waged employment still dominate current conceptualisations of work-related solidarity. This article argues that it is increasingly difficult to distinguish between work and non-work. Considering cultural production as laboratory for new forms of work, this article uses Hannah Arendt’s distinction of labour, work and action to explore a cultural project that negotiates conflicting economic and political demands. It identifies solidarity as temporary phenomenon that draws together disparate groups and that necessitates constant engagement to create and maintain its conditions. Work aiming at solidary action, however, cannot be analysed without considering labour that sustains the needs of the individuals involved. Yet, when being subjected to individual economic needs, the solidary action can be compromised.
Abstract
Notions of formal and waged employment still dominate current conceptualisations of work-related solidarity. This article argues that it is increasingly difficult to distinguish between work and non-work. Considering cultural production as laboratory for new forms of work, this article uses Hannah Arendt’s distinction of labour, work and action to explore a cultural project that negotiates conflicting economic and political demands. It identifies solidarity as temporary phenomenon that draws together disparate groups and that necessitates constant engagement to create and maintain its conditions. Work aiming at solidary action, however, cannot be analysed without considering labour that sustains the needs of the individuals involved. Yet, when being subjected to individual economic needs, the solidary action can be compromised.
Introduction
Classical conceptualisations of solidarity, such as those by Hegel, Marx or Durkheim have closely been linked to work (Smith, 2015) and seen in light of an on-going political struggle between the working class and the bourgeoisie. This ultimately leads to conceptualisations of solidarity as a form of connection or association between workers, informing studies in terms of unionized solidarity (Hyman, 1999, 2015). In recent decades, however, work has undergone a global shift in nature in recent decades mirrored in a growing discussion about various types of work that considerably differ from standard employment.
Contributions engage with informal employment (Visser, 2017), contingent work (Bolton and Laaser, 2013), un-paid work (Siebert and Wilson, 2013) or pose the more fundamental question of what is work after all (Kirton, 2013). The latter points out that the numerous processes of creating and maintaining distinctions between different categories of work and non-work should become central points of interrogation (Hatton, 2015). With forms of non-work starting to display the same form of productivity (Virno, 2004; Hesmondhalgh, 2010; Terranova, 2000), capitalist forms of exploitation have long left the boundaries of the workplace and become relevant to the process of capital accumulation in what Tronti (1966) coined ‘social factory’ (van Dyk, 2018; Weeks, 2011). This dwindling of standard employment is also reflected in re-considerations of work-related forms of solidarity that have traditionally been associated with organized labour (Hyman, 2015, 1999). Discussions on ways of revitalising unions, for instance through strategies of organising (Engeman, 2015; Connolly et al., 2017), suggest that currently these forms of solidary, too, are subject to change. Central in these debates, however, remains a concept of work as waged activity combined with notions of community and membership. Such emphasis on community or even homogeneity (Bayertz, 1999), however, tends to fall short of grasping possibilities for solidarity in light of precarious labour conditions, increasing mobility, flexibility and consumerism contributing to ever-growing individualisation (see, e.g., Virno, 2004). Within this setting, cultural and creative workers symbolise ‘more than any other […] transformations of work’ (Gill and Pratt, 2008: 2). Not only because a considerable part of their labour being non-waged (Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2011; Hesmondhalgh, 2010), but also because the value they created is often siphoned off by others, for instance, the real estate industries. Although highly visible in the discourse on immaterial labour and precariousness (Sholette, 2011), cultural workers have not managed to mobilise and formalise solidary action. Often, creative workers’ individualistic subjectivities are considered to block collectivity from emerging (Shukaitis and Figiel, 2015), because striving for ‘creative autonomy’ is assumed to compete with pursuing solidary action (Umney and Kretsos, 2014: 586). In contrast to this assertion, this article assumes that the very characteristics of cultural work as being transient, precarious and individualistic make it ideal to reconsider and extend the discussion on work-related solidarity. While not intending to diminish the importance of unions as political leverage to negotiate social injustice, this article, thus, introduces a case study of an artist setting up a project that addresses the issue of social housing to explore how solidarity may be contained and enacted ‘in creative work itself’. Cultural work is ridden with conflicting logics that oscillate between commercial, artistic and political imperatives (Eikhof and Haunschild, 2007).Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s (1958/1998) distinction between labour, work and action as well as her understanding of solidarity as action in the public sphere, this article explores cultural work’s potential for solidarity under these conditions, thereby contributing to the nascent discussions on changing notions of solidarity within changing concepts of work. It does so first, by situating the study in current discussions on work to point out gaps with regard to how work and related notions of solidarity are conceptualised. It then introduces Arendt’s distinction between labour, work and action as analytical framework for carrying out a close analysis of a cultural project with an explicit political intent to address the mechanisms of value-production and extraction beyond waged-work. The analysis shows that in contrast to institutionalised forms of organised labour, solidarity in the social factory it not linked to notions of stable community or homogeneity but a temporary phenomenon between ever-changing actors who need to actively create the conditions for it. This article shows that solidarity as a political concept is always precarious in that it is always prone to co-option and exploitation. A critical discussion of the findings links the analysis to debates on possibilities and the ambiguities of solidary action within contemporary forms of work.
Human plurality […] has the twofold character of equality and distinction. If men [sic!] were not equal, they could neither understand each other […] …
Arendt, 1958/1998: 175–176
Solidarity and changing forms of work: the case of cultural labour
Solidarity is generally seen as mediating between the individual and the collective (Scholz, 2015) and bridging different interests (Banting and Kymlicka, 2017). Related to work, it often appears as an institutionalised and formalised set of practices involved with formal employment. Solidarity between workers is assumed ‘because they are workers’ (Simms, 2012: 113, emphasis in original), which conjures up an image of homogeneity. Considering that ‘solidarity is always an achievement, the result of active struggle to construct the universal on the basis of particulars/differences’ (Mohanty, 2003: 7), such a homogeneity cannot be assumed per se, in particular not for cultural workers. Work in the cultural sphere is subject to various ideological and structural constraints that undermine homogeneity even if cultural workers are represented by a union, such as actors (Dean, 2012).
Umney and Kretsos(2014: 573), for instance, argue that the very ‘bohemian appeal of creative work as a means of evading the capitalist labour process’ undermines the strength needed to act in solidarity on the labour market. At the same time, income is closely linked to individual reputation (stardom), so that ‘solidaristic concepts like established minimum rates are likely to be weakened’ (Umney and Kretsos, 2014: 586). Against Coulson (2012) who highlights the communitarian, non-utilitarian activities of creative workers and sees a possibility for solidary action within the cultural sphere, Umney and Kretsos (2014) state that this over-romanticises cultural work and instead point to the often flawed and cliquish character of entrepreneurial networking that cultural labourers pursue. While the discussion so far emphasises on solidarity as a form of collective action, cultural workers often engage individually with the politics of their working condition (Eikhof and Haunschild, 2007), for instance by making them content of their cultural production. Avant-garde artistic production, for example, has always been highly involved with politics, which is reflected in debates around framing political art as activism or considering politics being constitutive of art production (Bishop, 2012; Kester, 2011). Shukaitis (2016) points out the specific connection art has to labour politics that is mirrored in the way artists critically respond to processes of commodification through their art production, for instance, by responding to the market’s crave for art objects with more ephemeral formats, such as fluxus art, relational aesthetics (Bourriaud, 2002), participatroy art (Bishop, 2012) or socially-engaged practices. The political potential of such artistic responses, however, is often debated when being fed back into commodification and marketisation processes that also allow artists to make a living from their art. As a starting point, this article takes the need of cultural workers to negotiate conflicting demands, such as commerce and creativity (Eikhof and Haunschild, 2007) and extends it with regard to the political to explore how solidarity may be contained and enacted ‘in creative work itself’. Moreover, the specificities of cultural work also entail that a narrow focus on formalised employment that still dominates an engagement with work-related solidarity must be put into question. Tronti’s (1966) term of the ‘social factory’ helps to expand the analysis of value production within today’s circuits of capitalism (Böhm and Land, 2012). The social factory is characterised by the operation of interlocking systems of exploitation that draw together apparently unconnected phenomena for which cultural work is exemplary. Shukaitis (2016), for instance, refers to the discourse of the Creative Class (Florida, 2002) that at once reconceptualises creative labour as a form of personal fulfilment (McRobbie, 2016), which leads to a labour force that works longer, harder and for less pay (Hesmondhalgh, 2010), while using cultural initiatives for neighbourhood renewal to reinvigorate capital accumulation based on land value. These seemingly disparate aspects contribute to value-production beyond the immediate sphere of work and is siphoned off by other actors, such as the real estate industry. At the same time, they aggravate not only the situation for everyone marginalised in capitalist value-production – unemployed, old, young, unpaid house-workers, etc. – but also cultural producers who are at the heart of it. Hence, working ‘in’ the social factory does not necessarily produce a homogenous group of workers but bears potential of forming ‘a multi-class precariat’ (Ross, 2008: 34) that asks for work-related solidary action beyond the workplace.
Beyond the realm of employment, solidary relationships are conceptualised as occupying a middle ground in between ‘anti-social egocentrism’ and ‘one-sided “thou-centrism” such as altruism, sympathy, caring, or Christian charity’ (Laitinen and Pessi, 2015: 2). Connected to this is a concept of reciprocity that goes ‘beyond the duality of giving, receiving and the obligation to give in return, to exchanges across and between different subgroups’ (Sahakian, 2016: 210) which makes interdependence voluntary and based on interestin community (Servet, 2009) without community being presumed. This resonates with Arendt’s (1958/1998) political concept of solidarity that can only be enacted in the public sphere, which differs from the social sphere in that the latter is marked by an ‘assumed one interest of society as a whole in economics’ (p.40). The public, instead, is characterised by plurality that is, commonality situated in difference.
… If men were not distinct […] they would need neither speech nor action to make themselves understood. Signs and sound to communicate immediate, identical needs and wants would be enough.
Arendt, 1958/1998: 175–176