Imagine experts in the world of art admitting that the entire project of artistic salvation to which they pledged allegiance is insane and that it could not have existed without exercising various forms of violence, attributing spectacular prices to pieces that should not have been acquired in the first place. Imagine that all those experts recognize that the knowledge and skills to create objects the museum violently rendered rare and valuable are not extinct. For these objects to preserve their market value, those people who inherited the knowledge and skills to continue to create them had to be denied the time and conditions to engage in building their world. Imagine museum directors and chief curators taken by a belated awakening—similar to the one that is sometimes experienced by soldiers—on the meaning of the violence they exercise under the guise of the benign and admitting the extent to which their profession is constitutive of differential violence.

Agents of artistic circulation mistake the decision to withdraw one’s labor or participation for idle disengagement. The illusion of political agency granted by global artistic circulation underpins this ideology. In contrast to these false accusations, striking art workers engage in artistic self-organization, the highest form of social creativity, which produces new social assemblages that sustain artistic creativity beyond its ossified forms. Only when reinvigorated by strikes, boycotts, and occupations do institutions of the commons emerge and provide ground for art as a practice of freedom. Far from destroying circulation, the refusal of art workers in moments of productive withdrawal allows for its resumption at some point in the future and under better terms. Without moments of collective refusal, there would be nothing to circulate under the name of art but luxurious objects, emptied of sense and value.

In the most recent sermons on the inescapable power of capital, we hear increasing praise for the dominance of the algorithm. But what is this algorithm? It is nothing but another machine, born of the cooperation of workers, and one that the boss then places on a level above this same cooperation. The algorithm is, as Marx used to say, a machine that runs where there has been a strike, where there has been resistance or a rupture in the valorization process: a machine produced by the same…

Since October 27, 2005 workers have walked the streets with placards. When we stand on paths that lead to factories at the start of the morning shift, many stop. We exchange stories, ideas, and glances; the restlessness of management rises . 1 The labyrinthine paper trails of the cloth mill where I, Ram Sagar, worked for thirty years and, like thousands of others, thought myself to have been a worker, have revealed themselves as belonging to seventeen different companies. This…

We ourselves, the refugees, make the demonstration, and we are the ones who want it. It is our fight. We thank everybody for their help, but we don’t allow anybody to use us. This is a self-organized struggle of and by refugees, one that needs your support, your presence on the street on Saturday.” —From a speech by refugee Salaheddine Najah during a protest song contest at the Rabenhof Theatre, Vienna, February 12, 2013 Since November 2012, refugees have been protesting in…

A standard way of relating politics to art assumes that art represents political issues in one way or another. But there is a much more interesting perspective: the politics of the field of art as a place of work. 1 Simply look at what it does—not what it shows. Amongst all other forms of art, fine art has been most closely linked to post-Fordist speculation, with bling, boom, and bust. Contemporary art is no unworldly discipline nestled away in some remote ivory tower. On the…

—Who wants to know? —I want to know. —What do you want to know? —I don’t know! At some point last year I proposed within my institution, Goldsmiths, University of London, that we develop a free academy adjacent to our institution and call it “Goldsmiths Free.” The reactions to this proposal, when not amused smirks at the apparently adolescent nature of the proposal, were largely either puzzled—“What would we get out of it? Why would we want to do it?”—or horrified—“How would…