Framing the Working Class: Ray’s a Laugh, 28 Years On

Billingham’s desire to make something aesthetically rather than socially or politically moving can be understood not just as a form of complicity with individuals and their families but, in its commitment to structure, as the imagination of an alternative. For example, the question of the frame in the photo of Liz doing her puzzle is not reducible to the ethics of photographing your mother. Rather the photo ignores the questions of family ethics. More important, it doesn’t so much ignore as seek to overcome even the question of working-class identity. Liz’s dress, her tattoos, the couch she’s sitting on can all lend themselves to being read as the markers of such an identity.

The Uses and Abuses of Manet’s Olympia

Manet’s art is about challenging what we think we know about the world: about what makes a finished picture as well as about what constitutes a politics of class, gender, and race. And doesn’t the moral value of artworks lie in their resistance to our assumptions about the world, not how they reaffirm what we already think we know?

The Painter: 5 Prose Poems in Memory of Joseph Marioni

Joseph Marioni emails to say that he has finally resolved his large green painting. The last Archetype has fallen — not fallen, exactly, rather it has yielded to The Painter’s uncompromising efforts.

The Inauthenticity of our Class Discourse: or, Publishing Respects your Foodbank Usage

The issue, therefore, is not that we need to stop representation from benefiting elite minorities—that’s just representation in its most indefensible form—but that we need to stop believing that representation, or, more broadly conceived, anti-discrimination, should be our foremost social justice commitment. Without a prior grounding in a politics of economic equality, all anti-discrimination boils down to is the neoliberal promise that people should have an equal opportunity to escape poverty; rather than trying to get rid of it.

Issue #48: American Finance, the Global Market for Art, and the Need for Speed

This issue is structured around contemporary political and aesthetic debates focused on three books: The Fall and Rise of American Finance: From JP Morgan to BlackRock by Stephen Maher and Scott Aquanno; The Global Rules of Art: The Emergence and Divisions of a Cultural World Economy by Larissa Buchholz; and Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism. Included here are a range of responses to these books in the hope of generating more discussion around finance capital, the global art world, and the accelerated rate of consumption under capital. Also featured is an essay by novelist Sunjeev Sahota on class politics and publishing.

The Global Rules of Art: The Emergence and Divisions of a Cultural World Economy

It is assumed that “thinking globally” is a moral imperative within the humanities. Is it? Among other things, it presumes a neutral space from which to expand one’s geographic purview, as though curators and scholars could stand outside the global game of profit and recognition. In this issue of The Tank, art historians and critics respond to sociologist Larissa Buchholz’s analysis of the global contemporary art field. Do globalizing initiatives really serve artists outside the Global North? Or do they refract neoliberal logics of concentrating capital and expanding markets? Has the global turn transformed our evaluative norms? Or has the very concept of “the global” become just another currency for meting out prestige?

The Fall and Rise of American Finance: From J.P. Morgan to BlackRock

The central argument we make in the book, contrary to the received wisdom on the left, is that the rise of capitalist finance in the current period cannot be understood as a cause or symptom of the decline of the “real” industrial economy. Nor can it be considered as “separate” from production. Rather, finance is and has been utterly integral to the dynamism, flexibility, and strength of capital. Moreover, we show that it is precisely as a result of the role of finance that capitalist development has not led to increasing monopolistic stagnation but has increased the competitiveness of capital by facilitating its growing mobility across space and among economic sectors. Capitalist financialization has thus served to intensify the competitive discipline on all investments to maximize monetary returns.

The Theory of Immediacy or the Immediacy of Theory?

At a crucial juncture in her reconstruction of Marx’s account, Kornbluh claims that “labor makes things useful, while exchange and its hypostasis in the concept of value and the medium of money is the activity that generates value qua value.” But this neglects Marx’s distinction between abstract and concrete labor, or labor as productive of value and labor as productive of objects of use. Contrary to Kornbluh, value is not “generated” by exchange but rather by the expenditure of labor time and realized through exchange. So long as value—labor time—is the measure of social wealth, workers must expend abstract labor in exchange for a wage, while the capitalist appropriates the products the worker has valorized. This implies that the form of distribution—the propertylessness of the worker—is grounded in the form of production itself.

Going Forward from the Edge of the Abyss

Trump has no new coalition; he can’t because those “groups” aren’t real as groups, and people identify with them largely around thin identities more like consumer taste “communities” or partisan fans of sports teams. This is not to say that the reified categories couldn’t become constituencies on the same principal as the Heisenberg effect; part of the beauty of interest-group politics is that tossing some resources around will produce constituencies—or at least people who claim to speak for them.

Challenging the New Deal’s “Contemptible Neglect”: The CIO’s Campaign to Organize Agricultural Laborers

That disaster followed in 1947 when Republicans, who won majorities in both houses of Congress in the 1946 election, passed the Taft-Hartley amendment to the Wagner Act, which placed a raft of restrictions on labor unions, opened the door for right-to-work laws, and required all union officers to sign affidavits confirming that they were not members of the Communist Party. The latter caused the biggest problem for FTA since all its national officers were Communists. This opened the door for more conservative unions in the AFL and the CIO to launch membership raids on FTA locals, often with the support of employers.