Alternative culture, civil society and class struggle

Abstract

The abridged Chapter 5 from Praznik’s Slovenian book The Paradox of Unpaid Artistic Labour: Autonomy of Art, the Avant-Garde and Cultural Policy in the Transition to Post-Socialism (Ljubljana: Sophia, 2016) reconsiders alternative art workers’ political agenda of the 1980s in light of political transformations of late Yugoslav socialism and the emergence of neo-liberal rationality. During the 1980s, art workers of the alternative art scene in Yugoslavia aimed to redefine and transform socialist production model by critiquing socialist ideology and institutions without taking issue with class differences in the arts. The chapter demonstrates how the 1980s alternative art scene did not consider transformations of working relations of the freelance art workers who were at that time redefined by cultural policy as socialist cultural entrepreneurs. By examining government’s attitudes of and policies for artistic labour the author argues that the spontaneous absorption of neo-liberalism (the realization of personal freedom) and exclusive focus on the critique of repressive state apparatuses during the late Yugoslav socialist period undermined the mandate of the welfare state’s institutions, which secured collective social reproduction and security. After the destruction of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, the protagonists of the alternative art scene became members of the post-socialist precariat of self-employed cultural entrepreneurs who are divorced from social security and economic stability.