Free Class FaM[1] Call for Demonstration against Wage Labor on April 30, 2010, 19.00, Galluswarte in Frankfurt/M.

Art is no wage labor[2]. Artistic freedom promises its producers to themselves decide about the means, ways and content of production. This formal independence from the standards of surplus value production still feeds the contradicting promise of art to allow self determined production, despite capitalism. This assumed salvation of artistic refusal of wage labor is the humiliating competition for a place among those 5 % , who at least temporarily can survive from their income as artists. One who is not yet part of those chosen few, is allowed to hope for the slightly better chance of getting a place in the state-funded residency carousel, traveling from one gentrification project to another. This includes free studio-usage and pocket money, but continuities of political commitment and solidary organisation can barely take place in this context.

The bourgeois hope for artistic autonomy to make capitalism more free and human, or at least prevent it from barbarism, is historically disproved. The aesthetic independence of art can be a realist intervention into normalized orders of perception, or simply just a culinary pleasure, but in itself it can barely become a way of social emancipation. Those willing to artistically organize their lives in distance to the alienation of the wage-labour centered reality, will stay bitterly disappointed. This will only be increased under conditions of the crisis development of capitalist economy, which currently is becoming more visible. Artistic escape from wage labor does not mean communist one. Living as fishermen in the morning, web designers at midday, and conceptual artists in the evening, won’t protect artistic rejecters of wage labor from being pseudo communists of the capital, idealizing the stereotype of flexible and unsolidaric working conditions. Those who profit most from all of this, are such unsympathic events as those organized by the “cultural nation” Germany. During the last years the country of poets and thinkers treated art as a very special local investment. In the field of visual art a wave of theme shows adressing the topic of germany (Vertrautes Terrain, ZKM, 2008; Deutsche Positionen - Kunst und Kalter Krieg, DHM, 2009; ...) illustrated how also decidedly critical, or even antinational positions can be curated into very personal, subjective commitments to the German national state. In this way national promotion productively integrates the shiny suffer-and-perform-imperatives of the cultural industries. Art turns into a resource for a subjectivist nationalism that pretends to harbor even the most critical differences. What is hidden behind this picture is the invisible opposite: the existential exclusion of the useless, dispensable and unqualified, of those who, compared to most artists, are confronted with contradictions of bourgeois freedom on much less glamourous levels.

Against the instrumentalization as art-heroes, -divas and dandies of the cultural nation, we see those everything but self determined conditions of production as reason for politicisation. Organizing one-self against capitalist normality and its waged labor is the most realist strategy to finally overcome it. The freedom of art as we know it today appeared as the outcome of a revolution that failed halfway through more than 200 years ago. Feudal command was replaced by bourgeois command. Its negation remains the task of a social revolution that won’t be satisfied with formal promises of freedom, but sees communism of the 21st century as the solidary self determination of everybody.

Demo and Party
Fr. 30.04.2010 - 19.00 - Galluswarte - Frankfurt/M
Further Information: http://krise.blogsport.de/

Organized by: autonome antifa [f], antifa [ko], campusantifa, FAU-Gewerkschaft für alle Berufe Frankfurt/M, Jugendantifa, Krisengruppe Frankfurt/M, ÖkoLinX – Antirassistische Liste, Ökologische Linke Frankfurt/M

Supporters: Revolutionaeres Bündnis Autonomer AntifaschistInnen, Anarchistische Gruppe [:ag] Freiburg, Libertaeres Bündnis der Wetterau, antifa düren, Free Class FaM, Autonome Jugend Antifa Hagen, Antifa Bad Bergzabern, Anti Hartz Plattform Saar, Zwantifa (Zweibrücken), Antifaschistische Linke Darmstadt (ALDA), Antifa R4 Gießen, ASJ Bonn, FAU Darmstadt, Libertäre Sozialistische Gruppe Bergstraße (LSG), Libertäre Sozialist_Innen Darmstadt (LSD), Antifa Bensheim, RAW Windeck

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[1] The Free Class FaM is a dyslexic club without native language, art workers council, counter-academy, an organisation of cultural producers. It was founded in 2007 and ever since works on the critique of art, compareable to the free classes in Berlin, Braunschweig, Vienna and Munich.

[2] Wage labor defines the exchange of ones labor force against a salary (wage). This term therefore also defines the political and economical relationship between wage workers and those entrepreneurs who own the means of production and who need to buy labor in order to produce for and sustain on the market. Thereby entrepreneurs accumulate a surplus value, its maximizaton is the core motor of capitalism. Artist producers are self employed, entrepreneurs of them selves, underlying the imperatives of the market with no direct connection to wage labor relationships.