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Organizing Artists Today

These remarks were presented at a weekend conference by Anticapitalism for Artists on March 26, 2021. NY-YCL Co-Chair Justine Medina was invited to speak on her experience and analysis of the importance of organizing artists as workers. The panel remarks can be watched here. 

The theme for this weekend is “How do we get capitalism out of art?”

The answer that seems obvious to me, what I think the answer has only ever been: We must organize together as workers to overthrow the capitalists who control our systems and lives.

This is an answer that to me, as a socialist, as a marxist, as I said seems obvious. But why do I say it? That may not be obvious to everyone here, so I’d like to say a little bit about why I feel this is the answer.

Some people may ask why can’t we boycott to change, or even why can’t we create new things as individual artists, that will have people imagine better!

Everyone here identifies as an anticapitalist of some stripe. And by taking on that identification, we recognize that Capitalism is a system we are opposed to, and as a system, it is baked into everything in our society, and cannot be changed with simple individual action. Especially considering how much money, how much capital, how much power, the capitalists who run the institutions of our lives currently have.

Think about which small pool of individuals is funding our arts institutions. Which small group of people is telling us what we must say, what we must make, who is allowed to present their creative work. Think about the even smaller group of people who own our arts institutions. Who owns the smaller and smaller number of companies that produce and distribute on a large scale: Disney, Netflix, Amazon. 

If we, as anti-capitalists, socialists, Communists, know how much power they have through capital, we know that our choices as individuals cannot truly do anything. But if we come together as a collective, to challenge the site of where and how they make their money, they hold their power, the thing they care about. That site of power is where we can force change. The place where you most disrupt the capitalist is as a worker, is in your role in producing that which makes the capitalist profits.

But artists are often taught not to think of themselves as workers. Of course, the working classes of this country are generally propagandized out of thinking of themselves in this way. Class consciousness has been really destroyed in the US. But art and artists even more so are often viewed both by society and themselves in a liberalized, mystified way. “Artists are just doing things they love, so it’s not work” they don’t need to be paid, they can be “paid in experience”; or even worse, art is seen in society as extraneous, or unnecessary -- we see it undervalued, underfunded.  

But artists are workers. In fact, I would argue, in a sense, artists are essential workers.

Artists’ work propels society forward. The first panel discussed the role an artist can play in forwarding revolution. But even before and after that moment of revolution, in our day to day life, artists’ work provides comfort, care, healing required for social reproduction. Our work allows people to express themselves, learn, grow, reflect, build.

But even if you do not accept the work of artists as workers as essential. We know artists are workers, because our work makes people money, often if it is not us, but the capitalists

So we must recognize ourselves as workers. We must come together as a class of workers, to get the changes we seek. And this is not hypothetical or theoretical, but tested by history

Or course, we all can name, at least broadly, various organizing successes brought on by radical left wing organizers of the past 150 years, revolutionary successes of the last century, you know even social democratic reforms in the capitalist states that were won by hard organizing.

But, in specific, we can look to the history of artists who changed their own material conditions, as well as changed societal conditions, by organizing.

It was revolutionary fervor of the Communists in the 30s that forced the Roosevelt Administration to create the Federal Writers, Arts, and Theater Projects, founding over 100 community arts centers throughout the country and sustaining the work of some 10,000 artists. Composers like Aaron Copeland, Charles Seeger, Marc Blitzstein, found themselves in Communist musician cells, trying to write new singable marches for Communist demonstrations, and even children’s revolutionary street songs. Worker’s theater and dance groups were formed all over the country to develop agit-prop plays and performances, with Martha Graham herself making dance pieces for left wing and Popular Front Causes. Other prominent artists, from Paul Robeson, to Jacob Lawrence, to Langston Hughes created art to spread socialism. A whole talk itself could be given about this history which is often hidden from us, due to the Red Scares, the Cold War. But it is a rich history, and we can learn much from it.

And from this history, we know, we must come together to organize as a collective of workers. 

But what does it mean to organize?

Organizing is connecting a community to together change things, or work towards channeling change for a desired result. Ok...but what exactly does that mean, in practice?

I’ve been organizing in various spaces for 10 years, and I still have a difficult time describing what organizing is, or what it means to organize. (like art, on the one hand could be described very simply or spend a lifetime explaining it)

In reflecting on what I wanted to talk about today, I’ve been having conversations with friends of mine who have been organizing for a while as well, and said this to one of them, that I had a hard time describing it, and one said. “We all do. We just kinda do it.”

This really struck me. Organizing is the doing. It’s the day to day tasks. It’s creating a spreadsheet of people you know who care about an issue. It’s having conversations, picking up the phone and texting, or better yet, calling. It’s researching meetings you can go to in your community, related to this issue. It’s showing up to that meeting that you think people should go to; and volunteering to take notes while there. It’s setting up a table PPE, or voter registration forms, or a petition, fliers to hand out. It’s introducing yourself to the people in your neighborhood and learning about what they do, want, need. It’s inviting people into shared struggle to do these things with you.

Because organizing is more than just doing things yourself. Organizing is about the collective, it’s about relationships, it’s about community building. Good organizing is ultimately about building an organization of some kind, it’s about building a structure for an organizing community that holds up over the long haul. Because organizing takes time.

So good organizing involves teaching other people to do these things, how to teach these things guiding along, repeating as necessary. And not teaching or telling a micro-manager sort of way. We want these processes to be both practical and communal, structures things replicate and build upon themselves, because good organizing is generative.

And this relationship and community building towards social change is something you want to do not just abstractly, but concretely. Good organizing requires long term vision, planning, walking backwards from that vision or goal; it requires systemization or structure. It requires careful objective analysis of many moving parts of a situation. It requires patience.

Because organizing is not spontaneous. Victories are not spontaneous.

An election win, getting civil rights legislation passed, a successful anti-privatization campaign, a successful unionization or strike, a successful revolution - none of these things are spontaneous, none of them happen by chance. It can seem like that from the outside, and certainly there can be trigger moments in society that cause spontaneity, spontaneous mass action, self-mobilization - we saw this to some degree with the Uprisings last year, for example. But we know that victories, concrete material changes, even when they involve capturing and channeling that spontaneous energy, the wins don’t come from that spontaneous energy.

So if we are to win, if we are to ultimately get capitalism out of art, it won’t be easy, it won’t be overnight, it will take organization. And we must always be thinking: how do we organize our communities? And how do we organize these communities to come together in one big collective?

We must organize as workers in our own communities but we must also organize as workers across communities. We must, as artists, support the struggles of people’s movements: striking workers in other industries, fights against anti-asian violence, movements for black lives matter, indigenous sovereignty, anti-fascism, peace, preventing climate destruction, organizing with workers internationally to prevent coups and western imperial violence, the list can go on and on. As we know there are many intersecting struggles and areas of oppression. But as we also know, these all come back to one source: capitalism, and capitalists that rule this society.

As we’re asking ourselves these questions, we’re planning together, how we do this, how we build this collective, this structure, this organization, this community of arts workers. As we’re asking what can history tell us? How do we build this long term project, that will win power, for us and all workers, and all oppressed peoples; power, that will win us freedom to create what we want, that will win us freedom to live dignified lives?

As we’re thinking and strategizing these things, I would like to spend the last bit of my remarks talking about one of the many, many tools in the toolbox of organizing: Mobilization. 

Mobilization is, basically, turn out. You mobilize for specific events. Meetings. Rallies, Elections. Mobilizing is getting people to do a specific action you ask. Maybe even lots of people.

The reason I want to take a moment to focus on mobilization is because mobilization is often confused with Organizing.

The momentary event, which is certainly an important part of organizing, can often be confused, to people new to organizing, or people who are from certain philosophical schools of organizing, with organizing writ large.

Labor organizer, Jane McAlevey, talks a lot about this. Asks people to be self-critical in this way.: “No hashtag, no gimmick, no social media tactic - no shallow mobilization technique that is going to save us. It is only the slow, long-term work of organizing.”

When we’re mobilizing, we spend our time talking to people who already agree with us.

We get 200 of our people to turn out to a rally. And then we think that’s not enough, go back to our list of thousands, and then at a future rally, we get 2000 to turn out.

But even tho these are two separate events, getting more people to turn out to the second one is not organizing, per se. It’s not building a new community, per se; it’s getting better at mobilizing the community you already have.

People may think: We called a public meeting, we invited people to come, and people came and we’re going to do an action. And because all those things involved people, people think they’re organizing. But while they are doing a piece of organizing, that is not necessarily the long-term full version organizing.

In organizing, by contrast, always seeking to expand that community. Because you are working not to just get people to show up to a thing in the existing system, but ultimately to change something systemically. Seeking to use all tactics to do that. Very importantly, organizers seek out the unorganized.

In an organizer mindset, consciously doing base-expansion every day, from whom we can later mobilize — whether it’s going to the polls, getting people to block a bridge, or getting people to strike and shut down key industries.

In organizing, you’re waking up every morning, with a testable plan to expand your universe of people, people who might even think they don’t like you, might even think they’re opposed to you. In fact that’s who you need to be reaching. That’s the work of organizing and organizers, going out to build unity and solidarity and expand the universe of people in our movement.

Mobilizing is an important part of organizing. And mobilizing can be an important [part of your] strategy to organize. But it is not organizing in and of itself. Because with mobilizing you’re looking at “how do I turn my people out to this event.” And with organizing you’re looking at “how does turning people out to this event, to get new people to join our community, to pressure and ultimately shift the forces of power.”

Organizing a movement to win, even to win something such as a union contract can take years. Long term strategizing. Base building. Practical, even mathematical analysis. Part of it is knowing “ok, to win this union contract, we need to get 90% of workers at this worksite to turn out for the vote, we need 90% of them to vote yes.”

Organizing is not just knowing that, but as I said earlier, it’s doing that. Organizing is the doing. The grunt work of making the collective plan-to-win happen. It’s building the structures to make that happen. And it’s doing that in community, with shared vision. 

I am not highlighting this to say: Oh what you’re doing is bad, and oh you’re not a real organizer if you’re just doing x, y, or z. I really do believe that anyone can [learn to] be an organizer. That’s the beauty of building working class organizations. Anyone can organize. We all do tasks and skills of organizing all the time, without thinking about it.

But for us to come together — as workers, as a collective — to build something big, and beautiful, and new together, then we must be thoughtful, we must be self-critical, open to new ideas from each other, but also studying and applying what worked historically.

And, ultimately, to win a world without capitalism, we must be organized. We have no time to waste.