class analysis as anti-capitalism
As has been said, “anti-capitalism” is more and more frequently being named as an organizational commitment. However, what that means in organizational practice is often unclear. One step can be to look at how class and class struggle is active in an organization’s mission or project. Class analysis is an important anti-capitalist practice because the core engine of capitalism is the capital class struggling to maintain dominance over the remaining classes. Getting clearer about class lets us get clearer on the larger historical trends taking place at any given moment. To this end, we can ask what is the class struggle in which we are principally engaged? Global South v Global North? U.S. Capital Class v. U.S. working class? White Settlers v. Afrikan people? What is the evidence for this belief? These kinds of questions are beginning steps of class analysis. Let me share an example of how I’ve used class analysis to better understand arts funding in cities with a significant Black/African population. I will be using certain class designations and to see how I arrived at those, please look at this set of criteria.
Let’s begin by taking a look at the class make up of the boards of White settler, Black, Indigenous, Latine, and Asian arts organizations funded by foundations and the State, and then correlate this with budget size. This is a labor intensive process better suited to a team than an individual, but 9 out of 10 times, you will see that the the capital class sits on the boards of the most highly capitalized and largest budget arts organizations, typically the symphony, opera, ballet and museum, the second tier of budget sizes belongs to those with highest number of professional/managerial class people, and finally the bottom tier of budget sizes is left for the upper working class. This has led me to recategorize “Large”, “Mid-Sized” and “Small” arts organizations as “capital-class” “professional/managerial-class” and “upper working- class” arts organizations. As soon as I say these terms, people often take notice because there are some different terms with different connotations. My objective is to destabilize the normality of the White capital’s dominance.
Intersect this analysis of class by looking at people’s relation to the means of production with an analysis of national or racial class and we will see that there are likely none or only one capital class African/Black arts organization in that city. If we continue the examination further, we will likely see that there are no funded arts organizations governed by wage earning working-class African/Black people. Finally, look at the zip codes to track grantmaking and we will see that by far the the majority of money is going to the capital class organizations located where the capital class works and owns real estate i.e. downtown. This demonstrates a few things (a) an important part of arts funding is as a capital class land development strategy, (b) the sector recruits some professional/managerial and upper working class African/Black people but totally ignores the arts and culture of the wage earning African/Black people (and I would bet it is the same for wage earning White people), (c) arts funding reflects western arts history as a tool of the aristocracy and capital classes. In this way, the arts as a sector express class struggle of White settler capital classes.
What does this mean or what value does it have? This is the kind of question for a broad set of cultural workers and organizations, but I think it does point to how relationships to foundations should be approached in the context of existing class relations between European and African people and between the European capital class and the vast majority of workers, because the individual foundation relationship is a reflection of this larger set of class relationships. It also places the way Black artists and cultural workers were engaged after the George Floyd rebellions as part of a longer historical tradition. This is to say, that the settler capital classes have used the arts as a means of class struggle in ways that are the exact opposite of their outward expression as signals of freedom and democracy. There is a host of work on this and I recommend Francis Stonor Sanders’ “Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War.” Shouts to the work of Gabriel Rockhill, and the Cultural Theory Workshop which is where I first heard of this kind of mind-blowing piece.
