The Return of the Class Struggle or from Socialist Self-Management to Neoliberal Self-Exploitation

Contrasting two episodes related to unpaid labor in the arts from socialist past and post-Yugoslav present, this chapter is a polemical essay about the question of class struggle in the context of the post-Yugoslav sphere of art production and artists’ agency to counter labor exploitation. The chapter argues that there is an underlying veiled presence of the class struggle, but that there is a lack of a critical political practice that considers the class position of agents in the field of art production in order to change the relations of production in the arts. The author analyzes isolated challenges of power relations in the arts by Yugoslav artists and the reasons why they did not garner traction, and compares them to contemporary examples from the post-Yugoslav region that normalize unpaid labor and reproduce contradictory attitudes that justify free labor of artists.