Hello, and welcome back to part four of How Anarchism Works.  Now,
If you're new to the series, you'll probably wanna go back and start with part one. There's a link in the description.
Otherwise, let's talk about how art and science might work in an Anarchist society.
Chaper 10: Dull Conformity?
A common refrain of Capitalist propaganda is that life would become dull grey and conformist under any form of Communism.
Reactionaries loved to point to the popular conception of Soviet style uniformity and social stagnation when discussing Socialism,
making a claim that Capitalism, through the motive of profit, leads to far more and better creative output.
I could totally see why people might think that. After all, a Capitalist society isn't dull and conformist in the least.
I mean, in the USA every town is vibrant and rich with unique local culture... Okay, enough sarcasm.
I just think it's fair to say that Capitalism itself leads to increasingly bland conformity as it advances. Strip malls,
Starbucks and Subway's overtake our towns and cities as national corporations bulldoze local culture and replace it with cookie cutter
Big-box stores. We all know the story.
We see it happening all around us every day,
But there are deeper and more troubling issues when it comes to capitalistic domination of the Arts and Sciences.
Chapter 11: Subjective Needs.
The ideas we've discussed so far in this series have all been concerned with material needs. That is to say, meeting the conditions required for survival
Food, shelter, healthcare, personal safety and so on. But what about the higher callings of humanity?
I'm talking about creative and intellectual expression and innovation.
Art, science, building and collaborating.
The human animal craves this kind of constructive activity.
I think we can generally agree that most of us need art and entertainment, as well as
the fruits and benefits of scientific innovation in order to be truly happy.
Abraham Maslow, the famous mid 20th century psychologists refer to these as self actualization needs.
"What a person can be, they must be" is the general idea.
We all want to achieve our true potential in life, and any decent society should give us all the opportunity to self actualize.
In her fantastic video on Dadaism, which you should totally watch by the way,
Angie of Angie Speaks describes these higher needs as subjective needs.
"Art serves a higher purpose that fulfills the abstract spiritual needs within human nature that cannot be quantified by its material merits."
I think I'll stick with that because it's a lot less of a mouthful than "Self actualization needs"
but ,no matter what you call them these are needs that go beyond mere survival.
On a certain level all humans have the desire to create, to socialize, to relax, to enjoy life and to build things.
And make no mistakes, subjective needs are incredibly important.
To give you an idea of what life would be like with all material needs met but no subjective needs met,
think of a prisoner in solitary confinement.
They're given clothing, food, a bed to sleep in.
If they get really sick they might even be allowed to see a doctor ,if they're lucky.
But beyond that, they're completely cut off from every opportunity for self-expression,
intellectual activity or creative outlet. In conditions like these
human beings will quickly develop severe mental illness. Even domesticated animals
like dogs and chickens and pigs will suffer tremendously
if none of their subjective needs such as socialization and enjoying the outdoors are met.
So it's pretty clear that subjective needs are incredibly important and must be a high priority for any anarchist society.
But before we can address how we'll deal with the arts and sciences under Anarchism
Let's take a look at how Capitalism deals with our subjective needs.
Chapter 12: Creative commodification
and gatekeeping under Capitalism.
In our current Capitalist society, the State and Capitalists have a stranglehold on artistic and scientific development.
In order for an individual to engage in art or science
they must either be wealthy and fortunate enough to have copious amounts of money and free time to create or
they must allow their creative output to be commodified by Capitalists or arbitrated by the State.
Let's take a look at the art world first. Now. I'm an artist myself. So this is a bit personal for me.
I know very well the struggles of working-class artists faces under Capitalism and to understand these struggles
we must first understand the artist.
Artists are simply human beings who have a strong desire to express themselves and create things that other human beings can enjoy and consider and appreciate.
I happen to believe that there's an artist inside each of us and that art can take many different forms.
But under capitalism art as expression in and of itself has no value. [WORTHLESS]
It's only art as a commodity, that is art that can be bought and sold and monetized that's considered worthy.
[OFFICIALLY ART]
Artists are driven to create whether we receive monetary compensation or not.
There's certainly some cynical artists who are more concerned with trying to bank on their art than they are with expressing themselves.
But for the most part under capitalism the opposite is true.
The majority of artists are forced to commoditize our art for the market.
Visual artists must become graphic designers for marketing firms.
Filmmakers must produce 30-second commercials for corporate brands,
Even comedians and musicians must make compromises on their material to meet market demands
"I will not bow to any sponsor"
If I want to create art as expression instead of art as a commodity
I must have the free time and other resources to create,
which is very hard to come by when you have to work a full-time job, just to survive.
This means that the capitalist class and the super wealthy have much greater opportunity
to create art as expression while working-class artists have strict limitations placed on our subjective needs. in my past
I've been heavily involved in liberal led attempts to solve these problems under capitalism.
I've volunteered on Arts Councils and art business incubators, and I've talked to hundreds of artists about these issues.
The liberal solution is to develop the business skills of artists and to teach them ways to make the art they produce marketable.
In other words, we're told to transform our art as expression into art as a commodity.
We're asked to compromise our subjective needs to serve the agenda of the capitalist class.
Writers and musicians and painters are told to do market research and to find ways to
monetize our output and to spend time marketing ourselves and finding buyers for our works.
Of course liberals will typically advocate for the state to step in and assist in supporting artists.
Subsidies and state grants should help artists who have few other opportunities to express themselves, right?
But see, the state serves the interests of capitalists.
I've been on selection boards for art grants before and I know that these programs always serve the capitalist agenda.
Artists are typically selected based on how their art will benefit businesses and elected officials in some way,
and hierarchies quickly become established in art communities.
These serve to gate keep artists who won't serve these interests from ever being able to participate
or benefit from such programs.
Artists who are able to navigate and leverage these hierarchies might managed to survive even thrive under these conditions,
But the vast majority of artists I've talked to share a common refrain:
This is not fulfilling. Having to package and promote our art as a product is
devastating for the artist and severely limits artistic expression.
It's just not the way humans want to create; it's not good for the art nor for the artists nor for those of us who enjoy consuming art.
The only people who benefit from this situation are the capitalists who shape the system which they profit from.
The situation for science might seem very different from that of art on the surface. After all capitalism depends on scientific innovation,
Doesn't it? Corporations invest heavily in research and development and technology has advanced rapidly under Capitalist society, correct?
Well, let's take a closer look.
A lot of people would argue that competition is great for innovation since so many companies have to fight it out to bring newer and
better products to the market, but remember: Under capitalism
The only definition of better that really matters is more profitable. Of course with science just as with art
there are government research grants that go towards things like
vaccines and medicines and other innovations that benefit society. But these grants always serve the capitalist agenda as
Corporations are allowed to profit from the fruits of this
taxpayer-financed research.
pharmaceutical companies only research medicine that will bring profits.
Tech companies force their engineers to fixate on problems of profitability with emphasis placed on driving down production costs and
driving up revenues.
Considerations like end user satisfaction,
environmental impact and product durability are
secondary to making more money for the capitalists who own the company. In fact
Products are often made to be more destructive to the environment and less durable and functional for the end user
simply because it will make the capitalists who own the company a higher profit margin.
Scientists and engineers are limited in what projects they can pursue by the capitalist class.
Scientists we need to change the world
You've got the best scientific equipment money can buy you employ 3000 research staff. We've created
521 patents they this is the finest laboratoire in the western hemisphere!
Surely we can...
Even the public sector universities are increasingly becoming tainted by capital. And there are cases where capitalists have simply bought out the public sector
altogether, such as when Uber stole 50 people from one of the top robotics labs at Carnegie Mellon
completely gutting the program to build self-driving cars that will profit the capitalist who owned the company
All with the ambition, of course have eventually laying off the 2 million drivers they currently employ.
Chapter 13: Creative alienation.
Under capitalism the vast majority of creators are
alienated from their own creations.
if you're writing music or designing a machine while employed by a corporation
You will not own the product of your own labor. The songs you write or the patents
you file will belong to the corporation you work for. Even if you try to become an independent producer you will still be
alienated from your creative output
because you must compromise your vision to meet market demands if you want any hope of keeping a roof over your head while you create.
In addition, Capitalism puts me in a position where other artists are my competition.
We must vie against each other in a marketplace of art which often precludes collaboration and alienates us from one another in many ways.
Corporate secrecy, patents and anti competition regulations prevent the scientific community from sharing data and discoveries openly with one another.
Wwo scientists who are studying the same phenomenon or two engineers who are trying to solve the same problem are
banned from sharing notes and working together because they work for different companies. And in such an environment, where teams of
scientists and engineers are set against each other by their employers, scientific collaboration stagnates.
And then there are all the barriers to participating in scientific and technological
innovation under Capitalism. Before you can have a career in science and technology you first have to obtain an expensive and time-consuming education
that's just beyond the reach of most workers. And then you have to commit to wage servitude
in order to obtain access to the equipment and other resources needed to engage in scientific discovery.
Who knows what kinds of important breakthroughs have been prevented because of these tragic artificial barriers?
Who knows how many talented individuals were never able to blossom into the brilliant artists and engineers and scientific researchers that they could have been?
Simply because they were born into poverty and blocked from participation by capitalism,
racism and other forms of gatekeeping and oppression.
As Stephen Jay Gould said I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain
than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
What gives me some small hope as a creator is the anarchist spirit of creativity that manages to survive even in this oppressive environment of Capitalism.
There are artists
who are still able to create brilliant works of independent art and there are amateur scientists and engineers who still managed to build
Incredible inventions in the garages and maker spaces of the world against these overwhelming odds.
Imagine what we could accomplish if the greed fueled gatekeeping of Capitalism were done away with entirely.
Chapter 14: Time is currently money.
As Peter Coffin says in his book "Custom Reality and You"  Under Capitalism
everything is labor. "In our current societal perspective if you're doing work because you want to do work
It's not viewed as work
It's viewed as a hobby. And I think a lot of the things that we do right now that we consider
hobbies, that we consider not real work, are ultimately actually kind of work.
It's just that the perspective we exist in is so utterly coopted by capitalism.
There is a realism that
everything has to be done in a manner that serves to create profit. In the United States the first question
we usually ask a stranger is "What do you do?" and what we mean
of course is "What do you do for money?"
Because in capitalist society value is so tied up with money and so much of our time is spent earning money to survive
that we're brainwashed into believing that the work we do for money somehow defines us as individuals."In my Second Life
I was also a paper salesman and I was also named Dwight."
The fact is we are all, every one of us in the working class, so much more than the jobs
we do to benefit the capitalist class.
We all have deeper capacity and potential to contribute to the species to our culture and to our communities.
Ironically it tends to be what we "do for money" that holds us back more than anything else from doing
what we really want to do. Almost all of us in the working class wish
desperately that we had more time each day to do things that we care about much more than work.
Whether it's spending time with our families, creating art or enjoying our hobbies. Time is a vital resource.
Our most important resource. And under Capitalism
We're forced to sacrifice more than half of our time on this planet serving
the profit needs of our capitalist employers. 
 
"Chapter 15: After the Bread has been secured"
I've talked about Peter Kropotkin a lot on this channel.
He's one of my favorite political philosophers and his book "The conquest of Bread" is an incredibly forward-thinking
template for how anarchist society might function. If you dig this video series, you should really check it out.
It's free and it's all over the place on the Internet. I'll put a link in the description.
Kropotkin was well aware of the importance of subjective needs.
He was a scientist himself and he wrote "We see that the worker compelled to struggle painfully for bare existence is
reduced to ignorance of these higher delights, the highest within man's reach, of science and especially of scientific discovery of
art and especially of artistic creation...
It is in order to obtain these joys for all ,which are now reserved to a few, in order to give leisure and the
possibility of developing intellectual capacities that the social revolution must guarantee daily bread to all.
After bread has been secured leisure is the supreme aim." when Kropotkin talks about leisure
He isn't talking about just sitting around the couch and watching "Better Call Saul" Though That's certainly a component of leisure.
But he's talking about
Subjective needs. Kropotkin loved the arts and the sciences and he believed strongly that every human being on Earth should have access to the tools
time and space needed to create.
Kropotkin envision creator owned and operated
associations to fulfill our subjective needs. "Then we shall see art associations...
He who wishes for a grand piano will enter the association of musical instrument makers. And by giving the
association part of his half day's leisure he will soon possess the piano of his dreams. If he is passionately fond of astronomical
studies he will join the association of astronomers... and he will have the telescope he desires by taking his share of the associated work."
Kropotkin knew that the keeps developing such art associations is time.
He knew that Capitalists robbed workers of precious free time by forcing us to toil long hours for little pay.
Stripping away the value of our labor in the form of profits
so that what little free time we have left at the end of the work week must be spent resting and recuperating
energy so that we can begin to work again next week.
Kropotkin believed that in an Anarchist
society, having more free time would allow for more people to engage in creative expression within the arts and the sciences.
"In short, the five or seven hours a day
which each will have at his disposal after having
consecrated several hours to the production of necessities, will amply suffice to satisfy all longings for luxury however varied."
Thousands of associations would undertake to supply them.
What is now the privilege of an insignificant minority would be accessible to all."
Pay close attention to the words Kropotkin uses. In his mind, concepts of art and science and luxury and leisure are all
extensions of one core idea. We can call them subjective needs and
Kropotkin believe that if the oppressive systems of capitalism were dismantled then we would all have far more free time and
energy to pour into our passions which would create a boundless atmosphere of creative activity
along with more fulfilling lives of leisure and activity with our families and with our friends.
There's a lot more to be said for how anarchism would allow us to live these fulfilling lives,
but I'm afraid this is all the time we have for now.
 In the next part of this series
We'll talk about how we can build institutions that will allow us to enjoy not just artistic and scientific pursuits,
but leisure activities as well, And well, maybe we'll even have room for a little luxury after the bread has been secured.
Subscribe now so you don't miss it. I'm Emerican Johnson. This is Non-Compete. Thanks for watching.
