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Karl Marx's ideas about manufacturing are so central to my approach to the project, and my own conclusions.

He talks about how the quicker something has to be made, the more that a long process of one craft will be divided into small tasks, where a worker only has to repeat a minuscule section of it over and over.

That this over time produces a more "perfect" result.

However, he touches on a very important aspect, and that is that this division of labour will inevitably firstly turn a skill into multiple "unskilled" jobs (therefore lower paid), but also, this is how a skill can be lost. As there are no longer any people that know how to do something from start to finish, and no more apprentices (all of which would of course be more expensive).

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Harrod, T. (2018). Craft. London: Whitechapel Art Gallery.

In-text citation: (Harrod, 2018)

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This is a US publisher I would like to contact in the future - they seem really perfect for the book.

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Microcosm specializes in nonfiction DIY (Do-It-Yourself) books, zines, and decks that focus on the reader and teach self-empowerment. The most common reason that we cannot accept a submission is because the author didn't research the other books on their shelf at their local bookstores, so their book is not differentiated in any way.

We are interested in creators with both expertise and lived experience that fit in the following subject areas:

Magick How To (Witchcraft, Paganism, Herbalism, and the like-also tarot and oracle decks).

The Good Life (DIY, how-to, self-care, hands-on skills-anything from how to make or do something to parenting, mental health, and healthy relationships).

Mythology and Lore (stories about the background that fuels today's cultural propensities).

Scene History (what made a time and place into a unique climate for creativity, social justice, gender, sexuality, struggle, or a different way of thinking?).

Building the Bicycle Revolution (nonfiction about the promise of the bicycle to change society with a clear, new perspective on a familiar topic).

Queering Consent (#ownvoices erotica short stories)

Punx (the hidden stories of the musical style that became a social movement to fix shit up).

Comics Journalism (book-length nonfiction graphic novels that tell powerful stories. We do not pair writers with illustrators but we do perform full developmental edits for books that we publish. We'll sign a book based on your idea and portfolio alone and can help you workshop it together).

Gift (humor, animals, fun but educational).

We look for strong visuals and a leftist orientation-further left than the Democratic party. One reviewer said that we make "Castro look right wing," because, in many ways, he was.

We are especially seeking submissions right now about magickal how to/witchcraft, tarot or oracle decks, dogs, bicycling, comics journalism, sustainable DIY projects, parenting (especially for Black, POC, and/or queer people), reproductive rights, neurodivergence, mental health, sexual health, guidebooks, nature, survival, death, bees, games, and contributions to the Self Care Healthcare, Prison to Pamphlet, Queering Consent, and Scene History series. Our readers respond especially strongly to small, heartfelt books about a narrow interest of a self-empowering nature. We love books that help us discover interest in a new topic. Books with illustrations, photographs, or other strong graphic elements are strongly encouraged.
We do not publish work that would primarily be described as cookbooks, travel writing, or memoirs. If your book contains more than 20% personal stories, we are not the right publisher for it. We do not publish poetry. We only publish fiction as part of our established Queering Consent and Bikes in Space series.
If your book does not have a reachable audience of at least 5,000 people or if the subject matter does not require 100 pages, we'd suggest submitting your proposal for a zine (in which case you can skip step two, you do not need to list comp titles).

To pitch a book (or other publication) to Microcosm, fill out our submissions form.Think about why people would buy a book like yours and what your book would do particularly well for the kind of readers who need it. Knowing why you want to write it and your honest goals will help you make decisions and us to know if we can help you get there.

Our submissions form asks you to send us the following information:

* Tell us, in five seconds, the practical and emotional payoff for someone reading your book that makes it distinct from others on the shelf. Don't tell us a summary of your narrative (that comes later), why your book is important to you, or what you or your friends like about your book.

* In order to see if we are a good publisher for you, peruse our catalog and identify three similar titles we've recently published that would be on the same shelf as your book in a bookstore. If you can do that, it's probably a good fit. If you can't do that or you have to force it, we probably aren't the best place for you, but we wish you the best of luck and might be able to refer you elsewhere!
* State your expertise AND lived experience that make you qualified to write this book. * Tell us why you want to publish this book
* Send the outline for the structure of the entire book. For each section-Intro, Chapters, Conclusion-write the introductory paragraph for that section. Each section should open by telling the reader the main knowledge and skills that they will take from that chapter, and giving us a little color about what sort of research, science, details, and/or examples that part touches on. This exercise becomes the best frame and the opening text to each chapter. A fter work has been accepted, this exercise is the first step towards the editorial process. Even if we aren't right for your work, this is a good step to get your head around your book.

Specify if you would like pitch feedback.
Do not send your manuscript or any other information. The biggest problem with wading through pitches is that they are always too long. You are a writer. Demonstrate that to us with your gift for summary and brevity in your pitch.
Be honest and substantial! We have heard every hollow and meaningless line in a book pitch. We want you to think about your proposal and deliver something that is uniquely your own after looking at everything that is out there. (Spoiler alert: There are over twenty million books out there.)

It is important to follow our submission guidelines to the letter and to do a comprehensive title analysis before submitting. Following our guidelines tells us that you can work with a team and that you've investigated and developed your book properly, just like we have to when pitching it to our distributors and reviewers. If you don't believe there are other books on the shelf similar to yours, look harder. If there truly are not, then we cannot sell your book.
Here are two sample (successful) pitches:
If you are Black, Indigenous, a person of color, transgender, nonbinary, neurodiverse, or disabled, you are particularly encouraged to submit, as is anyone whose experiences are not well represented in the publishing world. We can't sell your book based on your identity, but we want to create equity in the publishing sphere and prioritizing marginalized voices is a way to do exactly that.

Yo, Miss is a graphic novel about a year at a second chance high school in New York City. It is similar to On The Books, Mark Twain Was Right, and Invincible Summer and is about Ms. Wilde's classroom at John V. Lindsay Wildcat Academy. Check out yomiss.com.
More advice for developing your book idea:
Street Journalist can be read in an hour and equips you to go out and cover breaking news or a feature on multiple platforms. I have worked in community reporting for over 30 years everywhere from community radio to a stringer for the New York Times. Similar titles include Action!, Make Your Place and DIY Screenprinting.

What is the thesis of your book that no other books are discussing and no one is thinking about in the same way?

How do readers benefit by reading this book?

Why would someone buy this book?

How many books have you purchased in the past year that are similar to the way that you have envisioned this one?

How is your book distinct from similar books that are in print?

Have you visited your local bookstores and surveyed their selection?

Have you researched similar books on Amazon?

There are over 12,000 new books published every day, so it's vital to know what's out there and be clear about what the heart of your book is. This is called title development. Good title development questions to ask yourself include:

If we are not able to publish your work, it's not a rejection of you or the quality of the work. It is likely that it just falls outside of our editorial guidelines and we know from experience that we are not the right place to be able to get your work to an audience. Best of luck to you and keep on doing what matters to you!

Thanks for wanting to work with us!

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Frequently asked questions about Microcosm Publishing, as well as our contact form.

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I find this interesting in relation to agency as well, it almost means that the entirety of a process will be hidden to most workers as well, if ever they were to employ it for themselves.

I really understood the practice of this while making letterpress prints. It took me two weeks to arrange 6 sentences together and print them, from start to finish, but of course the printworkers of Fleet Street would have been separated into different stations.

But in doing everything myself and considering every step, I had time to sit with the words I was printing, the fonts, and their arrangement. I had time to reconsider what I wanted to say.

https://archive.philosophersmag.com/fast-politics-slow-philosophy/

So the politics of slowness are interesting, as Michelle Boulous Walker talks in the article above, where she makes a connection between haste and totalitarian regimes.

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The nineteenth-century philosopher's ideas may help us to understand the economic and political inequality of our time.

On or about February 24, 1848, a twenty-three-page pamphlet was published in London. Modern industry, it proclaimed, had revolutionized the world. It surpassed, in its accomplishments, all the great civilizations of the past-the Egyptian pyramids, the Roman aqueducts, the Gothic cathedrals. Its innovations-the railroad, the steamship, the telegraph-had unleashed fantastic productive forces. In the name of free trade, it had knocked down national boundaries, lowered prices, made the planet interdependent and cosmopolitan. Goods and ideas now circulated everywhere.

Just as important, it swept away all the old hierarchies and mystifications. People no longer believed that ancestry or religion determined their status in life. Everyone was the same as everyone else. For the first time in history, men and women could see, without illusions, where they stood in their relations with others.

The new modes of production, communication, and distribution had also created enormous wealth. But there was a problem. The wealth was not equally distributed. Ten per cent of the population possessed virtually all of the property; the other ninety per cent owned nothing. As cities and towns industrialized, as wealth became more concentrated, and as the rich got richer, the middle class began sinking to the level of the working class.

Soon, in fact, there would be just two types of people in the world: the people who owned property and the people who sold their labor to them. As ideologies disappeared which had once made inequality appear natural and ordained, it was inevitable that workers everywhere would see the system for what it was, and would rise up and overthrow it. The writer who made this prediction was, of course, Karl Marx, and the pamphlet was "The Communist Manifesto." He is not wrong yet.

Considering his rather glaring relevance to contemporary politics, it's striking that two important recent books about Marx are committed to returning him to his own century. "Marx was not our contemporary," Jonathan Sperber insists, in "Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life" (Liveright), which came out in 2013; he is "more a figure of the past than a prophet of the present." And Gareth Stedman Jones explains that the aim of his new book, "Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion" (Harvard), is "to put Marx back in his nineteenth-century surroundings."

The mission is worthy. Historicizing-correcting for the tendency to presentize the past-is what scholars do. Sperber, who teaches at the University of Missouri, and Stedman Jones, who teaches at Queen Mary University of London and co-directs the Centre for History and Economics at the University of Cambridge, both bring exceptional learning to the business of rooting Marx in the intellectual and political life of nineteenth-century Europe.

Marx was one of the great infighters of all time, and a lot of his writing was topical and ad hominem-no-holds-barred disputes with thinkers now obscure and intricate interpretations of events largely forgotten. Sperber and Stedman Jones both show that if you read Marx in that context, as a man engaged in endless internecine political and philosophical warfare, then the import of some familiar passages in his writings can shrink a little. The stakes seem more parochial. In the end, their Marx isn't radically different from the received Marx, but he is more Victorian. Interestingly, given the similarity of their approaches, there is not much overlap.

Still, Marx was also what Michel Foucault called the founder of a discourse. An enormous body of thought is named after him. "I am not a Marxist," Marx is said to have said, and it's appropriate to distinguish what he intended from the uses other people made of his writings. But a lot of the significance of the work lies in its downstream effects. However he managed it, and despite the fact that, as Sperber and Stedman Jones demonstrate, he can look, on some level, like just one more nineteenth-century system-builder who was convinced he knew how it was all going to turn out, Marx produced works that retained their intellectual firepower over time. Even today, "The Communist Manifesto" is like a bomb about to go off in your hands.

And, unlike many nineteenth-century critics of industrial capitalism-and there were a lot of them-Marx was a true revolutionary. All of his work was written in the service of the revolution that he predicted in "The Communist Manifesto" and that he was certain would come to pass. After his death, communist revolutions did come to pass-not exactly where or how he imagined they would but, nevertheless, in his name. By the middle of the twentieth century, more than a third of the people in the world were living under regimes that called themselves, and genuinely believed themselves to be, Marxist.

This matters because one of Marx's key principles was that theory must always be united with practice. That's the point of the famous eleventh thesis on Feuerbach: "Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it." Marx was not saying that philosophy is irrelevant; he was saying that philosophical problems arise out of real-life conditions, and they can be solved only by changing those conditions-by remaking the world. And Marx's ideas were used to remake the world, or a big portion of it. Although no one would hold him responsible, in a juridical sense, for the outcome, on Marx's own principle the outcome tells us something about the ideas.

In short, you can put Marx back into the nineteenth century, but you can't keep him there. He wasted a ridiculous amount of his time feuding with rivals and putting out sectarian brush fires, and he did not even come close to completing the work he intended as his magnum opus, "Capital." But, for better or for worse, it just is not the case that his thought is obsolete. He saw that modern free-market economies, left to their own devices, produce gross inequalities, and he transformed a mode of analysis that goes all the way back to Socrates-turning concepts that we think we understand and take for granted inside out-into a resource for grasping the social and economic conditions of our own lives.

Apart from his loyal and lifelong collaborator, Friedrich Engels, almost no one would have guessed, in 1883, the year Marx died, at the age of sixty-four, how influential he would become. Eleven people showed up for the funeral. For most of his career, Marx was a star in a tiny constellation of radical exiles and failed revolutionaries (and the censors and police spies who monitored them) but almost unknown outside it. The books he is famous for today were not exactly best-sellers. "The Communist Manifesto" vanished almost as soon as it was published and remained largely out of print for twenty-four years; "Capital" was widely ignored when the first volume came out, in 1867. After four years, it had sold a thousand copies, and it was not translated into English until 1886.

The second and third volumes of "Capital" were published after Marx died, stitched together by Engels from hundreds of pages of scrawled-over drafts. (Marx had spectacularly bad handwriting; Engels was one of the few people outside the family who could decipher it.) The "Theses on Feuerbach," which Marx wrote in 1845, were not discovered until 1888, when Engels published them, and some of the texts most important for twentieth-century Marxists-the cobbled-together volume known as "The German Ideology," the so-called Paris manuscripts of 1844, and the book entitled the "Grundrisse" by its Soviet editors-were unknown until after 1920. The unfinished Paris manuscripts, a holy text in the nineteen-sixties, did not appear in English until 1959. Marx seems to have regarded none of that material as publishable.

In Marx's own lifetime, the work that finally brought him attention outside his circle was a thirty-five-page item called "The Civil War in France," published in 1871, in which he hailed the short-lived and violently suppressed Paris Commune as "the glorious harbinger of a new"-that is, communist-"society." It's not a text that is cited much today.

One reason for Marx's relative obscurity is that only toward the end of his life did movements to improve conditions for workers begin making gains in Europe and the United States. To the extent that those movements were reformist rather than revolutionary, they were not Marxist (although Marx did, in later years, speculate about the possibility of a peaceful transition to communism). With the growth of the labor movement came excitement about socialist thought and, with that, an interest in Marx.

Still, as Alan Ryan writes in his characteristically lucid and concise introduction to Marx's political thought, "Karl Marx: Revolutionary and Utopian" (Liveright), if Vladimir Lenin had not arrived in Petrograd in 1917 and taken charge of the Russian Revolution, Marx would probably be known today as "a not very important nineteenth-century philosopher, sociologist, economist, and political theorist." The Russian Revolution made the world take Marx's criticism of capitalism seriously. After 1917, communism was no longer a utopian fantasy.

Marx is a warning about what can happen when people defy their parents and get a Ph.D. Marx's father, a lawyer in the small city of Trier, in western Germany, had tried to steer him into the law, but Marx chose philosophy. He studied at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, where Hegel once taught, and he became involved with a group of intellectuals known as the Young Hegelians. Hegel was cautious about criticizing religion and the Prussian state; the Young Hegelians were not, and, just as Marx was being awarded his degree, in 1841, there was an official crackdown. Marx's mentor was fired, and the Young Hegelians became academic pariahs. So Marx did what many unemployed Ph.D.s do: he went into journalism.

Apart from a few small book advances, journalism was Marx's only source of earned income. (There is a story, though Sperber considers it unsubstantiated, that once, in desperation, he applied for a job as a railway clerk and was turned down for bad handwriting.) In the eighteen-forties, Marx edited and contributed to political newspapers in Europe; from 1852 to 1862, he wrote a column for the New York Daily Tribune, the paper with the largest circulation in the world at the time.

When journalistic work dried up, he struggled. He depended frequently on support from Engels and advances on his inheritance. He was sometimes desperate for food; at one point, he couldn't leave the house because he had pawned his only coat. The claim that the author of "Capital" was financially inept, and that he and his wife wasted what little money came their way on middle-class amenities like music and drawing lessons for the children, became a standard "irony" in Marx biographies. Sperber contests this. Marx had less money to waste than historians have assumed, and he accepted poverty as the price of his politics. He would gladly have lived in a slum himself, but he didn't want his family to suffer. Three of the Marxes' children died young and a fourth was stillborn; poverty and substandard living conditions may have been factors.

Marx's journalism made him into a serial exile. He wrote and published articles offensive to the authorities, and, in 1843, he was kicked out of Cologne, where he was helping run a paper called Rheinische Zeitung. He went to Paris, which had a large German community, and that is where he and Engels became friends. An earlier encounter in Cologne had not gone well, but they met again at the Café de la Régence, in 1844, and ended up spending ten days together talking.

Engels, who was two years younger, had the same politics as Marx. Soon after they met, he wrote his classic study "The Condition of the Working Class in England," which ends by predicting a communist revolution. Engels's father was a German industrialist in the textile business, an owner of factories in Barmen and Bremen and in Manchester, England, and although he disapproved of his son's politics and the company he kept, he gave him a position at the Manchester factory. Engels hated the work, but he was good at it, as he was at most things. He went fox hunting with the gentry he despised, and made fun of Marx's attempts to ride a horse. Engels eventually became a partner, and the income helped him keep Marx alive.

In 1845, Marx was expelled from France. He moved to Brussels. Three years later, though, something happened that almost no one had foreseen: revolutions broke out across Europe, including in France, Italy, Germany, and the Austrian Empire. Marx wrote "The Communist Manifesto" just as those uprisings were getting under way. When unrest reached Brussels, he was suspected of arming insurgents and was evicted from Belgium, but he returned to Paris. Rioters there had broken into the Tuileries and set the French throne on fire.

By the year's end, most of the revolutions had been crushed by monarchist forces. Many people who were or would become important figures in European art and literature-Wagner, Dostoyevsky, Baudelaire, Turgenev, Berlioz, Delacroix, Liszt, George Sand-had been caught up in the revolutionary excitement, and the outcome led to a crisis of faith in politics (the subject of Flaubert's novel "Sentimental Education"). The failure of the 1848 revolutions is what Marx's line "the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce" refers to. (He got the phrase from Engels.) The "tragedy" was the fate of the French Revolution under Napoleon; the "farce" was the election of Napoleon's nephew, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, whom Marx considered a nonentity, to the Presidency of France, in December, 1848. Bonaparte eventually declared himself Emperor and ruled until 1870, when France lost a war with Prussia. The Paris Commune was a by-product of that war.

So in 1849 Marx was forced into exile once again. He fled with his family to London. He assumed that the stay would be temporary, but he lived there for the rest of his life. That is where, day after day in the Reading Room of the British Museum, he did the research for "Capital," and it is where, in Highgate Cemetery, he is buried. The impressive bronze bust you see on his tombstone today was placed there, in 1956, by the Communist Party of Great Britain.

What was Marx like? The number of first-person reports is not large, but they tend to agree. He was, in some respects, a caricature of the German academic (which he had once expected to become): an imperious know-it-all with untamed hair in a misbuttoned frock coat. He once described himself to one of his children as "a machine condemned to devour books and then throw them, in a changed form, on the dunghill of history." He wrote all night in clouds of tobacco smoke, books and papers piled around him. "They are my slaves," he said, "and they must serve me as I please."

In professional matters, he was forbidding. He was a cogent speaker but had a lisp and was a poor orator; he knew it, and rarely addressed a crowd. He was ruthless in print, made enemies of many friends and former allies, and did not suffer fools-a large subset of his acquaintance, in his view. One German exile referred to him as "an intellectual customs agent and border guard, appointed on his own authority."

Still, he commanded respect. A colleague, recalling Marx at twenty-eight, described him as "a born leader of the people." He was actually good at running the show-as an editor and, later on, as the dominant figure in the International Workingmen's Association, known as the First International. His hair was black; his eyes were black; his complexion was swarthy. Engels called him the "black fellow from Trier"; his wife and children called him the Moor.

In private, he was modest and gracious. When he was not sick-he had a bad liver, suffered from bronchitis, and grew fist-size boils, which Sperber thinks were caused by an autoimmune disorder but which may have been a symptom of his liver disease-he was playful and affectionate. He loved Shakespeare, made up stories for his three daughters, and enjoyed cheap cigars and red wine. His wife and daughters adored him. A Prussian government spy who visited Marx at his home in 1852 was surprised to find him "the gentlest and mildest of men."

He became engaged to Jenny von Westphalen, also from Trier, when he was eighteen and she was twenty-two. Sperber thinks that a fairy tale has grown up about the marriage, but Jenny is said to have been exceptionally beautiful, and she was devoted to Karl. He wrote passionate love poetry for her. The engagement lasted seven years, during which he finished his studies, and they rarely saw each other. The relationship was mainly epistolary. (Sperber believes that they had premarital sex. I certainly hope so.) In her letters, Jenny calls Karl her "little wild boar."

The one possible flaw in the domestic idyll has to do with a child born to their servant, Helene Demuth. She was a "gift" to the Marxes from Jenny's mother and lived with the family. (Almost all women in nineteenth-century Britain who could manage to retain a servant did so. Even Miss Bates, in Jane Austen's "Emma," who lives on the charity of her well-off neighbors, has a servant.) Helene's child, named Frederick and called Freddy, was born in 1851 and was brought up by foster parents. Marx's daughters didn't meet him until after Marx's death.

Engels claimed paternity. This was not implausible. Engels was unmarried and had a taste for working-class women; his longtime lover, Mary Burns, worked in a Manchester factory. On his deathbed, though, forty-four years later, he is supposed to have named Marx as Freddy's real father, information that became known in Communist circles but was not made public until 1962. Sperber and Stedman Jones accept the story, as does the author of the standard English-language biography, David McLellan, although one of Engels's biographers, Terrell Carver, thinks that the evidence is not conclusive. Demuth remained with the family; after Marx's death, she went to work for Engels. And the Marxes' marriage survived.

It is sympathy for Marx that leads Sperber and Stedman Jones to insist that we read him in his nineteenth-century context, because they hope to distance him from the interpretation of his work made after his death by people like Karl Kautsky, who was his chief German-language exponent; Georgi Plekhanov, his chief Russian exponent; and, most influentially, Engels. It was thanks mainly to those writers that people started to refer to Marxism as "scientific socialism," a phrase that sums up what was most frightening about twentieth-century Communism: the idea that human beings can be reëngineered in accordance with a theory that presents itself as a law of history. The word the twentieth century coined for that was totalitarianism.

So, by 1939, when the British philosopher Isaiah Berlin published his widely read and not wholly unadmiring study "Karl Marx: His Life and Environment" (still in print), he could describe Marx as "among the great authoritarian founders of new faiths, ruthless subverters and innovators who interpret the world in terms of a single, clear, passionately held principle, denouncing and destroying all that conflicts with it. His faith . . . was of that boundless, absolute kind which puts an end to all questions and dissolves all difficulties." This became the Cold War Marx.

It's true that Marx was highly doctrinaire, something that did not wear well with his compatriots in the nineteenth century, and that certainly does not wear well today, after the experience of the regimes conceived in his name. It therefore sounds perverse to say that Marx's philosophy was dedicated to human freedom. But it was. Marx was an Enlightenment thinker: he wanted a world that is rational and transparent, and in which human beings have been liberated from the control of external forces.

This was the essence of Marx's Hegelianism. Hegel argued that history was the progress of humanity toward true freedom, by which he meant self-mastery and self-understanding, seeing the world without illusions-illusions that we ourselves have created. The Young Hegelians' controversial example of this was the Christian God. (This is what Feuerbach wrote about.) We created God, and then pretended that God created us. We hypostatized our own concept and turned it into something "out there" whose commandments (which we made up) we struggle to understand and obey. We are supplicants to our own fiction.

Concepts like God are not errors. History is rational: we make the world the way we do for a reason. We invented God because God solved certain problems for us. But, once a concept begins impeding our progress toward self-mastery, it must be criticized and transcended, left behind. Otherwise, like the members of the Islamic State today, we become the tools of our Tool.

What makes it hard to discard the tools we have objectified is the persistence of the ideologies that justify them, and which make what is only a human invention seem like "the way things are." Undoing ideologies is the task of philosophy. Marx was a philosopher. The subtitle of "Capital" is "Critique of Political Economy." The uncompleted book was intended to be a criticism of the economic concepts that make social relations in a free-market economy seem natural and inevitable, in the same way that concepts like the great chain of being and the divine right of kings once made the social relations of feudalism seem natural and inevitable.

The reason that "Capital" looks more like a work of economics than like a work of philosophy-the reason that it is filled with tables and charts rather than with syllogisms-is the reason given in the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach: the purpose of philosophy is to understand conditions in order to change them. Marx liked to say that when he read Hegel he found philosophy standing on its head, so he turned it over and placed it on its feet. Life is doing, not thinking. It is not enough to be the masters of our armchairs.

Marx thought that industrial capitalism, too, was created for a good reason: to increase economic output-something that "The Communist Manifesto" celebrates. The cost, however, is a system in which one class of human beings, the property owners (in Marxian terms, the bourgeoisie), exploits another class, the workers (the proletariat).

Capitalists don't do this because they are greedy or cruel (though one could describe their behavior that way, as Marx almost invariably did). They do it because competition demands it. That's how the system operates. Industrial capitalism is a Frankenstein's monster that threatens its own creators, a system that we constructed for our own purposes and is now controlling us.

Marx was a humanist. He believed that we are beings who transform the world around us in order to produce objects for the benefit of all. That is our essence as a species. A system that transforms this activity into "labor" that is bought and used to aggrandize others is an obstacle to the full realization of our humanity. Capitalism is fated to self-destruct, just as all previous economic systems have self-destructed. The working-class revolution will lead to the final stage of history: communism, which, Marx wrote, "is the solution to the riddle of history and knows itself as this solution."

Marx was fanatically committed to finding empirical corroboration for his theory. That's what it meant to put philosophy on its feet. And that's why he spent all those hours alone in the British Museum, studying reports on factory conditions, data on industrial production, statistics about international trade. It was a heroic attempt to show that reality aligned with theory. No wonder he couldn't finish his book.

Marx had very little to say about how the business of life would be conducted in a communist society, and this turned out to be a serious problem for regimes trying to put communism into practice. He had reasons for being vague. He thought that our concepts, values, and beliefs all arise out of the conditions of our own time, which means that it's hard to know what lies on the other side of historical change. In theory, after the revolution, everything will be "up for grabs"-which has been the great dream of leftist radicalism ever since.

Marx was clearer about what a communist society would not have. There would be no class system, no private property, no individual rights (which Marx thought boil down to protecting the right of the owners of property to hang on to it), and no state (which he called "a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie"). The state, in the form of the Party, proved to be one bourgeois concept that twentieth-century Communist regimes found impossible to transcend. Communism is not a religion; it truly is, as anti-Communists used say about it, godless. But the Party functions in the way that Feuerbach said God functions in Christianity, as a mysterious and implacable external power.

Marx did not, however, provide much guidance for how a society would operate without property or classes or a state. A good example of the problem is his criticism of the division of labor. In the first chapter of "The Wealth of Nations," in 1776, Adam Smith identified the division of labor-that is, specialization-as the key to economic growth. Smith's case study was the manufacture of pins. Rather than have a single worker make one pin at a time, Smith argued, a pin factory can split the job into eighteen separate operations, starting with drawing out the wire and ending with the packaging, and increase production by a factor of thousands.

To us, this seems an obviously efficient way to organize work, from automobile assembly lines to "knowledge production" in universities. But Marx considered the division of labor one of the evils of modern life. (So did Hegel.) It makes workers cogs in a machine and deprives them of any connection with the product of their labor. "Man's own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him," as Marx put it. In a communist society, he wrote, "nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes." It will be possible "to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner . . . without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman, or critic."

This often quoted passage sounds fanciful, but it is at the heart of Marx's thought. Human beings are naturally creative and sociable. A system that treats them as mechanical monads is inhumane. But the question is, How would a society without a division of labor produce sufficient goods to survive? Nobody will want to rear the cattle (or clean the barn); everyone will want to be the critic. (Believe me.) As Marx conceded, capitalism, for all its evils, had created abundance. He seems to have imagined that, somehow, all the features of the capitalist mode of production could be thrown aside and abundance would magically persist.

In 1980, the philosopher Peter Singer published a short book on Marx in which he listed some of Marx's predictions: the income gap between workers and owners would increase, independent producers would be forced down into the ranks of the proletariat, wages would remain at subsistence levels, the rate of profit would fall, capitalism would collapse, and there would be revolutions in the advanced countries. Singer thought that most of these predictions were "so plainly mistaken" that it was difficult to understand how anyone sympathetic to Marx could defend them. In 2016, it is harder to be dismissive.

"Economists today would do well to take inspiration from his example," Thomas Piketty says about Marx, in the best-seller he published in 2013, "Capital in the Twenty-first Century." The book did for many twenty-first-century readers what Marx hoped "Capital" might do for nineteenth-century ones. It uses data to show us the real nature of social relations and, by doing that, forces us to rethink concepts that have come to seem natural and inevitable. One of these is the concept of the market, which is often imagined as a self-optimizing mechanism it is a mistake to interfere with, but which in fact, left to itself, continually increases inequality. Another concept, closely related, is meritocracy, which is often imagined as a guarantor of social mobility but which, Piketty argues, serves mainly to make economic winners feel virtuous.

Piketty says that for thirty years after 1945 a high rate of growth in the advanced economies was accompanied by a rise in incomes that benefitted all classes. Severe wealth inequality came to seem a thing of the past (which is why, in 1980, people could quite reasonably call Marx's predictions mistaken). It now appears that those thirty years were an anomaly. The Depression and the two world wars had effectively wiped out the owners of wealth, but the thirty years after 1945 rebooted the economic order.

"The very high level of private wealth that has been attained since the nineteen-eighties and nineteen-nineties in the wealthy countries of Europe and in Japan," Piketty says, "directly reflects the Marxian logic." Marx was correct that there is nothing naturally egalitarian about modern economies left to themselves. As Piketty puts it, "There is no natural, spontaneous process to prevent destabilizing, inegalitarian forces from prevailing permanently."

The tendency of the system to increase inequality was certainly true in Marx's own century. By 1900, the richest one per cent of the population in Britain and France owned more than fifty per cent of those nations' wealth; the top ten per cent owned ninety per cent. We are approaching those levels again today. In the United States, according to the Federal Reserve, the top ten per cent of the population owns seventy-two per cent of the wealth, and the bottom fifty per cent has two per cent. About ten per cent of the national income goes to the top two hundred and forty-seven thousand adults (one-thousandth of the adult population).

This is not a problem restricted to the rich nations. Global wealth is also unequally distributed, and by the same ratios or worse. Piketty does not predict a worldwide working-class revolution; he does remark that this level of inequality is "unsustainable." He can foresee a time when most of the planet is owned by billionaires.

Marx was also not wrong about the tendency of workers' wages to stagnate as income for the owners of capital rises. For the first sixty years of the nineteenth century-the period during which he began writing "Capital"-workers' wages in Britain and France were stuck at close to subsistence levels. It can be difficult now to appreciate the degree of immiseration in the nineteenth-century industrial economy. In one period in 1862, the average workweek in a Manchester factory was eighty-four hours.

It appears that wage stagnation is back. After 1945, wages rose as national incomes rose, but the income of the lowest earners peaked in 1969, when the minimum hourly wage in the United States was $1.60. That is the equivalent of $10.49 today, when the national minimum wage is $7.25. And, as wages for service-sector jobs decline in earning power, the hours in the workweek increase, because people are forced to take more than one job.

The rhetoric of our time, the time of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, Brexit, and popular unrest in Europe, appears to have a Marxist cast. Sanders's proposals to reduce inequality are straight out of Piketty: tax wealth and give more people access to knowledge. Trump, since he admires authoritarian personalities, might be pleased to know that Marx supported free trade on a "the worse things get" theory: by driving wages lower, free trade increases the impoverishment of the working class and leads more quickly to the revolution. In the terms used everywhere today, on the left, on the right, and in the press: the system is "rigged" to reward "the élites." Marx called them "the ruling class."

How useful is Marx for understanding this bubble of ferment in the advanced economies? I think we don't yet know very well the precise demographic profile of Brexit voters and Trump and Sanders supporters-whether they are people who have been materially damaged by free trade and immigration or people who are hostile to the status quo for other reasons. That they are basically all the former may turn out to be a consoling belief of the better-off, who can more easily understand why people who have suffered economic damage would be angry than why people who have nothing to complain about financially might simply want to blow the whole thing up.

Still, in the political confusion, we may feel that we are seeing something that has not been seen in countries like Britain and the United States since before 1945: people debating what Marx would call the real nature of social relations. The political earth is being somewhat scorched. And, as politics continues to shed its traditional restraints, ugly as it is to watch, we may get a clearer understanding of what those relations are.

They may not be entirely economic. A main theme of Stedman Jones's book is that Marx and Engels, in their obsession with class, ignored the power of other forms of identity. One of these is nationalism. For Marx and Engels, the working-class movement was international. But today we seem to be seeing, among the voters for Brexit, for example, a reversion to nationalism and, in the United States, what looks like a surge of nativism.

Stedman Jones also argues that Marx and Engels failed to appreciate the extent to which the goal of working-class agitation in nineteenth-century Britain was not ownership of the means of production but political inclusion, being allowed to vote. When that was achieved, unrest subsided.

Voting is no longer the test of inclusion. What is happening in the rich democracies may be not so much a war between the haves and the have-nots as a war between the socially advantaged and the left-out. No one who lives in poverty would not trade that life for a better one, but what most people probably want is the life they have. They fear losing that more than they wish for a different life, although they probably also want their children to be able to lead a different life if they choose.

Of the features of modern society that exacerbate that fear and threaten that hope, the distribution of wealth may not be the most important. Money matters to people, but status matters more, and precisely because status is something you cannot buy. Status is related to identity as much as it is to income. It is also, unfortunately, a zero-sum game. The struggles over status are socially divisive, and they can resemble class warfare.

Ryan, in his book on Marx, makes an observation that Marx himself might have made. "The modern republic," he says, "attempts to impose political equality on an economic inequality it has no way of alleviating." This is a relatively recent problem, because the rise of modern capitalism coincided with the rise of modern democracies, making wealth inequality inconsistent with political equality. But the unequal distribution of social resources is not new. One of the most striking points Piketty makes is that, as he puts it, "in all known societies in all times, the least wealthy half of the population has owned virtually nothing," and the top ten per cent has owned "most of what there is to own."

This is probably not true of tribal societies, and it does not seem to have been true of the earliest known democratic state, Periclean Athens (at least, for the citizens). But inequality has been with us for a long time. Industrial capitalism didn't reverse it in the nineteenth century, and finance capitalism is not reversing it in the twenty-first. The only thing that can reverse it is political action aimed at changing systems that seem to many people to be simply the way things have to be. We invented our social arrangements; we can alter them when they are working against us. There are no gods out there to strike us dead if we do. ♦

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The nineteenth-century philosopher's ideas may help us to understand the economic and political inequality of our time.

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Is a faster news cycle helpful? Wouldn't the same efforts of having thousands of workers who were necessary due to haste have been incredible if applied towards slower made publications, lead by the process? What would be the results?

And what would have been the results, if instead of firing all those workers when a better technological plant was built, and organisation would have been built instead where this craft was preserved, and publications of a different kind would have been made?

It is also making me so sad that these workers would have printed so many vial articles that would go directly against their rights and privileges. That in order to print alternative materials, you had to find collectively owned smaller plants. And that after all this process, once it dies out, the process is also stolen from you, as most would have only learned a section of it (let alone not had the resources for the equipment).

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Understanding Picasso’s Ceramics - Artsper Magazine

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Pablo Picasso’s paintings and drawings are some of the most famous in the world... But do you know his ceramic work?

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I went to Waterstones and the Feminist Bookshop in Brighton!
Audience: the modern working person, ages 20 - 40
Theme: worker's rights, hidden histories
Genre: graphic non fiction fits best, or political historical anthology?

I think graphic non fiction would be the best category for me, but I did notice it's not a category you can find in Waterstones, so perhaps it's something which would work better in smaller alternative bookshops. I found several examples which relate to my project, and could take it in different directions.

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https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/mar/03/gustav-metzger-art-revolutionary-human-being-capitalism

For Picasso it was considered almost a political act at the time (Harrod, 2018) to start making ceramics as opposed to other mediums accepted by the art world. For this, he had to use ceramics studios, and work alongside others in their production. So craft is inherently political.

Another inherently resistant quality of the medium, besides care and slowness, is akin to the auto destructive art of Gustav Metzger. In relief prints especially, the initial block is traditionally destroyed after printing the edition. Equally, I get so many people frustrated that I won't sell them the original block. I always have to explain that the block itself does not look as nice after you print with it. To many, this seems almost like "wasted work" (of course not wasted to me, as I know there is no other way I would have arrived at that same image).

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This idea of critical fabulation was the most important in how I thought about approaching making up a story about Altab Ali. As there was little information about his personal life in the archive, I wanted to create a story where his personhood was at the centre of it, rather than reporting on the events surrounding him.

I was intimidated by the task, as I didn't want to be in any way disrespectful, or by mistake minimise some side of the story or an aspect unknown to me (especially as a white person).

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This episode of Black Mirror was such a revelation in how to approach this story, and it incidentally also dealt with the exact time period that the archive is talking about. It deals with the rise of the National Front Party and the racism of the time.

I was over the moon in their approach of creating a fantastical story in the middle of this crisis as a way of giving agency to a character who wouldn't have had any agency at the time, but in a critical way, which doesn't affect the reality of the time.

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I was really inspired on how fantasy could be used as a critical tool of filling in those gaps, with a much smaller risk of having an overlook in your re writing.

What I also liked was how it commented on individual responsibility, turning it on its head. It showed that there is no one thing that an individual by themselves could do facing such systemic racism (unless an alien god grants you the power to save the world by killing three people before a deadline).

So I decided to invent a story where three witches tell Altab Ali that he is meant to start a revolution. He wonders about it, and starts trying to work towards it, but he gets killed, which starts a revolution in his community.

I wanted to ask questions about legacy and fate, whether had he known his destiny, would he have chosen this fate?

My belief is nobody would want to sacrifice their life, even if they knew good change could come about, let alone that some of these issues still persist today. I hope we are able to find ways to organise ourselves and come together, unprovoked by atrocities.

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Excerpt from Unit 2 Essay - Mark Fisher and memory

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Excerpt from Unit 2 Essay - Mark Fisher and memory

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But I also wanted to deal with issues of memory, and symbols. Of course in reality, Altab Ali was a regular person, and not actually someone actively working towards solving the issues in his community.

So is it right to make his death a symbol, while not remembering all the other bengalis who worked towards gaining the comparative safety the community enjoys now?

Also, how would he have liked to have been remembered?

(It's worth mentioning these are just questions I am asking, not having an answer myself).

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There is a chapter here on the craft of spinning and cloth production in India, and why Ghandi was so enamoured with the dignity of this labour (also seeing it as an economic saviour).

I wanted to include an aspect of craft in here, as most Bengalis in the story were garment workers, and they also have a big tradition of cloth making in Bangladesh.

It's interesting too that people in the west saw this photo as almost Christ like, of Ghandi spinning at the wheel. There is a disconnet here.

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Clearly we have an inherent respect and divinity in craft, yet we can't wrap our head around fast fashion, and people being misstreated and underpaid in its production in the same way.

Inspired by these ideas, in my story, I used the garment as a storytelling device. In the first image the witches show Altab, he thinks it is him, as the person leading the revolution has a similar jacket. But if you look closely, the patterns on the jackets are different, and it was his brother in the vision.

Also hoping to show what a double edged sword this craft is for Bengalis, where on the one hand, it is a gift and beautiful tradition that gives them work, and on the other, it has been corrupted, and their wages are extremely low.

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I also read about the history of silkweavers in Spitalfields (where the story happens) from much much earlier, the 1700s. Studs Terkel is right when he says the history of work is violent. There are stories of strikes, or of movements of workers trying to campaign for better wages, and their leaders get executed in public view (the only ask of the employer is to execute them in the regular spot, and not near their homes where he initially wanted to).

It seems to us that this history is somehow far away, but I still believe the government to be at fault for a death like Altab Ali's in 1978, for allowing openly racist policies to be campaigned for.

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I was intrigued to know what Audre Lorde means when she says this, especially as I was trying to use what I thought were the "master's" tools with printmaking in a resistant way.

Of course I realise that actually craft comes from the workers and it honours their spaces of production, and if anything it becomes coopted.

But Audre Lorde talks about being aware of the differences within a movement, and while coming together, not ignoring these, but rather let yourself guided by them to allow for conversations and experiences to be shared. (Lorde, 2018)

In constructing this story, i had to be so vigilant of this, especially in trying to relay experiences of a group which wasn't my own.

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The thinking and theory behind this work was heavily discussed in the Unit 2 padlet and AV presentation

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The thinking and theory behind this work was heavily discussed in the Unit 2 padlet and AV presentation

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All existing work + Professional Portfolio

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All existing work + Professional Portfolio

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All existing work has been organised and can be found here:

https://www.moatzart.co.uk/stories-from-the-bishopsgate-archive

All publications made, the final major project outcome can be found here:

https://www.moatzart.co.uk/bishopsgate-archive-stories-manuscript

Documents from the archive on separate padlet:

https://padlet.com/amotiu10202111/archive-research-p5-bcbn8yu4g0hk8l24

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Either a graphic non fiction of Hidden Stories from the Bishopsgate Archive, focusing on just the stories. Or one with a personal element to it too, where I act more as a journalist and talk about my experience with researching this as well, like Escaping Wars and Waves. Or, ultimately, a collection and more of an anthology containing the stories but also giving historical context and using more of the original archival material as well.

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Don't Believe the Papers - Mireille Fauchon

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Don't Believe the Papers - Mireille Fauchon

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https://www.croydonist.co.uk/mireille-fauchon/

Mireille's work is very close in purpose to my own: "My practice-based research is fundamentally concerned with how illustration, specially my practice as a visual storyteller, can be applied as a social research tool."(Croydonist, 2019)

My project is so similar to Mireille's approach, and the way she develops her work makes me wonder whether I would be able to work towards a PHD proposal with my work.

It has been suggested to me so many times throughout the course that my method of exploring archive through print can be developed further into a visual research method past this course.

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Hito Steyerl "Politics of Art and the Transition to Post Democracy" 

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Hito Steyerl "Politics of Art and the Transition to Post Democracy" 

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One avenue that my project and methods are taking me towards is the artists' relationship with work, especially as I am being questioned more and more about my position as an author.

I have noticed how using a laborious technique, a trade/craft in order to make artwork on this topic successfully attracts an audience of workers, people really appreciate the "work" it takes for me to produce the illustrations.

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https://www.theshowroom.org/exhibitions/ciara-phillips-workshop-2010-ongoing

I have such a strong commitment to these mediums and to preserving and imparting this knowledge. I am also now equally passionate about the ideas relating to labour that we can extract from them.

So Ciara Phillips Practice is really impressive to me, especially as it is somewhat similar in approach to ideas I have been thinking about for future outcomes, as exhibitions or workshops.

I want to find meaningful ways of sharing these methods with the general public (i.e not specialised or any specific groups), and a participatory exhibition would fit well. Though I would like to find ways of connecting this to my research, and ideas of labour, and perhaps not be as "open" in the approach.

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Workshop (2010-ongoing) is a new installation made up of multiple screenprints on newsprint and large-scale works on cotton. This new work sets an attitude for a two-month temporary print studio that will take place in the gallery over the course of the exhibition.

Throughout October and November Phillips will be collaborating with invited artists, designers, and local women's groups (many of whom have ongoing relationships with The Showroom) to produce new screenprints. Guests will bring their different knowledge and experiences of working collectively to Workshop, whose structure is open for development as the project progresses. These new collaborations will initiate conversations and actions that aren't contained within specific disciplines of art, community action, design or activism. By making prints in these new collaborative groupings, Phillips will explore the potential of 'making together' as a way of negotiating ideas and generating discussions around experimental and wider uses of print.

Phillips' long-term commitment to collaborative production underpins her expansive printing practice that makes use of screenprinting, wall drawing and photography to create context-specific installations. Collaborative work includes projects with Poster Club, a group of Glasgow-based artists that she initiated in 2010 and with which she regularly works. Workshop aims to explore the relations between these interlinked strands of Phillips' solo and collective work and is also informed by recent research into the history of London-based print collectives.

Selected printed outcomes from Workshop will be collected in a new version of Irregular Bulletin, a hand-printed newsletter that will exist as a record of Workshop after it ends. Irregular Bulletin refers to a publication of the same name published at The Immaculate Heart College, Los Angeles in the 1950s and 60s. Visitors can view works in progress from Workshop in The Showroom's upstairs studio space, where the collaborative work Irregular Bulletin 53 (2012) is also displayed.
-- Workshop programme
Friday 4 and Saturday 5 October 2013
Camilla Wills and Ciara Phillips

Sunday 6 October, Sunday 13 October and Sunday 17 November 2013
Justice for Domestic Workers and Ciara Phillips

Sunday 19 October and Saturday 26 October 2013
Fraser Muggeridge and Ciara Phillips

Wednesday 23 October 2013
PERSONA publication launch with Melissa Gordon and Marina Vishmidt

Thursday 24 October 2013
Melissa Gordon and Ciara Phillips

Friday 15 November 2013
Gemma Holt with Ciara Phillips

Saturday 16 November 2013
See Red Women's Workshop Presentation with founding members Suzy Mackie and Pru Stevenson

The exhibition Workshop (2010-ongoing) is realised in the framework of COHAB, a two-year project initiated by The Showroom, Casco - Office for Art, Design and Theory, Utrecht and Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm, supported by a Cooperation Measures grant from the European Commission Culture 2007-2013.
--
With thanks to the following individuals and groups for their involvement in the project: Melissa Gordon, Justice for Domestic Workers (J4DW), Suzy Mackie, Fraser Muggeridge, John Phillips, Pru Stevenson and Camilla Wills. The exhibition is also supported by Arts Council England and The Elephant Trust. Research and work for this exhibition was developed during Phillips' Summer 2013 residency at Drawing Room, London through the biennial Drawing Room Bursary Award supported by CASS Art. With thanks to londonprintstudio for their support.
-- More:
Glasgow Women's Library
See Red Women's Workshop
Self Organised, edited by Stine Hebert & Anne Szefer Karlsen, 2013

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The Showroom | Ciara Phillips: Workshop (2010–ongoing)

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Workshop (2010–ongoing) is a new installation made up of multiple screenprints on newsprint and large-scale works on cotton. This new work sets an attitude for a two-month temporary print studio that will take place in the gallery over the course of the exhibition.

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https://www.bcu.ac.uk/research/making-a-difference/research-highlights/remembering-longbridge-motor-factory

What I appreciate about this project is two fold, how well the mode of production is represented and re-enacted, and the way the community was involved.

I would love to be able to design an equally strong way of re-enacting the processes I have been working with, on a larger scale.

Equally, throughout the project, I have met many people who took part in the Wapping Dispute. I would love to connect to more people like this, as these stories are more recent and still live, and find different ways of communicating them.

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Stuart Whipps' art project The Kipper and the Corpse has seen him highlight the iconic Longbridge car factory, formerly one of the most successful in the country and the last British-owned volume car manufacturer.

Research background - A cyclical history

Birmingham-born Whipps has enjoyed an acclaimed career as both a lecturer and artist.

He has exhibited across the globe as both a solo artist and in group exhibitions, winning the Observer Hodge Photography Prize in 2005 and the joint recipient of the East International Prize in 2009.

Stuart began the project while the Longbridge car factory was still open, photographing and documenting the site. To focus his aims, he concentrated on a particularly notable year, 1979, that saw Margaret Thatcher elected as Prime Minister and Longbridge's trade unionist Derek Robinson sacked .

"The events of 1979, such as the erosions of the unions, the Conservatives in power, etc, are mirroring the present day," Stuart explains.

"Great Britain leaving the European Union is a prime example. I believe looking to the past will help us to understand the attitudes and thoughts happening in the present day."

Research background - Combining community with art

Stuart called his project The Kipper and the Corpse after an episode of the comedy Fawlty Towers, which sees Basil Fawlty lambast British Leyland workers . "1979 was a unique time and the comedic ramblings of Basil showed certain attitudes towards car manufacturers," Stuart explains.

In 2014, commissioned Stuart to create an art project for the Longbridge Public Art Project (LPAP) .

LPAP aimed to celebrate the incredible history of the town through a commissioning model of artists-in-residencies. The goal of the LPAP was to create projects that combined public art, heritage, open space and community development.

Focusing on the Longbridge car plant, which had once employed more than 6,000 people and dominated the local landscape, was a no-brainer.

Outcomes and impact - Reconnecting to a cultural landmark

Stuart's exhibition has seen him restore a 1979 Mini Cooper car with the assistance of former British Leyland workers.

The conversations Stuart had with those ex-employees helped shape his project further.

"I didn't want nostalgic comments, I wanted them to speak about the place that helped form their identity," he explains. "Luckily, working with them for such a long time meant I enjoyed some really insightful conversations about the good and bad of factory life."

Stuart and co often worked on the project in the public eye, working in a glass cabin in Longbridge town centre. Seeing the car at various stages of repair showcased to the region how significant car manufacturing had been to the town.

Outcomes and impact - Highlighting history

The renovated Mini enjoyed exhibitions across the country, as part of Stuart's participation in the British Art Show exhibition.

"I like the idea that a Mini would sit in an art gallery in a traditional setting," says Stuart. "It's not trying to make it sculptural in an artful way through the subversion of materials, it's through this straight presentation of here's this object and here are the narratives that relate to it."

The Mini featured alongside photography, texts and archival material from the period, providing a rich cultural and political backdrop to the landmark automobile.

It came to Birmingham's IKON Gallery in September 2019.

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Remembering the iconic Longbridge motor factory

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Highlighting the iconic Longbridge car factory, formerly one of the most successful in the country and the last British-owned volume car manufacturer.

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I am very keen though in making a volume which maybe uses a variety of papers, and can mimick the experience of going through an archive? As the techniques I used to tell the stories are often the same as, the archival material was made from, and I think this would make for a nice experience of finding hidden histories.

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Escaping Wars and Waves - Olivier Kugler

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Escaping Wars and Waves - Olivier Kugler

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I was also attracted to volumes which invited people to resist and fight for their rights with bold titles, I don't know how aggressive I want to be with this, but it's definitely the underlying motive for all my research!

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Escaping Wars and Waves - Olivier Kugler

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Escaping Wars and Waves - Olivier Kugler

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A lot of graphic novels/ graphic non fiction seem to rely on a comic book style however, where I think I would like to include some original archival material as well, and have the illustrations alongside the text.

The project has prompted me to play with text for the first time and include it in my illustrations, but it is still not to the degree of this comic layout.

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Unfinished business - the fight for women's rights

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Unfinished business - the fight for women's rights

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So I also looked at some anthologies which rely on a lot of archival material and visual elements to get inspiration for the layout.

It is also giving me ideas for how to market this, as a kind of academic art book that is in between fiction and non fiction.

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Another example of the publishing of original archival material.

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Serena Katt's book was an inspiration to me throughout, in how it also stands between fiction and non fiction. It is also so interesting how she treats her grandfather as an unreliable narator in the context of WWII.

Similarly, at times, I think even archives can be an "unreliable narator" in themselves, as most of the documents will be from the governing powers of the time.

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It's also a good comment on and reminder that while I am dealing with stories from people directly involved in these movements, people also always have some degree of unreliability when telling a story, or discussing their memories.

So dealing with this gently is important.

Her book is inspiring to me in how I could turn some of the stories I have been working on into a bigger graphic novel perhaps in the future too.

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My site is the Bishopsgate archive.

I am uncovering stories related to worker's rights. I will be investigating this through making work based on the stories and imagery I find, through a variety of printmaking techniques, as a way of connecting to ideas of labour through a historical trade and laborious process.

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Why - What am I looking to find/show?

I think it is important to make these restrictions on the market visible in order for us to realise that there is no such thing as a free market, as many labour laws have been introduced throughout history, and they have been necessary. (Chang, 2011)

Equally, the economy has flourished every time a strong welfare state was in place (this doesn't indicate a direct correlation but it certainly indicates that a welfare state doesn't negatively impact the market) (Chang, 2010).

We have to understand this in order to keep fighting for new rights, as well as existing ones. I think my cases also show that progress is difficult especially as we are still having to fight for rights that have already been gained.

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These are the questions I am trying to answer with my work:

Who were the people who fought for our rights before?

What have they achieved and how?

How can we keep fighting?

How can we fight for new rights when so many of the rights we had already gained are constantly being challenged?

What is keeping us from organizing and fighting back?

I am hoping to work towards a book in three parts, based on my work from the three case studies, and what we can gather from each of them.

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I have tried to relate each case study to a labour law that has either passed, or is yet to pass.

I am focusing on personal stories throughout, as I think sometimes we distance ourselves from people from the past, somehow thinking they must have been different or stronger, or had more to fight for. I have found that I strongly relate to these stories today while looking through the archive, and the same issues come up again and again.

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1. Wages For Housework Campaign Archive (1970s - present)

The Wages for Housework Campaign has been advocating for paidhousework since the 1970s, a seemingly unachievable goal. Many victories can be attributed to them, like child benefits, and they havestrongly campaigned for many issues, such as the Marital Rape Lawintroduced in 1992.

The archive is dense and shows us the work it takes to organise and campaign towards a goal, especially when it comes to bringing together people who are not already part of a group/union.

They have not yet achieved their goal, but there are many small victories which can be attributed to them, like many child allowance increases over the years.

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2. The Murder of Altab Ali and following protests (1978)

Race Relations Act 1965    | Made it illegal to discriminate on grounds of race in employment and education.

The Race Relations act had already passed, which protected workers from discrimination at work. This did not extend yet outside of work, and wildly racist views at the time created an environment of great violence. Altab Ali, a garment worker in Brick Lane was murdered in 1978 in a racially motivated attack.

This is a case which shows us that the passing of one law is not the end of a struggle. The archive shows us what the political mechanisms which keep us from progress are.

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3. The Wapping Dispute (1986)
Rupert Murdoch fired 6000 printworkers by making them go on strike, so he could fire them without severance.

Employment Act 1990    | All forms of closed shop (a place of work where all employees must belong to one trade union) were made illegal.

The Wapping Dispute archive shows us the importance of Unions and that technological advancement shouldn't only benefit the employers. This case is considered by many as an important fight which had been lost by the unions, causing their incremental decrease in power since. (Horgan, 2021)

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The first step towards my exploration of the archive has been visual note taking, a method borrowed from Lily Jones' Further Feminisms.

This was instrumental in me grasping the complexities of the different issues I am dealing with, and the voices of the archive. I wanted to have this understanding of the overall context of each dispute before tackling the stories from workers.

For the Wages for Housework campaign I drew these notes, almost like a collage of information, copying images and what felt like important bits of information.

For The Murder of Altab Ali I sorted the most relevant material from the archive in a visual essay, which really helped me organise all of my research about the topic, as well as organise the material to tell a story.

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The previous notes which were more random, and made as I kept reading.

Using the original archival material felt different. I think the first notes tricked the viewer slightly through a more deceivingly delicate style. The original material almost seems more unreal in how graphically racist it is.

For the Wapping Dispute I started the same note taking process by using letterpress, reprinting words from the worker's pleas at the time.

It really felt like I was embodying these issues, as the technique is so laborious, making me understand the scale of this issue, and of the consequences of how technological advancement in general is treated in relation to work.

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I have been using traditional and original print processes which relate to the archival material I am investigating to make the work, which has been a very revelatory method.

For stories from the Wages for Housework Campaign I used etching which is a more free handed technique, allowing me to incorporate the multiple elements and voices from the archive.

For note taking for the Wapping Dispute I have been using letterpress and relief techniques, (wood carving and wood engraving techniques are relief techniques that are type high and combine well with type).

For The Murder of Altab Ali I will be using copper plates to engrave an original story. Copper engraving is one of the oldest techniques, which I think gives gravity to the work, like inscribing it into history.

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I am wondering whether my commitment to the medium also comes from a sense of guilt of choosing to be a full time artist, an objectively "easy" purpose. If I use this technique which takes so much work, my days feel productive, there is a clear process of production (as opposed to a lot of other contemporary art).

This resonates with my audience and the method has been useful in exploring my topic, but that is a strong realisation of the "guilt".

Of course this "guilt" about being an artist is unrealistic, as the arts are one of the most underpaid industries and highest in gig economy workers, with the least benefits and most hours (I sure have been working non stop since I started university, multiple jobs).

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Ultimately, I am hoping to work towards a publication in three parts, which can show 1. the political mechanisms which keep us apart (Murder of Altab Ali) 2. what it takes to and how to organise (Wages for Housework) 3. why it is imperative that we find more and more ways of sticking together, like unions (Wapping Dispute).

Below are my display ideas for my work in progress exhibition:

I would love to also find a way to incorporate my making of videos somehow - though is it necessary? This might be an opportunity to find another way of communicating these ideas?

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Display 1 - Notes from the Bishopsgate Archive

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Display 1 - Notes from the Bishopsgate Archive

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Just displaying my visual note taking from the archives, and arranging them visually, mixing up the three use cases (and a description of my project)

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Display 1.2 - Notes from the Bishopsgate Archive

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Display 1.2 - Notes from the Bishopsgate Archive

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Just displaying my note taking but separating the three case studies.

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Display 2 - Stories from the Bishopsgate Archive - The Wages for Housework Campaign

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Display 2 - Stories from the Bishopsgate Archive - The Wages for Housework Campaign

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Displaying my work for Wages for Housework as its finished. Displaying the main stories I illustrated framed in the middle, with descriptions of the original stories underneath - with my note taking around them.

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Display 3 - Work in progress + Publication?

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Display 3 - Work in progress + Publication?

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Using Wages for Housework again as an exercise since this is the case study which has all the work completed, displaying the framed prints of the stories from the archive, and turning the notes etc. into a publication prototype?

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The unregulated work climate we are in currently has been modelled after the gig economy of the art world, and most fields have also adopted damaging working ideologies from there (Steyerl, 2011) (Horgan, 2021), like "an abuse of the flexible biography and considerable self motivation of cultural workers" (Sigler, 2017).

They also tend to undertake work in communities where they compensate for the lack of a strong welfare state (a lot of well-being and mental health work is passed onto arts organisations).

Furthermore, the idea of comparing work fields might be damaging to us, as it accompanies the thought that we are also now "much better off" compared to people in the past as well.

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In reality, all types of work are ultimately unhealthy, and will affect us in the long run in some way (Horgan, 2021). (i.e servers and flight attendants do emotional labour when they continually smile even in dangerous situations or when receiving abuse, so many different jobs leave us with different physical ailments).

"The appropriation of artistic, that is autonomous and free kinds of behaviour has been an imperative in the post - fordist world of work for a long time. It is a governamental technique for self-control, which, as Foucault described, promises a better life and thereby engenders a new generation of precarious "creatives" who, between short term contracts and low pay, achieve burn out instead of freedom." - (Sigler, 2017).

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For the exhibition, I divided the work in the three case studies. For WFH, I showed the finished etchings based on stories from the archive (framed), alongside the protest material I made in response to the archive, and the original plates for the etchings. For the Wapping Dispute I showed the galleys, and the letterpress prints I made based on archival material. And for the murder of Altab Ali I showed the archival material, and a publication of notes from all three case studies.

The exhibition being work in progress has made me realise that I am still looking at working towards a publication, as this was the medium that felt most right as I did it.

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A second text in Work by Whitechapel Gallery then suggests that artists should be taking a huge strike (Sigler, 2017). I agree with this in practical terms, as artists should be a group to be able to organise and strike as well.

The text suggests that artists attempting to deal with social issues have a futile feat, being too entwined with the system, but that they will always attempt it anyway (Sigler, 2017).

I recognise that there are aspects where this is true, like as a part time working artist it is necessary to monetise the work I am doing, which feels wrong in relation to this topic (yet still practically necessary).

(there is also something in the above image which makes me think of the way capitalism manages to swallow its own critique, the fact that this painting is auctioned for £5600. this is the same with the kind of gig economy which was supposed to bring about freedom, but was coopted to mean more work, and more unregulated work instead.)

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If I were to work towards another exhibition, I would like for it to be more cohesive, and for it to go even further in looking at and embodying the production methods I have been exploring - similar to the Stuart Whapps Mini Factory, where he restored a 1979 Mini Cooper car with the assistance of former British Leyland workers.

What was suggested to me as a possible outcome was a visual video lecture, whereby I talk about the material and present my acquired documentation. I didn't feel it would have been a great outcome as I want the work to be less academic, and more focused and lead by stories, while heavily considering their mode of production.

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What The Ladies Have To Say - Zine (Microcosm Publishing)

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What The Ladies Have To Say - Zine (Microcosm Publishing)

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This zine format was inspiring to me in producing my own zines. It took some of the pressure off in how I approach arranging these heavier topics, in a more urgent and casual way.

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As I still feel most comfortable with the idea of a publication, I am left wondering how to best communicate my process of using printmaking as a methodology rather than just a medium throughout the book.

(I really enjoy documenting these processes and feel that these communicate these ideas so well, just maybe not on their own?)

I think possibly one easy angle for me would be to consider this kind of making in relation to other artists, taking into account the texts I have been reading about how contemporary art has dealt with the same issues I am dealing with.

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But it seems that the proposal is more sentimental and ideological, perhaps leading to a type of artist that sees producing any tangible artwork at all as agreeing with the system, and alienating an audience in the meantime, while not organising in any practical way.

(Equally I struggle to think who might be affected by this kind of "strike" if not just the artist - possibly art institutions, but I think it needs to be a better organised protest for it to have an impact on those).

Gustav Metzger was a big proponent of telling artists to take a three year strike.

While his self destructive work has a radical purpose, there was still a materiality to it which is part of what makes it so effective.

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There is something in the quality of the artist worker that mirrors all these cases, being underpaid as automatically it is a job you love or are naturally good at (similar to women being underpaid as their industries appear to be "natural"), the way that the whole unregulated gig economy has been modelled from creative economies (Sigler, 2017), and how technology has affected and will affect artist workers (as with the Wapping Dispute and AI today), eventually affecting all workers.

So a personal exploration of the "work" I have been doing towards a specific purpose and cause might be a good way of engaging these thoughts throughout a publication?

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I decided to turn all the note taking I had been doing based on the archive into a publication, as extra information around the work I was showing, and in some ways I found this to be the most successful experiment.

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There is also a strong performative element to the work which I could lean into in the future, perhaps instead of a workshop as exhibition - it could be an open studio as exhibition.

Tehching made a performance piece where he "clocked in" every day for a year as an artist.

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It was really exciting designing this and putting it together, and it really solidified for me that this would be a good format to work towards for my final outcome.

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This is difficult work to be showing without any context, and a book format allows so much room for discussing the issues at length (even for the show I felt the need to have written material alongside all visual work, in the form of stories, or quotes.)

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The visual notes themselves work so well in this format too, almost like a graphic novel.

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What The Ladies Have To Say - Zine (Microcosm Publishing)

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What The Ladies Have To Say - Zine (Microcosm Publishing)

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Ultimately I'm pondering whether embodying these modes of production is enough to communicate these ideas, akin to Mierle's practice.

"Manifesto for Maintenance art etc., Ukeles takes as her subject her socio-politically marginalised status as a woman artist and mother/housewife, seeing her artistic practice as analogous to domestic, reproductive activities that are connoted as female and thus excluded from the paradigm of work. In this case the activities of both "Housework and Art Work" are performative, affective and ephemeral - and are thus considered to be economically "unproductive". (Sigler, 2017).

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/mierle-laderman-ukeles

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Organising the original archival material in this way was also really useful and exciting, and I started playing with image and type.

It came about really from time pressure of me wanting to present the information quickly for the show, so in many ways it had the urgency of the original ethos of a zine.

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But I still find those pages some of the most successful visually, almost like illustrations in themselves.

I think what allowed me to put them together quite quickly was also the approach I had taken when I worked in letterpress - almost towards graphic design, and "painting with type", rather than adhering to strict rules.

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Studs Terkel Working Graphic Adaptation by Harvey Pekar

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Studs Terkel Working Graphic Adaptation by Harvey Pekar

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For her maintenance actions, she brings these "unproductive" activities into the space of art, gives them a physical presence, demonstrates the fundamental importance of this work ( as she says in her manifesto, "After the revolution, who's going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?", but also shows the physical strength needed to perform this labour, and at the same time highlights both the potentiality of these activities and the reasons for their marginalisation.

In other words, she works within her art for art, and in doing so reveals the negative aspects of a gendered world of work. Her position could not be more pertinent with "female activity", because of its reproductive character, indicating parallels with "immaterial work"."

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I also tried to keep in mind that the essential approach to editing these zines for me was the selection of the stories, in how I found them relevant to the ideas I had been reading about, and in what they made me realise about protest and resistance.

So in some ways, it is like these anthologies which pick out writings from multiple places on a single topic.

I decided to let those be the main the focus, as choosing and centring these stories is the interesting illustrative act in itself.

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These were the main questions I was left with after the show:

How do I show the different connections I am making through the different processes? If it was a book, how could I show the process?

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Etching as revealing

Engraving as solidifying history in time

Carving as working and decorating

Letterpress as labour

Screenprinting as revealing

Monotype as urgent