Mike Watson Why the artworld is the new Communist International

During his 1996 party conference speech, Tony Blair famously said, Ask me my three main priorities for government and I tell you: education, education and education. In part for the audacity of such a sentence it sets out to identify three priorities for government and settles for one and in part for the shift in focus that it at least ostensibly embodied, this line has entered the consciousness so much as to be instantly recognisable 17 years later. On reection, the sincerity of Blairs sentiments is questionable. The former prime minister did preside over the introduction of tuition fees after a commitment to keep to Conservative party spending plans in the rst term of o ce, and then a further rise in fees. Indeed it was Labour that commissioned the education review that led to the recent third rise in fees in the , to between 6,000 and 9,000 per year. The corporatisation of higher education is a trajectory that crosses over party boundaries and has gained so much momentum as to be beyond challenge through conventional political channels. It is arguably for this reason that education has increasingly taken the centre ground in political and social discourse in the period since Blair made his famous speech. Where education was once seen as a soft policy area secondary in mainstream politics to economics, scal policy, foreign policy and law and punishment, it is now seen as fundamental to political discourse both at a mainstream and alternative level. This shift in focus is arguably motivated by two principal factors. Firstly, the nal collapse of Soviet Communism during the late 1980s and early 1990s, followed by a massive collapse in the worldwide economy that started in 2007, and the inability of the political left to mobilise with convincing alternatives to capitalism in the intervening 17 years, has left us in need of new modes of thinking and new strategies for which our current knowledge base is clearly inadequate. Secondly, while the academic left fails to provide convincing alternative social models, funding has been stripped in the and this is increasingly reected throughout Europe from the subject areas that might most reasonably be expected to deliver those alternatives. We have a situation in which people need to get into debt to study a narrowing range of subjects that are increasingly reective of the needs of industry. Taken to its ultimate conclusion, such a system will soon be lending money to as many people as possible to school them in the principles of the nancial model which they will pay into when they graduate and begin to work in the interests of that same model. With the nation state in the being hollowed out, emptied of its social responsibility and reduced to the position of a defender
Cover of issue 6 of the English-language version of The Communist International, October 1919

of the rights of the powerful without losing any of its power to enforce law and intimidate, it must fall to others to pose a viable alternative to the current system. In light of the diminishment of the states role, a nonstatist option must be prepared by the political left, regardless of whether individuals personally veer towards a statist vision of politics. This is simply because, following the current trajectory, we will soon have a situation in which the state resembles little else than a malevolent giant guarding the palace against the hordes. Without an alternative to the values that it enforces through a mixture of instruction and coercion, the sum of human knowledge will become reducible to what is useful to the nancial machine the aforementioned palace. What relevance does this have to art? Well, as Mark Fisher put it, talking at a conference entitled Joan of Art: Towards a Free Education, organised by myself and held at , Rome, in April of this year, the artworld in a sense replaces the Communist International as a worldwide network and refuge for alternative thought. Joan of Art: In light of a convincing Towards a Free alternative existing in reality, Education is it is left to the artworld to in residence feign one: to grow an alternawith Gervasuti tive within the empty husk Foundation, left over from the dismantling Venice, for of the state.

the duration of the Biennale

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