Case studies of Slovenian Media Industry, Culture Industry and the Academia
Channel: Inštitut za delavske študije
Date: 2014-05-09

Katja Praznik: Welfare or Precarity? The History of Cultural Legislation for Artistic Labor and the Escalation of Class Differences in the Cultural System: The Slovenian Case

Primož Krašovec: Room for Class in the Contemporary Slovenian Academic Field



A brief overview of intensive European peripheral class struggles gives us the following polarity: on one side, we have the comprador bourgeoisie joined by a surge of extreme right movements, while on the other, we are faced with a fragmented workforce which is mostly incapable of unified political action despite an ostensibly univocal opposition against neoliberal policies. We can thus identify a number of social groups which are equally subordinated to the agents of capital, but all too often act independently of one another and do not recognise their common interest. It is a fact that the basic conflict of contemporary societies, the one between labour and capital, cannot be observed in its pure form anymore, and even less so can it be used as a basis for political action. Hence, more attention should be payed to the conflicts and oppositions that take place within both the exploiting and the exploited social groupings themselves. That is to say, we ought to analyse the horizontal dimension of class struggle and conduct class analyses of specific fields. The objective of this panel will thus be to analyse the workforce fragmentation and the class character of the workforce in specific sectors of the Slovenian peripheral economy. In this panel, we will provide specific case studies of the class relations in the Slovenian culture industry, media industry and the academia.

We will touch upon three major points in the discussion. First, we will be interested in the invasion of the market logic into each sector. On the example of media industry, we will analyse the precarisation of workers, the reduction of their social rights and the decline of their mobilisation power and political relevancy of their work. Second, we will analyse the specific legislation which contributed to the formation of class differences in the field of culture and institutionalised the precarious working conditions. Third, since the class position of university students and professors in Slovenia does not depend on some abstract predetermined place in a capitalist society, but rather on the state of the class struggle itself, we will scrutinise the relevance of class analysis that sees class as a thing or as a pseudo-natural property of certain social groups. Building on the dichotomy between intellectual and manual labour, we will then proceed to analyse the relations of dominance in Slovenian academia, while tackling the seemingly subversive and naïve defences of the abstract pole of this antagonism.