Outline for a Communist Infrastructure in the Arts: Interview with Aurélien Catin

Aurélien Catin is a French writer, researcher, and activist whose work follows in the footsteps of Réseau Salariat (Network for Wage Earners), which advocates for a “wage for living” (salaire à vie) as a political right irrespective of employment status. For Catin, this finds a privileged field of application in the art sector. His 2020 book Notre condition: Essai sur le salaire au travail artistique (Our condition: An essay on wages for artistic work) offers a radical critique of intellectual property and has become a reference for a growing number of art workers seeking to collectively analyze situations that are otherwise individualized. Instead, he proposes the establishment of a “wage for artistic work” that is fundamentally distinct from basic income experiments for artists, such as that recently trialed in Ireland, which functions as an exceptional allowance within the existing social system. As an alternative, Catin’s proposal relies on the communist infrastructure of social security to institute a political right to a wage.1

In 2024, the dissolution of the French National Assembly interrupted the discussion of a would-be historic bill for the “continuity of income for artists-authors” (continuité des revenus pour les artistes-auteurs), which had been the result of several years of union and activist mobilization in which Catin was involved. This was part of a broader movement: from the establishment of Art en Grève (Art on Strike) in 2019, which linked artists to broader social struggles, to reflections on a “social security system for culture” that would extend the model of socialized wages to the cultural field. I spoke with Catin about what he calls an “outline for a communist infrastructure”—in other words, a self-managed social security system for culture that could concretely displace both the managerial state and capitalist patrons.2 The discussion revisits the theoretical framework of this project and the concrete strategies adopted over the past five years to impose this framework and to link artists’ struggles to broader social movements. Finally, it addresses the premises of a “decolonial materialism,” which combines the struggles for a communist cultural infrastructure and for reparations for colonial extraction. The conversation has been edited for clarity. 

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Joana da Palma Monbaron (JPM): I would like to start with the question of copyright and the notion of the “artist-owner” (artiste-propriétaire). Your activist work historicizes the position of art within capitalist relations, in which it is granted a unique autonomy, unlike any other form of social activity. The celebrated autonomy of art and its apparent separation from labor are not natural; they are the product of the division of labor specific to capitalism, which established the “modern system of art” in the eighteenth century.3 This system produces the special category of “art” by expelling from it the realm of productive labor, creating the powerful illusion that art exists on a transcendent plane, beyond capitalist economic relations. Art is thus constructed as nonlabor, or as transcending labor.4 In your view, one of the cornerstones of this construction is copyright. Could you explain this idea?

Aurélien Catin (AC): First, intellectual property is a tool that does not fall under labor law. Its origins in France go back to the eighteenth century. It was constructed progressively, finding legislative expression in 1791 under the Constituent Assembly. During the Revolutionary period, a deputy named Isaac Le Chapelier championed the demands of lobbying groups of playwrights. Some of the playwrights were quite illustrious, like Beaumarchais. They challenged the power that monopolistic theaters exercised over the dissemination and exploitation of their plays. At the time, some theaters held royal privileges and were the only ones allowed to put on certain works. The playwrights demanded direct rights over the use of their plays. Le Chapelier presented the first law on copyright in 1791, arguing that “artists must reap some reward from their work.” And so, the premise of intellectual property was established. Simply put, the tool that was made available at the time was the generalization of property, a concept very much in vogue during the Revolutionary period. It was the idea that property should not be concentrated in the hands of castes, be it the nobility or the high clergy; everyone, as a free and equal individual, had a right to their share of property. It is this principle that was applied to works of art. Thus, the initial logic of copyright, even if it recognizes a worker’s investment, actually proceeds via something entirely different: the artist-author did something in the past, and this past act grants him (I use the masculine deliberately, as they were mostly men) access to a property right. The artwork thus becomes his patrimony, a form of private property. And if this property yields profit in a market (that of publishing for example), he will draw rent from it—what are commonly called “royalties” today—which may eventually compensate for the fact that the artist was not paid for his past labor. In exceptional cases, this new property right might make him rich. Intellectual property is therefore an extremely indirect tool; it may aim to recognize labor but in fact it recognizes authorship as the ownership of assets. In 1793, this right was extended to other types of creative work. Artists built their identity around this legal framework of literary and artistic property. Throughout the twentieth century artists fought against large proprietors and potential expropriators—adversaries akin to the artificial intelligence companies of today. A struggle is thus structured between, on the one hand, artists-authors and rights-holders or publishers, and on the other, AI. I would therefore say that, historically, the professional identity of artists-authors is quite particular, since it is not that of workers. Their mobilization strategies developed along different channels and with different concerns than those of workers.

Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, 1789. License: Public domain.

JPM: You also describe the relationship between the artist-owner and the distributor—whether it be a gallery, a corporate foundation, or a publishing house—in rather strong terms, calling it “toxic.” Could you elaborate on this?

AC: It is toxic precisely because it is asymmetrical—a fact that is hidden behind the fiction of property rights and commercial law. Unlike labor law, these legal forms do not recognize the existence of a relationship of subordination or economic dependence. On the contrary, they are based on the premise of equality between parties, when in reality this equality does not exist. Take, for example, a young author or novelist who is “lucky,” as they say, to be published by a major publishing house. This person finds themselves bound hand and foot, in a relationship of absolute dependence on their publisher. The publisher may well offer them a form of recognition, with the liberal fantasies of fame and fortune in the background. But the fact remains: the relationship is deeply skewed. There is a dominant party and a dominated party, but the legal framework refuses to recognize and clarify this.

JPM: Art’s historical separation from labor ushers in the figure of the autonomous artist—a figure coded as a heteronormative white man. This separation produces a “determined non-relation” to the feminized and racialized labor that supports the material conditions of this “genius.”5 How can a direct attack on the legal and ideological heart of this figure, notably through the critique and abolition of copyright, serve as a strategic lever? How can the dismantling of the artist-owner become a practical means of reintegrating artists into broader class struggles?

AC: Artists have historically been very distant from the concerns of workers, including those who are nevertheless close to them, such as museum educators, front-desk staff, and museum security guards. In the nineteenth century, the figure of the artist-as-genius was constructed in opposition to the very notion of work, which was rightly perceived at the time as a bourgeois value. Work was then understood in the sense we give it today in the expression “work ethic,” which is supposed to confer dignity on humans and discipline through thrift and foresight. This bourgeois conception of work served to frame a human nature considered naturally dissolute and lazy. The nineteenth-century artist was therefore constructed in reaction to this figure, in a movement of rebellion against the rise of this new morality. Thus, on the one hand, we have a very materialistic and concrete construction of the status of artists through property, and on the other, a more moral and cultural rebellion against the bourgeois values that were then in full swing. This process, in my opinion, was not seriously challenged, at least in Western Europe, until the late 1960s. The result is a social history of artists that is completely distinct, completely detached from that of labor movements. This situation has, in my opinion, two major negative effects. First, it works to prevent any joint mobilization between artists and other workers, because their respective objectives are not the same. When we fight to extend intellectual property rights to the internet, it has absolutely nothing to do with the demands of other workers, such as wage increases and the right to retire at sixty. Secondly, in the field of visual arts, the artist remains the central figure; while the vast majority of artists may be economically devalued, their symbolic value remains high. This symbolic valorization of the artist normalizes precarity across the entire art field: what artists accept, often out of necessity or because they are in denial about their status as workers, becomes the baseline for all cultural labor.

Jan Collaert, New Inventions of Modern Times [Nova Reperta], The Invention of Book Printing, plate 4, ca. 1600. Metropolitan Museum of Art. License: Public domain.

JPM: Do you have any concrete examples of an emerging transversal approach, where artists-authors establish themselves specifically as workers and engage in struggles on this common basis?

AC: Yes. In France this has accelerated particularly since the end of 2019, with the Art en Grève movement. We, as artists and authors, have become involved in what could be described as reformist struggles: for example, the establishment of regulated, or at least strongly recommended, fees for all types of activity. From the moment we start calling our activities “work”—for example, at exhibitions of our work or at a fairs, like comic book authors who do book signings—something fundamentally changes. It suddenly becomes much easier to talk to colleagues who are gallery educators and who are also fighting for better employment conditions. Suddenly, we are speaking the same language. Artists are no longer perceived as familiar but ultimately foreign figures; they become direct interlocutors. Gradually, a debate is emerging around income continuity, notably with proposed national legislation aimed at bringing artists and authors into the unemployment insurance system in France. What does this change in concrete terms? It links us, for example, to intermittent workers in the entertainment industry, who already benefit from this system. Thanks to this process, we are no longer simply making a declaration of solidarity in principle; we have concrete struggles and mobilizations to build, hand in hand with other intermittent workers. This is culminating today, for example, in the Cultures en Lutte (Cultures in Struggle) movement, which brings together artists, authors, intermittent workers in the entertainment industry, and to a lesser extent permanent employees at cultural institutions, as well as students and self-employed freelancers.

JPM: That brings me to the social security model and a social security system for culture. What strikes me in Bernard Friot and Nicolas Da Silva’s reinterpretation is that they separate social security from the state.6 Instead, they propose as a model “La Sociale,” an alternative mode of production that was historically self-managed by workers through autonomous funds from the state, between at least 1946 and 1967. Friot sees this as “existing communist seeds” (déjà-là communistes), a concrete prefiguration of an economy liberated from capital. However, in cultural struggles, we often see “public” and “state” used synonymously. Mobilizations are generally limited to protesting budget cuts or demanding more resources from the Ministry of Culture. Your proposal challenges this view. You describe social security not as “public spending” but as an “alternative mode of production.” Can you elaborate on this powerful idea and explain how social security, as “existing communist seeds,” allows us to fundamentally rethink cultural struggles beyond the simple opposition between a supposedly generous state and a predatory private market?

Bernard Friot holds a sign at a conference: “COMMUNISM = SELF-ORGANIZATION OF CONCRETE LABOR, SOVEREIGNTY OVER ABSTRACT LABOR, ECO-POLITICAL EXPROPRIATION of the BOURGEOISIE,” 2019.

AC: That’s not a done deal at all. I’ve been involved in Cultures en Lutte since the beginning of 2025, and, much to my dismay, I march alongside comrades who constantly chant “money for public services,” a slogan that seems to be one of the most central and unavoidable aspects of the movement. Speaking only for myself, marching through the Eighth Arrondissement of Paris shouting “money for public services” is simply humiliating. We are not here to ask the bourgeoisie to kindly give us a little money so that we can survive. But activist habits die hard. We must rediscover another militant tradition: that of collectively building the institutions that satisfy our needs. It is no longer a question of adopting a supplicatory stance towards a state apparatus, but of taking advantage of historical moments when this apparatus, or the legitimacy of the ruling class, is weak. I believe that we are entering such a moment. Lenin said, “For a revolution to take place, it is usually insufficient for ‘the lower classes not to want’ to live in the old way; it is also necessary that ‘the upper classes should be unable’ to live in the old way.”7 Because we have to be ready—it’s essential. We have to be organized and have a rough idea of what kind of institutions we want to put in place. This is exactly what happened after 1946 in France, with the creation of the general social security system. For some twenty years, it was managed mainly by workers’ representatives, not by the state. As Nicolas Da Silva shows in La Bataille de la Sécu (The battle for social security), it was indeed an institution that was built alongside the state. Of course, it was not totally independent of the state, as Da Silva points out: the state always sought to retain levers of control, even at the height of the labor movement. But despite everything, the social security system enjoyed a high degree of autonomy, first in its financing—it was not funded by taxes but by social contributions and was thus a form of socialized wage increase—and then in its management, with 75 percent of the seats in the governing body occupied by workers’ representatives. There you have it. This seems to me to be infinitely more fruitful, not only for breaking out of the neoliberal rut, but also for preventing the fascist project—the alternative we are being promised—from filling the void left by the collapse of the current ruling class.

JPM: I would now like to address a central point: the issue of wages as a political prerequisite. Your proposals are largely inspired by the idea of a “wage for living” (salaire à vie) developed by Bernard Friot, who sees it as a tool for political emancipation that goes far beyond simply “rewarding” work.8 If I understand the reasoning of Réseau Salariat correctly, wages, once detached from employment and subordination, become a universal political right. My question concerns the application of this idea in the artistic field. How is the counterintuitive idea of prefigurative wages, which you summarize with the slogan “first wages, then work,” the key to emancipating artistic practice?

AC: This is a point that I don’t think is made very clearly in my book Notre condition, because it wasn’t completely clear in my mind at the time. This can be seen in the subtitle, which is somewhat poorly chosen, referring to “a wage for artistic work,” whereas the proposal we are aiming for is precisely a wage that would not be the reward for a particular activity, but a political right granted independently of any activity. In Notre condition, I discuss two perspectives on the struggle, noting that I find the connection between them to be unclear. The first perspective concerns the struggle for wages for artistic work, which aims to bring all the peripheral activities involved in creating a finished artwork out of the shadows. The battle for wages for artistic work therefore demands remuneration for the right of public presentation, for residencies that do not necessarily aim to produce an artwork, and so on. This struggle is, I believe, necessary in order to form a class of art workers. I sometimes debate these issues with Friot, who is now quite critical of struggles for wages for work, whether it be domestic, student, or artistic work. According to him, the real emancipatory issue is precisely to detach wages from activity: not to be paid for what one does, but to be paid as a person, as a citizen—this is the second perspective on the struggle. Personally, I don’t see how we can mobilize people in different sectors around a concept as abstract as “wages for living.” The struggle is about organizing people, unionizing them, getting them involved in social movements and collectives. This requires identification with a unifying subject position—for example, student workers, or art workers, in all their diversity (artists, curators, educators, etc.). To bring this figure to the fore, we need struggles for wages for artistic work—wages as a right. But that doesn’t prevent some people from seeing, for example, the fight for unemployment insurance for artists and authors as a way of resolving the contradiction between the valorization of the artwork and the non-valorization of everything around it. They say: “This continuity of income is our salary for artistic work, which will pay for everything that distributors don’t pay us for.” Today, I no longer think this is the right way to present the issue, but I understand why some comrades see it that way. And if it’s a motivating factor, I don’t want to oppose it. For example, the CGT [the General Confederation of Labor, one of the major French confederations of trade unions], which is very focused on employment, defends the intermittent work regime but remains caught up in the ideology of the work ethic, according to which the only “real” wage comes from employment. For them, unemployment insurance, although essential, remains a last resort; the goal is for everyone to have a job. This view is still dominant, even on the left. So we end up with, on the one hand, artists and authors who see continuity of income as a recognition of all their invisible work, and on the other, organizations such as the CGT concerned that this framing might interfere with struggles against withheld wages. It is striking to see these militant traditions clash: people who are rarely paid directly, delighted to receive a socialized wage; and others, such as CGT members—who remain rooted in a union model of power relations—lobbying employers to secure a “real” wage.

JPM: You often refer to Silvia Federici and the Wages for Housework campaign, which used the demand for wages as a tool to politicize domestic tasks and challenge their naturalization under the guise of “love”—a dynamic you compare to the way the “love of art” serves to naturalize artistic work as nonwork.9 However, a careful reading of Marxist feminists in this tradition reveals that they regarded wages as less a solution than a means of exposing invisible labor and rejecting its exploitation. Their goal was not the extension of social wages but rather wages “against” domestic work (as the title of Federici’s manifesto goes). The idea was that by pushing the wage logic to its logical conclusion, exploitation would be made impossible, and therefore capitalist wage labor as we know it would be abolished. What is the fundamental distinction, from the perspective of Réseau Salariat, between the capitalist wage relationship (based on subordination and market validation) and the wage as a political right, which you defend?

Poster produced in 1974 by the Wages for Housework Committee, Brooklyn, NY. License: CC BY-SA 4.0.

AC: In the Wages for Housework campaign there was a very clear awareness, made explicit in their writings, that the wage was only a starting point. If it had been obtained, it would necessarily have been a socialized wage. Federici explains it very well: we mobilize the traditional register of wage struggles to go further and, ultimately, free ourselves from capitalist wages and the domestic tasks assigned to women. The idea was to challenge these tasks and challenge capitalist exploitation in the home and elsewhere simultaneously. It’s the same for us. The goal of the struggle for wages in artistic work is to have the freedom and collective means to fight against artistic work as it is organized today.

JPM: I would like to address an important theoretical tension by referring to the work of Marxist feminist Marina Vishmidt, who sadly passed away in 2024. She developed the notion of “infrastructural critique,” which goes beyond institutional critique to tackle the material conditions that reproduce systems of production and reproduction, with the aim of rendering art as it is practiced today impossible.10 In her book Speculation as a Mode of Production, she analyzed how financialization and art share a speculative logic, but she saw this as an opportunity to destabilize fixed categories. For her, terms such as “artist” and “worker” are entry points for mapping relations of exploitation, not identities to be fixed. This perspective questions the strategy of claiming the identity of “art worker,” a historical approach championed by movements such as the Art Workers’ Coalition in the United States and the Artists’ Union in the United Kingdom. My question is therefore twofold: By focusing on extending a system like social security to culture, don’t you risk—even if it is self-managed—creating a new universalizing institution which, in its scale and logic, could crush the specificities and autonomy of decolonial, queer, and feminist struggles? How does this universalism, based on wages as a political right, differ fundamentally from the abstract, colonial universalism promoted by the French Republic and the European civilizational project?

Art Workers Coalition demonstration in New York City, 1971. Photo: Mehdi Khonsari.

AC: Thank you for this question, which is both beautiful and difficult. The danger, when using terms such as “art worker” and “artist-producer,” is indeed getting trapped in what I mentioned earlier when discussing the CGT (which is far from the only left-wing organization with this mindset). The risk is confining ourselves to the figure of the artist-producer under the capitalist system, i.e., an artist who is “content” to seek greater direct remuneration from distributors. This can lead to the hyper-specialization of trade unions, which then become technical structures focused on social negotiation. This is a phenomenon that can be observed among wage earners in general, not just in the arts sector. It should also be noted that this tendency existed long before the emergence of the term “art worker.” Previously, struggles were very corporatist, crystallized around specific professions (translators, comic book authors, visual artists), and often depoliticized. The emergence of an “art worker” identity did not create this problem, but it risks reproducing it, which is a danger that must be recognized. What we are organizing towards today, particularly around income continuity and the identity of the “art worker,” is an overt struggle for equality; this is not about marginal improvements or “best practices,” but a paradigm shift. We cannot claim to support feminist or anti-racist struggles if we accept that economic inequality reigns supreme in the art sector. Nor can we say, “Yes to income continuity, but we don’t care about anti-racist struggles.”

JPM: In your conversation with Olivier Marboeuf, you outlined the foundations of what you call “decolonial materialism.”11 You openly acknowledged the blind spots concerning the link between social progress “here” and exploitation “there,” emphasizing that the French social security system, as a form of “existing communist seeds,” is inseparable from the imperial and colonial context of the postwar period. This analysis echoes that of anticolonial thinkers such as Kwame Nkrumah, who, as early as 1965, demonstrated how neocolonialism became the main instrument used by postwar Western imperialism to resolve social conflicts in the capitalist countries of the North, which created “welfare states” financed through neocolonial extractivism and exploitation.12 “Françafrique” is a structural example of this. The notion of the “white wage” also describes how white workers have historically benefited from a material and symbolic wage premium linked to imperialism.13 Using social security as a lever, how can we avoid reproducing, in the neocolonial era, this dynamic where social privilege in the Global North is built on the exploitation of the Global South? How can we conceive of a political right to wages and a social security system for culture that are not a new imperial privilege, but that, from their conception, incorporate principles of reparation and international solidarity?

AC: In terms of concrete internationalism, our struggles are still in their infancy. They mainly take place at the European level. With the La Buse collective we organized European meetings in 2023, which included representatives from Norway, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Belgium, and the Netherlands. The goal was to think about how to coordinate struggles beyond a national framework. Marboeuf provides valuable insights on these issues, particularly because he travels extensively and meets activists that I have not had the opportunity to meet. I will be traveling to Tunisia in spring 2026, and I look forward to hearing what comrades there have to say about the struggles of art workers. It is startling to note that the art sector is now entirely dominated by luxury brands—a direct legacy of French colonialism. These brands, in the hands of true imperialists, are among the world’s wealthiest and are engage in devastating transnational exploitation. These are the same people who promote fascist parties in Western countries. Seeing, at the same time, a proliferation of events on colonial heritage, criticism, and reparations, leads to a chilling question: What if all this is just a presentable showcase that allows the backroom operators to continue their appalling work undisturbed? One thing is certain: the heirs of the colonists—the transnational capitalists—are in our midst. You don’t have to look far to find them: Bernard Arnault, François Pinault, the Pernod Ricard family. They are here in the art world. It therefore seems to me that it would be effective to attack their power, because that is what our struggles are all about. Many of us are aware that the goal is not to obtain “money for public services,” or a little more money for artists, but to build organizations that recognize that a confrontation is already underway and that it will have to be resolved one way or another. 

JPM: For my last question, I would like to draw a parallel between your organizing work and a strategic shift in the English-speaking art world, which has seen an “infrastructural turn” in art struggles.14 There, institutional critique has given way to movements such as the Gulf Labor Campaign and Global Ultra Luxury Faction (GULF), Strike MoMA, and Decolonize This Place, which directly target the governance, funding, and complicity of institutions with colonialism, imperialism, incarceration, policing, and predatory finance. In my view, these struggles exemplify “decolonial materialism” in action, which ties in with the foundations you outlined with Marboeuf. These movements emerge when artists and cultural workers “betray” the institutions that employ them, allying themselves with broader social movements. Can your social security system for culture be a lever to promote this type of decolonial alliance in France, by freeing up the necessary capacity for action and “betrayal”? Do you see the current mobilizations in support of Palestine as a catalyst or accelerator for this articulation between the class struggle in art and decolonial struggles?

AC: Yes, it is a catalyst, and not only in the cultural field. It raises awareness and sparks a fighting spirit that extends far beyond that. The situation in Palestine—this attempt to eradicate an entire group of people—is the most appalling, widely publicized, and intolerable example we have before our eyes. Everything is happening in broad daylight. You don’t have to be a revolutionary to be horrified; a simple conscience is enough. The challenge is not only to recognize the intolerable nature of the genocide, but to understand that the political logic that leads to it is present—either in embryonic form or explicitly—in many other colonial and capitalist enterprises. We cannot accept that either. Bernard Arnault is a terrible person; we cannot tell ourselves that LVMH is no big deal. It is a very big deal. The goal, then, of a social security system for culture is to remove both the power of the state—notably the senior civil service—and the capitalists from the management of our means of production, including artistic and cultural production. There are ways to achieve this. The continuity of income for artists and authors is one, but there are undoubtedly others. The goal is to socialize the entire cultural sector. This is a goal that goes far beyond social and political issues in the national sense; it is a goal of radical equality. Radical equality does not mean saying, “We, the French, will be equal among ourselves, but the extermination of a distant people is not our problem.” That is impossible. Equality implies equality between human beings, without any intermediate levels. Otherwise, it’s like poor working conditions or self-employed freelancers: if we accept inequality in a single area, on the pretext that it is marginal or complicated, it ends up dragging everyone down. Either you’re on one side or the other. There is no comfortable gray area, no middle ground. Either we fight for emancipation or we don’t.