Dave Beech's 'Art and Postcapitalism' Examines Aesthetic Labor and Automation

Dave Beech's book 'Art and Postcapitalism' explores art's relationship to work through contemporary postcapitalist thought, arguing that art lacks a clear understanding of superseding capitalism despite being replete with critical practices. Published by Pluto Press in December 2019, the book retraces leftwing debates about work under capitalism alongside art's historical questioning of artistic labor, from the Enlightenment's rejection of craft to Duchamp's cultivated idleness. Beech contends that postcapitalism requires eliminating the capital-labor social relation rather than specific work types, challenging accelerationist thinkers like Nick Srnicek, Alex Williams, and Nick Land who focus on automation. He criticizes demands for artist wages in neoliberal cultural industries, noting such wages represent wealth justified by art's status rather than true labor value. The book examines contradictions in art's labor site between free creativity and commercial necessity, while avoiding Marx's vision of self-determination from 'The German Ideology' (1932). Beech's argument struggles with what people historically invested in art as a space for freedom and self-directed action, missing art's role as partial self-determination in an unfree world. The true test of postcapitalism, he suggests, is democratizing control over material production for collective and individual interests—neither work nor idleness but creative self-determination as a societal Gesamtkunstwerk.