ILPC 2026

The paper uses the case of disenfranchised art workers in socialist Yugoslavia during the 1980s as a case study to demonstrate how the apparent promotion of art workers into socialist cultural entrepreneurs is an exemplary form of the neoliberal transformation of the socialist welfare-state regime. In light of political transformations of late Yugoslav socialism and the emergence of neoliberal rationality, the contribution reconsiders alternative art workers’ political agenda of the 1980s. During the 1980s, art workers of the alternative art scene in Yugoslavia aimed to redefine and transform socialist production model by critiquing socialist ideology and institutions without taking issue with class differences in the arts. The paper demonstrates how the 1980s alternative art scene did not consider transformations of working relations of the freelance art workers who were at that time redefined by cultural policy as socialist cultural entrepreneurs. By examining government’s attitudes of and policies for artistic labor the paper argues that the spontaneous absorption of neoliberalism (the realization of personal freedom) and exclusive focus on the critique of repressive state apparatuses during the late Yugoslav socialist period undermined the mandate of the welfare state’s institutions, which secured collective social reproduction and security. After the destruction of Yugoslavia in early 1990s, the protagonists of the alternative art scene became members of the postsocialist precariat of self-employed cultural entrepreneurs who are divorced from social security and economic stability. The paper expounds not only how the neoliberal rationality altered the identity of the art worker into a self-propelled enterprise, but also how the neoliberal profession of freedom to self-expression coincided with the notion that art is a labor of love.