Orientation

Summing up Part I
My purpose in this two-part article is to show how creativity can be understood not only at the micro level of the individual artist, but also at the macro level of world history. I began in Part I by describing the ways in which the individual artist is different from the other workers. But then I show how romantic theories of art get in the way of seeing creativity as also a collective process rooted in history. I discuss the creative process of the artist, but then close by following Gertrude Stein and Henry Miller in demanding that an artist’s whole life should be a work of art.

What’s ahead?
We are now ready to discuss creativity at the macro level of workers. Like sleeping giants for the last 5,000 years workers have been unconsciously shaping and reshaping society. First, I talk about how all the arts were once integrated into magical activity in egalitarian hunting and gathering and horticultural societies.But then with the rise of caste and class societies, collective creativity in labor became unconscious and alienated. The magical rituals of egalitarian societies that united all the arts in the service of magic is undermined. What happens is:

But then I describe how even within capitalist societies there are instances during natural disasters, social movements and ultimately revolutionary situations where workers express their collective creativity consciously in the construction of workers councils. Ultimately, in communist society all the arts will be joined again in communist magical activity which will include the merger of the sciences and the arts in the service of communist planning, the development of high technology which allows us to do more and more with less and less.  Unlike in tribal societies where creativity was mostly collective, in communist societies creativity will be conscious at both the individual and group level.

Creativity as Collective Activity
Labor as human species activity
In order to earn a living in our environment and solve problems the human species has to work. Work involves collective-creative cooperation in the process of deciding on a means of subsistence, making and using tools, harnessing energy, dividing up the work and sharing the resources if successful. Labor is the totality of collective human energy, both physical and mental, which is expended on reproducing society, hence reproducing human beings. It is creativity beyond how an individual lives their life. The problem is that this is unconscious collective-creativity.

Co-creation of the socio-sphere
Labor creates and sustains human society. Over tens of thousands of years the activity of working and using up resources over generations has introduced creative changes onto the surface and depths of Earth. This socio-sphere is like a film, a social membrane which has also developed over generations. The socio-sphere overlays and interacts with the biosphere. The earth is our collective canvas that we have been painting for the last 100,000 years. We are thus self-transforming beings. By the practical transformation of the world through working we find ourselves changed, we find ourselves in a new world, a world of our own making, a world which invites us to satisfy new needs, desires and powers.
Let me briefly review:

• this socio-sphere is the collective canvas of humanity, but so far we have been painting behind our own backs, as if sleepwalking.

From society to history

Human social institutions are shaped and in turn shape the biosphere, but as society changes over time, it can no longer simply be understood as an extension of biological evolution. The “aging” process of society becomes human history which developed its own processes and laws that are not reducible to the biosphere. History-shaping includes periods when particular means of subsistence were dominant—hunting-gathering, horticulture, agriculture, industry. These ways of life come into being as creative strategies to ward off population pressure and a resource depletion crisis.

Human practice
History is the story, the ongoing saga, the odyssey of the marriage of society’s actions and consequences upon the rest of nature over time. This is called human practice, which is partly conscious and partly unconscious, and contains these ingredients:

• collective endeavors which are unconscious but which have consequences which accumulate behind our backs. For example the long-term effects of shabby health-care, education and housing on the productivity of a society.

The historical unconscious
It is this last dynamic that we can speak of as the historical unconscious. This is a result of a series of collective actions which slip beyond our attention span and over which we lose control. The collective sleep walk is our everyday work-life. We become unaware of the effect of our collective actions or inactions upon the production of history. We are like painters who are too close to the canvas to see what we are doing.

There are social institutions which produce a kind of collective defense mechanisms – ideologies. These go with the suppression of this historical unconscious. This is where history is presented as something other than the collective creative activity of the average individual working and breeding. Either taken together or taken separately, here are some examples:

• history is exclusively about the past.

In the first case, behind the institutions and the upper class and upper-middle class elites who embody these institutions are the countless laboring actions which provide the food and other necessities that provide those classes with what they need to govern. Without the work of the lower classes, these institutions would cease to function. The second proposition assumes that only vivid and unusual events created by extraordinary men make up history. Everyday events and the average person who makes them stand outside of history. The third proposition ignores that history is always being made in the past, present and future. It ignores the possibility that groups can intervene in history by using what is known about the past to change the future. In fact, we cannot shape history. We either shape it consciously or it is shaped unconsciously.

Creativity as matters of scale
Summing up: creativity can be expressed as matters of scale as:

• the collective creativity of history shaping of the entire human species.

The Alienation of Collective Creative Activity in Class Societies

So how did it come to be that the collective creativity of humanity, labor in shaping history and the lives of individuals were not connected to creativity and the only activity associated with creativity was the arts?

Egalitarian hunting and gathering societies and participatory magic
In egalitarian hunting-gathering and in simple horticultural societies, collective-creativity – labor – was collective and conscious. People decided together what the means of subsistence was, what the division of labor would be, how long they would work, what tools they would fashion and how the fruits of their labor would be distributed.

At the same time, before going out to hunt, gather plants or cultivate them preparation was needed. Magical rituals were undertaken to increase the chances of success. Most, if not all the activities which we now associate with art including  mask-making, drawing, music, dance and theatre were once magical rituals. In the beginning both arts and crafts were in the service of magic, and magic was in the service of transforming the world.

Chiefdoms and pristine states
As hunting-gathering societies and simple horticultural societies became more complex commodity production emerged. Alongside arts and crafts in the service of ritual, we now have arts and crafts as secular activities in the service of commodity production. With the emergence of state civilizations 5,000 years ago, there is a split between conscious and unconscious creativity. Conscious creativity is channeled into three social arenas.

• artistically in that a class of artists and artisans emerge who produce profane objects not only for public sale, but objects which for ideological support, as for example, monumental architecture for the ruling class. A second group of objects is in the service of conspicuous consumption by the ruling class.

Fall of magic and the rise of religion
With the fall of magic and the rise of monotheism, art ceases to be a collective-creative activity and becomes the act of isolated and rarefied individuals who prostitute themselves to religious authorities. Art becomes a wandering ghost, with a methodology but without an ontology.

Capitalist Societies
At the same time, the work of the lower classes becomes alienated, more or less mechanized and unconscious. In other words, the work itself contributes to the creative reproduction of society. But because the lower classes do not participate in the design and implementation of social policy, because they do not reap the full fruits of their labor (most of it is given over to the ruling class and its minions) their part of the creative contribution to society appears alien. The lower classes become unconscious of the full weight of what they produce. They merely perceive their work as something that reproduces their own life and the life of their family, rather than for the whole of society.

Making History Collectively Consciously
There is a kind of collective creativity which surfaces periodically in our society and sometimes sustains itself alongside the social unconscious. These activities are harbingers of what collective creative activity might look like in a post class society. The first kind is the spontaneous response of groups of people to natural disasters such as floods, earthquakes and swarming lizards. These collective actions are more or less reactive to circumstances and they dissipate when the catastrophic events have subsided. We will call this “historically conscious” collective creativity. There is another kind of collective-creative activity which is ongoing and designed to change history. This is the collective-creativity of social movements. Marx called this practical critical activity. I will also call this “historically self-conscious creativity”.

People in natural disasters
The following is a description of a personal experience I had with others during a snowstorm. The setting is New York City in the early 1960’s. I am 15 years old. It is the dead of winterin January and about 3:30 in the afternoon. It has been snowing or days. Upon leaving high school I see that the snow drifts have smothered all traffic. Things seem eerily still. In the distance I see something moving. Someone is coming towards me, waving for me to meet him. My fleeting reservation fizzles in the face of the starkness of these extraordinary circumstances. He asks me to help him push his car to the side of the road. As we begin, I notice that we have been joined by two or three others who spontaneously pitch in. When the car is safely pushed to the side of the road, we proceed to help the latest arrivals dig their cars out. More people come along. They suggest we all shovel out the entire street, since then we will all have access to the main road. Since I don’t have a car, this is not relevant to me. Still, I am caught up in the moment and what under normal circumstances I wouldn’t do in the name of individual self-interest, I find myself doing anyway. We organized ourselves into little groups and worked into the night

What is happening here? I am hustling about, shoveling here, pushing there. I have long since forgotten about eating. I feel as if I’m regressing in time, as if I were 8 or 9 years old. My adolescent posturing has wilted and, in its place, seeps an adventurous joy of plotting and scheming with playmates long ago. But this time, instead of “let’s pretend” fantasies, the snow and the storm invite us to actually change reality.

As this street-clearing project takes shape, we relax a little. Strangers are laughing and joking. Grateful neighbors are out in the street. Some offer hot chocolate and a hardy fire to war up by. Someone throws a snowball at me from across the street. A man in a three-piece suit ducks behind a car to avoid retaliation. How bizarre! But then this whole episode suggests something forbidden, not of this world. Time seems to have stopped. Since no traffic is moving, the street is ours to do anything we want with the piled-up snow, from sleigh-riding to castle-building to snowball fights. Kids come out of the houses and begin sleigh riding. Some are carrying ice skates on their way to a frozen pond three blocks away.

Both in process and result, we have created the seeds of a new social life. The labor of clearing the street, digging out cars, chopping ice was a spontaneously organized collective activity, achieved without coercions from authorities nor with the carrot of wage labor as a consolation. But some nameless abdication, we have inherited some hidden recess in the Himalayas.

Sometime around 7:00 pm the snow has stopped. The snow plows are out and traffic has begun to move. People acknowledge their exhaustion and car pool for rides home. But I don’t want this to end! I no longer have a material foundation to house the exuberance I felt that has begun to rapidly dissipate. I felt joy with those people in the wild snow, but the snow has been tamed. What do I do with the joy? Under what social conditions could I feel this way again? Will I ever feel this way again? Rarely have I despised the prospect of “normal life” as much as I did then. It is as if the freshly plowed street was like the sun beating on my face, early in the morning, awakening me from an enchanting dream.

On that twilight winter’s day, social life itself seemed as pliable, as impressionable as a slab of clay or a blank canvas. In our collective actions – shoveling snow, pushing cars, chopping ice – we experienced a creative process similar to what the individual artist lives through from the beginning to the end of a single painting – inspiration, a flurry of activity and finally a new artifact or situation. Our snow shovels were our paints and brushes, and the street, that microscopic chunk of social terrain, was our canvas. Society turned out not to be an impenetrable aggregate of frozen institutions, but a vast network of activities whose future is open-ended.

Under normal circumstances it is hard not to think of social institutions as solids rather than liquids, as nouns rather than verbs, as things rather than processes. Just as a fan revolving at maximum speed does not reveal how the individual rudders are connected or even visible, so too, the macroscopic “social fan” of life under normal times whirls too quickly and over too vast a terrain (an entire country) to display its structural components, the collective creativity of people working to produce the life of social institutions. It is as if the snow storm clogged a small corner of the rudder long enough for its constituent elements to become detectable.

Social movements
The second kind of collective creative activity is more assertive. Instead of reacting to extraordinary circumstances, social movements are on-going rather than sporadic and they are, at least in some cases, dedicated to creating extraordinary social conditions. These movements aspire to actively change the course of history.

Let’s take a very small, simple example. Let’s say a group of neighbors call a meeting to combat the rise of drugs and prostitution in their neighborhood. In order to address the problem, these people must meet more than once if to have a chance of being successful. Phone calls need to be made, petitions drawn up, house to house calls made, flyers designed, meetings with local neighborhood mediators scheduled and a system of vigilance set up. This endeavor involves collective creative activity. Like all creative actions there comes a point where the work they have done is tested by the larger community response including, the surrounding neighborhoods, the dealers, the prostitutes, their Johns and the police.

The reactions of these groups affect the future plans that these neighbors made. Resistance calls for one set of plans while a positive response calls for another. Other neighbors might be indifferent, the police ignore the problem, but a local socialist politician is supportive and willing to work with them. Just as an artist will alter the subject matter of his work, together with the color scheme or medium in response from the public, so too this community of neighbors will develop new plans and theories based on their practice. Social movements can be reformist (as above) or they can be revolutionary. In some cases, social movements seize power and transform the economic and political relations. This is the highest form of historically self-conscious collective-creative activity.

Workers’ councils
Especially in the last 150 years, there erupted a series of attempts to take over social life without capitalists, or without the state. These “workers’ councils” arose out of irreversibly critical situations in the existing order. In some situations, they emerged alongside the state, creating a “dual government”. When the state fell, some workers’ councils spread over a wider terrain. During the Spanish revolution they reached as much as 1/3 of the country. In some cases, they not only governed without the state but in places they abolished the local currency and began their own system of exchange. These experiments took place during revolutionary processes when the official authorities lost power but before their power was regained. The organization of this world and the experiences that participants experienced must have been beyond their wildest dreams. These movements lasted as briefly as 3 days (the Seattle General Strike) or as long as 3 years (the Spanish revolution).

Like most social movements, these councils began by simply reacting to the abuses of the existing order. Workers wanted higher wages, better working conditions, most justice. But once the authorities lost power, these workers found themselves doing far more than they bargained for. Though these workers’ councils were inventive and festive, like all creative activity it was productive and it contained its own collective discipline. In Spain, following the failure of Franco’s coup in 1936, at least one third of the country was self-managed with better productive records than the overthrown government. This was done in the middle of a civil war!

The internal organization of the councils expressed the creativity it was demonstrating in the world. They were organized in an anti-hierarchical and anti-bureaucratic manner. The workshop of the councils, the foundation from which all decisions were made, was the general assembly. Whatever resolutions resulted were carried out by mandated delegates who had no independent power of their own (unlike representatives who, once elected have power to make their own decisions). They merely carried out decisions already made in the assembly. Secondly, these delegates were often rotated so that no one got too comfortable being a permanent authority. Lastly, the delegates were immediately revocable. This means that any abuses of power were grounds for immediate termination. There were little state bureaucratic procedures or the political red tape where population had to wait until the next election.

In both their amazing coherence of their social management capacities and the profound change in the quality of their interactions, these experiments were truly “out of this world”. In fact, the depiction of what happened to the participants runs into the same problems that any mystic or artist or anyone who has had a peak experience has when they try to describe what happened to them. How do you describe an experience which seems almost that it is on another plane of reality than the language of the existing order.

Where did they occur? Workers’ councils have dotted the globe in at least the following countries:

• The Paris Commune of 1871
• The St. Petersburg Soviet of 1905
• The Russian Revolution of 1917
• Short-lived experiments in Poland, Italy, Germany and Bulgaria between 1917-1920
• The Seattle General Strike of 1919
• The Spanish Revolution of 1936 (for most of the first year and then on and off until 1939)
• The Hungarian Revolution of 1956
• The French General Strike of 1968
• The Chilean Revolution 1970-1973

Workers’ councils today exist in hundreds of factories in Argentina and are present in an embryonic form in workers’ cooperatives around the world. Let us look at how the metamorphosis begins.

The Paris Commune: from reacting to collective creativity
In order to envision how these workers councils begin, we will combine the descriptions from the Paris Commune of 1871 with the French General Strike of 1968. The Paris Commune emerged at the tail end of the Franco-Prussian war. It began as a patriotic movement at odds with its government which it felt was conducting the war in a half-hearted manner. In 1870 while the army was called to the front, the National Guard was called on to defend the fortifications in Paris.

“The war fever that now gripped the city generated a patriotic demand that all citizens be armed. Within a few weeks, there were over 130 new battalions, making a total of some 300,000 Parisians in the National Guard. ‘No one could call himself a citizen’ it was being said “unless he had a rifle’. The cry was for more arms, and the authorities were forced to distribute hundreds of thousands of weapons to those flocking to join the newly formed battalions. (Steward Edwards The Communards of Paris, 1871. 21)”

Here we have an armed, but so far merely patriotic population. The change from this to a social revolution began on March 18, 1871:

“Thiers [then the head of the government] sees the armed workers of Paris as his main obstacle to the conclusion of a peace treaty with Bismarck {head of Prussia]. He decides to send ‘loyal battalions to remove the cannons… the operation starts successfully in the early hours of the morning…but the operation has been bureaucratically and inefficiently planned. The necessary gun carriages don’t arrive to remove the captured guns. The crowd begins to grow. Women, children, old people mingle with the troops…Some …start talking to the guard. When General Lecomte, losing his head, orders his troops to fire, it is already too late. The soldiers refuse to fire, turn their rifle butts up…soldiers and civilians have fraternized…the soldiers who have deserted their regiments shouted to them to surrender, but they stayed in the saddle, and continued to spur their horses on furiously…’cut the traces’…The crowd let out a great cheer…the women closest to the cannons, to which they had been clinging to for half an hour took the knives that the men passed down to them from hand to hand…the maneuver was carried out amid joyful laughter and cheering. The artillerymen were carried off by their mounts and found themselves cut off from the guns and surrounded by groups of people inviting them to fraternize. They were offered flasks of wine and meat rolls… They were soon won over to the side of the rebels. The cannon had been retaken. . (Steward Edwards The Communards of Paris, 1871. 63)

National Guard barricade during the Paris Commune, May 1871

Adolphe Thiers, head of the Counter-Revolution

Two points are worth mentioning. First, revolutions begin when situations get desperate enough to where formerly indifferent or hostile groups recognize they have more in common with other groups than they had first suspected. In this case the soldiers, who were supposed to be loyal to their commanding officers. But in reality, most soldiers are working class. They have more in common with the people in the streets than with their officers. When a critical mass of soldiers refuses to follow orders, it undermines and limits what loyal soldiers can do. From the disarming of these solders the next logical step is the building of the barricades. For a portrayal of this we turn to the French general strike of 1968.

Thiers' suppression of the Commune. A Paris street, May 1871.

“Here with the help of cars, billboards, railings, torn off branches, trees, as well as cobblestones, the first serious barricades went up…(Singer, Daniel Prelude to Revolution, 127)  anything could serve the purpose… a neighboring building site was a real treasure. The most precious find there was an air hammer, which, once mastered made it possible to open up the streets wholesale. The paving stones then went from hand to hand…people were coming down with sandwiches, drinks, chocolate.” (139-140)

Whereas yesterday social life appeared as this alienated series of exchanges out of the control of most everyone, for days, weeks, months and even years in some places, these alienated institutions revealed their true nature as malleable institutions dependent on the continued alienated activity of workers for their very life. When social life stops their true origin in labor reveals itself. When social life resumes without these institutions people begin to grasp how superfluous capitalists and the state really are to social production and reproduction.

Seattle, 1919
The Seattle strike of 1919 was different than other strikes. The ship workers did not simply shut everything down and limit themselves to a set of demands. They used the strike as a stepping stone for starting things up under their own management. Additionally, the strikers organized themselves to provide essential services in areas not under the direct control of the strikers, such as taking care of hospital laundry, getting milk to babies, and collecting wet garbage. They didn’t stop at controlling their own factories or buildings. They related to the entire city as if it was theirs. Just as Daniel Cohn-Bendit argued, in expanding the terrain of their management they gradually learned how the city is run:

“The strikers were at once brought face to face, with the way in which the whole community, including their own families, is intrinsically tied together… if life was not to be made unbearable for the strikers themselves. (Root and Branch: The Rise of the Workers Movements, 280)

Here are some of the achievements of the milk wagon drivers who

“…established through their own organization thirty-five neighborhood milk stations all over the city…The stations were announced as open from nine to two., but the milk was always gone before noon. The amount handled increased as the days went on until about 3,000 gallons were handled in various stations. The first day the supply ran noticeably short…but by the third day…the irregularities were ironed out and the supply was more adjusted to the need. (Root and Branch: The Rise of the Workers Movements, 254-255)”

The most intense and complex re-organization fell to the provision trades, charged with feeding the strikers:

“Some 21 eating places were opened in various parts of the city. The food was cooked in large kitchens…and then transported to various halls where it was served cafeteria style …(R and B, 256-257)…Locations had to be found, numbers of diners estimated, food purchased, equipment borrowed or bought, transportation problems solved. (Robert Friedheim The Seattle General Strike, 127).

The resolution of these problems depended upon an improvised community of people who probably barely knew each other, without the benefit of any pre-existing organization and in open hostility to all established authority. There were delays in the opening day of this “feeding depot” for many reasons:

“…there was no corps of dishwashers to keep up the meager supply of dishes until the waitresses union, assisted by patrons, leaped into the breach…By the second day however, the difficulties were much reduced and meals began to appear with regularity. (R and B 256-257)…By the last day of the strike, 30,000 meals a day were served without a hitch. (Robert Friedheim The Seattle General Strike, 128).

In summary,

Commonalities between natural disasters, social movements, workers’ councils and artistry
Both kinds of history shaping – reactions to natural disasters and consciously planned as in social movements – require the spirit of the arts and those who make them. Art, like all forms of creativity has its feet in both worlds. On one hand, it is an expression of what is possible. On the other hand it reproduces and justifies the old world. But the highest form of art does not represent reality, or even make pictures of the world to come. Artists must supersede art itself and use artistic talents in the planning, together with others, the world to be built. Henry Miller sensed something like this when he wrote:

“One has to pass beyond the sphere and influence of art. Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant, it merely points the way…All art will one day disappear…and life itself will… definitely and for all time usurp the field… (The Creative Process, Ghiselin, 162)”

History of Conscious and Unconscious Creativity
I would like to close by summarizing the place of creativity in the human species, both at the individual and collective levels, at the micro world of individual development and the macro world of history.

Bio-social, historical foundations
First, creativity in general was a survival strategy that human beings use in competition with other species for resources. Second, we built an envelope around the earth, a “socio-sphere” first locally then regionally, then nationally and finally globally. Third, there is the building up of a thickening crush of human history as human societies change over time.

Creative and conscious creativity in egalitarian societies
There is conscious collective creativity involved in the production, circulation, distribution and consumption of goods. There is also conscious collective creativity involved in magical rituals for hunting and planting societies and these magical activities include all the arts, including mask-making, drawing, sculpture, music, singing and dancing.

Unconscious creativity in caste and class societies
This appears in the alienated labor of peasants and workers in Bronze Age, Iron Age civilizations as well as feudal societies and industrial capitalist and socialist societies.

Conscious creativity in caste and class societies
This exists In the economic and political design and implementation of social policies by elites—priests, priestesses, aristocrats and merchants. Secondly, in the religious construction of myths and rituals by priestly castes. Third, in the religious projection of creativity out of humanity in the forms of the activity and characteristics of gods and goddesses in the work of priest and priestesses. Further, there is a sacred and secular realm in individual creativity of men and women in the arts and crafts which serves the ruling classes as conspicuous consumption. Lastly, as we have seen, there is conscious creativity in the work of those involved in survival during natural disasters and in social movements.

Conscious creativity in communist societies
The first stop is what people do in revolutionary situations. The description of the activities in workers’ councils is an example. From there, maximum collective creative activity lies in the political and economic decision about the production and circulation of goods and services by a dialectical exchange between the local and regional workers councils on the one hand and the centralized socialist state on the other. This happens first locally regionally and internationally. The same process occurs when the human species sets up civilizations in outer space. In addition, there are collectivist myths and rituals for socialists which draws from the rich traditions of Neopaganism. In the process women and men re-own their alienated labor and become goddesses and gods themselves. On the individual level there are not visionary arts in the service of socialism

Conclusion: Healing the Split Between Conscious and Unconscious Collective Creative Activity
As I’ve shown in the last section, collective responses to natural disasters and the building of social movements are examples of attempts to make collective creativity conscious. In the case of social movements, through what Marx called “practical-critical activity”. In the case of workers’ councils, examples include conscious creativity in the service of building dual power proto-communist organizations.

Conscious collective creative activity under communism
Collective creativity would express itself in the design and implementation of political and economic organization and no longer be determined by aristocrats, capitalists or state bureaucrats. Secondly, whatever myths and rituals remained in society would be co-created by everyone, not by a priestly caste. Thirdly, humanity would re-own the projection of its creations as the work of gods and goddesses and simply recognize that humanity creates itself over time and across space through laboring. Lastly, while there would be arts and artists who would pursue their work on an individual basis, the arts would be freed from the service of the ruling class either as ideology or for conspicuous consumption. The arts would no longer be for elites. On a collective level, the arts would return to their magical roots, not as superstition but in the form of visions of the world being born through mask-making, drawing, sculpture, music, dancing, theater and writing for a socialist future.