Cultural Identity Politics in the (Post-)Transitional Societies

Cultural identities from the bottom up – labour relations perspective
one field is exempted which concerns control over people and where the nationality
of people is still very operative. Namely, the state retains control over labour relations
using the reduction of labour rights as a tool for raising its global competitiveness with
respect to “human resources”. Nationality, in this context, is a distinctive force in the
determination of labour relations, such as, for example, in Slovenia, where temporary
workers of various nationalities enjoy different labour rights. On the basis of bilateral
state agreements, for example, temporary Bosnian and Macedonian workers are
deprived of some labour rights, such as unemployment pay, which all other workers
have, including the temporary Croatian, Serbian and some Montenegrin workers.
Hence it follows that national identity might still be strongly present in some aspects of
socio-economic life. Why national identity is still operative in certain fields and not in
others (as well as in relationships between these fields) is a significant question for the
analysis of contemporary world governance.
Secondly, as some scholars (Lockwood, 1996; Standing, 2009) have noticed there
is a new identity construction (i.e. class formation) under way due to new citizenship
regimes (i.e. civic stratification) and labour relations. Old labour groups (managers/
professionals/skilled labour; upper class/middle class/underclass) have been changing
and the borders between them progressively torn down. At the same time, as we can
observe, new social groups have been created, such as the “working poor”, “proletarian
high-skilled professionals”, “precariat”. New labour groups cross-cut old ones and
reorganize them in new social groups with new social hierarchies and ties of dependence.
An important theoretical work will be needed in the future (a study in this direction was
undertaken in Močnik, 2011) in order to examine the new composition of the labour
force and related modes of production.
Re-questioning of cultural identities from the bottom up
In line with this conclusion, we will put under examination part of the huge problem
we have designated above. We will examine a particular labour group which once used
to be relatively privileged (i.e. cultural workers) and is now, as we have seen, under
transformation. We assume that if the general determinants of how a particular labour
group is integrated into the production and distribution of a new value have been changed,
the self-reflection would also accordingly change, as well as the aesthetic or social reflection
in art practices. If we take this aspect into consideration, at least we may be able to see the
range of all possible ideological positions the cultural worker might assume.
For this reason, we have decided to approach cultural identities from the bottom
up, from the perspective of labour relations, taking as the subject of our examination
“authors”, “artists” or, in short, the “creative class”. We will rephrase the initial question
accordingly by inverting the original phase of “cultural identities” into “identity of
cultural workers” and ask ourselves what the identity of cultural workers would be in
the context of their present labour relations. We believe that an examination of socio-
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