The Pittsburgh Symphony, Ujamaa, Planned Economies, and DEI as Class Struggle
The Pittsburgh Symphony, Ujamaa, Planned Economies, and DEI as Class Struggle
By: Justin Laing | February 12, 2025 | Non reformist reforms, Racial Capitalism
A recent article on the front page of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette (PG) headlined that the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra (PSO) was facing a $7M deficit along with a 12% increase in its costs and a drop in overall revenue of 8% when compared to the pre-pandemic 2018-19 season. Still, the writer, supported in part by a grant from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Getty Foundation, and Rubin Institute, reflected on a recent concert: “Even though the hall was only about half full, there was an air of optimism. The orchestra, the crown jewel of the Steel City’s arts organizations and an internationally competitive ensemble in terms of playing caliber, is bringing in more cash.” The article goes on to explain the PSO has raised about $28M of an $84M capital campaign that is still in its “quiet phase” and that sales for its core ”classical” music offering are “sluggish,” but that this aligns with national trends.1 This framing both conceals and serves settler2 capital class struggle,3 a category I explain below.
In keeping with the lack of criticality White capitalist media brings to its analysis of White capitalist class arts organizations, the PG shares key elements of the frame that places Western European Symphonic music at the center of U.S. cultural policy: (a) Orchestras represent the best of the arts in that it is “the crown jewel,” (b) its music is incredibly high-quality and so is “internationally competitive,” (c) the arts system is unproblematically dependent on the capital and elite classes as evidenced in its $84M capital campaign to support a 12% increase in artist salaries and future deficits, (d) the Orchestra is the victim of the uncontrollable economic winds i.e. it is seeking to return to pre COVID revenue, (e) despite quantitative data to the contrary, there are better days ahead in that the Orchestra is “bringing in more cash.”
What is left out of the frame is that early in the twentieth century, the European settler capital class, often called “industrialists” in arts history parlance, created the corporate symphonic genre to produce music at a scale and cost for which it knew there was not a matching level of consumption. In fact, segments of the capital class prided themselves on the fact that only the cultured could appreciate the music.4 Also not mentioned is that this $7M deficit is more than the operating budget of any African American arts organization in Pittsburgh in 2023.5 However, across the country, capital classes and elites, via foundations, individual donors, state arts councils, and musicians, still plan and produce Western European orchestral music at a scale for which there is no remotely matching consumption level. This overproduction is driven in no small part by boards of organizations for which more than ⅓ are members of the capital class, which I would define as having a personal capitalization exceeding $13M, so in the top 1% of that category6 or annual salary of more than $3.5 M putting them in the top .01% in terms of salary7. These are “European settler capital class arts organizations8,” a long phrase, but a clearer description than the mystifying adjectives of “major,” “large,” or “legacy” that are typically used to define this class or organization and obscure the social relations allowing their budget and financial statement.
Ultimately, the issues of the PSO are one of many indicators of a capitalist economy planned and organized by capital and elite classes (attorneys, doctors, engineers, accountants, terminal degrees) in ways they believe serve them. The land usage, capital deployed, media coverage, quality jobs, etc., are all elements of class struggle brilliantly explained by Domenico Losurdo and referenced below. European capital classes are struggling to define the urban landscape, narrative and cultural policy in their own constructed image of themselves. However, the contradiction in their espoused love of quality “art and culture” is that it is an industry in permanent crisis because it is not actually a high priority in and of itself, as the $7M deficit clarifies.
A question becomes, what class do we align with? What is that class struggling towards, and what is our position on that struggle? In this formulation of class, it is not juxtaposed with race as it usually is, but rather, Black people are a class, a national class. What is the state of our class struggle in the field of cultural production at this time? What is our vision and how does it relate to this particular period? Of course, the same could be asked of Indigenous, Asian, Latin American, and White cultural workers.9 The particular challenge of White cultural workers is they have aligned with White capital classes in the settler colonial class struggle, accepted their privileged position, and opposed even the attempt to integrate into the settler colonial project that is DEI. We have seen that clearly over the last five years.
But what if cultural production was led by Black, Indigenous, Asian, and Latin American cultural workers and communities, and we democratically planned what was spent, produced, distributed, and consumed with the stipulation to address the genocidal project of settler colonialism and the degradation done to African, Indigenous, Asian, and Latin American cultural workers and cultures (these categories are not mutually exclusive)? This would be Ujamaa, cooperative economics, and socialism, as Ujamaa was intended to signify in its initial formulation in the Kawaida Theory. Of course, to be successful, it would also need to be connected to many other struggles, but it moves arts and culture work into struggles for national liberation rather than the national 10integration struggle of DEI that has been dominant for at least the last thirty-five years. The PSO is just one example of the non-reformability of the current system.
- Jeremy Reynolds, “Rising revenues won’t cover the symphony’s $7M shortfall — but leadership has a plan,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, January 26, 2025. ↩︎
- J. Sakai, “Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat from Mayflower to Modern,” (Montreal, Kersplebedeb Publishing and Distribution, 2014) 5-24 ↩︎
- Domenico Losurdo, “Class Struggle: A Political and Philosophical History,” (New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) 1-6. ↩︎
- Lawrence Levine, “Highbrow Lowbrow: The Creation of Cultural Hierarchy in America,” (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1988) 122-132. ↩︎
- Pro Publica, August Wilson Center, https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/472697273 ↩︎
- Ivy Grace, “Are You Rich Enough To Be in the Top 1%? Yahoo Finance, 10/13/2024 https://finance.yahoo.com/news/richenough-
top-1-heres-213018631.html ↩︎ - Julia Kagan, “How Much Income Puts You in the Top 1%, 5%, 10%?,” Investopedia 11/7/2024
https://www.investopedia.com/personal-finance/how-much-income-puts-you-top-1-5-10/ ↩︎ - As the lands we are on were not ceded by the Indigenous people who are on these lands, by definition, the settler colonial process is ongoing. ↩︎
- Losurdo, “Class Struggle,” 23-26. ↩︎
- Maulana Karenga, “Kawaida Theory: An Introductory Outline” (Inglewood, Kawaida Publications, 1980) 57-64. ↩︎
