How can labour research employ workers’ inquiry to account for the capitalist settler-colonial relations defined by the connection that labour exploitation has to private property and colonial dispossession?

In July 2023, Steff Huì Cí Ling circulated Art Workers’ Inquiry for Decolonial Potential, a workers’ inquiry inviting art workers to respond to questions about worker identity, housing, employment, racialization, and property. This zine contains the collected responses to the final question asking respondents to imagine with their stated skillsets ways they would undo or un-think (“destroy”) private property. The zine is free and physical copies are shared with and among other art workers at town halls and other worker-centered gatherings focused on political education, skill-sharing, and troublemaking in our sector.

In a settler-colonial context, the public and non-profit arts sector funding model depends on the surplus-value of extractive capital produced by the ongoing occupation and dispossession of Indigenous lands. By exploring the art workers’ experiences of work and class identity, and by connecting labour exploitation in the art sector with the reproduction of private property, her research understands art workers in a historically and politically grounded relationship with labour and decolonial movements.

The zine includes a short introduction that presents workers inquiry and decolonial potential as concepts in Steff’s research which draws from Italian Operaismo and Romano Alquati’s notion of workers’ inquiry as “co-research” in conjunction with “co-resistance” — a political position theorized by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson within the framework of indigenous resurgence. By positioning workers’ inquiry within what she has been thinking of as a “working-class knowledge system “(workers’ knowledge by and for themselves and the class struggle), Steff’s research attempts to forge relations of solidarity and anti-capitalist co-resistance with Indigenous resurgence and Land Back.