>>29482Firstly, artistan is not Artist here, but the skilled craftspeople, tailors, jewelers, smiths, etc, who produce boutique goods independently in traditional modes of productions (e.g. guilds).
So not only are these not "artists," you also misunderstand his analysis, which is how it applies to the revolutionary potential of this class broadly (which again, is not "artists", but small manufactures who own a individual amount of property)
The thing that separates them is that they *own property*, albeit at small scale. They are politically inconsistent because they are squeezed by the growth of capitalism. The revolution force is the proletariat who are defined by having no property to lose *in the present*. The proletariat can, and do, produce Art and artists.
I think you further misunderstand, too (calling them "scum") what he says about this class. Which is that they will be forced to abandon their standpoint by the bourgeois, who will destroy and subsume their smaller manufactures, stores, etc. and force them into wage relationships. Their nature is not deceptive or false. but they are politically inconsistent and unreliable, because they are revolutionary only when anticipating the future in which their class position has actually changed and they own no property.
If you want to call everyone scum who does not work as an industrial wage laborer, and claim that laborers also do not produce art, or that desiring to produce art instead of doing wage labor, is counter-revolutionary. Go ahead. lol.