SCUM Manifesto – Money Work System 1984

“Money Work System”, Geoff Davis, 1984.

Agit-prop animation, from the SCUM Manifesto by the ‘founder of radical feminism’ Valerie Solanas

Micro Arts MA2 VARIOUS UNUSUAL EVENTS – Money Work System (SCUM) was in this collection. 6 x conceptual art pieces for micro computers, menu control, distributed on data cassette, 1984; Prestel videotext, 1985.

In 1967 Solanas submitted a manuscript to Warhol, but he suspected police entrapment as the script was so extreme. He mentioned this in an interview, and then lost the manuscript, triggering Solanas’s homicidal rage. In 1968 Solanas shot Andy Warhol, critic Mario Amaya and tried to shoot manager Fred Hughes. This is covered best in POPism by Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett. There’s also dramatised film version. (This was the third shooting incident at the Factory, something was coming.)

Solanas agitated for a money-free women-only system to solve the world’s ills. A universal benefit system with electronic money was later explored in one of my fictions, a novella ‘Death in the Bubble World’ (1997). This invented an electronic currency, please visit the site ‘Easy Money Units’. This EMU system also features in my new novel due 2025, with an art installation in September 2025 at CAS / BCS London.

The MA2 version was an animation, a sort of primitive graphic novel, with a sad faced male as anti-hero.

The original was an adult version. The frames have been edited 2022.

MORE ON RADICAL FEMINISM

Feminist Agit-prop was represented by Money Work System animation derived from the SCUM Manifesto by Valerie Solanas, who later shot Andy Warhol. Although diagngnosed a schizophrenic, and jailed for murder, she was only inside for two years, and continued to stalk Warhol after release.

An interesting sympathetic perspective on Solanas comes from Warhol ‘superstar’ Ultraviolet in her autobiography “Famous For 15 Minutes” (Ultraviolet was around the art scene a lot longer, previously with Dali et al). Solanas’s main complaint about Warhol was exploitation and copyright theft. Sound familiar?

Suffragettes

Londoners might have noticed the new names for the overgound train lines, ‘Lioness’, ‘Liberty’, ‘Mildew’ and the ‘Suffragette’ line from  Gospel Oak to Barking Riverside. Suffragettes were feminists fighting (with bombs and arson) to get women the vote (universal suffrage) – this was about 110 years ago, so not back in the middle ages. Emily Davison, a prominent suffragette, died after being struck by King George V’s horse, Anmer, at the celebrated Derby in 1913.

Solanas, instead of killing herself, tried to kill a powerful man she saw as patriarchal and exploitative to his ‘workers’ in the Factory, making multiples (‘Additions’) of his work, who were mostly poor drug addicts or mentally ill or both (Solanas is a case in point). Warhol is now the source of endless nostalgic rumination.

This is of course totally not Warhol’s new State-approved image – which is all about transgression, his repression, humility, etc. Like a modern saint in fact, complete with wounds to prove it. But in a Village Voice interview, a sitter for the ‘Ladies and Gentlemen’ series Marsha P. Johnson noted the shock of walking past a gallery where her classic Warholian portrait was being sold for thousands of dollars, even as she struggled to find affordable housing.

The SCUM Manifesto (Solanas, 1968) had reasons and plans for a post-patriarchical society, and has been popular ever since, although not in the mainsteam Art World, for obvious reasons. (SCUM=Society for Cutting Up Men.)

I was involved in the alternative art scene in the early 1980s, and this sort of role debate was common. Males weren’t excluded in the olden days, as things were more simply political, rather than tribal as now. (Grayson Perry was in the Neo Naturists, for instance.) This was discussed by Jasia Reichart at the ‘Cybernetic Serendipity: Towards AI’ conference at the ICA London in 2024, responding to a question about the male appearance of some of the art robots, and the old films showing the male visitors wearing suits (which was standard attire in those days, unless you were a hippy or skinhead).

In the Manifesto, Solanas discussed a new Money Work System. This is now called Universal Basic Income, UBI, and again is in the news with upcoming AI related job losses (or changes).