Issue 99: Summer 2009

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The Labor Factor in the Creative Economy: A Marxist Reading

By Laikwan Pang on December 17, 2009
Abstract: This paper offers a Marxist analysis of the creative agency conceptualized by the new creative economy. Analyzing the differences and continuities between the creative economy and the traditional industrial economy, I explore how creative labor is selectively invested with the logics of both artistic production and industrial production, so that the creative economy, like and unlike the traditional industrial economy, could operate and proliferate amid the tensions between scarcity and abundance. Labor does not evaporate in the creative economy, but it is only more intricately shaped to accommodate to and justify a condensed and twisted late-capitalist economic logic.

In the advent of the creative economy,1 creativity is turned into a tool for economic development. Through the reification of creativity, freedom is celebrated, and a new type of democracy is conjured up, which is not based on political participation but on free access to creativity -- everybody can produce creatively, and everybody can consume creative products according to individual tastes. Within such a discourse of celebration, what must be strategically ignored is the labor dimension essential to 

creative production. The creative economy relies on but also dismisses the materiality of creative labor. My focus in this essay is precisely to explicate the labor factor that makes up this creative economy.

 

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