What is the “labor theory of culture”? I first came across this phrase twenty years ago, in a 2004 essay by Michael Denning, Marxist theorist and professor of American studies at Yale. In “The Socioanalysis of Culture: Rethinking the Cultural Turn,” Denning called for a labor theory of culture to replace or, at the very least, supplement, two approaches that were dominant at the time: 1) the commodity theory of culture, which approaches culture as an object with multiple meanings, open for use by radical audiences; and 2) the ideology theory of culture, which approaches culture more as a weapon created by Hollywood and corporate media as a tool for social control.1
The problem with these two approaches, according to Denning, is that they position the concepts of work and culture as fundamentally at odds. These approaches imagine work as something we do when we are at work, and...
