The Labor Factor in the Creative Economy: A Marxist Reading

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.