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» NEW! » Cohen - Cultural Work as a Site of Struggle

Cohen, N. S. (2015). "Cultural Work as a Site of Struggle: Freelancers and Exploitation". In Marx and the Political Economy of the Media. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004291416_004

“Although once considered a blind spot of communication studies, cultural work has become a growing site of inquiry as scholars from a range of perspectives consider the work that goes into producing media, culture, and communication.1 Marx, however, is largely missing from these studies. On the surface, Marx’s inquiry into the characteristics of nineteenth-century industrialized production seems an outdated approach for understanding cultural work in the post-Fordist era. In Capital Marx described conditions on the factory floor: the wage labourer with nothing to sell but that most peculiar of commodities, labour power, enters into a “free” relationship of exploitation with an employer, who sets the worker to work. Under the capitalist’s control, the worker toils for a long stretch of the day. After earning more than what is necessary to reproduce her labour power, she generates surplus value, or profit, for capital. In the process, the worker becomes part of a generalized class of labourers. Her concrete labour is made abstract as it is sunk into standardized commodity production. Marx describes a subjugated, alienated worker who is interchangeable with other workers, rendered an anonymous input for production.

As work has moved out of the physical factory and into the studios, offices, and home-based workplaces of the creative economy, Marx’s account has either been ignored or deemed outmoded. In many cases, cultural workers are understood to be unique kinds of workers and cultural work radically different from other kinds of work, removed from traditional labour-capital antagonisms. In more critical accounts, Marx is dismissed as reductive because he does not attend to workers’ agency or subjectivity.”