Creative Labour, Before and After ‘Going Freelance’: Contextual Factors and Coalition-Building Practices

Abstract

This chapter presents empirical findings to oppose the discourses of liberation presented in postoperaist accounts of ‘immaterial labour’ and their modern proponents. It suggests that for creative labour the potential for creativity exists only in denial: capitalist development alone will not deliver fulfilled work. There must be struggle to recapture creative activity from its imbrication in capitalist social relations. Focusing on the movement of creatives from formal employment to freelancing, the chapter explores the possibilities of, and barriers to, this struggle. In a case study of creative labour in the UK and the Netherlands, it examines the wider economic and employment context behind the movement of creatives from formal employment to freelancing, the struggle they wage to be creative and their nascent forms of coalition-building.