Introduction

by Anthony Iles & Ben Seymour

In this short book, Richard Barbrook presents a collection of quotations from authors who in different ways attempt to identify an innovative element within society – what Barbrook calls ‘the class of the new’. This model workforce announces a new economic and social paradigm, constituting a ‘social prophecy’ of the shape of work to come. Their mode of being and, in particular, of producing, is set to become hegemonic. No matter how numerically limited at present, the way they live and work today is the way everyone else will live and work tomorrow.

From Adam Smith’s ‘Philosophers’ of the late-eighteenth century, down to the ‘Creative Class’ celebrated by sociologist Richard Florida today, the class of the new represents the future of production within and, for the author, beyond capitalism. In his essay introducing the textual montage, Barbrook offers his own interpretation of the mutations in the form and content of the class of the new, giving technological development a revelatory role: making new things in new ways constitutes the new class. Marginal at present, it is nonetheless potentially universal.

Focusing on the convergence among ostensibly disparate writers around the notion that contemporary ‘immaterial labour’ or ‘cognitive capitalism’ is both exemplary and potentially emancipatory, Barbrook considers the claims made for the latest embodiment of the ‘class of the new’. If the rhetoric of liberation through new kinds of work is never less than problematic, we should remain optimistic about the tendency of networked, cooperative and ‘livework’ forms of production to overturn hierarchies and reduce inequalities in labour and in life. Like the highest stage in the previous orders of technologically-centred development, the class of the new in its current ‘creative’ and informatic form poses a radical challenge to capitalism’s regime of intellectual property and division of labour which could go far beyond what creative class ideologues currently claim for it.

Wagering that this latest incarnation of the class of the new need not remain an exclusive club, Barbrook enjoins the technocrats who oversee the smooth accumulation of capital in ‘world cities’ like London to consider the economic benefits of including and supporting the ‘mass creativity’ of those whose work does not yet enjoy the privileged status of ‘creative’.

Is creativity really becoming the common and decisive feature of all labour? Will securing the increased participation of workers in the ‘General Intellect’ ensure a smooth transition to communism? Whatever one thinks of Barbrook’s own version of the ‘social prophecy’, he offers penetrating criticisms of the feel good rhetoric of ‘Creative Class’ boosters such as Florida.

In reality, the numbers may not bear out the great claims made for the Creative Class, whether from the point of view of ‘radicals’like Negri and Hardt (who give them a leadership role in the transition beyond Empire) or of those who brandish economic arguments for their supremacy such as Florida. Although both believe that what is good for creatives is now good for capitalism, it is by no means certain that the economic argument for the Creative Class is as strong as its proponents claim.

Focusing on the problems and potential of the latest class of the new in early-twenty-first century London, an environment where the conditions for its triumph are purportedly most promising, this book gives much needed historical and social context to current debates around ‘cognitive capitalism’ and the transformation of work it is said to entail.