The Makers of the Future

If the previous decades have been the years of the management consultants, the next decades may be the years of the designers, publishers, artists and a variety of other [creative] skills.1

Ken Livingstone, Mayor of London.

For Ken Livingstone, fostering the creative industries is also electorally advantageous. His victory as the Labour candidate in the 2004 Mayoral contest demonstrated that the growth of this sector was widening the voting base for progressive politics in London. Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class has provided the GLA with a theoretical explanation of this shift in party loyalties. According to the findings of his research, the new employers of the information age require a new type of employee: highly educated, culturally aware and technologically adept. As the experience of American cities has proved, tolerance, diversity and eccentricity are the preconditions for attracting the members of the Creative Class whose skills and inventiveness are vital for economic prosperity. In an ironic twist, conservative attitudes are now seen as bad for business.3

For those of a more sceptical disposition, Florida’s analysis is far too one-sided. When applied to London, his celebration of the creative industries minimises – and excuses – the downsides of the restructuring of the city’s economy: the dominance of international finance, the casualisation of employment and the gentrification of working class neighbourhoods.4 Some observers have even questioned whether the growth of the knowledge economy has changed the exploitative structures of capitalism in any significant way. In the 2000s, an oligopoly of large corporations and big banks still rules the world.5 Despite the cogency of their criticisms, these dissenters have remained a minority voice. Far from rejecting Florida’s approach, the most influential thinkers on both the Right and the Left are promoting their own versions of the Creative Class. Just like him, they’re also convinced that the new economic paradigm will vindicate their own political stance. According to taste, the growth in the number of information workers can be interpreted as the imminent triumph of either dotcom capitalism or cybernetic communism. Although often bitterly divided in their politics, these gurus still share a common theoretical position. Whether on the Right or the Left, all of them champion the same social prophecy: the new class is prefiguring today how everyone else will work and live tomorrow.

Their theoretical analyses have a venerable pedigree. Long before the Creative Class became a fashionable phrase, the members of this new social group were being described as the Prosumers, the Venture Capitalists, the Cyborgs and the Symbolic Analysts. Back in the early1970s, Daniel Bell formulated the theoretical template for this social prophecy. Inspired by Marshall McLuhan’s technological reveries, he claimed that the rapid convergence of media, telecommunications and computing was sweeping away the economic, political and cultural certainties of the industrial age. Anticipating universal access to the Net, Bell predicted that the advent of the information society would inevitably lead to the hegemony of the creators of information: the Knowledge Class.6 Over three decades have passed since this prophecy was first made. The terminology may have changed many times and its political meaning taken different forms, but the theory has remained the same. The rapid spread and increasing sophistication of the Net is bringing about the rise to power of the Knowledge Class. The future is what it used to be.7

In the early-twenty-first century, analysts and intellectuals are still entranced by this McLuhanist vision of the new class. Across the political spectrum, the Net is praised as the demiurge of the hegemony of the producers of information. Yet, for all its futurist rhetoric, the theoretical antecedents of this prophecy can be traced back even further than Bell’s speculations in the early-1970s. At the dawn of modernity in the late-eighteenth century, Adam Smith was the first person to put forward the argument that the economic growth was creating a specific group of modernisers. By deepening the division of labour, the market and the factory were increasing the efficiency of the workforce and raising the quality of their products.8 Within an economy diversified into different specialist trades, the Philosophers who improved and invented machinery had acquired a distinctive social role: designing the future.

In the more than two centuries which have passed between Adam Smith’s time and our own, many different thinkers have proposed their own versions of the theory of the new class. Following the examples of Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project and Humphrey Jennings’ Pandaemonium, the next section of this book uses a montage of quotations to tell the story of this social prophecy. In the same way that music samples can be mixed together to make a new tune, Benjamin discovered that his collection of research notes was turning into a book in its own right. Just like splicing different shots together to produce a film, Jennings constructed a historical narrative out of quotations from many different authors. What intrigued Benjamin was that this approach was able to reveal the contemporary ‘after-life’ of writings from the past. Creating a montage of quotations could achieve what he believed to be the primary purpose of historical research: understanding what was happening in the present. For Jennings, this technique allowed his readers to experience the cultural and political complexity of the past. By presenting the divergent views of our forebears, he could show that there was nothing preordained about the social structures of the present. Collecting quotations was his poetic antidote to the positivist certainties of academic historians.9

Inspired by Benjamin and Jennings’ methodology, this book brings together 86 definitions of the new class from the past 230 years. The well-known passages by famous authors are included along with obscure pieces by long-forgotten writers. The seekers after wisdom are found side-by-side with the promoters of confusion. Of course, the quotations which have been chosen are only short excerpts from long books. Because the passages were selected for their relevance to the overall argument of this book, the more nuanced positions of their authors are often lost. There is no substitute for reading the original texts. Yet, as Benjamin and Jennings demonstrated, a montage of quotations will create its own meanings. Reading through these different concepts of the class of the new reveals both continuities and discontinuities in the definition of this icon of modernity over the last two centuries. By analysing what has changed and what has remained the same, we can come closer to comprehending the political and economic significance of this social prophecy in the present.

The process of selecting quotations for this book highlights what thinkers with very different ideological positions have in common. Whatever their political loyalties, their definitions of the new class all start from the same fundamental theoretical insight: human history is an evolutionary process. In agrarian societies, time was seen as cyclical and immutable. Both Aristotle and Muhammad Ibn Khaldûn analysed history as the repetitive rise and fall of the same contending classes.10 But, with the advent of modernity, time became the linear movement of progress. In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith explained that humanity had evolved through a succession of economic stages: hunting, herding, agriculture and, finally, commerce.11 Crucially, it was this materialist conception of history which inspired his characterisation of the Philosophers as the class of the new. If agriculture had evolved into commerce, then capitalism itself must also be a dynamic social system. The inventors of machinery were the makers of the future.

From Adam Smith’s first iteration, all subsequent definitions of the new class have derived their theoretical foundation: historical evolution. Like Benjamin and Jennings, many of the promoters of this concept on the Left have also been sceptical about the benefits of capitalist progress. However, this rejection of Adam Smith’s economic liberalism didn’t lead them into sociological Creationism. On the contrary, they saw the new class as the promise of a new – and better – society. Just as importantly, the intellectuals of the Right never used this theory to advocate a return to the agrarian past. When Friedrich Nietzsche proclaimed the advent of the Superman in the 1880s, his aristocratic fantasy was presented as a modernist alternative to the equalitarian path of social evolution. According to Mario Piazzesi, the chronicler of the fascist counter-revolution in 1920s Italy, the Blackshirts were hi-tech warriors and businessmen. In more recent times, Ian Angell has promoted the concept of the New Barbarians while Alexander Bard and Jan Söderqvist have looked forward to the ascendancy of the Netocracy. Echoing Nietzsche, these conservatives argued that – far from being retrogressive – their elitist dreams described the inevitable consequences of historical progress. The only way of restoring feudal privileges is moving forwards into the future.

For each and every one of the authors in this book, defining the new class was a way of describing their own experience of the evolution of capitalism. Over the past two centuries, the restructuring of working methods and the development of better machinery have been the driving forces of this economic system.12 Each wave of organisational and technological changes has required another reordering of the hierarchical relationship between capital and labour.13 In successive generations, the concept of the new class has been used to analyse the impact of this process upon the social structures of modernity. The majority of the definitions in this book were attempts to understand how the latest surge of progress was going to impact upon the opposing poles of the capitalist economy. Depending upon the political motivations of their authors, the concepts of the class of the new have taken two distinct forms: the new ruling class and the new working class. Sometimes the same definition has been used to identify the latest iteration of both capital and labour. In other cases, different concepts have described the new forms of a specific class. By assigning them to one or both of these variants, the definitions of the new class form two distinctive lines of historical succession:

The New Ruling Class

the Philosophers  the Industrials  the Civil Servants   the Bourgeoisie  the Self-Made Man  the Superman  the Vanguard Party  the Samurai  the Bureaucrats  the Scientific  Managers  the Blackshirts  the Open Conspiracy  the Intellectuals   the Managerial Class  the Entrepreneurs  the Inner Party  the Power Elite  the New Class  the Industrial Managers the Order-Givers  the Technocrats  the Knowledge Class  the Post-Modernists  the Professional- Managerial Class  the Entrepreneurs  the Venture Capitalists  theSymbolic Analysts  the Virtual Class  the Digerati  the Digital Citizen  the Swarm Capitalists  the New Barbarians  the Bobos  the Netocracy  the Creative Class.

The New Working Class

the Industrials  the Bohemians  the General Intellect  the Labour Movement  the Educated Working Man  the Aristocracy of the Working Class  the Intellectual Proletariat  the Vanguard Party  the Labour Aristocracy  the Engineers  the Fordist Worker  the Intellectuals  the New Working Class  the Knowledge Workers  the Educational and Scientific Estate  the Hippies  the Produsumers   the Scientific Intellectual Labourers  the Proletarianised Professionals  the Post-Modernists  the Socialised Workers  the White-Collar Proletarians  the Nomads the Prosumers  the Post-Industrial Proletarians  the Hackers  the Cyborgs  the Symbolic Analysts  the Virtual Class  the Netizens  the Multipreneurs  the Immaterial Labourers  the Digital Artisans  the New Independents  the Elancers  the Multitude  the Cognitariat  the Free Agents  the Cybertariat the Precariat  the Creative Class  the Pro-Ams.

These two parallel histories demonstrate how – as Benjamin and Jennings pointed out – a montage of quotations can reveal its own meanings. By following the two lines of succession, it becomes clear that the originators of these different versions of the new class were responding to the evolution of the capitalist economy. In its early liberal form, the leaders of the emerging industrial system were lauded as heroic and innovative individuals: the Philosophers, the Industrials, the Self-Made Man and the Superman. Even the socialist critics of capitalism could admire the dynamism of the new class of the Bourgeoisie which ‘… has created more massive and colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together.’14 Facing this formidable enemy, the Left argued that the proletariat was also one of the primary driving forces of modernity: the Industrials, the Bohemians, the General Intellect, the Labour Movement, the Educated Working Man and the Aristocracy of the Working Class.

As liberalism gave way to Fordism, the dominant archetype of the new class changed almost beyond recognition.15 For the analysts of the elite, their most pressing task was to name the bosses who ran the rapidly expanding bureaucracies of big business and big government. Already, in the early-nineteenth century, Georg Hegel had anticipated this new form of the new ruling class in his concept of the Civil Servants. Inspired by this example, twentieth century thinkers produced a plethora of definitions for the rulers of Fordism: the Samurai, the Bureaucrats, the Scientific Managers, the Blackshirts, the Open Conspiracy, the Managerial Class, the Power Elite, the Industrial Managers, the Order-Givers, the Technocrats and the Professional-Managerial Class. Instead of opposing the rise of this administrative elite, some groups on the Left seized this opportunity to turn themselves into the masters of the bureaucratic system. Inspired by the Fabians’ statist redefinition of socialism, H.G. Wells argued that the Samurai had replaced the Labour Movement as the pioneer of the post-capitalist future. The tragedy of the 1917 Russian revolution – when the leadership of the oppressed became their oppressors – can be followed through the different definitions of this specific type of the new ruling class: the Vanguard Party, the Labour Bureaucracy, the Intellectuals, the Inner Party and Milovan Djilas’ version of the New Class.

According to Henry Ford himself, the Fordist Worker – the employees of the factories which epitomised the bureaucratisation of capitalism – was the sort of person who ‘… wants a job in which he does not have to think.’16 Ironically, although he gave his name to this economic paradigm, this captain of industry’s definition ignored one of the most distinctive features of corporate capitalism: the proletarianisation of scientific, technical, administrative and intellectual labour. From the late-nineteenth century onwards, influential social theorists have emphasised the prefigurative role of this group of educated and cultured employees. Far from producing a population of mindless drones, Fordism was creating its own bureaucratic versions of the new working class: the Intellectual Proletariat, the Vanguard Party, the Labour Aristocracy, the Engineers, the Intellectuals, the New Working Class, the Knowledge Workers, the Educational and Scientific Estate, the Scientific Intellectual Labourers, the Proletarianised Professionals and the White-Collar Proletarians.

When Fordism was superseded, there was another dramatic shift in the dominant archetype of this social prophecy. The evolution of the economy required a rethinking of fundamental ideas. In the mid-twentieth century, Joseph Schumpeter was already arguing for a new vision of the new ruling class: the Entrepreneurs. Dismissed at the time as nostalgia for the liberal icon of the Self-Made Man, his concept provided the inspiration four decades later for a new generation of conservative thinkers in America and Europe who had lost faith in the infallibility of big business and big government. Throughout the 1980s, they proclaimed the imminent triumph of a heroic elite of innovators, fortune hunters and speculators: George Gilder’s definition of the Entrepreneurs and the Venture Capitalists. Above all, like Adam Smith, these theorists argued that the transformative power of new technology was behind the rise of this new ruling class. From the early-1990s onwards, as media, telecommunications and computing converged into the Net, the charismatic leaders of hi-tech businesses were praised as the makers of the future: the Symbolic Analysts, the Virtual Class, the Digerati, the Digital Citizen, the Swarm Capitalists, the New Barbarians, the Bobos, the Netocracy and the Creative Class.

The faltering of Fordism also tarnished the modernist image of the new working class of salaried intellectuals employed by the large corporations and government departments. At first, the young people radicalised in the 1960s sought a replacement for this social group among their peers who – like the Bohemians in the early-nineteenth century – were looking for a way of living outside the confines of the bureaucratic system: the Hippies, the Produsumers, the Post-Modernists and the Nomads. But, as the crisis of Fordism deepened, the economic consequences of the restructuring of capitalism could no longer be ignored. Crucially, it was the refusal of many young workers to conform to the disciplines of the factory and the office which had discredited bureaucratic methods of organisation. In the late-1970s and early-1980s, some theorists argued that economic changes were building the political base of the New Left revolution. The growth in self-employment and short-term contracts was creating a new – and fiercely independent – working class: the Socialised Workers and the Post-Industrial Proletarians.

During the 1990s, this radical prophecy became a mainstream orthodoxy. What was once denounced as New Left subversion was now praised as neo-liberal modernisation. In the fashionable business manuals of the dotcom boom, top-down bureaucracy was castigated as an expensive and inefficient method of controlling the labour force of the information economy.17 Three decades earlier, Peter Drucker – the founding father of management theory – had pointed out that: ‘The knowledge worker cannot be supervised closely or in detail … he must direct himself.’18 Building upon this analysis, his admirers explained that the new post-Fordist working class was quite capable of managing its own exploitation by capital: the Multipreneurs, the New Independents, the Elancers, the Free Agents and the Pro-Ams. From the early-1980s onwards, the growth of this self-directed form of employment was closely associated with the accelerating convergence of media, telecommunications and computing. In their definitions, some intellectuals have emphasised the benefits that this new entrepreneurial working class derives from the knowledge economy: the Prosumers, the Hackers, the Symbolic Analysts, the Virtual Class, the Digital Citizen and the Creative Class. Others have celebrated the subversive potential of the networked proletariat: the Cyborgs, the Netizens, the Immaterial Labourers, the Digital Artisans, the Multitude, the Cognitariat, the Cybertariat and the Precariat. Above all, whether they were on the Right or the Left, these analysts insisted that the new working class of this cognitive stage of capitalism should be admired for its intellectual accomplishments, cultural sophistication and technological savvy.19

This contemporary fascination with the educated and entrepreneurial members of the proletariat has deep historical roots. For over two centuries, creativity has been at the centre of the struggle between capital and labour. As the industrial system has evolved, the contending classes have fought not only over the division of the fruits of production, but also over the control of the workplace. In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith showed how the increasing division of labour allowed capitalists to replace self-governing skilled artisans with more submissive unskilled employees.20 In Capital, Karl Marx explained how the introduction of more advanced machinery enabled factory managers to determine the pace and intensity of work.21 During the first half of the twentieth century, this separation of conception and action reached its apogee. Frederick Winslow Taylor believed that the Scientific Managers could monopolise all decision-making within the economy. Henry Ford offered higher wages in return for the Fordist Worker submitting unquestioningly to the disciplines of the assembly line. In the early-twentieth century, even prominent anti-capitalist intellectuals were convinced that this division between thinking and doing was not only inevitable, but also desirable. Just like the Scientific Managers within the factories, V.I. Lenin argued that the Vanguard Party should become the absolute master of the political organisations of the Left. In the same way that the Bureaucrats dominated their offices, H.G. Wells believed that the Open Conspiracy could impose order and discipline upon unstable market economies. For the followers of all of these sages, the rise of big business and big government during the mid-twentieth century seemed like the fulfilment of their authoritarian prophecies of a new ruling class which decided everything lording over a new working class which decided nothing. At the high-point of Fordism, Cornelius Castoriadis summarised the essence of this economic paradigm: ‘The increasing bureaucratisation of all social activities … [means] the division of society into order-givers and order-takers.’22

The catalyst of the next evolutionary leap of capitalism was the late-1960s New Left rebellion against this absolute separation between conception and action. By proletarianising intellectual labour, Fordism had created a dissident minority within the workforce who were no longer willing to abdicate their right to think in return for the rewards of consumer society.23 For the past forty years, the advocates of new definitions of the new ruling class and the new working class have been trying to describe the implications of this momentous shift in attitudes. On the Right, thinkers have claimed that the decline of Fordism has opened up the opportunity for everyone to become a member of the elite. Around the same time that Schumpeter was elaborating his thesis, Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises – the gurus of neo-liberalism – were stressing that the most important activity of the Entrepreneurs was ‘discovery’: making better use of scarce resources to improve the choice, quality and affordability of products within the marketplace.24 Inspired by this analysis, conservative thinkers in the 1980s and 1990s argued that the rigid divisions between employers and employees were disappearing in the post-Fordist economy. From San Francisco to London, the same nostrums were promulgated.25 With a good idea and a bit of luck, any worker could found a thriving dotcom business and become a successful member of the Digerati. Whether they were Symbolic Analysts or Free Agents, individuals were now responsible for their own destinies in the unregulated global marketplace. Freed from bureaucratic diktats, both the Bobos and the Digital Citizens were able to express their own opinions and experiment with new ideas. Above all, in the age of the Net, economic dynamism depended upon lavishly rewarding the hi-tech Entrepreneurs. According to Gilder, the lessons of history were clear: ‘Material progress is ineluctably elitist … exalting the few extraordinary men who can produce wealth over the democratic masses who consume it.’26

For all its post-Fordist rhetoric, this neo-liberal celebration of the Entrepreneurs perpetuated the Fordist assumption that the new ruling class monopolised the making of the future. In a tautological argument, whenever workers demonstrated any autonomy, inventiveness or initiative, they were deemed to be behaving just like members of the elite: the Symbolic Analysts, the Virtual Class, the Multipreneurs, the New Independents, the Elancers, the Free Agents and the Creative Class. This confusion about the social status of these self-directed and self-motivated employees was partially a form of ideological mystification which rebranded market disciplines and job insecurity as individual freedom and career opportunities. Yet, at the same time, these definitions of the new working class were also genuine attempts to grasp the implications of the waning of Fordism. In contrast to the rigid hierarchies of this mid-twentieth century form of capitalism, the educational and cultural dividing lines between employers and employees in the knowledge economy have become much less distinct. The self-exploiting Digital Artisans had the same tastes, obsessions and lifestyles as the Swarm Capitalists who exploited them. As Ursula Huws pointed out, the corporate bosses who were reliant upon the technological expertise of the Cybertariat to operate their own computers couldn’t pretend to be the fount of all wisdom. David Brooks was amused that the rise of the Bobos – bourgeois bohemians – proved that the 1960s New Left might have lost the economic argument, but the Hippies had won the cultural war. When there was no longer an unbridgeable gulf between the order-givers and the order-takers, the same definition of the new class could easily be used to describe both the new ruling class and the new working class. Crucially, by covering both opposing poles of the capitalist economy, these thinkers were able to revive another potent form of this social prophecy: the class of the new as the new intermediate class. As with its two other forms, this third variant can also be tracked as the historical succession of different definitions:

The New Intermediate Class

the Industrials  the Bohemians  the New Middle Class  the Bureaucrats  the Labour Aristocracy  the Labour Bureaucracy  the Engineers  the Intellectuals  the New Middle Class  the Organisation Man  the Specialists  the New Class  the Educational and Scientific Estate  the Produsumers  the Scientific Intellectual Labourers  the Knowledge Class  the Intermediate Layers  the New Petty-Bourgeoisie  the Post-Modernists  the Nomads  the Prosumers  the Hackers  the Symbolic Analysts  the Virtual Class  the Netizens  the Multipreneurs  the Digital Artisans  the Digital Citizen   the New Independents  the Elancers  the Multitude  the Bobos  the Free Agents  the Creative Class  the Pro-Ams.

In the first phase of capitalist development, Henri Saint-Simon had pioneered this interpretation of the new class by including both employers and employees within his definition of the Industrials. Whatever divided them inside the factory, these two groups had a common interest in displacing the parasitic aristocracy and clergy which had dominated the agrarian economy. But, within a generation, his socialist followers had become convinced that Saint-Simon’s concept of an all-embracing class of the new was an anachronism. In The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels predicted that economic modernisation would not only sweep away the old feudal order, but also deepen the social divisions within capitalism. As competition intensified, artisans would be driven out of business, self-employed professionals would be forced to work for wages and peasants would lose their land.27 Far from resisting this path of progress, the primary task of the new class of the Labour Movement was campaigning for reforms like the Factory Acts which – by raising wages and improving conditions – accelerated the polarisation of society into the ever-diminishing minority who owned the hi-tech factories and the ever-expanding majority who worked in them. At the end of this evolutionary process, when almost the entire population had been proletarianised, the working class would be reborn as the new directing force of modernity: the General Intellect.

 During the late-nineteenth century and early-twentieth century, this Marxist analysis provided a distinctive ideological identity for the increasingly powerful parliamentary socialist parties and industrial trade unions in Europe. Their day-to-day struggles for reforms within capitalism were inevitably leading to the revolutionary moment of communist emancipation.28 As liberalism evolved into Fordism, social democrats argued that Marx’s predictions were being realised as the number of wage-earners grew and the corporatisation of the economy gathered pace. Not surprisingly, their opponents across the political spectrum – including some who described themselves as Marxists – were anxious to provide their own alternative explanations of the evolutionary direction of capitalism. Rejecting Marx’s thesis that modernity was the progressive polarisation of society into two distinct classes, these thinkers focused upon the intermediate groups within the economy which couldn’t be classified as either part of the bourgeoisie or the proletariat. They were delighted to discover that – even in the mid-twentieth century economies dominated by big business and big government – a substantial proportion of the population still made their living as artisans, self-employed professionals and peasants.29

More importantly, since these sectors were undergoing a long-term decline, the critics of Marx were also able to identify a more modern form of the intermediate class. Ironically, the proletarianisation of intellectual labour had created the conditions for the emergence of this group positioned between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Unlike the Fordist Workers on the assembly-line, this new intermediate class hadn’t surrendered all of its autonomy to the Scientific Managers and their machinery. Although these wage-earners might not have owned capital, members of this privileged group did possess other potent sources of economic power: educational qualifications and cultural knowledge. Across the political spectrum, thinkers championed their different versions of the new intermediate class. For moderates, the robustness of capitalism had been proved. Instead of social polarisation, economic modernisation was creating the living embodiment of consensus and compromise: C. Wright Mill’s New Middle Class, the Organisation Man, the Specialists and J.K. Galbraith’s New Class. For revolutionaries, the growth of the new intermediate class confirmed the political indispensability of the Vanguard Party. Far from uniting the population into the General Intellect, the evolution of capitalism was spawning privileged minorities which perpetuated the divisions within the exploited masses: William Morris’New Middle Class, the Labour Aristocracy, the Labour Bureaucracy, the Intellectuals, the Educational and Scientific Estate, the Scientific Intellectual Labourers, the Intermediate Layers and the New Petty-Bourgeoisie. Whatever their political motivations, all of these intellectuals were convinced that the only variant of the new class which explained the unique social structure of industrial capitalism was the new intermediate class.

As Fordism evolved into post-Fordism, this strand of the social prophecy also had to abandon its bureaucratic archetype. Looking for a replacement, intellectuals turned to the canonical texts of McLuhanism. If the convergence of media, telecommunications and computing was the demiurge of social change, then the builders of the Net must be the cutting-edge of modernity. In the knowledge economy, all definitions of the new intermediate class have to be an updated version of the Knowledge Class. During the 1990s, the third variant of the social prophecy flourished among the analysts of the rapid and chaotic expansion of the dotcom sector. In the new paradigm of the new economy, the educated and entrepreneurial employees of the new media companies were praised as pioneers of a new version of the new intermediate class. Looking at their working patterns and cultural attitudes, they couldn’t be easily identified as either strictly bourgeois or proletarian. The New Independents and the Free Agents moved from short-term contract jobs to running up their own companies and back again. The Netizens and the Bobos dressed in the same clothes, drank in the same bars, listened to the same music and shared a common obsession with cutting-edge technology. Above all, both the Digital Artisans and the Digital Citizens believed that the measure of success wasn’t just making lots of money, but also creating something cool.

Since the early-1990s, the various definitions of new intermediate class have reflected the social fluidity and cultural distinctiveness of the employees of cognitive capitalism. Some neologisms can also be used as a description of the new ruling class: the Digital Citizen and the Bobos. Other definitions can also be applied to new working class: the Netizens, the Multipreneurs, the Digital Artisans, the New Independents, the Elancers, the Multitude, the Free Agents and the Pro-Ams. Most potent of all are those concepts which cover all three historic strands of the social prophecy: the Symbolic Analysts, the Virtual Class and the Creative Class. Avoiding the economic conflicts of the present, the promoters of these definitions emphasise the divide between those who cling to the past and those who are building the future. The Digital Citizens have more in common with the Digital Artisans than either of them do with their late-adopter class brethren who are off-line and out of touch. By excluding the providers of traditional – and essential – goods and services who make up the majority of the population, the differences between employers and employees within the hi-tech sectors can be made to disappear. Everyone within the creative industries is part of the futurist elite. Making new things in new ways with new technologies is the only prerequisite for membership of the class of the new.

Under Fordism, prominent theorists had defined this intermediate group by very different criteria. In the early-1970s, Nicos Poulantzas had characterised the New Petty-Bourgeoisie as the employees of the managerial hierarchy. Even office secretaries and bank clerks weren’t worthy of inclusion within the heroic ranks of the exploited proletariat.30 Although an extreme case, Poulantzas’ suspicion of white-collar workers was shared by many on the Left. As the manual labourers below them knew all too well, these salaried bureaucrats were order-givers as well as order-takers. Just as importantly, as Poulantzas kept reminding his readers, many members of the New Petty-Bourgeoisie aped the conservative politics and mores of their superiors. Twenty years earlier, William Whyte had berated the Organisation Man not only for his ‘cheerful acceptance of the status quo’, but also for his ‘disinterest in the arts.’31 The path to a successful career within the Educational and Scientific Estate was internalising the routines and procedures of the corporate monolith. In its Fordist form, the educated conformist was epitome of the new intermediate class.

According to the 1990s gurus of the information economy, the attitudes of the Organisation Man were exactly what were not required. Controlling the workplace with a top-down bureaucracy was not only too expensive, but also, more importantly, too inflexible. Employees were now expected to manage themselves and set their own priorities. Released from the disciplines of Fordism, the Symbolic Analysts organised their own exploitation, the Multipreneurs ran their work lives as small businesses and the Free Agents were their own bosses. Above all, the members of the Creative Class had to be creative. Instead of repeating routines and following procedures, intellectuals, artists and techies were supposed to move beyond the curve and think outside of the box. Innovation not conformity was now the path to promotion. Aestheticism not philistinism had become the leitmotif of the new intermediate class. On her company’s website, Helen Wilkinson praised the virtues of these pioneers of the dotcom future: ‘[the] Elancers are change agents, challenging traditional ways of working with their unique energy and spirit.’32

In his canonical text, Florida divided the class of the new into two distinct groups: the new ruling class and the new intermediate class. At the top of the social hierarchy were the visionaries of the Super-Creative Core who are responsible for ‘the highest order of creative work’: developing hardware, building software, making films, writing books, designing buildings and composing music. But, as Florida admitted, these innovators were only a small minority of the class of the new. Instead, the overwhelming majority of this group consisted of creative professionals ‘… who work in a wide range of knowledge-intensive industries such as high-tech sectors, financial services, the legal and health-care professions, and business management.’33 According to Florida, the continual expansion of the information economy was recruiting more and more people into the ranks of this intermediate layer. Because the boundaries of his new class were drawn so widely, he was convinced that - in the early-2000s - its members already made up as much as a third of the American workforce. Above all, Florida believed that the Super-Creative Core and the creative professionals were together producing half of the nation’s wealth.34 The descendents of the Bohemians had become the producers of economic abundance.

In the 2002 GLA report, the Mayor’s statisticians were equally enthusiastic about the importance of London’s Creative Class. According to the official figures for the late-1990s, the media, cultural and computing sectors had grown much faster than the rest of the local economy. After the sellers of business services, the creative industries had been the largest source of new jobs for Londoners in this period. By 2000, around 10% of the city’s inhabitants were earning their living as artists, designers, programmers, technicians, writers, musicians, architects, actors, directors, copywriters and tailors – or by providing support for these professions.35 Extrapolating from this evidence, the GLA report concluded that the expansion of the Creative Class would accelerate over the next few decades. Like Florida, its authors believed that they had identified the all important group which was prefiguring the future of the whole of society. In the post-Fordist economy, people increasingly expect goods and services that are tailored to their own needs and tastes. Whatever their line of business, if they wanted to meet this demand by making short-runs of specialised products, companies would have to imitate the flattened hierarchies and cooperative ethos of media, cultural and computing firms. Above all, they would also have to employ highly educated and self-motivated workers. In the epoch of cognitive capitalism, the Creative Class was the trailblazer for the entire city’s economy.36

At the beginning of the GLAreport, its authors reluctantly admitted that ‘… using official statistics is problematic.’37 Crucially, the British government’s employment surveys lumped together people with very different jobs under the same category because they happened to be working in the same industry. When they were on the payroll of a film company, security guards were transformed into members of the Creative Class. Yet, far from compensating for this inaccuracy, the authors of the GLA report engaged in their own inflation of the employment figures. When they were selling artworks and antiques, old-fashioned shopkeepers were counted as part of the new class. This statistical massaging found its theoretical justification in Florida’s book. Under his schema, the definition of the Creative Class covered almost all of the professions which didn’t involve heavy manual labour or menial services. The new elite was open to everyone with taste, learning and imagination.

By exaggerating the size of the Creative Class, the Mayor’s statisticians had tried to counter the sceptics who doubted that capitalism was undergoing another evolutionary mutation. Not surprisingly, in the aftermath of the dotcom bubble, the credibility of the McLuhanist prophecies of the digital utopia had been badly dented. If, even at the boom’s peak, there had been more lorry drivers than computer programmers employed in the American economy, the rise of the Creative Class might be nothing more than another piece of Net hype.38 Ironically, like the GLA report, this dissenting analysis was also fixated on the numbers game. The size of the Virtual Class was the measure of its economic importance. Depending upon how the figures were calculated, both boosters and critics could produce statistics which confirmed their own political positions.

In his introduction to the GLA report, Ken Livingstone welcomed the ascendancy of the Knowledge Workers as the harbinger of the next stage of modernity. However sophisticated, quantitative measures could never grasp the qualitative potential of this social group. Back in the mid-nineteenth century, the factory proletariat had also been only a minority of the English working class. The overwhelming majority of wage-earners were employed as unskilled labourers, shop assistants and household servants.39 Yet, within a hundred years, the whole of society had been remodelled in the image of the Fordist factory. Market competition had systematically redistributed wealth from the labour-intensive to the capital-intensive branches of the economy.40 Small businesses had fused into massive corporations. Politics had been rationalised. Everyday life had been taken over by consumer culture.41 In their definitions of the new class, thinkers of both the Right and the Left had anticipated this evolutionary path of capitalism. The Philosophers invented the machinery which was transforming the economy. The Labour Movement was forcing companies to adopt more sophisticated methods of production. The Bureaucrats and the Scientific Managers were building the political and economic hierarchies which would supplant liberalism. The Vanguard Party and the Samurai were precursors of the conspiratorial elite which would control these centralised power structures. Long before the triumph of Fordism, the theorists of the new class had described in detail the peculiarities of this particular stage of capitalist civilisation. The shape of the future could be discerned by analysing the makers of the future.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the high point of the bureaucratisation of society inspired a plethora of definitions: the Power Elite, the Organisation Man, Djilas’New Class, the Specialists, Galbraith’s New Class, the Industrial Managers, the Order-Givers and the Technocrats. Yet, in the 1940s, Schumpeter’s concept of the Entrepreneurs had already foreseen the transcendence of Fordism. By the time that this economic prophecy was fulfilled, thinkers from across the political spectrum had abandoned the bureaucratic archetype of the new class. Instead, their definitions emphasised the autonomy and independence of the youthful makers of the post-Fordist future. On the Right, the gurus of neo-liberal globalisation celebrated the ascendancy of the Gilder-style Entrepreneurs, the Venture Capitalists and the Symbolic Analysts. On the Left, the sages of community activism eulogised the emergence of the Hippies, the Produsumers, the Socialised Workers, the Nomads and the Post-Industrial Proletarians. Despite their deep political differences, all of these theorists were in agreement that capitalism was undergoing a fundamental transformation. Defining the new class was the most effective method of describing the emerging economic paradigm.

During the late-1990s dotcom boom, this post-Fordist vision of entrepreneurial employers and self-managing employees was promoted as the up-to-date business strategy of the information age. But, as Ken Livingstone pointed out in his introduction to the GLA report, management consultants have determinedly resisted this path of economic development for over two decades. McKinsey’s experts argued that – instead of undermining corporate hierarchies – the convergence of the media, telecommunications and computing technologies was strengthening the power of the order-givers over the order-takers.42 When production was outsourced to small businesses, the Post-Industrial Proletarians weren’t liberated from the disciplines of the factory. On the contrary, thanks to the ‘information Panopticon’, the Scientific Managers were now able to monitor, audit and control the Knowledge Workers in much greater detail than the Fordist Workers had been subjected to in the past.43 Best of all, by blocking the emergence of the self-directing Cognitariat, the McKinsey consultants could force the majority of the hi-tech labour force into the ranks of the exploited Precariat. The authoritarian definitions of the new class from the Fordist stage of capitalism had been updated and successfully imposed upon its post-Fordist iteration. Big was still beautiful in the age of the Net. But, when the dotcom bubble burst, the credibility of this analysis was undermined. One of the crash’s most prominent casualties was the McKinsey consultancy’s star pupil: Enron. Instead of building the hi-tech future, the tightening of top-down management had led to a litany of corporate failures: out-of-control executives, irrational investments, dodgy accounting and, finally, catastrophic bankruptcy.44 Within the network economy, making new things with new technologies apparently implied new ways of working.

In contrast with the McKinsey experts, the neo-liberal proponents of the Digerati, the Digital Citizen, the Swarm Capitalists and the Bobos did realise that the hierarchies of Fordism weren’t eternal. The centralisation of corporate and financial power at a global level – paradoxically – required the loosening of managerial controls within the most advanced sectors of production. Although confused by its technological determinist assumptions, the McLuhanist prophecy had alerted the dotcom gurus to the economic consequences of the convergence of the media, telecommunications and computing. For the thinkers of the Right, their definitions of the new class explained how cutting-edge businesses were able to profit from this transformation. Similarly, for their rivals on the Left, concepts such as the Cyborgs, the Digital Artisans, the Immaterial Labourers, the Multitude, the Cognitariat, the Cybertariat and the Precariat described both the upsides and downsides of the knowledge economy for its workers. Whatever their political starting-point, these contemporary theorists of the new class have tried to anticipate the future of all of society by identifying its most developed sections in the present. They are convinced that – like the factory in earlier times – the network is more than just an economic phenomenon. All aspects of society are in the process of being restructured in its image.45 More than any other group, the new class is at the forefront of the transition to cognitive capitalism. What they are doing today, everyone else will be doing tomorrow.

Over the past two centuries, successive definitions of the new class have provided inspiration for policy-makers. Since their predecessors had successfully predicted the advent of Fordism, the modern proponents of this social prophecy have an aura of credibility when they describe the advent of the knowledge economy. Following their path towards the future must be the route to success. Not surprisingly, the London Development Agency (LDA) – the GLA’s economic arm – has prioritised its strategy for supporting the creative industries. As in other branches of production, the local state can help employers and employees in this sector by providing business advice, cheap premises, financial aid and educational opportunities.46 In addition, the LDA set up an initiative to meet the specific needs of the knowledge economy: Creative London. Above all, its officials have had to develop policies which are suitable for the new conditions of cognitive capitalism. Back in the Fordist epoch, big business and big government were the two dominant methods of organising collective labour. But, as the contemporary definitions of the new class emphasise, these top-down structures are inca

pable of realising the full potential of the network economy. Responding to this new paradigm, the LDA has decided to foster the development of ‘clusters’of creative firms. By congregating in particular areas of the city, the Swarm Capitalists are able to cooperate as well as compete with each other. By hanging out in these urban villages, the Cybertariat can help each other to find new jobs, learn new skills and discover new ideas.47 Alongside the traditional duo of the market and the factory, the network has become the third – and most modern – method for organising collective labour.

As the LDA has realised, London has all the necessary ingredients for construction of thriving creative clusters. From medieval times onwards, particular trades have been associated with specific areas of the city. As the capital of the dominant imperial power of early modernity, London is home to the most ethnically diverse population on the planet. Since the 1950s, its youth subcultures have been renowned across the world. In the LDA’s strategy, the creative cluster is the meeting place for these three sources of innovation. Brought together in a specific locality, the multi-ethnic and culturally sophisticated inhabitants of London are able to discover how to combine their individual talents for their mutual benefit. Like silk-weavers and cabinet-makers in the early-nineteenth century, the Digerati and the Digital Artisans of the 1990s were concentrated in Shoreditch. Speaking 300 different languages, the city’s New Independents and Free Agents are its ‘greatest competitive asset’ in the global media marketplace.48 Just like their youthful mod, punk and raver predecessors, the grown-up members of the Netocracy and the Cognitariat can be identified by their distinctive fashions and tastes in music. By fostering creative clusters, Ken Livingstone’s administration – as the elected representative of the Labour Movement – is fulfilling its historical mission: accelerating the evolution of capitalism.

The origins of this economic development strategy can be traced back to the early-1980s. Two decades ago, Livingstone first became a national figure as the charismatic leader of the forerunner of the GLA: the Greater London Council (GLC). For five years, his administration’s reforming programme was demonised in the media and frustrated by the Thatcher government. When the GLC was eventually abolished in 1986, this progressive experiment appeared to have failed. But, by the time that Livingstone was elected Mayor of London in 2000, almost all of its radical ideas had become common sense: improving public transport; celebrating ethnic diversity; defending gay rights; making peace in Ireland and tackling police racism. However, these retrospective victories couldn’t compensate for the GLC’s economic defeat. During the first half of the 1980s, Livingstone’s administration had tried - and failed - to halt the deindustrialisation of the local economy. Under the Thatcher government, finance and property were confirmed as the masters of London.49 Twenty years ago, the GLC was a pioneer of economic policies which were specifically focused upon the creative industries. As well as encouraging cultural pluralism, these initiatives were also designed to increase employment opportunities and foster technological innovation. Although it was an important part of their overall strategy, the GLC’s planners never believed that aiding this sector was a replacement for helping more traditional industries.50 Two decades later, a different approach was needed. By the 2000s, the process of de-industrialisation in London had advanced much further. While other European counties are still major manufacturers, Britain has long forgotten that it was once the ‘workshop of the world’. London’s prosperity now depends upon its role as a global financial centre.

Like their GLC predecessors, the LDA’s planners are also committed to reversing the decline of manufacturing. Even after two decades of neo-liberalism, this traditional sector is still an important provider of jobs. But, with financial institutions now dominating the local economy, providing support for the creative industries has become a higher priority. Both directly and indirectly, these businesses have benefited from the neo-liberal restructuring of London over the past twenty years. As the profits have flowed in from abroad, the financial sector has redistributed some of its wealth to the owners of advertising agencies, art galleries, entertainment venues and a host of other cultural enterprises. By ‘pumppriming’ these ventures, the ‘trickle-down’ of this money has underpinned two decades of growth in London’s creative industries.

According to Florida, this phenomenon has wider economic benefits. From his research, he has concluded that cities like London with a thriving music scene and a large gay population are now the prime locations for hi-tech businesses. Even if they never go clubbing or are completely straight, members of the Creative Class want to live in hip and tolerant communities. Where the Digital Artisans congregate, the Swarm Capitalists who want to employ them must follow.51 For the enlightened planners of the LDA, Florida’s analysis gives political succour. Fostering creative clusters will not only create more jobs within this specific sector, but also could potentially reverse the decline of manufacturing in London. The prime location for software firms will attract hardware companies as well. When Silicon Valley was the icon of computerised modernity, its combination of lucrative military contracts and enthusiastic venture capitalists was almost impossible to replicate in a European setting. But, with Florida now anointing Austin as the prototype of the future, London has in abundance his prerequisites for becoming a flourishing digital city: bohemian ambience and cultural tolerance. All the LDA has to do is build upon what is already there.

Underneath its feel-good rhetoric, Florida’s book also contains a more troubling message for the Mayor’s planners: creative clusters are fragile structures. From the American experience, this theorist has concluded that gentrification doesn’t just have negative consequences for the original inhabitants of inner-city areas.52 If unchecked, this phenomenon will also seriously damage the local economy. Property speculators destroy the street life and community feeling which attract hi-tech firms to these locations in the first place. Rather than helping businesses, building shopping malls, yuppie flats and sports stadiums lowers a city’s growth rate.53 In London, the redevelopment of the East End for the 2012 Olympics could be a repeat of this mistake. The disappearance of local retailers, low-cost housing, trendy clubs and art galleries would weaken rather than benefit the local economy. In the late-1990s, rising property prices led to an exodus of media and advertising companies from Soho to more hospitable boroughs.54 As East London now also succumbs to the corporate monoculture, its vibrant creative cluster is similarly being broken up and dispersed across the city.55 The financial institutions are not only a friend, but also an enemy of the new class. Their hunger for short-term speculative profits is a constant threat to the spatial and cultural foundations of London’s long-term prosperity.

In a concluding flourish, Florida ended his book with a call to arms: the Creative Class must acquire ‘class consciousness’. As the dominant group of the knowledge economy, its members have the awesome responsibility of leading the whole of society into the networked future.56 By stressing this common purpose, Florida down-played the divide between employers and employees within the Creative Class. The LDA’s cluster strategy makes exactly the same assumption. The growth of the creative industries can deliver not only increasing profits, but also more jobs and rising wages. As the definitions of the Swarm Capitalists and the Multipreneurs have highlighted, it is becoming increasing difficult to distinguish the small business owners from the self-employed workers in this sector. In the defence of their hip neighbourhoods, the Bobos and the Multitude are united against the predations of property speculators and management consultants. These makers of the future – sometimes – do have consciousness of their common identity as the class of the new.

As part of its Creative London initiative, the LDA offers a free copyright advice service that: ‘clues you up on how to protect and market your ideas.’57 Like other aspects of the cluster strategy, the legal framework of intellectual property is assumed to be in the interest of both employers and employees. Over the last few decades, national govern

ments and international agencies have been systematically tightening the copyright laws in response to lobbying from the creative industries. As with other commodities, information will only be produced if it can be sold for a profit in the marketplace. By copying intellectual property without payment, piracy disrupts the smooth functioning of the knowledge economy. In 2004, Estelle Morris – the British Arts Minister – declared that: ‘Intellectual Property Rights have always been at the heart of our Creative Industries – by encouraging and rewarding creativity.’58 According to the Blair government, the strict enforcement of the copyright laws was essential for transforming information into a commodity. If intellectual property wasn’t protected, leading British companies would go bankrupt and large numbers of workers would lose their jobs. Copyright is the legal foundation for the economic well-being of all sections of the Creative Class.

During the late-1990s, neo-liberal politicians and pundits championed the Net as the pioneer of the global information marketplace. As shown by Amazon, e-Bay and other e-commerce sites, this new means of communications is an excellent tool for selling material goods and services. Ironically, what has been much more problematic is making money out of the iconic commodity of the neo-liberal knowledge economy: information. For over a decade, the music industry has been struggling to prevent people swapping tunes for free over the Net. Napster was closed down. Teenagers were taken to court. iTunes made it easy to pay for downloads. Yet, despite all these initiatives, a generation has grown up who think that paying for music is a choice not the rule. As connection speeds have increased, other creative industries are also having to face the same problem. If you know where to look, you can download your movies, software and games for free. Instead of providing the overarching legal structure for the information economy, the restrictions of copyright are only observed in the more legitimate areas of the Net. Even with advice from the LDA, London’s creative cluster can’t rely on the law to protect its ideas.

The prophets of neo-liberal McLuhanism were betrayed by their own favourite technology: the Net. In their visions of the imaginary future, computer-mediated-communications was primarily a tool for buying and selling information commodities. Unfortunately for them, the Net was invented for a very different purpose: scientific research. Instead of organising their collective labour by trading information, academics work together by sharing knowledge with each other. Scientists advance up the career ladder by presenting papers at conferences, contributing articles to journals and distributing their findings for peer review. Not surprisingly, the pioneers of the Net built its architecture in their own image. By the time that business discovered the wonders of this technology, the social and cultural mores of the academic gift economy had been hardwired into its infrastructure. The Net is primarily a tool for sharing knowledge not selling information.59 Repeatedly over the past decade, experts have confidently asserted that the days of the hi-tech gift economy are over. But, at each moment when big business appeared to have triumphed, the next iteration of cultural collectivism has swept across the network society: home made websites, virtual communities, open source software, P2P systems, blogging and locative media. In the late-2000s, the information Panopticon is an anachronism. Ubiquitous copyright isn’t only unenforceable, but also undesirable.60

Within the academy, the scope of intellectual property is strictly limited. The peer review of scientific findings is founded upon sharing information. The critical analysis of different theories and empirical research depends upon the ‘fair use’of material from copyrighted publications. This book itself is an example of how the academic gift economy advances understanding. Constructing a montage of quotations is a potent technique for telling the history of the theorists of the new class. Selecting particular passages – and leaving out others – imposes a specific theoretical interpretation on this collection of definitions. When included in this book, a thinker’s analysis could be serving a very different purpose from that which was intended. Within the academic gift economy, knowledge must be shared not only among close colleagues, but also with bitter rivals. Under the rubric of ‘fair use’, the readers of this book are also encouraged to appropriate this text for their own ends. This section can be cited and criticised. The quotations can be quoted. A different interpretation can be drawn from the same material. When downloaded in its digital form from the OpenMute website, this book can be easily sampled, reassembled and combined with other texts. In the information age, every reader can be an author.

This democratisation of creativity exposes a growing rift inside the Creative Class. In Florida’s book, the same broad definition covered all three variants of the social prophecy: the new ruling class, the new intermediate class and the new working class. In its generosity, this concept encompassed both employers and employees. Despite the two sides of industry having some common interests, their attitudes towards copyright highlighted the differences between them. At the beginning of the dotcom boom, Netscape based its business strategy upon a paradoxical insight: software was ‘free, but not free’.61 Although this corporation is long gone, the creative industries are still coming to terms with this economic conundrum. For the Digerati who own intellectual property, the hi-tech gift economy is clearly a threat to their wealth and position. But, for the Immaterial Labourers, the position is much more ambiguous. On the one hand, the Multipreneurs want to be able to sell their work to others. On the other hand, the Cognitariat know how to get their software, music and films for free. When most members of the Creative Class don’t respect the copyright laws, prosecuting teenagers for swapping tunes seems absurd. As Gilberto Gil – the Brazilian Minister of Culture and tropicalismo superstar – has urged, a rethink of the concept of intellectual property is now long overdue.62 The smart Swarm Capitalists can find ways of making money within a post-Fordist paradigm where the boundaries between commodities and gifts are fuzzy: ‘Those who obey the logic of the net … will have a keen advantage in the new economy.’63

For many on the Left, the withering away of intellectual property is a symbol of hope in pessimistic times. While most sectors of the economy are suffering from the tyranny of management consultants, the creative industries are pioneering more participatory and fulfilling ways of working. During the past two decades, prominent thinkers on the Left have identified the employees of the knowledge economy as the new working class: the Cyborgs, the Digital Artisans, the Immaterial Labourers, the Multitude, the Cognitariat and the Cybertariat. Ironically, even these radical celebrations of post-Fordism are still caught up in the hierarchies of Fordism. As in the dotcom definitions of the Right, creativity is still a privilege of the few. Within the division of labour, a minority can make their living in this way only because the overwhelming majority of the population are doing other things. It was under Fordism that the separation of conception and action was pushed the furthest. The top-down rule of the Scientific Managers over the factory and the office rewarded obedience and punished initiative. Yet, even at the high point of this authoritarian system, the creativity of the Fordist Workers couldn’t be completely suppressed. If they weren’t allowed to express themselves at work, they seized the opportunities offered in their leisure time. The boredom of the assembly-lines was requited in the pleasures of hobbies.64

As the GLA report recognised, Londoners from all walks of life have helped to transform the city over the past fifty years from a drab imperial capital into a thriving creative centre. Ever since the 1950s, the trendsetters of its youth subcultures have played a key role in shaping its image as a cool and happening place. As both discerning consumers and innovative producers, they have defined the new styles in music, fashion, arts and design which London’s creative industries have then successively sold to their admirers across the world. What has made these movements so attractive over the years to people from very different cultures and backgrounds is their celebration of self-expression. Frustrated at work, creativity reappears on the dance floor and in the streets. Being a clubber or a fashionista is much more exciting – and glamorous – than being a labourer or a bureaucrat. London’s subcultures have always been much more than consumer cults. All of them have started as participatory movements. The new thing emerges within the community before it’s repackaged as a commodity. In particular, this Do-It-Yourself attitude has shaped the city’s music scene. London is a home of DJ culture: bootlegs, versions, remixes and mash-ups. Confounding the copyright purists, there are plenty of Londoners who don’t just listen to music, but also make music with music. For a few, their extra-curricular activities can become a lucrative career, but, in most cases, making music remains a hobby. Long before the Net escaped from the universities, the bedroom DJs were working within a hi-tech gift economy.

Looking at London’s recent cultural history, the limitations of Florida’s thesis are exposed. Ironically, this theorist draws the boundaries of the Creative Class not only too widely, but also too narrowly. On the one hand, he includes people doing routine tasks which require little or no imagination within this sector. On the other hand, this theorist ignores the extent to which contemporary culture is a participatory phenomenon. Creativity isn’t a monopoly of the Creative Class. The majority of the population who earn their living outside this sector can also be cultural producers. When Florida praises cities with hip music scenes, he misses that some of the coolest people in their clubs and bars aren’t members of his new class. For them, creativity is what happens when they’re playing outside work. In the past decade, the social impact of this DIY culture has been amplified by the spread of the Net. Amateurs are still responsible for the overwhelming majority of its content. In the mid-2000s, the most celebrated on-line businesses – like Flickr and MySpace – are services for self-publishing and community networking. The knowledge economy isn’t just a new phase of capitalism, but also an evolutionary stage beyond capitalism. Alongside orders and commodities, gifts are now one of the principle methods of organising collective labour.65 Back in the nineteenth century, some perceptive radicals anticipated this path of modernity in their concepts of the new class: the Bohemians, the General Intellect, the Educated Working Man and the Aristocracy of the Working Class. Since the 1960s, this vision of mass creativity has re-emerged as an influential archetype of the social prophecy: the Hippies, the Produsumers, the Prosumers, the Hackers, the Netizens, the Multitude and the Pro-Ams. In the information society, making information is no longer solely the economic activity of a few professionals. As Joseph Beuys emphasised: ‘The whole idea of creativity is a question of everyone’s individual identity, a question of the identity of everyone on the Earth.’66

In this vision of mass participation, the prerequisite for the democratisation of culture is the breaking down of the division between mental labour and manual labour. For over two centuries, specialisation has been the path to prosperity. From Adam Smith onwards, thinkers in successive generations have identified the new class as the small group whose profession was inventing the future. As in other areas of the economy, experts were required to carry out this vital task efficiently. The few not the many were the builders of what was to come. In this book, the montage of quotations tracks the history of the different incarnations of this class of the new. In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, the dominant archetypes of this social prophecy – more or less successfully – anticipated the evolutionary path of capitalism from liberalism into Fordism. During the past four decades, the theory of the new class has become identified with the advent of the knowledge economy. Like the factory in earlier times, the network will provide the model for the restructuring of the whole of society. But, as this collection of quotations demonstrates, the concept of the new class has never been a dispassionate method for analysing the human condition. On the contrary, the proponents of this social prophecy have always had a political agenda. Just like the predictions of technological determinists, their prophecies of the future were primarily prescriptions for the present. Knowing what will happen is a claim to control what is happening.

In the early-twenty-first century, identifying the class of the new has lost none of its political potency. On both the Right and the Left, thinkers are still promoting their ideological programmes in the guise of sociological analyses. Living in a country where cultural conformity is increasingly obligatory, Florida’s definition of the Creative Class provides a convincing business rationale for opposing homophobia, racism and puritanism. Conservative Kansas is the Fordist past.67 Bohemian Austin is the networked future. For the Mayor of London, the thesis of the Creative Class is also welcome. The hegemony of the management consultants – the ideologues of his political opponents inside and outside of the Labour party – will soon be over. The LDA’s Creative London initiative is not only economically beneficial, but also politically rewarding. But, as Benjamin reminded his readers, the critical understanding of the present begins with the analysis of the past. For evaluating visions of the new class, this methodology is particularly essential. These prophecies of the future always look forward not backwards. However, like most influential concepts, this theory has a past. Florida’s optimistic thesis of the Creative Class is a remix of an old tune. For a critical understanding of this social prophecy, examining its long history is essential. Because its nineteenth century proponents did foresee the rise of Fordism, does this necessarily mean that their twenty-first century successors’prophecies about cognitive capitalism are also correct? Above all, even if we agree with this prognosis, the question of which version of this post-Fordist paradigm will prevail is still open.

During the past thirty years, thinkers have repeatedly promoted their iterations of the Knowledge Class as the makers of the future. Compared to McKinsey’s authoritarian credo, the neo-liberal Right’s versions of this prophecy can appear progressive. This theory explains why property speculation and cultural authoritarianism are not only socially regressive, but also economically harmful. But, even in the Left’s definitions, the elitism inherent in the Adam Smith’s first iteration of the new class hasn’t disappeared. However leftfield and wacky, the Cyborgs, the Digital Artisans, the Immaterial Labourers, the Multitude, the Cognitariat and the Cybertariat are still a privileged minority. If it wants to live up to its name, the LDA’s Creative London initiative must be committed to supporting the mass creativity of all Londoners. Political democracy requires cultural democracy. If everyone is a voter, then everyone is also a creator. When mapping out the route to the future of libertarian social democracy, the vision of the new class must become inclusive. When everyone can participate within the General Intellect, creativity will no longer be a privilege. The class of the new will then be superseded by the civilisation of humanity.

_____________

1 GLA Economics, Creativity

2 GLA Economics, Creativity, page 5.

3 See Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, pages 215-314.

4 See David Panos, ‘Create Creative Clusters’; and Benedict Seymour, ‘Shoreditch

and the Creative Destruction of the Inner City’.

5 See Aufheben, ‘Keep on Smiling’.

6 See Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society.

7 For a more detailed analysis of the historical origins of the information society

prophecy, see Richard Barbrook, Imaginary Futures.

8 See Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations Volume 1, pages 7-25.

9 See Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, page 456-476; and Humphrey Jennings, Pandaemonium, pages xxxv-xxxix.

10 See Aristotle, The Politics, pages 101-234; and Muhammad Ibn Khaldûn, The Mugaddimah, pages 91-261.

11 See Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations Volume 1, pages 401-445; Volume 2,
pages 213-253. Also see Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society.

12 See Karl Marx, Grundrisse, pages 690-743; Capital Volume 1, pages 492-639,
1034-1065.

13 See the analyses of the changing social composition of the twentieth century
European and American class systems in Sergio Bologna, ‘The Tribe of Moles’; andAntonio Negri, ‘Keynes and the Capitalist Theories of the State Post-1929’.

14 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, page 20.

15 For an explanation of this transformation of capitalism, see Michel Aglietta, A

Theory of Capitalist Regulation.

16 Henry Ford, My Life and Work, page 103.

17 See Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls and David Weinberger, The Clue
train Manifesto; and Jonas Ridderstråle and Kjell Nordström, Funky Business.

18 Peter Drucker, The Effective Executive, page 4.

19 For an analysis of this transition, see Carlo Vercellone, ‘Sens et Enjeux de la

Transition vers le Capitalisme Cognitif’.

20 See Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations Volume 1, pages 7-25.

21 See Karl Marx, Capital Volume 1, pages 553-564.

22 Paul Cardan [Cornelius Castoriadis], Modern Capitalism and Revolution, page 3.

23 See Alain Lipietz, Towards a New Economic Order, pages 14-23; and Antonio
Negri, ‘Archaeology and Project’.

24 See Friedrich Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order, pages 33-56, 77-118;
and Ludwig von Mises, Human Action, pages 251-256, 327-350.

25 See Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, ‘The Californian Ideology’.

26 George Gilder, Wealth and Poverty, page 273.

27 See Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, pages 21-35.

28 See Karl Kautsky, The Class Struggle.

29 See Ralf Dahrendorf, Class and Class Conflict in an Industrial Society, pages 136-

141; and Nicos Poulantzas, Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, pages 285-286, 328-331.

30 See Nicos Poulantzas, Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, pages 211-212, 268-269.

31 William Whyte, The Organisation Man, page 183.

32 Elancentric, ‘Project Description’.

33 Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, page 69.

34 See Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, page xiv.

35 See GLA Economics, Creativity, pages 4-11, 55-56.

36 See GLA Economics, Creativity, page 6.

37 GLA Economics, Creativity, page 3.

38 See Doug Henwood, After the New Economy, pages 71-78, 184-185; and

Aufheben, ‘Keep on Smiling’.

39 See Raphael Samuel, ‘The Workshop of the World’.

40 See Karl Marx, Capital Volume 3, pages 241-313.

41 See Michel Aglietta, A Theory of Capitalist Regulation, pages 151-272; Alain Lipietz, Towards a New Economic Order, pages 1-13; and Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World, pages 68-109.

42 For the McKinsey credo, see Tom Peters and Robert Waterman, In Search of Excellence.

43 See Shoshana Zuboff, In the Age of the Smart Machine, pages 315-361.

44 For an account of the rise and fall of Enron, see Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, The Smartest Guys in the Room.

45 See Benjamin Coriat, L’Atelier et le Robot, pages 25-31. 46 See Creative London, Believe.

47 See GLA Economics, Creativity, pages 31-50; and Creative London, Believe.

48 GLA Economics, Creativity, page 33.

49 For the story of the GLC, see Ken Livingstone, If Voting Changed Anything, They’d Abolish It; and Maureen Mackintosh and Hilary Wainwright, A Taste of Power.

50 See GLC, The London Industrial Strategy; The State of the Art or the Art of the State? 

51 See Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, pages 235-260, 283-302.

52 For an account of a local community’s struggle against social cleansing in East London, see Hari Kunzru, ‘A Dispatch from Tony’s Café’. Anthony Iles and Ben Seymour’s article, ‘The (Re)Occupation’, stresses that the Broadway Market campaign was primarily a battle to reinstate long-standing amenities of use to the (still) predominantly working class population of the area. For more info see: <34broadwaymarket.omweb.org>.

53 See Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, pages 302-314.

54 See Gautam Malkani, ‘Look Beyond the Media Heartlands for the Full Story’.

55 See Benedict Seymour, ‘Shoreditch and the Creative Destruction of the Inner City’.

56 See Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, pages 315-326.

57 See Creative London, Believe, page 9.

58 Estelle Morris in Department of Culture, Media and Sports, ‘Creative Industries Forum On Intellectual Property Launched’.

59 See Richard Barbrook, ‘The Hi-Tech Gift Economy’; and Mark Geise, ‘From ARPAnet to the Internet’.

60 See Richard Barbrook, ‘The Regulation of Liberty’.

61 For the story of Netscape, see Michael Cusumano and David Yoffie, Competing on Internet Time.

62 See the interview with Gil in Julian Dibbell, ‘We Pledge Allegiance to the Penguin’.

63 Kevin Kelly, New Rules for the New Economy, page 160.

64 For an analysis of the differences between these two forms of working, see Miklós Haraszti, Worker in a Worker’s State, pages 138-146.

65 For an ironic take on this historical moment, see Richard Barbrook, ‘Cyber-Communism’.

66 Joseph Beuys in Lucrezia de Domizio Durini, The Felt Hat, page 67.

67 For a description of this antithesis of the creative city, see Thomas Frank, What’s The Matter With Kansas?.