Critique comes first. We need to identify the social relations underpinning the creative economy to effectively challenge them.

The struggle takes on new dimensions as workers begin collectively organizing to address and resist precarious conditions. Alongside established unions in the film and television industries, workers in sectors not often considered sites of labour, such as modelling, art, and writing, are identifying and challenging conditions of their exploitation. Cultural workers in a range of sectors are reaffirming their status as workers by embracing the term “precariat,” whose roots lie in European social and protest movements (Prickett 2012; Standing 2011; de Peuter 2011). Canadian freelance writers, who have historically organized in professional associations, are turning to union models to collectively improve low wages and exploitative contracts (N. Cohen 2011). The US-based National Writers Union has launched a “Pay The Writer!” campaign to protest free labour online and to set a fair wage scale for online freelance journalists. Canadian Artists’ Representation/le Front des artistes Canadiens (CARFAC), which represents visual artists in Canada, is demanding payment for artists when paintings are re-sold, as the labour power embedded in their work generates surplus value for sellers (CBC News 2011). Building on CARFAC’s model, artists in New York City formed Working Artists in the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.) to organize around the demand that artists be paid for their labour in gallery shows. Also in New York, The Model Alliance was formed to recognize modelling as work and to challenge the exploitative relations that underpin models’ affective labour (de Peuter 2012). Key to these initiatives is that cultural workers are naming and addressing the precise conditions of their exploitation.

Emergent efforts by cultural workers to collectively organize are significant for those concerned with labour movement renewal. These initiatives are attempting to organize the unorganized, often through experimental formations that could serve as “test cases” for how to organize precarious workers in a flexible economy (de Peuter 2010). These initiatives are raising awareness of labour struggles and power relations in industries that are generally under the labour movement’s radar, either by establishing alliances with trade unions or by organizing outside of union structures. Underpinning these efforts are not demands to return to standard forms of employment, but rather policy proposals and demands that can build worker power outside of any particular workplace; demands that aim to reclaim non-standard work as a viable option for autonomous, flexible, yet secure work (de Peuter 2011; Vosko 2010). It remains to be seen if these efforts can build solidarity with the labour movement and politicize cultural workers, or if organizations will reinforce the individualism and entrepreneurialism underscoring cultural work under neoliberalism (Abrahamian 2012; N. Cohen 2011). Yet these initiatives signify changes underway that could have implications for labour politics and the way culture is produced.

As the rise in cultural worker organizing demonstrates, it is crucial to identify the processes, practices, and social relations that undermine autonomy in cultural work so that they can be interrupted. The need to disrupt the feelings of inevitability and self-responsibility that still pervade many cultural workers’ outlooks is urgent, and requires a critical political economy approach that understands material conditions as “always active, always unsettled, always subject to change” (Artz 2006, 45). After all, in some of Marx’s most famous ([1888] 1978c) words, the point is not just to interpret the world, but to change it.