This confers a unique and important quality on the creative worker within the creative process, namely that it is difficult to mechanise the creative process and hence to substitute machines or devices for the humans, reversing a trend that has dominated much of history. Implementing a creative decision is not really a creative role, we would argue, but making one is. (Bakhshi, Freeman and Higgs 2013, 22)
Based on this approach the authors calculated that in 2010, 8.7% of the UK workforce was part of the creative economy and that the majority of these workers were employed outside the core creative industries.
The two latter approaches have a strong focus on measuring occupations. However, in capitalism, “the commodity-form of the product of labour […] is the economic cellform” (Marx 1867, 90). The commodity is the economic form that objectifies value generated by humans and whose sale results in the realisation of monetary profit. Like Marx, it therefore makes sense to start economic analysis with the commodity form. Speaking about the information sector, this means that one must have a look at the commodity form of information as the economic cell-form of the information sector. The focus on creative occupations makes individual activities that generate novel information and are based on highly skilful and qualified labour the cell‐form of this sector. The notions of creative labour, creative industries, and the creative economy overestimate the role of highly educated and qualified non-replaceable labour. Many information commodities are generated in a division of labour that involves occupations that produce information, services, and physical products, that have varying forms of qualification (low, medium, high skill), etc. The point is that for the production of certain information commodities, the labour-time of a diverse set of workers is needed. All of their labour-time is reflected in the commodity. A labour theory of value applied to information sector must therefore start with the information commodity produced by a collective (but diverse) information worker as the basic focus.
“Editing a film is a creative task – but operating a 6 plate 35 mm Steenbeck editing table under the direction of the editor is not” (Bakhshi, Freeman and Higgs 2013, 22). The point here is that both the editor and the operator’s labour-time is objectified in the film as commodity and that they work in the same division of labour of the movie industry. To argue that the first’s labour is creative and the second is not can easily create the impression that only skilled workers are creating surplus-value and unskilled ones do not. In the production of an information commodity such as a film both of them are however productive workers, that is the exploitation of their labour that is expended in time results in commodities that are sold in order to accumulate capital.
Chapter Twelve | The Information Economy
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Introduction