The (Rise and) Fall of the Creative Class
Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class and urban
renewal 'guru', has had a great idea for a new book (The Flight of the Creative
Class: The New Global Competition for Talent): declare that your chronically
silly but successful previous work was a bit one-sided, add a modishly gloomy
bit of social conscience, then repeat most of the fatuous assumptions you started
out with.
Whereas before The Creative Class was on the point of saving humanity one gentrified
former industrial zone at a time, now it turns out that the creative class's
ascendancy is actually creating a seriously uneven, over-concentrated and 'spiky'
world. The 'creative cities for cultural creatives' dynamic produces not zingy
diverse hubs of vibrancy but – shock! – creative ghettos that the
cripplingly uncreative poor persons of the world just can't afford to live in.
It’s a revelation.
Actually, Florida still likes the world's 'creative cities', but it's just there's
only 10 of them and their demographic profile is about as diverse as Pitcairn
island's. Housing bubbles are making the archetypal creative cities uninhabitable
for all but the already rich; gentrification is pricing out not only the creatively
challenged residuum but more seriously now also the young 'creative' entrepreneurs.
It’s horrible.
Fortunately for his career as a regurgitator of undead liberal ideology, Florida
manages to remain deluded about the real causes of the inequity he now decries.
Rather than discovering structural problems with the capitalist economy as a
path to universal human creativity, he believes that if America can just get
back to the Rooseveltian good old days and start seriously investing in the
creativity of the wider population (public works projects? collective mural
painting?) it may be able to hold on to a diminished but respectable place in
a 'multipolar' new global order.
In fact, for Florida, on top of the growing economic divide which for some reason
is accompanying the rise of the creative economy, it's the right-wing post-9/11
crackdown that's most seriously stifling the US' ability to beat its 'creativity
deficit'! The clever, highly skilled upscale immigrants that the US economy
depends on are turned off by Bush's restrictions on foreign labour (Florida
doesn't consider the crucial role of illegalised immigrants in servicing the
'creative'/service economy, of course, nor the way the Patriot Act helps produce
a pool of cheap precarious labour fit for the US of Walmart, Starbucks, etc.).
Amusingly, Florida seems to think that the US' shortage of indigenous 'creatives',
and not the current account and trade deficits (which are mere symptoms of the
former, apparently), is the real crisis facing the US.
Unsurprisingly, Florida goes on to argue that only a renewed sense of the importance
of (you guessed it) creativity can save the US – and the rest of the global
creative economy. The underlying economic reasons for US decline – which,
of course, also lie at the origin of the 'creative class' and the 'creative
economy''s ascendancy – remain quite opaque, allowing him to return once
again to the universal panacea of vibrant, dense (!) and tolerant cities. If
we could just invest in creativity like we invest in sport, even dumb people
could be made to activate their latent potential and the US would reverse its
decline.
As in anti-Semitic 'theories' about capitalism being okay if it weren't for
the contingent obstacle to universal well-being posed by parasitic Jewish financiers,
Florida suggests that if it weren't for the Republicans and their militaristic
imperialism, the US could get on with reinvesting in creative jobs for all.
Soon America would become the creative Reich it should rightfully be, with everyone's
inner potential deployed to maximum economic benefit and no more wars... The
similarity, in terms of unproductive labour, between military and creative economies
seems to pass him by, let alone the interdependence of the two.
In the end the term 'creative' for Florida is synonymous with ‘middle
class’, creativity being located not only in the usual exalted forms of
media and IT work, but also the traditional professions, engineering, and so
on. Unfortunately, capitalism seems to have a problem turning everyone into
members of this 'creative' middle class, though the idea that it might somehow
do so isn't exactly fresh. Like Negri and Hardt, but without the professed ambivalence
regarding the construction of a global superstate, Florida sees the answer to
this problem in a global effort to foster a creative multitude. He calls for
a global New Deal, since the economic polarisation he describes is after all
not just an American problem but a global one. To really address the downside
of the 'creative revolution', some kind of international coordination of capitalist
strategy is now necessary and this will involve management of the global flows
of population. 'People whose minds are ready to become means of production'
will be fine, and their smartness should be rewarded by a tolerant immigration
policy attuned to entrepreneurial acumen, but the rest of the under-exploited
biomass will need some tweaking and some tending if they are to get by in the
new, integrated global order.
With the goal of bringing more people into the creative class, Florida's wishful
thinking nevertheless implies new forms of biopolitical control: the global
labour pool needs to be reorganised to extract more creativity from more people.
At this point his call for tolerance and diversity shows its true face as a
higher form of the barbarism he deplores in current US immigration policy.
Unfortunately, as a kind of 'mental Stalinist' (or mentalist Stalin) still enthused
about the economic benefits of maximising new forces of intellectual production,
Florida doesn't seem to realise that the creative economy is in itself a symptom
of – and stimulus to – the crisis of profitability which is now
starting to affect his chosen people. As the global bubble of grows, so the
centres of 'creativity' (aka privileged nodes in the circulation of this fictitious
capital) themselves become too expensive to reproduce.[1] It's ironic that from
Florida's perspective it's the potential shortage of entrepreneurs that threatens
the global economy, not, for example, its reliance on financial and other service
industries at the expense of productive industry.
Florida's switch from upbeat reformist spin about the creative economy (in 2002)
to gloomy reformist spin about its unsustainability (2005) is in itself a sign
of crisis. He seems to be always about 3 years late with his grand prognoses
– hailing the creative class in 2002? If his timing is as good with this
book as last time, the housing bubble in the USA will have collapsed by the
time it’s in paperback. At least, however, Florida is right to emphasize
the US' complacency about its global dominance, though his prescription for
restoring it to a healthier, less arrogant condition in the global economy seriously
underestimates the depth of the crisis.
Note
[1] Fictitious capital is, very briefly, the gap between the total value produced
through capitalist accumulation and the total price – the ‘paper
claims’ on this value. This is expressed as a global inflationary bubble
of which the dotcom bubble and current housing and commodities bubbles are just
(to mix our metaphors) the tip of the iceberg. In the current global conjuncture,
capital produces more claims on value than value. As Loren Goldner puts it:
‘Today, capitalist paper expands and social reproduction contracts.’
See ‘1973 Redux? Continuity
and Discontinuity in the Decline of Dollar-Centered World Accumulation’
by Loren Goldner, http://www.metamute.org/?q=en/node/7742
Related Links
Richard Florida, The
Flight of The Creative Class: The New Global Competition for Talent,
Collins: 2005
Richard
Florida Creativity Group
This text originally appeared as an article on Metamute.org: http://www.metamute.org/?q=en/Create-and-or-Be-Damned