For young workers, interning is a strategy for speculating on one's asset portfolio. Students and graduates undertake internships as a way of maintaining their self-appreciation and avoiding depreciation in a "human capital regime." In this article, we explore the specific example of interning in the creative industries as the self-management of human capital vis-à-vis the human capital theses. Taking three cultural objects and recent representations of the issue of unpaid internships-Intern magazine, an advert for a "volunteering opportunity" student placement, and testimonies from interns-we analyze how unpaid work in the creative industries and the neoliberal version of human capital entrepreneurship can be seen as embodied by interns.

The ideas and practices of the Situationist International (SI) and the Italian autonomists of the 1960s and 1970s continue to provide inspiration for developing strategies for contesting capitalism. This essay proposes to bring together concepts from these traditions, working between the Situationist concept of psychogeography and the dérive, with autonomist writings on the shaping of the metropolis. Drawing on the autonomist concepts of class composition analysis and conducting a workers’ inquiry, it will be suggested that they can be usefully combined with psychogeographic investigations and methods to understand the shifting terrain of surplus value production within the metropolis based on an analysis of these transformations to develop new forms of political action and ways to sabotage the accumulation process.

This article addresses the class composition of artistic and cultural labor in the metropolis: practices bringing with them political possibilities and potentials for renewed economic growth, but also the threat of exploitation and precarity. To shed light on the area of knowledge engaging with the lived realities of creative workers and the forms of subjectivation occurring in forms of labor, we bring together existing accounts addressing the politics of cultural work and the findings of our “Metropolitan Factory” research project. The research project, based on an investigation of the conditions and activities of independent cultural producers and drawing from the tradition of workers' inquiry, addresses, among other issues, the spatial organization of the creative labor process, the language used by workers to describe relations between life and work, and various forms of self-expression.

No abstract

No abstract