Everyone's an artist? Class, precarity, and the distribution of creative labor

This article examines the endurance of traditional class labels among precarious workers in post-recession Dublin. It argues that tensions remain be- tween creatives and non-creatives due to: (1) divergent class concepts, (2) a lack of social engagement, and (3) unequal access to economic, social, and cultural capital, which creatives mobilize to protect some highly vocational artistic labor. It is thus not a shared experience of the same kind of precarious exploitation that unites the precariat but a trap held in common, whereby self-actualization through labor is construed as a route to freedom. Drawing on Karl Marx’s theory of eman- cipation, I suggest that attempts to redress precarization should focus on under- mining this encroachment of work into life, which I argue results in exploitation and alienation for all precarious workers.