The Wages of Dreamwork is an ambitious and timely contribution to debates on labour, culture and social reproduction under contemporary capitalism. Drawing from autonomist Marxism, feminist theory, critical management studies and the history of avant-garde artistic practice, Stevphen Shukaitis and Joanna Figiel examine how creativity, desire and the search for meaningful activity have become increasingly central to capitalist accumulation. The book argues that the conditions historically associated with artistic and cultural labour—precarity, self-exploitation, blurred distinctions between work and life, affective investment and entrepreneurial self-management—have now become generalized across the wider economy. In doing so, it offers an important extension of social reproduction theory into the terrain of contemporary creative labour. The title itself announces one of the book’s central political interventions. The Wages of Dreamwork deliberately evokes the history of the Wages for Housework movement and the feminist critique of unwaged reproductive labour developed in the 1970s. The authors make this explicit when they describe the title as referring, first, to the Wages for Housework movement that sought ‘to make visible and struggle over the work of social reproduction including child care, housework, and other work involved in that’ (10). This is not simply a rhetorical gesture. The book’s core argument is that contemporary capitalism increasingly depends upon forms of labour that are experienced as personally fulfilling, self-expressive and freely chosen, and therefore become difficult to recognize as sites of exploitation.
The Wages of Dreamwork: Class Composition and the Social Reproduction of Cultural Labour, Stevphen Shukaitis and Joanna Figiel
Minor Compositions, Colchester, 2024. 240 pp., £18.00 pb
ISBN:9781570274077
The book begins from a deceptively simple question: ‘What is work good for?’ Rather than approaching work solely through the classical Marxist critique of alienation, the authors are concerned with the contradictory desires attached to labour itself. They note that many people seek not simply to escape work altogether, but to escape forms of work that prevent them from engaging in activities they find meaningful. The problem emerges when capitalism increasingly organizes exploitation precisely through those desires for meaningful activity. As the authors write, the book focuses on ‘the activities we pursue because they are personally gratifying and rewarding, practices we want to pursue and develop, regardless of whether they are paid or not’ 6-7). This insight gives the book much of its political force. The argument is not simply that artists and cultural workers are poorly paid or precarious, though they often are. Rather, the book demonstrates how the ‘psychic wages’ attached to creative labour become mechanisms for intensifying exploitation. Workers are encouraged to identify entirely with their labour, to understand work as self-realization, and therefore to accept conditions that would otherwise be intolerable. In this respect, the book extends one of the key insights of feminist social reproduction theory: capitalism depends not only upon labour-power, but upon the reproduction of subjectivities willing to submit themselves to labour under particular moral and affective conditions.
This is where the book’s connection to the Wages for Housework tradition becomes especially important. The feminist movements of the 1970s insisted that capitalism relies upon enormous quantities of labour that are systematically naturalized and rendered invisible precisely because they appear outside the wage relation. Housework, childrearing, care work, emotional maintenance and the reproduction of daily life were treated as expressions of femininity or love rather than labour, despite being indispensable to capitalist accumulation. What The Wages of Dreamwork demonstrates is that contemporary creative economies function through a remarkably similar concealment. The social cooperation that sustains cultural production—friendship networks, informal mentoring, emotional support, collaboration, collective experimentation and precarious forms of mutual aid—is continually appropriated while being represented ideologically as individual talent or entrepreneurial initiative. The mythology of the autonomous creative subject obscures the dense infrastructures of social reproduction upon which creative labour depends. In this sense, the book makes a major contribution by bringing feminist analyses of reproductive labour into dialogue with debates around immaterial labour, cultural production and post-Fordist work.
One of the strongest sections of the book develops this analysis through an examination of artistic labour and value production. Drawing on figures ranging from Duchamp and Yves Klein to Gustav Metzger, the authors situate contemporary cultural labour within longer histories of avant-garde attempts to reorganize the relationship between art, labour and politics. Particularly useful is their insistence that artistic labour should not be treated as exceptional or marginal. Rather, the conditions of artistic work increasingly prefigure more generalized transformations in labour processes themselves. As the book argues, the ‘passionate and self-motivated labour of the artisan’ has been generalized through ‘management theory and practices within the knowledge economy and post-Fordist working practices’ (40). This argument places the book in productive tension with dominant currents in business management and organization studies. Much contemporary management literature celebrates creativity, flexibility, innovation and entrepreneurial subjectivity as inherently positive organizational capacities. By contrast, The Wages of Dreamwork foregrounds the social costs embedded within those categories. Management discourse often treats passion for work as an inexhaustible resource while neglecting the reproductive conditions necessary to sustain workers materially and emotionally over time. Creativity is abstracted from the infrastructures of care and cooperation upon which it depends.
The book is particularly effective when it traces how artistic and countercultural critiques of Fordist labour were absorbed into neoliberal management practices. Here the influence of autonomist Marxism and of Boltanski and Chiapello’s The New Spirit of Capitalism is evident throughout. The authors show how demands for autonomy, flexibility, self-expression and the refusal of rigid industrial discipline were recuperated and transformed into mechanisms for deepening exploitation. The collapse of distinctions between work and non-work, labour and leisure, vocation and employment, becomes one of the defining features of contemporary capitalism. The result is a condition in which workers are never entirely outside labour processes because subjectivity itself has become productive. Some of the book’s most compelling passages emerge in its engagement with Situationist practices of psychogeography and autonomist traditions of workers’ inquiry. These chapters explore how the metropolis itself functions as a diffuse site of value production, where communication, sociability, mobility and affect become productive forces for capital accumulation. The authors ask: ‘If the metropolis were a factory, how would it go on strike?’ (50) This question effectively condenses the larger political problem posed by the book. If labour increasingly operates through sociality, communication and creativity, then resistance can no longer be confined to traditional workplace struggles alone.
At times, however, the breadth of theoretical references can become overwhelming. The book moves rapidly across autonomist theory, art history, cultural studies, urban theory, management studies and political philosophy. While this interdisciplinarity is one of its strengths, some sections risk becoming overly schematic or compressed. Certain concepts—especially class composition and the social factory—are invoked with considerable theoretical density, which may make parts of the text difficult for readers unfamiliar with autonomist traditions. Nonetheless, the authors generally succeed in grounding these abstractions in concrete analyses of cultural labour and artistic practice. The book’s concluding political horizon is significant because it refuses both nostalgia for Fordist labour arrangements and simplistic celebrations of creativity. Instead, it insists upon rebuilding collective infrastructures capable of sustaining forms of life outside entrepreneurial individualism. This is also why the role of Minor Compositions as the book’s publisher matters politically. The open access statement included at the beginning of the book describes publishing as part of ‘the free and autonomous sharing of knowledges and experiences’ and frames the project as contributing to the commons. Minor Compositions functions not simply as a publisher, but as a long-standing infrastructure for collective study, militant research and autonomous knowledge production outside increasingly financialized academic institutions.
This relationship between form and content is one of the book’s most compelling dimensions. The Wages of Dreamwork is itself embedded within the kinds of collective intellectual and political infrastructures that it defends. At a moment when universities and cultural institutions are increasingly governed by precarity, professionalization and market imperatives, projects like Minor Compositions preserve spaces where critical thought can circulate according to different social values. Ultimately, The Wages of Dreamwork makes an important contribution to contemporary Marxist debates by reconnecting analyses of labour to the problem of social reproduction. Its central claim is that capitalism today increasingly exploits not only labour-time, but desire, imagination, sociability and the very capacities through which collective life is reproduced. Against the isolation of entrepreneurial subjectivity and the privatization of creativity, the book insists that the production of culture is always social and cooperative. In doing so, it extends the political insights of feminist struggles over reproductive labour into one of the central terrains of contemporary capitalism: the organization of creativity itself.
Silvia Federici is a feminist writer, teacher and activist whose work develops Marxist feminist analyses of social reproduction, reproductive labour and the commons. A co-founder of the International Feminist Collective and the Wages for Housework campaign, she is the author of Caliban and the Witch, Revolution at Point Zero and numerous works on capitalism, gender and labour.