Development of The Concept of Creative Labor and The Formation of The Creative Class

This article discusses the issues of the development of the creative economy as one of the key directions in economic theory and policy over the past thirty years in the context of the digital economy and information technologies. Despite the continuous growth of the creative class and government measures to support the creative sector, the share of the creative economy in the overall global economy remains steadily around 3%. The goal of this article is to identify the contradictions and factors that limit the development of the creative class. The arguments and conclusions of the article are primarily based on a political economy approach. The main sources of information for the research are statistical data databases. The theoretical and empirical conclusions of the research show that the increase in the number of creative class representatives is not equivalent to its qualitative development; that the statistical measurement of the creative class through employment in creative industries significantly distorts the concept of creative labor and greatly underestimates the actual number of creative professionals; that the uneven development of the creative class among countries is explained, on one hand, by economic inequality and the migration of intellectual resources from developing countries to more developed centers, and on the other hand; that uniting creative professionals into a single category has no economic basis, as the socio-economic stratification is still incomplete; that the creative nature of labor under capitalism does not eliminate the alienation of surplus value, but rather the exploitation of creative labor takes on a new form – the alienation of intellectual property rights and the acquisition of intellectual rent.