Topic: On the Invention of Creativity in Capitalism

When: October 28, 2020, 6:00 PM

Where: Zoom Meeting

The old bourgeois ideal of leisure prompted Marx, Keynes, and Russell to reflect on the abolition of work. Yet, this ideal of leisure has shifted into the practice of “free time” (including reduced working hours), accompanying the rise of consumer culture. The practice of compensating for the toil of labor through increased consumption is currently transforming into a test of agility within the work itself—a process that, in the knowledge society, morphs into creativity. This goes so far that work is interpreted in entrepreneurial terms (as “creative entrepreneurship”). Is this the “humanization of work”—promised in the 1970s but never realized—that the philosopher Elizabeth Anderson calls for on different grounds: namely, the unique social fact that private authority is still exercised within business enterprises?