The recreative industries emerge from my long-standing preoccupation with thinking what a refusal of labour might look like as a generative proposal; one that can then be incarnated in practices, subjectivities and organizational forms understood as collective repertoires. Many of those post-work scenarios that have considered the technological problem of automation and digitalization have addressed the issue of free labour quite effectively. They have had noticeably less to say, however, about those forms a workforce freed from labour can take. In this respect, I believe the current debates around post-work would benefit from a more granular description of what anti-work activities and ways of organizing might consist of, what their subjects, procedures and objects (in Marxian terms, their political and technical composition) could be.
This article was published within the pamphlet ‘Competition and Cooperation’, in a series of 7 as part of the Radical Open Access II conference, which took place June 26-27 at Coventry University. More information about this conference and about the contributors to this pamphlet can be found at: http://radicaloa.co.uk/conferences/ ROA2. This pamphlet was made possible due to generous funding from The Post Office, a project of Coventry University’s Centre for Postdigital Cultures and the combined efforts of authors, editors, designers & printers.