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On Writers as Scabs, Whores, and Interns, And the Jacobin Problem
But the conversation around the payment of working writers is still inadequate, except for a few spots, and that’s because while people are able to understand, say, bringing coffee to your boss or filling out surveys or tweeting endlessly as forms of “work” that should be compensated, they’re still largely incapable of understanding the invisible kinds of labour that go into writing, or that writing is in fact a form of labour. Danielle Lee, a zoologist and blogger, was called a “whore” when she declined someone’s request to blog for free.
For all this, on a large scale, we can certainly a blame a capitalist framework which relies on the extraction of maximum profits from exploited labour. But I’d like to also suggest that too many of my writer and publisher friends are to blame for the current state of affairs, because they’ve bought into the idea that writing is some kind of special snowflake activity, practically a divine ordination that will bring about tectonic shifts in the world and that it should therefore be nothing more than a “labour of love.”
For all this, on a large scale, we can certainly a blame a capitalist framework which relies on the extraction of maximum profits from exploited labour. But I’d like to also suggest that too many of my writer and publisher friends are to blame for the current state of affairs, because they’ve bought into the idea that writing is some kind of special snowflake activity, practically a divine ordination that will bring about tectonic shifts in the world and that it should therefore be nothing more than a “labour of love.”
4 pages, Unknown Binding
Published December 10, 2013
6 people want to read
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