What's talent got to do with it? The collective labourer and the rise of Barcelona's digital economy

Abstract

This article explains the recent rise to prominence of Barcelona's digital economy, and, specifically, the role played by the city's “talent”. After developing a Marxian approach, we show how Barcelona's success rests upon a good supply of low-cost, appropriately skilled labour fit for insertion into labour processes that can generally not be described as innovative or of high-knowledge, high-skill intensity. There is, in fact, a dearth of highly skilled labour-power in the city, and inflows of foreign labour and outflows of freshly trained “talent” from the city's bootcamps are only swelling the ranks of a lower-paid, moderately skilled knowledge workforce—many of whom work in low-quality jobs. Finally, we show how leading startups in the digital economy are contributing to the expansion of “non-standard” forms of precarious work. We conclude by highlighting the limits to the development and realisation of human productive subjectivity or talent under capital today, even in a widely hyped technopole such as Barcelona.