Creative class and creative work: interrelation, exploitation and contradictions of development

The development of the creative economy has been one of the most popular areas of economic theory and economic policy for three decades. Despite the constant growth of the creative class and government measures to support the creative sector, the size of the creative economy remains at 3% on average worldwide. The purpose of this article is to show the contradictions and limiting factors in the development of the creative class. The argumentation and conclusions of the article are based primarily on a political economy approach. The main information sources of the study are the following statistical databases: Russian statistical base (Rosstat), ILOSTAT (employment by occupational groups). The theoretical and empirical conclusions presented in the work prove that the quantitative growth of the creative class is not identical to its qualitative development; that the statistical measurement of the creative class through employment in creative industries significantly distorts the original meaning of the category of creative labor and several times underestimates the real number of creative professionals; that the uneven development of the creative class among countries is due, on the one hand, to inequality in economic development and intellectual migration from peripheral states to the center, on the other; that the association of creative professionals into a class has no economic basis due to the incompleteness of the formation of socio-economic stratification; that the creative content of labor under the capitalist mode of production does not eliminate the alienation of surplus value, and the exploitation of creative labor takes on a new form - the alienation of intellectual property rights and subsequent intellectual rent.