172 TOPIA 38 ANDERSON Benjamin Anderson “But I’m a Professional…”: Collectivity and the Freelance Writer A review of Cohen, Nicole S. 2016. Writers’ Rights: Freelance Journalism in a Digital Age. Mon- treal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Is proletarianization still a potential danger for capital? On one hand, according to Guy Standing (2011), workers today face a common condition of precariousness in which jobs are moved to part-time or piecework models, social and organizational protections are removed, and wages remain stagnant or are lowered through new employment arrangements and industry deregulation. Standing argues that this shared condition has the potential to unite workers as a class, what he calls the precariat. On the other hand, under neoliberal conditions, workers are isolated and individualized and the formation of class consciousness is stunted by internalized entrepreneurial subjectivities (Foucault 2008). As individual enterprises, today’s workers are competitive agents who pursue their own interests and promote their own brands in order to survive in this precarious labour environment. According to Nicole Cohen, in her new book, Writers’ Rights: Freelance Journalism in a Digital Age (2016), cultural workers—and speciically, as we will see, freelance writers—are in a particularly tense position as they navigate a world of work in which they are increasingly expected to work for exposure more than for a wage and in which professional ideology and vocational passion serve as hindrances to eforts to collectively organize. Moreover, seeing themselves irst as creatives or as professionals, these workers do not necessarily identify with the experiences and conditions they share with more traditional industrial workers. his introduces a serious problem: How can workers organize to challenge exploitation and to improve conditions of overwork, low wages and contractual insecurity while facing such hindrances to the development of class consciousness? Cohen’s book sets the stage to answer this question. In it, she maps the journalis- tic labour process as it pertains to the freelancer and explores experiments in and challenges for collective organization amongst freelance writers. To accomplish this, Cohen tracks the downward trajectory of conditions for freelancers in terms