> of intensifying labour. Certainly no one, not even a Slashdotter, could
> argue that free software increases leisure. Rather, the software
> production as "immaterial labour" remains labour directed towards
> establishing, reproducing relations - relations between the common use
> base of software whose ultimate reason for existence remains opaque.
Hmm, there's a difference between labor which reproduces certain social relations, which is really the ideology biz, and labor in its own right, which can be aesthetically fulfilling. Free software has spawned some mighty interesting aesthetic forms, which have improved the quality of our leisure time: wondrous 3D videogames, Net activism, etc.
> * What is the "free software" equivalent of sabotaging the production
> line?
Why limit utopia to sabotage, to a stoppage of the machine? Dream further: a world where production nourishes human beings/the planetary ecology instead of preying upon them, and where people have jobs worthy of human beings.
> * Are "free software" geeks subject to the law of value? Or is immaterial
> labour by definition not compensated by value, and thus not accountable
> (both in the economic sense and in the 'moral' sense)?
Immaterial labor doesn't exist -- software always has a body: the code it's written in. Compensation isn't a bad thing; a free society would be characterized by free and fair exchange, rather than unfree/unfair expropriation. Maybe open source software is creating the equivalent of an electronic global commons.
-- Dennis