>Right, but isn't that a qualitative, rather than a quantitative
>argument? That is, that the labour involved in moving things around
>hasn't been changed all that much by immaterial/affective labour. I
>guess part of what I'm wondering is how we would go about measuring
>whether the changes brought about to a physical job by informational or
>affective factors are significant enough to be evidence of the hegemony
>of immaterial labour.
I wouldn't want to argue that truck driving and any number of other predominantly physical occupations are being changed by tech. But some people, from Gingrich to H/N, get so carried away by immateriality that they overlook how much physical labor goes on. I think it reflects the tendency of intellectuals - even Marxists - to overlook manual labor and see only the mental part.
Doug