Terms such as material and immaterial labor create unnecessary confusion, first of all because what is called "immaterial labor" -- "production of services," e.g., software troubleshooting in response to customer demands, which "result in no material and durable good" (Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, _Empire_, p. 290) -- is as material as what is referred to as "material labor": it requires physical exertions of workers (e.g., listening, watching, thinking, typing, etc.) and depends on existence of reliable material infrastructure (e.g., phone lines). "The other face of immaterial labor," according to Hardt and Negri, is "the _affective labor_ of human contact and interaction" such as health and entertainment services (pp. 292-293). Far from "immaterial," such industries tend to involve heavy bodily exertions (e.g, lifting and bathing adult bodies, performing routines in theme-park costumes) and far more labor-intensive than capital-intensive manufacturing industries.
The changes that Hardt and Negri's unfortunate terminology imperfectly captures are part of an interconnected series of changes in global capitalism, most of which are capital's responses to the crisis in the 1970s: just-in-time production and distribution; increasing relative proportions of business and personal services in the economies of the richest nations (and attendant increases in the proportion of women's time engaged in wage labor); the debt crisis and Structural Adjustment Programs deflating prices of primary commodities (expropriating and displacing peasants); continuing transnationalization of production (dependent on increasing expropriation and displacement of peasants and urbanization of populations in developing nations); expansion of the "informal" sector (which is more difficult to tax and unionize than the "formal sector"); deregulation and privatization of government services for social welfare and infrastructure support; and the end of state socialism in the Eastern bloc (which suddenly and massively expanded the pool of the global proletariat).
The changes were all designed to restore profitability, and they have to a large degree, but the very same changes have also created new vulnerabilities for capital. Just-in-time inventory control is a good example of capital's double-edged sword: it helps cut costs (of labor and infrastructure) but it makes capital vulnerable to potential supply disruptions, especially since the other changes have made capital less willing to directly or indirectly invest in necessary infrastructure to avoid bottlenecks (cf. <http://montages.blogspot.com/2004/12/attacking-wal-marts-supply-chain.html>). -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * "Proud of Britain": <http://www.proudofbritain.net/ > and <http://www.proud-of-britain.org.uk/>