When Italian theorists wished to deconstruct the possibility of making a sharp distinction between productive and unproductive labor, they generally used to use such terms as the social factory and the social worker rather than immaterial and affective labor. For instance, Michael Ryan writes in the "Epilogue" to _Marx beyond Marx_ by Antonio Negri (Autonomedia/Pluto, 1991):
<blockquote>Negri goes on to argue that one form of State control -- public expenditure, the social wage -- can be used by workers against the State. By increasing the quantity of needs and the level of demands, a point of qualitative explosion, a "fiscal crisis of the State," can be reached. Economic attacks of this sort (for work for social wages) are immediately political. . . . Mutations in legitimation have led to an increased role of the State, as a response to the falling rate of profit. The State becomes directly productive through the oligopolistic investment of public expenditure. This helps the accumulation of social capital, and "productivity" is the legitimating term of the complete process. But a gap opens between the productivity of business (the rallying cry which legitimates capitalist development in the "general interest") and the real terrain of accumulation (the cooperating social whole controlled by the State), and this becomes a space for struggle through the reduction of productivity and the accentuation of the dysfunctions of the social accumulation of the capital State. Both the work wage and the social wage become potentially destructive. But this struggle requires a recognition of society as a factory and of the State as a boss, as well as a breaking of the fetish of productivity as a weapon of legitimation. Instead, legitimation must be referred to the complete needs of the proletariat. (pp. 211-212)</blockquote>
From the perspective of the subjectivity of workers in rich industrial nations, engaged in myriad struggles both at points of production (e.g., wildcat strikes over control of labor processes, over management prerogatives to hire, fire, and promote whom they please, etc.) and throughout "the cooperating social whole controlled by the State" (e.g., struggles for welfare rights, gay and lesbian liberation, reproductive rights and freedom, empowerment of the racially, nationally, or ethnically oppressed, etc., struggles against colonial wars and neocolonial interventions), Negri and other Italian theorists sought to theorize the political economy of the sixties and seventies. Unfortunately, most workers could not consciously move beyond the horizon of capitalism, and those who did so were beaten back, sometimes by force, sometimes by mediations of trade unions and political parties, most often by higher interest rates, budget austerity, and mass unemployment, which were capital's response to the fiscal crisis of the state and the crisis of profitability. Workers did make lasting gains, but those lasting gains -- more egalitarian relations between sexes, between races, and so on -- have been made to adapt to the requirements of capital in order to restore profitability.
The way that the crisis was solved in capital's favor suggests that the distinction between productive and unproductive labor does matter as long as we live under capitalism, because capitalists do care about that. One of capital's responses to the crisis has been to seek to transform unproductive labor into productive labor through privatization, which doesn't necessarily make for greater efficiency but does create new avenues for creation of surplus value.
(1) Privatization (from unproductive to productive labor) is a kindred initiative overlapping with (2) expansion of the proportion of labor-intensive service industries (which Michael Hardt and Negri call "affective labor" in _Empire_) in national economies of the richest nations, (3) outsourcing of capital-intensive production of goods (i.e., relocating what Hardt and Negri call "material labor") to regions where wages are definitely lower and unions are generally weaker, and (3) just-in-time inventory control (the hegemony of what Hardt and Negri call "immaterial" over material labor), but none of the aforementioned processes is reducible to any of the others.
It seems to me that novel terms introduced by Italian theorists -- e.g., the social factory, the social worker, immaterial labor, affective labor, etc. -- get in the way of understanding struggles in the sixties and seventies, the fiscal crisis of the state, the crisis of profitability, and capital's responses to all three, for Italian theorists' neologisms unnecessarily blur useful analytical distinctions as well as differences that have real-world consequences.
In short, whether labor creates tangible goods or intangible services and whether labor is productive or unproductive (of surplus value) in Marx's sense are two different questions. There have always been (A) productive labor that creates things, (B) productive labor that offers services, (C) unproductive labor that creates things, and (D) unproductive labor that offers services. Which kind is proportionally expanding or contracting, which kind is playing the leading or subordinate role in reorganization of production, distribution, and consumption, etc. are very interesting and important questions. It is good that Italian theorists called attention to that, but just because we are interested in trends they sought to describe doesn't mean that we have to adopt their theory or terminology. -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * "Proud of Britain": <http://www.proudofbritain.net/ > and <http://www.proud-of-britain.org.uk/>