> At 04:35 PM 1/13/2012, Sean Andrews wrote:
>
>> immaterial labor.
>>
>
>
> i asked about this in the past and never got an answer due to folks being
> busy. anyone have time to explain this concept?
>
It depends, do you want the serious answer or the meta-critical answer?
The serious or sincere answer is something like the following.
In the first case, the best first place to go is Lazzarato's essay on the topic:
http://www.generation-online.org/c/fcimmateriallabour3.htm
I don't know for sure if he was the first to coin it, but when Hardt, Negri and the rest of the Italian Autonomists usually credit him for it. The idea is basically that, with the rise of intellectual, digital, culture industries labor and the product of labor has become more immaterial.
Labor now involves more
<quoting Lazzarato> activities that are not normally recognized as "work"—in other words, the kinds of activities involved in defining and fixing cultural and artistic standards, fashions, tastes, consumer norms, and, more strategically, public opinion. Once the privileged domain of the bourgeoisie and its children, these activities have since the end of the 1970s become the domain of what we have come to define as "mass intellectuality." The profound changes in these strategic sectors have radically modified not only the composition, management, and regulation of the workforce—the organization of production—but also, and more deeply, the role and function of intellectuals and their activities within society." <endquote>
This has a number of consequences for the autonomists and others riffing off the concept. For Hardt and Negri, for instance, immaterial labor is important because it's the foundation on which a resistance to capitalism can be built - most often with the immaterial workers as the vangaurd (in so far as they allow for vangaurdism) of the resistance. The metaphysical reason for this is that the process of production and the process of creating politics, culture, and political subjectivity all function in a similar manner: this homology makes the immaterial labor processes with which we are more and more familiar a good model to consider when we want to understand how power works. What this becomes is a Foucauldian reinterpretation of Marx and economic value, where the term biopolitical (from Foucault) production refers simultaneously to the production of immaterial products, the production of the subjectivities of the immaterial workers, and the productivity (and source) of the power of the biopolitical state.
Hardt and Negri here create a hybrid of Foucault and the earlier members and ideas of the tradition about the force and power of the workers relative to capital. In that earlier tradition, in the late 60s and early 70s people like Tronti (first name escapes me) and Negri spoke about the economic role of the worker - as the producer of all the value for capital - as actually a political force. Through their refusal of work, they could starve capital of its necessary influx of labor power. This in turn was a force that could be employed against all capitalists and therefore the capitalist state. They managed to shut down the Fiat plant in Turin along with many other events which others can probably elaborate more (or you can just look up Hot Autumn). In response, Fiat cut its workforce and installed more robots. I'm trying to finish writing something about that, but the point Autonomists take from this is that workers do have power; and that every economic shift of capitalism is actually a response to this *political* power, not the apparent economic theory or crisis.
For instance, Hardt and Negri begin Labor of Dionysis with a chapter which accounts for Keynes' transformation of economic theory (e.g. in The General Theory...) in the following way: little mention is made of the crisis that had, at that point, crushed the world economy. Keynes might have looked at that a little, too. But his real recognition was that workers had power, something he had duly noted in the waves of strike activity at the time; therefore his theory really said the power of the capitalists would need to be shared with the workers so that they would not refuse to work and thereby exert their power over the capitalists. I've not read the rest of that book, but in thinking about it now (and knowing the general anti-union position of the Autonomists, who basically favored rank and file as the true power) it therefore characterizes Keynes as the bearer of working class kryptonite: he buys them off to keep them on the capitalist pipe.
When you don't fight unions and capitalists equally, you let the capitalists win.
In any case, in the 1970s what this means is that, somewhat perversely, people like Hardt and Negri and Berardi brag about the Italian strikes and the general labor unrest there, in the US, the UK and around the western world, as being the true cause of globalization - i.e. it wasn't about wages or profit margins, but about labor activism in general. The working class in the North had become too powerful. I'm not going to argue with this as a theory, but it does seem like an underreported element of that transformation. IIRC, this is one of the key things Doug agreed with them on. Immaterial labor, not so much. Here's an account I wrote about Doug's account of that....
Doug Henwood, in his book After the New Economy, mildly critique’s Hardt and Negri’s acceptance of this by saying, “They assert that immaterial labor—service work, basically—now prevails over the old-fashioned material kind, but they don’t cite any statistics: you’d never know that far more Americans are truck drivers than are computer professionals. Nor would you have much of an inkling that three billion of us, half the earth’s population, live in the rural Third World, where the major occupation remains tilling the soil. For Henwood there is no statistical basis for Lazzarato’s claim, except if we are assuming that the ideologists of the New Economy are telling the truth.
In answering Henwood’s critique, in their book Multitude, Hardt and Negri say as much when they defend their enthusiastic support of this as a defining feature by saying [To reiterate, this is the spot in Multitude where the great Hardt and Negri have to alter their rhetoric almost completely in order to answer the astute but obvious material question Doug has asked. They cite him as one of their critics in this regard. This is them trying to hold it all together. Go Doug.]
<Openquote>: In any economic system there are numerous different forms of labor that exist side by side, but there is always one figure of labor that exerts hegemony over the others. This figure serves as a vortex that gradually transforms other figures to adopt its central qualities. The hegemonic figure is not dominant in quantitative terms but rather in the way it exerts a power of transformation over others. Hegemony here designates a tendency.<block quote> </Close>
In short, the dominance of immaterial labor is, in fact, immaterial. It is an ideological dominance which structures how all of us think about work—or that we should think about work. This is an imprecise way of defining a quality that is meant to be the central feature of all work today—and hence a very poor basis for a political program. As Rosalind Gill and Andrew Pratt put it:
<BQ> It might be true that most work today is in some sense impacted by information and communications, the grandiosity of such a claim obscures profound differences between different groups of workers – between, for example, the fast food operative with a digital headset or electronic till in their minimum wage McJob, and the highly educated, well-paid cultural analyst. Both are touched by the ‘information revolution’, to be sure, but is the ‘interactivity’ or ‘affectivity’ deployed in their work sufficient grounds for treating them as similar kinds of labouring subject? </BQ>
In some cases, theorists make a distinction, such as in Berardi’s work, between “brain workers” and “chain workers,” but even this distinction gets laid to the side as he decides to focus on “the most innovative and specific forms, since they represent the trend that’s transforming the whole of social production.” As Henwood points out, saying all work is immaterial is an indirect way of buying into the boosters and apologists of post-industrial, neo-liberal “new economy,” with its focus on cultural and information workers.
....that's an incomplete paper that someday might get finished. But it also gives you some of the criticism. In general, my biggest problem with it is that it takes almost all the important ideas from the 1970s (and by a guy who wrote about it in about the 1870s) describing the incredible productivity, creativity, and vitality of human labor of all kinds and eviscerates them with this idea of immaterial labor being the most important thing. STFU. LABOR is the thing, its all creative and the fact that there is an immaterial, cognitive, imaginative portion to human labor is the thing that - oh let this guy tell it:
<OPEN> What distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realises a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will. And this subordination is no mere momentary act. Besides the exertion of the bodily organs, the process demands that, during the whole operation, the workman‘s will be steadily in consonance with his purpose. This means close attention. The less he is attracted by the nature of the work, and the mode in which it is carried on, and the less, therefore, he enjoys it as something which gives play to his bodily and mental powers, the more close his attention is forced to be. <CLOSE: CF. Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, 284.>
Saying there is some new kind of labor is - and has become - a way for people who have almost no interest in learning about labor process per se, much less labor unions, labor history, labor law, or labor anything to talk about labor and Marx and value and capital without ever having to learn about any of the above things. Instead they can talk about video games or advertising or facebook or being forced to care about customers at your job (affect) as being a kind of fashionable, edgy labor. There is certainly a need for this work and I'm glad people do it; but it is often (not always) really ignorant of any discussions of labor outside of the Italian Autonomist tradition. The reason given is usually that labor has changed and is more as they say it is than it was when other people were writing.
Immaterial labor in this sense, changes everything.
Otherwise my main problem is with the above mentioned synthesis in immaterial (other names: cognitive, affective, biopolitical) labor of this autonomist understanding of worker power and the Foucauldian understanding of biopower. As I understand it, what this means is that, though immaterial laborers are now dominant and exploited by the hegemonic version of capitalism, like the workers of the 1930s and 1970s, immaterial workers are therefore in a primary position to refuse to give their value to capital. Capital, the stupid beast that it is, flails about with ineffective IPR rules trying to capture for itself the value of the immaterial laborer - but this only makes the immaterial laborer work less for capital until it eventually is able to claim its power for itself through collective refusal of producing immaterial labor.
I'm sure that is jumbled but the main upshot is that you don't need to worry about planning a revolution or anything - it's just gonna happen. All those immaterial laborers and that big bad capitalism trying to take their value - eventually somebody's gonna get mad and start refusing (it's natural because the subjectivities they are producing in this process are hardwired for revolution - it's in their genes, ya'll!) Then, all the sudden, capital is gonna give in, give the multitude EVERYTHING and then we're gonna be set! Whether this means we'll have anything to eat at that point or just immaterial food is somewhat vague. On this point, I'll leave you (in a last act of solipsism) with one other critique of H&N I just wrote in another paper:
They only briefly address this in their most recent book, Commonwealth, wherein they descend, for six pages out of 400, to elaborate on a set of Keynesian inspired reforms “aimed at providing the infrastructure necessary for biopolitical production.” These include adequate food, drinking water, sanitary conditions, electricity, “and other physical necessities to support life,” as well as a compendium of further necessities: education, access to an internet that is open at all levels, money for research, freedom of movement, freedom of time (i.e. a guaranteed minimum income, which is ultimately what Gorz recommends to end the absurdity he describes), and a completely participatory form of democracy. Like Keynes, they insist that these should be instituted by capital in order to save itself, but that they will still only be done “when capital is forced to accept them.” By what means and with what leverage we are supposed to force its hand, they don’t say.
Yet, even if it does so – whether because it is forced by struggles or “pursuing its own interests and trying preserve its own survival” – it will ultimately create “its own gravediggers.” Here we discover that, once these things are provided, “the multitude will emerge with the ability autonomously to rule common wealth.” The precondition of their entire oeuvre, in other words, is a society with all the benefits of socialism and social democracy, but none of the messy politics of demands or organization. On how to achieve this precondition, they also remain silent