Andy Blunden
Central to comprehending the changes taking place in the political and social terrain is grasping the changes taking place in the labour process, and Negri and Hardt’s concept of “immaterial labour” is at the heart of their concept of these changes. In order to discover the meaning they attach to “immaterial labor” it was necessary to turn to §3.4, so accordingly my comments below draw from that section.
We find that “immaterial labor” simply means labour-as-service:
“ Since the production of services results in no material and durable good, we define the labor involved in this production as immaterial labor — that is, labor that produces an immaterial good, such as a service, a cultural product, knowledge, or communication.” [p. 290]
The scope of this concept is spelt out:
“In short, we can distinguish three types of immaterial labor that drive the service sector at the top of the informational economy. The first is involved in an industrial production that has been informationalised and has incorporated communication technologies in a way that transforms the production process itself. Manufacturing is regarded as a service, and the material labour of the production of durable goods mixes with and tends toward immaterial labor. Second is the immaterial labor of analytical and symbolic tasks, which itself breaks down into creative and intelligent manipulation on the one hand and routine symbolic tasks on the other. Finally, a third type of immaterial labor involves the production and manipulation of affect and requires (virtual or actual) human contact, labor in the bodily mode. These are three types of labor that drive the postmodernisation of the global economy.” [p. 293 my bold]
and Negri and Hardt explain how this change is not just a shift in the balance between the primary, manufacturing and service sectors, but on the contrary represents a fundamental change in the labour process as a whole:
“Services ... are characterised in general by the central role played by knowledge, information, affect, and communication. In this sense many call the post-industrial economy an informational economy. ...
“Just as the processes of industrialisation transformed agriculture and made it more productive, so too the informational revolution will transform industry by redefining and rejuvenating manufacturing processes. The new managerial imperative here is, “Treat manufacturing as a service”. In effect, as industries are transformed, the division between manufacturing and services is becoming blurred. Just as through the process of modernisation all production tended to become industrialised, so too through the process of postmodernisation all production tends toward the production of services, toward becoming informationalised.” ... [p. 285]
I think that Negri and Hardt have identified the crucial process here and it is these kind of changes that lie behind the restructuring of global capitalism over the past couple of decades. However, I believe that their characterisation of this phenomena as “immaterial labor” is strange and confusing, and leads them to utopian errors summed up as follows:
p. 294: “cooperation is completely immanent to the laboring activity itself. This fact calls into question the old notion (common to classical and Marxian political economics) by which labour power is conceived as “variable capital”, that is, a force that is activated and made coherent only by capital, because the cooperative powers of labor power (particularly immaterial labor power) afford labor the possibility of valorising itself. Brains and bodies still need others to produce value, but the others they need are not necessarily provided by capital and its capacities to orchestrate production. Today productivity, wealth, and the creation of social surpluses take the form of cooperative interactivity through linguistic, communicational, and affective networks. In the expression of its own creative energies, immaterial labor thus seems to provide the potential for a kind of spontaneous and elementary communism”.
This begins with a true and important statement: that cooperation is immanent to labour, however it is not true to take this to mean that in the current condition of humanity such cooperation can manifest itself independently of capital. It can’t. The idea that it can must rest either on a simplified or fetishistic conception of capital, a social democratic skating over the existence of capital or utter utopianism.
Negri and Hardt here make reference to “the old notion (common to classical and Marxian political economics)” of capital. Though the reference points to the concept of “variable capital”, I believe the problem is that Negri and Hardt actually share the bourgeois conception of capital as “accumulated stuff”.
Surely though, if we live in a time when the watchword is “Treat manufacturing as a service” we must with at least equal boldness re-conceive capital. “Capital” always was for Marx a social relation, not a property of material. By introducing “immaterial labour” as if we have here labour — a material activity — which is somehow immaterial, piles confusion on confusion.
Negri and Hardt counterpose to capital “cooperative interactivity through linguistic, communicational, and affective networks” without considering that in fact it is these very forms that constitute capital. Thus the completely false conclusion of the potential for “spontaneous communism” within this same bourgeois society!
While it is undoubtedly true that there exists a kind of hierarchy of labour, and just like immigrants come into a country from the bottom and move up, immigrants to the proletariat come in at the top and move down. One should not however rush to dismiss the labour of those pushed further to the bottom of the bourgeois heap. And a moment’s reflection on the absurdity of Negri and Hardt’s apologetic conclusion in the above-quoted paragraph indicates where such neglect may lead.
“immaterial labor thus seems to provide the potential for a kind of spontaneous and elementary communism”
It’s a bit like the inverse of the Islander woman who returns home after a decade earning a living taking in laundry in Sydney and tries to get everyone on the island to take in each other’s washing in the hope that the life-style of metropolitan Sydney can in this way be recreated.
To the professional writer, it seems eminently possible to establish communism on the basis of exchanging services, so long of course as the green grocer can still sell you real cabbage, and not just virtual cabbage. Nike may still rake in all the profits, but it remains the case that the contract workers in Philippino sweat shops make the sneakers. [I am reminded of the hippies who never forgot to go into town to pick up their dole cheque because they couldn’t grow LPs in the vegetable garden.]
What has changed is not so much the labouring activity itself, but rather the way in which the cooperation of labour is achieved. That such cooperation is “immaterial” is an illusion of postmodern capitalism. An analysis of this form of cooperation which has been transformed from social property to private property is required. Negri and Hardt have contributed lots of insights towards such an analysis, but I believe they come off the rails on this crucial question.
Turning back to §3.3 where Negri and Hardt present their analysis of the postwar period — of how the dominance of “immaterial labour” comes about. I find a lot of points of agreement in this section.
p. 261: “... capitalist crisis is not simply a function of capital’s own dynamics but is caused directly by proletarian conflict”
The resistance of the proletariat, its refusal to work is the essence of capitalist development! Attractive idea!
“the refusal of the disciplinary regime and the affirmation of the sphere of non-work became the defining features of a new set of collective practices and a new form of life”
p. 284: “With this objective convergence and accumulation of struggles, Third Worldist perspectives, which may earlier have had a limited utility, were now completely useless. We understand Third Worldism to be defined by the notion that the primary contradiction and antagonism of the international capitalist system is between the capital of the First World and the labor of the Third. The potential for revolution thus resides exclusively in the Third World.”
The break up of the Bretton Woods arrangement is described and attempts to contain the working class within the confines of the former highly regulated environment of Keynesianism and the dollar system.
p. 268: “At the same time, then, a second path had to come into play, one that would involve a technological transformation aimed no longer at repression but rather at changing the very composition of the proletariat, and thus integrating, dominating, and profiting from its new practices and forms. In order to understand the emergence of this second path of capitalist response to the crisis, however, the path that constitutes a paradigm shift, we have to look beyond the immediate logic of capitalist strategy and planning. The history of capitalist forms is always necessarily a reactive history: left to its own devices capital would never abandon a regime of profit.
and
“The power of the proletariat imposes limits on capital and not only determines the crisis but also dictates the terms and nature of the transformation. The proletariat actually invents the social and productive forms that capital will be forced to adopt in the future.”
p. 269: “In order to understand the continuation of U.S. hegemony, then, it is not sufficient to cite the relations of force that U.S. capitalism wielded over the capitalists in other countries. U.S. hegemony was actually sustained by the antagonistic power of the US proletariat.”
and
“... capital had to confront and respond to the new production of subjectivity of the proletariat. This new production of subjectivity reached (beyond the struggle over welfare, ... ) what might be called an ecological struggle, a struggle over the mode of life, that was eventually expressed in the developments of immaterial labor”.
p. 272: “... following Frederic Jameson ... postmodernisation is the economic process that emerges when mechanical and industrial technologies have expanded to invest the entire world, when the modernisation process is complete, and when the formal subsumption of the non-capitalist environment has reached its limit. Through the processes of modern technological transformation, all of nature has become capital, at least has become subject to capital”
p. 273: “... the value of necessary labor had risen enormously ...”
and
“The enormous rise in the social wage (in terms of both working wages and welfare) during the period of crisis in the 1960s and 1970s resulted directly from the accumulation of social struggles on the terrain of reproduction, the terrain of non-work, the terrain of life.”
and
“The social struggles not only raised the costs of reproduction and the social wage (hence decreasing the rate of profit), but also and more important forced a change in the quality and nature of labor itself.”
The death of the Soviet Union is explained as the inability of the bureaucracy to go beyond the model of disciplinary governability — Fordism and Taylorism. .. the advanced technologies are efficient only when they are rooted in subjectivity ... a matter of life or death for the Soviet political regime. (p. 277)
p. 278: “The Soviet proletariat’s refusal to work was in fact the very same method of struggle that the proletariat in the capitalist countries deployed, forcing their governments into a cycle of crisis, reform and restucturing.”
Andy
11th October