Living Labor and Social Labor: A Marxian Critique of Immaterial-Labor Theory

Abstract

Antonio Negri’s construction of the subjectivity and power of the working class relies on a productivist ontological reading of living labor. Such an understanding theorizes production as a process independent of capital valorization, positions laborers as separated from and in absolute opposition to capital, and concludes that immaterial labor directly implies postcapitalist social relations. However, this reading leaves aside the social form of labor, ignores that living labor is constitutive of capital valorization, and obscures how immaterial labor processes and immaterial laborers themselves are shaped by capital valorization. This essay proposes an analysis that understands labor, including immaterial labor, as a process that encompasses the dynamics of both domination and resistance, the key to which lies in theorizing capital valorization as socially constituted and mediated by different social processes. By theorizing how capital valorization interacts with the social conditions it is embedded in, the space for anticapitalist struggles emerges.

Key Words:

• Capital Valorization
• Immaterial Labor
• Living Labor
• Noncapitalist Moments
• Ontological Perspective

Notes

1 Negri and Hardt did not originate the concept of immaterial labor, but they have systematically elaborated it in their coauthored series of books—Empire (2000), Multitude (2004), and Commonwealth (2009)—and thus might be regarded as representative of this concept. Because of its theoretical affinity, cognitive-capitalism theory will also be mentioned and analyzed here. As Negri (2008, 63–4) has said, “Today we find ourselves in a way of life and in a way of producing that is characterised by the hegemony of intellectual labour. It has been said that we have entered the era of cognitive capitalism.”

2 As Marx (1996, 45) argued, whether one is producing material goods or immaterial goods is just a matter of what kinds of needs and wants are to be satisfied, which relates to the concrete labor that produces use value. When we understand these products as commodities—so long as they can be sold and enable capitalists obtain surplus value—distinctions between concrete usefulness no longer matter. In this sense, David Camfield (2007) argues that our focus point should turn from the sociotechnical attributes of labor to the social form of labor as wage labor. It should also be noted that some scholars discuss whether the labor described by Marx is material or immaterial from the perspective of the value (Caffentzis 2011a) or commodity form (Thompson 2005), which is consistent with the arguments for interpreting immaterial labor from the perspective of the social form of labor found in this essay.

3 Compared to Empire, Hardt and Negri revised their understanding of immaterial labor in Multitude. They distinguished three types of immaterial labor in Empire: “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 … Second is the immaterial labor of analytical and symbolic tasks … 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” (Hardt and Negri 2000, 293).

4 For an ontological reading of biopolitical labor, see Read (2001).

5 Carlo Vercellone believed that the opposition between living labor and dead labor that Marx theorized had been replaced by an opposition between living knowledge and dead knowledge. Like Virno, Vercellone (2007) also emphasized the dimension of knowledge that cannot be fixed and objectified; that is, as a kind of living knowledge, it is inseparable from workers.

6 The idea that the labor theory of value is only applicable to industrial capitalism is one of the most widespread beliefs shared by representatives of immaterial-labor and cognitive-capitalism theory (apart from Negri and Hardt, see also Marazzi (2008), Fumagalli and Mezzadra (2010), Fumagalli (2011), and Moulier-Boutang (2011).

7 In addition to theorizing why immaterial production is also measurable from the perspective of Marx’s literature, Caffentzis also interprets immaterial production as subjected to time in a more straightforward way. As he says, the crisis of measurability “does not seem to refer to what billions of people across the planet do every day under the surveillance of bosses vitally concerned about how much time the workers are at their job and how well they do it again and again” (Caffentzis 2011b, 112). He also emphasizes that whether something is measurable or not is subject to particular historical conditions, because “what can’t be measured in time t does not mean that it cannot be measured at time t+1” (Caffentzis 2011a, 42). All of this suggests that value and the labor theory of value are still valid for immaterial production.

8 Some theorists tend to use the term “the outside of capitalism” to express what I call noncapitalist moments. Instead, I see capitalism as inherently divided, shaped by both capitalist moments and noncapitalist moments. In other words, capitalism or capitalist society is not a system in which other social processes are shaped in a unidirectional way by the imperative of capital valorization, but it is rather the so-called “outside” of capitalism that is in fact inside capitalism.

9 Although Hardt and Negri (2004, 103) say that “multitude is a class concept,” it is unclear how a class analysis is implied by such a concept that relies on unidentical individuals (Resnick and Wolff 2001; Amin 2005).