IMMATERIAL LABOR IN THE AGE OF GLOBAL CAPITALISM
Mehmet Z. Demir CCG – 18/8/2008 Academic Communication
• 1. Introduction • 2. Immaterial labor as such • 3. Immaterial labor and its political implications • 4. Conclusion
Introduction • Theory: Labor (as living labor and thus immaterial labor) is not only economical but also a phenemenon that is in the realm of political ontology, in the age of global capitalism. • Labor is the living, form-giving fire; it is the transitoriness of things, their temporality, as their formation by living time. (Marx, Grundrisse, 361) • Living labor is the constituent power of society. It presents itself as the creative, vital locus, a dynamic factory of values and norms.In the production of new norms , living labor destabilizes the dead structures of society, devouring all of the existing norms that come in its path. (Hardt and Negri, Labor of Dionysus, 221)
Introduction Immaterial labor is something that produces informational and cultural content of commodity Informational content of commodity: It refers to the changes taking place in worker’s processes in big companies in the industrial and tertiary sectors, where the skills involved in direct labor are increasingly skills involving cybernetics, computer control, and horizontal and vertical communication. The cultural content of commodity: The kind of activities involved in defining and giving cultural and artistic standarts, fashions, tastes, consumer norms, and more
Immaterial Labor as such • •
Three types of immaterial labor: 1. The first is involved in an industrial production that has been informationalized has incorporated communication in a way that transforms the production process itself. Manifacturing is regarded as a service, and the material labor of the production of durable goods mixes with and tends toward immaterial labor.
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2. 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.
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3. Finally, a third type of immaterial labor involves the production and manipulation of affects and requires (virtual and actual) human contact, labor in bodily mode. (Hardt and Negri, Empire, 293)
Immaterial Labor as such • • • • •
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Immaterial labor can also be considered in two principle forms: 1. The first form refers to labor that is primarily intellectual or linguistic, such as problem solving, symbolic and analytical tasks, and linguistic expressions. The second form of immaterial labor is affective labor that produces or manipulates affects such as a feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement, or passion. (Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 108) It must be emphasized that the labor involved in all immaterial production remains material. It involves bodies and brains as all labor does. What is immaterial is its product. (Multitude, 109) In the process of immaterial labor, The worker’s personality and subjectivity have to be made susceptible to organization and command. Therefore, this process is authoritarian: One must express oneself, one must speak, communicate, cooperate and so on. (Lazzarato) Immaterial labor in the form of affective production can be experienced as extremely alienating: One sells his/her ability to make human relationships, something extremely intimate, at the command of the client and the boss. (Multitude, 111)
Immaterial Labor and Its Political Implications •
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Immaterial labor tends to move out of the limited realm of the strictly economic domain and engage in the general production of society as a whole. The production of ideas, knowledges and affects does not merely create means by which society is formed and maintained; such immaterial labor also directly produces social relationships. Immaterial labor is biopolitical in that it is oriented toward the creation of forms of social life; such labor, then, tends no longer to be limited to the economics but also becomes immediately a social, cultural, and political force. Immaterial labor can only be conducted in common, and it invents new independent networks of cooperation. Its ability to engage and transform all aspects of society and its colloborative network form are two enormously powerful characteristics that immaterial labor is spreading to other forms of labor. These characteristics can serve as a preliminary sketch of social composition of the multitude that today animates the movements of resistance against the global state of war.
Conclusion • As we have seen,since the beginning of 90’s, immaterial labor, based on Marxian definition of living labor, has been constructed and operated in different forms and by Neo-Leftist/Marxist theoreticians not only in the realm of economics and/or political economy but also political ontology. • These different forms are far from being acute categorizations and are vulnerable to some ambiguities, which are partly due to the difficulties that stem from the lack of a sharp distinction between materiality or immateriality of labor and and partly due to the constantly changes and innovations of capitalist mode of production that will likely lead to new forms and categorizations.
Conclusion • Despite these difficulties and ambiguities, it can be argued that immaterial labor is an innovative concept to analyse the constantly changing character of capitalist mode of production, the constantly antagonistic relationships between capital and labor, and the global movements of resistance against the global capitalist hegemony.