Keep on Smiling — Questions on Immaterial Labor

Introduction: a colorful necklace

Toni Negri and Michael Hardt’s recent works, Empire[129] and Multitude,[130] have earned these authors great popularity in the Anglo-Saxon world. Negri is known in Italy for belonging to autonomia operaia in the ‘70s and for being on the receiving end of political persecution by the Italian state at the end of that decade. His earlier work (above all Marx Beyond Marx)[131] was a valid contribution to the understanding of the nature of capitalism and influenced many among us who sought an answer to Marxist objectivism and a theory of history based on class struggle.

However, Negri’s earlier work circulated among a restricted public, via obscure publishers. The new Toni Negri for the ‘new’ era emerges in 2000 with Empire. A tome written with literature professor Michael’s Hardt, Empire was warmly welcomed even by the bourgeois press.[132]

Negri’s popularity is to be found above all in the fact that his new work addresses important questions, opened by the end of the cycle of struggles of the ‘70s. In particular: can we still speak about communism, the revolution, classes, in a world where the conditions for working class struggle seem to have been dismantled?

The new Negri proclaims the advent of a new, postmodern, phase of capitalism, in which orthodox Marxism no longer applies; and which needs a new theory: theirs. As Negri and Hardt say:

Social reality changes... then the old theories are no longer adequate. We need new theories for the new reality... Capitalist production and capitalist society has changed... (Multitude, p. 140)

Negri and Hardt’s work to find a new theory for the ‘new’ world proceeds alongside other academics, such as Paolo Virno or Maurizio Lazzarato. Their effort contributed to the development of new concepts such as that of ‘immaterial labor’ and the ‘multitude’.

An important reason for Negri and Hardt’s popularity is that their work seems to integrate the most fashionable theories of the last twenty years: postmodernism, theories of post-Fordism, weightless economy, etc. — but it is also a theory that presents itself as revolutionary and anti-capitalist.

Another important reason for Negri and Hardt’s success is that their theory is able to cover an enormous number of popular and urgent issues: globalization, the retreat of traditional class struggle, aspects of capitalist restructuring, the emergence of new social movements, the Zapatistas or the anti-GM peasant struggles in India.

We may perhaps be surprised that one book (or two: Multitude appears mainly to clarify Empire’s arguments[133]) can contain all this. But Negri and Hardt have a secret: they employ a new, postmodern style suitable, as Maria Turchetto comments, ‘for zapping’ rather than for a systematic reading.[134] Thanks to this style Negri and Hardt can swiftly touch upon a broad range of loosely interrelated issues, often in passing, often addressing the immediately obvious and the immediately agreeable. And indeed, for example, Autonomy & Solidarity notices that Negri and Hardt’s attractiveness is in the unquestionable positivity of their ‘demands for true democracy, freedom from poverty and an end to the war’.[135]

Although it has generated innumerable criticisms and comments, Negri and Hardt’s theory of everything escapes a comprehensive critique simply because of this fractalic nature.[136] We, too, are obliged to focus, of course. But we choose an issue that seems to be the backbone of their whole construction: the concept of immaterial labor/production.

In Empire Negri and Hardt claim they contributed to an international theoretical effort of definition and understanding of the concept of immaterial labor, the new labor for the ‘new’ era.[137] Initially conceived as labor based on the use of thought and knowledge, immaterial labor was later enriched by Negri and Hardt with the aspect of ‘manipulation of affects’. And it was redefined in terms of its aims rather than the nature of its material activity in order to dodge obvious objections (any labor, let alone ‘affective’ labor like care, always involves physical activity, etc.).

By Empire then, the newest definition of immaterial labor was: labor whose aim is to produce immaterial goods (Multitude, p. 334). As Negri and Hardt explain in Multitude:

The labor involved in all immaterial production, we should emphasize, remains material... what is immaterial is its product. (Multitude, p. 111)

So defined, immaterial labor has two main aspects:

a) it is ‘manipulation of symbols’ (i.e. IT work, production of knowledge, problem-solving, etc.)

and/or

b) it is ‘manipulation of affects’ (production of emotions, well-being, smiles, etc.).[138]

Despite this stress, in the course of their work Negri and Hardt freely use both the definitions considered above: immaterial labor as the creation of immaterial products and as any labor implying ‘immaterial’ practices (e.g. post-Fordism and computerization).

If this conceptual freedom may confuse us, it is only because we still think of production in a traditional way: as production of commodities. A more open mind like theirs, which sees production as anything done in society, can easily conceive the communication between staff in a car factory as a product in its own rights. Thus post-Fordist production can be seen as immaterial production alongside services and IT.

In fact, under the ‘hegemony’ of immaterial production, all production, including material production, tends to become more immaterial — living in a world where immaterial production is central, we increasingly tend to produce all goods for their images and meanings rather than their material functionality.

Not only all production, but, Negri and Hardt repeat many times, society as a whole is shaped by immaterial production. Immaterial production defines the way we see the world and the way we act in the world — in Hardt’s words, it has ‘anthropological implications’.[139] As we read in Multitude, immaterial production shapes society in its image. It makes society more informationalised, intelligent, affective:

Our claim... is that immaterial labor has become hegemonic in qualitative terms and has imposed a tendency on other forms of labor and society itself... Just as in [the times of the ‘hegemony’ of industrial production] society itself had to industrialize itself, today ‘society has to informationalise, become intelligent, become affective. (Multitude, p. 109)

Daring more, Negri and Hardt argue that not only does immaterial production influence society, but it actually produces it. This is true, they say, because this new production mainly aims at the production of communication and affects. Daily, tons of communication and affects are created by services, by selling ‘with a smile’, by the advertising industry, and via the Internet — not to speak about all the communication encouraged by Toyotism. Taking this production of communications and affects as a production of ‘social relations and social life’ in its entirety, Negri and Hardt call immaterial production a ‘biopolitical production’, i.e. a production of life:[140]

It might be better to understand [immaterial labor] as ‘biopolitical labor’, that is labor which creates not only material goods but also relationships and ultimately social life itself. (Multitude, p. 111)

As we will see later in detail, immaterial production defines a ‘new’ form of capitalist exploitation by the new global capitalist regime, Empire. But it also makes a revolution against this regime possible. How? Immaterial production, being based on the powers of our thoughts and hearts, is already potentially autonomous from the capitalist they say. Only a little step then separates us from taking this production over from the parasitic capitalist and self-manage it.

We can appreciate then how immaterial production sustains Negri and Hardt’s arguments and their political project. And, as we shall see below, it allows Negri and Hardt to construct a broad, universal theory that can present itself as radical. This is the reason why we will focus on immaterial production in this article. If we want to critique a multicolored necklace it is not good enough to speak about the necklace as a whole and miss the beads — but it is not good enough too, to focus on one bead. What we try to do is to have a go at the string.

In this article we will argue that under the appearance of a revolutionary theory, Negri and Hardt’s work hides a subtle apology for capital and constitutes an inverted version of the traditional Marxism that it was set to oppose.

In Section 1 we see how the concept of immaterial labor substantiates all the most interesting aspects of Negri and Hardt’s theory and keeps apparently contradictory or incompatible elements of it together in an elegant unity.

In Section 2 we explore Negri and Hardt’s idea of history as class struggle, specifically, the historical emergence of immaterial production.

In Section 3 we comment on Negri and Hardt’s argument that immaterial production is inherently autonomous from the control of the capitalist, thus potentially free from capital and amenable to self-management.

In Section 4 we consider the origin of class antagonism in the case of immaterial production of ideas and knowledge.

In Section 5 we consider the issue of class antagonism in the case of immaterial production of affections and communication.