Immaterial Labour and Social Change at the Heart of the Crisis

Abstract

Hardt and Negri's purpose in Declaration is to 'address the desire and accomplishments of the cycle of struggles that erupted in 2011 ' (2012: 6). More specifically, they aspire to attack the 'dominant forms of subjectivity' -that is, 'the indebted, the mediatized, the securitized and the represented' -by unmasking and demystifying their currently 'masked and mystified' powers (2012: 7). In Declaration, Hardt and Negri restate their well-known view that 'The centre of gravity of capitalist production no longer resides in the factory' as 'Capital increasingly exploits the entire range of our productive capacities, our bodies and minds, our capacities for communication, our intelligence and creativity ' (2012: 12). This position results in an understanding of capitalism in which exploitation is not primarily based on exchange, but on debt (2012: 12).However, the fact that labour has become increasingly immaterial after 1968, as Hardt and Negri theorize, does not change the fact that it is still dominated by the straitjacket of capital and has only one purpose: the perpetual multiplication of money by money. Even workers who, by Negri's definition, perform immaterial labour (such as computer programmers and the like) must still tailor their work to meet the demands of the market, that is, the demands of competition and the accumulation of wealth, the very values that capitalism's survival depends upon. Regarding the contemporary worker, Hardt and Negri claim:It thus seems more appropriate to think of such workers as not so much alienated as mediatized. Whereas the consciousness of the alienated worker is separated or divided, the consciousness of the mediatized is subsumed or absorbed in the web. (2012: 16) Contrary to the judgement of Hardt and Negri, I maintain, in keeping with the view set out in Capital and the early Frankfurt School theory, that our doing should still be characterized as alienated because our concrete labour in capitalism must necessarily be transformed into abstract, objectified labour. No matter our inclinations, we must sell our labour power in order to sustain a

Social Integrative Enterprises and the Construction of an Impaired Lumpenproletariat – a Swedish Case Study

“…While dominant MTI scholars such as Hardt and Negri (2000;2004) see this as a unilateral development, other MTI scholars such as Dyer-Witheford (2001) and Camfield (2007) have criticized this view and point towards a bipolar development. More specifically, Hardt and Negri (2000;2004; see in the increasing dominance of immaterial labour the coming of a new proletarian subject of immaterial labourers (see Grollios, 2015). Dyer-Witheford (2001) and Camfield (2007) point out that they hereby fail to see how those who fail to match these ideals become tied to a secondary tier of the labour market where the work carried out is typically manual and dirty.…”