Immaterial labor
Marxian economic framework
Immaterial labor is a framework with origins in Marxist-based political economy, particularly Autonomist political philosophy, to describe how value is produced from affective and cognitive activities, which, in various ways, are commodified in capitalist economies.
The concept of immaterial labor was coined by Italian sociologist and philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato in his 1996 essay "Immaterial Labor", published as a contribution to Radical Thought in Italy and edited by Virno and Hardt. It was re-published in 1997 as: Lavoro immateriale. Forme di vita e produzione di soggettività. (Ombre corte). Lazzarato was a participant in the Years of Lead (Italy) group as a student in Padua in the 1970s, and is a member of the editorial group of the journal Multitudes. Post-Marxist scholars including Franco Berardi, Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt, Judith Revel, and Paolo Virno, among others have also employed the concept.
Areas of application
Digital capitalism
Studies of immaterial labor have included analysis of high-technology industries, although immaterial labor is understood as a concept far pre-dating digital technologies, specifically in the performance of gender and domestic roles, and other aspects of affective and cognitive work.
Themes commonly associated with immaterial labor in the context of the internet include: digital labor, commons-based peer production, and user-generated content production, which might include open source, free software, crowdsourcing, and flexible licensing agreements, as well as the collapse of copyright amidst the ambiguities of sharing creative works in the digital age, digital care work, and other conditions produced by participation in social environments within the digital, knowledge economy.
Feminism
Feminism adopted discussions of immaterial labor to describe the alienating conditions and labors pertaining to care work, the performance of gender and domestic labor.
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