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.