Immaterial labor and the common

Immaterial labor and the common describe a transformation in which production increasingly makes social relations themselves: cooperation, communication, knowledge, and forms of life. The concept gives a political meaning to work that produces no discrete material object. Its promise is that people who collectively make and sustain social life might also govern it; its difficulty is that social production remains entangled with capitalist organization and unequal power.

From industrial labor to immaterial labor

The argument begins by contrasting Karl Marx’s historical emphasis on centralized, hierarchically organized industrial labor with a contemporary economy in which immaterial labor is described as hegemonic. This does not mean that such work is quantitatively dominant. It plays an emblematic structural role, as large-scale industrial production did in the nineteenth century: it gives a characteristic tone to the whole economy.

Immaterial labor stretches between intellectual or symbolic work and affective work. The first produces ideas, codes, texts, programs, and figures; the second involves work with people’s physical affects, including the work of doctors, babysitters, and flight attendants. The category therefore joins activities that may look unlike one another in their immediate tasks but share a role in producing social cooperation and relations.

The common as a product

On this account, the multitude produces more than goods and services. Its work also produces cooperation, communication, forms of life, and social relationships. These products constitute a common: shared knowledge and forms of cooperation and communication that cannot readily be contained within the form of private property.

The concept shifts attention from social relations as a background to economic activity to their production as an outcome of work. Karl Marx had emphasized that material production also reproduces the social relations within which it takes place. With immaterial production, the argument goes further: the production of social relations becomes an immediate end of production. The work’s cooperative mechanisms are contained within the labor itself, creating the possibility of economic self-management.

The democratic wager

Hardt and Negri’s political wager is that this directly socialized production makes owners progressively superfluous: production is social both in its organization and in what it produces. Because social relations are themselves the material of the work, producers may also acquire the capacity to regulate social space. Economic production would then become political production—the production of society itself.

The proposed consequence is absolute democracy: producers directly regulating their shared relations without the detour of democratic representation. The common is thus not merely a collection of resources held in common. It names a field of social cooperation whose producers might govern the conditions they continually create. This is presented as a possibility opened by contemporary labor, not as an accomplished political arrangement.

Capitalist form and its limits

The book questions the ease with which this possibility is derived from the organization of present-day capitalism. Hardt and Negri’s account alternates between fascination with capitalism’s deterritorializing power and a contrast between the multitude and the One of capitalist power. Decentralized decision-making, mobility, flexibility, and interaction among many agents appear as anticipations of the multitude’s coming rule; financial speculation, conventionally treated by the Left as capitalism’s enemy, can likewise be celebrated as capitalism’s most dynamic aspect.

That reading risks treating emancipation as a formal conversion of what already exists: as if the social forms of capitalism need only be changed from existing in themselves to being consciously organized for themselves. The criticism is that this neglects form in its strict dialectical sense. Existing cooperation and flexibility do not, on their own, show that the relations organizing them have been transformed. Nor does the existence of a common settle who controls its conditions or how its products are appropriated.

Networks, exclusion, and political sites

The discussion of immaterial production sits within a broader account of unequal networked economies. The 80/20 rule describes the tendency for a small share of workers, landowners, or network participants to account for a large share of output, ownership, or connections. In scale-free networks, highly connected nodes coexist with many less-connected ones; under certain conditions, competition gives way to a winner-takes-all structure. Microsoft serves as the example of a privileged node that captured the links through which others communicate.

This unevenness sharpens the question of who participates in, benefits from, or is excluded by social production. The book identifies slum dwellers as a possible new proletarian position, not simply a redundant surplus population. In Lagos, it notes that about two-thirds of the state’s 3,577 square kilometers could be classified as slums or shantytowns; the population was officially estimated at six million, while many experts placed it at ten million. Many residents work informally or are self-employed, yet lack adequate health and social-security coverage. Their condition is described as a product of global capitalism rather than an accidental margin outside it.

The common therefore carries a double significance. It makes visible the social cooperation on which production depends and suggests a basis for collective self-management. At the same time, the uneven networks and precarious lives surrounding that cooperation prevent its democratic promise from being treated as automatic: the political question is how the common is organized, and who has the power to shape it.