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That Empire is a major accomplishment-the most comprehensive attempt to date to forge a conceptual arsenal adequate to the dimensions of contemporary pan-- capitalism-needs no underlining. My critical comments will focus on one item in its treasure-trove of antiaccumulatory theory: the issue of "immaterial labor."
For three decades Antonio Negri has sought to define the features of a new revolutionary subject that would succeed the "craft worker" and the "mass worker" and restart the cycle of struggles posited by the autonomist Marxist tradition. In identifying this subject, initially named the "socialized worker," he came incrementally to accord ever increasing importance to the "intellectual" qualities of a postFordist proletariat enmeshed in the computers and communication networks of high-technology capitalism (Negri 1988, 1989; on the "socialized worker" and the autonomist tradition, see Dyer-Witheford 1999). This direction was intensified in the analysis of "general intellect" (the socialized, collective intelligence prophesied by the Marx of the Grundrisse) developed by the journal Futur Anterieur.1 Intimately bound up with "general intellect" was what Negri and coauthors such as Michael Hardt and Maurizio Lazaratto termed "immaterial labor": the "distinctive quality and mark" of work in "the epoch in which information and communication play an essential role in each stage of the process of production" (Lazzarato and Negri 1994, 86). As commodities come to be "less material" and "more defined by cultural, informational, or knowledge components or by qualities of service and care," so, Futur Anterieur claimed, the labor that produces them undergoes a "corresponding" change: "immaterial labor might thus be conceived as the labor that produces the informational, cultural, or affective element of the commodity" (Virno and Hardt 1996, 262). Negri, Hardt, and Lazaratto insisted that "immaterial labor" was not just a select cadre of technical workers but a generalized form of labor-power, a "massified quality of the laboring intelligentsia, of cyborgs and hackers" (Hardt and Negri 1994, 10, 280). The new communicative and technological competencies, while most explicit among "qualified" workers, existed in "virtual" form even within contingent and unemployed labor as the prerequisites of everyday life in high-tech capitalism (Lazzarato and Negri 1994, 87). Nonetheless, there remains a suggestion of a leading sector, since "all of the efforts of the refusal of work of all the other exploited social strata...