Theories of `immaterial labour` posit that `creativity` has become the general characteristic of work under contemporary capitalism. This paper examines the implications of such an assertion for the understanding of the subjectivity of labour and labour`s transformative potential in the light of structural changes in contemporary capitalism and the nature of `work` that it manifests.

Work and Its Centrality in Human Life

Karl Marx emphasised the centrality of work in human life and, potentially, as a liberating activity, described it as man`s `species activity` and `life activity`. Marx saw that `work` establishes a distinctive human relationship with nature and make humans a `species-being`.¹

While discussing the concept of creative activity and alienation in Marx and Hegel, Sean Sayers emphasises the `positive` and `negative` aspects of `work`.² Hegel maintained that by working on the world, shaping and forming it, human beings become separated from the natural world, unlike animals, and establish themselves as self-conscious subjects  as beings-for-self  against an objective world. “At the same time, however, it is through work that human beings overcome this division from nature. This is the positive aspect...” (Sean Sayers 2003). According to Marx, this division is overcome through the objectification of the species-life of man. Marx wrote:

“It is, therefore, in his fashioning of the objective that man really proves himself to be a species-being. Such production is his active species-life. Through it, nature appears as his work and his reality. The object of labour is, therefore, the objectification of the species-life of man: for man produces himself not only intellectually, in his consciousness, but actively and actually, and he can therefore contemplate himself in a world he himself has created.” (Economic and Political Manuscripts, `Estranged Labour`, 1844)

Alienation of Work under Capitalism

Human beings constitute themselves with respect to nature through labour, in their relationship to it as creators. However, Marx maintains that under capitalism labour is estranged, sapping all creativity from work. Man is estranged from the product of his labour, and consequently from his life activity, his species-being and other human beings.

This argument is to be read with Marx`s concept of the labour theory of value and alienation. The labour theory of value says that `work` or `labour` is the source of all value and under capitalism all value generated in `surplus labour`  beyond `necessary labour`  is denied to workers.

Andre Gorz (1989) distinguishes between three types of human activity: work done with payment in mind, that is, work for economic ends; `reproductive` work, that is, domestic labour, which guarantees the basic and immediate necessities of life day after day; and autonomous activities, that is, activities one performs freely and not from necessity, as ends in themselves.³

Gorz (1993)⁴ writes that, in capitalism, workers experience alienation as a result of triple dispossession  by rendering the instrument of labour inappropriate for labour, by separating the worker from the product and then by separating the worker from the labour itself, which thenceforth exists outside the worker as a wordless compulsion. Gorz states that under Fordist and Taylorist production under capitalism, the alienation is `built into the material organization of quantified, predetermined, rigorously programmed tasks demanding to be performed`. This is changing the post-Fordist organisation of production.

Creativity and the Realm of Freedom

Can man/woman regain creativity in work that is lost in capitalism? Marx considers it possible when human activity moves from the `realm of necessity` to the `realm of freedom`(Capital, Volume III). By the `realm of necessity`, Marx means the sphere of economically necessary labour  labour to meet material needs. The `realm of freedom` is beyond the actual sphere of material production. It begins only when the forces of production expand to meet the increasing physical needs and when socialised man, associated producers, rationally regulate their interchange with Nature. He also says that the true realm of freedom can blossom only with the realm of necessity as its basis. ⁵

There are various passages in Marx`s writing suggesting art as the free and the highest form of creative activity. The artist is not producing for immediate material consumption, contributes to the self-realisation of the artist and the artistic work is an end in itself. In the realm of freedom, human beings get more opportunities to engage in artistic activities.

A fuller form of freedom for all individuals is realised when we produce not to meet material needs but purely as an end in itself. The realm of freedom, therefore, could be achieved by the full development of the capabilities of the individuals as associated and socialised proudcers, and with the full development of the forces of production.

Creativity and Reduction of `Labour Time`

Another conceptual issue, relevant to our discussion, is the distinction Marx makes in Grundrisse between `necessary labour time` and `free time`, and the emphasis on the general reduction of labour time so that all engage in creative activities. Marx writes,

“…the free development of individualities, and hence not the reduction of necessary labour time so as to posit surplus labour, but rather the general reduction of the necessary labour of society to a minimum, which then corresponds to the artistic, scientific etc. development of the individuals in the time set free, and with the means created, for all of them.” ⁶

II:  Creativity under Contemporary Capitalism

There are many who argue that in the contemporary stage of the development of capitalism, there is a general movement of labour from a situation of alienation to a general situation of creativity. The overall development of productive forces under the contemporary phase of capitalism, the structural shifts in economies, the changes in the character of work and organisation of production as well as the nature of oppositions against alienation, especially in the developed countries, has generated a wealth of literature which argues that conditions are now ripe for a generalised shift from `labour` to `creativity`. They generally start off from the concept of work, the quality of work, the global division of labour, the nature of global capital and also the character of struggles against global capital.

A sharp distinction between `work` and `labour` is central to such arguments in order to establish that `creativity` is inherent in `work`, but lost in `labour`.

Vladislav Inozemetsev (1999)⁷defines the term work as “referring to all the main forms of rational human activity, regardless of which historical period the subject is being analyzed”, and labour as “rational and goal-directed physical or mental activity, as an individual`s response to the external environment which serves to satisfy his physiological or social requirements, rather than to meet the need for self-development.” In this formulation, `labour` is `work` but labour need not lead to the self-development of the individual.

Vladislav distinguishes among three types of human activities: 1) instinctive work during the early stages of human development, 2) labour itself and 3) creativity or creative work as the negation of labour. He also theorises that the types of activities broadly relate with the stage of development of human society.

He arrives at the distinctions among the types of activities by the degree of alienability and reproducibility of the product of each. The material product of instinctive work is inalienable from the producer since the process of production frequently coincides with the process of consumption. The result of labour is alienable and reproducible. The products of creative work are, like the products of labour, alienable, but are also, like the products of instinctive work, not reproducible. He says, creativity is born from the individual`s desire for self-development, and its object is the creator himself; to create something more of what he already is.

Modern man, in post-Fordist societies, is thought to be more creative because she/he is a subject of both production and consumption. Production involves the use of the creative potential of the individual; and at the stage of consumption, the goods produced by the creative potential of individuals requires the subjective involvement of the consumer.

It is pertinent to observe that the distinction between `labour` and `creativity` made here is not based on the alienability of the product, but based on the quest for self-development of the actors. The creative work in post-Fordist societies is alienable.

The way in which one works is dependent on the development of material production and the evolution of society`s economic structure. The structuring of modern corporations has a lot to do with how people are made to work in these organisations. <sup>8</sup> Terms such as `creative workforce` are now accepted as part of the lexicon of modern management. ⁹

Vladislav presents transition from instinctive work to labour and then to creativity as a historical progression. He does not, though, replace one form of activity by the other, but establishes the dominance of one over the other.

A powerful argument in this line concerning the changing form/expression/social reality/etc., of labour has come from Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, who in Empire¹⁰argue that historically, the dominant position has passed from primary to secondary to tertiary production. The first paradigm was in which agriculture and the extraction of raw materials dominated the economy; the second in which industry and the manufacture of durable goods occupied the privileged position; and the third and current paradigm in which providing services and manipulating information are at the heart of economic production. The third is called economic postmodernisation, or informatisation. He says, while it is important to understand the quantitative measures of production, more significant is to understand the hegemonic influence one paradigm of production has on the rest of the paradigms and it becoming the general characteristic of the society.

Hardt and Negri assert that in the final decades of the twentieth century, industrial labour lost its hegemony and immaterial labour came to the fore, pulling, as industrial labour had done before it, other forms of labour and society itself into its `vortex`.

Like Vladislav, Hardt and Negri also posit that the contemporary stage in the development of capitalism provides the material conditions for the self-development of individuals at work.

Creativity and Immaterial Labour

`Work` at the contemporary stage of global informatised production is variously called  `communicative labour`,¹¹ `immaterial labour` and `precarious labour`, depending on the slight variations in emphasis one might intend to convey.

Hardt and Negri define immaterial labour as that labour which creates immaterial products, such as knowledge, information, communication, a relationship or an emotional response. They distinguish three types of immaterial labour that `drive the postmodernisation of the global economy`. The first is involved in informationalsied industrial production in which `material labour of the production of durable goods mixes with and tends toward immaterial labour`. The second is the immaterial labour of `analytical and symbolic tasks, which itself breaks down into creative and intelligent manipulation on the one hand and routine symbolic tasks on the other`. The third type of immaterial labour involves the production and manipulation of affect and requires (virtual or actual) human contact and labour in the bodily mode. This involves service sector activities, care activities, etc.

Emphasising how capitalism involves the subjectivity and personality of workers in the creation of value, Maurizio Lazerrato¹² introduces another category, “the immaterial labour involves a series of activities that are not normally recognized as `work`  in other words, the kinds of activities involved in defining and fixing cultural and artistic standards, fashions, tastes, consumer norms and, more strategically, public opinion.”

Hart and Negri consider that this immaterial labour or `mulititudes` is capable of offering the transformation of contemporary capitalism.

Precarity: A Political Conceptualisation of Immaterial Labour

However, many critical thinkers have cautioned against an unqualified exposition of the concept of immaterial labour. Vassilis Tsianos and Dimitris Papadopoulos¹³ argue for going beyond normal sociological description to `operative political conceptualisation of immaterial labour`, which is possible only from an understanding `the power dynamics of living labour in post-Fordist societies`. The operative political conceptualisation of immaterial labour will bring out the subjectivities of living labour as manifestations of their response to the micro-opressions and exploitations they experience as immaterial labour.

Tsianos and Papadopoulos further argue that `precarity` is the embodied experience of the ambivalences of immaterial productivity in advanced post-Fordism. They enlist the characteristics of the embodied experience of precarity as : “(a) vulnerability: the steadily experience of flexibility without any form of protection; (b) hyperactivity: the imperative to accommodate constant availability; (c) simultaneity: the ability to handle at the same the different tempi and velocities of multiple activities; (d) recombination: the crossings between various networks, social spaces, and available resources; (e) post-sexuality: the other as dildo; (f) fluid intimacies: the bodily production of indeterminate gender relations; (g) restlessness: being exposed to and trying to cope with the overabundance of communication, cooperation and interactivity; (h) unsettledness: the continuous experience of mobility across different spaces and time lines; (i) affective exhaustion: emotional exploitation, or, emotion as an important element for the control of employability and multiple dependencies; (j) cunning: able to be deceitful, persistent, opportunistic, a trickster.”

Therefore, exploitation in contemporary capitalism takes place not only at the workplace, but has become an existential condition of workers in which vulnerability is felt as a `constant state of being in every moment of everyday life`.¹⁴ Rejecting Hardt and Negri`s argument that labour does not create value in contemporary capitalism, Tsianos and Papadopoulos argue that knowledge is only an instrument of value creation and that “the embodied experience of precarity is the terrain on which exploitation as well as value creation takes place.”¹⁵ Precarity then becomes the terrain on which the new subjectivity of embodied labour will emerge.

There is then the danger of simulacra -  the capacity of Capitalism to internalise the forms and contents of its adversaries. Developing the concept of contemporary capitalism as `flexible capitalism`, cultural critic Brian Holmes qualifies `immaterial labour` as `flexible personality`.¹⁶ Based again on the experiences in advanced capitalism, Brian Holmes describes, `the configuration of the flexible personality’¹⁷ as a new form of social control, in which culture has an important role to play. It is a distorted form of the artistic revolt against authoritarianism and standardisation, a set of practices and techniques for “constituting, defining, organizing and instrumentalising” the revolutionary energies which emerged in the Western societies in the 1960s and which, for a time, seemed capable of transforming social relations. In post-Fordism, capital has used these values as flexible forms of social control.

Holmes acknowledges also that social control is global, that the capital has extended the mass production model to the developing countries, not giving the latter the autonomy of self governance, but linking the production facilities and markets of the advanced countries with the fastest-growing, third-world countries.¹⁸

III:  Material Labour in the Global South

The majority of workers in the global economic system engaged in mass production in developing countries are bodily coerced, overworked, underpaid, informalised and unrepresented. However, Brian Holmes does not adequately explain the nature of other labour subjectivities and personalities under such a global system. In general, the issue of this serious question of how the subjectivity and creativity of these workers are integrated into the post-Fordist organisation of production and valorisation of labour are not adequately conceptualised by the theorists of creative labour.

To follow the argument of Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter, this conceptual and political gap could be because of the ambivalent positioning of precarity.¹⁹ The concept of precarity simultaneously captures, on the one hand, the growing phenomenon of previously guaranteed permanent employment conditions transformed into mainly worse paid, uncertain jobs and, on the other hand, present precarity (in the form of creative, cognitive, or new media worker) as a precondition for new forms of creative organisation that seek to accept and exploit the flexibility inherent in networked modes of sociality and production. They argue that the containing category of creativity leads to “an eclipse of those forms of bodily, coerced, and unpaid work primarily associated with migrants and women.”

Conclusion

It is true that immaterial, cognitive or creative labour is a defining characteristic of contemporary capitalism. However, this perspective has a distinct bias towards advanced capitalism. Unless and until the understandings of precarity are broadened geographically to reach the multitude of informalised labour whose bodily labour in the developing countries is integral to the existence of global capital, not only will the theory of social change but also the practice of transformation be skewed. The subjectivity of the embodied immaterial labour in the global north and the subjectivity of the embodied material labour in the global south might never meet.

Work is physical toil for a majority of workers in the world. They continue to experience the triple alienation discussed above  from the product, from the means of production and from fellow human beings. The embodied labour of these workers is the constitutive element of contemporary capitalism. The heightened productivity of post-Fordist capitalism has neither provided them material comfort nor free time to engage in self-development. A major task before us is to fill the conceptual and political gaps in the understanding and the role of the subjectivities of dual labour in the constitution of contemporary capitalism and the transformation of social relations towards a realm of creativity and freedom.

1.        Karl Marx writes in Economic and Political Manuscripts, 1884, “the whole character of a species, its species-character, resides in the nature of its life activity,      and free conscious activity constitutes the species-character of man.”

2.         Sean Sayers, `Creative Activity and Alienation in Hegel and Marx`, Historical Materialism, Brill Academic Publishers, Volume 11, No. 1, April 2003, pp107-128.

3.        Andre Gorz in  `Summary for Trade Unionists and Other Left Activists`, Chapter 3, Critique of Economic Reason,  argues that reproductive work includes such activities as preparing food, keeping oneself and one`s home clean, giving birth to children and bringing them up, and so on. Autonomous activities include all activities that are experienced as fulfilling, enriching, sources of meaning and happiness, for example, artistic, philosophical, scientific, relational, educational, charitable and mutual-aid activities and activities of auto-production.

4.        Gorz, Andre. “Political Ecology: Expertocracy versus Self-Limitation.” New Left Review. Volume I No. 202, 1993.

5.        Karl Marx, Capital, Volume III, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1971, pp820. Marx writes, “The actual wealth of society, and the possibility of constantly expanding its reproduction process, therefore, do not depend upon the duration of surplus-labour, but upon its productivity and the more or less copious conditions of production under which it is performed. In fact, the realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases; thus in the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of actual material production. Just as the savage must wrestle with Nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilised man, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production. With his development this realm of physical necessity expands as a result of his wants; but, at the same time, the forces of production which satisfy these wants also increase. Freedom in this field can only consist in socialised man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, their human nature. But it nonetheless still remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite.”

6.        Marx, Karl, Grundrisse, Translated by M. Nicolaus, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973, pp705-06

7.        Inozemtsev, Vladislav. “Work, Creativity and Social Justice.” Social Science and Modern Society. Vol. 36, No 2, 1999): pp. 45-54.

8.        Vladislav argues that in post-Fordist industries, the organisation of production and what is expected of workers have changed; “... labor management is being replaced by creativity management, (that) the management of laboring individuals is being superseded by the management of creative individuals.” Consequently, corporations are shaping into `aggregate of collectives rather than vertical and hierarchical institutions.

9.        Emphasising that modern enterprises look for `creative workforce`, a document prepared for Australian higher education, ‘Educating for the Creative Workforce: Rethinking Arts and Education`, points out that “overall competitiveness (of modern firms) may be compromised if the coupling of analysis and interpretation is unbalanced.” It says that `innovation` depends on two processes analysis and interpretation. Whereas analysis uses empirical methods to arrive at conclusions, interpretation is best achieved when individuals employ their creative faculties.

10.     Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Empire, Harvard, USA: Harvard University Press, 2001.

11.     Characterising post-Fordist labour as linguisitc labour, Paolo Virno in `Labour and Language`, says that contemporary labour manifests features and attitudes like that used to be those of political praxis: presentations in the presence of others, management of a certain margin of unpredictability, capacity to begin something new, ability to navigate amongst alternative possibilities. Here, labour is not objectified in a lasting product.

12.     Lazzarato, Maurizio, Immaterial Labour,generation-online, <http://www.generation-online.org/c/fcimmateriallabour3.htm>.

13.     Tsianos, Vassilis and Dimitris Papadopoulos, Precarity: A Savage Journey to the Heart of Embodied Capitalism. Immaterial Labour, Multitudes and New Social Subjects: Class Composition in Cognitive Capitalism. King`s College, University of Cambridge: University of Cambridge, 2006.

14.     ibid

15.     ibid.

16.     Holmes, Brian. “The Flexible Personality: For a New Cultural Critique.” Paris, 2002. International Seminar on Class Composition in Cognitive Capitalism`. University of Paris. <http://www.geocities.com/CognitiveCapitalism>.

17.     Ibid. Brian Holmes describes, “The word `flexible` alludes directly to the current economic system, with its casual labor contracts, its just-in-time production, its informational products and its absolute dependence on virtual currency circulating in the financial sphere. But it also refers to an entire set of very positive images, spontaneity, creativity, cooperativity, mobility, peer relations, appreciation of difference, openness to present experience. If you feel close to the counter-culture of the sixties-seventies, then you can say that these are our creations but caught in the distorting mirror of a new hegemony. It has taken considerable historical effort from all of us to make the insanity of contemporary society tolerable.”

18.     Brian Holmes indicates the emergence of neo-colonialism under corporate-led contemporary capitalism when he says, “the transnational corporation, piloted by the financial markets, and backed up by the military power and legal architecture of the G-7 states, has taken over the economic governance of the world from the former colonial structure.”

19.     Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter, “From Precarity to Precariousness and Back Again: Labour, Life and Unstable Networks.” the journal, issue 5.