Affective resistance to work and immaterial labor is bourgeois elitism that can’t scale up and gets coopted if it does.

If governmentality studies exaggerate the trope of economic action, thus ignoring the possibilities of capture that lurk behind our efforts to resist a cold and callous version of capitalism, autonomist Marxism suffers of the opposite problem. It shares a naturalist belief in the self-destructive capabilities of late capitalism precisely because it recognizes that the battle for the social reproduction of capitalism is being fought on territories which were once ornamental or external (if not outright inimical) to value production.64 The communicative and affective competencies (what autonomists call "general intellect") required by the "new economy" are the very same dispositions that will allow us to short-circuit biopolitical production and "become common" again. It is just a matter of time until workers realize that capital, especially in its cognitive guise, has lost its productive function of ensuring cooperation and circulation to become a purely parasitical structure that serves no other purpose than to expropriate our common laboring efforts.65 Once this injustice is recognized nothing will stand in the way of emancipation. It seems to me that this overly optimistic celebration of the subjective potential of labor, which fits in with the greater "turn to affect" that has emerged in cultural studies, mystifies the inherently duplicitous character of affect. To place trust in the self-destructive capabilities of late capitalism seems excessively optimistic seeing how the communicative and affective competencies demanded by the "new economy" have done more to solidify the stronghold of neoliberal ideology than erode it.

Autonomist Marxism tells roughly the same story as Foucauldian governmentality critique, albeit with a few modifications: neoliberalism is replaced with post-Fordism, subjectivity with living labor, and governmentality with biopolitical production. Where Foucault talked of neoliberalism as a general philosophy that takes the market into the guiding principle for all human action, the Marxian master-category of post-Fordism grounds the neoliberal ethos in the history of 1960s and 70s labor struggles and economic shocks. In operaismo66 (workerist) terms, post-Fordism is defined as a neoliberal tactic deliberately trying to fragment the relatively firm class alliances of the postwar period through technological innovation and economic globalization, and restore the power of managerial and political elites. Technological automatization, large-scale outsourcing, non-standard employment relations, and the overall state of economic precarity (in work, housing, finance, education, citizenship practices, and affective relations) that followed these waves of neoliberalization sought to respond to shop floor disaffection over tedious and repetitive jobs, but also discipline the "revolt against work" of earlier decades.

The greatest merit of what appears to be primarily a terminological shift from neoliberalism to post-Fordism is to make labor, something which not only political economy but Marx himself neglected, the subject of historical transformation. Instead of a somewhat generalized notion of subjectivity, autonomist thought grants ontological primacy to the proletariat. Work, the master relation of all human interaction, is the place where subjectivity is produced. Or, to put it differently, the waged relation, generalized across the entire social field, is the central method of control: work on yourself, your education, your finances, your personal health, and your social relations. This over-privileging of labor might seem strange considering that, especially in places blessed with the social, cultural, and symbolic rewards of post-industrialism, capitalism is less about producing goods and services than about reproducing hospitable forms of life (e.g., bodies, subjectivities, social relations, material processes, desires, and fantasies). Yet for autonomist Marxists it is precisely these affluent contexts, where work is largely immaterial, recreational, and consumptive, that the hegemonic tendency of flexible capitalism is most evident.67 The days of mass production may be over, at least as a formula for growth, but the logic of production now extends throughout the entire social field, collapsing labor and leisure, prosperity and sociality, philanthropy and entrepreneurship, into a so-called "social factory." Although similar, the effects of biopolitical production or "bioeconomy" are far more severe, critical Marxists argue, than those implied by Foucauldian governmentality. Whereas neoliberal governmentality tries to make the "economic perspective [...] coextensive with all of society"68, biopolitical production recognizes the limits of economic rationality and makes the "raw material of human relations"69, that is, our propensity towards language, communication, creativity, community, and everything else we are used to thinking is autonomous or alternative to capital, immanent to value production.

Several critiques have been raised against this strand of Marxism, especially in the form popularized by Hardt and Negri's trilogy - Empire, Multitude and Commonwealth. More loyal epigones accuse Hardt and Negri of abdicating from many of the core tenets of Marxism (e.g., explanatory primacy of relations of production, objective class interests, and the utopia of communism) and downgrading Leftist politics to a sentimental affiliation with no substantial political value.70 Feminist Marxists, on the other hand, take issue with Hardt and Negri's gender neutrality. An entire tradition of feminist analysis on the role of women's work in reproducing the working class, the enclosure of women's bodies in exploitative and precarious labor conditions, and the gender hierarchies that make all of this possible have been swept away by Hardt and Negri's superficial discussion of "affective labor."71 Perhaps the most important accusation, however, charges members of the post-operaista Left with exaggerating the intellectual and immaterial components of modern life, both in numerical terms and as a strategic move.

Immaterial labor, broadly defined, is work which includes and relies upon activities not traditionally considered as part of work, such as tastes, opinion, sociality, communication, creativity, leisure, art and affect. It is work which regardless of its material substance, extracts value from intangible properties, like knowledge, information, sociality or emotional response. Its goal is not to produce certain economic value, social good, or cultural product, but to implode the distinctions between these categories by producing social life itself.72 Critics interject that immaterial labor describes only the experiences of liberal bourgeois subjects (e.g., entrepreneurs, freelancers, writers, artists, architects, designers, academic, etc.).73 The post-industrial age Hardt and Negri proclaim can be accepted only if we gloss over the vast majority of the world's population employed in agriculture and industry as well as the army of low-skilled and undocumented laborers (e.g., cleaners, nannies, waiters, etc.) needed to sustain the creative juices of the few. Though Hardt and Negri go to great lengths to explain that immaterial labor is hegemonic in qualitative (not numerical) terms - immaterial labor is hegemonic in the same way industrial labor was 150 years ago74 -, critics doubt the usefulness of this gesture. Even if immaterial labor were the norm-setting mode of production which all other forms of work must emulate and be assessed against, this concept still does nothing to restore or produce cross-class alliances between computer programmers and construction workers, artists and agricultural workers. The work of communicating and translating these distinct experiences of precarity is in no way impossible, but it is also not a necessary consequence of "affective labor."75 Still, Hardt and Negri are not that easily discouraged. They trust that, in asking labor to become more "intelligent," capital is sawing the seeds of its own destruction. The very same qualities "new entrepreneurs" need to manage and organize themselves without the direct supervision of capital can be used for radical self-organization. In typical Marxist fashion, heightened exploitation and precarization can only work to capital's disadvantage because eventually the system is bound to crumble under the weight of its tensions and contradictions.

What is conveniently forgotten here is that, historically, capitalism has always been very skilled at stealing the subjective potential, the "democratic distemper"76 of the workforce to make accumulation tolerable and necessary again. The very same affective and intellectual predispositions that would allow labor to spontaneously organize itself are also what tie individuals to the gratifying, expressive, and pleasurable promises of essentially precarious and exploitative economic arrangements. Not only are the examples of the Zapatistas, the Seattle protests, and the Invisible Committee far too scattered to make real the dream of the multitude Hardt and Negri announce, but there is also not enough specification as to how or why this multi-headed subject should opt out of the benefits of immaterial work (e.g., prosperity, recognition, creativity, artistic expression, self-esteem) to join a rather demanding, lengthy and uncertain revolutionary road. As Madra and Ozselcuk accurately observe,

... there is very little discussion of why this post-Fordist subjectivity would not resist (for there are many who don't) and perhaps even derive enjoyment from this game of 'economic incentives,' the neoliberal universe of individual responsibility, pursuit of self-interest, and transgressive consumption. Nor do we find a discussion of the subjective investments and affective regimes that will enable these post-Fordist subjectivities to reorient themselves ethico-politically to resist the capture of Empire and move beyond the rule of capital.77