User:Janis Klimanovs Annotation of Maurizio Lazzarato - Immaterial Labor

Immaterial labor

In 1996 the author has described the change of immaterial labor and how it has developed during past 20 years up to the late 1990s. The labor sectors have experienced radical transformation from industrial to post-industrial period. Fordist factory labor models have been restructured during the time. It has increasingly modified from a manual work to the ability to deal with technology and computers. Employees need to be able to work with responsibility and make independent decisions. Management has developed as a new communication technology that has become necessary for the labor to control the processes. Workers have become more subjective, work functions require more knowledge.

A paradox has developed in the industry, not everyone want and can fit in the system that is managed by foreman who is concealing the interests of individuals and collective because they are not identical with the company. Also workers are from different social classes and lack of knowledge level and responsibility is an obstacle. Immaterial labor transforms to a field what is not that collective but exists more in networks and flows as a combinations of small productive units. These network based labors somehow interrupt the industry and become independent because of their ability of self management and other individual skills that are achieved in an work flow and adapted personally. They are a part of a stream, based on communication and interaction. The role of this kind of immaterial labor is to achieve more continual innovation stream, that first of all produces social relationship. "Industry does not form or create this new labor power, but simply takes it on board and adapts it." (p.140)

In whole labor process of consuming commodity is one more paradox, consumer service has become more important than the product. It starts to shift with the provided product because it becomes a social construction and a process of innovation. The value of the commodity more depends on the provided service. There are boundaries of valorization for the immaterial labor of creation and intellectual labor because of the limited knowledge of consumers, their value vary in different social groups.