Immaterial Labour and the City

Some of the most important work on the urban comes from the Marxist tradition. It’s not too difficult to understand why. Given the acknowledged historical connections between industrial development and modern urbanisation, an approach that acknowledges the relationship between urban forms and the productive processes of capitalism will have some appeal.

For urban analysts as different from each other as Lefebvre, Castells and Soja, transformations in urban space are related to transformations in the sphere of commodity production and its corresponding relations of production. While this may appear obvious to some, it does present important explanatory challenges. For instance, while modern urban forms of the 19^th and 20^th century present clearly visible spaces of industrial production (factories) and the social reproduction of labour (housing), such a neat bifurcation no longer seems applicable to the contemporary world of multi-centred and relatively dispersed urban space, characterised (at least in the West) by the relative absence of industrialisation as traditionally understood. The task for contemporary urbanologists, it seems, is twofold: First, to analyse new dynamics in our economic and social life and second, to demonstrate how these dynamics give rise to new spatial forms of urban development.

However, the attraction of both classical Marxist and post-Marxist interpretations of the urban lies in more than just the tradition’s explanatory power. Aside from its insights into the fields of economic production and culture, the Marxist tradition generally contains a commitment to a transformative politics that seeks to overcome capitalist relations of exploitation. As a result, the work of contemporary Marxist urbanism needs to address not just the structure and form of the urban in contemporary Western society but also whether our new urban spaces and populations are capable of producing counter-capitalist political change.

The connection between political practice and social analysis suggests that as long as we remain tied to a conception of the social world strongly determined by capitalist industrialisation, for so long shall we remain within models of political action that privilege capitalist agency over the possibility of resistance and transformation. But another consequence of this connection between theory and practice is that new and emergent practices of political transformation provide clues about the nature of the social world by revealing significant changes in structures of production and domination. With this formulation – one drawn from Autonomism and Negri – an intimate connection is revealed between knowledge, action and the practice of social transformation.

The theorists of the Autonomist movement began to sketch out an entirely new form of labouring subject that has become what is now popularly called the Multitude. Provisionally, it could be said that the concept of Multitude replaces the proletarian subject of classical Marxism, but there are important differences that point to the radical departure that Negri and other theorists of the Autonomist school propose to take from Marxism as it is generally understood. These differences have their basis in the forms of labour that that are characterise post-Fordist economies, and they are therefore relevant to the study of urban form. What is important to bear in mind is that these new forms of labour are affective; they involve communication, relation, and subjectivity. Much of what is distinctive about the analysis of the Multitude can be traced to Maurizio Lazzarato’s seminal essay on immaterial labour:

The concept of immaterial labour presupposes and results in an enlargement of productive cooperation that even includes the production and reproduction of communication and hence of its most important contents: subjectivity. If Fordism integrates consumption into the cycle of the reproduction of capital, post-Fordism integrates communication into it.

 

These themes of immateriality, productive cooperation, communication and subjectivity are, in my mind, central to any understanding of the urban in today’s Western societies. Provisionally, they seem to allow for the decentralisation and dispersal so visually apparent to most urban critics, while the emphasis on production allows for the persistence of those material characteristics of capitalism still prevalent in most so-called “global cities”: exclusion, poverty, exploitation and its characteristic urban forms.