"Immaterial Labor" And The Logic Of Capital

The Immaterial labor theory is an important part of Italian Marxism.As an Italian Marxist scholar,Negri inherited the traditional theory of Marx's political economics critique when analyzing and criticizing contemporary capitalism.He revealed a new form of exploitation—Biopolitical labor,which based on the confrontation relationship between labor and capital and the new labor form under the contemporary capitalism.On this basis,Negri explores the logic of disintegration and resisting capital domination under the condition of new era.The Immaterial labor theory has many meanings,which is the inheritag and development of the two theories of Marxist philosophy and post-structuralism in France.First of all,it is a kind of communication labor which appears with the information network.Secondly,this kind of labor mainly manifests the cooperation and the interaction between the main bodies;moreover,this kind of labor cannot separate from the labor main body but can promote laborer's subjectivity.Nagri's critical path to contemporary capitalism was based on Marx's critical thinking,which is,dissecting capitalism from the labor.But Nagri did not completely copied Marx's critical theory.First,he took Marx's dialectical contradiction between labor and capital as an antithetic logic between duality subjects;Secondly,Marx classified the demise of capitalism as the result of the internal contradictory movement of capitalism,while Nagri took it as the result of the new class revolution,and finally,in the whole process of contemporary capitalism critique,Nagri emphasizes the key role of the construction of revolutionary subjectivity in promoting the disintegration of capitalism,and ignores the analysis of the logic of the internal contradictions of capital,which leads to a complete neglect of the objective law of capital movement when discussing the revolution countermeasures,and an exaggeration of the role of the construction of the labor subjectivity on the political revolution.The theoretical method of Nagri criticizing capitalism from "immaterial labor" has certain limitations.First of all,his empirical generalization of the labor paradigm of immaterial labor is only a one-sided development of Marx's labor theory;Secondly,immaterial Labor cannot be a new production form to compete against capital by separating from the capital logic,and it is still included in the framework of the logic of capital;Finally,Nagri's political revolution theory emphasizes the subject logic too much,and ignores the contradiction relationship between labor and capital.His theory has no reality to resist the revolution strategy of the capitalist logic by way of running away.However,Nagri's analysis of contemporary capitalism is also significant.His research is not only a possible way to understand the current form of labor,but also a new breakthrough in the study of Marxist political economy.