“affective labor is biopolitical production in that it directly produces social relationships and forms of life. … When affective production becomes part of waged labor it can be experienced as extremely alienating: I am selling my ability to make human relationships, something extremely intimate, at the command of the client and the boss.”

— Antonio Negri, book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

110-111
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

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Antonio Negri63

Italian sociologist 1933

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“The capitalist call workers to the factory, for example, directing them to collaborate and communicate in production and giving them the means to do so. In the paradigm of immaterial production, in contrast, labor itself tends to produce the means of interaction, communication, and cooperation for production directly. Affective labor always directly constructs a relationship.”

Antonio Negri book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

147
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

“The contemporary scene of labor and production, we will explain, is being transformed under the hegemony of immaterial labor, that is, labor that produces immaterial products, suchs as information, knoledges, ideas, images, relationships, and affects. This does not mean that there is no more industrial working class whose calloused hands toil with machines or that there ae no more agricultural workers who till the soil. It does not even mean that the numbers of such workers have decreased globally. In fact, workers involved primarily in immaterial production are a small minority of the gloval whole. What it means, rather, is that the qualities and characteristics of immaterial production are tending to transform the other forms of labor and indeed society as a whole. Some of these new characteristics are decidedly unwelcome. When our ideas and affects, or emotions, are put to work, for insance, and when they thus become subject in a way to the command of the boss, we often experience new and intense forms of violation or alienation. Furthermore, the contractual and material conditions of immaterial labor that tend to spread to the entire labor market are making the position of labor in general more precarious. The is one tendency, for example, in various forms of immaterial labor to blur the distinction between work time and nonwork time, extending the working day indefinietly to fill all of life, and another tendency for immaterial labor to function without stable long-term contracts, and thus to adopt the precarious position of becoming flexible (to accomplish several tasks) and mobile (to move continually among locations). […] The production of ideas, knowledges, and affects, for example, does not merely create means by which society is formed and maintained; such immaterial labor also directly produces social relationships. […] immaterial labor tends to take the social form of network based on communication.”

Antonio Negri book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

65-66
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

“we will argue that the dominant form of contemporary production, which exerts its hegemony over the others, creates "immaterial goods" such as ideas, knowledge, forms of communication, and relationships. … what is produced in this case is not just material goods but actual social relationships and forms of life. We will call this kind of production "biopolitical" to highlight how general its products are and how directily it engages social life in its entirety.”

Antonio Negri book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

94
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

“By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labor. By proletariat, the class of modern wage laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live.”

Friedrich Engels book The Communist Manifesto

The Communist Manifesto, footnote (1888 edition)

“Immaterial labor has become hegemonic in qualitative terms and has imposed a tendency on other forms of labor and society itself. Immaterial labor, in other words, is today in the same position that industrial labor was 150 years ago, when it accounted for only a small fraction of global production and was concentrated in a small part of the world but nonetheless exerted hegemony over all other forms of production. Just as in that pgase all forms of labor and society itself had to industrialize, today, labor and society have to informationalize, become intelligent, become communicative, become affective.”

Antonio Negri book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

109
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

“conventional terms such as service work, intellectual labor, and cognitive labor all refer to aspects of immaterial labor, but none of them captures its generality. As an initial approach, one can concieve immaterial labor in two principle forms. The first for refers to labor, that is primarily intellectual or linguistic such as problem solving, symbolic and analytical tasks, and linguistic expressions. This kind of immaterial labor produces ideas, symbols, codes, texts, linguistic figures, images and other such products. We call the other principle form of immaterial labor "affective labor."”

Antonio Negri book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Affective labor, then, is labor that produces or manipulates affects such as a feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement, or passion.
108
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

“in general, the hegemony of immaterial labor tends to transform the organization of production from the linear relationships of assembly line to the innumerable and indeterminate relationships of distributed networks.”

Antonio Negri book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

113
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

“The last few decades have witnessed a growing integration of the world system of production on the basis of a new relationship between less developed and highly industrialized countries. The effect is a geographical dispersion of the various production stages in the manufacturing process as the large corporations of industrialized "First World" countries are attracted by low labor costs, taxes, and relaxed production restrictions available in developing countries.
This collection of papers focuses on inequalities among different sectors of the labor force, particularly those related to gender, and how these are affected by the changing international division of labor.”

June Nash (1927–2019) American anthropologist

Book summary
Women, Men, and the International Division of Labor, 1983