Lazzarato’s concept of immaterial labour names the labour that produces the informational and cultural content of commodities. It includes cybernetic control, communication, coordination, knowledge work, cultural production, taste-making, fashion, standards, norms and public opinion. The iconic idea is that production has moved into subjectivity. The worker is no longer only asked to execute tasks; the worker is asked to communicate, decide, cooperate, imagine, adapt and invest personality in the labour process. Management wants the worker’s soul to become part of the factory. This does not mean that material labour disappears. Rather, the old division between manual and intellectual labour becomes reorganized. Productive activity increasingly depends on collective learning, linguistic exchange, affective participation and the capacity to activate cooperation. Lazzarato’s importance lies in showing that post-Fordist production captures activities once considered outside work: creativity, sociability, cultural judgement, attention and subject formation. The commodity carries not only use value and exchange value, but communicative and cultural content. Immaterial labour therefore becomes a key to understanding contemporary capitalism as a regime that extracts value from signs, affects, relations and shared intelligence.
