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  • Sketches of Contemporary Labor
  • Edgar Illas (bio)

Contemporary labor remains a mystery that, like Poe’s purloined letter, seems to lay bare in front of all of us. The real subsumption of labor under capital has fully diffused the concept and activity of labor. Numerous terms have theorized this perplexing and yet transparent diffusion. Maurizio Lazzarato has defined contemporary labor as “immaterial labor”: “the labor that produces the informational and cultural content of the commodity.”1 Paolo Virno and Christian Marazzi have talked about the economy of language, a term that describes the self-referentiality of a finance capitalism based on opinion, information, rumor, and performative utterances.2 Michael Hardt has pointed to affective labor, the labor of human contact, interaction, forms of community, and biopower.3 Laikwan Pang has analyzed the materiality of creative labor and has shown how the creative or knowledge economy has intensified the contradictions between manual and intellectual labor.4

These terms, among many others, guide us in the Marxist task of examining the forms of capitalist exploitation. And yet, we encounter a crucial, unsolved difficulty again and again: how to measure the value of contemporary labor. The central notion that defines Marx’s whole enterprise is “value” understood as the unit that articulates social production. Within capitalism, this unit is expressed as money. Determining the value of labor is indispensable if one wants to account for the content and possibilities of class struggle. This struggle results from the appropriation of all types of productive [End Page 55] forces (creative powers, subjective talents, physical strength, affective aptitudes) and their transformation into labor force. This labor force can be purchased and its use value is expressed, like the value of all commodities, as exchange value; that is, as money.

The mystery of contemporary labor is caused by the fact that it is fully visible everywhere and at the same time its monetary value cannot be easily determined. We experience what Marazzi calls “the crisis of measurability of single work operations (of the work time necessary to produce goods).”5 In a situation in which all aspects of social life have been put to work and subsumed under the logic of capital, the Marxist imperative to calculate work time and account for the ways in which capital extracts labor outside of salaried work is as necessary as it is impossible. Marazzi speaks of “blocks of social time” to analyze the relationship between productive work time and free time.6 But this suggestive notion (which redefines Marx’s socially average units of labor power) tries to calculate the impossible measure of work time in a situation in which life and work have become one and the same thing.

You drive back from the airport. You just said goodbye to some relatives who visited you for a long weekend. They had fun during their visit. You enjoyed having them in town, but you are exhausted. Family visits are enjoyable, but they are also challenging, demanding, laborious, difficult. Your father questioned each plan for the weekend as you had scheduled it. He knew how to get to places, where to park, where to eat, and where to get the best deals in town, as if he lived here and you did not. Your mother asked you to be patient: you know how your father is, he will never change. In turn, she competed for attention. She had to prove that one’s mother is unique and irreplaceable.

Other relatives might have included a boring aunt who is always tired; a self-centered, frivolous sister who is a sophomore in college; an uncle who always tries to be funny; a bitter grandparent; and a sister-in-law who struggles to become a scriptwriter and does not taste alcohol because she claims she had a drinking problem. She talks about her drinking problem all the time, and everyone believes that her addiction was a case of self-delusion. She went to rehab and in the clinic she became friends with an actress who had played a role in the Star Wars series. Now she avoids alcohol at all costs. At one dinner during the weekend, she asked the waiter if the meat...

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