The production of economic value and the formation of political subjectivities in the post-modern

economy

Paul McFadden

Abstract

This paper addresses itself to literature on aesthetic labour, affective labour, emotional labour
and immaterial labour and I argue for a theoretical re-evaluation of the importance of labour in
analysis of the ‘modes of life’ of contemporary society by examining these forms of labour in the
context of the change in political economy since around 1970 and the Autonomist Marxist thesis of
the ‘General Intellect’. Labour under capitalism is the site of the production of subjectivity and the
activity of the production of economic value and these forms of labour are preponderant over
other labours in the knowledge-based, service-oriented economy. My analysis presents the specific
importance of work in the processes of the production of contemporary life.
In contrast to the Autonomist Marxists, this paper proposes that the activity of these forms of
wage-labour in the post-modern economy reveals a tendency toward the creation of capitalistic
subjectivities. The real extent of the Fordist organisation of labour in the West is often
underplayed, but the worker is not always individualized and often exhibits acts of rebellion within
the power-relations of aesthetic labour, affective labour, emotional labour and immaterial labour.

1. Introduction

This short paper attempts to give an overview of new ways of working and show the determinate

relationships that occur between processes of valorisation, work, and the formation of subjectivities in

what has been called the ‘post-modern’ or ‘new’ economy. I look at key-themes of the nature of worker

subjectivities that obtain in ‘immaterial labour’1, ‘affective labour’2, ‘emotional labour’3, and ‘aesthetic

labour’4 as a result of the new power relations of post-modern capitalism. Analysis of these labours show

that the site of intellectual control over the labour process has shifted from capital to labour. New regimes

of control extend previous capitalist systems of surveillance and discipline over workers’ bodies, as in

Fordist modes of labour, toward power over, and a commodification of, workers’ subjectivities. Worker

1
Although the concept is introduced in Maurizio Lazzarato, ‘Immaterial Labor’ In Paulo Virno and Michael Hardt
(eds.), Radical thought in Italy: A Potential Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), Hardt &
Negri have brought the concept to prominence.
2
Hardt & Negri have taken the concept from a perspective of unwaged care labour in the home to one of wage-
labour. Empire. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).
3
Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart: commercialization of human feeling. (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1983).
4
Warhurst, C., Nickson, D., Witz, A. and Cullen, A, ‘Aesthetic Labour in Interactive Service Work: Some Case
Study Evidence from the “New” Glasgow’, Service Industries Journal, 20:3, (2000). 1-18.
 Paul McFadden The production of economic value and the formation of political subjectivities in the post-modern economy

subjectivity is utilised as an economic value-producing and value-realizing resource by the turning of

worker-subjectivity upon the consumer- or social-subjectivity in the form of a commodity.

2. The production of subjectivity and the creation of value: emerging forms of labour.

The concept of abstract labour, ‘homogenous...labour power expended without regard to the mode of its

expenditure’1, is not as useful as it once was in examining value and subjectivity. The post-modern-phase

of capital is both defined by and has brought new ways of creating value that act upon human subjectivity

in new ways. The starting point for analysing the role of labour in the production of contemporary modes

of life must be in the qualitative, concrete aspects of labour, in the worker’s experience of it and in the

activity of labour.

Emotional and Affective Labour

There is a unity between the concepts of emotional labour and affective labour in both the historical and

concrete senses. Both can be said to originate before capital dominated social organisation, in

reproductive, nurturing and care labour in the home and there are also qualitative similarities in the

concepts. The key quality of affective labour as a commodity-producing activity is that it is ‘labour that

produces or manipulates affects such as a feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement or

passion.’2 Emotional labour ‘requires a worker to manage his or her own feelings to produce a desired

state of mind in a customer’.3

The occurrence of emotional and affective labour in capitalism represents an alteration of the relation

between labour and capital. The use-value produced by the labour-power is a specific sort of subjectivity

that can be cultivated to produce a certain type of emotional response in another person and the extent of

capital’s intellectual control of this production process is the regulation of subjectivities according to

1
Marx Capital I 45-46.
2
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Multitude. (London: Penguin, 2006). 108.
3
Ashley Mears and William Finlay. 'Not Just A Paper Doll: How Models Manage Bodily Capital and Why They
Perform Emotional Labour' Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 34:3 (2005). 319.

1
 Paul McFadden The production of economic value and the formation of political subjectivities in the post-modern economy

value-producing and value-realising norms. In the post-modern economy, the production of consumer

states-of-mind has an exchange-value.

Immaterial labour

Immaterial labour is the labour that produces the informational and cultural content of society and

immaterial labourers, according to Lazzarato and Hardt and Negri, possess cognitive control over the

production process and increasingly operate under conditions of self-determination and autonomy. Its

commodities are ‘information’1, ‘knowledge or communication’2, which in turn create ‘social relations’

and a ‘system of needs’3. Labour is becoming ‘biopolitical labour’4, creating social life as a commodity.

Neither Hardt and Negri, nor Lazzarato, offer a substantial qualitative content to the concept of

immaterial labour. There is a lack of ethnographic data on a specifically ‘immaterial’ form of labour in

action.

Hardt and Negri propose that the worker-subjective nature of the activity and cognitive control of the

production process is beginning to permeate traditionally ‘Fordist’ forms of labour. Despite its failings,

the concept of immaterial labour brings us to an understanding of a fundamental alteration in the

processes of the reproduction of labour and the reproduction of society in post-modern political economy

and the political potential of the development of capitalist processes of valorisation. The walls between

the inside and outside of capital are falling down.

Aesthetic labour

1
Lazzarato, ‘Immaterial’ 138.
2
Hardt, ‘Affective’ 94.
3
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Philosophy of Right Translated T.M Knox. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1942).
123.
4
Hardt and Negri, Multitude 109.

2
 Paul McFadden The production of economic value and the formation of political subjectivities in the post-modern economy

Aesthetic labour is work that relies ‘to a large extent upon the physical appearance or, more specifically,

the embodied capacities and attributes’1 of the worker. This aesthetic content of labour is commodified by

capital. The process of the commodification of embodied attributes begins with the recruitment of

workers with suitable attributes and capital develops regimes of behaviour control that utilise

subjectivities to “present” the aesthetic in a way that creates and realizes value. The commodity of

aesthetic labour is, again, the production of an affect – a desire, passion or want – in the subjectivity of

the consumer.

There are different power structures at work in the regulation of aesthetic. For Warhurst, the ‘regulation

of appearance’ is internalized by capital with ‘grooming standards committees [and] uniform police.’2

There is, however, a more ‘pure’ form of aesthetic labour that must be considered. Fashion models are

“self-employed” or, rather, they operate in an insecure form of wage labour. Fashion models, and the self-

employed generally, internalize the capitalist process of exploitation, and the ‘internalization of self-

exploitation’3 is accompanied in aesthetic labour by an internalization of capital’s regime of the regulation

of appearance. Fashion models are not contractually subject to capital’s structures of aesthetic regulation,

only the imperative to maintain or develop the particular aesthetic that capital requires for its valorisation.

Models, like other aesthetic workers, and emotional, affective and immaterial workers, must conform to

the subjectivity that capital decides is the valorising-subjectivity or they will not work in those spheres of

production.

Aesthetic labour requires the ‘ongoing production of the body/self’4 and highlights Hardt and Negri’s

“inside/outside”5 distinction of capital’s production of subjectivity. In aesthetic labour, there must be pre-

work management of worker subjectivity and capital requires that the end of that subjectivity is the

production of the required aesthetic. Capital’s production of subjectivity extends outside work-time and

1
Chris Warhurst, Dennis Nickson, Anne Witz and Anne Marie Cullen. 'Aesthetic Labour in Interactive Service
Work: Some Case Study Evidence from the "New Glasgow"' The Service Industries Journal 20:3 (2000). 2.
2
Warhurst et al, ‘Aesthetic’ 13.
3
Robert Cox, Production, Power, and World Order: Social Forces in the making of History. (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1987). 54.
4
Joanne Entwhistle and Elizabeth Wissinger. 'Keeping up Appearances: aesthetic labour in the fashion modelling
industries of London and New York' The Sociological Review 54:4 (2006) 774.
5
Hardt and Negri, Empire 196.

3
 Paul McFadden The production of economic value and the formation of political subjectivities in the post-modern economy

work-place. Systems of control of the aesthetic extend to the workers everyday life with specific

consumption regimes managed by the worker herself, of which the aim is to produce and realize value.

A mode of labour

By analysing worker-subjectivity, how it is exercised on an everyday basis, and where, how and why it is

produced, clear points of qualitative confluence and sameness are revealed across these four forms of

labour.

The goals of emotional, affective, immaterial and aesthetic labour are the same. The labour-activity of

workers in these spheres is to create a specific state of mind in the consumer of the commodity. Whether

that state of mind is enjoyment, guilt, desire or need, workers in these spheres earn a wage by producing

an alteration in the subjectivity of the object of their labour. However, the method of creating this

response, the labour activity, should be qualitatively differentiated. In emotional labour, capital invests

value, labour-power, in order to produce worker-subjectivities that “want” to produce the required

emotions in the consumer of the emotion-commodity. Capital wants labour to create emotion as though

the worker was hosting guests at home. In this way, capital ‘extends and uses [worker’s] basic empathy’1.

Affective labour and aesthetic labour operate in exactly the same capacity in their service guise. Workers

are required to behave as though their customers were important family friends. However, this non-work

subjectivity is alienated from the worker and reified because of its goal of value-production. ‘The

individual is an effect of power and, at the same time...is the element of its articulation’2 in terms of

labour activity, the production of commodity and value, and the formation of political subjectivities.

1
Hochschild, Heart 106.
2
Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977. Colin Gordon (ed.)
(New York: Prentice Hall, 1980). 98.

4
Paul McFadden The production of economic value and the formation of political subjectivities in the post-modern economy

The subject is alienated from her own subjectivity in this work and as her empathy or bonhomie are

utilised as a source of value, so empathy and bonhomie are reified and alienated. Emotion and aesthetic,

objectified under conditions of wage labour, become a commodity with an exchange-value. Subjectivity

is alienated from the worker in the transaction of the use-value of labour-power for its exchange-value.

As immaterial labour is the exercise of worker subjectivity under the subjectivity-production regimes of

capital, and as immaterial labour is also exercised to the production of value and occurs in the same

transaction of the use-value of labour-power for its exchange value, so immaterial labour also constitutes

an alienation of subjectivity. The alienation of subjectivity in the capitalist process of valorisation across

the forms of labour is the same. “Outside” capital subjectivity is alienated by capital, it is bought.

Subjectivity is managed and produced “inside” capital.

In all these forms of labour, capital subsumes worker subjectivity and sets that subjectivity to the

production and manipulation of the subjectivities of consumers. This production of subjectivity is the

commodity and the skill of the work is the ability to alter the subjectivities of others. The

emotional/affective/ immaterial/aesthetic worker is the subjectivity that manipulates subjectivity and the

worker relates to the consumer as an object. As the worker objectifies her subjectivity in the consumer

and alienates the consumer is rendered a subject/object by the worker and, ultimately by capital. This

objectification or subsumption of the person, or subject, is not merely a subsumption of the worker and

the consumer but is a process of capital’s reproduction of labour and society. The knowledge,

information, and culture that is produced as commodities by these forms of labour is institutionalised in

processes of the reproduction of society, such as education, law, welfare, politics, property and

democracy and in non-codified conventions like the concepts of ‘care’, ‘love’ and ‘work’. This

institutionalisation produces and reproduces social relations.

The emotional/affective/immaterial/aesthetic worker objectifies her subjectivity outside work-time and

work-place, before and after becoming a worker. The commodity produced by her labour creates the

conditions for the reproduction of labour and her labour creates the norms of capitalist accumulation that

5
Paul McFadden The production of economic value and the formation of political subjectivities in the post-modern economy

produce society. As the fashion model, waitress, flight attendant, marketing professional, and news

reporter regiment their subjectivity so the consumer of affects, information and aesthetics does.

If the Fordist worker can be called a “spoke in the wheel” of capitalist accumulation then the post-modern

worker is a wheel in herself, constantly directed to turn, go faster, remould, and repair. She makes her

decisions but her decisions are determined by capitalist power relations. This change in the cognitive

division of labour is both a cause and consequence of changes in the production and reproduction of

labour and society.

This post-modern mode of labour is capital acting upon subjectivity to act upon subjectivity. Capital

utilises and transforms worker subjectivities, and sets them and transforming the subjectivities of workers

and consumers. Capitalist processes of valorisation do not merely determine worker subjectivities but also

determine social, the non-work time and place. This mode of labour produces the informational and

cultural content of society as the relationship between capitalist valorisation and the production of

subjectivity acts in a “feedback loop”. As value determines subjectivity in a qualitative way, so

subjectivity determines value in both a quantitative and qualitative way. Subjectivity determines the

amount of value created and the manner in which it is produced.

3. Post-modern capitalism: Value, subjectivities and modes of life

There is a growing centrality of worker subjectivity in the production process, and the knowledge of

labour is becoming more crucial to the optimal production of value and surplus-value. The labour activity

of the production process, and therefore the production of value, is regulated by the subjectivity of the

worker.

The subjectivity of the consumer of immaterial, emotional, affective and aesthetic labour is transformed

in the act of consumption of the subjective-commodity. The consumer, in turn, becomes a producer of the

“immaterial” content of society. In this way, the affects, emotions, knowledge and culture that are created

by these forms of labour are transmitted “outside” capital and back “inside” capital via the social relations

and norms that are reproduced by the consumer after the commodity-exchange.

6
 Paul McFadden The production of economic value and the formation of political subjectivities in the post-modern economy

Capital extends its exploitative power structures toward ‘the totality of social times which participate in

social production’1. Capital’s processes of valorisation determine and are determined by the nature of the

subjectivities of society and therefore they determine and are determined by the socio-political structures

of society. ‘Communicative and affective capabilities are forcefully demanded by capitalism,’2 and this

demand creates determinate and determinant relations between labour and capital, the state and the

people, people and work, and, ultimately, between people. Free time ‘reacts back upon the productive

power of labour as itself the greatest productive power.’3 This is the political-economic phase of the

general intellect. ‘The material potentiality of general intellect,’ Virno attests on behalf of the Operaists,

‘has to be our starting point for a redefinition of political praxis.’4 The entirety of living labour, that is

labour-in-action, has become a means of production in itself. The use-value, ‘the material quality of the

means of labour, [becomes] fixed capital’5 and autonomous, self-directing, independent political

subjectivities are formed at the site of this new process of work and valorisation. Living labour, and the

society formed by living labour in the post-modern process of creating value, is a Multitude6of

heterogeneous political subjectivities with the potential for praxis.

‘The new human (or really the posthuman),’ Hardt and Negri argue, ‘will be accomplished primarily

through the new and increasingly immaterial forms of affective and immaterial labour.’7 The old battle

lines of class antagonism are redrawn by the Operaists, Virno talks of “tools of liberation”, as yet

unidentified by the political subject, but also points to, as Hardt and Negri do, the open rebellion against

capital and state-centric power structures.

Where is the rebellion? There is no evidence, or even a real suggestion, that workers from this so-called

hegemonic post-modern mode of labour are at the forefront of anti-capitalist or anti-state protest. If they

were then the modern state may well creak at the challenge. Virno proposes ‘the alliance between the

1
Vercellone, ‘Cognitive Capitalism’ 30.
2
Lazzarato, ‘Immaterial Labour’ 140.
3
Marx, Grundrisse 711.
4
Paolo Virno, 'Virtuosity and Revolution: The Political Theory of Exodus' in Paulo Virno and Michael Hardt (eds.)
Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
5
Marx, Grundrisse 693.
6
Vercellone does not use this term but presents the antagonism between the “living knowledge of labour” and the
“dead knowledge of capital” as an issue of political subjectivities. ‘Cognitive Capitalism’ 33-35.
7
Hardt and Negri, Empire 217.

7
 Paul McFadden The production of economic value and the formation of political subjectivities in the post-modern economy

general intellect and political Action’1 but no indicators or examples accompany this claim. We may

assume, therefore, that the subversive threat of the ‘social worker’, and of society, to the capitalist order

remains latent.

These claims for revolutionary subjectivity are based on a representation of an autonomous and self-

directing worker. The Operaists assume worker-autonomy and assume its proliferation amongst labour.

In the clamour for the revolutionary extension of their thesis, they ignore the very real systems of

surveillance, power-relations of domination, and the effectiveness of capital’s creation of valorisation-

focused subjectivities within the affective, immaterial, emotional and aesthetic industries. Hochschild

addresses the domination and perversion of worker subjectivity. Emotional workers, and workers across

the post-modern sector, are “self-sellers”; their customers are “guests”. Furthermore, the immaterial

labour of communication is regimented, for example, by computers (the machine), ‘automated call

distribution’2 systems, and abstract “performance” statistics. ‘Control over the labour process is encoded

into the machines’3 and the purpose of this discipline and control, and its accompanying production of

conformist and fearful subjectivities, is the creation of value. Work from across the four post-modern

forms is ‘a way for organisations to extend their control over workers from their bodies to their hearts and

minds’4. Post-modern labour is the domination of capital over labour and society.

If we assume that the Operaists are correct in their methodological assumption that all labour and all

industries are becoming increasingly dependent on communicative, cultural and affective content, what

might other alternatives be to the thesis of “revolutionary subjectivity”? We might say that the capitalist

culture and information industry ‘produces mass deception and a false sense of happiness’5, or that it

generates superficial and spurious needs ‘to create, purposely and deliberately, permanent and

1
Virno, ‘Virtuosity and Revolution’ 197. (Virno’s capitalisation)
2
Donald J. Winiecki, 'Subjects, Subjectivity, and Subjectification in Call Centre Work: The Doing of Doings'
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 36 (2007). 358.
3
Matt Davies. 'Works, Products and the Division of Labour: Notes for a Cultural and Political Economic Critique'
in Jacqueline Best and Matthew Peterson (eds.) Cultural Political Economy (London: Routledge, forthcoming
2009). 21.
4
Mears and Finlay, ‘Paper Doll’ 319.
5
Andreas Wittel. 'Culture, labour and subjectivity: For a political economy from below' Capital & Class 84 (2004).
13.

8
 Paul McFadden The production of economic value and the formation of political subjectivities in the post-modern economy

meretricious dissatisfactions in human beings’1. Under monopoly capital the artisan is bodily thrown into

the factory. The new phase of capitalism reveals a tendency to totalise the subjugation of subjectivities

and extend the reach of capitalist determination to all spheres of life: capital throws the minds of the

workers into the factory. The post-modern mode of labour is the material representation of knowledge

becoming a force of production but also of the production of capitalistic subjectivities and capitalistic

modes of life.

Bibliography

Abiala, Kristina. 'Customer Orientation and Sales Situations: Variations in Interactive Service Work'
Acta Sociologica 42 (1999). 207-222.

Adkins, Lisa. 'Social Capital: The Anatomy of a Troubled concept' Feminist Theory 6:2 (2005). 195-
211.

Althusser, Louis, and Etienne Balibar. Reading Capital. Translated Ben Brewster. (London: New Left
Books, 1970).

Atzert, Thomas. 'About Immaterial Labor and Biopower' translated by Frederick Peters. Capitalism
Nature Socialism 17:1 (2006). 58-64.

Bowring, Finn. 'From the mass worker to the multitude: A theoretical contextualisation of Hardt and
Negri's Empire' Capital & Class 83 (2004) 101-132.

Bradford, Simon and Valerie Hey. 'Successful Subjectivities? The Successification of class, ethnic
and gender positions' Journal of Education Policy 22:6 (2007). 595-614.

Brown, Andrew. 'A Materialist Development of Some Recent Contributions to the Labour Theory of
Value' Cambridge Journal of Economics 32 (2008): 125-46.

Carchedi, Guglielmo. 'The Fallacies of "New Dialectics" and Value-Form Theory' Historical
Materialism 17:1 (2009). 145-169.

Catephores, George and Michio Morishama. Value, Exploitation and Growth: Marx in the Light of
Modern Economic Theory. (London: McGraw-Hill Book Company (UK) Ltd, 1978).

Cleaver, Harry. Reading Capital Politically. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979).

Cox, Robert. Production, Power, and World Order: Social Forces in the making of History. (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1987).

1
Mandel. Alienation 25.

9
Paul McFadden The production of economic value and the formation of political subjectivities in the post-modern economy

Davies, Matt. 'Works, Products and the Division of Labour: Notes for a Cultural and Political
Economic Critique' in Jacqueline Best and Matthew Peterson (eds.) Cultural Political Economy
(London: Routledge, forthcoming 2009).

Deranty, Jean-Philippe. 'Repressed Materiality' in Jean-Philippe Deranty, Danielle Petherbridge, John

Rundell and Robert Sinnerbrink (eds.) Recognition, Work, Politics (Leiden: Brill, 2007).

Dixon, William and Geoffrey Kay. 'Marx's Theories of Value: A Response to Cartelier and Williams'
Cambridge Journal of Economics 19 (1995): 509-22.

Dobb, Maurice. Theories of Value and Distribution since Adam Smith. (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1973).

Elson, Diane. 'Introduction' in Diane Elson (ed.) Value: The Representation of Labour in Capitalism.
(CSE Books: London, 1980).

Elson, Diane. 'The Value Theory of Labour' in Diane Elson (ed.) Value: The Representation of
Labour in Capitalism. (CSE Books: London, 1980).

Engels, Friedrich. Anti-Dühring: Herr Eugen Dühring's revolution in science (London: Lawrence &
Wishart, 1969).

Entwhistle, Joanne and Elizabeth Wissinger. 'Keeping up Appearances: aesthetic labour in the fashion
modelling industries of London and New York' The Sociological Review 54:4 (2006) 774-794.

Fine, Ben. Marx's Capital, 2nd Edition. (London: Macmillan, 1984)

Fine, Ben and Laurence Harris. Reading Capital. (London: Macmillan, 1979).

Foley, Duncan K. Understanding Capital: Marx's Economic Theory. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1986).

Fromm, Erich. Marx's Concept of Man. (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1979).

Gallie, W.B. ‘Essentially Contested Concepts’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 30 (1955-6).
167-198.

Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks Translated Quintin Hoare. (London:
Lawrence & Wishart, 1971).

Hardt, Michael. 'Affective Labor' boundary 2, 26:2 (1999). 89-100.

Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Empire. (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2000).

Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of the State Form (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1995).

Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Multitude. (London: Penguin, 2006).

Harrod, Jeffrey. Power, Production and the Unprotected Worker. (New York, Columbia University
Press, 1987).

10
Paul McFadden The production of economic value and the formation of political subjectivities in the post-modern economy

Harrod, Jeffrey. 'The Global Poor and Global Politics: Neomaterialism and the Sources of Political
Action' in Matt Davies and Magnus Ryner (eds.) Poverty and the Production of World Politics.
(Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006)

Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity. (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990).

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Philosophy of Right Translated T.M Knox. (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1942).

Hochschild, Arlie Russell. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1983).

Kay, Geoffrey. 'Why Labour is the Starting Point of Capital' in Diane Elson (ed.) Value: The
Representation of Labour in Capitalism. (CSE Books: London, 1980).

Kincaid, Jim. 'Production vs. Realization: A Critique of Fine and Saad-Filho on Value Theory'
Historical Materialism 15:4 (2007). 137-165.

Kristanjanson-Gural, David. 'Postmodern Contributions to Marxian Economics: theoretical

Innovations and their Implications for Class Politics' Historical Materialism 16 (2008). 85-115.

Lazzarato, Maurizio. 'Immaterial Labor' in Paulo Virno and Michael Hardt (eds.) Radical Thought in
Italy: A Potential Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).

Lazzarato, Maurizio. 'From The Revolutions of Capitalism' SubStance 36:1 (2007). 98-105.

Lebowitz, Michael A. Beyond Capital. 2nd ed. (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2003).

Mandel, Ernest. ‘The Causes of Alienation’ in Ernest Mandel and George. The Marxist Theory of
Alienation (New York: Pathfinder, 1995).

Marx, Karl. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy Translated S.W. Ryazanskaya
(Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970).

Marx, Karl. Capital Vol. I: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production. Translated Samuel Moore
and Edward Aveling. (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2003).

Marx, Karl. Capital Vol. III: A Critique of Political Economy. Translated David Fernbach. (London:
Penguin Classics and New Left Review, 1991).

Marx, Karl. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Translated Martin Milligan. (New York:
Prometheus Books, 1988).

Marx, Karl. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. Translated Martin
Nicolaus. (London: Penguin, 1993).

Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto (London: Penguin Classics, 2002).

Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. The German Ideology (New York: Prometheus Books, 1998).

Marx, Karl. ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ in Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels. Selected Works (Moscow:
Progress Publishers, 1980).

11
Paul McFadden The production of economic value and the formation of political subjectivities in the post-modern economy

McCabe, Darren. 'Individualization at Work? Subjectivity, Teamworking and Anti-Unionism'

Organization 14:2 (2007). 243-266.

Mears, Ashley and William Finlay. 'Not Just A Paper Doll: How Models Manage Bodily Capital and
Why They Perform Emotional Labour' Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 34:3 (2005). 317-343.

Negri, Antonio. 'Interpretation of the Class System Today' In Werner Bonefeld, Richard Gunn and
Kosmas Psychopedis (eds.) Open Marxism, Vol. II: Theory and Practice (London: Pluto Press, 1992).

Negri, Antonio. Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse. Translated Michael Ryan, Maurizio
Viano and Harry Cleaver. (London: Pluto Press, 1991).

Negri, Antonio. 'Twenty Theses on Marx' In Marxism Beyond Marxism, in Saree Makdisi, Cesare
Casarino and Rebecca E. Karl. (eds.) (New York: Routledge, 1996).

O'Donnell, Rory. Adam Smith's Theory of Value and Distribution: A Reappraisal. (London:
Macmillan, 1990).

Ollman, Bertell. 'The Theory of Alienation' in J. Losco and L. Williams. Political Theory (New York:
St. Martin's Press, 1992).

Ollman, Bertell. Alienation: Marx's Conception of man in capitalist society, 2nd edition. (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1976).

Ricardo, David. Principles of Political Economy and Taxation. (London: Dent, 1973).

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. Translated Hazel Barnes (London: Routledge, 2003).

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Critique of Dialectical Reason. Translated Quintin Hoare (London: Verso, 1991).

Sayers, Sean. ‘On the Marxist Dialectic’ in Norman, Richard. & Sayers, Sean. Hegel, Marx and
Dialectic (Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1980).

Sayers, Sean. 'The Concept of Labor: Marx and His Critics' Science and Society 71:4 (2007). 431-451.

Scheid, Teresa Linnea. 'Emotional Labor and Burnout among Mental Health Professionals' in James
A. Holstein and Gale Miller (eds.) Perspectives on Social Problems (Stamford, CT: Jai Press Inc.,
1999)

Schultz, Suzanne. 'Dissolved Boundaries and "Affective Labor": On the Disappearance of

Reproductive Labor and Feminist Critique in Empire' Translated Frederick Peters. Capitalism Nature
Socialism 17:1 (2006). 77-82.

Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Vol. I. 2 vols.
(London: J.M. Dent, 1910).

Sorenson, Bent Meir. 'Immaterial Labour and the production of subjectivity' LOK Conference:
Kolding, Denmark, 2002.

Thoburn, Nicholas. 'Autonomous Production? On Negri's "New Synthesis"' Theory, Culture & Society
18:5 (2001). 75-96.

Thompson, Edward P. The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Pantheon Books, 1964).

12
Paul McFadden The production of economic value and the formation of political subjectivities in the post-modern economy

Toms, Steven. '"Immeasurability": A critique of Hardt & Negri’ Conference of Practical Criticism in
the Managerial Social Sciences. Leicester University, January 2008.

Toscano, Alberto. 'From Pin Factories to Gold Farmers: Editorial Introduction to a research Stream on
Cognitive Capitalism, Immaterial Labour and the General Intellect' Historical Materialism 15: (2007).
3-11.

Toscano, Alberto. 'Vital Strategies: Maurizio Lazzarato and the Metaphysics of Contemporary
Capitalism' Theory, Culture and Society 24:6 (2007). 71-91.

Vercellone, Carlo. 'From Formal Subsumption to General Intellect: Elements for a Marxist Reading of
the Thesis of Cognitive Capitalism' Historical Materialism 15 (2007). 13-36.

Vercellone, Carlo. 'The Anomaly and Exemplariness of the Italian Welfare State' in Paulo Virno and
Michael Hardt (eds.) Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1996).

Virno, Paulo. 'General Intellect' Historical Materialism 15:3 (2007). 3-8.

Virno, Paolo. ‘Notes on the “General Intellect”’ In Marxism Beyond Marxism, in Saree Makdisi,
Cesare Casarino and Rebecca E. Karl. (eds.) (New York: Routledge, 1996).

Virno, Paulo. 'On the Parasitic Character of Wage Labor' SubStance 36:1 (2007). 36-42.

Virno, Paulo. 'Post-Fordist Semblance' SubStance 36:1 (2007). 42-46.

Virno, Paolo. 'The Ambivalence of Disenchantment' in Paulo Virno and Michael Hardt (eds.) Radical
Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).

Virno, Paolo. 'Virtuosity and Revolution: The Political Theory of Exodus' in Paulo Virno and Michael
Hardt (eds.) Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1996).

Wade, Robert. 'Financial Regime Change?' New Left Review 53 (2008). 5-21.

Warhurst, Chris, Dennis Nickson, Anne Witz and Anne Marie Cullen. 'Aesthetic Labour in Interactive
Service Work: Some Case Study Evidence from the "New Glasgow"' The Service Industries Journal
20:3 (2000). 1-18.

Warhurst, Chris and Dennis Nickson. 'Becoming a Class Act? Reflections on Aesthetic Labour'
International Process Conference. Strathclyde, 2005.

Warhurst, C. and Dennis Nickson. Looking Good, Sounding Right. (London: Industrial Society,
2001.)

Williams, Claire. 'Sky Service: The Demands of Emotional Labour in the Airline Industry' Gender,
Work and Organization 10:5 (2003). 513-550.

Winiecki, Donald J. 'Subjects, Subjectivity, and Subjectification in Call Centre Work: The Doing of
Doings' Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 36 (2007). 351-377.

Wittel, Andreas. 'Culture, labour and subjectivity: For a political economy from below' Capital &
Class 84 (2004). 11-32.

13
Paul McFadden The production of economic value and the formation of political subjectivities in the post-modern economy

14