Starmerism Vs Immaterial Labour

Here's an abstract for a paper I'll be delivering at the Midlands Critical Theory conference in the Spring. Long-time readers can pretty much recite the stuff I'll be talking about.

Italian post-Marxism's theorisation of immaterial labour has proven influential and has been the object of trenchant critique and spirited defence. However, its application to an understanding of political dynamics has tended toward abstraction. For example, Negri's (2018) pronouncements on cognitive capitalism, the city, and "exodus" confined itself to sketching out in theoretical terms the broad trajectory of the class politics of immaterial labour. Case studies Negri employed to illustrate the utility of this approach were relatively superficial. Using the British political scene, I operationalise this contribution of post-Marxist critical theory to address the contours of resistance in the 2020s. Drawing on previous work that has theorised the close relationship between values and the lived experience of immaterial/"social" workers to explain the rise and fall of Jeremy Corbyn and the long-term decline of the Conservative Party, it considers how the contemporary Labour Party is actively working against the new modes of political collectivity forged by immaterial labour and what kind of opposition Keir Starmer's leadership, knowingly or not, is cultivating.

Some more here and here.