[comments in this entry are part of a process of working through this problem. They are as such experiments and therefore provisional. This means they will most likely change as understanding grows and deepens]

In this place where the old left continues to break the lines of struggle to bow to the alter of the organized industrial worker, it is important to note how work has/is changing. This thing affective labour is important in all this. I have always found this to be difficult concept. But I think it means something like work that produces affect. This is usually linked to the way in which emotions are generated by the performance of tasks. Last night I went into the quickly expanding chain of Nandos with a friend. Nando’s is one of the few successful fast food multinationals locally grown and their success has been determined not only by it ability to make chicken but the extent to which it understood the organization of work and creation of value within this economy. Standing to the side of the counter as we waited for our number to be called, my friend pointed an odd piece of paper facing the people who take orders. It read: “{smile} Hi, my name is {your name} welcome to Nandos what do you crave”. The media campaign that accompanies this chicken chain boasts that Nandos will satisfy your craving. How does this labour invest value in the chicken. It has no effect, on the size or taste of the chicken. It attempts to produce an affect that is associated with the chicken, perhaps outwardly expressed as a smile in relation to the word crave. This is comparable to the work of a comedian. In fact comedy is becoming more common in other forms of labour generally. Recently I flew Kulula-dot-com, a small new airline which has managed to survive in spite of the general crises in this industry. On their plane their staff use comedy in their flight announcements. This labour of the stewards attempts to enrich the flight – in the form of a service – to enrich the value of the flight. The way Kulula competes with the bigger airlines is by charging for on flight drinks and extra’s. But it seems that they also extract more ‘value adding’ labour from their in-flight crew to compensate for the lack of material value in the form of commodities (your drinks) provided by the airline. The skills for this kind of work are also different. They require a particular character, personality and arguably investment in the dominant social order. The kinds of knowledge’s and experience that are valorized are also markedly different. Simply it can be said that the comedy of the airline crew and the speech given by Nando’s counter staff add value to the respective commodities that are associated with them. This component of their labour is immaterial, adds value to the product without being directly associated with the mechanics of producing the commodity. It is labour whose only aim is the production of a specific affect that is value. Now why should this change the way we understand the proletariat. Ask any post graduate sociology student and they will tell you that this kind of immaterial labour has always been part of the circulation of commodities. However what makes our current period so interesting is the manner in which the circulation of commodities comes to be defined by the hegemony of immaterial labour of which affective labour is one component. So we have to explain immaterial labour more generally and how the hegemony of immaterial labour poses a challenge to the traditional working class solidarity project.