I have a question though about the argument that present day work is no longer labour. Doesn’t Virno argue this because he, more than the other in this crowd, is preoccupied with the Aristotelian/Arendtian distinctions of behaviour? Labour is simply a translation of poiesis?

But with Lazzarato it seems different. It seems to me that he really states that the activity of, you know, problem solving, “defining and fixing cultural and artistic standards” etc., _is_ labour. And the reason that it really is labour, is not some intrinsic quality in these activities, since he seems to argue that they were not labour when they were the “privileged domain of the bourgeoisie and its children”. The reason does instead have to do with class. The concept of immaterial labour seems in him to fall under the concept of a certain “composition, management, and regulation of the workforce”. Indeed he starts the text with approaching the concept of immaterial labour through “an attempt to define the technical and subjective-political composition of the working class”. Perhaps it is somewhat circular (or at least not very sound methodologically) to start with the concept of workforce and working class, and then define what is labour in relation to these categories (labour is whatever this group in general is preoccupied with, or something like that), which then (via empirical research) come to define their present condition of existence. But the concept of labour is, anyway, not done away with.

And with Negri and Hardt “[l]iving labour is the fundamental human faculty”, so one would guess that to them every possible human society is a “society of labour”.