• Korean journal of communication and information
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• v.79
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• pp.226-259
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• 2016

Drawing on the autonomist Marxist concepts of 'social factory', 'immaterial labour', and 'precarity', this paper discusses the changed nature of labour, life and social relations in contemporary informational capitalism. More specifically, it first traces back to the early autonomist (operasimo) theories of 'social factory' and 'class composition' and then discusses how these earlier theories were developed into the concept of 'immaterial labour' by a group of later autonomist theorists such as Paolo Virno, Maurizio Lazzarato, Micheal Hardt, and Antonio Negri. Then, it reviews how the concept of immaterial labour was taken up to understand the nature of labour in digital economy within the tradition of Cultural Studies, closely intersecting with the critiques of 'creative labour'. Finally, it discusses how the changed nature of labour is interrelated with the neoliberal labour forces transformations such as casualization of employment and increasing insecurity in employment and life, which the autonomist explores with the concept of 'precarity', the material condition of immaterial labour.