Given how different Boutang finds cognitive labor to be to physical labor, I question why it has to be thought as labor at all, rather than as the social activity of a quite different class. Boutang at least canvasses this possibility, in mentioning Berardi’s idea of a cognitariat and Ursula Huws’s of a cybertariat, but the least settled part of attempts to think the current mode of production seems to me to be questions of the classes it produces and which in turn reproduce it.10

The symptom of this for me is the emergence of new kinds of property relation, so-called “intellectual property,” which became private property rights, and which were extended to cover an ever wider range of information products. Boutang is aware of this:

One of the symptoms indicating that both the mode of production and the capitalist relations of production are changing is the importance assumed nowadays by institutional legal issues. Never has there been so much talk of property rights, by way of contesting them as well as by way of redefining them. (47)