[...] For Lazzarato, the concept of immaterial labor refers to two different aspects of labor:

On the one hand, as regards the “informational content” of the commodity, it refers directly to the changes taking place in workers’ labor processes ... where the skills involved in direct labor are increasingly skills involving cybernetics and computer control (and horizontal and vertical communication). On the other hand, as regards the activity that produces the “cultural content” of the commodity, immaterial labor involves a series of activities that are not normally recognized as “work”—in other words, the kinds of activities involved in defining and fixing cultural and artistic standards, fashions, tastes, consumer norms, and, more strategically, public opinion.

Immaterial labor, unlike the knowledge worker, is not completely confined to a specific class formation. Lazzarato insists that this form of labor power is not limited to highly skilled workers but is a form of activity of every productive subjectwithin postindustrial societies. In the highly skilled worker, these capacities are already there. However, in the young worker, the “precarious worker,” and the unemployed youth, these capacities are “virtual”—that is, they are there but are still undetermined. This means that immaterial labor is a virtuality (an undetermined capacity) that belongs to the postindustrial productive subjectivity as a whole. For example, the obsessive emphasis on education of 1990s governments can be read as an attempt to stop this virtuality from disappearing or from being channeled into places that would not be as acceptable to the current power structures.