I just found this, which draws some connections. I’ve not read Moll Flanders. There’s loads of novels I’ve not read. I’d not thought of this before, but novels could supplement the reading of labor history and so on I gestured toward here, as a way to ground some of the claims to novelty among the post-operaisti, and substantiating my claim that these folk take phenomena which are not unique to the present and claim that they are unique to the present. (On that note, reading history for this stuff, re-reading the Sewell book wouldn’t hurt either.)
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Along other lines, I should finally get around to reading on hegemony – hegemony in political senses (hegemony of one part of the class – as in the hegemony of the mass worker within the working class, or the hegemony of one bloc of capitalists over others – as well as the hegemony of the capitalist class or one section thereof over the working class or sections thereof) as well as in the technical sense implied in the immaterial labor stuff (one form of labor as hegemonic within the labor process); from there talking about the relationship (or not) between these sense of hegemony, and then talking about stuff that is not/was not hegemonic (subaltern sections of the working class?).
crashcourse666 
Note to self:
Come back and read many of these things closely:
http://der-augenblick.blogspot.com/
http://critecon.wordpress.com/
Hi Nate…the idea of Moll Flanders as an ‘immaterial labourer’ certainly poses some interesting questions about the image and concept of ‘immaterial labour’ (she’s usually thought of as a kind of figure of a new social role capitalist and also a caricature metaphor for “capital”); she lives principally off the profits from commodity production (Virginia, tobacco, slaves) her first (small, risked) and last (considerable, permanent) fortunes are made as joint proprietor of a slave/indentured labour plantation, and from investing directly expropriated wealth, (legal inheritance and illegal “primitive accumulation”), into land and slaves and tobacco production. Except for her childhood, and very briefly after her financier fifth husband is near bankrupted and dies, when she does needlework as piecework, she manages to avoid labour of any sort, and remains a gentlewoman (a term the book sets out to clarify), that is an expropriator/appropriator; she has a brief career as a theif-burglar-swindler, which involves activity surely, and danger, but one can’t call it production (Defoe sees it as more like banking and finance, in contrast to commodity production), which is sort of an “outlaw capitalist” phase (which Defoe admires as it exhibits the spirit of enterprise, daring, the heroic nature of heroic bourgeoisie, and Moll’s pretending to offer assistance in order to burgle houses on fire is likened to her acquiring land for planting in the North American colonies); except for the needlework, which is very very brief, she’s always a capitalist and proprietor – wife of landed gentry, plantation proprietor’s wife, widowed rentier, banker’s wife, plantation proprietor in her own right. Nobody gets any surplus value out of her social behaviours – she accumulates capital, by direct expropriation, by employing/exploiting labour, and especially by investment in commodity production, which latter is by far her most profitable venture, (her only enduringly profitable venture) and in a sense the inevitable happy fruition of her career of expropriation, saving and accumulation.
So identifying her as a figure of post-workerism’s ‘immaterial labourer’ in early modernity suggests the rather close relation between the idea and portrait of the immaterial labourer in these writings and the traditional image of the dashing entrepreneur. The kinds of daily activities are emphasised while the position in the relations of production (class) is marginalised – the idea of the “immaterial labourer” maybe fits certain capitalists (Steve Jobs, Spike Jonze, Angelina Jolie, Hank Paulson…) better than anyone who today is obliged to sell their labour power to live. The category “immaterial labourer” in this light seems to include capitalist entrepreneurs, upper management, as well as wage workers, but in some way the image of this category of people and assertions accompanying it strongly suggest the propertied part of this category (the owner/managers of the commodity production enterprise, the financiers, the entrepreneurs like Moll Flanders) are to be congratulated as the “most productive” and most creative of value.
As the ability of these purportedly dominant value productive activities (the creation of ‘immaterial signs’) to produce any real value themselves has been again proven null in the late financial crisis – the AAA ratings issued for fees and produced by white collar office workers actually don’t produce real value but facilitate temporary activities of direct expropriation of already existing wealth by ancient forms of deception – Moll Flanders’ adventures also include a bubble and burst episode based in appearance/reality discrepancy, narrating the catastrophic disappointment of irrational expectations of future gains from investment in mere (fraudulent) appearance, and making up a part of a kind of allegory of economic growth. Lest any of his readers suppose Moll, or money capital, is actually capable of producing wealth ex nihilo, without land and slaves/servants/wageworkers, (private property in the means of production and labour to exploit), Defoe dramatises the revenge the law of value takes on bubble zealots. Returned from her first sojourn in Virginia with £450 of extracted surplus after marriage to a plantation owner who turned out to be her own brother, Moll poses as a widow of great independent fortune in hopes of attracting a new husband. At her lodgings in London she meets the scheming former mistress of a penniless but refined Irish gentleman who lures her to the North of England with the intention of helping her upper class lover to marry Moll and thus obtain her (imaginary) fortune. While Moll is acting the part of a widow with fifteen thousand pounds invested in the Bank of England, her suitor expends what little remains of his inherited resources on an empty show of splendour to give the impression of possessing even greater, landed wealth (lavish estates in Ireland, with lots of tenants and workers). Himself deceived about Moll’s “worth’”, he deceives Moll about his own and thus into marriage. Birds of a feather, they really fall in love, but when their mutual deceptions are unveiled (on discovery of his fraud, Moll hides from him that she actually has a small fortune, though the interest would not be enough for them to live on in the style suitable to his status), the bubble marriage, based on the mere illusion of wealth without any substance behind it, bursts. They part, her aristo husband takes to highway robbery (he really can’t do anything else without derogating class) and Moll, after disposing of their inconvenient newborn baby with a nurse in the countryside, (never to be heard of again,) which endeavour serves as pretext for a disquisition on market incentives, returns to London to marry a banker who has fallen for her and, with Moll’s encouragement, meanwhile rid himself of an unfaithful wife, whom he divorces and who upon the news of it conveniently commits suicide. During her detour into the bubble marriage and its inconvenient pregnancy, Moll has kept the banker iron in the fire, (she has entrusted him with the management of her small fortune, and given him hopes of her consent to marriage should he obtain his liberty to offer it) and the opportunity she seeds and waters matures in time for her to capitalise on her efforts in the wake of the bubble enterprise’s unravelling. But eventually, after they both go through a period of “primitive accumulation” (highway robbery and burglary), Moll (finance, upward mobility) and her aristo husband (landlordly tradition and status) will be reunited and become wealthy capitalists in commodity production together in the colonies, returning eventually to live an easy old age in England on revenues from their plantation of three hundred pounds yearly, far more than either was able to amass by direct expropriation (relying on personal charisma and daring) alone.
Oh, and – Defoe is presenting Moll, money capital and the entrepreneurial spirit, as potentially productive/creative, but only when in a position to exploit material resources – land and exploitable labour. He’s coming out in favour of commodity production as the engine of economic growth and prosperity. Moll’s sterile parasitism (on her own, without land and labour) is emphasised in lots of ways – she keeps giving birth to children, for example, but never rears them, and they all basically evaporate except the one who inherits land and slaves/servants in the colonies with whom she is eventually reunited and who “pays her a return”; Moll’s children thus resemble failed investments, dissipating into nothing, because they are had with men who don’t own the means of production and employ productive labour: there’s the younger son of the gentry (rentier) her first husband who raises her (permanently) to gentility – not his brother the estate inheritor by primogeniture who is Moll’s first seducer but reneges on his promise to marry her (her life is then a series of detours to that final destination she was promised and cheated of) – with whom she has some kids she hands over to his family when he dies (and whom we hear nothing of ever again); there is the linen draper (commercial middleman) she marries next and with whom she has a child who “was buried”; there is the bubble husband, penniless, landless aristocrat Jemmy her true love, with whom she has one child she leaves as newborn infant in the countryside and whom we know nothing further of even after the parents are reunited and rich (these two get rich but found no new landed dynasty); there is the banker, with whom she has several children whom when widowed and faced with a dwindling stock of capital she also abandons never to be heard of again, and there is her brother, the Virginia tobacco planter, whom she marries without knowledge of their later revealed consanguinity, with whom she has several children only one of whom, heir to very profitable tobacco plantations, appears again in the story, (the others are never mentioned again after their existence is remarked in passing when she leaves them) ; this one son obligingly turns over Moll’s inherited plantation from her mother and some additional capital as gifts or a kind of tribute which compound her holdings in tobacco production in the colonies. Moll’s career as mother/reproducer is thus being used almost allegorically to underline her career as entrepreneur, with none of her ventures/investments in reproducing “herself”, in growing being fruitful and multiplying, succeeding or resulting in revenues except the one invested in land and exploitable labour in the colonies.
(Maybe the defining feature of the “immaterial labourer” is at bottom something like “living a life that can be told as a good story” (adventures, not too repetitive, lots of characters, some surprises, changing situations and circumstances). So that the one indispensible “immaterial” product which all immaterial producers produce is the first person narrative itself. )