Cyber-Proletariat: Global Labour in the Digital Vortex by Nick Dyer-Witheford (review)

In his latest book, Nick Dyer-Witheford advances theories of digital capitalism, the political economy of production chains, as well as understandings of how systems of oppression have shaped the development of a global proletariat. Furthermore, the regime of austerity that followed the great recession of 2008 plays a central role in his account of uneven economic and social transformation. "Some areas fell into economic decline," writes Dyer-Witherford, "others stagnated, yet others grew even faster than before but with increased social polarization." (4) It is here that new cycles of struggle began.

Cyber-Proletariat invokes the autonomous Marxist convention of using the working class as a point of departure, demonstrated by the focus on resistance and the role of technology in shaping the contours of social mobilization. In the United Kingdom, Dyer-Witheford illustrates, smartphones were used to outwit police during the riots of 2011. Anti-government protests in Egypt were similarly coordinated by these digital platforms. Meanwhile, outside of the Foxconn factories that produce our mobile technology, anti-suicide nets were being installed in an effort to counter labour's response to nightmarish working conditions: self-harm.

Most importantly, Dyer-Witheford avoids the utopian aspirations often associated with technological innovation. In fact, Cyber-Proletariat confronts this tendency by problematizing assumptions that revolutionary objectives can simply be achieved through social media self-organization and on-line collectivism. To this conversation he adds advances in cybernetics and the promises this development held for the world of work. Indeed, revolutions in computerization and cybernetic systems maintain a prominent position throughout the book: specifically, inventor Norbert Wiener's predictions about the impact robotization would have on manufacturing in the United States. And, by invoking the work of Karl Roth and Marcel van der Linden, the book acknowledges that the process of proletarianization is constructed through mutual determination, whereby gender, race, and other intersections of oppression play a pivotal role in shaping the face of the global working class.

Chapter 2 invokes a characterization of capitalism as a vortex, "a whirlwind, hurricane or tornado, made up by the triple processes of production, circulation and financialization." (15) In other words, a reformulation of Marx and Engels' famous edict about markets, "all that is solid melts into air." Indeed, metaphoric language is featured throughout Dyer-Witheford's book and shapes the trajectory of each chapter. The so-called "whirlwind machine" is really that of turbulent financial markets, systems, and algorithms powered by developments in artificial intelligence. His analogy is also deployed to provide a conceptualization of technological innovation within capitalism, from James Watt's steam engine to modern mass production systems.

From here Cyber-Proletariat examines the effect such advances have had on the macro-economic reality, particularly Marx's predictions about the tendency towards a falling rate of profit. In an aptly titled section called "The Rate of Struggle", operaismo is subsequently invoked to critique consumptionist perspectives on reform. (29) Theories of the social factory as well as the circulation and cycles of struggle, which provide a foundation for the analysis found in this chapter, truly are signature features of the autonomist tradition. Chapter 2 ends with a conversation about how cybernetics has radically changed the game. He goes on to illustrate this by pointing to an exchange between mit professor and cybernetics pioneer, Norbert Wiener, to then-United Auto Workers president, Walter Reuther. In that 1949 letter, Wiener informed Reuther that the world of the (middle class) mass worker was to be threatened by "cybernetic automata." (41)

In getting to this point, Dyer-Witheford charts the history of cybernetics in Chapter 3. From a school of scientific thought that emerged throughout the 1930s and 1940s as part of the war effort, Cyber-Proletariat embraces the ideas of cybernetic thought as a "guide to how computers have altered the technological processes of capital." (42) Of course, this conversation cannot take place outside of the Cold War context, as well as the creation of super computers like maniac (Mathematical...