Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High Technology Capitalism Review

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(More customer reviews)This superb book not only takes elements of Marx's legacy and makes them contemporary in a prose embraced enthusiastically by undergraduates. It also lists four sites of struggle within a visions of 'circuits of struggle.' These four are
1. struggle at the site of production (usually waged work)
2. struggle at the point of reproduction (women producing people and labour power, students being educated...);
3. struggle at the interface of nature and people (eco-feminism, water, air, forests and indigenous knowledge, seeds, terminator biotechnology and the like); and finally
4. struggle at the site of consumption (GMO foods, labels on foods, carcinogens and war-related poisoning of people and the ecosystem and the like).
The power of this complex analysis of peoples' resistance to corporate profit making is situated in its capacity to unite the thousands of different (formerly called 'single-issue') struggles into one international movement to 'globalize from below' or to build a new 'subsistence society' worldwide centred on the satisfaction of human and ecological needs rather than the production of profit or as John McMurtry (see his forthcoming Value Wars, Pluto, 2002, or 'the Cancer Stage of Capitalism, Pluto, London, 1999)calls 'money demand.'
This book is, for me, one of the top ten pieces of brilliant, committed scholarship, ever. It is in the tradition of both CLR James and the Italian autonomistas, notably Antonio Negri and Maria Rosa Dalla Costa.

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'In this highly readable and thought-provoking work, Nick Dyer-Witheford assesses the relevance of Marxism in our time and demonstrates how the information age, far from transcending the historic conflict between capital and its laboring subjects, constitutes the latest battleground in their encounter. Dyer-Witheford maps the dynamics of modern capitalism, showing how capital depends for its operations not just on exploitation in the immediate workplace, but on the continuous integration of a whole series of social sites and activities, from public health and maternity to natural resource allocation and the geographical reorganization of labor power. He also shows how these sites and activities may become focal points of subversion and insurgency, as new means of communication vital for the smooth flow of capital also permit otherwise isolated and dispersed points of resistance to connect and combine with one another'.'Cutting through the smokescreen of high-tech propaganda, Dyer-Witheford predicts the advent of a reinvented, 'autonomist' Marxism that will rediscover the possibility of a collective, communist transformation of society.Refuting the utopian promises of the information revolution, he discloses the real potentialities for a new social order in the form of a twenty-first-century communism based on the common sharing of wealth'.