Abstract
Dyer-Witheford adds to the corpus of Marxist analyses addressing the changing composition of the principal popular class in a capitalism reorganized by information and computing technologies (ICTs) and their embedded logics. For him, this class remains the “proletariat,” in contradistinction to Hardt and Negri’s (2000, 2004, 2011) “multitude,” and the contemporary technological logic is “cybernetics.” He breaks with Hardt and Negri due to a perceived lack of details in how their concept of class unity across disparate groups is supposed to coalesce. Nonetheless, he recognizes the need for a broad conception of proletariat, which he views as encompassing those displaced and excluded via shifts in the organization of capital. Meanwhile, he continues to embrace the larger autonomist Marxist tradition (to which Negri belongs), insofar as he begins his analysis with the question of class composition and the proletarian capacity to “challenge and break their subordination to capital.”
In describing this process, he evokes a metaphorical “vortex,” within which capitalism’s three core “moments” of production, circulation, and finance are, respectively, represented by the funnel, the circular motion, and the turbulence of the storm. Underlying this vortex is the paradox of what Marx calls the “moving contradiction,” wherein capital exploits and then latterly expels labor. In the cybernetic age, this expulsion largely occurs through interrelated processes of automation, networking, and the deployment of algorithms. Dyer-Witheford effectively charts these processes as they have unfolded from the early emergence of ICTs, through the deployment of Web 2.0. While he provides a convincing analysis of the contested evolution of the proletariat in the digital age, his description of the process of class formation is no more lucid than Hardt and Negri’s. Nonetheless, he adds to this realm of discourse by outlining class dynamics beyond the leading edge of “immaterial workers” that constitute Hardt and Negri’s focal point, even if the activist reader is left with no clearer understanding of how these variegated members of the cyber-proletariat are meant to join together.
This book is essentially a labor history of cybernetic capitalism, and it succeeds so long as it stays within that scope, rather than reaching for a more comprehensive conceptual model of resistance. This history extends from the early implementation of “automata” in mass-producing factories to the subsequent programming of “feedback loops.” While the former has permitted the displacement of assembly line workers, the latter has allowed for the circumvention of human engineers, thus thwarting capital’s dependence on the “living labor” of technical specialists and machinists. Meanwhile, “networking” was subsequently appended to the cybernetics discourse, viewed as a means of reducing capital’s reliance on labor by creating a “symbiosis” of the “speed of machine processing with goal-setting human intelligence.” Ultimately, this ethos of networking meshed with an embrace of “globalization,” which helped precipitate the mass dislocation of industrial labor from the global North and West, most notably in the former auto-making strongholds of the American Midwest.
This destruction of the “mass collective worker” was effected alongside the development of supply chains, as companies adjusted their prevailing organizational logic to the newly global breadth of their operations. While the necessary changes involved in transportation and information were significant in this process, Dyer-Witheford contends that the biggest impact was felt at “the end of the supply chain, where deindustrialization of the global North met, as both cause and effect, the rural depopulation of the global South,” thus resulting in a convergence of disparate proletarian actors facing new forms of exploitation and precariousness.
In analyzing the new conditions of capitalist and worker organization, he adopts the autonomist mode of analysis, which sees a historical “circulation of struggles” sharing a parallel and reflexive history with the “circulation of capital.” In the industrial epoch, the mass worker emerged around traditional union organizations as a response to being deployed in large numbers at major production centers. Meanwhile, the era of cybernetic globalization has seen workers dispersed throughout the globe in varying degrees of insecurity, resulting in a vast expansion in the pool of available labor and a concomitant rise in the ranks of the unemployed, or the “reserve army” of labor in the Marxian parlance.
In response to these changing class dynamics, he underlines three strands of public unrest and protest. First, he recounts the “riots of the excluded,” including the Parisian banlieues uprising of 2005 and the 2011 riots in Tottenham, north London, both of which he sees as rooted in “police violence and harassment, poverty, inequality and the austerity regime elimination of social programs and educational benefits.” Second, he looks at the worldwide strike wave from 2007 to 2010, which occurred largely in one of four sectors: the newly industrialized areas of the global South, the “logistics and transportation sectors,” among agricultural workers, and in a public sector being threatened by the ravages of austerity. Finally, he evaluates the various public square movements from Tahrir to Zuccotti, for which he adopts Woland/Blaumachen’s (2014) assessment of these movements as being primarily composed of an increasingly insecure middle-class fearing a descent back into proletarian existence, though he acknowledges that the Egyptian case grew to include significantly larger swathes of the population.
This appraisal of the occupation movement seems too centered on the underlying class dynamics and downplays the forces of atomization and alienation that have motivated young people to take action. These are forces driven by the commodification of the self and subsumption of subjectivities into the inner workings of capitalist logic, which are so central to Hardt and Negri’s (2000, 2004, 2011) work and get only brief mention in this book. Moreover, Dyer-Witheford surely is right in noting that the world’s proletariat remains very industrial, particularly in the global South, but the qualitative turn to immaterial labor can reasonably be assumed to presage a broader trend, especially if the cybernetic ideal of eliminating traditional wage-labor realizes greater success. Nonetheless, this analysis works as a recent history of the reorganization of the working class in the age of cybernetic capitalism and is useful if approached as such.