Cyber-Marx (review by Sid Shniad)

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Cyber-Marx

Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-Technology Capitalism

By Nick Dyer-Witheford

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.

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.

"An excellent study. . . . Those interested in understanding the vast
changes we are undergoing and how we can use technologies to create a
better future should find Dyer-Witheford's work extremely useful." --
Douglas Kellner, author of Television and the Crisis of Democracy

NICK DYER-WITHEFORD is an assistant professor in the Graduate School of
Library and Information Science at the University of Western Ontario.


NOVEMBER 1999
416 pages. 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 inches.
Cloth, ISBN 0-252-02479-6. $49.95x
Paper, ISBN 0-252-06795-9. $21.95a
Marxist Philosophy


Louis Proyect
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