Angela _________
This guy's essay in Cutting Edge [Verso, 1997] was excellent. Looks like he's expanded that piece into a full fledged work. Call Santa.
Ian
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/5200/02479.ctl
Dyer-Witheford, Nick Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-Technology Capitalism. 416 p. November 1999
ISBN: 0-252-02479-6 Cloth $49.95 ISBN: 0-252-06795-9 Paper $21.95
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.
Subjects:
Marxist Philosophy University of Illinois Press