this, below, is something which might be interesting within this discussion, though on the related issue of the connections between depictions of the class, technology and strategy.
(there's also a good essay btw by Andrew Ross on cyberdrudgery, but I can't seem to find it...):
" 'The End of Work or the Renaissance of Slavery? A Critique of Rifkin and Negri' Constantine George Caffentzis
[the rest at: http://aries.gisam.metu.edu.tr/autonomia/negri/caffentzis.html ] ... Negri imperiously denies "the social and economic laws that govern the deployment of labor-power among the different sectors of social production" and rejects the view that labor-time is crucial to "the capitalist processes of valorization." But capital and capitalists are still devoutly interested in both. That is why there is such a drive to send capital to low waged areas and why there is so much resistance to the reduction of the waged work day. For the computerization and robotization of factories and offices in Western Europe, North America and Japan has been accompanied by a process of "globalization" and "new enclosures."
Capitalists have been fighting as fiercely to have the right to put assembly zones and brothels in the least mechanized parts of the world as to have the right to patent life forms. Instead of a decline, there has been a great expansion of factory production throughout many regions of the planet. Indeed, much of the profit of global corporations and much of the interest received by international banks has been created out of this low-tech, factory and sexual work (Federici 1998). In order to get workers for these factories and brothels, a vast new enclosure has been taking place throughout Africa, Asia and the Americas. The very capital that owns "the ethereal information machines which supplant industrial production" is also involved in the enclosure of lands throughout the planet, provoking famine, disease, low-intensity war and collective misery in the process (Caffentzis 1990) (Caffentzis 1995). Why is capital worried about communal land tenure in Africa, for example, if the true source of productivity is to be found in the cyborgs of the planet? One answer is simply that these factories, lands, and brothels in the Third World are locales of "the counteracting causes" to the tendency of the falling rate of profit. They increase the total pool of surplus labor, help depress wages, cheapen the elements of constant capital, and tremendously expand the labor market and make possible the development of high-tech industries which directly employ only a few knowledge workers or cyborgs. But another complementary answer can be gleaned from Part II of Capital III: "Conversion of Profit into Average Profit," which shows the existence of a sort of capitalist self-valuation. In order for there to be an average rate of profit throughout the capitalist system, branches of industry that employ very little labor but a lot of machinery must be able to have the right to call on the pool of value that high-labor, low-tech branches create. If there were no such branches or no such right, then the average rate of profit would be so low in the high-tech, low-labor industries that all investment would stop and the system would terminate. Consequently, "new enclosures" in the countryside must accompany the rise of "automatic processes" in industry, the computer requires the sweat shop, and the cyborg's existence is premised on the slave. Negri is correct in connecting the rise of the new workers in the high-tech fields with self-valuation, but it has more to do with capitalist self-valuation--i.e., the right of "dead labor" to demand a proportionate share of "living labor"--rather than workers' self-valuation. Indeed, capital's self-valuation is premised on the planetary proletariat's degradation. One can easily dismiss Negri's analysis as being profoundly Eurocentric in its neglect of the value-creating labor of billions of people on the planet. Indeed he is Eurocentric in a rather archaic way. He would do well, at least, to look to the new global capitalist multiculturalism and the ideologies it has spawned (Federici 1995), instead of to the rather small circle of postmodern thinkers that constitute his immediate horizon, in order to begin to appreciate the class struggles of today, even from a capitalist perspective. But the charge of Eurocentricism is a bit too general. What can better account for Negri's methodological oblivion of the planetary proletariat is his adherence to one of the axioms of the Marxist-Leninism: the revolutionary subject in any era is synthesized from the most "productive" elements of the class. It is true that Negri has nothing but scorn for the metaphysics of dialectical materialism and for the history of "real socialism," but on the choice of the revolutionary subject he is Leninist to the core. Negri makes so much of computer programmers and their ilk because of their purported productivity. Since the General Intelligence is productive, then these intellectual workers are its ideal (and hence revolutionary) representatives, even though they have not yet launched a concrete struggle against capitalist accumulation qua "social workers" or "cyborgs." But this methodological identity between revolution and production has proven false time and again in history. Leninists and Leninist parties in the past have often paid for this mistake with their lives. Mao's political development clearly shows that it took the massacre of Communist workers in the cities and many near mortal experiences in the countryside before he recognized that the Taoist principle--the seemingly weakest and least productive can be the most powerful in a struggle--was more accurate than the Leninist. Negri's choice of revolutionary subject in this period--the masters of the ethereal machines--is as questionable as the industrial worker bias of Leninists in the past. Indeed, the failure of The Labor of Dionysius which was published in the US 1994 to address the revolutionary struggles of the indigenous peoples of the planet, especially the Zapatistas in Mexico, is a definite sign that Negri's revolutionary geography needs expansion."
Angela --- rcollins at netlink.com.au