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

Reviewed by Enda Brophy Carleton University, Graduate Program in Communication eobrophy@chat.carleton.ca What potential does newer information technology hold for oppositional movements at the beginning of the twenty-first century? Can marxian theory in general help us to more fully understand a dynamic of social struggle translated into a world of communication technology? If so, what particular vision within marxian theory has demonstrated itsdfable to comprehend not only the radical restructuring of capitalism, commonly referred to as a move towards postFordism, but the accompanying renewal of socially circulated struggle? The tide gives a good idea as to whether Dyer-Witheford believes marxian theory offers explanatory relevance and transformative potential in awodd both similar and yet dramatically different from that which Marx himself described in the nineteenth centur)~ The means bywhich this condusion is arrived at is, however, both unconventional and thought-provoking. Drawing from a particular reading of the role of technology in Marx's work, Dyer-Witheford traces the struggles emerging at every point along the newly emerging circuit of capital accumulation. Having analyzed the principal theoretical deaths Marxism has been the victim of, Dyer-Witheford goes on to counterpose the related theories on technology of those identified as the descendants of Babbage and Marx. While the former's utopian claims concerning the intrinsically emancipatory potential of information technology have most obviously not come to fruition, Dyer-Witheford suggests that the latter's mix of perspectives, now dominant in the left, have only been partially helpful. These views of the new information technologies deployed by capitalism in its reinvention oscillate between paralyzing pessimism and unwarranted optimism. Thus the newest information technologies are either examples of how increasingly flexible techniques of control act to immediately suffocate possibilities for social change or to open up a set of possibilities reminiscent of a benign form of capitalism along the lines of that championed by the information society theorists. Departing from this range of theoretical positions (some of them perhaps having been unduly caricatured in the process), Dyer-Witheford introduces the perspective of autonomous marxism as a more fruitful way of understanding the recurring crises and subsequent reconfigurations of capital. These arise not from the "internal barriers" of capitalist accumulation, but from the external one of the working class struggle against exploitation. The focus of this lesser-known strand of Marxist theory is Marx's description of the relationship between waged labour and capital. Yet where it departs from many conventional visions of struggle is where it chooses to lay its theoretical focuson dass composition. This stems from a reading of Marx which foregrounds the power of the working dass, a power which capital must continually try and incorporate in an unending project ofsubsumption. Such an analysis, while hopefully not losing sight of capital's awesome power, is "aimed at assessing the capacity of living labour to wrest control away from capital." (p. 66) Capitalist restructuring is thus viewed as a reaction against the tendency of the workers to periodically compose themselves as a collectivity. The most recent round of restructuring, in which information technologies play a central role, is seen less as an attempt by capital to overcome some kind of internal crisis than as a reaction against the widespread social unrest during the sixties and seventies. The deployment of technology by capital against the demands of the "mass worker" has succeeded in both reducing and dispersing workers which were once brought together on the shop floor. But even this process, argues the autonomous perspective, has unforeseen and potentially very troublesome results for capital. This reconfiguration only succeeds in creating a "factory without walls" so highly dispersed in its productive nature that the world itself has become a kind of"social factory." This is the premise for the emergence of the