Caught in a Cyber-Hurricane

"Cyber-Proletariat - Global Labour in the Digital Vortex," by Nick Dyer-Witheford, 2015

I picked this book up thinking that I was going to find out about a new strata of the working class or proletariat that was unfamiliar.  You know, geeky techies who now consider themselves cyber-communists or something.  But what Dyer-Witheford (DW) does in this book is connect very familiar present events and issues to the living tissue of the technical computer revolution, the cyber-matrix we now live in.  This 'strata' actually involves nearly all proletarians, across the world.

Grin and Bear It?

DW covers robotization, the cell phone, the internet, digital platforms, artificial intelligence and automata, tech companies, the different strata of techies, world supply chains, software and the like - all translated through Marx.  DW is an 'autonomist Marxist' in the Italian tradition of Negri and others, and so eschews Leninism.  He seems to favor a spontaneous, mass approach to class struggle, which he calls 'The Human Front.' (!) Organization is almost invisible in his high-tech world, but then this book is not really a prescription of 'what to do,' but of what is happening to us.

Some writers love to coin new phrases and you can't fault DW for trying in this book.  It is a habit of the precise academic.  In one example he focuses on the 'proletariat' as those who might be able to work, not the narrower category of the 'working class,' which at least has a job.  However, even people without a job have to work to stay alive...  DW contrasts the disaster of industrial capitalism in Detroit with the growth of cyber-capital in Silicon Valley.   He tracks the growth of precarious part-time employment, showing how the majority of proletarians in the world do not have a full-time jobs.  For instance, 93% of Indian workers are in the 'unorganized' sector. He describes finance capital's 'money grid', where 'M=M+' was not possible until the development of the computer, which aided in financialization.  Wall Street and banking were one of the first areas to become digitized.     

In the most illuminating section, DW shows how the mobile phone has become essential throughout the world as a way for temporary workers to be 'on call' for work.  As I've pointed out in the past, it is the neo-liberal commodity 'par excellance.'  In richer countries or higher-income strata in less wealthy ones, the internet phone is the fetish of all fetishes.  The computer, the cell phone, the internet phone, the software and physical networks that tie all of it together are in essence how modern imperial capital controls the world's labour - how it functions.  The quick movement of capital, of orders, of instructions, of commerce, of entertainment, of data, of news, of labor - all are part of this cybernetic vortex.  The stock markets themselves are a reflections of how algorithms trade at lightning speeds.  Nearly every job has been touched by computers - not just in white-collar cubes but blue collar work like mechanics, machinists, construction workers, railway workers, even miners and farmers.  DW, like Marx & Engels, describes it as a type of social hurricane, which is only speeding up.  It is matching nature's Maria, Irma and Harvey in their acts of de-composition.      

Monthly Review has downgraded the role of the tech revolution because of the few people it ostensibly employs.  That is true, at least in the U.S., which outsourced its blue collar PC board force, and now concentrates on intellectual property.  But beneath them, even in Silicon Valley, are more than 200K support workers.  Overseas the tech industry's flagship plant is Foxconn in Shenzen, China, which employs over 200,000 workers alone, making it this century's 'River Rouge' plant.  Modern growth in industrial production has mostly come from the tech industry, saving capital for a time from complete stagnation.  Even automobiles are becoming massive tech gadgets.  Due to automation and software, employment is now not what marks capital's progress - in fact the LACK of it indicates its regressive 'progress.'  

The second issue is profits, and tech firms are some of the most highly capitalized firms in the world. Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Verizon, Sun, Oracle, Cisco, Tesla, etc. - you have heard of them, right?  The third issue is that of control - and the cyber web now encompasses the globe, both in a corporate, a military, a propaganda and a surveillance sense.  This truly qualifies as a technical breakthrough for capital on par with the steam engine or the automobile, and it is a method which is still developing at lighting speed, as the development of 'self-driving' cars and trucks attests.  Truck drivers are the most common blue collar jobs in the U.S. - 1.8 million - so this development, IF it happens, will result in massive unemployment, as capital never has a plan for those rendered obsolete.

Robots of the World ...Unite

Marx pointed out that the more capital invests in technology (fixed capital) and not in labour, it results in a falling rate of profit, as labour is the source of surplus value.  This is if other things do not interfere, like war, environmental destruction and the issues that DW raises about cheaper fixed machinery.  Additionally, it can easily be seen that a corporate plan to replace humans with machines, like some capitalist "Terminator" end-game, will result in poverty for the majority of humanity - and that would be bad for sales at a certain point.  All this 'creative disruption' as Schumpeter labeled it, could become 'plain destruction.'  Which is why billionaires and tech bosses are trumpeting the 'guaranteed national income' - sort of a warehousing plan for now economically useless human beings.

DW points out that Marx's concept of the 'reserve army of labor' implies that some of these people 'might' get a job someday if the production cycle picks up.  At present, some people will NEVER have a job, except perhaps in the marginal peddler economy, selling things people barely want like Chicklets. They are 'surplus humanity.'  He also contends that imperial development is disrupting the standard 'center/periphery' economic model, as the 'center' becomes increasingly immiserated while some in the periphery get wealthier, and tries to describe a new world model based on localized zones.

He has a section on the varying roles of Twitter, Facebook and various messaging platforms in social struggle.  He shows how in some countries - Egypt and China - they played a huge role in organizing protests, while in others they were peripheral.  Mirroring the lack of large revolutionary organizations on the left, some protests were as ephemeral as Tweets - they came and they went. 

DW discusses the dispossession of farmers, migrant labor, virtual slave labor, unpaid labor mostly done by women, and every other kind of workforce drawn into the cyber network.  Primitive mining for metals in the Congo, staffing call centers in India, picking apart e-waste in Mexico, peddling cell phones in Nairobi, 'content-moderating' in San Jose - all join a chain of production that was non-existent not that long ago.  Even the free 'user content' you are reading now on this blog actually helps Google.  And yes, some techies (hackers) have become proletarianized as routine coders and 'help desk' personnel, just as is happening in almost every other white collar area.  But sorry, no real movement in the direction of 'cyber-communism' from the techies I meet. 

Other books on this topic:  "The Precariat,"  "Flash Boys," "Cypherpunks," "The Shock Doctrine," "The Unseen," "China on Strike,"

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

September 28, 2017