Overview

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.   Cutting through the smokescreen of high-tech propaganda, 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.  

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9780252067952

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Reviews

An outstanding survey of various forms of electronic and political activism that have challenged and even successfully subverted existing technologies; this information is worthy of a volume of its own. This book is a welcome antidote to the dominant voices of business and government, which claim that virtually every aspect of life must succumb to market forces. Dyer-Witheford succeeds in making complex ideas understandable without oversimplification. Required reading for anyone interested in the implications of new information technologies for capitalism and work. - Choice An excellent introduction to the political theory of the 'antiglobalization' protests... The book's bibliography is quite exhaustive... [It's] clarity of presentation makes it quite useful for academic classes in the social and cultural studies of information and communication, in classes on the political economy of information, for classes in knowledge management, critical management studies, history of information and history of communication. -- Ron Day, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology ADVANCE PRAISE 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

Author Information

    Nick Dyer-Witheford is an assistant professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Western Ontario.  

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