Cyber‐proletariat: global labour in the digital vortex by Nick Dyer‐Witheford (2015), London: Pluto Press. 248 pp., £15.00 (paperback)

• Author: Vahini Sangarapillai
• Date: 01 November 2018
• Published date: 01 November 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ntwe.12120

New Technology, Work and Employment 33:3

ISSN 0268-1072

Book Review

Cyber-proletariat: global labour in the digital vortex

by Nick Dyer-Witheford (2015), London: Pluto Press. 248 pp., £15.00 (paperback)

This book examines relations between technology and the global composition of

class following the 2008 crash. The theoretical point of departure is autonomist

Marxism. The force of this book comes in the pursuit and narration of digital

capital’s drive towards automation and the creation of workers without work.

Descriptions of contrasting technology work across the world are scattered through-

out the 10 chapters. The author is careful not to offer a reductionist, technologically

determined analysis of class. The significance of class on the development of new

technology is communicated effectively through these wide- ranging accounts of

work.

The first three chapters provide theoretical and historical backgrounds. Chapter

1 introduces the proletariat with a section on uprisings. Giving a vast array of

examples of revolts and uprisings following the 2008 recession, the backdrop is

drawn here for the appropriation of technology by those who wish to divert

capital’s drive, which he expands on in his final chapter. The opening chapter

argues the existence and significance of class, taking nothing for granted, pointing

out that the rhetoric of technology’s bountiful promises has been used, inaccu-

rately, to suggest a dissolution of class.

Chapter 2 lays the theoretical foundations of autonomist Marxism, which em-

phasises the capacity of workers to resist and create alternatives to capital. Marx

and Engels’ description of the capitalist market is reimagined as a vortex. In this

whirlwind, the triple processes of production, circulation and financialisation take

place and these stages structure the book. Chapter 3 offers a historical perspective

of the topic, reviewing Cold War origins of cybernetics and tracing the shift from

the mass worker to the new global proletariat. Detroit’s car industry is selected

to illustrate the processes through which the author argues cybernetics have

decomposed organised labour.

Chapter 4 focuses on the workers that make up Silicon Valley, from those

employed in electronic assembly, manufacturing and services to programming.

Programmers are described as semi- autonomous experts who have reduced au-

tonomy as a result of the networks and automation they themselves have begun.

These workers, mostly white and male engineering and management workers,

share the chapter with assembly workers, mostly women from ethnic minorities,

often migrants experiencing relative impoverishment. The author acknowledges

that these workers and those who suffer ill health due to exposure to toxic waste

from semiconductors experience ‘a far blunter exploitation’ than the programmers

(p. 66). Nonetheless, the overarching aim of the book is to see the global prole-

tariat form under the description of all those ‘deployed to the advantage of capital’

(p. 80).

Chapter 5 is about circulation. After introducing the Dagongmei, young female

rural migrant workers in China assembling electronics equipment, the focus moves

to the American proletariat providing unpaid online labour. Although the author

agrees with Hesmondhalgh’s (2010), criticism of an equation between Facebook

posting and sweatshop work, he argues that Facebook users are also exploited.

Such extreme variance in working conditions, as already set out in the previous

chapter, and in the level of choice in types of work, highlights the importance

Book review 271© 2018 Brian Towers (BRITOW) and

John Wiley & Sons Ltd.