Cyber-Proletariat

Today's crisis of capital is also a crisis of networks. It arises from a failed project of globalisation that attempted to destroy the industrial working class and bind labour with planetary commodity chains, a project unthinkable without computerised command, but which also threaded the world-market with a digital meshwork of potentially subversive devices and connections. The immediate cause was the catastrophe of a financial sector raised to dizzying heights by light-speed trading and algorithmic modelling. In the aftermath of this disaster, social struggles sprang up from Cairo to New York, and from Athens to Guangdong, struggles fought out not only in streets, squares and factories but also via cell phones, social media, surveillance and hacker exploits. These ongoing conflicts are set against a darkening background of mounting planetary inequalities, terror-wars and ecological danger-signs that all demonstrate capitalism's inability to absorb the creative capacities of the information technologies it has produced. And they beckon on a new communism adequate to networks' potential for cooperative production, distributed planning and free association. This book argues that the current turmoils mark not only a decomposition of the current mode of production and communication, but also the emergence of a new collective subject, the global worker, whose future depends in part on battles waged within and over information networks, on the digital front.