Labor in the Global Digital Economy: The Cybertariat Comes of Age

Labor in the Global Digital Economy: The Cybertariat Comes of Age

Language: English

Pages: 240

ISBN: 1583674632

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


For every person who reads this text on the printed page, many more will read it on a computer screen or mobile device. It’s a situation that we increasingly take for granted in our digital era, and while it is indicative of the novelty of twenty-first-century capitalism, it is also the key to understanding its driving force: the relentless impulse to commodify our lives in every aspect.  

Ursula Huws ties together disparate economic, cultural, and political phenomena of the last few decades to form a provocative narrative about the shape of the global capitalist economy at present. She examines the way that advanced information and communications technology has opened up new fields of capital accumulation: in culture and the arts, in the privatization of public services, and in the commodification of human sociality by way of mobile devices and social networking. These trends are in turn accompanied by the dramatic restructuring of work arrangements, opening the way for new contradictions and new forms of labor solidarity and struggle around the planet. Labor in the Global Digital Economy is a forceful critique of our dizzying contemporary moment, one that goes beyond notions of mere connectedness or free-flowing information to illuminate the entrenched mechanisms of exploitation and control at the core of capitalism.

 

The Future of the Race

Sociology for Dummies

Culture Wars: An Encyclopedia of Issues, Voices, and Viewpoints

The Boys in the Bunkhouse: Servitude and Salvation in the Heartland

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Established themselves as alternative destinations to the earlier players (like Barbados and the Philippines). China is gaining ground with an even larger population and lower costs than India, as well as a determination to acquire a leading role in the “eEconomy.” Different business functions are characterized by different types of workers. Lower-skill functions like data entry or customer service work tend to involve large numbers of workers who are more likely to be women; higher-skilled.

Autonomy, and for fairness and, in a kind of dress rehearsal for the broader policy debates of the 1980s and 1990s, between the desires for security and stability on the one hand and adaptability and flexibility on the other. Between 1972 and about 1987 (the last two faded out gradually so it was difficult to date their final demise) I was a member of several women’s groups, in London and in Yorkshire, which spanned an often overlapping range including consciousness-raising groups, personal.

Many purposes, but it can leave the impression of the “state” as an abstract and undifferentiated entity, rendering invisible the enormous differences that exist between states: with the hegemonic power of the United States at one extreme and at the other “failed states,” or those that cannot even guarantee a rule of law sufficient to enforce the most basic labor standards.25 Supranational bodies play a part. The World Trade Organization (WTO), for instance, plays a role in forcing open markets,.

From any form of adult family life altogether),43 burning out, dropping out, striking a pose of cynical anomie, indulging in isolated acts of “letting off steam” or sabotage, or adopting a ruthless “devil take the hindmost” attitude that may involve trampling on the interests of fellow workers. Developing new forms of collective organization and resistance is, of course, an alternative option but one that we found rather little evidence for in the WORKS research.44 Case study research throws up.

Certain value as a result. Some of this value is essential to cover the cost of subsistence, and the hours worked to produce this value, “necessary labor time,” are (usually) reimbursed. The remainder, “surplus value,” is appropriated by the capitalist to distribute as profit and invest in new means of production. On close examination, however, just about every element of this simple story turns out to be open to question. What, exactly, is “labor”? And, more particularly, what labor is.

Download sample

Download