Categories: Technology, Communication Design, Theory & Rhetoric
Citation-worthy:
"[In] the information age, far from transcending the historic conflict between capital and its laboring subjects, constitutes the latest battleground in their encounter; how the new high technologies--computers, telecommunications, and genetic engineering--areshaped and deployed as instruments of an unprecedented, worldwide order of general commodification; and how, paradoxically, arising out of this process appear forces that could produce a different future based on the common sharing od wealth--a twenty-first-century communism" (Dyer-Witherford, 1999, p. 2).
"The principlce claims of the information revloutionaries can be summarized in seven points of 'revolutionary doctrine.' 1. The world is in transition to a new stage of civilization, a transition comparable to the earlier shift from agrarian to industrial society. ... 2. The crucial resource of the new society is technoscientific knowledge. ... 3. The principle manifestation and prime mover of the new era is the invention and diffusion of information technologies--that is, technologies that transfer, process, store, and disseminate digitalized data... 4. The generation of wealth increasingly depends on an 'information economy' in which the exchange and manipulation of symbolic data matches, exceeds, or subsumes the importance of material processing. ... 5. These techno-economic changes are accompanied by far-reaching and fundamentally positive social transformations. ... 6. The information revolution is planetary in scale. ... 7. The information revolution marks not only a new phase in human civilization but also a new stage in the development of life itself" (Dyer-Witherford, 1999, pp. 22-26).
"The more persuasively such analysis demonstrates the complete instrumentality of technoscience to capital, the harder it becomes to posit credible opposition or alternative. This of course is where the Frankfurt School encountered a fatal self-contradiction. For if technological dominance was as total as Adorno or Horkheimer suggested, it became difficult to explain even the basis for their own critical viewpoint, let alone how it could possibly mobilize political action. Critical theory relentlessly painted itself into a corner, where hope could be sustained only at the price of heroic inconsistency. This dilemma is repeated by many later theorists, in whose portrait of techno-capitalism revolutionary possibility gives way to dystopian nightmares of indoctrination, surveillance, and robotization" (Dyer-Witherford, 1999, p. 53).
"[The autonomist Marxist] perspective shows how the information revolution came into being as a result of a social contest, as part of a vast restructuring by capital intended to evade and suppress working-class opposition. More important, it suggests that this informational resturcturing has failed. Rather than pacifying class conflict, digitalization and genetic engineering only displace capital's constant internal war--so that the lines of contestation now run along the inside of the very technological systems deployed to overcome them" (Dyer-Witherford, 1999, p. 237).
Summary/Review:
The working class does not exist anymore. The battleground of the conflict between capital and labor has moved into technologies
Daniel Downes (2000) provided the following excellent synopsis in The Canadian Journal of Communication. 25(3) of Cyber-Marx:
In recent debate, the link between globalization and communication is so strong that it is commonplace to characterize society in media-centric terms (examples include Mark Poster's "Second Media Age" and Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo's era of "generalized communication"). In his book, Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-Technology Capitalism, Nick Dyer-Witherford discusses the connections between communication and globalization in both a historically enlightening and theoretically ambitious manner.
Dyer-Witherford's thesis is that the information age does not, as is often argued, transcend the historic conflict between capital and labour. Rather, the information society constitutes the latest battleground in their encounter. The crux of his analysis of globalization lies in his discussion of what one might call the double-edged effects of technology. On the one hand, high technologies like computers, telecommunications, and genetic engineering are shaped and deployed as instruments of a worldwide order of general commodification. On the other hand, these same technologies facilitate the appearance of "forces that could produce a different future based on the common sharing of wealth-a twenty-first century communism" (p. 2). This second aspect of globalization identifies the author's theoretical ambition-to articulate a renewed Marxist perspective on globalization against the tide of postindustrial, postmodern, and post-Fordist criticisms alike.
Chapter 2 provides a useful discussion of various "postindustrial" arguments as critiques of Marxist thought. According to theorists from Bell to Negroponte, the technoscientific knowledge crystallized in high technology unleashes an ongoing and irresistible transformation of civilization. Later in the book Dyer-Witherford argues that various postmodern theorists offer a new inflection on the distinction between industrial and postindustrial societies by emphasizing the epistemological, philosophical, and aesthetic consequences of this transformation. For postmodern theory, like the postindustrial theorists, Marxism fails in the face of new social and economic circumstances. In an era of intelligent machines, Marxism remained blind to the significance of symbolic data. Marxist politics were committed to a despotic statism that vainly tried to repress irresistibly proliferating channels of communications. Finally, the Marxist concept of revolution has become obsolete through technological progress.
In Chapter 3, Dyer-Witherford addresses these grievances by arguing that there are three positions on the significance of technology in Marx's own work. First, he acknowledges that technoscientific processes and machinery increasingly replace manual labour. Here, information society theory and scientific socialism share a determinism that subordinates the wishes of human subjects to the necessity of technoscientific advance (see p. 48). As well, there is, in Marx, the neo-Luddite who describes technology as a demonic power that converts the worker into a living appendage. This perspective dominates much of the political economy of technology and communication characteristic of Schiller, Smythe, and Mosco. Dyer-Witherford takes care to note that although such critiques often begin with a rediscovery of Marx, they frequently end with a repudiation of him. The more strongly Marx's writings on technology-as-domination are emphasized, argues Dyer-Witherford, "the greater the inclination to dismiss or regret his equally undeniable assertion about its liberatory potentials" (p. 54). This third perspective, which emphasizes the positive aspect of relentless innovation, is the perspective Dyer-Witherford wants to reclaim. This is the Marx who is an enthusiast for the progressive possibilities of human-machine interaction.
Each of these perspectives led to potential exits from Marxism. Scientific socialism was shattered by optimism marked by the fall of the Soviet Union. Neo-Luddism descended into dystopian, radical pessimism. Finally, versions of post-Fordism converged with a post-Marxist politics that claimed to go "beyond" issues of capital and class. Post-Marxists, for Dyer-Witherford, have seriously mistaken the target of their attack. The major source of reductionism and totalization at work in the world today, he contends, is not Marxism but the world market based on the imposition of universal commodification. Thus, rather than identifying the disintegration of Bolshevism with the end of Marxism, Dyer-Witherford suggests it can be seen as opening up a space within which other, repressed branches of the Marxist genealogy can emerge and blossom.
Dyer-Witherford does not want to reject the struggle between labour and capital. Thus, he looks to another movement in Marxism-the autonomist movement in Italy-as a source for rethinking the relationship between Marxist thought and high-tech capitalism. In particular, the process of composition, decomposition, and recomposition of class or collective constitutes a cycle of struggle. This concept permits recognition that from one cycle to another the leading role of certain sectors of labour, organizational strategies, or specific cultural forms may decline, become archaic, and be surpassed, without equating such changes with the disappearance of class conflict. The working class is, according to Dyer-Witherford, perpetually "remaking" itself again and again in a movement of constant transformation (p. 66). This transformation is evident in the process of globalization itself.
It is a common assumption that globalization is linked to new technologies and communication systems. Dyer-Witherford discusses the process of globalization in terms of an historical struggle on the part of capitalism to expand its influence and fragment a global workforce. This strategy to consolidate power has also transformed the world in two directions. First, the globalization of the world-market occurred due to the increasing circulation of struggles during the crisis of the 1960s and 1970s which compelled capital to a fundamental reorganization, one that broke down the previous segregation of the globe into First, Second, and Third Worlds. The objective of this manoeuvre was to unify and integrate the circuits of profit while severing and destroying connections among the working class. The globalization of markets has, however, unintentionally created the terrain for a new recomposition of oppositional forces-not least by its fabrication of a worldwide net of communications formed to facilitate the operations of the market, but increasingly expropriated by oppositional forces for very different purposes. For example, examining cyberspace, Dyer-Witherford argues that the medium serves both to extend capitalist control and to extend the "circulation of struggles." Automating production in an information-based economy; capital strove to augment its powers of control. But the increasingly "communicative" texture of the modern economy intensifies the fundamentally "socialized" and co-operative nature of labour. In the end, a global workforce comes into friction with capital's hegemony.
The combined effects of a transforming working class engaged in different cycles of struggles and the interconnectedness of labour made possible by new networks of communication and new forms of socialized work leads Dyer-Witherford to conclude that information technology and postmodern thought offer exciting possibilities for a postcapitalist society. He proposes this society could take the form of an information-age communism. Dyer-Witherford intimately links his proposed commonwealth to new technologies. He writes:
Just as capital's introduction of new technologies, by potentially freeing huge surpluses of time, have unintentionally opened up prospects of liberation from work, so its expansion of new communication technologies inadvertently opens up a world of counterusage....Electronic communication, by reducing the necessary circulation time for information goods, opens onto two diametrically opposed options. It makes possible either a radical intensification of commodification-through pay-per services and consumer surveillance-or a fundamental attenuation of the commodity form, through the generalized transgression of electronic property rights. (p. 203)
Thus Dyer-Witherford sees networks of communication and labour fulfilling Marx's observation that the ultimate consequence of technoscience in the labour process is the undoing of the capitalist order itself.
Cyber Marx makes a number of useful contributions to communication scholarship. For students and scholars alike the author provides a useful exposition of postindustrial, Marxist, and post-Marxist reactions to globalization and the information society. He provides an historical context for the information revolution and, using examples ranging from the Italian autonomist Marxists to the Chiapas rebels, he explores the consequences of radical uses for new media. His historical argument about the rise of globalization as an economic and political strategy complements recent work by Armand Mattelart, Arjun Appadurai, and others. Perhaps most important, Dyer-Witherford makes a concerted effort to articulate an alternative vision if not of society, then at least of social struggle in a context that is often structurally closed to argument.
While the book successfully contextualizes both the information revolution and a variety of theoretical responses to globalization, the author's theoretical ambitions are less successful. Dyer-Witherford frames his discussion around the class struggle between labour and capital. Instead, he might have taken more from his creative re-reading of the autonomist Marxists-new social and economic contexts might indeed need new formulations of struggle, of opposition to dominance as well as new understandings of the relationships people have with technology. In the end, rather than constituting a new social order based on changing social, economic, or political relations, the postindustrial society constitutes, for Dyer-Witherford, a new form of the same relationship between capital and labour that characterized industrial society. I am not entirely convinced this is an inevitable conclusion. However, though one may remain unconvinced that a revived Marxism is the necessary structure for an alternative to transnational capital, Dyer-Witherford's book makes a welcome and timely contribution to discussions about the future of globalization and communication systems.
