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

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

Author : Source : Monthly Review Press 2014-11-17

Ursula Huws, a professor of Labour and Globalisation at the University of Hertfordshire in the UK published his new book Labor in the Global Digital Economy: The Cybertariat Comes of Age in Monthly Review Press in October.

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.

Editor: Du Mei