Peer2Politics

Labor in the Global Digital Economy: The Cybertariat Comes of Age 208 pp, $19 pbk, ISBN 9781583674635 By Ursula Huws Reviewed by Elinor Taylor “When will work be over? This question, both urgent and plaintive, increasingly imposes itself as any fulfillment of the emancipatory promise of automation is indefinitely deferred and as work intensifies in… | more |… | more…

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.… | more…

We have now entered a period…when new waves of commodification set in motion in earlier periods are reaching maturity. The new commodities have been generated by drawing into the market even more aspects of life that were previously outside the money economy, or at least that part of it that generates a profit for capitalists. Several such fields of accumulation have now emerged, each with a different method of commodity genesis, forming the basis of new economic sectors and exerting distinctive impacts on daily life, including labor and consumption. They include biology, art and culture, public services, and sociality.… | more…

Ever since the implications of the ‘silicon chip’ for work first penetrated public awareness back in the 1970s, commentators have prophesied the end of the 20th century post-war model of stable, full-time, permanent employment. At first, attention focused on the deskilling effects of digitisation and the mass unemployment that might result from computerised automation. In the 1980s attention shifted to the potential of communications technologies to relocate employment in the form of teleworking. By the 1990s, when global telecommunications networks were in place and the Internet was born, the discourse opened up to encompass worries about offshore outsourcing of digitised services. Now, in the 21st century, there are similar fears: on the one hand, a resurfacing of concerns that the use of robots will destroy skilled jobs, and, on the other, apprehension about the implications of a development for which there is not yet even an agreed name: the exponentially spreading use of online platforms for managing work.

We have now entered a period…when new waves of commodification set in motion in earlier periods are reaching maturity. The new commodities have been generated by drawing into the market even more aspects of life that were previously outside the money economy, or at least that part of it that generates a profit for capitalists. Several such fields of accumulation have now emerged, each with a different method of commodity genesis, forming the basis of new economic sectors and exerting distinctive impacts on daily life, including labor and consumption. They include biology, art and culture, public services, and sociality.… | more…

This presentation begins by summarising changes in employment patterns since the middle of the twentieth century, arguing that the mid 2000s marked the begin...