Cyber-Marx

Author: Nick Dyer-Witheford
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252067952
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 362

Book Description
In this highly readable and thought-provoking work, Nick Dyer-Witheford assesses the relevance of Marxism in our time and demonstrates how the information age, far from transcending the historic conflict between capital and its laboring subjects, constitutes the latest battleground in their encounter. Dyer-Witheford maps the dynamics of modern capitalism, showing how capital depends for its operations not just on exploitation in the immediate workplace, but on the continuous integration of a whole series of social sites and activities, from public health and maternity to natural resource allocation and the geographical reorganization of labor power. He also shows how these sites and activities may become focal points of subversion and insurgency, as new means of communication vital for the smooth flow of capital also permit otherwise isolated and dispersed points of resistance to connect and combine with one another. Cutting through the smokescreen of high-tech propaganda, Dyer-Witheford predicts the advent of a reinvented, "autonomist" Marxism that will rediscover the possibility of a collective, communist transformation of society. Refuting the utopian promises of the information revolution, he discloses the real potentialities for a new social order in the form of a twenty-first-century communism based on the common sharing of wealth.

Inhuman Power

Author: Nick Dyer-Witheford
Publisher: Pluto Press (UK)
ISBN: 9780745338606
Category : Artificial intelligence
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
The past several years have brought staggering advances in the field of Artificial Intelligence. And Marxist analysis has to keep up: while machines were always central to Marxist analysis, modern AI is a new kind of machine that Marx could not have anticipated. Inhuman Power explores the relationship between Marxist theory and AI through three approaches, each using the lens of a different Marxist theoretical concept. While the idea of widespread AI tends to be celebrated as much as questioned, a deeper analysis of its reach and potential produces a more complex and disturbing picture than has been identified. Inhuman Power argues that on its current trajectory, AI is likely to render humanity obsolete and that the only way to prevent it is a communist revolution.

Cognitive Capitalism

Author: Yann Moulier-Boutang
Publisher: Polity
ISBN: 0745647324
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Book Description
This book argues that we are undergoing a transition from industrial capitalism to a new form of capitalism - what the author calls & lsquo; cognitive capitalism & rsquo;

Windows Into the Soul

Author: Gary T. Marx
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022628591X
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 427

Book Description
In Windows into the Soul, Gary T. Marx sums up a lifetime of work on issues of surveillance and social control by disentangling and parsing the empirical richness of watching and being watched. Ultimately, Marx argues, recognizing complexity and asking the right questions is essential to bringing light and accountability to the darker, more iniquitous corners of our emerging surveillance society.

Singularities

Author: Joshua Raulerson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 1846319722
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Book Description
This groundbreaking volume is the first to mount a sustained and wide-ranging critical treatment of Singularity (the irrevocable transformation of the nature of human existence by technological advancement) as a subject for theory and cultural studies.

Cyberdiplomacy

Author: Shaun Riordan
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509535934
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 148

Book Description
The world has been sleep-walking into cyber chaos. The spread of misinformation via social media and the theft of data and intellectual property, along with regular cyberattacks, threaten the fabric of modern societies. All the while, the Internet of Things increases the vulnerability of computer systems, including those controlling critical infrastructure. What can be done to tackle these problems? Does diplomacy offer ways of managing security and containing conflict online? In this provocative book, Shaun Riordan shows how traditional diplomatic skills and mindsets can be combined with new technologies to bring order and enhance international cooperation. He explains what cyberdiplomacy means for diplomats, foreign services and corporations and explores how it can be applied to issues such as internet governance, cybersecurity, cybercrime and information warfare. Cyberspace, he argues, is too important to leave to technicians. Using the vital tools offered by cyberdiplomacy, we can reduce the escalation and proliferation of cyberconflicts by proactively promoting negotiation and collaboration online.

Gramsci is Dead

Author: Richard J. F. Day
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781783716548
Category : Anarchism
Languages : en
Pages : 254

Book Description
Inspired to contribute to the symbiotic relationship between the academic and activist worlds, Day has decided to pick up the pen instead of the Molotov cocktail. The result is this brilliant book. Ann Hansen: Ann was sentenced to life imprisonment for blowing up a cruise-missile component factory, and is the author of Direct Action: The Memoirs of an Urban Guerilla. Gramsci and the concept of hegemony cast a long shadow over radical political theory. Yet how far has this theory got us? Is it still central to feminism, anti-capitalism, anti-racism, anarchism, and other radical social movements today? Unlike previous revolutionary movements, Day argues, most contemporary radical social movements do not strive to take control of the state. Instead, they attempt to develop new forms of self-organisation that can run in parallel with -- or as alternatives to -- existing forms of social, political, and economic organization. This is to say that they follow a logic of affinity rather than one of hegemony. This book draws together a variety of different strands in political theory to weave together aninnovative new approach to politics today. Rigorous and wide-ranging, Day introduces and interrogates key concepts. From Hegel's concept of recognition, through theories of hegemony and affinity to Hardt and Negri's reflections on Empire, Day maps academia's theoretical and philosophical concerns onto today's politics of the street. Ideal for all students of political theory, Day's fresh approach combines Marxist, Anarchist and 'Post-structuralist theory to shed new light on the politics and practice of contemporary social' movements.

Storming Heaven

Author: Steve Wright
Publisher: Pluto Press (UK)
ISBN: 9780745399911
Category : Communism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Storming Heave in Steve Wright's unsurpassed study of Italian autonomist Marxism. This new edition remains the only book to examine Italian workerist theory and practice, from its origins in teh anti-Stalinist left of the 1950s to its heyday twenty years later. First developed by Antonio Negri, Mario Tronti, Sergio Bologna and others, workerism, or 'orperaismo', includes the refusal of work, class self-organisation, mass illegality and the extension of revolutionary agency, all of which are still practised today by workers across the world. This edition includes a new chapter looking at the debates around operaismo and Autonomia since the book originally appeared in 2002.

Marx in the Field

Author: Alessandra Mezzadri
Publisher: Anthem Press
ISBN: 1785274511
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Book Description
Marx in the Field is a unique edited collection illustrating the relevance of the Marxian method to study contemporary capitalism and the global development process. Essays in the collection bring Marx ‘to the field’ in three ways. They illustrate how Marxian categories can be concretely deployed for field research in the global economy, they analyse how these categories may be adapted during fieldwork and they discuss data collection methods supporting Marxian analysis. Crucially, many of the contributions expand the scope of Marxian analysis by combining its insights with those of other intellectual traditions, including radical feminisms, critical realism and postcolonial studies. The book defines the possibilities and challenges of fieldwork guided by Marxian analysis, including those emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic. The collection takes a global approach to the study of development and of contemporary capitalism. While some essays focus on themes and geographical areas of long-term concern for international development – like informal or rural poverty and work across South Asia, Southern and West Africa, or South America – others focus instead on actors benefitting from the development process - like regional exporters, larger farmers, and traders – or on unequal socio-economic outcomes across richer and emerging economies and regions – including Gulf countries, North America, Southern Europe, or Post-Soviet Central and Eastern Europe. Some essays explore global processes cutting across the world economy, connecting multiple regions, actors and inequalities. While some of the contributions focus on classic Marxian tropes in the study of contemporary capitalism – like class, labour and working conditions, agrarian change, or global commodity chains and prices – others aim at demonstrating the relevance of the Marxian method beyond its traditional boundaries – for instance, for exploring the interplays between food, nutrition and poverty; the links between social reproduction, gender and homework; the features of migration and refugees regimes, tribal chieftaincy structures or prison labour; or the dynamics structuring global surrogacy. Overall, through the analysis of an extremely varied set of concrete settings and cases, this book illustrates the extraordinary insights we can gain by bringing Marx in the field.

In Letters of Blood and Fire

Author: George Caffentzis
Publisher: PM Press
ISBN: 1604862971
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 480

Book Description
Karl Marx remarked that the only way to write about the origins of capitalism is in the letters of blood and fire used to drive workers from the common lands, forests, and waters in the sixteenth century. In this collection of essays, George Caffentzis argues that the same is true for the annals of twenty-first-century capitalism. Information technology, immaterial production, financialization, and globalization have been trumpeted as inaugurating a new phase of capitalism that puts it beyond its violent origins. Instead of being a period of major social and economic novelty, however, the course of recent decades has been a return to the fire and blood of struggles at the advent of capitalism. Emphasizing class struggles that have proliferated across the social body of global capitalism, Caffentzis shows how a wide range of conflicts and antagonisms in the labor-capital relation express themselves within and against the work process. These struggles are so central to the dynamic of the system that even the most sophisticated machines cannot liberate capitalism from class struggle and the need for labor. Themes of war and crisis permeate the text and are given singular emphasis, documenting the peculiar way in which capital perpetuates violence and proliferates misery on a world scale. This collection draws upon a careful rereading of Marx’s thought in order to elucidate political concerns of the day. Originally written to contribute to the debates of the anticapitalist movement over the last thirty years, this book makes Caffentzis’s writings readily available as tools for the struggle in this period of transition to a common future.