5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An original and compelling critique of capitalism, March 29, 2004
This review is from: The Making of a Cybertariat: Virtual Work in a Real World (Paperback)
Ursula Huws' "The Making of a Cybertariat" is a collection of essays on the political economy of technology and its myriad social consequences. In this fascinating book, Dr. Huws has developed an original and compelling critique of contemporary capitalism. While the articles span from the 1970s to the early 2000s, the analyses are consistently razor-sharp and the insights remain as valid today as when they were originally conceived and written.
Dr. Huws has worked for many years as an activist, researcher and free lance writer living in Great Britain. She currently serves as a Professor at London Metropolitan University. Both the immediacy and the solid scholarship that infuses her writing is evidence of these myriad roles as well as Dr. Huws' professionalism and dedication to her work.
Integral to Dr. Huws' analysis is the Marxist-inspired concept of commodification, or capitalism's tendency to draw into the cash economy activities which had been previously carried out by unpaid labor. For example, the hand-washing of clothes is replaced by the laundromat and in turn by the home washing machine. With each succeeding wave of technological advancement, the division of labor increases in a manner that richly rewards technical specialists while it enslaves large masses of deskilled workers and consumers into an increasingly tenuous and impoverished lifestyle.
But Dr. Huws goes well beyond Marx by emphasizing the Feminist identification of the home (not the factory) as the primary locus of struggle. As telecommunications and computer technologies increasingly blur the distinctions between home and office, it is the female who disproportionately bears the cost of capitals' expansion, Dr. Huws posits. Capital benefits from technological innovations such as self-service banking, for example, mainly by offloading laborious tasks onto consumers. Dr. Huws goes on to state that the machines, laws and social norms that regulate domestic female behavior turns housework into "drudgery" and helps extend and enforce the sphere of male domination and control.
Within this general analytical framework, individual chapters are dedicated to discussions of the Internet and its facilitation of corporate restructuring and the outsourcing of work overseas; how women's health suffers due to inequalities in the workplace and the female ethic of sacrificial caregiving; technology's role in the failure of collectivity in the 1970s, the rise of individualism and the decline of the public sphere from the 1980s to today; the debunking of postmodern theories pertaining to the supposed dematerialization of the economy; the contestation of time wrought by the automation of routine tasks and the application of Taylorist management principles; the myriad challenges of forming a "cybertariat" class consciousness in a contingent global economy that is segmented by space, status and culture; and more.
At the close of each chapter, Dr. Huws ponders how citizens might wrest control of the work processes and technologies controlled by capital and state in order to channel it towards the cause of enriching society and empowering people.
I highly recommend this superbly researched, persuasively argued and highly readable book to everyone.
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