So, as inoculation, let us resurrect one of Marx's most vivid

metaphors: he writes that capital, 'vampire-like, only lives by sucking

living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks' (1977: 342). Let's
say straight out: class is a vampire relationship. It is a transfer of energy,
time and consciousness - aka the extraction of surplus value - from one
section of a species to another, in a process that makes the recipients
increasingly alien to the coerced donors. In what follows, we will try to
describe this process with a scholarly exactitude and terminological rigor
that does not lose sight of its bloody, toxic nature. Nevertheless, if the
reader at any point feels her or his eyes glazing over, we recommend a
thought experiment: for class read 'position in the vampire food chain'; for
class struggle read 'the battle against vampires'; for class and cybernetics,
'vampires - but perhaps also vampire-slayers - with smartphones'
It was therefore a surprise when in 2000 one of the leading operaismo
theorists, Antonio Negri, with co-author Michael Hardt, proposed a
dramatic reinterpretation of social conflict in a digital era. Their Empire
(2000) suggested that a fully global capital now confronted not so much
a working class as a 'multitude' immersed in 'immaterial labour' involving
the communicational and affective dimensions of networked production.
Huws particularly emphasizes how digital value
chains have intensified capital's dependence on a female and globalized
labour force performing routine and neo-Taylorized clerical, data entry
and office work, work that perpetually crosses with the demands of unpaid
labour in the home, and sharply contrasts with the glamorized, 'cooler'
and often masculinized high-end forms of so-called 'immaterial labour'.
My argument attempts to maintain this important perspective, but
draws mainly on lines of thought within the broad school of autonomist
Marxism but less well known than Hardt and Negri's. The work of George
Caffentzis (2013) and Silvia Federici (2012), whose analysis of primitive
accumulation in the global South and female work in the home and
factory showing how networked capital demand both 'cyborgs' and 'slaves'
has been particularly important.
Conversely, however, the very content and significance of what it
means today, within capital, to be 'woman' rather than 'man', is not just
an anatomical designation but is shaped by the historical and current
occupation of positions of unpaid reproductive labour vis--vis wage
labour. To be 'black', 'brown', 'yellow' or some other shade of 'non-white'
is not just a matter of colour but of how skin encodes a legacy of slavery,
indentured and bonded labour and other forms of super-exploitation in the
one-time colonies and peripheral zones of capital. That is why so much of
the new intensification of exploitation required and enabled by cybernetic
accumulation is borne by women and non-European populations, even
as this digitization reworks both the organization of the home and the
geopolitical division of labour
Some branches of operaismo suggested capital could be fought not just
at the immediate point of production, but also throughout the whole
'social factory' which surrounded and serviced it. These ideas were
especially important for a feminist wing of operaismo that eventually
detached itself from the original grouping. This 'wages for housework'
movement proposed that women's work in the home made an invisible and
unrewarded contribution to capitalist value creation by its unpaid labour
of care for children and families (Dalla Costa and James 1972; Fortunati
1995). Such offshoots of operaismo made not only the workplace but also
the sites where labour power was reproduced - that is, where people are
raised, trained, educated and socialized for work in households, schools
and welfare offices - into points of struggle.

Such analyses
inspired the Wages for Facebook manifesto that appeared in 2014: 'They
say its friendship; we say its unwaged work. With every like, chat, tag or
poke our subjectivity turns them a profit. They call it sharing. We call
it stealing' (Ptak 2013). The echo of the autonomist feminist 'wages for
housework' campaign against the unpaid contribution of domestic work to
value creation is intentional and apropos. Free online labour for Web 2.0
capital is one of the manifold forms of shadow work through which capital
supplements surplus value extracted through the wage, a process labour
historians such as van der Linden and Roth (2014) see as always having
been constitutive of capitalist proletarianization and that now takes fresh
form at a new level of technological subsumption.
Facebook posting is a form of
exploitation, which, without explicit violence, is nonetheless parasitic. It
does not replace the 'normal' structures of daily class exploitation at work
and home, but is added to and superimposed upon them, to constitute a
regime in which the user is habituated, on pain of exclusion from social
worlds, to surrendering the elements of their personality - identity,
creativity, sociality - to enhance the circulation of capital. This submission
is not the same as the brutal bodily discipline inflicted on the dagongmei,
but it is a form of subjectification that is both infiltrative and extroversive
in the abject submission to the commodity form it elicits.
This
relation is in one way, as 'Third World' Marxists have repeatedly and
correctly pointed out, that of conflicting global class interests (Cope
2012): the relative affluence of the North American Facebook user is based
on the cheap commodities, including computers, produced in China's
factories, so that s/he benefits from the exploitation of the dagongmei. Yet
the relation is also, simultaneously, one of complementary exploitations,
in which the computer made by the dagongmei becomes the means for
the Facebook user's surrender of free labour and subjective subordination
to the commodity form. Each exploitation drives the other; the toil of
the dagongmei creates the material basis of the social media platforms
that generate 'voluntary' labour for digital capital which in turn propels
further low-wage physical exploitation of electronics workers. The result
of both was an increase in the power and wealth of major information
corporations and in the overall buoyancy of capital, whose mid-decade
stock market boom these companies contributed to - and whose sudden
disruption would send reverberations from the Potomac to Pearl River.
1) The end of the global peasantry. The subsistence farming that over
millennia supported the largest part of the world's people in Asia,
Africa and Latin America has for decades been eroding under a variety
of pressures: the 'urban bias' (Lipton 1977) of capitalist and socialist
modernizers; monocultural food export policies; the automated harvesters
and genetically modified seeds of high-technology agribusiness plugged
into the supply chains of the global food industry; land expropriations for
urbanization or extractive industries (Weis 2007). Increasingly unable to
sustain itself by farming alone, and dependent on periodic or permanent
wage labour, the global peasantry is slowly disintegrating, in a process
combining the coercive push of poverty and violent dispossession with the
pull of wages and urban modernity (Wildcat 2008). To become proletarian
is both emancipating and immiserating; the vortex blasts people free from
local famine and parochialism, and into limitless insecurity and new
subordinations; for young women in particular, flight from the land can
be a liberation from traditional patriarchal repression, but in exchange
for factory exploitation. This exodus fuels a new phase of the primitive

accumulation that provided capital's early proletariat. In 1980 agricultural

labour accounted for nearly half of global work, but three decades later
it was closer to 35 per cent (Dobbs et al. 2012: 3). In 2010 for the first
time more than half of all people lived in urban areas, compared with
1990, when less than 40 per cent of the global population did so, and
representing an epochal break with the situation a century ago, when only
2 out of every 10 did so (WHO 2010; World Bank 2013b: 6).
1) Bodies. In its historical origins 'proletariat' refers to the reproduction of
the species - to those who have lost everything except that reproductive
capacity. Bodily, sensuous, fleshly and feeling human existence was taken
by Marx as the basis for all his writing on proletarian existence, exploitation
and revolt, as a given. It is today this given that is being taken away by a
capitalism that orients itself increasingly towards the reproduction of its
fixed, not variable, forms - to the reproduction of machines by machines.
In this context, Franco Berardi (2012) is altogether correct when he
suggests, in what can be read as a tacit criticism of the algorithmic and
immaterialist preoccupations of post-operaismo and accelerationist
theory, that the primary project for contemporary struggle is to recover
the corporeality that the 'general intellect' is annihilating, and to counter
the 'digital-financial hyper-abstraction that is liquidating the living body of
the planet, and the social body'. Berardi, however, articulates this project
more in aesthetic than in political terms; but poetry is not enough - the
recovery of the body needs organizational form.
To counter this, new, cross-segmentary struggle organizations are
urgently needed: without invoking too much left-historical baggage,
let us call these 'syndicates'. Some principles that should inform such
organizations are: a) alliances of the working, workless, and precariously
employed; b) taking responsibility for the social reproduction of the
destitute and crisis-struck, without becoming a voluntarist substitute for
a destroyed social safety net, but instead maintaining a fighting front; c)
adopting a stance of 'raising from the bottom up', prioritizing the needs of
Dyer CP 01 text 201 05/03/2015 08:49
202 Cyber-Proletariat
the most precarious and pauperized workers in a racialized and feminized
workforce. These new types of organization may emerge from within
the perpetual struggle to remake labour unions into cross-segmentary
organizations - a project consonant with what Immanuel Ness (2014) calls
'the syndicalist and autonomist restoration of class-struggle unionism'.
It may also, however, come from the stronger entry into issues of work
and worklessness by other radical currents (migrant rights, anti-racist
and autonomist or anarchist organizers), as recently suggested by Chris
Dixon (2014). More broadly, there is a space for new forms of syndicalism
that aim to cross the boundaries of the four types of actions that have
characterized the recent cycle of struggles - riots, wage struggles,
occupations and hacktivism - each with their characteristic class
compositions, so that these learn from and interpenetrate one another in
a new organizational synthesis.
However, communisation theory's insistence on 'nothing but'
an immediate communism that it can describe only in the most abstract
terms is also implausible; we can't share its faith - the 'wager' - that this
outcome will arrive without some premeditation. Planning for transitions
to a post-capitalist communism is necessary, providing these plans are kept
transitive, mobile and multiple, constantly subject to discussion within
the movement and always understood not as fetishized programmes but as
means to heightened struggle and full-out appropriations against capital.
But despite - or because of - such

conditions, we can pit against Land's cyber-punk Terminator-futurology

of exterminatory cybernetic capital an unlikely counter-narrative: The
Wizard of Oz. Dorothy, our female proletarian protagonist, is plucked off
the land in a tornado and swept to a domain under the spell of a malign
force that enslaves entire populations with its bio-drone flying monkeys.
Somehow these fractioned and uncertain forces assemble a coalition
capable of dispelling the mystifications and fetishism to which they have
been subjected, recapturing their world and extricating themselves from
the terrifying system that has engulfed them. The contested ruby slippers,
with their capacities for leaping over space and time, stand in nicely for
the cybernetic means of production and communication.