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By Nick Dyer-Witherford. Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999. 344 pp. ISBN 0252067959.
In recent debate, the link between globalization and communication is so strong that it is commonplace to characterize society in media-centric terms (examples include Mark Poster's "Second Media Age" and Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo's era of "generalized communication"). In his book, Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-Technology Capitalism, Nick Dyer-Witherford discusses the connections between communication and globalization in both a historically enlightening and theoretically ambitious manner.
Dyer-Witherford's thesis is that the information age does not, as is often argued, transcend the historic conflict between capital and labour. Rather, the information society constitutes the latest battleground in their encounter. The crux of his analysis of globalization lies in his discussion of what one might call the double-edged effects of technology. On the one hand, high technologies like computers, telecommunications, and genetic engineering are shaped and deployed as instruments of a worldwide order of general commodification. On the other hand, these same technologies facilitate the appearance of "forces that could produce a different future based on the common sharing of wealth--a twenty-first century communism" (p. 2). This second aspect of globalization identifies the author's theoretical ambition--to articulate a renewed Marxist perspective on globalization against the tide of postindustrial, postmodern, and post-Fordist criticisms alike.
Chapter 2 provides a useful discussion of various "postindustrial" arguments as critiques of Marxist thought. According to theorists from Bell to Negroponte, the technoscientific knowledge crystallized in high technology unleashes an ongoing and irresistible transformation of civilization. Later in the book Dyer-Witherford argues that various postmodern theorists offer a new inflection on the distinction between industrial and postindustrial societies by emphasizing the epistemological, philosophical, and aesthetic consequences of this transformation. For postmodern theory, like the postindustrial theorists, Marxism fails in the face of new social and economic circumstances. In an era of intelligent machines, Marxism remained blind to the significance of symbolic data. Marxist politics were committed to a despotic statism that vainly tried to repress irresistibly proliferating channels of communications. Finally, the Marxist concept of revolution has become obsolete through technological progress.
In Chapter 3, Dyer-Witherford addresses these grievances by arguing that there are three positions on the significance of technology in Marx's own work. First,...