The Making of a Cybertariat: Virtual Work in a Real World

The workplace has been changed in recent decades by the rise of digital technologies. Parts of a single labor process can be moved around the world, with implications not only for individual workplaces, but for the working class as a whole.

Within advanced capitalist countries, the workplace has been made more flexible through cell phones, e-mail, freelancing, and outsourcing. The process often makes the situation of the workers more precarious, as they are forced to pay for the tools of their trade, are expected to be constantly accessible to workplace demands, and are isolated from their fellow workers.

Huws' The Making of a Cybertariat examines this process from a number of perspectives, including those of women in the workplace and at home. It explores changing categories of employment and modes of organization, and how new divisions of race and gender are created in the process. It questions how the virtual workforce can identify their common interests and stand together to struggle for them.

The Making of a Cybertariat is both a testament to the author's remarkable record in the politics of technology over several decades and a vital resource for grasping ongoing debates and controversies in this field.

Huws (international labor studies, London Metropolitan U.) defines commodification as "the tendency of capitalist economies to generate new and increasingly standardized products for sale in the market whose sale will generate profits that increase in proportion to the scale of production" and applies the concept to both material products and services. She argues that understanding commodification is central to understanding change in capitalist economies, and she discusses this theme in 11 essays, first published between the late 1970s and the early 2000s, Topics include the impact of technology on domestic labor, the atomization of work and leisure due to information technology, and the contestation of time. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Ursula Huws has been an activist and commentator on labor and technology issues since the 1970s. Her writings have appeared in the Socialist Register, Z Magazine, and the New Statesman.

Colin Leys is professor of political science at York University, Toronto, and author of Renewing Socialism: Democracy, Strategy, and Imagination..