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Institute for Workplace Studies-----------------Professor Samuel B. Bacharach

School of Industrial & Labor Relations-------- Director, Institute for Workplace Studies

Cornell University

16 East 34th Street, 4th floor--------------------Stuart Basefsky

New York, NY 10016 -------------------------------Director, IWS News Bureau

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Monthly Review Press

Labor in the Global Digital Economy: The Cybertariat Comes of Age

by Ursula Huws

http://monthlyreview.org/books/pb4635/

208 pages

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-58367-463-5

Cloth ISBN: 978-1-58367-464-2

November 2014

For every person who reads this text on the printed page, many more will read it on a computer screen or mobile device. It’s a situation that we increasingly take for granted in our digital era, and while it is indicative of the novelty of twenty-first-century capitalism, it is also the key to understanding its driving force: the relentless impulse to commodify our lives in every aspect.

Ursula Huws ties together disparate economic, cultural, and political phenomena of the last few decades to form a provocative narrative about the shape of the global capitalist economy at present. She examines the way that advanced information and communications technology has opened up new fields of capital accumulation: in culture and the arts, in the privatization of public services, and in the commodification of human sociality by way of mobile devices and social networking. These trends are in turn accompanied by the dramatic restructuring of work arrangements, opening the way for new contradictions and new forms of labor solidarity and struggle around the planet. Labor in the Global Digital Economy is a forceful critique of our dizzying contemporary moment, one that goes beyond notions of mere connectedness or free-flowing information to illuminate the entrenched mechanisms of exploitation and control at the core of capitalism.

REVIEWS--

Following on her brilliant The Making of a Cybertariat, a modern classic in the analysis of class and gender, work and consumption, Huws turns her sharp eye to the present crisis into which the cybertariat ‘has come of age.’ Rich in theoretical and methodological insights, Labor in the Global Digital Economy carefully guides us through the world of transnational business, value chains, creative, precarious and knowledge labor, self-service consumers, and consumption workers. Challenging accepted thinking and providing enough wisdom to fill several volumes, Huws has once again demonstrated her preeminence among analysts of work and inequality in digital capitalism.

—Vincent Mosco, author, To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World

Ursula Huws is a global treasure: her essays collected here continue her several decades of scholarship analyzing the impact of technological change on women and workers. This book brings her prescient Marxist feminist theorizing to a wider audience. It is a must read for anyone who cares about what the future holds for workers in the digital era.

—Gina Neff, author, Venture Labor: Work and the Burden of Risk in Innovative Industries

As always, Huws has a treasury of insights to offer. Use this book as a manual for understanding how the alliance of capital and digitization is reshaping the landscape of labor.

—Andrew Ross, author, Creditocracy and the Case for Debt Refusal

Ursula Huws is without peer as an analyst of life in contemporary capitalism.

—Leo Panitch, York University; editor, Socialist Register

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