IS THERE such a thing as a cyber-proletariat?

The Greek-derived prefix “cyber” means “governor” and, in the sense that a new subdivision of the working class has control over the technology of the digital age, then a cyber-proletariat could be the governors of social change and vanguard of a response to the entropic growth of capitalist disorder.

There is an alternative view, however. Since the internet was created as a weapon in the cold war, with the collapse of “actual existing socialism” in the USSR and eastern Europe, its creators — described by US president Dwight Eisenhower as the military-industrial complex — have turned it upon internal threats to its hegemony, consolidating and developing its use as an attack on any possible gravediggers of the capitalist status quo.

Which of these views is correct? The answer is both.

As Mick Dyer-Witheford, the author of this comprehensive and well-documented survey of the issue, points out: “In the pacified political climate of a US preoccupied with housing booms and infinite credit card debt, social media and cell phones seemed to colonise digital commons with consumerist subjectivities.

“What became apparent in 2011, however, into more volatile political contexts such as Egypt, [is that] these platforms, even in the hands of a relatively small number of activists, alongside other media and organisational efforts, recovered their subversive charge. These radical recoveries were then relayed back up capital’s hierarchy of wage zones to Europe and North America.”

Marx, writing in 1858, shines a light through the dialectical murk of our own times, in explaining that: “The science which compels the inanimate limbs of the machinery, by their construction, to act purposefully, as an automaton, does not exist in the worker’s consciousness, but rather acts upon him through the machine as an alien power, as the power of the machine itself.”

But “in machinery, objectified labour materially confronts living labour as a ruling power and as an active subsumption of the latter under itself, not only by appropriating it, but in the real production process itself.”

Like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz film — whose storyline as well as the lyrics of its songs was adapted from Frank Baum’s original by Yip Harburg, himself a victim of the McCarthyite blacklist in later years — Nick Dyer-Witherford concludes with a mythic parallel: “Toto, we’re not in Kansas any more.”

Review by Karl Dallas