Urna’s Reviews > Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High Technology Capitalism > Status Update

"As Peter Linebaugh has pointed out, in origin, the term "proletarian" designated someone who has no function but to reproduce themselves
In Marxist usage, this has conventionally been understood as a person who has nothing to sell but their labour power. Soon, however, it may be applied to someone whose only economic asset is their gestational capacity and their genetic heritage."

"Just as in production capital combines sweated labour and robotics, so 'family values' and genetic engineering are poles in a single overarching regime of reproductive control, with biotechnological options commercially available to the rich, and surrogate mothers drawn from the ranks of the poor."

"In what autonomists term the “Crisis State,” the governmental apparatus is dissolved in so far as it serves popular purposes, but maintained or enlarged as the coercive and administrative arm of capital."

"The revolt in Silicon Valley--Mecca of an industry whose products are specifically intended to free capital from dependence on
troublesome humanity--presents an extreme irony. But it is by no means exceptional."

"... the cartography of capital’s circuit maps not just its strengths but also its weaknesses. In plotting the nodes and links necessary to capital's flow, it also charts the points where those continuities can be ruptured."

"Their annunciation of a new age was not merely a prediction, but a project, an effort both of prophecy and partisanship aimed at setting in motion the social and technological measures necessary to restore the stability of an order threatened by what they saw as chaotic and subversive forces. This is the idea, which has subsequently flowered into theories of the information revolution and virtual capitalism."

"Since 1989 history has, of course, refused to lie down and die." (The author's tongue-in-cheek rebuke of Francis Fukuyama's "end of history" thesis, which he identifies as the coming full-circle of post-WWII "end of ideology" thesis by writers like Daniel Bell, the Tofflers, etc.)

"Marx was present in the support for Vietnamese and Cuban guerrillas, in the theories of the New Left, and in the slogans of workers and students in Paris, Turin and Detroit."

"In the age of cyberspace, Lenin lies in ruins."
(This books has some ridiculously delicious quotable quotes. Note: the author goes on to dismantle this idea, or at the very least explore why this idea exists in the first place and what are the problems with it.)

"To grasp the situation of late capitalism, however,we must imagine a planet, our planet, on which the dinosaurs (obvious metaphorical
figures for the gigantic, alienated powers of global corporations and financial institutions) have lived-on well beyond their appointed time of extinction."