(I’m)Material Labor in the Digital Age

Abstract

One must be bold enough to ask if mental labor means the millions upon millions of workers who still occupy factory positions or are currently migrating to these positions. Does the much-theorized techno-communicative “countermobilization” strategy for global resistance also include the world’s homeless or half-billion illiterates?4 Classical Marxism informs these important questions.  Yet as devastating the implications one must at the same time recognize the gravity and reality of transformation, including one recent estimation that “[f]inancial markets trade more in a month than the entire annual global gross domestic product” (Martin).  To be sure, late capitalism’s “regime of investment” does not include portfolios from the majority of the world’s working class poor, but it does account for the increasing concentration of the world’s wealth.