The processed world

McHoul, A. (1992) The processed world. Cultural Studies, 6 (3). pp. 498-501.

Abstract

Does the information age have a proletariat? You betcha sweet ass it does. If Marx is still remembered today, he is remembered as an economist, political theorist and philosopher. But his role as ethnographer of the British working class in the nineteenth century is often forgotten: the relevant and copius pages of capital are hardly referred to. But in the 1980s and 1990s, a different literate proletariat has emerged, with access to complex communication devices and the ability to write and disseminate the fine details of its own conditions of existence.