Autonomist Marxism champions the autonomy of workers, their capacity to resist and find alternatives to capital. To that end, it has always focused on struggle, and working-class capacity. Cyber-Proletariat p.188

Our theoretical point of departure lies in the tradition of autonomist Marxism, so called because of its emphasis on workers’ power to challenge and break their subordination to capital (Cleaver 1979; Dyer-Witheford 1999; Eden 2012). In this tradition analysis starts with class struggles, ‘their content, their direction, how they develop and how they circulate’ (Zerowork Collective 1975). Cyber-Proletariat p.4

Amongst the fiercest critics of the new technologies were members of the ‘workerist’ or ‘operaismo’ tendency, forerunner of what would later become known as ‘autonomist Marxism’. Observing the assembly-line car factories of Northern Italy theorists of this school such as Raniero Panzieri (1980) had in 1963 described how technological development became part of capitalist planning to disempower workers. In the same year, Romano Alquati analyzed how in the plants of Olivetti, a manufacturer of typewriters and calculators, computerized automation was beginning to be used to control a new generation of information workers; he concluded that ‘the universal diffusion of capitalist despotism … realizes itself above all through its technology, its “science”’, and suggested that ‘Cybernetics recomposes globally and organically the functions of the general worker that are pulverised into individual micro-decisions: the Bit links up the atomised worker to the figures of the [economic] Plan’ (Alquati 2013; Pasquinelli 2014a). Cyber-Proletariat p.9-10

My argument attempts to maintain this important perspective, but draws mainly on lines of thought within the broad school of autonomist Marxism but less well known than Hardt and Negri’s. The work of George Caffentzis (2013) and Silvia Federici (2012), whose analysis of primitive accumulation in the global South and female work in the home and factory showing how networked capital demand both ‘cyborgs’ and ‘slaves’ has been particularly important. Cyber-Proletariat p.13