The New in the Old: Subsumption and Reserve Army on Digital Platforms

ABSTRACT

In recent years, labour studies have had a major focus on digital platforms, given the great challenge of categorizing them and the enormous social impact caused by them. However, most of these recent studies have a strong empirical character, with a richness of description, but a certain lack of theoretical development. Within this framework, this article proposes a re-theorization of the main social relations of work through digital platforms, highlighting the main contradictions existing in the current debate and how digital platforms reproduce in new concrete ways the processes of subsumption and constitution of a reserve army.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital platforms
• labour
• subsumption and reserve army

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 A more systemic study of concrete changes in recent work can be seen in Colombini (2020).

2 The history of capitalism is marked by the process of division and segregation of labour, in which different stages of production are separated to become invisible to each other (Huws 2014). Displacement and outsourcing are traditional hallmarks of this process, but the various forms of unpaid work are also crucial elements of this process of making work invisible under capitalism (Dalla Costa 1995).

3 The concept of social constitution is used in this work as the dialectical logical process of formation of open capitalist sociability, that is, of the social struggle for the formation of categories, instead of understanding them as a sociological datum. For further discussion of this debate see Bonefeld (1992).

4 There exists within the Marxist literature a great deal of debate as to why Marx discarded the chapter from publication in volume I, most likely to be used as a transition to volume II. For a broad discussion of the reasons and different interpretations, see Murray (2009).

5 The process of commodification through digital platforms in theoretical terms has already been explored in the literature, but with focus on the withdrawal of rights and regulations (Aloisi 2015), not exactly the process of constituting a relationship of capitalist alienation through these platforms. Important studies on this commodification process were also carried out within the theoretical framework of Karl Polany, highlighting the effects of embeddedness and disembeddedness through these platforms (Marceta 2021; Wood et al. 2019).

6 This process of generating surplus value on digital platforms, both absolute and relative, does not necessarily contradict the so-called secular stagnation of productivity, since this observed trend has as its central element the dilemma of measuring immaterial goods, which are central in current capitalism, as well as the measurability of its productivity. However, a more detailed discussion on this topic is beyond the scope of this paper, due to this trend going beyond the digital platform sector analysed here. For a more specific study on this topic, see Colombini (2023).

7 It is also worth mentioning that the constitution of this fluid reserve army dependent on each activity performed still differs from labour practices such as payment by quantity produced, as argued by Joyce (2020). The issue here is not just the pressure exerted by the form of payment, as in the case of piecework, but how the resources used by digital platforms make it possible to merge actives and reserve armies, something that does not necessarily happen in remuneration by quantity.

8 The theory about the contradictions of capitalist sociability and the importance of creating cracks in the class struggle can be seen in Holloway (2010).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Iderley Colombini

Iderley Colombini is a permanent professor at the Institute of Economics at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro(IE-UFRJ) and at the Postgraduate Programs in Economic Theory (PPGE-UFRJ) and International Political Economy (PEPI-UFRJ).