Interrogating the Interaction between Relative Surplus Population and Forms of Economic Production: A Case Study on Platform Capitalism.

AuthorCroce, Nicholas

Everywhere the eyes of modern corporations look, there is data--even if not actively seen as such outside of the company. From the cars people drive, to the search engines they use, and the dozens of web searches they conduct each day, data is created--and often harvested--at every turn. Increasingly, this data drives corporate service delivery by means of "platforms." Data harvesting and implementation occurs in a process that regularly goes underappreciated, consented to through lengthy Terms of Service agreements that often go unread. Karl Marx, in Capital: Volume One warns readers that, within a capitalist society, things are often not how they appear. For instance, the wage worker and employer seem free on the outset, but their relationship is revealed for what it truly is--a relationship of exploitation--only after entering the factory where there is "no admittance except on business." (1) For understanding modern capitalism and how it impacts workers, further investigation is necessary on the platform structure of firms, predominated by systems of exchange that include one or more of the following characteristics: a focus on the extraction of rents and sale of related services (as opposed to the sale of goods), bounded systems with value creation relying on network effects, independent contract labor, and the commodification and deployment of data (often behind the scenes or in masked ways) for profit.

Inspired by Marx's investigation of ever-obfuscated exploitation, this analysis seeks to look beyond the flashy manifestations of what is often endearingly called the "knowledge economy" or "sharing economy." Where does exploitation operate today, and what does it look like to have one's labor power exploited? The process of economic exploitation in the gig economy is affectively different when compared to previous labor arrangements; gig work depends on independent contractor labor that is often assigned electronically and in just-in-time cybernetic fashion. Workers in the gig economy experience a high level of labor precarity: their work contract is signed one ride, one delivery at a time, and they are fired not by being called "onto the carpet" but through account deactivation that originates thousands of miles away, or even algorithmically. Perhaps even more uncannily, has capitalism veiled value production within what most identify as modern leisure time, subsequently making it difficult within any lived instance to identify worker, commodity, surplus labor time, profit, ad infinitum? Just as in Capital, the secret to profit-making--and the secret of exploitation--is evident within the locus of economic production. The following analysis looks at a new and unique type of production means, one that centers on the collection, distillation, and operationalization of vast amounts of data. It is long past time to see electronic data as foundational to a modern historical materialist approach.

This project adopts a contextual approach and assumes that today's various platforms within the market have somewhat different impacts, affects, and appearances geographically. Therefore, this analysis focuses primarily on platform capitalism as it appears within North and Latin America, due to researcher positionality and the examples offered by Nick Srnicek, but also in hopes of prompting an awareness and action in some of the most privileged users of platforms: Americans and those in the West. Certainly, this is a story of globalization which transcends borders.

Platform capitalism is an approach to structuring the production and exchange processes within the market. This analysis evaluates what digital economy theorist Nick Srnicek coined "platform capitalism." This is an alternative to what social theorist Nancy Fraser calls "financialized capitalism," whose defining mark is large stores of capital, rapid and global capital flows, and the domination of the financial sector upon the market. Financialized capitalism is certainly a component of Srnicek's analysis, but that framing is Fraser's. To Srnicek, the modern process of value valorization is marked by platformization, which emphasizes the extraction of rents over ownership alongside a focus on data.

As Nick Srnicek notes, this altogether new type of economic strategy is driven by the implementation of platforms in capitalist enterprises. In his work Platform Capitalism, Srnicek argues that techno-historical events, like the post-war economic boom, 1990s technology bubble, and 2008 financial crisis set the backdrop for a new mode of commodity presentation, creation, and consumption. These events, in large part, came to center around data as a raw material to be "extracted, refined, and used" (2) and ultimately commodified (and perhaps even enclosed.) (3) To Srnicek, the modern economy's distinguishing feature is platform capitalism, where data accrues value and marketability in particular ways. He defines the platform as a new type of business model that gives incentives for buyers, sellers, workers, and intermediaries to conduct business within the context of a bounded system. Srnicek lists five subtypes of platforms: advertising, cloud, industrial, product/on-demand, and lean. Owners of platforms benefit from their positionality and functionality as the forum for transactions as well as "network effects." (4) As mediator, firms extract data for use as a source of value. This value can emerge later, after analysis and operationalization, or can be rapidly implemented into business models through techniques like machine learning. Network effects simply mean that, the more people simultaneously using a platform, the more utility each user of the platform receives. This value comes from more people being on a singular platform, and therefore more goods or information are available for exchange between parties. The network effects become especially potent when a platform owns horizontally or vertically-integrated firms that share customers, making data from one firm's business valuable to the conglomerate's other enterprises.

A simple example of platform effects follows. Facebook, a platform, benefits users (and itself) by being a means for an ever-increasing list of things: messaging, calls, sales, gaming, payments, events, and more. According to Srnicek, Facebook as a platform, a closed-system, is able to obtain information about users because of its positionality and privilege as a closed-system. Since users cannot easily interact with those not on Facebook, or utilize its services without an account, Facebook cultivates a sort of monopoly power over certain social realms and their appertaining data. Facebook's power as a platform is multiplied through "network effects" which mean that the more people who use the Facebook platform, the more people can interact with others, which makes the network more "social" and ultimately of greater economic value. (5) In other words, users of Facebook, as well as Facebook itself, both gain value the more people use the platform. Due to this phenomenon, Srnicek says that "a tendency towards monopolization is built into the DNA of platforms." (6) The platform as a corporate form has consequences for the workforce.

Marx hypothesized three categories of relative surplus population that describe the connection of workers to the labor market as well as their socio-economic position. It is not clear which technological or economic processes facilitate the making of people into the "floating," "latent," or "stagnant" categories of surplus population. This paper posits that each stage of capitalist production--and therefore the subtypes of platform capitalism--requires different configurations of floating, stagnant, and latent surplus populations. (7) The paper does not present a general theory for the etiology of the ratios in relative surplus population, but suggests that its segmentation is a result of the material conditions of production: conditions that are socially, geographically, technologically, and politically situated.

Introducing Marx's Theory of Surplus Population

Karl Marx, in Capital: Volume One, categorizes workers in a few ways. In the broadest sense, Marx first says that there is an "active army of workers" and the "industrial reserve army"; the latter curbs the economic "pretensions" of the former through a demonstration of the industrial reserve army's precarity. (8) The industrial reserve army, those with a marginal attachment to work, is more specifically the "relative surplus population" which is made up of workers who are either "partially employed or wholly...

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