Ownership of the means of production has long been considered key to power in capitalistic societies. The capitalists are powerful because they own the means of production, granting them the resources to manipulate workers. But today, the hottest form of capitalism, the platform economy, seems to work the opposite way. Lean businesses, platforms, and institutions have been fattening their pockets through the disownership of means of production – a seemingly counter-intuitive act. For example, in order to work for platforms like Deliveroo, workers are expected to own or rent their own vehicles. They also work in relative solitude, making it harder to unionize.
Deliveroo-style zero-hour contracts are also increasingly used as a negative term. Traditionally high-paying jobs suffer too, as companies and institutions cut back on employee training and research funding, while increasingly expecting workers to bring their own intellectual and material resources to the table. They are expected to compete harder to keep their job, as the Internet has made it evermore easier to find someone else.
This seems to send a horrifying signal. It’s not that proletariats don’t own anything, but that you can’t even enter the job market without owning something. This, then, begs a scarier question: where have the proletariats gone if you need to own some means of production to qualify as a proletarian worker today?
Turns out, neoliberalism isn’t just the rollback of the welfare state, but also the dissolution of orthodoxy modes of capitalism. Today, the platform economy seems to grow by the decumulation and disownership of physical assets – the traditional means of production – to carry out more rapid, flexible, and all-encompassing global spatio-temporal fix with the Internet. Forget about land grabs, nowadays it is exactly the lack of physical possessions that enable the global sensation of lean platforms. They are cost saving geniuses, to say the least.
This means lean platforms like Deliveroo quickly manipulate a global workforce algorithmically while presenting themselves as offering flexible work opportunities. Despite being the aggregator of the problem, they appear as the savior of the working class who may need a second job in this neoliberal gig economy. The digital lean economy is achieving what colonization and enclosure couldn't have imagined: generating wealth without owning assets or dealing with the power of (unionized) labor. When workers worked collectively in factories, their physical presence certainly presented a bigger managerial task. Now, lean platforms have strapped all this with an algorithm, where workers manage themselves to make ends meet.
It is manpower, plus their own means of production, that these platforms are ‘owning’ – de facto. By not owning physical assets of their own, platforms have cleverly saved cost, and manipulated the workers’ means of production. The workers supposedly did this willingly, too. This time, people have been enclosed – willingly. Even scarier, mostly in solitude, meaning fewer chances of unionization.
The specter of neoliberalism is haunting the world. In true ghostly fashion, the invisible hand has become truly digital and invisible, yet it has got its hands on more workers and means of production than ever. In solitude, we are each caged by the algorithmic bureaucracy, suffering our own alienation. And it isn't just about being haunted by the invisible hand of the algorithm, but also about ourselves vanishing into these algorithms, spectral and unseen.
Erci Li
our aspiring realist