Inclusion through the platform economy? The ‘diverse’ crowd as relative surplus populations and the pauperisation of labour

The platform economy has been celebrated as offering unprecedented work opportunities to socio-demographic groups that have historically been marginalized in the labour market or excluded from it. Adopting a Marxist lens, this paper argues that platform work subsumes ‘surplus populations’ into capitalism as wage labour. Subaltern, diverse workers who were previously largely subsumed into the process of capital accumulation through unpaid reproductive work, informal work, indentured work, slavery, etc. become formally free crowdsourced labour. In as far as platform-mediated wage work abstracts labour power from social relations that define it as subaltern along social markers (e.g. gender, age, race, geographical location,…), it renders labour power more homogeneous and the labour class more inclusive. However, this abstraction is not only incomplete, it also comes with the reconfiguration of the capital-labour relation as a plethora of single market transactions, or ‘gigs’, for which a large number of workers compete locally (for on location gigs) or globally (for online gigs). This fragmentation of work and digitally-heightened competition enable capital to buy an increased share of labour power below the living wage, making labour more reliant on unpaid work, state support, the subsistence economy and debt for its social reproduction. Against the grain of readings of the platform economy centred on rent extraction, self-employment and the formalization of informal work, our analysis shows how the subsumption of surplus populations as labour changes not only the socio-demographic and geographical composition of the labour class but its very terms of existence.