Digital Workerism: Technology, Platforms, and the Circulation of Workers’ Struggles
Sai Englert*, Jamie Woodcock**
and Callum Cant***
*Leiden University, Leiden,
Netherlands, s.p.englert@hum.leidenuniv.nl
**Open University,
UK, jamie.woodcock@googlemail.com
***Independent researcher,
London, UK, callumcant@gmail.com
Abstract: The use of digital technology has become a key part of contemporary debates on how work is changing, the future of work/ers, resistance, and organising. Workerism took up many of these questions in the context of the factory – particularly through the Italian Operaismo – connecting the experience of the workplace with a broader struggle against capitalism. However, there are many differences between those factories and the new digital workplaces in which many workers find themselves today. The methods of workers’ inquiry and the theories of class composition are a useful legacy from Operaismo, providing tools and a framework to make sense of and intervene within workers’ struggles today. However, these require sharpening and updating in a digital context. In this article, we discuss the challenges and opportunities for a “digital workerism”, understood as both a research and organising method. We use the case study of Uber to discuss how technology can be used against workers, as well as repurposed by them in various ways. By developing an analysis of the technical, social, and political re-composition taking place on the platform, we move beyond determinist readings of technology, to place different technologies within the social relations that are emerging. In particular, we draw attention to the new forms through which workers’ struggles can be circulated. Through this, we argue for a “digital workerism” that develops a critical understanding of how the workplace can become a key site for the struggles of digital/communicative socialism.
Keywords: Workerism, operaismo, socialism from below, Deliveroo, digital economy, digital socialism
Digital technologies – whether
platforms, automation, artificial intelligence, or other novelties – are
increasingly dominating the debate on work and how it is changing. In
particular, the topic is increasingly referred to as “the future of work”
something that either explicitly or implicitly sees little role for workers
agency in this supposed future. In this article, we prefer thinking about the
future of workers and the central role they play in struggling over and
reshaping work. Instead of predicting how many workers’ jobs may be “lost” to
automation (Frey and Osborne 2013), considering whether their work is “decent”
(Berg et al. 2018) and classifying workers
according to whether they are “low” or “high” skilled, we want to draw
attention to the new skills, tactics, and strategies that workers devise in
their struggles against digital capitalism.
This article focuses on what we term “digital workerism”, an approach
that seeks to return to the premise of workerism that workers and their
experiences matter to the critique of capitalism, while updating its methods
into a digital context. This is explicitly an attempt to force workers agency
back into the future of work, specifically while experimenting with what
digital socialism could mean in practice.
In order to achieve this, we first return to workerism to consider
what tools and frameworks can be salvaged for this project. Second, we consider
how these could contribute to a “digital workerism” and would it would entail.
Third, we apply this to the case study of Uber, both specifically in the UK and
more widely in a global context. This involves thinking critically about class
composition in light of new technology, platforms, and the circulation of
workers' struggles. Then, finally, the article concludes by using this approach
to discuss what a “digital socialism” could entail – particularly when drawing
on these struggles as a guide.
The use of digital technology has
become a key part of contemporary debates on how work is changing, the future
of work/ers, resistance, and organising. Workerism took up many of these
questions in the context of the factory – particularly through the Italian Operaismo – connecting the experience of
the workplace with a broader struggle against capitalism. The Italian
workerists began from a fundamental perception that a gulf was emerging between
the struggle of workers in the rapidly developing high tech production sectors
of Italian capitalism (particularly automotive, technological and chemical
manufacture) and the politics of working-class parties, such as the Italian
Communist Party (PCI).
The first evidence of the developing gulf was a wave of
near-insurrectionary struggle against the conference of the neo-fascist MSI
party that broke out in Genoa in 1960. It was led by young factory workers who
became known as the “striped T shirts” [magliette
a righe]. Their militancy was not restricted to the streets, but also
increasingly bled over into the workplace. It was in this context that the
workerists began to publish their first cohesive journal, Quaderni Rossi [Red Notebooks], in which they attempted to theorise
how this gulf had emerged, and what it meant for socialists (Wright 2017). It was in this context that operaismo
developed its theory of empirical research into the workplace through the idea
of workers’ inquiry.
Workers’ inquiry did not begin with operaismo. Its history can be traced back directly to Marx and
then, depending on the genealogy employed, via Lenin, Mao, the Johnson-Forrest
Tendency, and Socialisme ou Barbarie
before it arrives in 1950/60s Italy. However, it is in its Italian context that
workers’ inquiry had perhaps its most influential 20th-century iteration.
Turin-based dissident Marxist Danilo Montaldi was the first to connect the
Italian movement to the work being carried out by other currents abroad through
the translation of The American Worker (Romano and Stone
1946), one of the first inquiries to be produced by the American
Johnson Forrest Tendency. In his introduction of the Italian translation, he
stressed that the text “expresses with great force and profundity this idea,
practically forgotten by the Marxist movement after the publication of the
first volume of Capital, that the
worker is first of all someone who lives at the point of production of the
capitalist factory before being the member of a party […] and that it is the
productive process that shapes his rejection of exploitation and his capacity
to build a superior type of society […]” (Montaldi 2013)
In its operaist form, workers’ inquiry became a mode of scientific
investigation into the balance of class forces in the rapidly-developing sphere
of production (rather than the narrative exploration of working-class life, as
most earlier forms of labour studies had been). In a period of transformation,
it would allow Marxists a way to connect with the reality of working-class
struggle and develop their ideas accordingly.
The results of workers’ inquiry were primarily comprehended through
the framework of a theory that has (largely postfacto) been expressed as “class
composition”. This framework is built around a close attention to what Marx
identified as the three “simple elements” that make up any labour process: the
“(1) purposeful activity, that is work itself, (2) the object on which that
work is performed, and (3) the instruments of that work” (Marx
1990, 284). These factors are understood as the technical composition of
the working class: that is to say, the way that labour power is organised with
capital to produce a productive process. This technical composition, which
includes patterns of cooperation is then understood as creating the basis for a
leap into resistance. This resistance, organized on a collective basis and
utilising forms and tactics that emerge from the technical composition, is then
understood as the political composition of the working class. Recent work has
also extended this approach by considering factors beyond the labour process
under the heading of “social composition” (Notes
from Below 2018).
In
the last ten years, there has been a renewed interest in workerism,
particularly through the approach of workers' inquiry. The financial crisis of
2007-8 led to a wave of political contention that catalysed the development of
a generation of Marxist intellectuals who acted as the avant garde of what Milburn (2019) has
called “generation left” In the search for new theoretical and methodological
tools with which to understand the re-emergence of overt class struggle, many
of these intellectuals happened across Italian workerism – often through the
lens of Steve Wright’s history of the workerists, Storming Heaven (2017) and the work of
German Workerists associated with the journal Wildkat and the Hotlines call centre inquiry project undertaken by
Kolinko (2002).
This move was perhaps one of the first indications of a wider tendency
towards a revitalised 21st-century workerism that has been expressed through an
increase of workers' inquiry publishing. For example, the special issues of Ephemera (see Woodcock
2014), the launch of Viewpoint
and Notes from Below. For the Notes from Below project this
re-articulation of workerism in the contemporary context means using a practice
of workers’ inquiry to understand workplaces from the working class’ point of
view and then interpreting the results of that inquiry through a theory of
class composition, understood as:
a material relation with three parts:
the first is the organisation of labour-power into a working class (technical
composition); the second is the organisation of the working class into a class
society (social composition); the third is the self-organisation of the working
class into a force for class struggle (political composition) (Notes from Below
2018).
The main aspects, as discussed above,
that can be inherited from workerism provide a starting point for thinking
about class composition and work today. However, class composition has shifted
in profound and differing ways, meaning that many of the questions need to be
taken up very differently today. If the tools and the frameworks of workerism
provide the starting point, we also need to start charting a new path forward
in the context of digitalisation.
This paper is not the first to propose thinking about what a “digital
workerism” could involve. For example, Brown and Quan-Haase’s (2012) call for a “Workers’ Inquiry 2.0” examined
digital labour, drawing on Bruns’s (2008) portmanteau
of “produsage” – production and usage. They studied Flickr, a website that
hosts a picture gallery with aspects of social media. The core of their
argument is about how these are not “users”, and this is a “complete misnomer”,
as they are “produsers […] willing to produce content at no cost to the owners
of these domains at the same time as these sites generate massive profits” (Brown and Quan-Haase 2012, 488).
While this is an interesting endeavour, we seek instead to return the
focus to the workplace specifically in our formulation of digital workerism.
For example, their study does not interrogate the conditions or struggles of
the workers paid to ensure the operation of the platform, upon which the produsage
takes place. Brown and Quan-Haase (2012, 494)
conclude that “the mode of produsage should be considered hyper-exploitative
because it does not even offer its legions of workers a wage in exchange for
their labour power and time.” While they are right to identify new methods of
exploitation, there is a risk that this loses focus on exploitation through the
wage relation. For example, as Dyer-Witheford’s (2015, 93) notes, it is right
to:
reject a direct equivalence between the
experience of, say, the dagongmei and Facebook users. But vampire bites come in
many ways. Facebook posting is a form of exploitation, which, without explicit
violence, is nonetheless parasitic. It does not replace the “normal” structures
of daily class exploitation at work and home, but is added to and superimposed
upon them, to constitute a regime in which the user is habituated, on pain of
exclusion from social worlds, to surrendering the elements of their personality
– identity, creativity, sociality – to enhance the circulation of capital. This
submission is not the same as the brutal bodily discipline inflicted on the
dagongmei, but it is a form of subjectification that is both infiltrative and
extroversive in the abject submission to the commodity form it elicits.
While some of
those involved in Italian Operaismo went on to look for new social
subjects everywhere, including within a boundless “multitude” (Hardt and Negri 2000), there is a risk here in
forgetting about the continuing importance of exploitation at work.
we risk
falling into the post-workerist trap of looking for the new social subject
everywhere but the workplace. While
making sense of digital capitalism from this lens does offer some insights, it
says nothing about the work, infrastructure, and capital required for the
activity to take place. Our focus is not on the “free labour” (Terranova 2000) of Internet users, despite the the
“nascent evidence that this hyper-exploitative relationship is causing
produsers to organise struggles against it” (Brown
and Quan-Haase 2012, 458). These have been focused around what they
describe as the “frequent uproars occurring on social networking sites
regarding the violation of one’s privacy [which] have time and again resulted
in controversy”.
There are similar comparisons that could be made with the conflict in
videogames over modifications (or mods). Valve and Bethesda decided to try and
monetise mods on the digital distribution platform Steam. In response, as
Daniel Joseph put it, the “mod community then collectively lost its shit”,
convincing the company to reverse its decision. This ties into a longer history
of modding, resistance, and forms of “playbor” (Kücklich
2005) within the videogames industry – something which later formed the
backdrop of worker organising in the industry (Woodcock
2019). However, it would not make sense to base an understanding of class
struggle in the industry only from the free labour of modders. We see digital
workerism as a return to a focus on workers, albeit integrating an understand
of how different forms of labour feed into their struggles.
For a “digital workerism”, there are a series of studies that have
already begun to sketch what it could mean in practice – although none of these
have yet used the term – which move away from either a focus on technology or
users, and instead privilege the self-activity of workers. Arguably, one of the
first in this vein was the Kolinko (2002)
collective’s inquiry that examined class composition in call centres, taking
aim at how technology was being used by management to recompose precarious
workers. This approach was taken up by Woodcock (2017)
in his ethnographic inquiry into working conditions, technology, management,
and resistance in a call centre in London. Call centres have proven to be an
important testing ground for changing forms of digital work, experimenting with
new technological methods of surveillance and control, which have then been applied
more widely in other industries and sectors (Woodcock
forthcoming). This means that the prelude to thinking about a digital
workerism involved finding ways to understand digital technologies from the
perspective of workers experience of the workplace.
The rapid growth of the gig economy and platform work has provided a
focus for new forms of digital workerism. As discussed previously, platform
work has become symbolic of many of the far reaching – and potential future – changes
in work. Too often, the focus is not on new forms of class composition this
entails, but becomes narrowly concerned with technologies and algorithms.
However, the workers' inquiry method has increasingly been applied, both in
Notes from Below and elsewhere, to begin understanding the new composition on
gig work platforms in London. For example, Waters and Woodcock (2017) put forward a co-written inquiry into
working for Deliveroo, drawing on the experience of Waters, as well as digital
methods including self-tracking and multimedia representation. This approach of
co-writing has been followed up with Aslam and Woodcock (forthcoming), covering the history of driving for
Uber, the story of organising, and the struggles against both the company, the
regulator, and in the courts.
Both Cant and Woodcock (as well as the other editors of Notes from
Below) published a series of interviews and reports from the front lines of the
gig economy, including worker bulletins and strike reports. The most recent
piece includes a polemic against other reports that keep talking about the
emergence of resistance in platform work, arguing instead that the key is now
understanding in which ways it will develop (Cant
and Woodcock 2019). Cant (2019) has recently
published his workers' inquiry into Deliveroo, interrogating these changes
within a framework of class composition. Similarly, albeit in a different
industry, Woodcock (2019) has applied this
framework to the videogames industry.
Across all of these, there are substantial challenges in thinking
about, or even carrying out, these kinds of projects from an academic
institution. This is particularly due to ethics review boards discouraging this
kind of research process, as well as an emphasis on legal liability that
disadvantages critical research (Badger and
Woodcock 2019). This makes intervention from an academic context a
challenge, something that is not an optional add on for workerism, but core to
the practice. However, there is a powerful example of how HCI (Human Computer
Interaction) can influence thinking about intervention. Irani and Silberman's (2013) Turkopticon project established a software
plug in to support micro-workers on Amazon Mechanical Turk. It provides a way
for workers to rate those giving out the tasks, reversing the panopticon like
process that Mechanical Turk uses to organise and regulate this digital work.
In addition, Turkopticon provides a way to bring workers together to discuss
their work, focusing on a bottom up organising approach.
Across these examples, the possibilities of a digital workerism
emerge. However, it is important to remember that workers' inquiry has two
central concerns: first, the relationship between technical and political
composition; and second, the synthesis of research with organising. For
“digital workerism”, this means following Notes
from Below to introduce the third aspect of social composition, while in
the latter part, drawing attention to the politics of technology when
considering co-research. It is to the application of this framework that we now
turn.
We use the case study of Uber to
discuss how technology can be used against workers, as well as repurposed by
them in various ways. By developing an analysis of the technical, social, and
political re-composition taking place on the platform, we move beyond
determinist readings of technology, to place different technologies within the
social relations that are emerging.
Much of the research on Uber has focused on technology, a narrow
aspect of the technical composition of Uber. For example, many studies have
focused on the use of algorithms in general (Pasquale
2015; Lee et al. 2015), and at Uber in
particular (Rosenblat and Stark 2016; Rosenblat 2018) as well as critiques of this new mode
of work organisation (Slee 2015; Scholz
2017). In part, this is due to the highly visible example of technological
change that Uber represents. While there have been other examples of
significant management-led technological change, Uber is one that many people
have direct experience of as customers or can access very easily through the
smartphone app interface. There was a similar starting point for Ravenelle’s (2019) study of gig work, having come into contact
with these workers as a customer.
It is clear that aspects of algorithmic surveillance and control are
key to understanding the shifting composition in platform work (Woodcock forthcoming), including the mediation of work
via a platform, the use of data, ratings by customers, and so on. However,
there is a risk with many accounts of Uber that these are seen as totalising
methods of control that provide little ability for workers to contest or
subvert these. Instead, through inquiry with workers it is possible to pick
apart these aspects of the labour process to understand how they work in
practice. In particular, this draws attention to the material parts of the
work, including the kind of car used and the relationships through which it is
owned. In London, the majority of cars are leased Toyota Prius hybrid cars,
locking drivers into high weekly payments for a specific car, preventing
cheaper options. In addition, Uber drivers have to hold a private hire license,
issued by TfL (Transport for London). This means a large proportion of drivers
work full time to cover their costs and attempt to make a living. This is
different to parts of the US, where drivers are not licensed and can use a much
wider variety of vehicles, meaning part time work is more common. This means
that while there might not seem to be a workplace (at least analogous to those
found by the original workerists), drivers share the roads and the city, often
with common meeting points.
In London, the social composition of Uber drivers is shaped by the
pre-existing relationships within the taxi industry – particularly the
two-tiered distinction between Black Cabs and minicabs. While Black cab drivers
have to pass “the knowledge” test of geography and routes, and drive the
differentiated Black cab, minicab drivers have a much lower bar to entry. They
do not need to pass additional tests, but are required to have a private hire
license. Many of these minicab companies are based out of offices with radio
controllers, recruiting from migrant groups. There is also a clear split in
racial composition between the white British Black Cab drivers and (often
migrant) BME minicab drivers. When Uber was established, it targeted minicab
drivers, recruiting these drivers and their licenses. This meant that there
were many pre-existing relationships and networks that were imported into Uber,
including friendship groups and migrant organisations. These form the basis of
the “invisible organisation” (Alquati 2013) that
preceded more formal organisation of Uber drivers.
As detailed by Aslam and Woodcock (forthcoming),
there is already an on-going history of struggle in Uber in London. This first
began in 2013 with WhatsApp groups of drivers that started to discuss problems
with working for Uber and having initial meetings with the platform. By 2014,
the drivers began having organising meetings and launched LPHADA (London
Private Hire App Based Drivers Association), after which Uber stopped
communicating with them. The following year, LPHADA was folded as the drivers
joined the GMB union, which then supported the employment tribunal case against
Uber in 2016. However, the drivers were dissatisfied with the approach of GMB,
launching a network of drivers called UPHD (United Private Hire Drivers). After
an election within GMB was cancelled, the drivers then left and affiliated to
the IWGB. At each stage, there has been a moment of political recomposition as
drivers have experimented with different forms of organisation - and different
organisations - as well as moving targets from only Uber, to the courts, and
most recently targeting the regulator (TfL) as well as the mayor of London.
Throughout this process there have been different points of contestation, as
well as moving from networks to strikes and protests. As Yaseen Aslam has
explained: ‘When we first started organising people said we would never succeed
– included trade unionists, academics, and journalists that we thought would be
on our side’ (Aslam and Woodcock forthcoming).
Instead, the drivers have had to learn their own approach to becoming
organisers - leading to a complicated route as they begin to find ways to successfully
resist. Most recently, drivers began coordinating internationally to strike and
protest Uber’s IPO. This latest moment of political recomposition is spreading
across national borders.
What this analysis of Uber highlights is that the shifting technical
composition of platform work is not only led by capital. Uber engages with
previous forms of work, relationships, and organisations. As such, it is not
just a “disruptive” business model and technological innovation, but instead is
mediated through existing pressures within capitalism. This also returns a
focus to the agency of workers – who after all the platform needs to actually
driver the cars, despite the use of bogus self-employed status.
In particular, we draw attention to the
new forms through which workers’ struggles can be circulated. Through this, we
argue for a “digital workerism” that develops a critical understanding of how
the workplace can become a key site for the struggles of digital/communicative
socialism.
The focus of Italian workerists on the self-activity of workers and
their political agency emerges out of a longer-term commitment at the heart of
Marxism. Indeed, Engels (1888, 517) famously wrote in
his introduction to the communist manifesto that “the emancipation of the
working class must be the act of the working class itself”. In doing so, he was
rephrasing interventions by Marx (1875) in his Critique of the Gotha Program and their
joint drafting of the International Workingmen’s Association’s General Rules (Marx 1871; see Hal Draper 1971 for an overview of
the concept of self-emancipation in the Marxist tradition). This foundational
idea served as the cornerstone of the work of both men and their vision for a
transformation of the capitalist world-order through struggle from below and
worker self-organisation.
Equally important was the fact that Marx and Engels theorised this
approach in opposition to different strands of socialism that were developing
in their lifetime. On the one hand, they polemicised against utopian socialists
who believed that the unleashing of the productive and creative potential of
capitalism, this time under workers’ control, would liberate humanity from the
material limitations of its natural environment. On the other hand, both men
took on the growing influence of reformist ideas and their heavy reliance on a
teleological reading of history that would inevitably lead from within the
existing infrastructures of capitalism to workers’ power (see the
above-mentioned Critique of the Gotha
Program, Marx
1875).
What both traditions had in common, despite their deep-seated
opposition to each other, was a reliance on the development of technology, a
lack of engagement with the realities of workers’ struggles, and a confidence
in an inevitable socialist future that would emerge from the entrails of
capitalist society. Against this, Marx and Engels would argue for the need to
rupture with the old order and identify the working classes’ strategic position
in production as the key to make this rupture possible. There was nothing pre-determined
about socialism – it could only be achieved through a ruthless struggle against
capital and its erstwhile representatives.
Unfortunately, while this tradition of self-emancipation remained
important within Marxism, from Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg to C.L.R. James and
Angela Davis (to name but a few, alongside the Workerists discussed above), the
history of 20th-century socialist movements was marked by the twin dominance of
Stalinism and social democracy. Both approaches succumbed to the siren call of
technological determinism and historical teleology and abandoned the agency of
working people as the driver of social transformation and the only potential
route towards a classless socialist society. It is these traditions that Draper
defined as “socialism from above”, because of their belief that socialism could
be imposed by “socialist governments” once they had captured the state, in
opposition to “socialism from below”, which were those traditions that
continued to foreground workers’ struggles and self-organisation contra capital
and the state (Draper 1966).
Similar questions continue to confront social movements today. From
the hopes surrounding the emergence of new self-proclaimed socialist electoral
projects in Europe (see for example Watkins 2016) to
the emergence of new utopian techno-centrist accounts of a socialist future (Bastani 2019), contemporary activists and theoreticians
continue to propose routes out of capitalism that bypass workers’
self-organisation, struggle, and ultimate collective democratic control over
production. The debates surrounding digital platforms and their future,
discussed above, run into comparable issues: stuck between technological
determinism and the illusion of disappearing workers they imagine and theorise
change while writing worker agency out of the picture.
So, what about digital socialism? What we have outlined in the first
sections of this essay is the approach of “digital workerism” and its
application to Uber. However, one of the challenges of workerism has always
been the leap from the technical to the political. In this section, we want to
consider how “the refusal” (see Tronti 2019) and
other tendencies of struggle can connect to a political horizon. In the case of
Uber, where the technological aspects of technical composition are particularly
sharp, we consider how such composition can be considered on the political
terrain. Before turning to discuss how struggles of Uber drivers can be
connected to a digital socialism, it is first worth considering what other
approaches are already underway when thinking of platform work specifically and
how they inscribe themselves within the traditions of the workers’ movement
that fail to foreground worker agency.
The first example is one that attempts a synthesis between theory and
practice: the Fairwork Foundation. Both Sai and Jamie have been involved in the
early phase of this project – and the experiences inform our thinking about
practice in various ways. The basic aim of the project is to improve working
conditions of platform workers through a certification process (Graham and Woodcock 2018; Woodcock and Graham 2019). This is an attempt at
impact-orientated research – albeit one more attuned to the idea of measurable
impact that has become popular in British universities, which is a very
different fusion of theory and practice to workerism. The core of the Fairwork
project involves scoring platforms against five principles of fair work – pay,
conditions, contracts, governance, and representation – out of a total of ten
points (with two points available for each of the five principles). The project
had some initial success in refusing to follow the platform operator logic that
workers were self-employed – as well as encouraging one platform in South
Africa to agree to recognise a union should one be established. The first is part
of winning a wider argument about the platform economy being underpinned by
bogus self-employment, while the latter is an example of how research can help
to encourage worker self-organisation.
As neither of us continue to work for the project, we have now had the
space to reflect on the tensions and contradictions of a certification project.
These kinds of projects rely – at least to some extent – on the voluntary
engagement of the company to be certified. This has reached limits with
certification in other industries. For example, the Fairtrade certification –
targeted at commodities like coffee and chocolate – continues to disintegrate (Subramanian 2019) – as well as never having
rigorously engaged with workers’ rights as a core concern anyway – as companies
decide to opt out. Fairwork, like other certification approaches requires
funding in order to continue, as well as maintaining relationships with the
certified organisation for access to data and so on. This means that checks and
balances are key to ensuring that workers’ concerns are heard above the other
pressures. For example, with Fairwork, each stakeholder is given a say over
changes to awarding a score each year (for example raising the level of pay to
receive a point), which means that while
workers have a say, but so do platforms, academics, policy makers and so on.
This means a necessary watering down of the thresholds to make the scoring
palatable for a range of stakeholders, rather than giving primacy to workers.
The second approach is that of platform co-operatives or co-ops (Scholz 2016). At first glance, platform co-ops seem like
an exciting shortcut to the challenges of contemporary class struggle. After
all, socialism could be conceived of as a “free association of producers” in
which the means of production are no longer privately held, but held communally
and co-operatively. Many traditionally industries present substantial barriers
to workers simply setting up their own co-operative alternatives, for example,
factories require high levels of capital outlay. Platform co-ops, or so the
argument goes, are an easy alternative. Instead of needing capital intensive
infrastructure, a taxi co-op would just need a co-operative app as the drivers
already own the capital (in the form of the car and smartphone and so on). This
argument is presented as a technological solution and shortcut to fairer work –
there is not even any need to have conflict with the existing capitalist enterprise.
Platform co-ops are clearly influenced by the FLOSS (Free, Libre and
Open Source Software) movement, and inflected by the technological determinism
and libertarian optimism that can be found amongst some of their proponents.
Like open source, if workers can make something just as good (or even better)
as those projects funded by capitalists, why would users not choose to switch
over to the more ethical alternative? The problem with a platform co-op version
of Uber is that the real cost of taxi transportation in London is often much
higher than the advertised price to users – and more often even higher than
that paid to drivers. Given the strategic importance of London to Uber there
has been heavy spending of venture capital as subsidies.
A platform co-op would have to compete with – and indeed out-compete –
a capitalist platform like Uber. While an ethical platform might seem to be an
easy sell versus a company like Uber, the latter has a vast marketing budget
and already has the user base. The ability for venture capital platforms to run
at a loss to ensure monopoly (or near monopoly) status, means that they have
the resourcing to be vicious competitors. The only successful alternatives have
been able to operate when regulators or legal changes have banned capitalist
alternatives. However, a broader question about what a co-op involves can also
be found here. For some proponents of platform co-ops, it is simple as having
the digital platform infrastructure as no longer privately owned – or at least
no longer profit seeking. This means it does not have to involve worker
democracy or other aspects of more radical co-ops that we might associate with
a “free association of producers”.
Workers have neither called for platforms to be rated as fair, nor have
Uber drivers in London campaigned for a platform co-op alternative. There was
only one abortive attempt to set up a co-op between the GMB (a union that
organises Black Cab drivers and at one point had Uber driver members, although
they later left to join IWGB) and NEF (the New Economics Foundation – a
progressive think tank).
What marks out both of these approaches is that they are, to adapt
Draper's terminology, both approaches for fairer work that are devised and
implemented “from above”. They draw on expertise from academics, rather than
from workers. Rather than wishing to engage in lengthy polemics, we use these
as warning points that can help us make sense of what a digital socialism “from
below” could look like. As Draper (2019, 10)
explains, “socialism from above” is “handed
down to the grateful masses in one form or another, by a ruling elite which
is not subject to their control”. Whereas, “socialism from below” starts from
the “view that socialism can be realized only through the self-emancipation of
activised masses in motion, reaching out for freedom with their own hands,
mobilized ‘from below’ in a struggle to take charge of their own destiny, as
actors (not merely subjects) on the stage of history” (Draper
2019, 10).
The risk with thinking about digital socialism is that it can tend
towards “from above” given the technological solutionism that often accompanies
discourse in this area, often imbued with the “Californian ideology” of
neoliberal technological determinism (Barbrook
and Cameron 1996; Sandoval 2019). However,
rather than falling into the somewhat obvious trap of thinking that digital
socialism could be built with an “Uber for X” - the now common refrain that the
platform model can, and should, be applied to everything (Srnicek
2017) – we should instead identify where, how, and under what conditions
digital socialism can be built from below.
Callum has argued that the strategy through which we could achieve a
digital socialism from below is “platform expropriation”. The hypothesis of
this strategy is that a transferal of capital ownership from bosses to workers
in the platform sector, achieved through an escalating cycle of political
struggle (a cycle that has already been the subject of significant inquiry),
would be the optimal way to prevent market competition from undermining
different forms of worker-run platforms.
This transformation of ownership, however, is not enough in and of
itself. Management of the platform has to be placed in the hands of both tech
and delivery workers, in conditions of workers’ control. But rather than
commodity production under workers’ control, which would remain just a strange
form of distributed ownership capitalism, the real socialist possibility in
such a reorganisation lies in the decommodification of the platform through its
integration into a programme of universal basic services. Rather than
maintaining the current market niche of food delivery to relatively well-off
urban white-collar workers, this people’s Deliveroo would be actively
re-designed to produce the greatest possible social use value. By taking
control over their daily activity, exploited platform workers could
increasingly become the co-producers of a decommodified urban food system – one
premised on the socialist transformation – and collectivisation – of the
relations of social reproduction.
These far-reaching changes are only
possible to win through a digital socialism from below. As the instances of
workers struggle in platform work continue to rise – as well as increasingly
connecting on a transnational level – the task ahead is to connect these
struggles against platforms to the fight against digital capitalism much more
broadly. The fight of Uber drivers in London, Bangalore, Sao Paolo, Cape Town,
San Francisco are beginning to converge. The struggles of these workers, both
locally and internationally, are key to understanding capitalism today. Like
the struggles of factory workers for the Italian Operaimso, we can begin
to see the germ of an alternative that emerges from the refusal of platform
workers. However, if we propose forms of digital socialism from above, we risk
not only missing these radical germs, but also encouraging the viral spread
across the digital economy and beyond.
Digital workerism, therefore, goes
beyond just theorising digital capitalism to engage in the theory and practice
of workers’ struggle. While we may start with a traditional method, like Marx’s
(1880) famous postal questionnaire, the intention is
not just to collect data. Marx’s survey was also intended to make contact with
workers, seeking to use the research process as the starting point to
organising. Digital workerism too can start with research, but it must involve
the meetings, picket lines, WhatsApp groups, and Facebook pages. It requires
supporting actual workers struggles, experimenting with new forms of
co-research that give primacy of the workers viewpoint and action. It is from
this base that digital socialism can be won.
Throughout this article, we have sought
to chart out an approach of digital workerism. This is not to be able to say
what a digital socialism would look like, but rather to begin plotting how
resistance in digital capitalism can become central to its overcoming and
shaping an alternative future. Our final thought here is about the limits of
talking about socialism. Too often today, socialism is taken to mean “socialism
from above”, something to be achieved by voting for someone else to enact it.
No doubt, a digital socialism from above would be markedly better than the
current economic and social conditions. However, if we are to win a future in
which the fruits of technological development are freed from the imperatives of
capital and shared across society, the vibrant and chaotic forces of digital
socialism from below will either be needed to help deliver on electoral
policies, or force its own agenda onto the horizon. The starting point is still
one taken from workerism, that understanding and supporting workers struggles
is key to building an alternative – whether the work is digitally mediated or
not.
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Sai Englert
Sai Englert is a lecturer at Leiden University. He works on the Political Economy, Labour Movements, Zionism, and Settler Colonialism.
Jamie Woodcock
Jamie Woodcock is a researcher based in London. He is the author of The Gig Economy (Polity, Forthcoming), Marx at the Arcade (Haymarket, 2019), and Working The Phones (Pluto, 2017).
Callum Cant
Callum Cant is the author
of Working for Deliveroo and
a PhD student at the University of West London.