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

Abstract

The chapter theorises the inclusion of ‘diverse’ workers into global capitalism by means of platform crowdsourcing through the prism of the Marxian notion of ‘relative surplus population’, or the portion of the working-age population who are surplus to the immediate needs of capital for waged labour at any given place and time. These workers constitute a share of the proletariat that is structurally un- or underemployed, in unpaid socially reproductive work, subsisting through the informal economy, or lacking a living wage to meet basic subsistence needs. Drawing on the existing empirical evidence on the profile of crowdworkers and the conditions of their work, we show how platforms’ capital accumulation rests on the digitally mediated reworking of hierarchies of racialized and gendered difference, which redefines the boundaries between hyper-exploited wage work and the people and places cast out from its relations.