International Political Economy of Digital Platforms: Labour-Capital Relations

We aim to assemble interrogations of the variegated and actual experimentations of digital authoritarianism through the international political economy of digital platforms. We grouped the collection of studies into two sessions, one on platform sovereignty and the other on platform labour.

In the second session, we are interested in the organisation, experience, meaning and mobility of platform labour. Platforms become the intermediary agents that give rise to a revised, flexible employment regime, linking different types of precarious workers, such as content producers without formal jobs and idle labour in the supply chain. In addition, new business practices, combined with “labour-saving technologies” in logistic platforms such as delivery platforms, have triggered the flexibilisation of transportation and distribution workers (Danyluck 2018). Cheap labour forces are re-created, and workers' unions and regulations are weakened through outsourcing and subcontracting systems facilitated by the platform companies (Bonacich and Wilson 2008). This perspective also highlights the role of the state in the process of internationalising capitals as local labour systems are mutually constructed through the infrastructural project of platforms. The session will illuminate how the platform economy is materially and ideologically reshaping essential Fordist distinctions between hierarchies and networks, markets, state and society, formal and informal work, and value creation and extraction.

Together, the two sessions will illuminate how the platform economy is materially and ideologically reshaping essential Fordist distinctions between hierarchies and networks, markets, state and society, formal and informal work, and value creation and extraction.