Beyond the ‘salary institution’: on the ‘society of performance’ and the platformisation of the employment relationship

Federico Chicchi

doi:10.13169/workorgalaboglob.14.1.0015

Abstract

In this contribution the author discusses the intimate relationship between the crisis of the wage labour system of industrial capitalism and the growing diffusion of spaces of exploitation related to the explosion of digital algorithms and platforms. In other words, it is argued that capitalist transformation (in the post-Fordist sense) has had a decisive impact on the social relationship of subordination by inscribing the practices of exploitation of labour into an extended space that the traditional category of subsumption was not able to describe effectively. Even more specifically, work in contemporary society - a society where the digital paradigm takes on an unprecedented configuration through the platformisation of capital-work relationships - is forced to redefine itself as a mere performance, where performance means an activity that is basically stripped from the social protections of paid employment and is legitimised on a social level only by virtue of its immediate commercial usability. In other words, work in the society of performance is a subjective space deprived of the (formal and substantial) protective dimensions that were specified during what is sometimes referred to as the wage-earning society. At the same time, work is also a space subjected to an extraction of value according to a precise and renewed neoliberal logic that finds in the new urban fabric a place to renew its social hegemony.

Highlights

The increasingly important way in which digital platforms impact the organisation of production processes and the job market is closely linked to the ‘extractive logic’ (Mezzadra & Neilson, 2019) and ‘post-waged’1 context within which capitalist accumulation takes place today
What I discuss in this contribution is the existence of an intimate relationship between the crisis of wage labour and the growing diffusion of spaces of value extraction governed by digital algorithms and platforms
As Neil Brenner pointed out in his latest work from this perspective, the explosive politics of scale that has proliferated under contemporary capitalism must be viewed as an attempt to dismantle the tendentially nationalised scalar configurations that prevailed during the post-war accumulation regime and to resolve its cascading crisis tendencies, but as a series of relatively uncoordinated yet concerted politico-spatial strategies to establish stabilised, rescaled formations of the capitalist urban fabric that might support a new wave of expanded capital accumulation. (Brenner, 2019:85–86)

Summary

Introduction

The increasingly important way in which digital platforms impact the organisation of production processes and the job market is closely linked to the ‘extractive logic’ (Mezzadra & Neilson, 2019) and ‘post-waged’ context within which capitalist accumulation takes place today. The ‘cognitivisation’ of work, by which I mean the increasing use of intangible resources and skills in the valorisation processes of capital, represents a structural and transversal process in the contemporary productive world It denotes a process whereby, through subjective work practices and experiences (albeit in different ways and forms according to the contexts and types of platform), the forms, functions and contents of work are altered profoundly. Trust in one’s professional skills and in the ability to build opportunities and social connections to put them into practice becomes an essential element for supporting the worker’s spirit of enterprise and personal initiative In this regard, Sergio Bologna invites us to bear in mind that self-employment will never receive full social political inclusion as long as its relational dimension continues to be considered as a sort of exogenous diseconomy and not as a structural component of the new jobs. The entrepreneurship of work, fictitiously promoted as positive and creative, can be seen as the other side of the process by which waged employment is fragmented and rendered precarious

On job overflow or the boundaryless transformation of work

Findings

Conclusion