Some notes on the "gig" economy
We all have an instinctive sense that something has gone horribly wrong in what we call “The Economy.” Wages are stagnant at best, work is more precarious than ever before, the cost of education, healthcare and housing has climbed relentlessly for the past few decades. On top of all this, Silicon Valley has entered the fray.
“Tech” companies like Uber, Lyft, Doordash, Instacart and so forth have turned precarious workers into digital servants for their users, performing menial chores, like driving and picking up grocieries, for low pay and working under the ever-present risk of termination if they slip up.
The extra profits generated by the neoliberal era come, as always, from humans. These have been squeezed out of the welfare moms forced to work multiple jobs, the undocumented immigrants who live in too much fear to organize, the retirees who’ve lost their pensions to corporate raiders, teachers disciplined by their states’ governors into working harder and paying for more of their own health coverage, and on and on it goes. These are workers who work long hours for little pay. Their labor power comes cheaply. These are workers who primarily produce absolute surplus value by working longer hours for lower wages.
As Class Unity, a DSA caucus, pointed out during the great PMC debate, the lions’ share of these extra profits have been spent on workers who produce relative surplus value. These are essentially brain workers, who use their long, long years of education to produce more surplus value for the bosses. They earn higher wages because they have become indispensible to the production process. These are managers, designers, marketers, computer programmers, engineers, consultants, lawyers, and so on, what we usually call the “white collar” workers. They aren’t a class, though, they’re more of a stratification within the working class, the newer iteration of what Lenin would call the “labor aristocracy.”
Parenthetically, I contend that this labor aristocracy has eaten up these superprofits not because they are leeches, but because they are the ones keeping the capitalist economy on life support in an era of declining profits. However, if the Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall is to be believed, the extra relative surplus value they produce won’t keep up enough to prevent gradual decay in the business cycle and eventual crisis.
The Silicon Valley bosses saw this wage differential between the labor aristocracy and the precariat and saw a business opportunity. If time is money, then these white collar workers’ time was potential profit. They didn’t want to waste time picking up groceries when they could be working (perhaps from home or in the office, another perk!) and earning those high wages. Have someone who needs the extra money do it.
The stark brutality of this labor market stratification was revealed during Covid. In the ultimate backhanded compliment, the workers who produced absolute surplus value were deemed “essential” enough to risk disease and death. The workers who produced relative surplus value, who are closer to the capitalists both culturally and personally and whose qualifications render them less expendable, were deemed “inessential” and allowed to avoid choking to death on their own lung fluids.
This kind of extreme stratification should not, hard as it is, be confused as a “class” divide. A class isn’t a level of culture, education, or wages, in fact it isn’t a level of anything. Its a relation inside the production process between one group of people and another group of people.
It might seems as if the precariat has been enserfed to the labor aristocracy, but the reality is that they both belong to the same class, because they both work in the service of capitalists. Whether you’re an app-bound delivery driver or an engineer, you have to produce profit for your boss!