Super-circulation: Towards a Political Economy of Platformisation

Introduction

Since the transformations resulting from the capitalist crisis of the 1970s, labour studies have widely analysed how a proletariat that was ‘stable’ and ‘fixed’ has transformed to become ‘flexible’ and ‘mobile’. In the central economies, commonly associated with the type of Fordism that would have characterised the productive strategies of industry in these countries for much of the 20th century, the erosion of the previously existing condition would stimulate new thought and approaches regarding a ‘return of super-exploitation’ (Harvey, 1989), the crisis of the ‘wage society’ (Castel, 1995) and the emergence of a ‘precariat’ (Standing, 2011) among others. Additionally, the privatisation of planned economies was also accompanied by a broad framework of dismissals and the implementation of labour turnover, characteristic of business and administration strategies adopted in line with productivity restructuring. In the capitalist peripheries, where the former condition (‘stable’ and ‘fixed’) when observed covered scarcely a minor statistical fraction of workers, a specific process, although consonant, has also been analysed in different ways.

These processes would have approximately observable implications on data being produced about current global labour trends. Approximate because there is an empirical lack of knowledge about the circulation of the labour-power due to a lack of instruments for measuring the phenomenon and, therefore, an absence of specific or direct data or about it. However, a good indicator to observe as a result of these processes is the fall in average job tenure in all countries producing data on the subject. Similarly, also of significance is the decline or practically the end of so-called ‘jobs for life’, even in the countries that, for example, were characterised by groups of workers that for generations on end exhibited practically zero labour-power circulation. ¹

While the data indicate increasingly broad and generalised trends, the ways in which such a process would develop involve parameters, forms, durations and degrees quite different from one another. In this case, it is appropriate to open a brief introductory parenthesis for the reader, even if the analysis of this matter does not fall within the scope of this article. In general, analyses of such trends that purport to be global but restrict themselves to the effects of and the struggles over dismantling the welfare state – with parameters such as the growth of formal ‘unemployment’ figures or the end of formal full employment, for example – run the very real risk of reproducing a crude eurocentrism. A vast informal sector of the economy consisting of a high circulation of the labour-power and a reserve army of enormous proportions are not new characteristics in most parts of the world, especially in Latin America, Asia and Africa. ² However, a converse sceptical myopia also runs the risk of reproducing a bias as crude as the previous one in the face of significant phenomena such as the case in Brazil, for example, of the rise in so-called ‘turnover’ across all sections of the workforce, especially among those with higher education and specialisation, an increasingly widespread feature across the formal market (DIEESE, 2017). ³

Work on the Supermarket Shelves

The widespread use of business strategies employed on the basis of flexible labour markets entails some aspects of what is meant by the terms ‘flexibilisation’ or, in other cases, ‘labour precarisation’. Given the even more recent impact of management and labour relations inspired by the company Uber and/or work taking place on digital platforms (whose tendencies I will point out are becoming radicalised), I will also discuss what is meant by other new terms like ‘uberisation’, ‘platformisation’, ‘platform capitalism’, etc. (Abdelnour and Bernard, 2018; Marszalek, 2017; Srnicek, 2016).

As such, it has been related to a number of issues: the impact of networked businesses and the adoption of new information and communication technologies (Huws, 2003; Lojkine, 1992); unemployment, a decline in labour-power purchase contracts of undetermined length and an increase in part-time or fixed-term contracts (Castel, 1995); informalisation, deregulation, reduction or absence of workers’ rights (Antunes, 2001); variable remuneration ⁴ ; multifunctionality, polyvalence or multi-skilling (Bihr, 1991); irregular, relocated or unspecified working hours (Sennett, 1998); subcontracting and general practices for outsourcing within, outside or across national borders, in the most varied forms (home-based work contracts, component supplier contracts, third-party service contracts – businesses and/or individuals – and contracts for businesses whose workers carry out the productive activity or service in the contractor’s premises, generally with the structure of staggered subcontractors) (Smith, 2016).

Along the same lines, I intend to demonstrate something transversal in the analyses that have already been carried out: the process of accelerating and expanding the circulation of the labour-power, which in the absence of any other concept I will refer to as super-circulation. In this sense, it is not my intention to analyse each of the concepts previously attributed to the so-called flexibilisation of work, nor to take them for granted. My objective is to point out that these specific data can be analysed from some current trends in the circulation of labour-power. For this purpose, I emphasise the epistemologically simple relationship established between the specific dynamics that capital circulation assumes since approximately the 1970s and the commercial circulation of the labour-power that it subsumes.

Considering that there is a fundamental change in the circulation of capital in terms of rotation, compressing the time-space relationship, there are also ongoing changes in the forms of production and the circulation and use of labour-power that stem from this new circulation of capital. Since what is required is the ‘flexible’ use of labour-power, that is, the adoption of ‘just-in-time’ or ‘end of stock’ methods for buying and selling labour-power, it is not necessarily a question of dispensability but of increasing its circulation as a commodity that in turn, I would stress, sets off a series of other changes in the production and use of labour-power. I point out that this process involves changes in terms of time and space for the mercantile circulation of labour-power, denoting issues of conjectural order that can be unfolded in various directions.

By expansion, for example, we can attribute quantity (in the sense of a larger number of workers situated in reserve and/or a greater flow entering and leaving the labour market); extension (greater spatial mobility of the labour-power); quality (greater plasticity or recruitment range for labour-power offered by multi-skilled, multi-specialised, or cross-sector workers).

Acceleration, in turn, involves more buying and selling of the commodity. It is related, to a certain extent, to the process conventionally called ‘labour flexibilization’, which is the form of adapting labour regulations to the current stage of accumulation of capital and its congruent labour market, either with a change to laws that previously prevented employers having an ability to dismiss workers and being given the freedom to buy/sell and use labour-power, or with the creation of new jobs already previously regulated in this way or not legally formalised in general.

However, strictly speaking, it should be noted that circulation, mobility and displacement are theoretically and analytically separate issues. Rather than developing each of these possible implications in this article, I intend to outline an attentive démarche, on the one hand to the conditions of social reproduction for workers under such a regime, and on the other towards a programme of coherent studies that in this case does not epistemologically obliterate the social relations of circulation in contemporaneity.

In the meantime, it is necessary to point out that the process mentioned not only means classical theoretical effects of greater intensity of social action of the reserve army, as analysed by Marx in the original sense of this concept, such as dismissibility, competition and the lowering or control of salaries, but also, at present, an alteration in the very relationship between the active army and the reserve army, in the sense of a convergence. ⁵ The forms that mercantile circulation of labour-power take on today tend to continually reduce the distance between active army and reserve army, constituting a ‘reserve working class’, in constant circulation. ⁶ That is, what historically characterised some continuous layers of the reserve army that Marx (2013 [1867]) would have associated etymologically with liquidity, fluency or fluctuation, using the terms flüssige and fließender, for example, would now also tend to be characteristics or situations of increasingly large sections of the working class. Instead of a border one must think of transit, movement, or in certain cases almost a blurring – which does not in itself signify the formation of a ‘new social class’ but a new morphology of the working class given that for example, as I propose below, within a Marxist tradition, the social relations are strictly the same. In basic terms, having the crucially powerful ‘labour-power’ categorisation as a parameter for analysing the commodity sold by the wage worker, Marx determined that ‘Every worker integrates it [the relative surplus-population or reserve army of labour] during the time in which he/she is partially or entirely unoccupied’ (Marx, 2013: 716).

However, as a historical process, these rotation policies had and do develop under specific conditions. At least since Taylor (1919), the modern scientific administration rationalises the production process in a way that lessens dependence on the individual worker; instead, according to Taylor, the ‘system’ becomes independent of the ‘efficient man’. The Taylorist worker-mass is a piece of the machine, of the body-factory, that is to say indispensable but replaceable when necessary. Ford’s retention policy was also founded precisely on this possibility of replacement that Taylorism progressively rationalised. Or as he maintained in his well-known maxim: ‘Men work for only two reasons: one is for wages, and one is for fear of losing their jobs’.

This rationalisation, by continually expanding its scope, enhances the circulation of labour-power and business policies of rotation, i.e. embedding dismissibility/discardability or the immediate exchange of the individual worker. As a historical process, however, it would go back to the polemically dated beginnings of capitalism itself. Theoretically, in this sense, it can be construed as the continual process of subsumption of labour to capital as described in Book I of Capital. A process that, as Marx also discussed in the manuscript of the ‘unpublished chapter’, evolves through the transformation of both the means of labour and labour relations, and that ‘continues and repeats itself continuously’ even after the subsumption of labour to capital (Marx, 1978: 66). Consequently, the process of replacing formal subsumption for real subsumption of labour to capital and, after, its continuation through relative surplus-value production methods, such as the intensification of labour, continually produces and enhances the acceleration of labour-power circulation. ⁷

From this perspective, the organisational changes by scientific administrations to follow the Taylorist-Fordist paradigm not only deepened this rationalisation but also embedded a process directly related to it – super-circulation.

Ohno wrote in his book that the first thing he wanted to see in the USA was a supermarket. It was from supermarkets that he would have taken the idea of implementing just in time objectives at Toyota (or at least this was the way he explained his actions a posteriori). What was imperative was to avoid ‘waste’:

From the supermarket we took the idea of visualising the initial process in a production line like a kind of shop. The final process (client) goes to the initial process (supermarket) to acquire the necessary parts (products) at the time and in the quantity needed. The initial process immediately produces the newly withdrawn quantity (restocking the shelves). We hoped that this would help us achieve our just-in-time objective and, in 1953, we implemented the system in our workshop in the main factory (Ohno, 1988: 45).

Thus, the managers mentioned in the ‘new model’ applied these strategies to how they used the workforce in the production process, taking it from the shelves in the exact measures required, i.e. at the exact time and in the exact quantity needed. Acquired and discarded in the quantity and at the most exact moment possible; employed and remunerated, in the end, only for the day, hour, piece or task required in a given productive process.

I would stress, however, that such a process stems from the very nature of the social relations of production established in wage labour and that, consequently, even though they are related to working conditions technically belonging to the era of the so-called ‘flexible accumulation’, they stem from the same capitalist commercial mechanism of valorisation of value and exploitation of labour-power. In the capitalist mode of production, as a commodity the labour-power is necessarily ‘mobile’, that is, always subject to ‘mobility’, as Gaudemar (1976) proposes, referring to those spatial and qualitative changes imposed by the circulation and accumulation of capital. However, in this case, it is necessary to make a digression to Marxian categorisations: in theory, what specifically does an increase in the circulation of labour-power mean?

Circulation and Super-exploitation

The labour-power commodity circulates in a labour market, unique and special but a market nonetheless, in which the capitalist purchases the labour-power and not the worker or the work. By definition, the worker is ‘free’ and ‘mobile’. The sphere of circulation, in which the purchase and sale of labour-power occur, as Marx ironically puts it, ‘is, in fact, a true Eden of the innate rights of man. It is the exclusive realm of freedom, of equality, of property and of Bentham’ (Marx, 2013: 250). But the mobility of the labour-power, even being a commodity like any other, in Marxian terms is also quite unique.

In Chapter 2 of Capital, on the subject of the exchange process Marx affirms: ‘The commodities cannot go by themselves to the market and exchange themselves with one another. We have, therefore, to return to their guardians, the possessors of the commodities’ (Marx, 2013: 159). Referring to the exchange, it is known that the simple circulation of commodities does not alter their value and only expresses their metamorphosis, C-M-C. The transportation, however, constitutes necessary labour for the production of a commodity: for a commodity to be offered and exchanged in a market place it must be moved there, which thus means more necessary labour time for its production. Therefore, the commodity’s value has in its composition the value added by its transportation, the socially necessary labour time for its transportation. ⁸ What about the labour-power?

The most evident feature – or, better, most apparent – is that this commodity is the only one that ‘takes itself to the market’. However, if we continue with the proposed reasoning, we will see that what applies for other commodities also broadly speaking applies for the labour-power. The displacement is a part of its value, necessarily. The costs of spatial displacement are always a part of the labour-power’s value since in order to have use-value for its buyer, the capitalist, the worker necessarily has to move to the place where this consumption will take place, the place of work. Strictly speaking, in terms of value, exactly the same logic prevails with other commodities. Although extremely significant in understanding current home-working dynamics and all other forms of displacement and transformations of sites where labour-power consumption occurs, this would be, consequently, a scarcely apparent feature.

Nevertheless, the spatial mobility of the labour-power normally involves other complexities that researchers face, for example in relation to so-called ‘migrant work’. With regard to mercantile circulation of the labour-power, it should be noted that the very spaces of movement and displacement are also spaces for reproduction, which, depending on the distance and time involved, involve a rise in the costs of reproduction of the labour-power. That is, there is also ‘re-production’ of the commodity in this sphere of the circulation. The reproduction of the worker (and of his/her social unit of replacement) also includes the time that they remain in the reserve army, their ‘circulation time’, that is to say, the period that comprises a sale and another sale of the labour-power – ‘time’, we should emphasise, since obviously as a commodity the labour-power can also circulate without spatial displacement: ‘A house that A sells to B circulates as a commodity, but does not go out for a walk. (. . .) What actually moves is the title of ownership of the thing, not the thing itself’ (Marx, 2014: 229).

Yet the issue is that circulation time is a reproduction not paid immediately in the wage form. This is a truly distinctive characteristic of the labour-power commodity when it comes to the simple circulation of commodities. ⁹ A factor that, although clearly perceived by Marx, was not developed by him at the time. ¹⁰ The current process of accumulation, however, impels us towards this.

The value of the labour-power is defined by Marx in various passages of Capital Book I (2013: 245–247; 338; 388–389; 587) and in other texts (Marx, 2006a: 44; 2006b: 126). To recap, unlike other commodities, its measurement includes a ‘historical and moral element’. But, continuing our digression, in Marxian terms it is also a commodity like any other. Thus, just like for other commodities, it is necessary to differentiate value, exchange-value and price of the labour-power. ¹¹ And for this though, it is necessary to observe that Marx’s mode of exposition in Book I takes the view, methodologically, that value = price (i.e. in the case of labour-power that it is remunerated according to its exact value). This exposition derives from the subject in question, the process of production of capital, and thus an interest in demonstrating and analysing the valorisation of value, the relevance of the categorisations labour-power, extra, relative, and absolute surplus-value, etc. However, its complexities (non-equivalence price-value) are not just pointed out in various passages of Book I itself but also in other texts that he wrote before and after it that were published posthumously in other books of Capital. ¹²

Let us make a careful observation of the definition of labour-power. Marx calculates an average value (in this case, a daily value) whose composition includes all the reproduction of the worker (and of their social unit of replacement for labour-power). ¹³ If the price of the labour-power does not include this minimum average value, it means that this price is below its value. That is, as Marx observed for example, when the value received is reduced to only what is indispensable for the day or the man/woman, the price of the labour-power falls below its value (Cf. Marx, 2013: 246–247).

In this sense, so long as the wage form does not take into account the value of the circulation of the labour-power (of reproduction as a whole) it will be below its value. ¹⁴ Its appearance and its benchmark, therefore, only condition the circulation itself of the labour-power. In a market society, as is known, the historical ‘great transformation’ of wage labour is also in the fact that the wage form only immediately remunerates the labour-power hours purchased and not the labour-power’s circulation. The condition of the labour-power commodity only exists in the market itself and when its circulation is not immediately remunerated it cannot also have an existence outside of it, its exclusive possessor must sell it once more and keep it in circulation in the market. As with any other commodity, the labour-power does not have value without use-value, and its use-value is only realised with its consumption.

If for other commodities the sphere of circulation does not add value (except in its transportation, which in a way still integrates the sphere of production), in the case of the labour-power commodity, despite its circulation being integrated in its value, the wage form only refers immediately to the hours in which it was sold, i.e. the sphere of production. It is in the process of work that the labour-power is (re)created ipso facto – it is only realised with its consumption. However, its value also consists of the time in which it circulates.

Thus, the due understanding of the condition of the labour-power commodity should take into account its rotation, for which the sphere of production is as important as the sphere of circulation. Just as with any other commodity, these spheres cannot be epistemologically separated. Such an observation can and should be unfolded across countless implications regarding contemporary critique of political economy, as is the same with sociological analysis of the working class in terms of its platformisation or uberisation. One of these implications is the value and price relationship itself and the possibility of a super-exploitation of labour.

Circulation time has a logical relationship with the value and price of the labour-power. That is, the introduction or increase of the circulation time variable implies a change in the price of the labour-power when other variables are kept constant (value of the labour-power and its determinants). Thus, for example, for the labour-power to not fall beneath its value, the magnitude of its price should necessarily increase proportionately with the increase in circulation time.

In this case, it is still necessary to emphasise that production time is not to be confused with working hours. Production time refers to the period in which the labour-power commodity was sold and not the duration of the working day. Production time comprises both the hours devoted to the working day and the hours of rest (non-working hours) for the worker throughout the time period in which they sell labour-power to the capitalist. The working day accounts for just the hours in which the labour-power is being consumed in the work process, that is, the period that produces value in the case of productive work.

A reduction in production time for the labour-power does not mean a reduction in working hours. The result is usually the exact opposite of this. In truth, it is a means of extending the working day and reducing paid non-working hours in the purchase of labour-power, its faux frais. This is because there is no loss to those purchasing the labour-power since the price of labour-power has no immediate reference to the increase in circulation time, that is to say that it is not readjusted as described above. Given these circumstances, neither the absolute magnitude of surplus-value nor the relative magnitude changes: the price of the labour-power remains the same. On the other hand, those selling the labour-power have the value pertaining to circulation time subtracted from the price. The more circulation time increases (and production time decreases), the less the worker will proportionally receive. And the limit of this subtraction goes further than the purchase of labour-power for just a day, i.e. when production time is faced with a working day. For example, it is by means of purchasing labour-power that it is possible to completely remove the value relating to the reproduction of all non-working hours, as is the case of the price reached in certain wages paid by piece or by time/hour. The direct effects of this subtraction are precisely the prolongation of the working day and its intensification, the only ways for the worker to obtain the minimum for their reproduction. ¹⁵

Marx analysed in detail how waged labour masks unpaid work, how the sale of the commodity labour-power masks the production of surplus-value, since both the capitalist and the worker think the wage form acceptably reflects the product of the labour of a working day. With regard to the circulation of the labour-power, even if the worker perceives the absence of salary or the increase in circulation time as impoverishment, the wage form is still usually a masking of the lowering of the price of the labour-power to levels lower than the proper value of the labour-power. In other words, in a certain way, the wage form also masks unpaid reproduction.

Currently, forms of labour-power purchase/sale that tie production time with the working day are expanding across the whole world, provoking not just this process that I am outlining but also a drastic process of accelerating and expanding the mercantile circulation of labour-power. Businesses that use apps to provide delivery or transport services through digital platforms are a radical example of this global expansion.

Conversely, researchers are noting that when purchasing labour-power, the difference between working hours per day and paid non-working time is also becoming less defined. What would contribute to this is not just an increase in the working day by means of increasing the number of hours dedicated to work (overtime, transportation, food, qualification/study, notice, home-working, etc.) or by means of introducing a time bank for example (both direct tools in reducing non-working hours fairly well known in a situation in which the sale of labour-power occurs and in which, in general, the class struggle has been developing historically and politically at least since the 19th century). ¹⁶ Given how non-working time is going unmeasured, there would now be a trend for indistinctive accountancy when it comes to shifts and hours, i.e. the intercrossing of objective tasks done outside of the formal working day, increasingly capacitated by information and communication technologies (mobile phones, computers), and subjective concerns, being integrated more and more by participating management and by the capture not only of the physical body but of the mind, of the worker’s subjectivity.

However, in the face of what I called super-circulation, I would point out other aspects. In general, ‘flexibility’, as feminist studies since the 1980s have pointed out (Hirata, 1995), is sexed, to which we could add: racializated, ethnificated, bodificated. In this case it would be one more way of intensifying to the maximum the economic exploitation of bodies and minds through the selective use and reproduction of historically constituted social subalternities in a given context. But not only that. The process of increasing the circulation of the labour-power would also allow, for example, the adoption of certain business strategies that intensify all the effects listed above selectively. Across more and more sectors, it allows practices of continual recruitment/dismissal, selecting certain worker profiles (age, marital status, higher qualifications, education, etc.), introducing productive restructuring (ending roles, expelling and exchanging professions, ‘renewing staff’, ‘downsizing staff’, etc.), reducing costs with internal professional training, demanding greater labour intensity (the hiring period being associated with a performance ‘test’ or constant ‘selection’), economically producing and reproducing the most varied oppressions (race, ethnicity, sex, gender, disability, sexual orientation, etc.), as well as rotating the already dilapidated labour-power (sick, dead, worn out, the generally ‘unproductive’). ¹⁷

Final Reflections

For a certain market ideology that is hegemonic, accelerating and expanding the circulation of commodities would in theory result in deep transformations in time and space but not in greater social contradictions. An interpretation from the point of view of a Marxian theory of labour value, like the one I proposed, allows a hypothesis in the opposite direction. The social reproduction of the worker is deeply altered in terms of space and time and also seriously dilapidated by actual ‘market laws’. ‘Labour’ is considered by modern business management as a ‘service’ that should be acquired for the lowest market price, used in the most intense form possible and replaced as soon as it is no longer necessary or profitable by something better. In other words, being a ‘thing’ like anything else, a profitable element or part, obviously has different implications for its seller.

The strategy of this modern management of labour, increasingly employed in order to reduce costs through salary reductions and matching productive processes with oscillations in the market, streamlines the production with forms of purchase, exact use, and ‘leanness’ in the labour-power in the productive process. However, increasing the circulation of labour-power would also probably be a mechanism for super-exploitation. The working class does not simply circulate more but also works more, in a more intense and extended form. When it sells its labour-power and receives less, it ends up spending more time circulating in an unpaid manner. What in appearance seems to mean a simple labour deregulation (or re-regulation) or an increase in working hours, as has been verified in general worldwide, actually translates to extremely efficient commercial forms for extracting surplus-value that in fact focus not on the advancement of the productive forces of labour but primarily and fundamentally on the dilapidation of the labour-power. Its currently measurable objective result – an increase in working hours and an increase in hours of ‘unemployment’ – is therefore not to be confused with the increase in working hours that unleashed the class struggles in English industry in the 19th century. These are forms that could only be developed under other conditions. Only under the current labour conditions is it proving possible to promote this trade in labour-power and adopt these surplus-value extraction strategies in an increasingly generalised manner and practically in all productive processes and sectors of the economy.

The consequences of a process like this are not just that work and production relations are made invisible, as Marx proposes, but also that there is an extreme circulation of the labour-power that makes the sale and purchase of the commodity invisible, and strongly biased, as with the borderline case of purchasing by piece, service, hour or fraction of an hour (also partly through conditions different from piece work and through forms that intersect productive and unproductive labour in a complex way). When we consider the condition of the labour-power commodity from the Marxian theory of value, we can understand a contradictory process whereby the labour-power is dilapidated by an increase in circulation time (unsold time) for its commodity whilst simultaneously undergoing an increase in work time (hours of consumption).

Understood in this way, considering other conditions of labour-power circulation and the convergence between the active and reserve armies, a series of issues still deserve to be better studied – not only regarding production relations but also the social relations of circulation, i.e. the new morphology of the working classes in conditions of circular labour exploitation that impose on them an acceleration in the sale and purchase market for the only commodity at their disposal. A wide range of issues are suitable for empirical research: the spatial and social displacements (between professions, between sectors, between firms, etc.) and of intergenerational rearrangements, for gender, parentage, conjugality, sexuality, domesticity and reproductive social morphology in general; ¹⁸ similarly, an analysis of any forms of political action arising from this proletarian condition that will perhaps challenge the conventional association of greater ‘rotation’ with less political power and less class organisation. ¹⁹

In this sense, a thoughtful investigation regarding the world of work that is epistemologically attentive to the current proletariat condition entails bringing to light a procedural analysis of circulation, that is, of the vast world still unexplored in everyday life and in the historicity of the social processes of circulation, to the extent that the procedural analysis has so far privileged historical transitions or transformation processes with polarised meanings, such as peasant condition to proletarian condition, factories before and after productive restructuring, stable qualified workers to precarious labourers, rural-agrarian to urban-industrial, category or A sector to category or sector B, active army to reserve army, etc.