Digital labour platforms, reserve army, and capitalist social constitution

Abstract

This commentary engages with Arvidsson and Bonini's analogy between digital platforms and early modern workhouses, acknowledging the fruitfulness of comparing platforms’ role in disciplining surplus populations, but rejecting their reliance on the techno-feudalism thesis. Framing platforms as prefiguring a ‘re-feudalization’ is both unnecessary and theoretically inconsistent, since monopolies and rent extraction are inherent to capitalism rather than signs of a break from it. Drawing on the Marxist categories of formal and real subsumption and the industrial reserve army, this commentary argues that platforms actually expand and intensify the capitalist value-form by deepening the subsumption of labour under capital, while also dissolving the boundaries between active workers and the reserve army – transforming precarity from an exceptional condition into a permanent, internalized experience. Rather than signalling a post-capitalist or neo-feudal departure, platforms represent a new concrete configuration of the industrial reserve army, one that disciplines subjectivity, entrenches algorithmic control, and extends value extraction into the constitution of social reproduction. The workhouse analogy remains valuable, but only when understood within a consistent Marxist framework that treats the reserve army as a constitutive social relation of capitalism, not as evidence of a transition beyond it.