capitalism has the ability to subsume unto itself

Along with that we see a certain kind of entrenchment of under development, at least in the global South. There is a widespread increase in disenfranchisement of labor.

The worker is now seen as a co-participant in the production process and therefore the corrective burden of “fixing” the systemic rot is also to be equally shared by them as equal “stakeholders.” Workers-as-consumers are expected to pay for privatized health, education, data, information (services that ought to have been freely and universally accessible) through rent-debt structures: subscriptions, temporary contracts, commission-based remuneration (against wages) and crypto bonds, to name a few. They’re seen as part of the capitalist “dream” which falsely justifies itself by selling the logic that anybody can become a capitalist in a system which is based on exploitation for its own survival. Right now we’re also contending with a framework where workers are posited as consumers or prosumers.

These new jobs in the digital market don’t offer any social protection, they don’t give workers any rights. Rather they rely on a systematic deskilling of labor populations accrued by international and national withdrawal of investment from public goods and services: education, health and nutrition. A lot of the jobs that are being created, which even the WEF takes pride in, are not secure. Over and above the loss of secure jobs, what are the new jobs that are being created? David Graeber talked about the “bullshit jobs” that have been created by the capital. One thing is the displacement of labor that is already in the precarious and lowest rungs which is not limited to digitisation of work but also due to the structural reconstitution of social relations, ideological and governance coordinates that this digital regime of capital imposes. So, on one hand, there is automation which ties to questions of migration and flow of labor then, on the other hand, that is platformization and digitalization of work which leads to internal displacement of labor. Now, those jobs are getting automated and near-shored. This has and can lead to large scale displacement and dispossession.Ī lot of big capitalist firms, like Levi’s, would get some of the menial jobs done in factories in Bangladesh or India. In the earlier production and reproduction processes where women were engaged, it has been about doing routine intensive work for big companies like transnational corporations. At this point, the production process itself is engendering the value of labor in a false relation with the capital. There are Bitcoin cities emerging in El Salvador and other places, this should tell us about the material effects of a highly speculative global system of data trade. We are seeing that there are carbon credits and other provisions being exploited to penetrate the flow of capital in the global South. The World Economic Forum (WEF) has set an agenda for the Great Reset, but we need precisely the opposite of that.

Everything is in the shape of capital, which has created global digital debt relations that have a peculiar impact in the ‘global South.’ Now we have a network monopoly within Big Data and algorithmic mining also, which has led to a commodification of social production of knowledge, art, communication and information. It’s capitalism in crisis, but capitalism at the end, which is revolutionizing itself in data capitalism. What we need is to create alternate structures for collective action and for social commons, especially at a time when we know that we’re dealing with something new. What would an anti-capitalist framework look like? It needs to go beyond the hunt against corporations and corporate power, which of course, is something that we have to dismantle.

Capitalism has the ability to subsume unto itself