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14 May 2020
Day of Study promoted by Into the Black Box within the Project PLUS (Platform Labour in Urban Spaces)
@DamsLab (via Azzo Gardino, Bologna)
We share this text as a form of invitation asking to circulate it to scholars who could be involved in the day of study Transitions 4.0: mutations in the labour/capital relationship, new technologies, emerging conflicts to be held in Bologna on 14 May organized by Into the Black Box within the project Horizon2020 PLUS (Platform Labour in Urban Spaces). For those who are interested in participating, we ask to send by Sunday, March 29th a proposal for a speech (title and abstract of max. 250 words) to get an idea of the contents of the contribution in order to organize reasoned discussion sessions.
To submit proposals or reuqests please write to info@intotheblackbox.com
Niels Van Doorn will participate as keynote speaker.
With this study day we would like to focus on an analysis and interpretation of the so-called “4.0 revolution”. Within this headword we consider a set of processes distinguished by genealogies and peculiarities but united by a search for new fields and forms of exploitation through (among other things) technological innovation: the rise of the Information Technology industry (starting from the U.S. GAFAM – Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft) and the recent rapid growth of “platform capitalism” (AirBnb, Uber, food delivery apps, etc. …); the “Factory 4.0” of German origin, i.e. the search for an increase in productivity through the integration of cyber-physical systems in industrial processes (the bimodal dimension, an ecosystem of physical and virtual resources); the becoming smart of production and distribution (technological mix of automation, information, connection and programming) of a capitalism deployed on a planetary level along supply chains and global value chains; more generally, the grafting of the so-called radical technologies (robotics, Internet of things, artificial intelligence, algorithmic dimension) into everyday life. This set of elements, which emerged in particular after the 2007/2008 crisis, is profoundly transforming – and this is the perspective that we intend to adopt as a privileged lens – the world of work along coordinates to be mapped and following conflicts that open many unprecedented questions.
We list some of the knots and questions around which we would like to structure a polyphonic discussion and dialogue:
- If we observe forms of platform work such as those of the new metropolitan logistics (Amazon, home delivery platforms), we are faced with extremely varied interpretations: for example, there are those who claim that we are witnessing a return to 19th century forms of work (piecework, use of one’s own means of work, etc.)..); there are those who speak instead of neo-taylorism or of a new factory-system of services; those who finally believe that this is the latest development of the neoliberal process of building a labour force as self-entrepreneurship. What perspectives should be adopted for an understanding of the new frontiers of work?
- In the analysis of 4.0 the Marxian categories of formal subsumption or real subsumption are frequently mobilized, in an alternative way, while there are those who focus on the dynamics of a new original accumulation and those who propose a new threshold, that of total subsumption. In the overlapping and integration between these figures, how can we use them today? How do we place the processes of resistance and organization of the workforce with respect to these processes?
- What is the relationship between platforms, hi-tech industries and living labour? Are we faced with purely extractive devices of value in front of a social cooperation with a strong tension to autonomy? Or do platforms organize and regulate the workforce in an exogenous way? Is the 4.0 transition to be read mainly as the integrated action of a series of devices acting “from above” in the era of sprawling precariousness and endless crisis, or is the 4.0 “sucking” dynamics of endogenous cooperation to metropolises and class reproduction? Which interpretative models are most effective from an analytical and political point of view?
- What new forms of class hierarchy and s-composition are emerging in 4.0? How are the diagonals of gender, race and generation being redefined?
- What forms of rejection of work are being produced in digitized and automated work? What are the forms of subsumption of them? Do digital platforms and infrastructures evolve by continuously absorbing “worker rejection” or do they come first logically?
- Digitized work confronts us with a complex ecology in which human-machine-environment interaction is to be understood as a process without a predefined centre. In this scenario can we talk about the industrialization of the human and an increasingly machinic system? If we look at technology as a condensation of social power relations (thus containing both domination and forms of capturing cooperation), which scenarios open up in the labour/capital conflict with respect to fixed capital? Which potentials of liberation or domination open up in the become-cyborg and which lenses to adopt to read the human-machine-environment ecology today?
