Scoring the U.S. working class: expropriation and digitalization
/Originally published: /Focaal Blog
<https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/03/28/don-nonini-scoring-the-u-s-working-class-expropriation-and-digitalization/>
on March 28, 2022 by Don Nonini (more by Focaal Blog
<https://mronline.org/guest-author/cap-focaal-blog/>) - Posted Apr 18, 2022
Introduction
Working-class people in the United States are now at a turning
point–whether to compliantly return to the pre-Covid conditions capital
set for them, or to shift toward a new militancy toward capitalism. Now,
two years into the pandemic, they have suffered severe personal
hardships due to Covid-related illness, hospitalizations and deaths, and
sudden loss of employment. These traumas have occurred even as they have
experienced an historically unprecedented hiatus of relative economic
security, given the Covid-related payments and protections they received
from the U.S. state, while many have been praised as “essential
workers.” This essay seeks to review what has happened to them over the
last four decades that has made this into such a turning point.
Anthropologists speak of the period since the 1970s as one of
neoliberalism. Instead, in this essay I adopt a different perspective by
exploring the conditions prevailing under the transition from the
liberal nation-state to the corporate-oligarchic state that has occurred
widely with the integration of platform-surveillance capitalism into
state administration and the use of massive databases by corporations
and governments to govern populations (Kapferer and Gold 2018). Freedom
and enslavement in the contemporary United States are linked to two now
converging phenomena. One is digitalization; the other is the expansion
of expropriation as a mechanism of capital accumulation beyond its
historically racially marked boundaries to encompass the racially
dominant white population. These changes have taken place with the rise
to domination of finance capitalism in the world economy, a new period
of economic decline and social crisis in the West.
First, as to digitalization. It has not only led to unprecedented levels
of economic inequality among the population, but also to new mechanisms
of accumulation organized around the generalized dispossession of
working-class people made possible by their indebtedness combined with
corporate and state deployment of digital technologies with large-scale
predictive capabilities. The rise of surveillance capitalism and its
integration into the corporate state has taken the form of a massive,
commercialized apparatus of surveillance–“a single behemoth of a data
market; a colossal marketplace for personal data” (Harcourt 2015, 198).
The ascendance of finance capital has come to operate in tandem with a
racialized corporate state formation using an apparatus of analog
surveillance and control of working people combined with digital
surveillance over them. This apparatus has come to rationally extract
and then realize large volumes of surplus value from them outside the
capitalist workplace. This apparatus employs digital technologies (i.e.,
artificial intelligence) to increase the hyper-exploitation and
expropriation of racially vulnerable groups, but also extends to the
racially dominant white population. I focus my attention on the United
States because its relentless attachment to new forms of financialized
repression of working people through capitalizing (on) their debt
repayment and petty income streams leads the way for capitalist regimes
in other “advanced industrialized” countries undergoing economic decline.
[...]
continua qui:
https://mronline.org/2022/04/18/scoring-the-u-s-working-class/
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