The New in the Old: Subsumption and Reserve Army on Digital Platforms

ABSTRACT In recent years, labour studies have had a major focus on digital platforms, given the great challenge of categorizing them and the enormous social impact caused by them. However, most of these recent studies have a strong empirical character, with a richness of description, but a certain lack of theoretical development. Within this framework, this article proposes a re-theorization of the main social relations of work through digital platforms, highlighting the main contradictions existing in the current debate and how digital platforms reproduce in new concrete ways the processes of subsumption and constitution of a reserve army.