The book The Privilege of Servitude: the New Service Proletariat in the Digital Age was originally published in Brazil by Boitempo (2018), followed by an updated and expanded second edition, in 2020. In that same year, it was also published in Italy (Punto Rosso, 2020) and, in different versions, in Spain/Galicia (Fundación Moncho Reboiras, 2020) and Peru (Editorial Ande, 2023). The Argentinian edition is currently being prepared for June 2025 (Editorial Prohistoria).
However, this new publication in the Historical Materialism Book Series (Brill) has a special dimension, as it offers a new, more up-to-date version of the book. After The Meanings of Work, published in 2013, we are happy to be back in the series.
The central aim of The Privilege of Servitude is to understand a new and rapidly expanding phenomenon in contemporary capitalism, the new services proletariat in the digital age. This process has developed since a destructive triad came to dominate the world of capital: neoliberal regression, the strong hegemony of financial capital and an intense permanent productive restructuring that has fuelled new digital technologies.
Especially under the influence of the large digital platforms that are constantly expanding, the harmful effects on the working class are evident and seem endless: increased informality, intermittent labour, precariat, infoproletariat/cybertariat, uberised labour, etc., all expanding rapidly on a global scale.
With the advent of the new digital engineering, with its algorithms, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Big Data, Internet of Things (IoT), etc., we have witnessed a spectacular technological advance capable of processing an unlimited volume of information (time, place, quality, intensity, rhythms, etc.), all under the command of large corporations, with a purpose that is essentially profit-driven – a situation that has expanded the new services proletariat.
These mutations have led to the representation of sections of the working class that were previously informal or unemployed, first as ‘outsourced’, ‘service providers’, and more recently as ‘collaborators’, ‘independent contractors’, up to and including the hoax of false ‘entrepreneurship’. All this in order to exclude the new services proletariat from all the labour rights that are the result of centuries of working-class struggle.
Given the present accentuated destructiveness of capital’s antisocial metabolic order, embodied in the unlimited devastation of nature and the destruction of human labour, we are at one of those rare moments when everything that seems solid can melt into thin air.
This forces us to reinvent a way of life in which labour is endowed with meaning in its most vital and essential activities. We are therefore challenged to reinvent the imperative of social emancipation if we do not want to see humanity perish in the privilege of servitude. This is the main warning in this book.
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For this English edition, we have made an important addition (Chapter 4, ‘Labour and (De)value in Platform Capitalism: Three Theses on the New Age of the Disanthropomorphisation of Labour’), in which we present three theses and a hypothesis, aiming to indicate the density and depth of the mutations taking place in the world of work.
First Thesis: with the simultaneous expansion of large digital platforms and Industry 4.0, capitalism has become more destructive in relation to labour, especially during the pandemic, when there was an expansion of laboratories for experimenting with labour, of which the uberisation of labour has become an emblematic example (not only in the South, but on a global scale).
Second Thesis: we are witnessing an apparent paradox in which platform capitalism in the twenty-first century, with its enormous technological advances, defines a reality for labour that is increasingly characterised by exploitation, expropriation and spoliation, reminiscent of the proto-form of capitalism in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries;
Third thesis: With the advent of Industry 4.0 and the large digital platforms, the two ends of the same labour-destroying process have merged, accentuating the trend towards a new era of the disanthropomorphisation of labour.
A Hypothesis: as this process does not occur without contradictions, the expansion of the new services proletariat in the digital age has sparked a new era of social struggles, with an emphasis on the emerging struggles of uberised labour that is expanding on a global scale.