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Comment by Illniyar | Hacker News Reader

"In that classic form, Marx’s favorite class doesn’t really exist in the rich world today, except in the so-called gig economy."

What? how? What about service workers (which constitute a major section of US workforce)? Do burger flippers at mcdonald's own their means of production? Cleaners? Waiters? Heck even truckers don't own their truck.

On the contrary, in the classical sense most gig-economy workers (at least those we associate with the gig economy) are not Proletariat - uber drivers own their car, AirBnB own their houses, Marketplaces (etsy, fiverr etc... which Amazon turk is nominally a part of) own the tools and knowledge to make whatever they sell.

Amazon Turkers are really not representative of the Gig Economy (a term that came much later then Amazon's Mechanical Turk) and at least for me I don't really think of them as part of the Gig Economy.

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Crucially, gig workers do not own an important part of their means of production: the platform that processes rides/rentals/etc, payments and users, which allows the traditional bourgeois to extract surplus value (Mehrwert) in the usual way, and the workers fit the definition of proletarians.

True, but they own some of it, and there is competition between platforms for them (I.E. lyft vs uber). In fact many people "work" for multiple platforms. It's similar to a farmer selling his ware in a marketplace, which he must pay rent for. Would you say that because he doesn't own the marketplace (or store) he doesn't own his means of production?

Now the question is whether they must own all of the means of production to be considered bourgeois? I would say no, especially in today's world, where most production is a complicated multi-tiered process.

But even if you do think so, they are still much better off, Marxist-wise, from virtually every service worker, who own no means of production.

In any case, that doesn't mean that there is no exploitation or that the gig economy should not be regulated, but it really doesn't have anything to do with Proletariat.

What means of production do they own? Surely that's the platform app and backend, which offers a price?

A farmer on a market stall can price however he likes.

The car (Uber,Lift), the house (AirBnB), the tools for making what they sell (Etsy,fiverr).

Only Uber (and other ride-haling apps I suppose) forces a price, all other marketplaces the price is set by the seller - AirBnB, Etsy, fiverr. In Amazon Turk the seller and buyer roles are reversed and Turkers only accept work that pay enough for them.

I would say it's more a product of the industry they are in - transportation is usually regulated to have a fixed price almost everywhere - then the nature of marketplaces in the gig-economy as a whole.

I don't see how it can be. The equivalent of the capitalist's lock out, is a ban from or temporary closure of a platform.

An individual driver withdrawing his car is a resignation, or declining to do a particular job, surely? Go back to pre employment legislation times and it was pretty common to require a worker to own the tools by buying them themselves and take them to work in the local factory. The factory and machinery was still the means of production.

Consider a nationalisation where a state buys the means of production. They would nationalise the company that owns the factory not the individual workers and their tools. If someone decided to nationalise AirBNB or Uber they'd take the company and platform, not a thousand cars or houses.

Uber does not force a price.

It is up to the driver to accept the fare.

I've been told that uber hides some of the information (either the price or the distance the driver has to go or both) which makes that not quite true.

If that is true than it is no better than the US healthcare system.

I currently drive for Uber and both of these are 100% true When a request pops up all I see is the estimated time it'll take me to get to the pickup point, I also have exactly 10 seconds to accept a request.

Is this also true for Lyft?

No. Take it or leave it is them dictating a price.

if i demand a $2mm salary, take it or leave it, i am not dictating a price; i am getting laughed out of the room and someone else is getting the job. uber is only dictating a price to the extent that lyft won't offer more.

firms like comcast, who may be the only ISP offering >25mbps in a particular area, are the ones who get to dictate a price.

>It's similar to a farmer selling his ware in a marketplace, which he must pay rent for. Would you say that because he doesn't own the marketplace (or store) he doesn't own his means of production?

This analogy doesn't hold in the Marxian framework. Gig companies adopt the "D-M-D" scheme, where they hire a worker to produce a service which the company will sell, earning part of the profits; the marketplace owner does not enter such a scheme, and its relationship with the farmer is not considered to extract surplus value.

>But even if you do think so, they are still much better off, Marxist-wise, from virtually every service worker, who own no means of production.

Indeed, people like the farmer - owning the means of production, and self-employed or with few employees - are a distinct class in the Marxian framework, namely the petite bourgeoisie.

Just because you own the tool you use -- be it a hammer, a screwdriver, or a car -- doesn't mean you own the means of production except in the very narrowest sense. The tools you use are worthless if there's no work to do with them, or nobody willing to pay you for that work.

"The means of production" in the gig economy is the marketplaces and apps. They parcel out the work to people to carry out using the tools they have at their disposal -- a car, a bike, a toolkit, whatever. It's established, much like a factory is, to break up the work into discrete steps to be carried out by people who are largely replaceable. In this case the app is just the replacement for the top-hatted capitalist factory owner.

AirBNB hosts are slightly different since they more closely resemble petit bourgeois smallholders and innkeepers rather than members of the proletariat.

Actually I would argue that a marketplace is not part of the "means of production", at least not in any sense that Marx meant.

In a similar way that if a blacksmith (or a farmer) made something and went to the market square to sell it, he isn't a Proletariat just because he doesn't own the market square (which by the way, some would require rent to use).

Most gig-economy workers operate in multiple platforms (at least when possible) - drivers are on both Lyft and Uber, AirBnB apartments are also rented directly or through other platforms.

It's not the fact that the sellers don't own the marketplace that leads to exploitation, it's the fact that the marketplace exploits it's monopoly to extort too much freedom away from the drivers. I visited Ukraine a few weeks ago and drivers in the dominant ride-hailing app (Uklon I think) can refuse a ride if the pay is too low - this opens kind of a bid system. While the experience was terrible as a user it does change the dynamics completely.

Most people don't understand Marx idea about the ownership of production, they see it as rich vs poor and a trucker can make a decent amount of money, enough to buy a house and own a personal car.

That was never seen as possible in the squalor of 18th Europe.

So it is not that weird that people get the two wrong.

Yeah, the vanishing act of the proletariat was hilarious. I was shoked thinking Bloomberg might be writing an article from a left-wing point of view. It took 1 line to prove myself wrong.

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