A platform fix? Contextualizing the multidimensional fix of the platform economy in the capitalist longue duréee

What the paper says

Given the multiple ongoing crises currently pervading neoliberalism, as well as the growing debate on the role of digital platforms in capitalism as such, this article asks: to what extent do platforms truly succeed in providing the current form of capitalism with the tools necessary to reproduce itself in a relatively durable way? To examine this, this paper draws on Beverly Silver’s work and breaks down the understanding of the ‘fix’ into four dimensions – spatial, technological, product and financial. It argues that a ‘platform fix’ should be framed in relation to the longue durée of capitalist development and changing capital-labor relations rather than as strategies adopted by platforms to overcome barriers to profitability. Understood in this way, platforms have not succeeded in offering a ‘fix’ – despite having integrated themselves into an increasing number of features of the global political economy, setting new trends on the labor market and becoming integral to, and at the forefront of, accelerating processes of datafication. Situating these emergent tendencies within the capitalist longue durée allows this paper to show that platforms have not succeeded in fundamentally reshaping the relationship between capital and labor and that they do not represent a new relatively stable mechanism upon which capitalist accumulation can be based. Rather, a ‘platform fix’ is best understood as the spectrum of political and economic experiments seeking to entrench platforms across existing spatial, technological, product and financial fixes in an effort to open up new growth areas within neoliberal accumulation.