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-cla...> 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/