Outlines of a Critique of Digitalization and Challenges for Class Autonomy

Emiliana Armano

Die Philosophen haben die Welt nur verschieden interpretiert, es kommt darauf an, sie zu verändern.

    

Die 11. Feuerbachthese von Karl Marx

L’intérêt de la co-recherche aujourd’hui, cinquante ans après son invention, repose sur la tension qui la traverse entre science et politique, entre connaissance sociologique et transformation sociale. Il ne s’agit pas de nier la science, mais de produire une science impliquée.

    

Antonella Corsani, Chemins de la liberté.
Le travail entre hétéronomie et autonomie, 2020

Le rêve positiviste d’une parfaite innocence épistémologique masque en effet que la différence n’est pas entre la science qui opère une construction et celle qui ne le fait pas, mais entre celle qui le fait sans le savoir et celle qui, le sachant, s’efforce de connaître et de maîtriser aussi complètement que possible ses actes, inévitables, de construction et les effets qu’ils produisent tout aussi inévitablement.

   

Pierre Bourdieu, La Misère du Monde, 1993

Introduction

Numerous research concepts coexist in the field of social sciences, which can be classified, very schematically, into two broad categories: sociological research and engaged research developed through inquiry. As Corsani (2020) argues, this typology is based on two main criteria: a) the objectives and b) the inquiry relationship, i.e. the way in which the relationship between the researcher and the topic of the study, or between the researcher and the participants, is conceived and constructed. Sociological research aims to produce positivist and evaluative scientific knowledge about society and its functioning. With inquiry, on the one hand, the production of knowledge is not an aim in itself, but rather directed at social transformation; on the other hand, the researcher and participants develop a relationship of co-production of knowledge. The two types of investigation are based on two different epistemologies: whereas sociological investigations are essentially part of a positivist conception of the sciences, engaged research is a whole that encompasses the construction of the ‘object’ and its problematisation, the formulation of hypotheses and the research methodologies that enable their verification, the techniques for interpreting the results and their publication. More importantly, this epistemological set includes the methods of objectification, which should reflect the scientific approach of the researcher. Social and workers inquiry, which finds its original and main references, albeit not exclusively, in Marx’s workers’ inquiry (1880/2004) and the interpretive approach comprising it, also aims to produce knowledge about society, but with a view – which is the purpose and function of social inquiry itself – to social change. From the outset, therefore, engaged research with social inquiry presupposes a value judgement on the state of affairs, which reflects the need for change and guides intervention to bring it about. This value judgement is incompatible with positivist conceptions of sociological inquiry that, not without contradiction, make axiological neutrality a value (Paugam, 2012). Thus in the current mainstream language of the social sciences, the term ‘object’ of investigation is often used. This term is contested by authors who draw on the long history of social inquiry and who, in the investigative relationship, recognise the ‘other’ as a subject of knowledge and action, rather than as an object to be known (Pugliese, 2009). As Corsani (2020) argues, social and workers’ inquiry and co-research can be structured epistemologically in as rich and complex a manner as sociological research. Whilst retaining the classical approach built around the sequence of defining the research problem, formulating the hypothesis, choosing the method, collecting data, analysing and interpreting the results, it poses the issues of neutrality, objectification and validation in very different terms as compared to sociological research. Positivism, by contrast, sees the social sciences as sciences aimed at knowing reality by measuring it and with the objective of predicting and controlling the behaviour of individuals.

In the theoretical perspective of inquiry and according to the encompassing and interactionist model, the function of social research is to identify social problems and to contribute both to the formulation of hypotheses about the causes of these problems and to the search for solutions. And, very importantly, the concept of inquiry presupposes that it is also an instrument through which public space is constituted and modified, since inquiry is also an instrument for another representation of (often socially invisible) issues in public space. The existence of an inquiry presupposes that the collective experiences a problem, manages to diagnose it, makes hypotheses about its causes, seeks solutions and becomes an agent of change. This is why, when we speak of the tradition of inquiry, we refer to the concept of involved science (Bourdieu, 2002; Coutellec, 2015), a science that acknowledges its responsibility, that is aware of the need to pay attention to consequences, that opens up the possibility of questioning its own objectives. This is a science that no longer claims axiological neutrality in order to assert its objectivity, a science that makes commitment (to a territory, to a particular objective, in a context) a central epistemic value, a science that organises the sharing of knowledge and the powers attached to this knowledge. Finally, the sciences involved are sciences that contribute to the construction of a common world in a context of vulnerability and uncertainty, rather than adding a corporate or mercantile objective to the capitalistic chaos, which is the final effect of the current scientific productivism.

In this cultural and epistemological context, the assumption on which my reflections on co-research is based is that there is an inescapable link between observation, knowledge production and social action. In this perspective, the meaning of knowledge is fully given in the awareness of its being situated, with the implications that follow from this statement. Placing myself in this frame of meaning, I present here a contribution that refers to the research approach developed by Romano Alquati, a theorist and protagonist of conricerca (Alquati, 1993, 2022; POSSE, 2001, Chicchi, Cominu, 2013; Cavazzini, 2013; Palano 2015; Chesta, 2018; Armano 2020; Workers Inquiry Network, 2020; Woodcock, 2021) and operaismo (Wright, 2002/2017; Mezzadra, 2000; Borio, Pozzi, Roggero, 2002) since its emergence. In the early 1960s, he elaborated a significant part of the central concepts of this theoretical-political tendency (Borio et al., 2002). The paper is divided into three parts: in the first, I briefly introduce the historical, political and social context in which conricerca [co-research] was born in Italy. In the second part this is further developed as a specific form of militant research practice, in order to sketch a provisional and exploratory definition of co-research and the characteristics that differentiate it from workers’ inquiry and action research. So for the sake of clarity, I will dwell on the similarities and differences of these participatory approaches. I will then focus on why co-research cannot be understood as being limited to the 1960s given today’s loss of centrality of the Taylorist factory. In the last part I want to show why co-research can be of interest in understanding, interpreting and transforming the reality of platform capitalism we are currently experiencing and its possible limits as a form of societalisation. Co-research presents relevant characteristics that make it quite recognisable and peculiar, through, for example, the concepts of class composition and subjectivities; trying to reposition it today in the light of the questions posed by the current economic-social formation, may be an interesting cultural operation, even if it is not easily put in practice and confronts us with interpretative difficulties.

In What Context Does Co-research Emerge and What Questions Does It Answer?

Co-research was born in Italy between the end of the 1950s and the early 1960s, and Romano Alquati was one of its main exponents as a theorist and protagonist. At the same time, it is incongruous to attribute an unambiguous theoretical, sociological, and philosophical birth to co-research. It is important, therefore, to recognise and place co-research within its historical genealogy, evolving at the crossroads of different cultural traditions.

The first important background of co-research is discernible in the experience of the journal Quaderni Rossi directed by Raniero Panzieri, which proposed a return to Marx being both a call for a ‘socialist use’ of inquiry and an attempt to open up new avenues of research and action. Central to it is the tradition of ‘heretical’ neo-Marxist thought (Chicchi & Cominu, 2013). The second philosophical background is that of phenomenology and critical qualitative social research. If co-research innovates, it does so starting from the relationship with the constitution of the subject. In this emphasis on subjectivity, there is a great debt to phenomenological thought, but also to qualitatively oriented critical sociology (Alquati, 1994). This second approach, which was attentive to the phenomenology of reality and initially matured within the Chicago Sociological School and American militant social research, was brought to mind in the Italian social research context by Alessandro Pizzorno and critically reworked by Danilo Montaldi and Romano Alquati, who incorporated contributions from French sociology. Similar to the approach of the Chicago Sociological School and American militant social research, phenomenological categories are strongly present in Montaldi’s and Alquati’s research experiences: in an original manner, they fruitfully hybridize the categories of commodity and class with the phenomenologically derived category of subjectivity. They use this wholly heretical and innovative conceptual apparatus to describe class as it presents itself historically socially and culturally, as opposed to the abstract and ahistorical description of it, as elaborated in the 1960s by reformists and repeaters of Marxist orthodoxy. According to Romano Alquati, the links to the theories developed by Alain Touraine (1992) and the group of intellectuals and activists of Socialisme ou Barbarie ^[2]were of importance in this.

Co-research, as it was conceived and practised in the 1960s, is not primarily a methodology but a practice of intervention (simultaneously cultural, political, and workplace-focused) in which the militants and the subject(s) under investigation are placed on the same level. In this way, the separate figure of the vanguard, dear to the political tradition of the 20th-century left, is in fact called into question. Co-research is essentially a practice aimed at re-establishing power over the knowledge of reality and organisational processes. The objective is the creation of knowledge and capacities to act in a horizontal relationship between theory-practice-organisation, within a cyclical cognitive movement conceived as a recursive sequence of confrontations, fighting practices, and knowledge sharing. The context of the late 1950s and 1960s was marked by Italy’s entry into early Taylorism-Fordism. What did workerist militants find in the factories of that era? In the 1950s, the places of production appeared as pacified places, the prevailing class composition in the large factories being determined by the presence of a Taylorist model of organisation of industrial work in which there were apparently silent mass workers. The workerist militants who established the magazines Quaderni Rossi and Classe Operaia included Romano Alquati, Pierluigi Gasparotto, Emilio Soave, and Romolo Gobbi. They were active at the gates of Fiat and Olivetti (Alquati, 1962, 1963). And in these factories, in discussing with these new labour figures, they were able to recognise multiple latent forms of resistance, which were expressed by informal practices and behaviours and which contained an intrinsic political character open to different developments: whether individual or increasingly assuming that collective form which would explode into social conflict from the early 1960s onwards. In this regard, Alquati uses the concept of the intrinsic politicalness of social relations, meaning:

… the capacity of any entity, fact, relationship, exchange, and movement to affect relations of domination (and command and power), shifting or changing them in a different direction. This politicality is intrinsic, it is internal to everything, in the overall society and its environs. In other words, intrinsic politicalness, in which everything is seen insofar as it affects capitalist domination, is the widespread and omnipresent dimension of politics and is perhaps the most important. It is something rather subjective because it basically emerges as a way of looking at reality: from the perspective of relations of domination (Alquati, 2021, p. 157).

How Can Co-research Be Defined, and How Does It Differ from Militant Inquiry and in Particular from Workers’ Inquiry?

Recently, there has been a certain resurgence of interest in the interpretive approach and practices of workers’ inquiry in Anglophone radical thinking (Woodcock, 2021), as well as in the minoritarian approach within critical sociology named sociologia di posizione [Militant and committed sociology] (Illuminati, 2023; De Nardis et al., 2023) in which participatory methods have scientific worth. In this way, workers’ inquiry has made a comeback, following a notable rise of attention in radical critical debate thanks above all to certain areas of theoretical-political analysis associated with journals like Notes from Below (2018) including earlier journals and groups, such as Arranca (2008), Viewpoint Magazine (2013), Quaderni di San Precario and Effimera, Plateforme d’Enquêtes Militantes, Ephemera Wildcat, Angryworkers (2023), and EIPCP. ^[3] In addition, it must be said that Historical Materialism also published some interesting essays on Italian operaismo that, while not focusing specifically on inquiry, have nonetheless indirectly and positively contributed to soliciting attention to it. All of the publications named above have understood workers’ inquiry as a sort of general political container, a set of research perspectives, models, and methods that variously seek to critically investigate life and work (but especially work), from the point of view of the subjects who experience them. This includes the use of qualitative tools such as observational participation and in-depth ethnographic interviews that seek to bring subjects into the research process.

How does co-research differ from militant inquiry, and in particular from workers’ inquiry?

Regarding both the distinctions as well as the affinities between workers’ inquiry and co-research, it is important to recall what Romano Alquati (1994) wrote in 1994, taking stock a year after the publication of his book Per fare conricerca (Alquati, 1993):

… It should be immediately obvious that co-research is not ‘workers’ inquiry’. ‘Workers’ inquiry’ differs from ‘co-research’ in two respects. First, it is extemporaneous: it lasts a few months and then it ends! It therefore implies a whole other relationship between inside and outside (between internal militants and researchers that come from ‘outside’ but are themselves, perhaps, more or less militants…). Moreover, workers’ inquiry remains in a predominantly cognitive dimension, devoted merely to knowledge production. But then it entrusts the actual use of the knowledge acquired to a political agency that is usually distinct from the team that has researched it, and more or less delivers the knowledge produced to the political operation of this agency that specialised in such activities. In other words, to a political agency performing in a more or less separating sense (even self-referential, legitimising itself, seeking cover, alibis), perhaps in terms of representation, etc. Such a political agency specialises in ‘party political intervention’; but it does not even produce knowledge itself in its normal activity and applies – and how? – mostly exogenous knowledge, alongside exogenous elaborations of applied theory …Within co-research, it is expected and assumed that workers’ inquiries can be used profitably especially at the beginning, yet the two do not coincide. And there remains the whole question of whether and if so, how researchers (step by step and/or at the end) give or report knowledge about the researched to the researched themselves, for their own use for themselves. Also evaluating the difference between them, the difference of position and ends … What this means, the significance of these distinctions and propositions, is certainly debatable.” (1994: 75-76)^[4]

The dimensions of the duration of the cognitive process and the type of relationship envisaged between researcher and subject/object in co-research thus constitute for Romano Alquati an element of difference that qualitatively distinguishes co-research from workers’ inquiry. It will be important to remember these two aspects when we set ourselves the objective of interpreting the reality of the present and rethinking co-research today, as we will see in the second part of this article.

Co-research is therefore not reducible to a critical methodology of social research. Rather, it can be defined as a practice of knowledge that transforms not only the ‘object of research’ and the ‘researcher’ in his beliefs but also reality itself, through a process whose outcome is a priori indeterminate (Sormano, 2011). Another difference, according to Alquati, is that:

Co-research is a process and (while not being limited to it) open to the future, and its open processuality is its fundamental modality. And even in its theoretical research and development aspects, it is ultimately always a practical process. Open not only because it is always hypothetical and indefinite, in its infinite movement towards the future; but also because it is flexible, with margins of indeterminacy and continuously reproducing alternatives, thus providing, at least potentially, one existing variety: that from which the new, the additional can always be proposed again and sought and reproduced. (1993: 3)

This characteristic of an indeterminate outcome clearly distinguishes co-research from other forms of militant research (workers’ inquiry), in which the distinction between an ‘agency’ that promotes the inquiry and the cognitive process presupposes the upstream definition of the direction and objective to be imprinted in the transformation of subjectivities. Co-research, therefore, primarily as a form of militant research, is a praxis that can neither be formalised and enclosed a priori in a single method nor, above all, in a result to be achieved that has been defined in advance. Even in periods of social passivity, it allows for reading trends and latency lines in the technical and political composition of the working class as well as identifying the inherent potential for conflict, despite the ambivalence of informal class organisation. Alquati’s conricerca is thus employed in the first instance not only when conflict is taking place but in its latency, in its ability to form grounded hypotheses of possible developments. As a knowledge practice and process whose outcome is indeterminate, co-research produces an epistemological rupture and is also distinctly different from other models of social research, including other militant approaches (Cavazzini, 2013). This is not to deny that there may exist differences in role and function between militant researchers and the research subject/object—but if so, they move in an open, dialogic, circular continuum of influence and feedback (Armano, 2020). The objective, therefore, is the creation of a horizontal relationship of theory-practice-organisation, engaged in a cyclical cognitive and transformative movement of self and reality. At first glance, this may be considered a methodological feature of co-research, but the issue is not so simple; it is instead laden with implications that refer primarily to a political issue of reappropriation of knowledge and power. An in-depth critical discussion of this can be found in chapter five of Antonella Corsani’s book, which reads co-research as a model of implicit social research (Corsani, 2020).

It is clear from what has been said so far that co-research and workers’ inquiry (Woodcock, 2021) make up two distinct models of militant practice and research. The aim of producing intentionally oriented knowledge certainly unites inquiry with co-research. In the latter, however, there is a radical questioning of the separation between thought and action that remains in inquiry, of the distinction between the agency that promotes knowledge and the social actors who are its recipients, and therefore between the production of knowledge and the political or union organisation that employs it. Co-research is the shared production of knowledge as well as the production of capacity to act in a single solution, given the tension towards the creation of an autonomous subject capable of integrating thought and action:

Co-research involved male and female workers, clerks, technicians, etc. within a systematically executed research work with intellectuals and researchers from outside the workplace, even if in some ways rooted within it. This relationship and exchange was experienced as mutually formative and multiplied in avalanche in such a way as to involve more and more workers in the knowledge/action process (Corsani, 2020: 174).

Co-research, Workers’ Inquiry, Action Research. What Are Their Similarities and Differences?

While workers’ inquiry, action research, and co-research may appear to be structured on cognitive and epistemological foundations somewhat similar to those of sociological research, in co-research the questions of the partiality of knowledge, the validity of the results, and more generally of the aims of research diverge sharply, posing themselves in different terms from those of sociological research. In the co-research perspective, first of all, the function of social research can never be of a cognitive type aimed at itself, just as knowledge can never think of itself as neutral and objective. Instead, it is always of an intentional type, i.e., aimed at identifying social problems and contributing both to the formulation of hypotheses on the causes and to the search for practices of transformation of reality and the participants that are part of it.

As Masiero (2022) and Di Nunzio (2022) argue with regard to action research, recalling Alain Touraine (1978), the organisations of the workers’ movement interpret the conditions and complexity of social life through collective elaboration. From this basis, they nurture actions that are more or less conflictual, aimed at fostering the subjectivation of workers and opposing the power of the dominant actors, contending with the latter for the cultural orientations that define the modern era. Action research has, therefore, a specific role in the broader process of the union’s collective elaboration. In summary, action-research can be considered as a collective elaboration conducted with a scientific method, which has been structured over time. As such, it has accompanied the development of the trade union movement, to the extent that it has been considered a determining factor in the construction of an autonomous point of view of workers and their representatives for providing a connection between the labour movement and the scientific community and other social and institutional actors. Different degrees of participation and different styles characterise all three of these critical research models. The following table briefly defines the similarities and differences between these various approaches.

Table 1. Comparison of dimensions characterising action research, workers inquiry, co-research in relation to sociological research

		Social research
		Sociological Research	Militant (Engaged) research
			Action research	Workers’ enquiry	Co-research
1	Value orientation	Implicit values	Explicit values	Explicit values	Explicit values
2	Main authors and reference theorists	Serge Paugam	Kurt Lewin, Alain Touraine	Raniero Panzieri, Vittorio Rieser	Danilo Montaldi , Romano Alquati
3	Aims of the intervention	Producing knowledge of reality	Producing transformative knowledge	Producing transformative knowledge	Producing transformative knowledge
4	Choice of objective	Defined upstream by researchers	Defined upstream by researchers	Defined upstream by researchers	Defined in a first approximation upstreamby researchers, but liable to be implemented and redefined in the course of implementation by participants
5	Planning and organi­sational manage­ment of the research intervention	Separate activity, carried out mainly by the researchers	Activity partially shared with the participants	Activity partially shared with the participants	Activity shared with the participants
6	Relationship between researcher-principal investigator (com­mittente)-participant	Usually clearly distinguishable roles(e.g. in the case of academic research carried out within the university or academic research commissioned by institutions)	Distinguishable but overlapping roles between client and researcher (e.g. a trade union commissions its own researchers to carry out a survey)	Distinguishable but overlapping roles between client and researcher (e.g. a political agency promotes the survey through its members who carry out the research work)	The role of the client overlaps with the role of the participant.The various roles of researcher – client – participant are negotiable.
7	Participation of social actors in the process research.	Considered only as object of research during data collection	Included in the field research phase, data collection, and potentially also in the other phases	Included in the field research phase, data collection, and potentially also in the other phases	Included in principle in all phases including preliminary formulation of initial hypotheses, design and organisation of the research, access to the field, data collection, analysis interpretation of results and discussion
8	Recursive­ness of research process and possible reformu­lation of theorical hypotheses	No discussion of research findings is necessarily envisaged with participants	Envisaged as an integral part of the research process	Envisaged as an integral part of the research process	Envisaged and a fundamental part of the research process

Source: own elaboration.

Co-research, like workers inquiry and action research, belongs to the broad field of knowledge-oriented studies premised upon the critical and transformative intentionality of reality. On the basis of what has been said so far, we believe it is possible to provisionally situate co-research within the heterogeneous landscape of critical social research (Cardano & Ortalda, 2016; Murgia, 2020) and the approach of sociologia di posizione e militante [militant and committed sociology] (De Nardis et al., 2023). In broad terms, co-research can be thought of as a model of cognitive and transformative practice in which subjects: a) autonomously analyse their own condition; b) self-organise their knowledge of the reality in which they live and act; c) make use of more structured external knowledge that is placed at their service. With this type of approach, the subject of the research is identified together with the object, while research methods and aims are defined collectively and progressively in the course of the research. Thus, the ends of research, the ends of political action, and the goals of change are linked together and – quite originally – field research is linked in a combined manner with the means, i.e., technological artefacts, organisation understood as a set of formal and informal procedures and languages. This in turn produces a process of self-organisation that invests knowledge and action, starting from the identification of the lines of force already existing in the present, even if in embryonic form.

In so doing, the research ambitiously aims to solve an impossible equation: to hold together the epistemology typical of the modernist perspective that considers reality as an objectifiable and knowable product, and the interpretive perspective in which the organisation of processes is defined as the social construction of reality through the meanings attributed to it by subjects. Can these participative research models be considered ‘scientific’? The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s answer (2002) to this question is yes, if we want to define ‘science’ as engaged knowledge that actually wants to change the world in order to improve working and living conditions. In her study on the relationship between research and trade unions, Ida Regalia (2022) discusses the critical relationship between researchers-commissioners-participants by highlighting the existence of a necessarily (structurally) complex relationship, usually existent in participatory engaged research—a relationship rich in implications, including epistemological ones. Taking into account what has been said so far, and the critical nodes that appear to be open and remain to be explored in perspective in the future, it would be interesting to develop a systematic theoretical and methodological reflection on the relationship between action-research, inquiry, and co-research. In particular, to explore the implications between them and union and political action, starting from a comparison of some experiences, in order to identify the advantages, limitations, critical issues, and perspectives of each. This would entail considering: a) their objectives (scientific knowledge, collective action, individual involvement); b) the sense of action (planned intervention, explication of values); c) the organisational model (co-management and participation). Such a project could benefit from the influence of critical Marxian epistemology present in contemporary sociological approaches of inquiry—think of Alain Touraine’s intervention sociologique (1978) that proposes a social research practice capable of triggering processes of reflexivity in the social actors investigated (Toscano, 2023).

Why Talk about Co-Research Today? Can It Still Be Considered Relevant?

Can co-research be thought of today as it was practised in the 1950s and 1960s, during the era when the class composition was dominated by the Taylor-Fordist factory? Obviously, we do not believe that this particular form of co-research can be reintroduced, yet some of the fundamental characteristics of that model remain highly topical. Let us see what they are. Co-research is primarily a form of militant research, a practice that cannot be formalised, rather than a method. It allows—even in periods of social passivity—a reading of the lines of tendency and latency in the technical and political composition of the working class, along with the identification of the intrinsic potential for conflict despite the ambivalence of informal class organisation. Alquati’s conricerca, as Chicchi and Cominu (2013) write, was employed in the first instance not when the conflict is in place to ride it and act as a sounding board but ‘tepidly’, in its latency, in its ability to foresee and anticipate it. It is therefore not exhausted by the actuality of the two key concepts of which it is innervated: class composition and subjectivity.

Class composition concerns the relationship between collective labour/activity and capitalist organisation; it is historically determined in the link that is established between the technical composition and the political composition, that is, between the capitalist articulation of labour (and activity) in its relationship to machines and the formation of the class as a potentially independent subject (Bologna, 2013). Steve Wright (2020) points out that in Alquati’s reading of the concept of class composition, the organisational dimension, both as the capitalist articulation of labour and its hierarchisation and as the informal fabric of relations, is more important than the technological one in the strict sense. Romano Alquati’s essays in Quaderni Rossi and Classe Operaia (Alquati, 1962, 1963, 1975) and Sergio Bologna’s writings (1972, 2013) constitute the primary and immediate source for exploring this notion, the political utility of which is considerable and has allowed operaists to leave their own special imprint on the reading of class politics during the Long ’68 of the 1960s and 1970s (von Kempis, 2008).

Alquati defined subjectivity heuristically as:

a system of beliefs, visions and conceptions, representations, awareness, informal and formalized knowledge and culture … and desires, of certain aspects of the imaginary and even of passions and will, of options… (Alquati, 1993, p. 27).

It is not, therefore, an already given; on the contrary, subjectivity is to be defined “in the open space of possibilities located between what does not exist and what is already given” (Conricerca.org, 2012), in which the complex process of re-subjectification and construction of autonomy is located in the reciprocal recognition. There are therefore many nuances that characterise the notion of subjectivity. So, how can co-research still be relevant in times of precarious subjectivity? By precarious subjectivity, we refer to the lived experience of socialisation brought about by digital platforms, in particular to the experience of systematic risk-taking which has become very important. Together with the aspects of performance measurement, relational skills, and communicative risk management, it constitutes the core of the ongoing process of precarisation. Adherence to the underlying performative model of self-entrepreneurship constitutes the fundamental prerequisite for the construction of the neoliberal subject (Armano et al., 2022). This particular implicit notion of precariousness does not deny, but rather expands and goes beyond the boundaries of the notion of precarious work, i.e., contractual and occupational precariousness, the spread of temporary and freelance work in relation to casualisation and the general change in the regulation and conditions of the labour market (Moore, 2018).

How can the new composition be defined and investigated? This involves seeing how co-research can be inscribed on the one hand in the current conditions of capital development and on the other contribute to defining processes of re-subjectivation. Let us try to outline a few elements that go in this direction and that match the processes underway. Alquati identifies in the industrialisation processes of human activity as such, the re-subjectification of capitalist subsumption on the terrain of the overall reproduction of capital and in particular of social reproduction. His studies on production, services, and education (and more generally on the commodified reproduction of human-living-capacity as a product of capital) attempt to explore the new class composition defined by the process of hyperindustrialisation as the effective capitalist subsumption of the entire human experience and the valorisation of social reproduction (Alquati, 1989, 2021). In order to avoid possible misunderstandings, it is necessary to clarify that by industrialization, we do not mean here the statistical-commodity definition according to which industrialization represents the secondary, manufacturing sector of the economy. Industry is not a sector, but rather a way-of-organising human activity. In a polemic with post-industrial theorists, industrialization is defined here as a transversal mode of organising production (and tendentially all human action, including in the sphere of reproduction, consumption, and social life in general) in a serial and proceduralised manner.

So the ‘industrial’ is configured as a:

collective and scientifically organised way of acting/working, based on machinery as the material basis and on innovation and progressive labour-saving/activity and time (Alquati, 1997, p. 53).

In such a formulation, it is assumed, from a logical point of view, that certain general features of the industrial mode such as seriality, modularity, standardisation, go beyond the manufacturing sector to extend to the spheres of the social, educational, and more generally to the reproductive in a systemic sense (Pentenero, 2019). Alquati’s concept of industrial is thus defined as a transversal way of organising the whole of human action. The insistence on processes of industrialisation does not lead Alquati to deny the discontinuity with the previous capitalist phase, but instead to account for the leap made in certain structural invariances, including the extension and intensification of processes. In a passage from his last paper (dating from 2001/2002 and just recently been published in 2021), hyperindustrialism is in fact also defined in reference to the digital transition as:

a transversally organised manner, which is at least implicitly collective, of working in networks including telematic ones, both in a distributed form as well in the form of rather centrally organised command pyramids, consisting of cooperative psychic and neo-artisanal relations, in which this cooperative work in general is pre-composed and redistributed by means of a computerised (and numbered, digitalised, etc.) and virtualised sign plan that pre-reintegrates it by way of signs into the network according to a peculiar and flexible scientific rationality aimed at saving, above all, psychic human-living capacity, time and capital, and aiming at obtaining such savings by way of innovations. Hence it proceeds.˙..˙.through high degrees of standardisation and repetition, in a planned and programmed manner which is continuously adjusted (by means of real-time control), and leads to the use and continuous development – primarily qualitative – of the rather intangible machinery, towards new and more powerful and automatic man-machine systems and thus necessarily open towards the future (Alquati, 2021, p. 39).

On the basis of this interpretative approach, the transition to the digital is here described as a qualitative leap in the process of industrialisation in which the digital machine expresses an unprecedented formative power in the intensification of the power of codification, control, surveillance, and addressing of social practices. The emphasis is not on a new type of technology, but rather on the reorganising and colonising dimension of platformisation (Cingolani, 2021; Armano & Cominu, 2021), on an organisational relationship based on the active combination between capital means^[5] and human activity:

What is meant by active combination? And what characterises it? […] For several years now I have been modelling activity hypothetically, especially in relation to human capacity, and specifically in relation to knowledge which is a very important part of it, taking into consideration its commodification and its development as capital means etc. And [I have modelled it] as an indispensable and irreducible and ever-present active combination of human capacity with the means […]. [… ] There are two innermost components that constitute the heart of [human] action: the human agent and the means. These two are always inevitably combined: there is no agent without means, and despite automation, there are still no means without an agent, at least not on a truly significant scale. That is why I say that what acts is indeed an ‘active combination’ of agent [and] means or ‘co-activity’ (Alquati, 1996, pp. 15-16).

It is therefore not simply a matter of processes of digital Taylorism that have been extended to social spheres: what actually succeeds in imposing control over the social actor at the same time is not a simple technology of digital neo-Taylorist disciplining that controls, limits, traces, and directs, but rather the social relationship that is being established by way of the new digitally mediated organisation (Heiland, 2022; Beverungen, 2017). But how does it act? Contrary to common sense, digital algorithms do not detect but provide a description of social reality, and thereby constitute it on the basis of questionable criteria. The various standardisation procedures operating in digital algorithms in fact only evaluate those selected aspects through the ranking mechanisms which are susceptible to quantification, thereby using a mechanism by reputational digital processes that tends to create the object which is supposed to pre-exist the executed evaluation. This process of continuous evaluation and measurement, operating in all digitally mediated social spheres, acts as a discourse of truth, a verisimilar representation (Sadin, 2015) to be internalised. In such a discourse that presents itself as truthful, quality is determined by quantity measured through processes governed by a priori criteria encapsulated in the purposes written upstream in algorithms (Cardon, 2015). Thus, it would be a mistake to read into all this ‘only’ a deepening and extension of the tendencies towards standardisation and impoverishment that had already been identified by Braverman (1974). Today’s processes of hyperindustrialisation are less evident than those of the Fordist factory but more pervasive than in the past. Previously, ‘external objects’ such as stamping machines and chronometers disciplined rhythms, times, and working and living conditions, thus intervening exogenously, outside the social actor. Now, in order to better respond in a performance-oriented manner, the procedures of industrialisation with digitalisation extended to everyday life directly intervene in the fabrication of subjectivity as such: the hyperindustrialisation inherent in the functioning of the digital machine thus tends to address (not only the labour power of Marxian memory but) all active human capacity in a performance-oriented sense (Chicchi & Simone, 2018) tending to perform subjectivity.

From this point of view, the real challenge for capital as the factory of the performing subject is to form a subjectivity that is no longer simply disciplined in production but rather the machinic subjectivity of an actor who acts with autonomy (instrumental and organisational for capitalist purposes) and ‘creativity’ in all social spheres. The second aspect Alquati helps us to identify is the change in class composition through the extension of hyperindustrialisation to capitalist social reproduction on the cognitive and the thymic level. In this process, it is informality that is heavily invested, in the sense that present-day capitalism requires social actors with pro-active capacities both in the places of production and in the spaces of social life. The new type of active combination then comes to hinge on the autonomy required of active human capacity and individualisation. Autonomy understood as the capacity of the social actor at work to organise and give itself the tools to be able to take upon itself the risk of achieving capital’s goals becomes a criterion for evaluating performance, and precariousness concerns the intensification of work rhythms and the forced readiness to be always connected but also and above all the more general becoming an enterprise of the person (Gorz, 2003). In this context of the industrialisation of action, the problem of the production of the neo-liberal subject and the question of widespread precarity arises, including the increasing fragility of the social bond and of the identity of the human being, here previously referred to as precarious subjectivity.

The fundamental point to be made is that in the present social composition, the question of autonomy is posed in quite a different way from how it was posed in the Fordist-Taylorist phase of mass production within which co-research was developed. In the Fordist world, autonomy relied essentially on the informality necessary to make the procedurality formally provided for in the scientific organisation of labour actually function. In this informality lay its ambivalence, that is, in its being able to become a space of resubjectivation for the tendency to organize struggles for the establishment of class for itself. Since that epoch, there have been many steps that in various respects have gradually marked the transition. The fact is that today we are witnessing a sort of reversal of the sign of autonomy, which, while it tends to affirm itself at the level of useful activity, at the same time is increasingly directed by outside influences (or heterodirected) in that it is subordinate to the development of the performing precarious subjectivity. This does not detract from the fact that informality re-proposes itself once again—albeit within a grid predetermined by the new technical composition—and it is at this level that co-research must place itself.

If the combination-activity of a new kind between hyper-industrialised form and machinic subjectivity appears today as the unilateral dominance of technology over society and life, we must strive to grasp the elements of ambivalence and the possibility of inventing re-subjectivations and practices capable of escaping the commodification of formatted and hyper-industrialised relations. The challenge, then, is to attempt to distinguish between a hyper-industrialised form of empowerment of capital which is in a way already fully inscribed in a performance logic and a form which potentially contains an ambivalence that is unsustainable for capital and can be reversed into a logic of re-appropriation and self-determination of one’s life. Before dealing with the specific case that we will analyse in the following pages, let us now try to draw some principles from what has been said so far about the potential for ambivalence and how it can be identified. First: as structures that are simultaneously organising and connecting, the new digital tools create new environments in which there are new spaces of interaction. Second: these spaces are potential sites of conflict in which each social actor exercises all the power it possesses. Third: the new digital organisational environments settle against the backdrop of the pre-existing distributions of social, organisational, economic, and political power, roles, and inequalities. Fourthly, this means that the new balance of power between social actors that results from everyone’s ability to be more connected is something deeply uncertain and unstable. These key aspects will become clear with the following description of the case of the riders’ experience of digital counter-connectivity.

Doing Co-research in the Time of Platform Capitalism

According to official data, some 500 digital platforms operate in the European Union alone, employing at least 28 million workers (Consilium.europa.eu, n.d.). The phenomenon is therefore significant (Huws et al., 2016) and is also forecast to be growing. Some web-based platforms operate exclusively online, enlisting people (perhaps on another continent) to obtain services such as translations, lessons, consultancy, call centres or chat services, or to perform micro-jobs such as transcribing an audio recording, recognising an image, solving a captcha, or reading a receipt. In these cases, each individual service is a separate task and is paid separately: there is no continuity in the working relationship, managers, workers, and customers never meet each other physically. In all of these cases, one speaks of ‘crowdwork’, literally ‘work in the crowd’, because you offer your work online to a potentially infinite mass of customers who then ‘choose’ you, perhaps for that one micro-service, that single micro-performance. Other so-called ‘location-based’ platforms offer services on the ground. This is the more familiar world of ‘riders’ who bring food to our doorstep, Uber ‘drivers’ who act as taxi drivers, ‘shoppers’ who bring groceries to our homes, etc. These platforms make use of workers who operate in a delimited geographical area, physically coming into contact with customers (and potentially with each other) (De Agostini, 2024).

As regards the Italian situation, according to the INAPP 2022 study, in 2020/21 570,000 people could be classified as digital platform workers, distributed variously between 36.2% home meal delivery (the riders), 14% product or parcel delivery, 4.7% drivers (Uber type), 9.2% housework, 34.9% online activities, 1% other activities (INAPP, 2022). From a theoretical point of view, there has been discussion as to whether platform capitalism is the emerging model that capitalism has adopted as a strategy for its exit out of the crisis (Scholtz, 2016; Srnicek, 2016; Armano, Briziarelli, Risi, 2022; Mezzadra, Cuppini, Frapporti, Pirone, 2024; Vale, Ferreira, Rodriguez, 2024) and for inducing the rise of accumulation on a global scale. A phenomenon that already constitutes a significant trend, even though in quantitative terms it is still lagging behind other forms of employment, hence the importance of opening up terrain for theoretical-empirical analysis. Some social processes seem to confirm a reading according to which platform capitalism may be able to intervene in the crisis where the mechanisms of accumulation have jammed.

The co-research approach is once again of some possible relevance today to help us define and interrogate today’s class composition, which includes forms of life and work organised through digital networks and platforms (delivery, personal services, etc.), and to investigate subjectivities. As in the mega-machine (Mumford, 1971) of the classical industrial era, today’s class composition is characterised by structured work and activities, socialised today in platforms. Whilst being reduced as it was then to measurable standards, now, however, formal autonomy, algorithmic surveillance coexist, with the possibility (for platform operators) of control with tools that Taylor could not have imagined even in his wildest dreams, as David Noble states regarding post-Taylorist technology (Noble, 1993).

The plight of riders is exemplary for the development of co-research: socialised by an organisation of work mediated by new, digital technology, riders have become the symbol of the most primitive exploitation due to the reintroduction of piecework (task) and the denial of the most basic labour rights. Nevertheless, they have led a great wave of resistance. The beginning of their large-scale mobilisation, which in alternating phases continues to this day, coincided with the August 2016 shift from hourly wages to piecework wages, in London, when workers went from £7 per hour to £1 per delivery, with a flat rate of £3.75 per commission (Dufresne, 2024). A massive strike led to the emergence of a transnational movement of couriers and ultra-precarious workers. In the following year, there were at least forty mobilisations in some fifteen European cities: strikes across Europe (Germany, Spain, Sweden, Denmark, Italy) were particularly visible. Common features emerged: a heterogeneous movement consisting of spontaneous mobilisations, with highly decentralised and diversified expressions, in which weak links between mobilisations and with trade unions prevail (Dufresne, 2024). These are experiences that can also be read in the context of workers’ inquiry (Woodcock, 2021). In Italy in the meantime, and since 2016 (Struggles in Italy, 2016), a rich apparatus of analyses and critical studies has developed, mostly in the run-up to the mobilisations and with the involvement of exponents of the autonomous trades and labour council, the Riders’ Union of Bologna, the Riders’ Collective of Milan and Turin, through focus groups and interviews, site and social analyses, even during the period of the Covid 19 pandemic (Leonardi et al., 2020; De Nevi, 2022).

In the book Pratiche di inchiesta e conricerca oggi [Inquiry and Co-research Practices Today] (Armano, 2020), a number of diverse inquiry and co-research experiences are presented and discussed, all of which are marked by precarity and neoliberalism, prevalent in this era. One of them in particular concerns work on digital platforms with a co-research conducted with cyclo-drivers working for food delivery platforms (Leonardi et al., 2020). It is important to dwell on this specific analysis, also taking into account the fact that the use of work and activities mediated by digital platforms has strongly increased during the Covid 19 pandemic, which has imposed on the one hand the confinement of people, and on the other the use of distance communication enabled by digital technologies. In the article in question (Leonardi et al., 2020), some theoretical-interpretative hypotheses are proposed regarding the introduction of algorithmic management systems explored in relation to both the typical model of industrial capitalism, based on direct and disciplinary control, and the typical managerial model of post-Fordism, focused instead on the subsumption of subjectivity and autonomy (Boltanski & Chiapello, 1999). The results of this research conducted among riders highlight a new class composition oriented by the digital organisational system and algorithmic management in which delivery platforms tend to construct pre-coded environments of situations and possible patterns of action, as well as of routing of responses, both defined a priori. These are environments that shape and constrain workers’ and consumers’ choices, in this sense also conditioning their thinking. Rules of operation are constituted (internalized) through a system of rewards. Exemplary in the algorithmic management of the case studied is the order allocation and performance measurement system integrated with an evaluation system that assesses the performance of the cycle drivers. After the run, both the customers and the recipients of the delivery service provide evaluations through a platform-mediated system. In the illustration below, showing the screenshot of the app on the mobile phone, it is shown how the evaluation and construction of the rating is a complex mechanism involving multiple actors. The rider, in fact, is rated by three entities: the customers receiving the delivery, the restaurants using the platform and, finally, the company (Armano et al., 2022).

Figure 1. Illustration of the rating system

Source: Image taken from: Armano et al. “Algorithmic Management in Food Delivery Platforms”.

A reward-punishment rating system of an apparently objective and impersonal type, based on the choices and willingness of the individual is thus constructed.

In our case study, technology fulfils the function of a tool for the individualised control of workers. The algorithm measures step by step performance and timeline, requiring workers to log in order to start the shift, otherwise the application needed to make deliveries is not activated. From that moment on, riders are constantly geolocalised. At the same time, social actors can potentially use technological means to their own benefit, confront, connect, and mobilise themselves to obtain the improvement of their working conditions. But to do this, they must break the situation of individualisation and performative self-activation acted out in the digital environment constituted by the affordances (Gibson, 1979) designed by the platform—i.e., ‘break’ with the pattern of reactive behaviour and machinic subjectivation directed by the algorithm. They must relate to each other, discuss, reason together, create strategies. Hence the importance of emphasising the possible ambivalence of an organisation centred on digital connectivity and the relational dimension. Capitalist innovation effects the world of work by transforming it. Alquati (2000) defines innovation as recombination between the means and the human agent. If we take a critical look, the starting point is to grasp the ambivalences of innovation and the technology that accompanies it.

The fact that Foodora’s workers created their own WhatsApp group as an alternative to the corporate one in order to coordinate and be able to discuss freely, and without fear of repercussions, shows the contained ambivalence of online platforms, as well as the opportunities for action that subjects can put in place to re-appropriate what, until recently, has been the main corporate instrument of control.

The results of the analysis conducted in the field highlight the ambivalence of connectivity in the condition of riders. What emerges from the single case study can also be extremely useful for the analysis of other contexts. This shows that while digital connectivity constitutes an unprecedented form of pervasive control, it can simultaneously, under certain conditions, be acted upon and reversed by subjects and become a mode of communication and (precarious) self-organisation. Reflecting on the forms of resistance of precarious subjectivity, on the ways in which these forms can increase the capacity for agency of the subjects involved, is then crucial to grasping their capacity for self-organisation. At the same time, it is important to emphasise the ability expressed by workers in using the technological instruments of control to their advantage.

What is the validity of such an approach and the results obtained? The main validation criterion used by co-research is to collectively produce transformative and constitutive knowledge of reality, to produce public space, starting with the analysis of class composition and subjectivity. In our case, the practice of co-research has certainly produced changes: it has highlighted in the public space the condition of riders, a condition that was previously silenced in the mainstream media, and it has prompted initiative on the issue on the part of the unions. More generally, however, it should be noted that the situation is problematic, since the class composition prevalent today can be said to be informed by the processes of hyper-industrialisation and the phenomenon of digital connectivity, with all the related organisational implications, first and foremost concerning subjectivity that is marked by the ambivalent character of autonomy often present in new jobs.

The second criterion for the validity of co-research—in some ways making it akin to the broader field of qualitative research to which action research and ethnographic analysis belong—is that of specificity. In other words, the validity of the results lies in the fact that these results could not have been achieved with other instruments or investigation techniques. It has certain characteristics that partly unite it with the critical approaches of qualitative research and represent its strengths. In fact, like qualitative research, it makes it possible to explore in depth the system of values, motivations, expectations, potentialities, but also and peculiarly the possible lines of rupture with the present; it investigates in depth what quantitative analysis barely points out and/or fails to explain comprehensively; it delves into the systems of meaning and significance of social action; in addition to this, it creates recognitions, identities, and promotes capacities to act in combination with means.

From this point of view, co-research performs a reversal: it makes its partiality not its limitation but its strength. It allows us to know about partialities of reality that are, however, important partialities, which would be inaccessible otherwise. All in all, it can be confirmed that co-research itself is a practice of great interest and topicality because of its considerable complexity due to its intrinsic characteristics, even though it remains to be explored further.

Discussion. Difficult Questions and Generalisations

Digitalisation is a far-reaching technological revolution, but the direction of this development is not predetermined or even intrinsic to the technology. At the same time, digitalisation offers an ambivalent potential, on the one hand for increased capitalist control, and on the other for apparent greater autonomy for everyone. This is particularly evident in the new forms of work controlled by algorithms.

The case of riders seems to describe the current evolution of class composition in continuity with the historical Fordist world. However, this is only an apparent continuity, as the reality is far more complex. In fact, the dominant characteristic of today’s platform capitalism is that it holds together the two major dynamic components of capitalism, which can be defined as the tendency towards homologation and the tendency towards the extreme diversification of realities from a material, organisational, contractual, and subjective point of view.

The overall picture is extremely fragmented: from many points of view, precarity as a political device operates in-depth in a divisive, selectively hierarchising manner (Breman & Van Der Linden, 2015). Unlike the organisational machine typical of the age of Taylorism, the connective machine of the digital era in which we are all immersed and socialised does not tend to homogenise and make similar the social actors performing the same functions, nor does it make its disciplinary power immediately recognisable, precisely because the subject defined through digital devices is a social actor perceived to act with ‘creativity’ and ‘autonomy’. Unlike in the past, connectivity problematically and ambivalently structures digital society. In today’s landscape, wherever there is someone using an app or a platform, there is active combination, and active combination is not only a part of what Alquati called the process of hyperindustrialisation and value extraction, but at the same time shapes organisational processes and subjectivity itself, in a varied, multifaceted, and proactive way. The point to reflect upon in relation to digitalisation, then, is both that of the plurality of working conditions and spaces that shape a multiform disciplining and intensification of processes but also (and above all) of the heterogeneity of subjectivity that has also become difficult to intercept. Autonomy—understood as instrumental autonomy, as motivational and organisational ability to take on risk in a broad sense and choose the tools to activate all possible resources to achieve company objectives—has become a fundamental requirement of work, with effects from the point of view of the content of work activity, organisational and contractual. Through all this, autonomy hybridises all these various planes (Murgia et al., 2020). This particular autonomy, from the point of view of subjectivity, coexists with the spontaneous disposition to individualisation and self-imprisonment of the self. In this process, it is above all the new generations that are losing the sense of problematisation of the existing—a stage of consciousness that long precedes the perception of the possibility of conflict.

According to Bonini and Treré (2024), users of digital platforms tend to develop a repertoire of actions that shows a certain degree of autonomy in terms of agency power. But the range of variation of these actions tends to be limited by the structural constraints imposed by the technological affordances of the platforms and their terms of service.

A key concept for understanding the production of subjectivity in platform capitalism is the concept of affordance, first introduced by psychologist James J. Gibson in the late 1970s, and crucial for understanding how subjectivity and digital machines interact today (Gibson, 1979). As a first approximation, affordance refers to the properties or characteristics of an object or environment that suggests the possible actions an individual can take with it. In other words, affordance describes what an object or space offers or ‘allows’ an individual to do while using it. Thus, an addressing of objects and environments emerges, in an ambivalence that is based on the ‘socio-material’ nature of digital devices, which on the one hand enable—without thus predetermining—a multiplicity of possible social uses, while on the other hand restricting and orienting them through the boundaries set by its material arrangements. Affordances can be defined as the “‘socio-technical architectures’ of platforms, implying their ability to shape the agency of human actors” (Armano et al., 2022, p. 4).

Using this approach, it is also easy to understand the kind of power that algorithms and platforms can wield over life. This power, characterised by a new and positive rather than merely interdictory and disciplinary nature (Rouvroy & Berns, 2013), has been effectively defined by legal philosopher Antoinette Rouvroy as algorithmic governmentality (Rouvroy & Berns, 2013) and as the power of interactions structured around spectacularised and continuous evaluation. Given the general tendency towards hyper-industrialisation that coexists with diversification and fragmentation, the interpretative framework cannot therefore be simplified in terms of digital Taylorism, with a reading of easy continuity with the Fordist-Taylorist world in which co-research was born.

If co-research hinges on a process of relationship and mutual recognition, the problem is that in the current class composition, it is difficult to recognise a critical attitude towards reality in the subjectivity with which one would like to establish a co-research relationship, even though all this is the fundamental and indispensable premise for the passage from passivity to conflict. To think today in terms that are not only individual, to position oneself collectively, on a mass level, is certainly not something immediate: it is not on the prevailing mental horizon, nor is it within the dispositions that emerge spontaneously in society. As Sergio Bologna (2021) has written:

Precisely by observing self-employment I seemed to notice that the absence of an instinct of solidarity, of a drive to coalition—which for example in my generation has always been very strong—is really disappearing in the perception of many people, where individualisation, that is, behaviour determined by the conviction that only the individual solution to problems is the viable one, seems to be an entirely natural, spontaneous, primal way, while the move to coalition involves an effort, a coercion, almost as if it were a cage, and not an instrument of greater power and therefore greater freedom.

Given this tendency that is now inscribed in the social fabric, the role of inquiry and co-research can prove all the more important as a moment of subjectivation for the production of capacities to act in the perspective of a new, possible ‘mutualism’ that counteracts the tendency towards individualisation dominant in the current capitalist phase. From this point of view, both the reflections present in the metropolitan inquiries (POSSE, 2001) reflecting in areas where the tasks are not of the neo-Fordist type and the more recent analyses collected in the book Pratiche di inchiesta e conricerca oggi (Armano, 2020) that are carried out with precarious workers in research, publishing, and journalism (Armano, 2020), provide considerable insight into the complexity and contradictory nature of the processes of subjectivation underway. In a similar fashion, a variety of other experiences and practices are beginning to be expressed in terms of knowledge understood as the defetishisation of dominant social relations, as attempts at re-subjectivation, bending the ambivalence existing in the latent levels of counter-organisation towards the re-appropriation of space and its transformation from abstract to concrete space of struggle. These are experiences that are also innovative, given their exploration and counter-use of digital platforms as mobilisation networks.

Nonetheless, we are still a long way from imagining an organisational counter-machine capable of acting in terms of class autonomy from capital, since today it is always a logic of performance, and precarious subjectivity performing according to affordances, that are at work everywhere. It is necessary to continue investigating how ambivalence acts in the current variegated composition, in what terms, given that today class autonomy in the strong sense is no longer expressed. This has given way to the autonomous but individualising activisation of individuals deputised to transfer human experience to machinic empowerment. Ambivalence still remains, fundamentally, the crux of the dispute: the knowledge and autonomous actions of individuals can be expropriated, bent to capitalist valorization under the codification of formalized technical-scientific language, or shared during the processes of struggle to achieve the true autonomy of subjects from capital (Alquati, 1993).

Conclusion

The co-research approach becomes topical again to define and interrogate the present, which includes forms of life and work organised through digital networks and platforms (delivery, personal services, etc.), and to investigate subjectivities.

The article assumes that there is an inescapable link between observation, knowledge production, and social action and is divided into three parts. In the first part, the article presents a reflection on the value, validity, and limits of co-research within the broader landscape of social research. After introducing the epistemological reasons why co-research and more generally militant forms of social research differ from sociological research, the characteristics that distinguish co-research from other militant engaged research such as social enquiry, action research, and intervention research are described. Co-research has some relevant features that make it quite recognisable and distinctive, through, for example, the use of the concepts of class composition and subjectivity.

In the second part, the article dwells on the reasons why co-research cannot be understood solely as a militant research practice limited to the 1960s, when the factory and Taylorist labour were typical. Instead, co-research can today be considered an interesting model and approach for understanding, interpreting, and transforming the reality of platform capitalism that we are currently experiencing.

In the third part, theoretical-interpretive hypotheses are proposed to read algorithmic management systems with a heuristic and exploratory analysis dedicated to the condition of riders operating through digital platforms.

The analysis compares the control systems present in the platform capitalism model with those of the disciplinary type in the structures of industrial capitalism of Fordist times. In retracing the evolutions of the role played by research in the various capitalist organisational models that have followed one another, from Fordism to the present day, what is brought to light is that digital platforms become the latest piece in the transformation of the space/time coordinates of capitalist production by means of unprecedented devices for disciplining work and social life.

It is clear from the research findings that for the future development of co-research, it is necessary to continue investigating the forms of capitalist valorisation and class composition, taking into account the subsumption dynamics of autonomy opened up by platform capitalism. In this perspective, it is possible to outline two different but strongly intertwined aspects that we can briefly summarise as follows.

The first concerns the attempt to define the boundaries of the emerging model of capitalist subsumption, based on the logic of value extraction, mostly, but not only, on the mediation by digital platforms. For the definition of this new ‘case’ of exploitation, the extremely widespread and transversal form of work experience and activity mediated by digital platforms deserves to be emphasised. On the one hand, it assumes as its distinguishing (even if not exclusive) characteristic, that of the centrality of the performances, at times even disengaging itself from the discipline of wage regulation. On the other hand, it presents a whole series of new mechanisms of subordination that establish new, stringent and wilder modes of exploitation characterised by heterodirection and algorithmic control of activity and work centred on the governance of autonomy, but also traceability, continuous measurement, and above all addressing the production of performing subjectivities, as has been described in this article in the case of the riders.

From this point of view, interest focuses on the analysis of the technical composition of capital, as a reconstruction of the organisational processes that, within this frame composed of affordances and the active combination of human capacity and capital means, realise the extraction of value from those social practices that capitalist socialisation, mediated by digital platforms, makes possible today. Alongside the defining of a hybrid and controversial profile of exploitation, which we might define as performance activity, an organisational model is spreading that underlies a whole series of postures of widespread shadow work implicated by the active combination of algorithms with human activity (Lambert, 2016). By shadow work, we mean all those activities that we do outside our professional activity yet do not perceive as work, but which are in fact free labour tasks.

These are (paid) activities that used to be performed by men and women workers whose jobs have been automated, often through digital platforms on the altar of savings. Furthermore, to analyse the technical composition of the platform-based capitalism model, one must consider that as Zuboff (2018) writes, the digital platform business system certainly has a peculiar side. It detects the traces left by all users and proceeds by means of datafication (data mining): it extracts and uses the extensive data left unconsciously by users, using them and making them available, as a source of value. In direct production processes, digital platforms operate, both upstream and downstream, value extraction mechanisms. They are pivotal infrastructures within the sectors in which they operate, directing—if not even creating from scratch—entire new markets.

In order to analyse the technical composition of capital, we need to go beyond the specific rider model. It is clear that digital platforms encompass not only those services that govern riders. As Srnicek (2016) argues, there are various platform types, and this complexity already suggests that we should not focus the analysis on individual platforms or individual platform types, but rather on the transformation that has reached at the level of the system, the epochal leap in the capitalist system in which tracing and data mining, i.e., the use of work process and customer data by companies, and their translation into value, is relevant.

The second aspect of interest consists in a reflection on the ambivalence contained in the digital organisation and the practices of struggle and resistance that even at this stage can be constituted from the diffusion of the new digital devices of value extraction. In the preceding section of this article, we emphasised that the accentuated individualisation and fragmentation of conditions of work and activity make it particularly difficult to construct collective paths of conflict as an expression of real autonomy from capital. Digital platforms entail an undoubted ability to govern behaviour and direct subjectivities in a performative manner through the affordances contained in digital devices. Nonetheless, platforms cannot be considered exclusively determinants of the reproduction of capitalist social relations.

Steve Wright (2020:126) notes that:

capital seeks not only to replace workers with technology but to design machines that can emulate labour … The boundary between ‘what machines can do’ and ‘what workers can do’ is constantly being redefined; Alquati nonetheless reminds us of the strategic importance of coming to terms with this ‘other side of machinisation’ and the possibilities latent in this in terms of ‘the qualitative growth of the potential of that living labour, of its intensification and empowerment’.

In this regard, workers and users of digital platforms show that they have developed a repertoire of actions that testifies to the existence of a certain degree of agency at their disposal (Bonini & Treré, 2024). The most recent experiences of mobilisation that we have seen multiplying among riders and drivers show how it is possible to succeed in affecting these arrangements by also leveraging the organisational ambivalences contained in the platforms. This aspect that we could very schematically define as the analysis of political composition is the one in which we need to invest most in order to begin a transformation of social relations and converge shared knowledge into forms of liberation and political struggle to affirm autonomy from capital. There needs to be a way to give value and visibility to all possible endemic and everyday forms of algorithmic action and resistance, and it needs to be emphasised that the platform society is a battleground contested by opposing forces.

While it is true that algorithms are everywhere around us, permeating more and more aspects of our daily lives, and while narratives about the power of platforms tend to present them as the one best way, the only inevitable objective power, however, namely people and workers, can resist the power of algorithms in a variety of spheres. People and workers can collectively appropriate new modes of action to reconfigure algorithms and pursue their goals as a class.

It is precisely the problem of organisation that needs to be rethought. During Fordism, co-research identified organisation as a given, a paradigm of the existing, both as capitalist organisation and as trade union organisation. In the current situation in which the new technical composition of capital is characterised by performativity and individualisation (of which freelancers and platform users are the emblems), it is necessary to consider class organisation not as a paradigm but as an option of individual and collective action.

References

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