ABSTRACT
This chapter theorises the inclusion of ‘diverse’ workers into global capitalism by means of platform crowdsourcing through the prism of the Marxian notion of ‘relative surplus population’, by which is meant ‘the portion of the working-age population, who are surplus to the immediate needs of capital for waged labour at any given place and time. It deals with a reading of crowdsourcing as transforming not only the socio-demographic and geographical composition of labour through the digitally mediated integration of part of the relative surplus population but also, by so doing, its relation to capital, weakening labour’s ability to obtain a living wage from the sale its labour power. The qualifier ‘relative’ points to this inextricable relationship of surplus populations to the cyclical expansion and contraction of capital accumulation. Crowdworkers find themselves in a particularly weak position to determine how much they work due to information asymmetries between workers, platforms, and clients.
