Class and contention: an introduction

The structural transformations driven by the process of digitalization pose new questions regarding its effects on work and worker agency. Looking at the relationship between digital technologies and work through the lens of contentious politics allows for an understanding of class development in the new digital landscape. In particular, the emergence of a new digital working class and its relationship with other classes must be investigated throughout the whole cycle of the social transformation that gave rise to precarious work.

New forms of worker mobilization have attempted to tackle the problem of the social conditions of precariousness. Our research aims at understanding how the rise of digital technologies has reshaped the concept of work, transformed the social identities attached to it, and thus posed new challenges to social regulation. In this sense, we address the new configuration of individual and collective rights linked to the deregulation of work under neoliberalism and the related debate on the ever-growing ‘precariat’ (Standing, 2011) as a potential new class of workers experiencing the social insecurity linked to neoliberal deregulation in terms of labour fragmentation and contractual instability. Nowadays, this debate on the precariat as a new potential class extends to its digital frontiers, as terms like the cybertariat (Huws, 2009), the info-proletariat (Antunes, 2012, and the virtual class (Casilli, 2020) are coined to refer to a new class of working poor in cyberspace, aware of the complex intertwining between working conditions offline and online.

The debate is thus updating classic questions regarding the centrality of work in society, and how relations between class and labour have changed with the advent of the process of digitalization. This process seems to have strengthened the dynamics of capital accumulation globally. The digitally led accumulation process has, indeed, further expanded the exploitation of labour in intension, as a result of the power of new technologies of automation and datafication over things, artefacts, and humans, as well as in extension, given the expansion of new areas of value accumulation in the virtual and physical world. Research on the effects on contemporary work of these transformations should, therefore, be twofold: examining the pressures from the top, such as the structure of the political economy, and those from the bottom, such as labour bargaining and mobilization power.