Surveillance Capital and Post-Fordist Accumulation: Towards a Critical Political Economy of Surveillance-for-Profit

This article presents a critical political economy of contemporary surveillance-for-profit. The article makes the central argument that surveillance capital emerged out of the contradictions of capitalist accumulation and remains subject to the imperative of accumulation for the sake of ever more accumulation. Platforms constitute the infrastructure and surveillance provides the instrument for the expropriation-accumulation-commodification of user-generated data. Firstly, the article maps how surveillance capital valorizes. Surveillance capital derives surplus value from expropriation rather than exploitation in a strict Marxian sense. Secondly, the article shows that surveillance capital is far from unique in its expropriation of both resources and labor. Indeed, capitalist accumulation has always entailed both expropriation and exploitation. Thirdly, the article argues that while surveillance has always been a key tool for shaping capital-labor relations, surveillance capital as such first emerged under Fordism and has now become an integral part of a Post-Fordist mode of flexible accumulation that is based on the expansion and intensification of forms of surveillance that arose in response to the requirements and contradictions of earlier modes of capitalist accumulation. The article concludes that Post-Fordist flexible accumulation in general and surveillance capital’s valorization in particular may end up producing a crisis of effective demand, as workers who are subject to increasing precariousness and disposability may no longer have the income to consume the commodities on whose sale surveillance capital ultimately depends.