Reflecting on law, code and exploitation: corporations and the working conditions of the digital proletariat

Aitor Jiménez is based at International Institute for the Sociology of Law as Ramon y Cajal Professor and is a Professor at the University of the Basque Country. He is also affiliated with the University of Melbourne Criminology Department and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. He has a transdisciplinary academic and professional background in law, sociology, criminology, and politics and his research and teaching are informed by his commitment to social, environmental, and anticolonial struggles. His latest book, The Crimes of Digital Capitalism Corporate Crime in an Age of Exploitation, will be published in March 2025 by NYU Press.

The session will build on Aitor’s paper ‘Law, Code and Exploitation: How Corporations Regulate the Working Conditions of the Digital Proletariat’, published in 2022 in Critical Sociology.

The abstract  of the paper reads as follows: “Contrary to what orthodox Marxism claims, the article defends that the legal field has been a fundamental aspect of the capitalist social ordering, and an unavoidable feature to understand how dominated subjectivities are produced and exploited. Expanding Lessig’s concept of ‘code as law’ with Marxist scholarly insight, the article argues that digital capitalists are reorganising work and the labour force through a form of algorithmic regulation. The article states that algorithms – that is, digital machines – have become not only part of the means of production of the era of automation, but also the code by which capitalists are writing the conditions of existence and exploitation of the digital proletariat. The article bridges recent contributions on labour law, AI and algorithmic regulation with the latest Marxist sociological contributions analysing the relation of work and digital exploitation, opening with it new ways to understand how sociotechnical systems owned by corporations regulate the behaviour not only of the working class but of the wider citizenry.” 

To follow the session, participants invited to read the paper and the text of the EU AI Act.