In the age of platform capitalism, everything seems to be changing — except for the well-worn ideological refrains about the disappearance of the working class. The 1990s and 2000s were boom years for the rhetoric of permanent change. Jeremy Rifkin advocated “the end of work” and the Californian ideology of “disruption.” Pundits continually announced the overcoming of class conflict and the restoration of a market society based on a consumerist and entrepreneurial citizenship.

This was not just rhetoric, for it was embodied in elements of reality. Underlying this new dominant ideology was the real crisis of Fordism, the model of accumulation that had dominated the postwar period. The declining labor movement, expanding globalization, the birth of the internet, and the financial restoration were accompanied by new forms of accumulation and new paradigms of governance of the capitalist firm and of exchange. The contours of these new paradigms were not defined, but it was clear to most observers that everything was “new” (a “new spirit of capitalism,” according to Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello), “post-Fordist,” and “networked” (as Manuel Castells announced in his research). Fordism, with its compromise between capital and labor, its large concentrated and monopolistic companies, and its state interventionism in the economy gave way to the establishment of the free market as a form of regulation of social relations, to the flexible, networked company, concentrated on the core of its activity and outsourcing the rest. In the following decade, the contours of the new post-Fordist paradigm were strengthened with the advent of the platform economy, with Amazon perhaps the most successful example.

Yet the development of Amazon has itself revitalized some of the aspects of Fordism that the new platform capitalism claimed to have overcome: network effects fueled monopoly; venture capital concentrated financial flows; the platform internalized the market within the firm (in their People’s Republic of Walmart, Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski showed how Amazon actually resembles a huge, private, economic planning mechanism); and coordination between economic actors has given way to vertical and horizontal integration. Finally, bureaucratized, Taylorized, and massified wage labor has not disappeared, as we see in the recent mobilizations of Amazon workers in the United States and Europe. Rather, logistics operations, the backbone of Amazon’s business, bring together millions of workers around the world. It is from these elements, from this hybridization between platform capitalism and Fordism, that we can identify a specific paradigm: Plat-Fordism.