Take Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, which the company describes as a ‘crowdsourcing marketplace that makes it easier for individuals and businesses to outsource their processes and jobs to a distributed workforce who can perform these tasks virtually’. But let us call it what it is: a cloud-based sweatshop where workers are paid piece rates to work virtually. Nothing is happening there that Karl Marx had not fully analysed in the twenty-first chapter of the first volume of his Capital, where he stated: ‘Piece-wages become…the most fruitful source of reductions in wages and of frauds committed by
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