Algorithmic Management and the Logistics of Exploitation

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

“The circulation of commodities is the starting point of capital. The production of commodities, their circulation, and that more developed form of their circulation called commerce, these form the historical ground-work from which it rises.”

— Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I

In The Acceleration of Decay, I made a brief argument that I am returning to here at length. Writing about the pandemic lockdowns and the state-engineered consolidation of monopoly logistics, I noted in passing that the “essential worker” of 2020 was not in fact producing surplus value in the classical Marxist sense. The Amazon driver, the DoorDash courier, the Instacart shopper, the Uber driver, all were doing something different: circulating commodities whose value had already been extracted elsewhere. I called them an army of circulation rather than an army of production, and I moved on.

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Algorithmic Management and the Logistics of Exploitation