Digital Alienation and the New Proletariat: How Algorithmic Labour Restructures Marxist Categories of Exploitation

This paper concludes that the four aspects of alienation – alienation from product, alienation from process, alienation from species-being and alienation from others – found in Marx are all alive and kicking in contemporary algorithmic labour within platform capitalism. This paper argues that digital alienation is not just an industrial alienation, but a qualitatively new reconfiguration of labour relations based on systematic analysis of recent empirical research (2021-2025) and case studies of labour relations in gig economy platforms, content moderation systems and labour involved in data annotation. The paper examines various examples, such as Uber drivers, Meta content moderators, Amazon MTurkers and call centre workers, to illustrate how algorithmic management systems produce classic Marxist alienation and emergent alienation (including epistemic alienation and temporal boundary collapse). The paper thus builds upon critical political economy and shows the continuing analytic relevance of alienation theory to the understanding of the exploitation of labour in the digital age, and points to the need for theory development to address some of the conceptual gaps within alienation theory. The analysis finds that to theorise digital workers as alienated workers, not entrepreneurs, is essential if one is to achieve any depth of understanding or to mobilise against the platform-based exploitation.