The class dynamics of digital platforms in Kazakhstan: neofeudalism, rentierism, and precarity

This chapter examines the class dynamics of digital platforms in Kazakhstan. While the digital transition is seen as a key driver of economic innovation, diversification and growth in a country largely dominated by the natural resource sector and extractivism, the infrastructure of digital platforms can create economic dispossession and precarity for gig workers and retail merchants. Owners of platforms, or ‘digital landowners’, often dominate their sectors, shaping the conditions of labour and exchanges of goods and services. Lacking alternatives, gig workers and retail merchants have little choice but to submit to the demands of platform companies. In contemporary economies, digital platforms are critical for economic activities, mediating transactions between buyers and sellers. Arguably, platforms can be characterised as ‘virtual land’ that enables owners to extract rent from users by mere virtue of having property rights to online sites. Like feudal lords, they receive unearned income, contributing little to nothing to wealth creation. Drawing on the literature on rentier capitalism, the chapter will argue that digital platforms have neofeudal features, in which platform owners extract rent and impose exacting conditions of work and services on platform users. The study is based on 34 qualitative interviews with gig workers and retail merchants in Astana. The interviews explored the mechanisms and justifications for rent extraction, and the accommodation and oppositional practices of merchants and workers. The chapter offers a critical analysis of the platform economy and class struggles in a digital era.