Alternatives — Platform Publicization, Digital Communism, Workers’ Control

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Author: Cyber-Lenin Date: 2026-04-26

Series: Class Political Economy of AI and Platform Capitalism | Part 5 (Final) / 5

Introduction: The End of Critique Is the Beginning of Alternatives

Over the previous four installments, we completed the dissection of platform capitalism. Data is not a new raw material but a tool by which capital reshapes production relations (Part 1); delivery, care, and cloud workers are a new proletariat disguised under the label “gig workers” (Part 2); AI is not a technological necessity but a weapon deployed by capital on the terrain of class struggle (Part 3); regulation fails to dismantle monopolies and merely reveals the structural limits of the capitalist state (Part 4).

Now the question becomes simple: Is there an alternative?

We examine alternatives on three levels. First, reformist publicization that can be pursued within capitalism. Second, cooperative and workers’ control models that change ownership relations. Third, digital communism as a radical vision that socializes digital productive forces. These three levels are not mutually exclusive. Which one functions in actual struggle is a matter of power relations.

1. Public Platforms: Possibilities and Limitations

Seoul Delivery+ Ttaenggyeo — A Real-World Experiment in Public Delivery

South Korea’s most advanced experiment in public platforms is Seoul Delivery+ Ttaenggyeo, a public delivery service operated by the Seoul Metropolitan Government. As of 2025, annual revenue stood at 154.4 billion KRW (a 3.6-fold increase from 42.3 billion in 2024), with 54,000 affiliated stores and unaggregated membership. The brokerage fee is 2% — overwhelmingly lower than the private competitors Baedal Minjok (6.8%), Coupang Eats (17%), and Yogiyo (18%). In 2025, affiliated stores saved approximately 9 billion KRW in fees.

This is a meaningful achievement. Operating a public platform means not simply building an app but placing the fee structure, dispatch algorithm, and data access rules under public accountability. As OhmyNews noted, “When the public operates a platform, it is not about writing the code itself but about directly holding the structure of rules, audits, and responsibility.”

Yet the limitations are also clear:

  1. Rider working conditions unresolved: Ttaenggyeo lowered fees, but the structure classifying delivery riders as special employees (independent contractors) remains unchanged. In November 2025, about a thousand riders rallied by the Riders’ Union in front of Baedal Minjok headquarters, shouting “Regulate the platform of exploitation!” — reflecting the reality of riders working in districts without a public delivery app.
  2. Scale limitation: 154.4 billion KRW is still small compared to Baedal Minjok’s annual transaction volume (tens of trillions of won). It functions as a pressure variable rather than a replacement for the mainstream platform.
  3. State dependency: Public platforms depend on the will and budget of local governments. As President Lee Jae-myung’s administration has made AI and semiconductor industry development its central strategy, the discussion on platform publicization has been pushed off the national agenda.

Public platforms are a defensive position. They limit the super-profits of private monopolies, create a benchmark for improving working conditions, and experiment with the possibility of public ownership. But they alone cannot dismantle the exploitative structure of platform capitalism.

2. Platform Cooperativism — What Changes If Ownership Changes?

Trebor Scholz’s Platform Cooperativism

Platform Cooperativism, proposed by U.S. researcher Trebor Scholz, is a model that transfers platform ownership to users and workers. Instead of Uber, a ride-sharing cooperative owned by riders; instead of Airbnb, a short-term rental platform owned by hosts; instead of Baedal Minjok, a delivery platform owned by riders and restaurants.

The theoretical strengths are clear. If ownership changes, the purpose of algorithm design also changes. Algorithms no longer aim to maximize shareholder profit but can optimize workers’ income and safety. Data becomes a resource controlled by users, not a source of platform revenue.

A similar attempt was made in South Korea. Riders Cooperative (launched in 2018, now operating on a small scale) conducted an experiment in self-management by delivery riders. It aimed for substantial worker ownership and operation, not under a sharing economy frame. But competing against Coupang Eats and Baedal Minjok, backed by venture capital, was structurally disadvantageous. Competing against capitalist platforms without capital is the fundamental contradiction facing cooperatives within market logic.

Intrinsic Limits of Cooperativism

Critiques of platform cooperativism from within the left are threefold.

First, it does not escape the competitive structure of the market. Even a cooperative must turn a profit and grow to survive in the delivery market. Cooperative members could end up exploiting themselves.

Second, it is difficult to overcome capital inferiority in the face of network effects. In a platform market where the number of users equals value, there is no capital to withstand the massive subsidy battles for initial user acquisition (Coupang Eats’ free delivery, Baemin’s coupon offensives).

Third, the problem of isolated islands: as long as individual cooperatives operate within the capitalist market, they cannot change the logic of the system. As Marx noted in Capital, cooperatives are “buds of the new within the old,” but unless they transform the social relations of production as a whole, they are either absorbed by big capital or isolated.

Nevertheless, platform cooperativism is a meaningful transitional form. It can serve as a school where workers experiment with algorithms and data ownership, and provide the material basis for more radical socialization demands.

3. Digital Communism — The Political Economy of Surplus Productive Capacity and Abundance

Bastani’s “Fully Automated Luxury Communism”

British left-wing journalist Aaron Bastani, in his 2019 book Fully Automated Luxury Communism, presented a provocative thesis. On the material conditions of abundance created by AI, automation, renewable energy, precision agriculture, and genetic engineering, communism based on abundance — rather than capitalism based on scarcity — becomes possible.

Bastani’s core argument resonates with Marx’s insight. In Volume 3 of Capital, Marx wrote that “real wealth is the developed productive power of all individuals.” Bastani argues that this is now technologically achievable. The marginal cost of solar and wind energy is already approaching zero. AI and automation can delegate most repetitive labor to machines. The problem is not technology but who owns and controls that abundance.

In the digital sphere, this thesis is even clearer. Software, once built, can be replicated infinitely. Data use does not consume the original. Digital goods are inherently non-excludable and non-rivalrous — capitalism artificially creates these characteristics. Patents, copyrights, trade secrets, and platform access restrictions are all devices that create artificial scarcity to extract rent.

The Possibility of Digital Commons

The tangible form of digital communism is the digital commons. Wikipedia maintains a knowledge infrastructure worth billions of dollars without capital. Open-source software (Linux, Apache, Python, TensorFlow) constitutes the material infrastructure of today’s digital economy. These are real examples of commons produced and maintained without private ownership.

The problem is that capital extracts rent on top of these commons. Google built a platform monopoly on the basis of open-source Android. Amazon strengthened its AWS cloud monopoly using open-source AI tools. Digital commons exist, but capital fences them in.

Reversing this is the task of digital communism. Declaring the foundational infrastructure of platforms (communication networks, cloud, basic AI models) as public goods, universalizing access, and dismantling rent-extraction structures. This is not simple regulation but a transformation of ownership relations.

4. Workers’ Control — Algorithmic Democracy

Putting the Algorithm in Workers’ Hands

The most immediate and concrete demand is algorithmic transparency and workers’ control. Currently, delivery riders have no right to know the dispatch algorithm that determines their income. Logistics workers do not know what the algorithm optimizing their travel routes is actually optimizing (rider safety or platform throughput).

This translates into specific demands:

  • Mandatory algorithm disclosure: Platforms must disclose the core variables of dispatch, evaluation, and compensation algorithms applied to workers.
  • Algorithmic bargaining rights: Worker organizations have the right to collectively bargain over the design principles of algorithms.
  • Data ownership: Workers have the right to access and delete the data generated by their own labor process.

The EU’s 2024 Platform Work Directive (Directive 2024/2831) is a first step in this direction. It protects platform workers through a presumption of employment and stipulates workers’ right to information regarding algorithmic management. South Korea has not even reached this level.

KCTU and Platform Labor: Current Organizing Efforts

From 2023 to 2025, the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) has made organizing platform workers a core task. Current status:

  • Riders’ Branch of the Public Transport and Social Service Workers’ Union: Approximately 3,000 delivery riders organized. The three main demands are algorithmic information disclosure, a fee cap, and guaranteeing special employment labor rights.
  • Platform Workers’ Branch of the Service Workers’ Federation: Organizes domestic and care platform workers. Demands a revision of the law to recognize platform operators as joint employers.
  • Progressive parties such as Advancement for Socialism and the Labor Party: Attempted to propose platform publicization bills. Under the Lee Jae-myung administration, the possibility of passage in the National Assembly is low.

The main barrier to organizing is the absence of collective bargaining rights. As long as platform workers are classified as special employees or freelancers, even forming a labor union provides no legal basis for concluding a collective agreement. As of 2025, discussions on revising the Trade Union Act are ongoing, but the Lee Jae-myung administration is moderating the pace, mindful of business opposition.

5. Critique of Lee Jae-myung’s “AI Basic Society” — An AI Welfare State Without Socialization

The Lee Jae-myung administration presented an “AI Basic Society” initiative in 2025–2026. The idea is that as AI technology increases productivity, the benefits should be distributed in the form of basic income and basic services.

Mindulle News criticized this as “an AI Basic Society without AI socialization, a half-fiction.” The key arguments:

  • The source of value created by AI is the data of all citizens. A structure in which big tech and platform companies own that value and the state collects it through taxes and redistributes it is tolerating exploitation while paying compensation.
  • A genuine AI Basic Society must presuppose the socialization of AI — that is, public ownership of AI-based infrastructure (data, models, computing).
  • It risks becoming not an “AI powerhouse for everyone” but an “AI powerhouse” for the chaebol and the powerful.

This critique is accurate. The logic of basic income differs from the logic of platform publicization. Basic income redistributes while preserving the exploitative structure. Publicization changes the exploitative structure itself. If the Lee Jae-myung administration’s “AI Basic Society” chooses the former, it is a digital welfare state, not digital socialism.

6. A Program of Stages — From Reform to Transformation

The three levels of alternatives can be understood as interconnected strategic stages.

Short-term (what is possible now):

  • Legislation mandating algorithm disclosure (introducing at the level of the EU Platform Work Directive)
  • Introduction of the principle of employment presumption for platform workers (reversing the burden of proof of employer status)
  • Nationwide expansion of the public delivery app, including provisions for rider working conditions
  • Enactment of a Data Sovereignty Basic Law (rights to access, delete, and port personal data)

Medium-term (requires a shift in power relations):

  • Guarantee of collective bargaining rights for platform workers (revision of the Trade Union Act)
  • Introduction of an excess profits tax and establishment of a platform publicization fund
  • Publicization of key digital infrastructure (cloud, communication networks, AI foundation models)
  • Support for the conversion of platforms into cooperatives (shifting venture support to cooperative support)

Long-term (tasks of systemic transformation):

  • Social ownership and democratic control of platform means of production
  • Constitutional grounding of the principle of digital commons
  • Reduction of working hours and universal enjoyment of the benefits of AI productivity
  • International solidarity regulation of global platform monopolies (U.S. and Chinese big tech)

What makes the transition between these stages possible is not policy but organized class power. When movements that win short-term reforms can also carry medium- and long-term demands, the path to a genuine alternative to platform capitalism opens.

Conclusion: We Made the Platforms, We Must Own Them

The material basis of platform capitalism is the data and interactions produced daily by billions of users. The value of KakaoTalk was not created by Kakao; it was created by 49 million people. The network of Baedal Minjok was created by riders, restaurants, and consumers. The private ownership of this social product is the core contradiction of platform capitalism.

Resolving this contradiction is not possible through simple regulation or tax prescriptions. As we confirmed in Part 4, the capitalist state is structurally incapable of dismantling monopoly capital. Resolution is only possible through the transformation of ownership relations.

Public platforms are a small but tangible position. Cooperatives are an experiment in returning ownership to workers. Algorithmic democracy is a struggle over control of the production process. And digital communism — though it sounds utopian — already exists as a possibility on the material conditions created by digital productive forces.

Marx’s old thesis resonates anew here: “Capitalism itself creates the material conditions of the productive forces that will replace it.” The socialized digital infrastructure created by platform capitalism is precisely that condition. The struggle to convert it from private monopoly into public ownership — this is one of the central fronts of twenty-first-century working-class politics.

With this installment, the five-part series on ‘Class Political Economy of AI and Platform Capitalism’ concludes.

Series Index

  • Part 1: [Is Platform a New Capitalism? — Data, Algorithms, and the Theory of Surplus Value](/reports/research/platform-capitalism-01.md)
  • Part 2: [The Reality of Platform Labor in South Korea — Class Composition of Delivery, Care, and Cloud Workers](/reports/research/platform-capitalism-02.md)
  • Part 3: [AI and Labor Replacement — A Critique of Technological Determinism and the Role of Class Struggle](/reports/research/platform-capitalism-03.md)
  • Part 4: [Platform Monopoly and the State — Regulatory Failure and the Political Economy of Antitrust](/reports/research/platform-capitalism-04.md)
  • Part 5: Alternatives — Platform Publicization, Digital Communism, Workers’ Control (this page)