Bipin Balaram
1) The Uber spokesman is quoted in the article defending the surge pricing scheme thus: “While we understand that no one likes to pay more for the same trip, it’s the only way to ensure that passengers can always get a ride when they need one." Capitalism has always been very good at projecting measures intended to boost private profits as 'painful' but 'necessary' steps for the common good. 15 passengers need cabs, you have only 10, how on earth will surge pricing make sure that "... passengers can always get a ride when they need one." Therein lies the point. It is very clear that you cannot satisfy 15 'needs' with 10 cabs, so you make the fare surge in such a way that 5 drop their 'need' for a cab and catch a suburban train instead. Now you see, 10 needs, 10 cabs; everyone gets a ride when they 'need' one. Seen in this way, surge pricing is the inverse of advertisement. The latter creates 'needs' where there are none and the former kills it; in both, every commodity gets a buyer and every capitalist gets his profit.
2) The reaction of Uber drivers to the surge pricing is ambiguous. The article says that the drivers are normally against the proposals to do away with surge pricing. This is because with the surge in fares, their share also increase and workers see this as an 'incentive'. "In the U.S., many Uber drivers get on to the road only during surge hours, and in fact, wait for it." How do they perceive this sudden increase in the money that they pocket? What do they see as the reason for this? Reaction of at least some fo the drivers suggest that they see it as originating from the 'clever' fare manipulations by the corporate house. As it helps them too, they spontaneously side with the company against riders. But, in economic matters, workers cannot be fooled for ever; they tend to get it right very soon. Althusser was correct in his assertion that workers can understand 'Capital' much more easily than philistine, petty bourgeois economics professors who are nothing but confirming and servile. "While a high quantum surge of say, three times the normal fare,would result in extra earnings in cities like Bengaluru, it also means that drivers have to wade through endless traffic to earn the extra amount ... Though earning more was attractive to drivers, the initial enthusiasm has worn off. Drivers realize that there is more demand at a given time because there are more people out on the streets, making driving that much tougher." Many drivers have understood this fact and are saying that the extra money is not worth the effort that they have to put. Thus, it is clear that the extra that the driver makes is not a gift from Uber, nor is it the result of clever pricing from the corporate house, it is the extra that he has earned because he has done extra work. If it takes 20 minutes to travel 10 km in normal time, it may take more than an hour to do so in rush hours. Hence, the extra that he earns is actually not enough to compensate the extra time spent by the driver. But there is someone else who is making easy money from all this dynamic pricing and that is the corporate house itself. The men who own Uber, the executives and the share holders, do nothing, sit tight and make money and in rush hour, they surge the price and make even more money. Thus they bleed both the driver and the rider.
3) Another interesting question here is the class essence of an Uber driver. Is he working class or is he not? How can he be of the working class?, doesn't he own his means of production which is the vehicle itself? Doesn't Uber call him "driver-partner" rather than just driver or worker? He doesn't seem to even draw a wage, instead he takes a share of the fare. And he doesn't 'produce' anything also, he just drives! So, aren't Uber and the driver partners, rather than Uber being the employer and the driver being the worker? Such questions are widely raised and in the hands of petty bourgeois academic imbeciles, become a full blooded theory of 'service' capitalism which they claim have outlived Karl Marx. A cursory look at Marx's 'Theories of Surplus Value' and 'Results of the direct production process' will expose the claims of these so called 'post-Marxists' as utterly ridiculous. Marx was never an academic pen-pusher and hence was smart enough to realise that a worker need not always produce 'commodities'; he shows how, under capitalism, even teachers can be categorized as workers.
If a driver owns a cab and rides it as a taxi, then he cannot be categorized as proletarian, not because he does not 'produce' any commodity, but because he does not produce any surplus value (or loosely, profit) for others. He is self employed or is a budding petty bourgeoisie who can rise into the ranks of petty bourgeois proper if, over time, he buys 3 more cars and employ other drivers. If he goes broke, he may lose his cab to the creditor and may slide into the ranks of the proletariat. But the situation is different with an Uber driver. Yes he owns the cab, but the connection between the driver and the cab on one side and the rider on the other is not direct as in the case of our petty bourgeois cab owner friend. It is routed through Uber, or rather through Uber's powerful and complex algorithm. This huge computerised structure, along with all its paraphernalia like Uber's outreach, the booking apps, the call centres, the booking websites etc. comes in between the driver and the rider. It is this structure which makes sure that the driver is assigned a rider almost instantaneously once he has finished his previous assignment. So we have the classic situation here: we have a man who knows to drive and has a cab. He wants to transport others in his cab so that he gets paid in exchange. On the other side, we have people who wants a ride and who are ready to pay money in exchange. Now, in between, we have Uber's owners who neither wants to drive nor wants to ride, but just makes sure that the driver meets the rider and pockets a hefty share. That makes them the bourgeoisie - those who live on the labour of others. And the fact that the driver's labour gives Uber owners sitting at home a profit makes the driver a worker - a producer of surplus value. Thus we understand that the computerised structure plays the role of means of production, that is, as a tool that helps the worker (driver) to discharge his labour usefully, or as a prerequisite for the realisation of the worker's labour power. A proportional portion of the amount that Uber has spent to get this whole structure in place enters into the fare that the rider pays.
When we analyse this 'hyper-real' means of production, something strikes us instantly. 'Material' means of production like machines tend to get worn out over time and Volume 1 of 'Capital' tells us how the value of this worn out material is included in the value of the commodity produced. But at first sight it seems that this is not applicable to the means of production employed by Uber. How can a machine learning algorithm be worn out? Granted that there cannot be any wear and tear to the algorithm, but it can become obsolete, or at least, parts of it can definitely become obsolete. Hence the constant effort from firms to update their programs. This means that a scientific team has to be constantly engaged in periodically revamping these portions and that constitutes the 'wear and tear' costs in this case. Sometimes, over time, the whole algorithm will have to be replaced by a completely new one, like one replaces a machine. So, we see that there is qualitatively no difference here. Now, who are the villains of this story? Obviously the vampire like owners of Uber, who cosily sit at home and live by sucking the blood out of the workers (drivers).
Seen in the context of the above discussion, the class content of the struggle waged by taxi owners and driver cum owners against online taxi services in Kerala with the support of left trade unions becomes clear. It is the struggle waged by the petty bourgeois against the entry of the big bourgeoisie. For Marxists, such struggles are clearly reactionary. In every trade, differentiation of the petty bourgeois class is a reality under capitalism, a minority of them joins the big bourgeoisie and the vast majority of them gets cast down into the ranks of the toiling proletariat. It is a painful process, but it is unavoidable. Any efforts to reverse this process aims at the consolidation of the reactionary petty bourgeois class and is hence regressive. The similar process in agriculture is the differentiation of the peasantry and the transformation into capitalist agriculture and Lenin had the following to say in this context: "The radical transformation of agriculture by capitalism is a process that is only just beginning, but it is one that is advancing rapidly, bringing about the transformation of the peasant into a hired labourer and increasing the flight of the population from the countryside. Attempts to check this process would be reactionary and harmful: no matter how burdensome the consequences of this process may be in present-day society, the consequences of checking the process would be still worse and would place the working population in a still more helpless and hopeless position. Progressive action in present-day society can only strive to lessen the harmful effects which capitalist advance exerts on the population, to increase the consciousness of the people and their capacity for collective self-defense." Similar to the process of transformation of peasant into wage labourer, online taxi services is paving the way for the transformation of self employed drivers into driver-workers working for firms like Uber. But efforts to check this process will only consolidate the petty bourgeois mindset and act as a fetter against the building of proletarian class consciousness. That all the left trade unions are in the forefront of this struggle is another indication of the fact that the Indian parliamentary left has discarded Marxism, class struggle and the revolutionary programme.
