However, among the most interesting advocates of the refeudalisation argument, it is worth noting that the idea is used as a metaphor rather than an equivalence with the past, and that it can contain a strong and useful sociological perspective (Arvidsson, 2020; Borghi & Peterlongo, 2023; Neckel, 2020; Supiot, 2013). According to Neckel (2020), refeudalisation represents a social metamorphosis that characterises various aspects of our contemporary capitalist societies: from the oligopolistic concentration of wealth to the growth of inequalities, from the restructuring of welfare in the Global North to the reorganisation of economic processes dominated by speculative-financial logics, up to the reaffirmation of new and old forms of forced labour along the global value chains. This process deeply impacts the entire sphere of labour, where first and foremost a refeudalisation of the public–private relationship and workers’ rights is observed, as argued also by Supiot (2013) or by Volscho and Kelly (2012). In the realm of platform capitalism, this paper argues, some of the characteristics of the refeudalisation come to the fore. Today, gig economy platforms reflect a refeudalisation process for at least two reasons. On the one hand, the hegemony of the platform business model reveals a (re)feudalisation of capitalism itself, in the sense that the processes of accumulation and operations of capital increasingly turn towards speculative, extractive and predatory activities. Indeed, following Arrighi (1994), refeudalisation is a symptom of the crisis in every cycle of capitalist accumulation, as also occurred during the late Middle Ages in many parts of Italy “when capital withdrew from the risky market activity to be invested instead in land ownership or other secure assets” (Arvidsson, 2020, p. 50). Today, we see certain markets dominated by global companies run by a handful of managers who focus more on lobbying and financial speculations than purely productive activities; consider, for instance, the striking case of the Uber Files that surfaced in 2022 revealing the fraudulent and abusive practices employed by Uber managers to secure the endorsement of economic lobbies and governments worldwide. The Uber files, a trove of over 124.000 documents leaked to The Guardian by a whistleblower, has thus ignited a global firestorm of outrage and scrutiny against the Californian company. These revelations have exposed a dark underbelly of Uber’s operations, spanning from flouting laws to duping local authorities, exploiting violence against drivers and engaging in secretive lobbying efforts during its aggressive global expansion (Davies, 2022). In addition, platform companies rely on a restructuring of previous existing markets more than in the creation of new ones, leveraging upon their role as economic intermediaries (Mezzadra & Neilson, 2024). Moreover, on the second hand, as we will delve into in the empirical analysis, platforms promote a refeudalisation and informalisation of working conditions, as old expressions of feudal relations are reintroduced into the digital organisation of work—foremost among them, piecework (Supiot, 2020), which however has never disappeared along capitalism global value chains—but also the permeability to informal mechanisms—such as digital caporalato (gangmastering) and other industrious and informal circuits of labour—that develop behind the scenes of the gig economy (Arvidsson, 2020; Peterlongo, 2023). But it is above all the mixture of contradictory and seemingly irreconcilable elements that characterise the model of refeudalisation, rather than an illusory return to old organisational patterns.
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