Plataformas de aluguel temporário no capitalismo periférico: Airbnb, trabalho e renda fundiária na economia urbana do Rio de Janeiro

Abstract

After the 2008 global economic crisis, digital platforms became popular as alternative sources of income and employment for different fractions of the working class, while simultaneously reinventing strategies for capital accumulation to ensure the continuity of the capitalist system. With the rise of digital short-term rental platforms such as Airbnb, Vrbo, and Booking.com, a range of urban problems began to intensify in cities around the world, manifesting in processes of gentrification, touristification, evictions, and rising housing costs. In this context, and using the city of Rio de Janeiro as a case study, this dissertation analyzes how Airbnb penetrates the urban economy in peripheral countries and accumulates capital through housing, benefiting from labor and land rent, and materializing in a particular way the expansion of U.S. imperialism through digital monopolies. To this end, it draws on: the theories of value, surplus value, and rent formulated by Karl Marx and revisited by David Harvey; the contributions of Milton Santos and the theorists of the Marxist Theory of Dependency (TMD) concerning the economic dependence between peripheral and core countries; and data from Inside Airbnb for Rio de Janeiro. Methodologically, the study adopts historical-dialectical materialism, articulated with data analysis based on Python and Geographic Information Systems (GIS). The main findings demonstrate how Airbnb and other capital holders benefit from labor through the organization of production and consumption, as well as from the expansion of land rent through changes in tenant profiles, the exploitation of periods of high tourist demand, and investments in mega-events and urban renewal. This process, in turn, constitutes a form of accumulation by dispossession, deepens the dependency between peripheral and core countries, and directly contributes to the globalized structural impoverishment of the working class.