If you spend ten minutes on any street corner in urban India, you’ll see them: a sea of orange, red, and blue shirts weaving through gridlocked traffic in their electric vehicles. These are the riders for Swiggy, Zomato, Zepto, and Blinkit whose job it is to deliver our convenience at breakneck speed. On our screens, the app interface is clean, friendly, and efficient, build by product designers and product managers from reputed univeristies around the country. But if we pull back the curtain and look through a Marxist lens, we see something far older and more predatory.
The gig economy is not a “new” way of working. It is, quite literally, capitalism stripped of its mask. It is the perfection of exploitation, hidden behind a “Login” button.
What is a piece wage? : Think of a piece wage as the ultimate “no results, no pay” deal. In a standard job, you’re usually paid for your time, a fixed salary for an eight-hour shift. With piece wages, you are paid only for the specific unit of work you complete: one restaurant order delivered, one ride finished, one delivery compeleted.
By labeling gig workers as partners, independent contractors, riders, captains companies escape obligations related to minimum wages, workplace safety, insurance, and pensions.
The marketing sells a dream of “flexibility” and “being your own boss” but it’s actually what Marx identified as the trap of piece wages. When you’re paid per delivery instead of per hour, you aren't being handed freedom; you’re being handed all the risk. The company stops paying for your time and starts paying only for your output, effectively forcing you to ride faster and longer just to stay afloat. It isn't autonomy; it's a structural incentive to push yourself to the breaking point just to survive the day.
A rider might see an average of ₹35,000-₹40,000 in their app at the end of a grueling month (i.e if they work 12-14 hours shift everyday). But that number is a mirage. Once you subtract the soaring cost of petrol, the EMI on the bike (since majority of gig workers dont own their vehicle) , mobile data, and the inevitable wear and tear on a human body working 14-hour days in the Delhi heat or the Mumbai rain, that "profit" often collapses below the legal minimum wage.
In a traditional workplace, you can at least look your employer in the eye. You can argue with a supervisor or appeal to a manager’s sense of fairness. In the gig economy, the boss is a ghost - an algorithm that doesn’t care if you’re sick or if your bike has a flat tire. This algorithm surveilles each trip, each movement of the gig worker, often backed by AI for hyper-supervision.
This is what Marx called alienation taken to its logical extreme. The worker is completely detached from the value they create. If a rider misses a “surge” target or fails to meet a 10-minute delivery window because of a broken elevator, the algorithm simply penalizes them. There is no human authority to talk to, only an opaque system that governs their access to work. It is a system designed to make the worker feel entirely replaceable.
Marx emphasized that capitalism depends on a reserve army of labor : a mass of unemployed or underemployed workers that disciplines those currently employed.
Why do people accept these conditions? Because in India, the “Reserve Army of Labor” is massive. With high unemployment and a shrinking informal sector, these platforms thrive on desperation. If a group of riders in Bengaluru protests, the company doesn’t need to negotiate; they simply tweak the algorithm to onboard a thousand more people waiting in the wings.
This precarity is not accidental; it is structural. Platforms benefit from high worker turnover because it prevents collective organization. A workforce that is constantly entering and exiting cannot easily unionize or sustain resistance.
One of the most insidious aspects of gig capitalism is how exploitation becomes normalized and internalized. Workers begin to accept unsafe delivery targets, unpaid waiting time, and arbitrary penalties as part of the job. Consumers, too, normalize the idea that food should arrive in 10 minutes, regardless of human cost.
When survival depends on constant hustle, workers internalize the logic of capital - The idea that people need to work harder if they want to be successful.
They blame themselves for low earnings rather than the system that sets impossible conditions. Productivity becomes a moral duty; exhaustion becomes a personal failure.
This is how exploitation reproduces itself not only economically, but psychologically.
The gig economy also accelerates the centralization of capital, another process Marx identified. Quick-commerce platforms undermine local kirana stores through predatory pricing funded by venture capital backed by billionaires. Small retailers, unable to compete with discounts and speed, shut down.
What appears as consumer choice is actually the elimination of alternatives. Once local competition is destroyed, platforms gain monopolistic power (Indigo *cough*) -over prices, workers, and suppliers alike. This is not efficiency; it is accumulation through destruction.
The gig capitalism isn’t some unstoppable force of nature or “inevitable” progress. It is a choice we are making about how we value human life.
From a Marxist perspective, the question isn’t how we “fix” the apps with better UI or a shift of 10 min delviery threshold to 15 minutes. The question is whether we are okay with a society that builds its convenience on the bones of a permanent, unprotected underclass.
The strikes we are seeing across India today - the riders standing together demanding fair pay - prove that even the most advanced algorithm can’t kill the human impulse for dignity. These aren’t just “delivery partners” complaining about an app; they are a working class beginning to realize that while the technology has changed, the struggle for a fair life remains exactly the same.
The two-day strike is a powerful signal, but it is followed by a harsh reality: tomorrow, those same riders will have to log back into the apps. They have families to feed, rents to pay, and debts to settle - the very economic trap that forced them onto gig work in the first. We aren’t fighting for a more polite algorithm; we are fighting to dismantle a system that treats human lives as mere inputs. The struggle doesn't end until labor is freed from the platform and restored to the hands of those who actually create the value.