Rohan Arthur
This piece makes a deliberate choice. It does not evaluate gig platforms on moral grounds. Questions of dignity, justice, and fairness are real, but they are not the object here. What follows is a narrower test: whether these platforms succeed or fail on capitalism’s own terms. The critique that follows is economic, institutional, and structural. If it sounds severe, it is because the standard being applied is the one that their defenders themselves invoke.
Secondly, no part of this essay is a confession of my personal political inclinations. The attempt, rather, is to assess the skill and competence of India’s tech elite.
Over the last few weeks, some of Indian tech’s most vocal persons have taken to social media to defend gig platforms as exemplars of capitalism at work. The defence sought to be pragmatic in tone and empirical in posture, but landed as emotional in rhetoric and impatient with scrutiny.
Even on the very surface, the tweets and articles look like capitalism-as-a-mood. Careful analysis calls for far more patience than the more pragmatic approach of outright rejection of these arguments. But let us try.
Taken seriously, these claims invite evaluation rather than outrage. The defence has been revealing. In attempting to shield gig platforms from criticism, India’s tech elite has exposed not just a moral blind spot (a failing which may be largely inherited), but a technical one: a profound confusion about what capitalism is supposed to do, and how success within it is measured.
If capitalism’s legitimacy rests on its ability to create durable value, i.e., to raise productivity, stabilise labour, expand purchasing power, and reinvest surplus into capacity, then much of India’s platform economy fails its own test. What is presented as innovation often amounts to little more than the redistribution of risk downward, the obfuscation and compression of labour costs, and the conversion of exhaustion into ephemeral efficiency.
If this is the best Indian tech can do with capitalism, the problem is not the critique; it is the competence. Or *merit*.
The Numbers and the Model They Assume
One of the most common defences of gig platforms is numerical. Earnings are calculated, expenses deducted, and a monthly figure is produced to demonstrate viability. The conclusion is that the criticism is exaggerated, even sentimental.
Again, that in one dreamy example, the supposed number falls at a laughable (because questionable) Rs. 21,000 a month is besides the point of this piece. The point is that these numbers only work within a very specific model: They assume uninterrupted demand, sustained physical output, no injury, no illness, no downtime, no attrition, and no bargaining. They assume that risk can be perfectly individualised without consequence to the system.
They also don’t address that the pursuit of that shaky monthly figure often entails necessary, recurring and non-trivial expenditure for petrol, vehicle EMIs, maintenance, mobile data, etc.
From a capitalist standpoint, this is not robustness; it is severe fragility. A system that functions only under ideal biological conditions is not efficient. It is brittle. It isn’t increasing shareholder value, but exposing them to gross structural risks.
The claim is that the risk has been eliminated. If only. It has been pushed entirely onto the worker, treated as an infinite buffer rather than a cost. This is simply untenable, and the cost will show up on the balance sheet one way or another.
If the arithmetic were as stable as claimed, there would be no need for the persistent churn, repeated strikes, or recurring demands for regulation that now characterise platform labour. Workers respond rationally to incentives and constraints. Their behaviour suggests that the model is unstable, not misunderstood.
Visibility Is a Distraction
Another line of defence insists that nothing fundamentally new is happening. That informal and class/caste-bound labour has always existed, and that the only change is visibility. Critique, therefore, reflects discomfort rather than dysfunction.
Again, this argument fails economically, not just morally.
The issue is not about individual discomfort, but about structural inefficiencies. Surely not that labour has become visible, but that it has been re-disorganised.
What was once locally embedded and socially mediated (however unequal) has been transformed into a system governed by opaque algorithms, instantaneous penalties, and unilateral control. Pay fluctuates without explanation. Workers can be removed without recourse. Downtime, injury, and attrition are treated as individual failures rather than systemic costs.
By framing the problem as visibility, defenders avoid the real question: how risk, control, and accountability have been redistributed within the production process.
This isn’t disruption. It is the return of a more capricious, more faceless and even less competent zamindar.
The zamindar did not produce value; he extracted it. His power lay not in productivity but in control over access. He bore little risk, exercised discretion arbitrarily, and was insulated from the consequences of failure below him. Gig platforms reproduce this structure in a new form. They do not own land, but they control access to demand. They do not issue orders directly, but their algorithms decide livelihoods. They do not negotiate, but they enforce. Their authority is faceless, their penalties opaque, their obligations minimal.
So now the platform becomes a capricious intermediary able to extract value without responsibility, to discipline without explanation, and to exit without consequence.
Capitalism does not require such figures. Capitalism emerged partly as a reaction against feudal–zamindari relations. Creating new zamindars is fundamentally anathema to capitalism’s own logic and a societal regression.
Again, the argument here isn’t so much that “zamindar=mean”, but “zamindar=wasteful”.
Convenience Is Not Value Creation
At the heart of the defence lies an unexamined assumption: that convenience, by itself, constitutes value creation. Capitalism does not operate on assumptions. It operates on outcomes.
Value is created when productivity rises, when skills compound, when labour becomes more capable over time, and when surplus is reinvested into expanding capacity. By these standards, most gig-backed consumer platforms perform poorly.
Food delivery, quick commerce, and ride-hailing do not significantly raise productivity. They repackage existing services, compress time, and arbitrage labour availability. The convenience they provide is real, but it is not generative. It does not create new productive capacity; it reallocates costs.
When profitability arrives primarily through tighter labour terms, reduced incentives, and the withdrawal of subsidies, it reveals the underlying weakness of the model. The value was never durable. It was temporarily underwritten.
Is this innovation? Or is it merely financial logistics coupled with labour obfuscation?
The Labour Beneath the App
The labour pool that sustains these platforms is not accidental. It is disproportionately migrant, informal, and drawn from communities that have historically absorbed risk, indignity, and disposability. Technology did not disrupt this structure; it merely refined it.
This matters because economies do not run on users alone. They run on workers who must eat, recover, plan, and endure. A system that depends on permanently cheap, insecure labour cannot produce a stable consuming class. Income volatility suppresses demand. Exhaustion does not compound into prosperity. All this, while the total addressable market is a tiny, fiercely inelastic fraction. This isn’t even a fight.
Conflict is feedback, not inconvenience
Worker unrest is often framed as an unfortunate side-effect of progress, or worse, as agitation driven by misunderstanding (or dismissed as paranoia about “vested interests”, as though capitalism itself were not a system structured precisely around them).
This reverses cause and effect.
Conflict is not a temporary glitch in the system. It is a property of the system itself and how structural limits announce themselves.
When margins depend on pushing biological and social limits, resistance is the inevitable outcome. Workers do not organise because they dislike technology. They organise because the risks they carry are permanent, while the rewards they are promised remain conditional. This pattern can be observed across industries, geographies, and timelines.
Labour asks for dignity. That’s just an inescapable cost.
This Is Not an Argument Against Markets
It bears repeating: this is not a rejection of markets or enterprise. This piece reserves that judgment because there isn’t anything new to add there.
So the question isn’t whether platforms should exist, but whether they are organised to succeed without consuming their own foundations. Who bears risk? Who controls surplus? Who is allowed to fail safely?
India’s economic history contains examples (cooperatives, producer collectives, shared institutions) that created value without permanent disposability. They were not anti-market. They have been successful because of their design.
Merely taking a transaction from the street to an app is not innovation. The invitation is to look at look at the right kinds of transactions, model the risks faithfully, and build for tomorrow.
Policy Is Not the Enemy of Innovation
If gig platforms are to exist (and they likely will), certain choices are unavoidable.
Labour floors are not ideological impositions; they are stabilisers. Social security cannot be optional when risk is mandatory. Algorithmic governance demands transparency and due process. Ownership and cooperative models do not emerge spontaneously; they require active support.
These are not anti-market interventions. They are the conditions under which markets stop cannibalising themselves. The encouragement is to apply the discipline of capitalism more faithfully: count risk as cost, market expansion as value, labour stability as infrastructure.
A Note to Builders
If the ambition is to build lasting enterprises in India, then the task is not to defend capitalism rhetorically, but to practise it competently. Productivity must rise, skills must deepen, labour must stabilise, and demand must expand.
Anything else is arbitrage, not enterprise.
Intellectual honesty will lead to real innovation and disruption. Build in worker organisation as a design feature, rather than a future reaction to the inevitable resistance. Examining the open sourcing algorithms, redesigning distribution models, bringing in real elasticity to pricing, etc. Maybe I’m not competent enough for this, but neither are the incumbents.
The Irony That Remains
The incumbents: there is something grossly ironic about watching Indian tech elites position themselves as guardians of capitalism. If capitalism’s benchmark is durable value creation, institutional resilience, and broad prosperity, then much of the ecosystem celebrated on podcasts, television panels, and Twitter threads has little to show for it.
Shark-tank judges and valuation games are not evidence of success. Surviving without subsidy and without disposability is.
The defence of capitalism will not be won by emotional Twitter rhetoric.
It will be won, if at all, by learning how to do it properly.
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Rohan Arthur is a software engineer based in Bangalore. He writes from memory, old stories, and everyday conversations. He is curious about how people and places shape each other.
