I have got tons of Assamese people while doing this work, but they never speak to me properly. They only see me as a delivery person, nothing more. They see me as a commodity, something which they have ordered on their phones.
One of the main reasons for this transformation of human beings into dehumanised commodities is the constant fetishisation of interactions that a human being has with technology which results in many customers of platform-based services seeing the workers as nothing different from the platforms’ user interface (Deb Roy, 2019). This results in a massive dehumanisation of the workers whereby the system completely strips them off their labour and their humanity (Anderson, 2017). This results in the creation of a massively heightened form of hyper-dehumanisation and primitive accumulation (Marx, 1844, 1867/1976).
Primitive accumulation in India has produced the basis for the transition of the agrarian economy to a neoliberal one, and as such has decimated the agrarian relations of production resulting in a growing reserve army of labour for capital in the urban spaces to exploit (Gopalakrishnan, 2009). The creation of such a workforce makes it possible for capitalism to keep the general wages depressed that contribute a growing social poverty in the society. Migrant workers help capitalists in keeping the wages low and gaining a competitive edge over their competitors (Marx, 1894/1981). This helps them in extracting a greater amount of surplus labour and surplus value from the workers, which in turn, plays a critical role in the generation of profits for platforms. Platform-based capitalist processes in the contemporary society thus, behave akin to most components of global finance capital where migrant workers are treated as being disposable parts of the workforce (Ness, 2023).
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<sup>24</sup> See Nandi, S. (2020). Covid-19: Uber to offer cabs for essential services. Mint, April 05, https://www.livemint.com/news/india/covid-19-uber-to-offer-cabs-foressential-services-11586077100965.html. Also see Mawii, Z., Rathi, A., & Tandon, A. (2020). From Health and Harassment to Income Security and Loans, India’s Gig Workers Need Support. The Wire, April 29, https://thewire.in/business/covid-19-lockdown-del ivery-gig-workers [Accessed 04.07.2024].