For Marx, the industrial revolution provided the material context that the human society needed to strive towards the achievement of freedom (Dunayevskaya, 1958). This is because the industrial revolution produced the basic structure for the formation of class structures in the society by creating a massive wealth inequity and a destruction of pre-capitalist social structures (Marx, 1867/1976). With the industrial revolution, the working class had been exposed to a variety of different issues such as the housing crisis and the crisis of a dignified way of life, as Engels (1845, 1872) had elaborated upon. In India, the workforce—as has already been stated—comprises of more than 90 per cent of informal workers (Sengupta, 2008), who suffer from numerous issues concerning decent work and social security. In most cases, these workers live under conditions where they do not have adequate land space, dwelling area, and are constantly tormented by the structural violence that creates ‘the crisis of living’ (Desai, 1991, p. 175, own emphasis), which negatively affects the extent of urban belongingness that migrants possess. Urban belongingness is a critical part of the realisation of the full potential possessed by the inhabitants of an urban society. Migrants usually are characterised by a sense of alienness within the spaces that they come to inhabit, more so if they come from marginalised social backgrounds. People from marginalised social backgrounds are often looked down upon as being outsiders within the spaces that they come to serve. This is not only done by their employers—the platforms in this instance—or the customer, but also by other workers themselves, as two migrant workers explain in detail, one from Bengaluru and the other from Hyderabad, respectively. The first worker, Iqbal comes from Bihar and has been in Bengaluru for around a year while the second worker, Ashish<sup>25</sup> had come to Hyderabad to work as a security guard from West Bengal five years ago (in 2017) but has since Covid-19 unable to find a salary-paying job. They argue:
5 MIGRANT GIG WORKERS OF INDIA’S CONSUMERIST CITIES
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